^LPCIT^fMMLPMCT coiwcLL^KiifEiinnr 3 1924 090 111 539 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 9240901 1 1 539 Essentials of Community Efficiency A Statement of the Human Forces and Factors Involved in Making Effective in American Communities, Ideals and Principles and Practices of Social Responsibility and Com- munity Welfare By ROBERT PERRY SHEPHERD, A.M..Ph.D. Author of "Turgot and the Six Edicts," "Religious Pedagogy," "Commentary on the Pentateuch," and "Hand-Book on Teacher Training" Printed for the Author by THE ABINGDON PRESS Chicago Copyriiihted br ROBERT PERRY SHEPHERD 1916 Contents Page Preface XI CHAPTER I, THE NEW AGE Introductory Definitions and Explanations 1 Social Service — Social Responsibility — EiBciency — Community — Illustrated and Enforced by War 2 American Leadership — Experiments with Com- munity Organization — Necessity of Local Wak- ening 6 Social Efficiency Idea Underlying Education — Education by War 8 Practical Helps and Hindrances — New Civics — Maternal Conscience — Drift of Sentiment — Changes in Religious Ideals — Newspapers — Lack of Local Initiative 10 Efficiency a Local Growth — Human Inefficiency- Dependence Upon New Generations — New Spirit 'in Schools — Place of Parental Instincts. . 16 Military and Moral Preparedness — Power of Community Sentiment Organized 20 CHAPTER II. IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONS Group Interests^Community Institutions 24 Report of a Battle 26 Community Groups 29 CHAPTER III. THE EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY Eye-Minded Education — Destruction of Energy. . 32 y Realities and Symbols — The Stream of Human Reality 34 Collapse of the Old Education — Schools, Abstract and Concrete — Modern School Work Shops . . 37 Schools in Homes — Recent Discoveries — Defini- tion of Education 41 Rural Schools and Health — Use of School Funds 43 Schools Robbing Communities — Community Use of Schools — New Test of Teacher's Value — Communities as Schools — School Help to Com- munities 46 Civic Use of School Children — School Boards — Vocational Education — Physical Education — School the Year Round , 50 CHAPTER IV. THE CHILD COMMUNITY Biology Giving a New Viewpoint — Make-Up of the Child Community , . < 58 Place of Child Welfare in Community Better- ment 62 Pre-Natal Welfare Conditions — Community Senti- ment on Limitation of Parenthood — On Condi- tions of Labor and Social Life 63 Infant Mortality — Trained Public Nurses — Nur- series 68 Public Interest in — Investment in Community Health 69 Importance of Early Childhood — Place of Play^ Means of Insuring World Peace — Playgrounds. 71 Adult Ignorance of Child Life — Human Quality of Childhood — Material-Gathe/ing Period ...... 75 CHAPTER V. THE YOUTH COMMUNITY The Human Problem — Tragedy of Parenthood — Law of Companionship 80 Picture of Youth in Communities 84 vi Need of Practical Insight — Neglect of Youths . . 86 Solutions of the Problem — Institutional — Re- ligious — Male Companionship — Female Ig- norance 88 Steps in Community Solutions — Meeting Human Needs • 94 CHAPTER VI. THE PARENT COMMUNITY Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce 99 Collapse of Home and Family Life — Religious Solution — Nucleus of Wise Parents and True Children 101 Physical and Moral Parenthood — False Assump- tions — Need of Intelligent Community Senti- ment : 108 The Social Peril — Changed Attitude of Physicians 113 Community Exercise of Moral Parenthood — Closer Ties between Parents and Teachers — Belated Sex Teaching 114 Sex Hygiene — Sex Facts — Teaching of Sex Hy- giene—Summary 119 CHAPTER VII. THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY Popular Distrust — Immediate Need of a Con- structive Message — Central Place of the Com- munity 123 Fundainental Questions^Abstractions and Specu- lative Religion — Human Elements — One Re- ligious Difficulty — Religion and the Stream of Human Reality 124 Jesus and Human Realities 130 "Billy" Sunday and Protestantism 132 The World-Challenge to Religion — Simplicity of ' the Religion Lived by Jesus Christ 134 Christian Faith and Fellowship a Family Life 136 Community Religion and Community Churches, , . 137 Community Not Church the Object of Effort 139 Social Service and Missions 141 vii Religious Instruction — Making a Kighteous So- ciety — Child-Centered Religions — A Community Task — Absolute Need for Unified Churches — Pointed Demands — Crucial Challenge of Re- ligious Instruction 143 Religious Instruction Related to Humanized Re- ligion — National Interest — Successful Experi- ments — Summary 148 CHAPTER VIII. THE COMMERCIAL COMMUNITY The Economic Motive — Results of Commercial Unpreparedness — Use of Facts , 154 Diflficulties of Retail Trade — New Principles^ Editorial Opposition to Mail Order Business^ Community Inefficiency — Faulty Store Methods 156 Local Difficulties — Competition in Number of Stores, Invasions, Stocks, Out-of-Town Trade — Department and Chain Stores, Mail Orders, Credits 160 Need for Community Attention and Effort 166 Creating a Commercial Community — Concrete Efforts 167 Systematic Cooperation — ^Wasting Money and En- ergy .170 CHAPTER IX. THE INDUSTRIAL COMMUNITY The Age of Machinery — Industrial Efficiency — Human Elements — Scientific Management of Materials, Machines, and Men 176 Natural Conditions vs. Artificial Advantages 180 the Case of M.— of K 183 Systematic Cooperation in Community Efficiency — Place of Industrial Leaders — Blueprinting Community Plans • . . . . 187 viii CHAPTER X. THE AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITY The New Age in Agriculture — County Agents' Primary and Secondary 'Programs 193 Soil Fertility and Community Efficiency 194 Marketing of Products — Reason for Farmer's Individualism 196 Rural Accounting and Community Efficiency.... 199 Systematic Cooperation in Social and Educa- tional Betterment — Equality of Social Opportu- nity , , . 201 The Retired Farmer-Citizen Problem — Reasons.. 205 Bridging the, Chasm between Farms^and Towns.. 209 Absentee-Landlords and Tenants 210 Remedial Legislation , 211 Town and Country Social Intercourse 213 . County-Seat Responsibility for the Coutity Unit. . 216 Farmer's Duties toward Towns 220 CHAPTER XI. THE SOCIAL COMMUNITY Place of the Community House — Recovery of Sb- cial SelfrRespect over School Board — Central- ized Schools 222 Community House Activities 226 Explanations 228 CHAPTER XIL THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY Government by Neighbors — Political Sanity — Pro- tection Against Vested Interests — Fitness for Self-Government .-257 New Political Conditions — Maternal Conscience, Child Welfare, Civic Conscience, Scientific Method, Civic Stewardship, Community Con- sciousness, Humanitarianism, Religion, Social Democracy — Community Business 262 Preface The chapters which follow contain the sub- stance of lectures which I have been delivering, some of them for a number of years past, in helping citizens to come together, look over the field of their community interests, put a concrete program of betterments before themselves and then organize the community for realizing their own program. All of the lectures have been recast in the light of current events. In giving the lectures written form I have tried to do one thing in a definite way, namely, to put all the principles of community effi- ciency in a human setting and to do this in a way which would be both readable and challeng- ing to the leaders of local sentiment. When the lectures are delivered from the platform I can make use of illustrations and graphs which the printed page will not allow. The important thing is to help citizens see the whole of their problem, see how to analyze it clearly and to direct local sentiment to constructive ends. It has been my privilege to know community conditions quite intimately in California, Colo- rado, Kansas, and Illinois. Community organ- izations have been formed as a result of our courses of lectures in Illinois, Ohio, and Mich- igan. My lecture engagements have taken me into nearly all the states and provinces and I have accumulated a vast mass of statistics on community life and organizations, most of which I have purposely omitted from this book. Where I have been able to identify the sources of ma- terials used I have done so in ,the text and avoided the use of footnotes. A few books of especial worth to the theme under discussion have also been referred to in the text. The oral lectures are all "purpose" addresses, designed to move listeners toward a definite objective. I have allowed myself in the printed lectures to go beyond the attitude of academic indifference in some of the chapters, because of the conditions surrounding all American com- munities and the decided urgency of putting community life on a clear-cut basis of matured plans. Some of the lectures are certain to meet some opposition but whatever is unable to stand opposition ought not to stand. Church affairs, with which I have been most widely associated for many years, are not efficient so far as com- munity welfare is concerned. The only way to avoid controversy in most local communities is to say nothing positively constructive. I am urging a method of harmonizing religious differ- ences in communities, a method which is in active use successfully, but its inevitable tend- ency is to put superfluous congregations in the way of becoming one united Church. I have yet to meet one minister or group of worshipers will- ing to admit that they are the superfluous parties. The work of community efficiency is so vast that all one could hope to do within reasonable limits is to open the windows and call attention to outstanding features of the scene. This I have tried to do with constant emphasis on the human elements involved. Others might do the work vastly better and if the following pages shall inspire anyone to put the material they need into the hands of citizens in American com- munities, and set forward the actual work of crystallizing sentiment on the well-being of all persons in each locality, my labor in writing this book will be fully compensated. After putting some theories of community organization to a more extended test in actual field work, I plan to publish a work on social organization including some actual programs of community betterment, as worked out by cit- izens in a series of mass meetings, and such plans of action as have proved practicable in making the programs actual. So far as I am able to learn the work of real civic evangelism is in its infancy, of gathering citizens by groups and in mass assemblies and addressing enlight- ened conscience and will, putting before them the challenge of their own present community conditions and possibilities, and guiding them to make up their own welfare program and efficient social organization. I shall be~~gl£id to learn of similar experiments and of the successes and failures resulting from such efforts. I am under especial obligations to Mr. Samuel Lewis and to my wife for help in preparing the manuscript, reading proofs, and making the y/ork what It IS. ROBERT P. SHEPHERD," Chicago. CHAPTER 1 The New Age TSew Tools. A new set of words, representing a new world of ideas, had begun to become cur- rent in America when the war thrust some of them into obscurity and others into unusual prominence. The words and ideas which sur- vive each crisis are the instruments with which the new world of human relations must be fash- ioned. Social Service, for example, had come to be a significant term in some religious and humani- tarian circles. Its meaning was vague to most Americans. It was hazily coupled up with char- ity, donations of food and clothing to paupers, a kind of beneficence in which everybody, of course, ought to be interested sentimentally if not prac- tically. Even in some groups where the phrase was familiar. Bishop W. T. Sumner's definition of social service as, "ttie study of human nature under adversity in order to help remove the adversity," was held to be more theoretical than intensely practical. The full meaning of social service had not yet gripped the mind of either the Church or the non-Church world. 2 Essentials -of Community Efficiency Social R esponsibility was even less generally understood. It was commonly understood and agreed that society was responsible for the care of its poor, its imbeciks, criminals, insane per- sons, and indigent sick. That local society, town- ship or town, city or county, was responsible for all the causes of poverty, imbecility, insanity, and crime produced within it had not at all reached the heart of citizens generally. They were more inclined lazily to accept the mediaeval way of calling each of these cases "an act of God." Soci- ety was responsible for the education and pro- tection of all of its members — this much was easily accepted as a general principle. But when resjionsibility was drawn in toward particulars,, like the duty to educate and protect child ahd women employees, to educate and protect folk and those yet to live from venereal diseases and all preventable maladies, to educate and protect mothers and provide pensions for them, and spe- cific applications of social responsibility like these, there was a very general disposition to shift social responsibility to the capitol or the courthouse. Hot' public debate over the right to recall judicial decisicftis which manifestly worked social injustice did more than any other one thing to turn the serious mind of citizens generally to consider the human basis of a com- munity's duty to its members. The mind of the nation, at all events, was not yet clear as to The New Age 3 what social responsibility actually meant and what all it implied. Efficiency was a clear-cut and meaningful term in most industrial circles and in some com- mercial relations. Popularly it was either a source of cartoons and pert paragraphs or a shib- boleth of a fad, something which threatened more or less directly to interfere with familiar habits, pet customs, and traditional /practices. It was regarded, on the whole, as a fine thing to read about in current literature but a distinctly unpleasant thing to confront and incorporate into individual life or business administration. As applied to local and state governments, local and general Church administration, charity or- ganizations and general social institutions, effi- ciency had a long way before it to win popular approval. Community had become a catchword. Every- body was supposed to know precisely what the community is, where to find it and how to manip- ulate it. The idea came closer to folk generally and enterprises of all sorts adopted the designa- tion. Street carnivals, chowder parties, and all sorts of performances were staged as community projects, "to build up the community." Locality and community commonly meant the same thing. A great many people, even until now, and not all of them identified with the unthinking herd of humanity, do not yet comprehend what Pro- <2) 4 Essentials of Community Efficiency f essor Peabody might have meant by saying that "the discovery of the community was the great- est achievement of the nineteenth century:" Surely the community is here, has always been here, will be here when we are gone ! - Suddenly, behind the most terrible ring of iron ever seen on this planet, appeared a most aston- ishing community. Seventy-eight million and more souls welded by a sense of social respon- sibility, dedicated to death from birth, the prod- uct of a century of discipline in community wel- fare and of near half a century of remorseless training in efficiency. < The hideously destructive power of this com- munity cannot hide the import of its constitu- tion. Had the circumstances been such that its directing minds felt free to use the compact community only in conquests of peace it would have been an even more formidable conqueror of the world, wholly irresistible if beneficent and constructive, humanized and honest. As it is, for the first time in history, the interested atten- tion of all the people on the globe is drawn to the place where one world is dying in agony and another is bloodily being born. The vague terms, once vague here and almost everywhere, are baptized with such a baptism as is given to few words in all man's history. Interest is heightened in America, in this "nation made by its schoolmasters," by the The New Age 5 knowledge that its social genius and organization i were given to it by a country school-teacher. Professor Franklin H. Giddings summarizes the story in his booklet, "The Western Hemisphere in the World of To-morrow": It is time that Americans were reminded that this social - responsibility - efficiency - and-better- ment idea, destined more and more to occupy the attention of serious men and women of every continent, is not a German invention, and not the product of any other nationality. "In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations," the man who scientifically developed it and experimentally tried it out was an American. Next after, Jona- than Edwards and Benjamin Franklin he was, I think, the greatest American. No one else in our history can make out, all things considered, quite so good a claim to third place. But while Edwards and Fraiiklin are remembered, Benja- min Thompson has been forgotten. So was crea|ted one half, the nonpolitical half, of Kultur, that wondrous thing which all the world is now invited to admire. The other half, the political half of Kultur, is a philosophy and a habit, a habit of obeying without question or protest a state conceived as absolute, supreme above the moral law as above statute and de- cision. Kultur was not made in Germany. The political half of it, as everybody knows, was made in Italy, and formulated by Machiavelli. The nonpolitical half of it, the social efficiency half, which all the world will yet adopt and profit by, was made in Massachusetts by Puritan faith, con- science, frugality, and toil, and was taken to Bavaria by Benjamin Thompson. 6 Essentials of Community Efficiency Community, community efficiency, social wel- fare, social responsibility, and community better- ment are now writ in red for the reading o^ mankind. Wholly apart from the near and dis- tant causes of the war, the merits and demerits of the struggle, or the issues which are at stake on the outcome, the power of compact and efficient social organization has exhibited by contrast the fatal weakness of individualist democracy, the haphazard, every-man-fpr-himself social policy of Great Britain and America. Events wholly outside have conspired to put America in a posi- tion vi leadership among the peoples of the earth — ^but leadership has its fixed price; Incom- petents are never leaders. Bulk of wealth may be a source of fatal weakness and not of strength. Only as the proved ideals of power are built into the dominant ideas of the nation will aspirations of leadership among the nations be realized. The traditions and present mood of Americans are not favorable to paying promptly the price of constructive leadership. The farms, ^stores, offices, and houses where Americans live and do their thinking are a long way from Europe, vastly further than the mere miles which lie between. Apart from inven- tion and industrial exploitation Americans love the familiar and fear the unfamiliar as much as any people on the planet. Efficiency may be decreed by imperial fiat in Germany just as The New Age 7 vodka is abolished, as a Russian drink, by im- peria)i ukase. But fiats and ukases and imperial decrees are permanently unpopular on this hem- isphere. Having got on thus far without kings the sovereign go-as-you-please citizen of America must be made efficient by entirely different proc- esses. The mere mention of efficiency in matters of personal conduct and social order is quite offensive to many voters. It is especially ab- horred by the classes which thrive on the shif t- lessness and civic carelessness of the majority of citizens. Whole states have been known to rise and give conspicuous rebuke to state institutions whose leaders have been forward to go out and show citizens how to live efficiently. The prin- ciples of efficiency can be introduced in factories, crafts, and commerial enterprises in a way more nearly approaching European fashions. The compulsion of making a living, of holding a job, of getting wages, leads many workers to adopt practices of getting largest results from least expenditure of effort when, left to themselves, they would scorn suggestions of efficiency with vengeful glee. Experiments have been made during recent years to organize communities for more efficient social life. Some of these experiments have been made under government, state, and university supervision, some under private and local initia- tive. Only those who have had actual experience 8 Essentidls of Community Efficiency in trying to introduce the ideas and practical ideals of efficient social organization into Amer- ican communities can fully appreciate the quan- tity and quality of difficulties which have to be met and overcome. Occasional success in set- ting up and maintaining flexible and effective organization of a whole community is the one assurance that it can be done. Abnormal in- crease in motives to unusual effort opens the way far more than it has been in the past. The diffi- culties to be faced are only eloquent witnesses to the need, land the surmounting of obstacles gives zest to the task, increasing the compensa- tion of energetic citizens who see the task, work at it, and win out. Discovering the community was a very great achievement in the field of social theory. But the discovery remains fruitless in large measure till the discovery becomes local, till the folk who are the community discover themselves as a social unit, discover the social power of the unit and learn how to guide that power to the great- est help of each member of the community fam- ily. . This shaking up, "shooting up" in some places, of community consciousness, waking and sharpening of community conscience and the guidance of the community will-to-Serve make up the problem of community efficiency in America. The New Age 9 Social efficiency, when it is brought closer and stripped of its formal garb, is a rather famil- iar idea, popular in fact, in American communi- ties. It wears unfamiliar airs in books and speeches, seeming more formidable than it is. School taxes are the least unpopular of all public revenues paid by American citizens. Common sense approves the idea that society as a whole has a duty to make each of its individual parts a self-respecting and socially reputable member of the body social ; to provide practical education for all children without distinction, and to pre- vent the production of miscellaneous mis5ts in business and the professions ; to prevent need- less wastage of human beings through the igno- rant and careless handling of babies, children, growing and grown folk; to prevent preventable disease, deformity, delinquency, and crime; and to provide whatever is required by the instinct of the whole group for enriched, fruitful and prosperous life. The direct facts involved in community efficiency are generally admitted. But we are too young in social experience to trust ourselves and each other to do all the specific acts required to make the ideal real. Some of these ideas are far older than the Bible, reaching back into the ancient civiliza- tions of the Nile and Euphrates valleys. They are part of the permanent property of the race. They need only to be caught up into the work- 10 Essentials of Community Efficiency ing minds of citizens and set to work sanely to play a vast part in the reconstruction of human relations all over the planet. It ought not to need the shock and jar of war to put these ideas forward in the consciousness of citizens in every community in the nation. For these ideas are the moral preparedness apart from which mili- tary preparations will be but a. repetition of the mockery of all that is best in men. Wholesale killings have actually been advocated by many Americans as the only way by which to waken the people of the nation from frivolities and put everybody face to face with final realities. A nation which must have deluges of blood to waken it or keep it awake has no business to live. The surge of passion for the welfare of the living is the only sure urge to prosperous peace. SOME PRACTICAL HELPS AND HINDRANCES School text-books are now being written for pupils in the grades as well as for high school ahd college students, inspiring all the young people to live their civics. This is a great step toward educational sanity. The juiceless study of the federal and state constitutions foisted upon children in the past in the name of civics was about as sensible as Aristotle's logic would have been if used as a fourth reader. The oncoming citizenship of the nation is better trained in The New Age 11 practical civics than the off-going men and women of the nation. The younger generation, taught more purposeful use of their eyes and ears and noses, are also led to discover for them- selves the power of group effort directed to definite ends. The force of such discipline in the reshaping of human aifairs here and abroad is immeasural)le. Maternal conscience is now projected into pub- lic aifairs. Because the feminine mind centers spontaneously in persons and personal relations rather than in abstract principles of conduct, the civic interests of women lead them toward dif- ferent conclusions than have the impersonal schemes of male citizens. Universal female suf- frage may or may not come but practically uni- versal influence of female minds in American politics is already come. The civic sections of women's clubs, civic clubs engineered by women, and like organizations are doing vastly more than reading papers to each other and mildly agitating: they have begun shrewdly to organ- ize the power of voluntary associations and to insist upon higher standards of social decency and protection of persons. This new political tone is wholly good. Drift of popular sentiment toward community welfare and community enterprises was fos- tered by the commercial interests into whose charge the free platform has come. Community 12 Essentials of Community Efficiency action is essential to the life of lyceum and Chautauqua managements. Their agents have been compelled to put stress upon united effort for public benefit. The direct effect of this argu- ment by the ubiquitous army of salesmen has undoubtedly done more to create community sentiment than the work of "talent." Charlie- chaplinized public frivolity increases the demand for platform "pep" and "punch" and constant action by lecturers on both the lyceum and Chautauqua platforms. And modern lyceum courses are quite different from the strong lec- ture courses of the last generation. The presi- dent of the International Lyceum Association pleaded earnestly, in September, 1915, that local lyceum committees should be persuaded, by all means, to include at least one serious lecture in their season course. The indirect effect Upon community life, of coming together to listen, laugh, learn to appreciate the higher musical and artistic values and to respond together to appeals from the open forum, has been vast. It has helped to open the way for more insistent con- structive work in creating and crystallizing com- munity sentiment. Churches, in the past, were hindrances and not helps-to making communities of people into self-conscious social units. This result has not been because of religion but in spite of it, due not to the religion of Jesus Christ but to the The New Age 13 perfectly normal action of the institution-loving instinct in men which is forever laying hold on fluid movements and freezing them into fixed organizations. This truth deserves wider recog- nition, especially by those who are fond of insist- ing that religion has retarded social progress more than any other one force in human history. When the expression, the pulpit, was used in ^he past it expressed a fairly uniform quantity; it has no uniformity now. Formerly the Church was mainly interested in what happened to dead folk, to folk who died many centuries ago and to the folk in the pews who shortly would be dead, and in the various theories of how it hap- pened and would happen. Divisive groups neither would nor could find grounds of agree- ment — they didn't like each other to begin with. Communities thus torn apart, by theories of interpretation covering the far past and the cer- tain future past the grave, could not be brought .to see or care much about the community's babies and boys and girls and youths in the immediate present; to get old sinners headed*] away from a hell for d€ad folk and to get all the saints into a heaven also for dead folk bulked so big that no one paid much serious attention to the hell on earth which live folk were making for themselves and each other. In other words, the speculative elements of theology excluded the practical elements of religion from 14 Essentials of Community Efficiency popular consideration. The main business of Churches was sermons, not service. The main principle of Church life was institutional loyalty, not human loyalty and love. "~~ The social turntable has been slipped under- I neath the whole machinery of the Church and the whole field of religion, so far as it relates. to community interests, is dependent upon indi- vidual local leaders. Neither pulpit nor Church indicate definite quantities or qualities to be known from a distance. Many Roman Catholic pulpits resound with sermons which would grace any Protestant pulpit. Pulpits supposed to rep- resent the quintessence of conservatism are filled by impassioned radicals. Pulpits supposed to be dedicated to forward-looking social progress are filled by messengers who died long ago but still talk. This unsettledness is the despair of eccle- siastics who worship the status quo but it is one of the chief helps to those who have seen "the greatest achievement of the nineteenth cen- tury." The religion which lives in live folk •prompting them to love all other live folk, whether they like them or not, has now its chance to develop community consciousness, con- science, and efficiency. Local newspapers have largely lost their for- mer place of power in shaping community senti- ment. Many of them are known to be merely organs of some individual or corporate interest. The New Age ' 15 All of them are compelled, in order to live, to be mainly daily or weekly bulletins of gossip, snappy cynicism. Mutt and Jeff cartoons, and ad- vertisements. Anything out of the ordinary, a dramatic or human interest incident, is eagerly welcomed ; but straight-out appeals for principles and projects of social responsibility and com- munity efficiency can find space only as parts of some extraordinary occasion. In some localities the newspapers are far worse than pulpits as promoters of public interests, hindrances and not helps. In other localities editorial energy is the chief community asset. Individual initiative is prized among Amer- icans but it is an unknown quantity to most of them. At its highest in industrial circles where the game is big and tense, individual initiative is at its lowest stage in simplest duties of com- munity life. A very flippant song was kept alive for a time by its grotesque falsity. The theme of it was, "Every man 's a devil in his own home town." As a simple matter of experience and observation every man is most a coward in his own home town, docile as a sheep before the invisible conventionalities set up by community sentiment, reserving all his bravado and devil- ment for exercise when he gets away from home. Public school emphasis on uniformity has whipped all notion of originality and energetic initiative out of the souls of most of the present 16 Essentials of Community Efficiency generation of citizens. They suffer indignities, perils to health and welfare, shameless betrayal of public trusts, and if they protest against out- standing educational iniquities or social wrongs they get in little groups and whisper about it or . go off in solitude to swear. The chief hindrance j to an immediate and powerful introduction of ideals of social responsibility and community I welfare is the terror of the average citizen, of both sexes, of the wrath of the god, They-Say. The handicap can be turned to good use by using large groups of citizens at once, taking advan- tage of mob psychology and shaping the mob into an organized body of live sentiment. r~ Such practical helps and hindrances are the rule in American communities of less than twenty thousand population and in those which are out- side the influence of aggressive industrial influ- ences. The city problem is distinct from that of the smaller community, even though back of them both is the one human problem of indi- viduality and personality. The most hopeful in- dex for the smaller cities is the widespread agitation for scientific management of public busi- ness. Out of this will come inevitably an exten- sion of municipal activity and oversight, and a publicity to challenge the serious consideration of all citizens who think with anything more than their eyes. The New Age 17 Social efficiency must come from within com- munities and not from without. Salvation by imported talk is as futile in civics as in religion; in all its forms it is to be worked out^by united local effort. Social prosperity cannot come from Congress nor from the Legislature: it is wholly a local product of cooperation. The rock foun- dation of community welfare is laid only when the folk of any locality learn to treat each other, first and last, as human persons without distinc- tions of wealth, religion, politics, or any other classification based upon abstract nouns. The world of individuals will be a social world only when the human needs and necessities of indi- vidual human beings are held steadily in the foreground of emotions and reflections and con- duct. Not otherwise will the nationalisms and national moralities which have drenched the world with blood give place to the international- ism and international moralities which rest upon universal human needs. Americans throughout the length and breadth of the land are good-hearted and kindly-inten- tioned folk. Many of them are liars but largely because thfey were compelled to learn to lie by misguided parents and other teachers. Many of them are unreliable and unscrupulous mainly because they have been taught by example that if one only got enough while getting goods of any sort, most people would piously forget to 18 Essentials of Community Efficiency ask how the getting was done. Some are gen- erously stingly for they were trained to act as if a dead sea were better than a fountain — and never learned to the contrary till they had lost their sight and were too old to develop the inter- nal machinery of giving heartily. Most of them are more or less timidly ambitious, eager to play the game and not be rated as failures. Not many are "commercial" in the sense in which that term is often used, greedy for gain, sunk in sordid grasping for the power of gold. Communities are made up of just this sort of human stuff, good and bad but more good than bad — mixed, in short. The "social-responsibility-efficiency- and-betterment" idea must find lodgment in the thoughts and emotions of a good nucleus of plain, neighborly citizens in each comchunity. The quickened consciences of a few must touch others till the dpugh is ready for the oven. And enlightened consciences quickly discover that the power of the present and the hope of the future lies not in the well-shaped or misshaped citizens whq are rapidly going off this scene of action, but, emphatically, does the hope of hu- manity rest upon the yet unformed and unshaped citizens upon whom this generation is rolling the biggest load ever put upon human shoulders. The one outstanding community institution in America is the public school. Fortunately this is now wide open to the introduction of "all The New Age 19 germs of pure and world-wide purposes." Com- munities are often more interested in the com- munity's children than are the physical parents of many of the same little ones. Real Americans almost never protest against school taxes. Citi- zens respond generously to concrete needs of children for food, clothing, dental and medical care. Schools are not, as is sometimes igno- rantly charged, claiming a larger and larger share of parental oversight and care of children; on the contrary, this is increasingly thrust upon the schools by unloving animal parents of children, as every superintendent of schools and school- teacher knows. But because of the sweeping changes, as will be noted later, the per capita cost of education, facilities, and equipment is making heavy increases until about three quar- ters of a billion dollars annually are now spent on public education, and this item is usually paid more cheerfully than any other part of the public budget of expense. Child welfare makes a strong appeal to taxpayers even though overworked and shamelessly underpaid teachers often find it diffi- cult to believe it true. Parents to the number of hundreds assemble, sometimes at unseason- able hours, to confer on the plain facts of phys- ical and moral parenthood with relation to. social welfare and community efficiency. Out of such conferences often come the quickened conscience and deeper determination to put through, during (3) 20 Essentials of Community Efficiency I a period of years, a program of human better- ments and community improvements. Such pro- grams, rooted in parental instincts, are most likely to find sure and abiding anchorage, for these instincts must, finally, be relied on to per- petuate the race and to keep the race fit to be perpetuated. Those who are interested in developing a true sens€ of social responsibility in the citizens of America Snd here their chief help and point of contact with all live community interests. From a basis in parenthood all practical phases of social efficiency can be discussed in terms of daily life and friendly association. The precise jargon of the social sciences may be unintelligi- ble to many citizens but all iinderstand clearly enough what it means to be neighborly with those who live round about, to treat each other without regard to sectional and sectarian differ- ences, to come together frequently in a play festival with everybody irf it, and to organize their local neighborliness so as to look out for the all-round welfare of all the babies, giris, boys, yojmg women, young men, and grown folk of the locality. Once the gist of the real work of social responsibility is well lodged in the sym- pathies of American citizens, they have wit enough, sense and stability enough, and .grit enough to work at, work out, and work clear The New Age 21 through most gratifying results in the way of social reform and welfare. — v Preparedness, at this writing, is on parade: hundreds of thousands parading and millions ap- plauding. It is like ancient Rome brought to life. The military unpreparedness of China and Amer- ica is much cartooned and caricatured, Perhaps we are foolishly helpless. Those who know any- thing, as they ought to know it, know assuredly that America's peril lies not on the coasts and outer boundaries but in the homes; that the source of chief danger is not in Europe, nor yet in Asia, but inside American minds. Our lack is not so much of ships and skilled shooters but of unselfish citizens, not of professional blood- letters but of honest neighbors. Moral ideals, dominant and driving motives to help the other fellow get on his feet and be a helper, these are the things we lack, because we were never taught them aright. Most citizens of middle age were never fashioned in that social consciousness which sees the equal worth and fundamental likeness of human beings when they are stripped to their naked selves and separated from their decorations and abstractions. Neither were they guided into that social conscience which locates responsibility on him who knows and is able to act helpfully; which covers with the stigma of social indecency whoever claims the flag to hide his vulgar selfishness. The big problem is not the 22 Essentials of Community Efficiency preservation of a nation of citizens with plenty of money in every pocket, but rather the creation of a nation of folk who believe in themselves and in mankind, and who will fight to the death to give human beings anywhere a square deal in the chance of finding life and happiness. This problem is not to be solved by multiplying dress performances: it is the simple problem of com- munity life, of creating the sentiment that noth- ing less than the best is good enough for anyone in our locality, of a practical patriotism which finds expression in neighborliness with the folk closest to us. The problem is a community problem: the solution, of the problem must be where the problem is. " The level of community sentiment can be lifted by well-planned effort just as it is lowered by effortless neglect. What social sentiment is already in the community can be enlightened and invigorated. New sentiment can be called into life. The whole vague and ill-defined senti- ment can be drawn to a focus and crystallized on concrete plans and systematic cooperation set in motion. It# cannot be done by occasional speeches and fine essays. It will not come by accident nor steal in while men sleep. It must have first place in the attention of the community for a definite period of time. It must grow up out of the mind of the community, and not be as something manufactured elsewhere and im- The New Age 23 ported as a new toy. Even the framework of cooperation must be made on the ground, a flex- ible expression of the spirit of good-will among local citizens. "Freedom only comes by grace of God, and that which comes not by his grace must fall." Whatever is artificial, forced, will crumble by its own deadness. Helps and hindrances will be recognized, helps used, hindrances accepted as challenges, shortcomings discounted, com- munity vision clarified, and conscience sensitized, till those who actually are the community stand up in new self-consciousness. This is not proph- ecy but history. It has been done and is being done. Communities once dead are become alive, and their new life heralded far and wide. It only waits for alt the communities of the English- speaking nations to catch the contagion of social responsibility and to set sanely about the task of betterment and efficiency in order that "the new age in the life of the world" may bring in a more brotherly humanity. CHAPTER II Ideas and Institutions Old Guards and Progressives appear in all generations, in politics and religion, in business affairs, and in social life. Prophets and priests were pitted against each other in the ancient Hebrew church-state. Philosophers and ecclesi- astics waged their struggles during the middle ages, and their fight which forced the Renais- sance laid the foundation of the modern world in a revival of learning. Modern insurgents and standpatters merely represent the endless warfare in the world of ideas between those who face the past with fidelity and those who, looking for- ward, set a higher value on children than on grandparents, who exalt the living rather than the dead, who believe in playgrounds more than in cemeteries. Farmers have more at stake than have phi- losophers in persuading people to live for Ideas more than for Institutions. Hereditary loafers, men and women taught from earliest infancy that they were created with special rights to the fruitage of the lives and deaths of other human beings who were created with special duties to toil and die unquestioningly, ruling classes of the 24 Ideas and Institutions 25 Hohenzollern and Hapsburg type, always have been and always will be ruthless and brutal and inhuman in business and in politics. The whole spirit of western deniocracy is dead set to incul- cate ideas, to teach all children the worth of per- sons and personal rights, to make business and politics as well as education wide open with equal opportunities for all. The rights of all persons over against the privileges of a few per- sons are by no means yet conceded, but the issue is more and more sharply drawn with clear out- lines, in the light of current happenings in Mexico, Europe and Asia. Each new generation of babies starts in total ignorance of both rights and duties. Infants, most of them, are brutally punished into a recog- nition of their duties toward adults, cowed into submission to all the whims of parents, and/ they absorb unconsciously a sense of the real or fan- cied rights of the class of human beings the parents represent.' All the artificial distinctions and abstract relations which grown folk have made for themselves are forced into the child world to the complete destruction of its native human democracy. "Sheltered Daughters" and "Oppressed Sons" are in this way whipped into conformity with institutions and conceptions which lie entirely outside all strictly human reali- ties and relations. A contrast betweet^ reports of a battle, such a report as 'might come any 26 Essentials of Community Efficiency day from the three thousand mile battle front,, will show the difference between the world of abstract institutions and that of human realities and concrete ideas: REPORT OF A BATTLE As couched in impersonal abstractions: We repulsed an enemy charge in force yesterday. Our reserves swept all before them. The enemy fought bravely but could not withstand our supericv, numbers. They left many on the Seld besides the prisoners we took: New troops are being brought up and to-morrow ought to bring us a memorable vic- tory. God is gracious to us. To Him be all the glory. REX. As told in human realities: Yesterday we succeeded in killing 4,000 boys and unmarried men, 5,000 married men, of whom 4,000 were the fathers of 9,000 children. We had killed, of our men, 5,000 boys and unmarried men, 5,500 hus- bands, of whom 4,500 were fathers of 10,000 children. For several hours the men fought with bayonets and knives, stabbing, in all, about 2,000 boys and young men. We sent strong young lads in to clean out the captured trenches and they shc't and stabbed all who were too badly wounded to escape, then threw their bodies up where our garbage collectors could get them. Both sides are burning human carcasses to- night as fast as fuel can be brought up. Of the wounded on both sides about 20,000 are mangled be- yond all hope of health and self-support. Nearly 4,000 became raving maniacs incurable. We took 6,000 men whom we can kill,^most of them at least, by neglect in camps. We are bringing up thousands more of Ideas and Institutions 27 ictys and young men on both sides, and we ought to kill and mangle frightfully at least fifty thousand of these youths before to-morrow night. We are add- ing great numbers of widows and half-orphans to our communities every day. God is gracicns to us. To Him be all the glory! REX. How long could military wars continue if their results were thus stated in terms of bare human facts? How long could the causes of all wars, economic and social as well as military, be har- bored in human minds if they were always put forth in their naked human realities? Much preaching and miscellaneous moralizing over human selfishness are vain and fruitless simply for lack of concreteness and reality. Profuse professions of a love of peace may be only a cloak for laziness and cowardice. Actual hatred of war implies active effort to plant and cultivate the causes of vigorous peace in the live bodies of children and young women and young men. Peace between persons is something vastly more than mere absence of physical conflict. The bloody nose which boys sometimes contribute to a cowardly little bully is an invaluable cause of peace, for the heart of all peace is mutual recog- nition of a square deal in all relations with chil- dren and with youthful or mature women and men. If the present war compels all mankind to put new emphasis on the value of human persons and on the worth of concrete human relations 28 Essentials of Community Efficiency its incalculable cost to the world may be abun- dantly justified. But this emphasis on human reality must be anchored to visible and praictical expressions of humane sentiment. Scope Tor action must be provided. Common ground riiust be found on which men of ideas and men of institutions can unite without friction and constant misunder- standing, the one class' of persons free to < agitate always for better conditions of personal well- being while the other class give themselves to preserving and conserving all the worthy achievements of the past. i This meeting place for action- is the com- munity. The institutions of Church and state |and home are now recognized as existing not for themselves as abstractions but for the community j of concrete persons who are capable of knowing each other as individuals and of insuring to each \ other the full measure of a square deal in all their : various contacts and relations. These contacts and relations need to be examined, discussed, understood and used as they affect all the hu- man lives which make up the actual or potential community. Sentiment must be created, com- mon sentiment, the general sense of the com- munity must be reached by some manner of social conversation. Some of this sentiment, a very little of it, can be reached and roused by the printed page. Most of it will come into being Ideas and Institutions 29 and become effective only as neighbors are per- suaded to discuss among themselves new and larger phases of the things in which they are most deeply concerned. The human side of things must be clearly seen. The general inter- est throughout America in coriimunity affairs seems most of all to need crystallizing into sim- ple and definite programs of betterments and equally simple and definite organization to make those programs realized in community action. Systematic cooperation must have a sufficient blueprint before it can commence to build, and discussion, is the price which must be paid for clear-cut estimates of the social situation of each community. An adequate discussion of community welfare would include in its scope all the principal ele- ments of common life in American communities. Some organized forces closely affect common interests. Some unorganized influences work powerfully for the shaping of community senti- ment, ideals and welfare. A detailed analysis of these forces and influences is outside present purposes. The relation of the most conspicuous of them to the community-efficiency idea and to underlying human interests is to be pointed out. They are: I. The Educational Community: Old and New Education; Practical Education; Practical Citizenship; Physical Educa- tion. 30 Essentials of Community Efficiency JI. The Child-Community: A New View- point; Before Babies are Born; When Babies are Born; When Babies are Weaned; The Community of Children. III. The Youth-Community: The Human Problem; The Solution. IV. The Parent-Community : Courtship, Mar- riage, and Divorce ; Physical and Moral Parenthood; Sex Hygiene. V. The Religious Community: What is Religion? Getting Rid of Churches; Practical Religion ;' Community Churches and Ccimmunity-Ceritered Churches ; Social Service and Missions ; Religious Education-. VI. The Commercial Community:; Principles of Retail Trade; Local Commercial Conditions; Cooperation for Profit and for Community Betterment. VII. The Industrial Community: Principles of Industrial Efficiency; Local Indus- trial Conditions; Cooperation for Com- munity Efficiency. VIII. The Agricultural Community: Primary and Secondary Programs; Retired Farmer-Citizens ; Absentee-Landlords and Tenants; Social Cooperation be- tween Town and Country, IX. The Social Community: Community House Centers. X. The Political Community: Government by Neighbors; New Conditions in Politics. Each one of these group interests has much to do with all the others, and with the less promi- Ideas and Institutions 31 nent forces which, taken together in all their re- lations to human well-being, go to make up the community. By examining each group interest apart, but with knowledge that it is never a thing apart and unrelated to all active interests, it be- comes plainer why the community is now re- garded as the center of civilization, the true object of effort in setting in motion the forces of efficiency and betterment. Social responsibility resting upon immediate personal interests is founded on the only basis which is as changeless as the nature of our race. CHAPTER in The Educational Community Old Education and the New When father and mother went to school there was no question as to what education was and how it was obtained. "Get your lessons. Get promoted. If you get whipped you'll get another one at home." Some assorted admonitions were added to fit sex, age, and known characteristics. All nature might be calling loudly outside, but inside the schoolhouse it was: "Repeat the table of Troy weight. Spell gnosiology. Repeat the list of prepositions. Give the eighteen rules of construction. Bound Mexico, and tell what they raise there, and how often. Quit whispering. Stop pulling that girl's hair." Such was the an- cient process of making bricks of human clay. Education was acquired through the eyes, car- ried in memory until examinations, then cheer- fully forgotten. Children would be shocked, now as then, if grown folk told the truth, told how little they remembered, and were glad of it, or how much of it they would gladly forget if they could in other ways get a teacher's certificate. Grown folk know that what one can remember is of slight account: what one cannot forget is 32 The Educational Community. ■ 33 live material. "Hie old education was not life, only preparation for it, a filling up on dry facts which touched real life not at all. No one seemed to think it was the only life school children had. Life begun only when the president of the school board handed over a diploma and some wise ora- tor told youngsters they could now "commence." The theory was that all the children would be magically transformed by what they memorized, and that all of them except the hopeless incor- rigibles would love their teachers dearly, load their memories properly, be nice, and live hap- pily ever afterward. Some still revel in that ed- ucational moonshine. "Mind in the Making," at least the first chapter, and "Youth and the Race," both by Professor E. J. Swift, are excellent tonic for this malady. The hopeless incorrigibles most often proved to be the most virile citizens ever produced in that locality. The most energetic young minds dropped out of school or, if they stood the grind until graduation, it was sure to be by the frequent attacks of blindness by teach- ers whose human sense was stronger than their slavery to the school system. The really good children, those who finished with high honors for memory and deportment, those who succumbed, had most of their lively desires crushed out, and were permanently incapable of being enthusias- tically bad or good. Parents, school teachers — every one seemed to take a special delight in 34 Essentials of Community Efficiency repressing originality and in impressing conven- tionality. Youthful insurgents stood no chance except to become outlaws, strike out for them- selves, and meet the world's challenge by the force of youth's splendid fegotism. Those who stayed, the real products of the old education* were cut to one pattern, talked alike, had the same handwriting, duplicated each other even in permanent mediocrity. The old education feared contact with realities. Three angry farmers protested in unison against the school children ransacking the whole vicinity for all sorts of measures from teaspoons to grain sacks. They snarled their contempt for the small bin of oats used in the schoolhouse for all kinds of mathematical purposes, and vowed they wouldn't stand for teacher and scholars wasting so much time staking out foundations and mak- ing all the building specifications for a needed addition to the building — ^they "paid taxes to have their children learnt, and if the teacher couldn't j learn 'em they'd get one who could." They were ' perfect products of the old education. The old education went directly to symbols, realities be- longed to life after commencement. Nearly the whole of the old education was memorizing and glib repetition of symbols, letters and figures, words and numbers, grammar and arithmetic, rhetoric ^nd algebra, logic and geometry, litera- ture and mathematics. Eye-minded children The Educational Community 35 could "pass" with little effort; ear-minded or touch-ijiinded children got along only by the goodness of teachers who would lie academically rather than be humanly cru^l and conform strictly to the rules of the system. Many chiU dren suffered tortures, even to the permanent un- dermining of their health, in sincere efforts to whip themselves to do the impossible, and so retain the favor of teachers and parents. Natural processes for unfoldment of physical and mental powers had nothing to do with framing the con- tent of studies or means of making those contents alive. Bookishness, erudition, wide command of symbols — this was education even if the educated person had to forget pretty much all of it in order to make a living at anything except dealing ,in symbols. Professor Brander Matthews speaks the mind of multitudes when, in conversation, he declared that the first twenty years of his educa- tion were worse than wasted; that when he left school and came to grips with realities he found that he had been merely playing with the names of things; that the mental images he had made to go with the memorized names corresponded not at all with thp real things; and that much of what he had learned had to be unlearned, being untrue to realities. So much of the old education in schools and colleges did this very thing for youthful minds — kept them pointed away from actualities, away from wide contact with reali- W 36 Essentials of Community Efficiency ties; kept them immersed in the symbols of < lit- erature and the classics and mathematics^ a life so withdrawn that even college love affairs swam in a haze of romanticism and ethereal unreality— not a thousandth part as human and real and true as the love-making of the country lad who gets his girl in a buggy and attends strictly to business. The unrealism of the old education became most fully apparent when its tasks were finally left behind, and young people dropped from the clouds at the marriage altar, began to hustle for a living, and gripped the real job of rearing babies into boys and girls, children into young men and young women, and young folk into parents. ONE STREAM OF REALITY, AND ONLY ONE, FLOWS CEASELESSLY THROUGH TIME ON THIS PLANET— THE STREAM OF INFANT LIFE BECOMING CHILD- HOOD, OF CHILD LIFE BECOMING YOUTH, AND OF YOUNG HUMAN LIFE BECOMING PARENTHOOD. Too long — and with frightfully bitter results — have the ideals of mankind been fixed on "a place in the sun" of some far-off achievement in the world of adults, some lufe of unreality cloaked in lofty symbols, some dancinj; ignis fatuus beckoning all humanity, like a true corpse-candle to a dance of death. Men lay down their lives by The Educational Comnmnity 37 millions for ideals which can have no place in human realities. The pity of it all ! Whole gen- erations finding no realities from the time ,they leave mid-youth till driven headlong or wearily at last into the unescapable reality, nb-life! By the time young folk reach middle adolescence, in the early twenties, their real future does not at all lie ahead of them, but is actually behind them — in the world of young lives, in other's babies and their own, who shall take up life as it is rolled down upon them by the whole com- munity, and carry it — ^whether upward or down- ward, forward or backward, toward refined hu- man society or brute savagery, all depends on what is done with them before they are seventeen years of age, and loosed to do what they will with themselves. This world of unrealities will in- evitably go on till the ideals of the old education are abandoned and human reality, the normal needs and processes of human beings unfolding, is put in its place. The old education was built by adults to fit miniature adults for mythical adulthood. The new education aims to fit babies for fine babyhood, to fit boys and girls for full and buoyant childhood, to fit youths for intelli- gent parenthood and effective citizenship, and to fit mankind for a decent, truth-telling, square- dealing treatment of flesh-and-blood folk of all races and colors an(^ kinds. The present world full of lies, execrations, murders, blood-dripping 38 Es^sentials of Community Efficiency profits, national moralities based upon cool and calculating and sinister and scientific lying, and the national selfishness which derides a "presi- dent of humanity," the world as it is now in Europe and Asia and America and Australia and Africa, is the legitimate and inevitable outcome — and it will continue till end of time to be the outcome — of education which ignores the human realities which constitute mankind in the mak- ing. If any lover of traditions feels impelled to make a plea .for traditional education, let him back up against the war and disorganized Amer- ica and plead for these things to be treasured as the best humanity can do with itself. In so far as civilization can properly be said to have cot- lapsed, it is the old education which has fallen into infiriite disrepute^an education whicli looked upoh babies and children and youths as only so much human fodder for adult purposes and comforts and conveniences. Over against the wreckage of man's works is a growing des- perate earnestness, fired by sympathies not yet petrified, and human affections not yet atrophied, to turn the whole world end for end, and to put all the power of organized religion and education and statecraft behind the natural processes of culture and social efficiency of young human beings. School, to most Americans, has been an abv stradt symbol of the embodied wisdom of the The Educational Community 39 ages. Parents have blissfully sent their offspring "to school," in trustful confidence that everything essential for their complete preparation would be provided by a super-parental wisdom and fore- sight. School, in the concrete, has mostly been a crowd of squirming lads and lasses, anchored to desks which ought to be in museums as relics of the age of the Inquisition, confronting more or less books full of fewer or more symbols of reali- ties which the youngsters have never faced and most of them never will, compelled to memorize in solitude and unsocial torture a lot, of stuff that has no relation to the world of reality which now is or will be or ever was ; and directed by a young woman who has achieved bookishness enough to get a license to teach courses of study designed by men, most of whom do not know, never did know, and never will know what a real child is biologically, physiologically, or any other "log- ically" outside of the deductive logic of adults based on assumptions contrary to fact. If this seems like a caricature, let any middle-aged citi- zen dig honestly in his own memory or go over to the schoolhouses of the old type and watch the school processes at work — watch the differ- ence between the children on the playground, alert, thrilling with life and energy, whipping each other into practical morals and workable social standards, and those same youngsters "in 40 Essentials of Community^ Efficiency school" with their drilled stupidity and artificial docility — getting their education! So long as the old education persists, six out of seven of the boys and girls who enter the first grade escape before they "pass" from the eighth grade. Where the new education is in operation nothing but accident or dire necessity can keep one of the youngsters away from school even during the vacation months when no compulsion is upon them. The old education regarded boys and girls as so many pairs of eyes and so many intellects to be stuifed with devitalized facts. The new education looks upon them as so many wills equipped with organs of sense and action to be trained, guided, and controlled. School- houses of the old style were bare rooms, desks and blackboards. Modern schoolhouses are workshops equipped with the finest and best of tools, implements, musical instruments, motion picture projectors adapted to the finest films, libraries, laboratories) swimming pools^ gymna- siums, playgrounds, conservatories, gardens — places where children live, learn how to live splendidly and to live together successfully, to achieve education for themselves in the compan- ionship of men and women who honor and revere the mysteries of life unfolding, and to feel the thrill of joy inexpressible when they know they have learned to do thoroughly well some worth while things. It reads almost too good to be true, The Educational Community 41 like a vision of the far-flung future. But fortu- nately for America, the Gary Plan of human edu- cation had become a concrete reality, simple, effective, and sane, before the old age of the world cirumbled. Outside of the system of public education cre- ated by Superintendent Wirt to realize the educa- tional ideals of Dewey, Draper, and others, parents of the new type who make a profession of the art of parenting had pioneered a new nat- ural education which brought the school into the home and made their children the astonishment of teachers and parents of the old school. These parents proved that by using the spirit of play and constructive suggestions, children could easily be ready to enter college by the time they are fourteen or fifteen years of age, finish college in two or three years, and be fully qualified for highest academic honors by twenty or twenty- one. One doubting Thomas rushed into print with criticisms of these young folk and the sys- tem of education thtough which they had come : the next week he rushed into print again with a most abject retraction, and in this case^ contrary to the usual rule, the apology carried much fur- ther than the original offense. These parents had simply ignored traditions, treated their chil- dren naturally, used the first twelve years of their lives as the period in which nature equips human beings especially to gather their material for later 42 Essentials of Community Efficiency use, languages, nature studies, incidents of daily life, sources of information and the like, and they used the second twelve-year period to guide the young folk in choosing and familiarizing them- selves with the tools of mechanical and moral effort. Parenting of this sort is, of course, un- usual; but unusual only because the old educa- tion succeeded in blinding most young folk before they became parents to the realities of how minds first begin to learn by doing and grow in power by doing more enjoyable things for themselves. Past mistakes can be excused. It is only eight decades and less when first, since the world be- gan, men discovered the actual structure of the human body, and began, slowly, to comprehend the significance to all the sciences and all knowl- edge of that wonderful thing, the most wonderful object in the created universe, the human infant. The man is ojily recently dead who claimed as his contribution to modern science the discovery of the social meaning of the prolonged period of human infancy. The man is not dead but still leading who, most of all, discovered and threw open for exploration the uncharted world of hu- man youth. Less than half a century ago the study was first seriously undertaken of approach- ing the whole human being as a living unitary organism. Not a decade has passed since the scientific study of the human mind came to be known as the science of human behaviour, and The Educational Community 43 conduct, not deductive logic, became the starting point for all practical education. The times of ignorance may be winked at, but the progress of knowledge in human realities appears to be the supreme hope of the new age in the life of man on this planet. If ages of ignorance can only succeed in filling the world with wars and prep- arations for wars ; if ages of unrealities can only flood the nations with suspicion and distrust and make men spies 'upon their closest neighbors; if blind adulthood can only clamor for women to be more prolific breeders of ordinary human pawns in great games of scientific slaughter, and fiing all sex moralities into the cauldron along with most other social morals; if such thfngs were the confessed |)roducts of the best that is in man, our human nature would stand most closely identified with that of fiends and furies. But, on the contrary, if human nature has never had a fair chance because of ignorance and of multiplied symbols of unrealities, those who feel within themselves the promptings of nobler pas- sions and cleaner affections, must — ^unless they forfeit right to be called human — ^foster the new passion for direct contact with realities and try if the kinship of mankind be true. Education, then, will be simply the guidance of others in getting, and in ofganizing for use, and in using experiences; treasuring those experiences which 44 Essentials of Community Efficiency prove to work for well-being, and putting away those that make for ill-will and unlovableness. GETTING THE MOST FOR SCHOOL TAXES There are in the United States 20,000,000 school children. Over twelve million (sixty per cent) of these are attending 250,000 rural schools. The country schoolhbuse is tlje worst, the most insanitary, and inadequate type of building in the whole country, including not only buildings for human beings, but also those used for domes- tic animals. Rural school children are less healthy, and are handicapped by more physical defects than are the children of the cities, including even the chil- dren of the slums. Healthful and attractive rural schools are ab- solutely essential to the physical, mental, social, economic, and moral well-being of the children themselves, and to the life and welfare of the nation as a whole. Country school children should have as sani- tary and attractive schools, and as effective and intelligent health care as school children in the cities. Country children deserve as much health and happiness as city children. Counti'y children are entitled to as careful cul- tivation as livestock and crops. Conformity to the minimum sanitary require- ments should be absolutely necessary to the pride and self-respect of the community, and to the sanction and approval of county, state, and other supervising and interested official and social agencies. The Educational Community 45 Neglect of anything essential for health in the construction, equipment and care of the rural school plant is at least an educational sin of omis- sion, and may reasonably be considered a social and civic crime or misdemeanor. From a pamphlet. Minimum Health Require- ments for Rural Schools, prepared by Dr. Thomas D. Wood, and issued in 1915 by the Joint Com- mittee on Health Problems in Education, of the National Educatio(n Association and the Council on Health and Public Instruction of the Amer- ican Medical Association; 525 West 120th Street, New York City. County superintendents of schools made gen- eral distribution of the foregoing pamphlet dur- ing the early months of 1916, The human good- sense of America is being powerfully directed toward the country school. Parents cannot loiiger hide the blindness with which they have inflicted upon helpless children conditions which tend to break both physical and mental health, and to condemn sons and daughters to make a broken path through life. Plain speech and sharp criticism are needed in other places as well as where parents perpetuate the one-room district schoolhouse. By increasing majorities in four successive elections taxpayers in an Ohio school district voted against schooL bonds. The build- ings used had been condemned by local and state authorities. Conditions foisted upon school chil- dren violated the laws of the state, of nature, 46 Essentials of. Community Efficiency and of common decency. Wealthy taxpayers used every means to persuade citizens to vote against the bonds or not to vote for them. In an Illinois town two bachelor bankers used fair and unfair means to defeat in like manner the will of decent parents. Such conditions. are everywhere. Citi- zens who would deliberately steal educational rights from children would steal candy from babies if they happened to like candy. It, would scarcely be safe to raise chickens in a district populated by such citizens. What are the six hundred and more millions of school funds for? To keep up a system of schoolhouses and school boards? Brought down out of the clouds, the whole gigantic enterprise is simply providing opportunities for boys and girls to find nurture for their growth and exer- cise for their development. Education may be defined in whatever formidable terms, biit hu- manly speaking, it is simply showing boys and girls how to live efficiently, how to live together harmoniously, and how to make the world of human relations honest and true. Taxpayers who do not insist on getting human results worth the investment have no complaint if school boards, superintendents, and the whole administrative machinery run true to traditions, perpetuate precedents, build as the fathers built, and turn out the same sort of civilization the fathers have made up to now. The Educational Community 47 Savage opponents of public schools had at hand^ a better weapon than most of them ever thought to use. If a system had been devised expressly to rob each community of its best products, toi drive out or guide out of the community all who' were most worth while of its lively youths and I compel them to invest their energies somewhere ( else, it is hard to see how it could have been con- trived more successfully than by the school sys- tem as it has been run. Pupils have been pointed ' to college, university, the city — anywhere and everywhere rather than to the undiscovered and undeveloped possibilities of the community which maintained the school. The proverbial bad boys — measured by blind standards — drifted from indifference to incorrigibility and expulsion, from school censure to parental disapproval and social ostracism till they struck out for them- selves, found themselves, and began to amount to something among folk who know energy when they see it, capture it, and give it sugges- tions and a chance. Bright and docile pupils were urged by everyone to go on and get out. Only those who could be whipped into absolute conformity and conventionality were welcome to stay and fix more rigidly the forces of social petrifaction. One fine high school senior, pleaded that public sentiment should re- quire not expulsion, but extra work from the fel- lows who broke over school discipline in a lead- 48 Essentials of Community Efficiency ing Michigan city. An Indiana farmer boasted that his son was in the university preparing for better work than his father had to do. Asked what course the son was taking, he repUed with enthusiasm, "I don't know what course it is; but he gets $150 a month when he gets through." Any course good for $5 a day has been regarded by most parents of the old type as the utmost in educational attainment. Community life has been persistently impoverished until conimon sense began to move in the breasts of taxpayers. They began to demand that the school be used primarily to build up the home community, and that only those who were wholly worthless at home be permitted to escape to the city, where they would find plenty of congenial company. This revival of practical — and profitable — good- sense is marked in the agricultural sections of many states, Indiana probably being in the lead. An industry whose annual product, in 1915, amounted to a sum equal to $9.81 per minute for the entire time from the birth of Christ to 1916, is big enough to challenge the attention of any thinkifig person. Scientific farming has devel- oped the fact that successful agriculture is the most versatile, satisfying and profitable of all jobs for those who can develop trained brains enough to get into it and stay with it. To discover and exploit to the full the possibilities of the home farm and the home town is challenging an in- The Educational Community 49 creasing number of trained college men and women. "Acres of diamonds" of varied hues are being uncovered in most unlikely places. The changed attitude of demanding first service to the community by the school of the com- munity is in itself a powerful factor in bringing in the new education. The senses, eyes and ears and .noses of school children are being made sen- sitive to all that is best and all that is less than the best in the home locality : and their hands and feet and tongues are being made apt to grapple what ought to be improved and to grip hard what ought to be wiped out. True teachers hail this change in public sentiment for two plain reasons : it gives an immediate chance to show tangible results for school-funds invested ; and, better than all else, to most of them, it points a way out of the appalling grind of petty tasks which the old order heaped upon teachers. For the discovery is now heralded far and wide that children do not get their education in schoolhouses, that teach- ers are there only to help children get their edu- cation more advantageously outside the school, and that their ability to do many essential things thoroughly well and cheerfully is the final test of the combined good work of teacher and pupils. The community, the whole community in all its parts, is now for the first time clearly seen as the real school which children attend. The way things are done in homes, stores, churches, on 50 Essentials of Community Efficiency streets and playgrounds; in alleys and back- yards — this is what children unconsciously ab- sorb or consciously imitate. They merely reflect in the school rooms what they are learning in the big real school outside. Teachers see home man- ners and company manners, home attitudes and society poses, town decency or general corrup-' tion written in bold letters in the features and habitual reactions of the children. This beitig true, the duty of the school to help to the utmost to make the whole community all that it ought to be is clear — unless a waste of school-money is to be covered up by a lot of polite and mislead- ing sophistry. Teachers of the new type, for example, have discovered that no eyes are so sharp as young eyes to And needless dirt and causes of disease, open cesspools and manure heaps, rotted vege- tables back of stores, meats and vegetables ex- I posed to contamination by dust and flies, foul bakeries and factories of foodstuffs, dirty dairies I and milkers, and all threatened pollution of the . food, milk, meat, and water supply of the com- munityr More comprehensive and detailed reports on civic health conditions can be got from school children in one day than most health offlcials would be likely to find in a year. The same pry- ing eyes and nimble feet and fingers can find out nearly every case of defective wiring before the fire — and most fire boards cannot do that. Any The Educational Community 51 suspected breach of social morals, illicit peddling of intoxicants, resorts of vicious nature, thefts and the like, all can be more completely run to earth and exposed more mercilessly by a bunch of older school-fellows than by a corps of trained detectives. Social order can be more effectively maintained by a group of youthful police-asso- ciates than by all the police and night watchmen in the district, as Chicago and other big cities have recently discovered. High school students can turn over to the health board certified chem- ical analyses — they are doing it — covering the whole subsistence of the community, and save large bills for expert analysts. A few boys or girls sent to report on happenings at the police court, in the council chamber, in the court room, at the public service plants, or to ride with the firemen, or make a trip with the state dairy in- spector, will send throughout the whole school a thrill of practical civic aspiration and interest infinitely more than all the fireworks and flag- waving and general hip-hurrahness of patriotic celebrations. Some municipal politicians oppose turning loose in the community such intense civic zeal. Where school-money is paid to keep up a par- ticular brand of politicians, taxpayers have noth- ing else to say. Communities have been moved often by civic pride to build fine school plants, turn them over 52 Essentials of Community Efficiency to school boards, and then be denied by those boards the privilege of using the property which they paid for for civic and social purposes. This exhibition of monumental stupidity is only an- other evidence of the power of the old education to produce sheeplike docility in whatever citizens did not escape from the town. Adjectives nor adverbs can fitly characterize it. If groups of citizens want to build partisan meetinghouses, tie up thousands of dollars of fixed capital and let it stand idle more than nineteen twentieths of the time — ^why that is one of the prized priv- ileges of religious liberty in America. But to shut schoolhouses against any use which all citi- zens may want to make of them is directly con- trary to public policy and good-sense. This new need, newly discovered need, adds another urgent reason for emptying every schoolroom in Amer- ica of rigid, immovable and unadjustable desk seats and to install in their place movable desk chairs which can be put out of the way and leave the rooms clear for any sort of public use. Re- vival of the social spirit in communities is making a wider use of school plants indispensable. Tax- payers should insist upon electing school boards who have community sense as well as the ability to get teachers to work for $5 a month less salary. School property idle xexcept for thirty or thirty-six hours weekly is a clear waiste of tak- payer's money. The community's schoolhoiise The Educational Community 53 ought to be fit for use and open for use twelve to fourteen hours a day for twelve months in the year. Demands for more efficient and economical use of taxpayers' investment in schools couples up perfectly with the new education. The superintendent of a centralized township I school had the equipment of a blacksmith shop, harness shop, and shoe shop housed in the school- j yard. Boys and girls, with a little guidance,! quickly became expert in making such iron and leather repairs as are always needed on farms. Girls brought sewing and household stuff, boys brought ,or bought carpenter, plumbing, tinning, and garage tools. Without fuss, almost without notice, within a year the schoolhouse became pre- cisely what the superintendent knew it ought to be, a veritable workshop of practical education, where youngsters not only learned how to doi practicEil work, but where also the lessons from books became alive by contact with the duties of daily life. No citizen of that district now chuckles at jibes about children coming out of school with a lot of book-learning and no sense. They know better. Their children are having all their senses made active and acute and their organs of action brought under motived control. That part of education is splendidly taken care of. One large part has yet to be done. ^ 54 Essentials of Community Efficiency Physical education has been taken up and pro- moted energetically by the State Teachers' As- sociation of Michigan, as elsewhere. A woman's club accumulated $500 which they wisely in- vested in playground equipment, set it up, and unwisely told the children of the city to go to it. They did. Presently the equipment was splinters and ribbons. The women are convinced that if the doctrines of hereditary depravity and infant damnation are not true they ought to be. Many tears and much feminine profanity flowed freely. Fathers held their peace, mostly, and kept on working. The case is typical. * Destructiveness is one of a child's most valua- ble assets. It is the immature power of analysis, of. investigation and discovery working without guidance. Given no supervision and "Helen's Babies" will keep on till the end of time wanting "to shee a wheels go wound." Turned to con- structive ends the same impulses find expression in new experiences and new social combinations. Physical education has more to do with health, mental alertness, poise and self-possession than any other phase of culture. Older persons need it scarcely less than do children and youths. But chastened self-control makes adults more inde- pendent of supervision and direction than young folk can possibly be. A municipal director of physical education, giving part^ of his time to youths out of school and to parents, is one of the The Educational Community 55 indispensable public servants in this new age. This is, furthermore, one of the big wedges being driven into the old field of education to let in new ideas and let out new energies. Play, organized and supervised play, has come to be recognized as one of the chief of all educa- tional processes — not "interfered" play in which grown-ups are forever mixing in and stopping the natural processes of child play. Group plays are the main agency for making a society out of individuals, of planting the basis of morals deep in the live tissues of youthful human beings, and of cultivating that keenest of all weapons of cor- rection, conscience. The sway of the spirit of play, judiciously guided by older minds, is the surest of all ways to develop that much-sought and universally desirable thing, leadership. Gen- erous provision for supervised playgrounds has more to do with community welfare now and with determining the quality of community weU fare in the future than has any other one use of school-funds. But practical education and larger community use of school energies are finding another field of expression which has already been suggested. The whole rural school population of states like Indiana will soon be cared for exclusively in con- solidated or centralized schools. More than forty per cent of the rural school children of In- diana are already so cared for. Teachers of do- 56 Essentials of Community Efficiency mestic science and of agriculture, hired for year- round service, are being put into these schools as rapidly as possible. Home project work is chosen by the pupils during the school period, and sug- gestions are made by the teachers. Immediately on the close of school in the schoolhouse the teachers begin miaking the rounds to pupils' homes, and continuing school work in the homes and on the farms of the big school district, mak- ing suggestive criticisms, conferring with parents, and building the life of the school into the life of the home and its interests. This coupling up of teachers and parents, of school work and home work, of making culture a handmaid of practical efficiency, is one of the most wholesome of all ways to get full value out of school-funds. Pro- fessor W. D. Christie and his co-workers in In- diana are getting for the children what the Gary Plan does not provide, credit for graduation for this home work when it is creditably done. A similar work at Strawberry Hill, la., about which Mr. E. G. Cooley writes with enthusiasm, shows that the idea is good leaven. When farmers can see better crops, better stock, and better home- makers as a direct result of combined school- home work, paying school-taxes begins to look like a definitely profitable investment. The old education was a sort of sacrosanct system, a re- mote and aloof affair not to be criticised by any except those who were on the inside, those who. The Educational Community 57 being themselves the system, might criticise themselves and scold each other to their heart's delight. The new education puts the parent on a level with teachers, puts a concrete measure into the hand of the taxpayer, makes it not only possible, but quite certain that pointed' and direct questions will be asked of usurping school boards and of back-looking teachers, and that answers equally pointed, practical and concrete will be insisted on in reply. Getting full value back to taxpayers for school-funds invested lies close to the heart of the whole problem of social respon- sibility and of community efficiency. CHAPTER IV The Child-Community A New Viewpoint From the time that Theodor Schwann discov- ered the cellular structure of animal bodies, in 1839, there has been an inevitable drive of inves- tigation in all the departments of study touching human life. How the cells unite to begin a new living organism ; how the first live cell multiplips and becomes all the different kinds of cells which go to make up a male or a female body ; how the life of the father and mother affect the original cell life of the embryo, both the past life and the condition at the time the child is begotten and durflig the period of gestation; how the life of the father and mother affect the child during its first sixty months of individual life; how other lives than those of the parents impress infant organisms ; how intelligence first manifests itself and how it grows; how the delicate tissues of the infant body are organized by activity, and how the control of the parts of the body to satisfy desires fixes the tendencies and temperament of the child ; how^ the child learns — ^by unconscious imitation, conscious imitation, conscious effort in play or work ; how what the child inherits The Child-Community 59 physically from its parents becomes the instru- ment of what it inherits from them after it is born — ^from them and others who touch its life; how children learn during the different stages of growth and development; how they affect each other; how a bold and forward child or a back- ward or defective child influences the lives of other children; how the different types of chil- dren influence each other in fixing their tastes and inclinations — the world never knew how little it knew of things it most ought to know till biol- ogy began to lay new foundations for self-knowl- edge, self-reverence and self-control. The whole science of medicine has been revolutionized. The science of psychology and the art of education have been born anew. The function and pro- grams of religion have been put upon an entirely new basis. This new age in the life of the world is bound to be child-centered to an even greater degree perhaps than Jane Addams meant. The creation of the Bureau of Child Welfare in the national government marked a new departure in governmental activities, and it is in every way fortunate that this department had won a fixed place before world politics distracted and diverted attention from this most fundamental work. The discovery of the community is mainly fruitless, as has been noted, until the discovery is made local, until citizens discover themselves as a social unit with definite common rights and 60 Essentials of Community Efficiency * duties. The discovery of the child and of the child-community is, in the same way, largely in vain till it is made local. Parents, each new group of parents, must be guided to see not only that childhood is a distinct and definite stage of human life, but that there is a child-community wherever there are two or more children. The growth of this idea into a conviction is about all that is needed to work a complete and greatly needed revolution in all local schools. And not until the existence of a real child-community is recognized and provided for in each locality can it be at all properly said that the Tdeals of community efficiency have become national. Each locality already has in its public school the nucleus of a child-community, but almost never, as yet, is the local public school organized or operated or even capable of being organized and operated as a child-community, without sacrifice of some of the most cherished educational traditions which we inherited from the* "good old days" when the child was an unknown quantity and a child-com- munity unheard of. Mr. Randolph S. Bourne says: "The movement for vocational education has done nothing more valuable than to show us how far we are still from realizing the public school as a child-community, first of all as a quickening life and only secondarily as an educa- tional institution." Writing about "Continuation Schools" for boys and girls employed in gainful The C hild'C ommunity 61 occupations, in the New Republic, June 10, 1916, Mr. Bourne says : "The states are one after another jacking up the child-labor limit to sixteen years. We are rapidly coming to the conviction that the school should care for all children's activities up to that age. * * ■* But this means that we shall have to have a reinvigorated school. It must not be a place where children are kept when they long for the freedom of outside work. It must be a place where full opportunity for expression is provided for each child in a varied life of study and work and play. It must be an organic life and not an institution. * * * The vocational movement goes blundering on in amazing disregard of the psychology of the worker. Even the docile Gtv- man child, it is said, must be coerced into his admirable continuation school, where he gets a thorough orientation in his relations to his work, the community, and his comrades. What are ad- mirable trades and studies going to mean to boys and girls who are doing the most rudimentary work, their impulses undirected, their minds filled with sex-fantasy, 'personal mirages, and all the cheap and feeble excitements of the city streets? The groping and desiring spirit of youth is going to resist your most thoughtful schemes until you have a school which from the earliest years, by its freedom, its expressive life, its broad communal and personal excitements, its contact 62 Essentials of C dmmunity Efficiency with real things, provides a child-life which meets these inner needs. Our best American public schools already begin to show that such a child- community life is not at all impossible. Until we achieve it generally, our continuation school will be one of the stop-gaps, and a lusty warning of what we have failed to achieve." • Within a decade the idea has become quite general that child welfare bears the same relation to the community or social body as does the wel- \^fare of teeth to the individual human body. Fancy parks, golf links, club houses, and lodge rooms are an index of what the grown folk of a locality think of their own pleasures, comforts and con- veniences. Their provisions for child-life, for the health, robust constitutions, proper food and ex- ercise, and constructive activities of all their babes and children, are the sure and sensitive index of the mind of the adult community toward their best products, their boys and girls. Prac- tically all the problems of community health cen- ter here — in the physical welfare of the babies, the children and youths. Practically all the prob- lems of community morals center here, in the provisions which a community makes to surround little and youthful lives with- abundant attractive contacts with life and its activities, with aims and goals which lure toward the splendid and away from the sordid outlooks upon the present and future. The esthetic problems of community life The Child-Community 63 and efficiency center upon the varied objects of ^appreciation which are brought before young and ebullient lives, elements of refinement not left out of the common program until tastes are blunted and appreciative powers are withered. For, let it be said again and again, babies are born to the whole community, they go to school to the whole community, their health and vigor and initiative and energy, their ideals of citizen- ship, parenthood, neighborhood and nation and world, are fashioned for them by the whole com- munity both before they come into the world and after they arrive. This new viewpoint of com- munity efficiency must, it seems, very largely govern the development of active social con- science toward responsibility and betterment. BEFORE BABIES ARE BORN Jacob and Laban and their kind knew certain laws of breeding quadrupeds thousands of years ago. The laws of breeding human bipeds are not yet known, but there are tendencies so striking as to challenge directly the common sense of every community in America. No town or vil- lage but has its "fool," some walking witness of an ancestor's folly. There are liot institutions enough in America to care for half the feeble- minded boys and girls who ought to be cared for by the communities which permitted them to be born. "Chicago has more than fifty thousand 64 Essentials of Community Efficiency mental defectives walking its streets every day, with absolutely no restrictions upon their actions. New York state has more than thirty-two thou- sand known feeble-minded persons, less than half of whom are cared for in public institutions of any kind. There is no way of knowing exactly how many other mental defectives are roaming at will in that state, but there is good authority for believing that the number is almost as large as that for the known defectives. Indiana has thirteen hundred feeble-minded boys and girls, men and women, in one state institution, with more than one hundred on the waiting list. Dr. Bliss, head of this institution, declares that there are at least five thousand other mental defectives at large in the state, allowed to roam without re- striction and to intermarry and propagate their kind." Marc N. Goodnow reports this in Chi- cago. One Michigan county has fifty known de- fectives who cannot be admitted to any state institution until other counties are permitted to reach their apportionment. Six hundred and eight pupils oUt of sixteen hundred and seventeen in one Ohio public schpol are deferred at least two years from the easy local standard, and nearly half of these are defectives. In another school are two low grade morons barely able to find their way to their desks. Dr. William J. Hickson, director of the psychopathic laboratory of the Chicago Municipal Court, examines and The Child-Community 65 tests most of the boys and young men who come before the Boys' Court, female offenders in the Morals Court, and the men and women who come before the court of Domestic Relations. He re- ports that eighty-four per cent of boy offenders are feeble-minded ; seventy per cent of profes- sional prostitutes are feeble-minded; almost eighty-five per cent of two hundred and forty- five boys from the Boys' Court, averaging about eighteen and three fourths years of age, were morons, persons of arrested mental development. Massachusetts and New Jersey are finding large farms invaluable in caring for these marks of community neglect. Put alongside these records the frightening in- crease in tendencies to insanity, paranoia and mental derangements, to tuberculosis and other tissue ravages, to physical defect and deformity, and the evidence is conclusive that community sentiment has not been answering aright concern- ing the causes of these results. When physicians and public-spirited citizens brought befofe the citizenship of Iowa, some years ago, the need for sterilizing both sexes who showed strains of in- sanity, defiance of public right to invade the re- gion of private inclination to propagate was hurled forth from pulpits and platforms. Community sentiment, as the final court of appeal in America, must be brought to give judg- ment based upon full view of all the obtainable 66 Essentials of Community Efficiency) facts, and to answer straight-out, as self-govern- ing Americans are strangely loth to do, this ques- tion: Has the community both a right and a duty to say what children have a right not to be born by fixing beyond all question what men cannot become fathers and what women cannot become mothers? Discussion of a child-community in any towij- ship, town or city is perfectly superficial and chiefly artificial unless the men and women of the locality are willing to look human facts in the face and shape community sentiment and action accordingly. Has a drunken father, while drunk, a right to beget a child crippled in body or mind or both and dump his paternal wreckage on the. community for support? Has a man with syphilis or gonorrhoea a right to beget a child while afflicted with these filthy poisons, to im- peril the life of either an innocent or a guilty wife or woman, and to inflict upon the community another piece of human wreckage? Has a woman, young or older, a right to become a female peril to every boy and young man in the locality by her weak willingness to yield her body as an instrument of lust? The results of community dodging of these questions can be seen in every locality by any person who walks about with open eyes and understanding vision. It is quite fascinating to watch the feathers fly from the bird of freedom when some human The Child-Community 67 Roman candle lets himself loose on oar great republic able to lick all out of doors — but only about one out of hundred applicants for enlist- ment in the navy can give a clean bill of health and be accepted. As a matter of quite unpal- atable fact, the people of most American com- munities are, as yet, too cowardly to face any reality till they are driven up against it by some unescapable emergency. Our mental laziness and moral idiocy are the real problem of preparedness, as every honest citizen knows. Playgrounds and pop-guns will be of slight avail until communi- ties square up against intelligent conviction of public duty toward the child before the baby is born. Another phase of this matter drives the com- munity to invade stores and factories and look about with seeing eyes. Social and economic conditions have forced millions of girls and women to become bread-winners. What effect does the nature of their work, hours of labor, wages received, hours of rest and leisure, social conditions while at work, relations to employers and managers and foremen, and all physical con- ditions surrounding thpm have upon the final fact of motherhood? Are the women being qualified to give babies a decent outfit of blood and tis- sues? Have they time, inclination, and intelli- gence enough to give unborn babes a chance to come into this world with better than a fighting (6) 68 Essentials of Community Efficiency chance to find life, liberty, and a way to find happiness? National attention is being called to these questions but, here again, each local com- munity must intelligently form its opinions and enforce its convictions for its own safety as well as for the salvation of the nation and race. Piti- less publicity is the price of both safety and san- ity before the child-community is formed. WHEN BABIES ARE BORN Latest official figures show that ten per cent of white babies born alive die during the first month. This frightful infant mortality would, of course, be lower if all parents were healthy. But ability to beget and bear children has never yet demanded from parents sense enough to feed, bathe, dress, and exercise infants properly after they arrived. Communities have a big invest- ment in the pangs and privations of every woman who goes into the shadows of death to bring back a life. Each community owes to each of its mothers a debt which is, in some states, find- ing expression in mother's pensions. But no grant of money in token of public duty toward motherhood can possibly take the place of insur- ing to all mothers the best of expert help in proper rearing of the young. District nurses, visiting nurses, school nurses are being provided by many communities where, ten years ago, such public action would have been counted impos- The Child-Community 69 sible. Attention has simply been attracted and held to the general need until community senti- ment has justified the expenditure. Mothers in homes of refinement and culture welcome the visits of these public messengers of good cheer as much as do less fortunate women who find in them confidential friends. The activity of the rep- resentatives of community interest in mothers is evidence that American civilization is alive at its roots. Increasing solicitude by all Churches for the lives and welfare of all babies in the parish, an interest marked by active supervision of cradle rolls and font rolls is^a like evidence of a vig- orous quality of religious life. Many mothers in many communities have to work, work hard, work often where they cannot take their little ones. To have babies unpar- ented by either or both of the parents is bad for the parents, worse for the children, but worst of all for the community. Radical social reform- ers have seriously urged that changed conditions of parenthood, of economic and social conditions, make it increasingly demanded that all babies be taken as soon as they are weaned, if not before, and be reared in specially equipped institutions precisely as communities do with school children of a few years' later growth. Such an extension of public responsibility may have to come if motherhood is legitimized regardless of pater- nity, and women are permitted to contribute 70 Essentials of Community Efficiency physical maternity without moral parenthood to the state. Traditional morals may prevent this for a time — true religious teaching of youths would prevent it for all time. But it is not im- possible, apparently^ that the nations including America will try what sort of citizens may be raised up from bottle-fed and institution-bred infants. The very least of the duty of the Church in all communities is to join in with the kinder- garten movement and see to it that nurseries in sufficient number and conveniently located are provided to give good mothering to all babies not well cared for by their own mothers. A high rate of infant mortality brands a community with the stigma of indifference to its own best inter- ests. Dr. Evans reports in the Chicago "Tri- bune" that: The New York milk committee sends a letter annually tci 255 municipal health departments asking for the infant death rate. The last report is from 241 cities. The cities showing highest rate of infant mortality are Reading and Norris- town, in Pennsylvania ; Raleigh and Wilmington, in North Carolina; Perth Amboy and Passaic, in New Jersey; Montgomery, Alabama; and Nash- ville, Tennessee. The baby death rate in Passaic is nearly six and a h'alf times as great as in La Crosse, the rates being 193.6 and 30.6, respec- tively. The cities with rates sixty-five and under, and every such city is entitled to place on the honor list, are La Crosse, Wis.; Ogden; Omaha; East Orange; Seattle; San Diego; Madison, The Child-Community 71 Wis. ; Berkeley, Cal.; Portland; Waltham, Mass.; Oshkosh; Sioux Falls; Salt Lake City; James- town, N. Y., and Montclair, N. J. Perhaps when the New York milk committee puts out its report on 1916 they will limit their list to cities whose birth registration is accepted by the United States census office. The sign is unmistakable of a new day in civic conscience when cities and states begin to vie V7ith one another in putting the rate of ipfant mortality to the lowest possible minimum. Even in many rural districts it is bound to become common to find prominently located stations for distribution of certified milk, ice in season, medi- cines and health suggestions, the community making it a matter of public conscience to supply every need and necessity for the health and healthy growth of all its babies. High taxes judiciously spent for the health and happiness of helpless persons is an investment which all citi- zens may worthily covet. WHEN BABIES ARE WEANED When an infant can feed and dress itself with- out diirect help, and when it is able to propel itself about with reasonable safety, it .leaves the stage of negligible sex characteristics and be- comes to society a male or female child, a boy or a girl. Fun begins, usually, about that time — fun for itself and all the neighbors as well as for members of the household. The infant's fun 72 Essentials of Community Efficiency has been brought to it and forced upon it; boys and girls prefer to hunt out their own sources of enjoyment, to escape from watchful oversight and explore the planet for personal experiences. At this precise point, when baby ceases to be a toy and searches for its own significant experiences, is where most human lives begin to be wrecked, suppressed, ruined by adult ignorance of child- life and the meaning of human hunger for expe- rien£es. Sympathetic eyes and ears find no more pathetic occurrences on this earth than the pit- iable incidents always happening, in which the eager search of children for something to do, something to enjoy, some experience by which it yearns to be fed, begins to be crushed back and down by ignorant, blind, tired, nervous parents, nurses, or other adults. Only toward the end of the last century did systematic knowledge of child-life come to be a recognized science. Pai- dology, the science of childhood, is not a study merely of theories but of living facts, male and female facts, of boys and girls in the process of gaining experiences, of gathering and sorting and classifying the results of doing now one thing and now another with insistent restlessr ness. It is one of the finest and most practical of all studies. It is the foundation of moral par- enthood, of intelligent guidance of the lives brought into the world that they may be full and finished lives. When it becomes, by demand of The Child-Community 73 community sentiment, a condition of parenthood regardless of classical or vocational education, the exceptional parents of the present will only be forerunners of the usual parents of the future. Available literature on this subject is becoming voluminous. The reading of it and practice of its truths ought to be universal among parents and teachers. One of the striking discoveries of this new ' field of study is that play is a necessity and not 1 a luxury to a child. The whole impulse to give / expression to impulses and all the challenges to action which beat upon the shores of fresh lives compel the child, challenge it to various actions. Play is the child's work. This work needs only guidance, suggestions, and a chance. Work in the spirit of play is the only work well done b; anyone on this earth. To do what one likes to do, to have joy in doing something well; to have joy multiplied by inning the approval of companions, playmates, loved ones; to run in and out of the big world full of surprises with keen zest in playing the game till weariness or despair comes on ; to build into the tissues, fibers, cells of the physical body the motor memories which only can make it possible to do things "without thinking," to meet the spirit of adven- ture with explorations especially into all for- bidden places; to indulge the instinct of perver- sity by doing something else or doing the same i 74 Essentials of Community Efficiency thing in some unheard-of way; to clash wills noisily, thresh out conflicting purposes, settle dif- ferences in a most heartless but thoroughly satis- factory way; to build into the inscrutable store- house of pure memories the permanent materials of mental growth; to be alive to every living thing and share mystic company with unseen realities — the indescribable wonders and untold possibilities of the play-world through which the Creator prompts the child to unconscious prep- aration for meeting with abundant and ready resources the big world just beyond child-world, here is the place and tirhe and way for making or marring human lives. Europe is at war — because boys have been taught to play soldier and girls to play nurse. Not all the duplicities of politicians and abstract ideas could send men to war in the spirit of play even unto death unless boys had died ten thousand times in play warfare, built the play of war into their whole lives from infancy onward. It ought to be plain to every thinking mind that if ever war is banished from human relations the equivalents of war must be built into the play of the child-community. The practice of getting all the facts first, of giving everybody a fair chance to clear himself, of in- sisting upon a square deal even if every little bully in town has to be threshed thoroughly up to the standard, of putting discussion before force The Child-Community 75 and not afterward, of helping children to find their own way to the best decisions instead of forcing them to take without reason the will of others — simple common sense in guiding the experiences of children is the way of community- making and of nation-making. The Playgrounds Association of America is ready to supply all needed facts to prove to the most reluctant citizen that a well-equipped and well-supervised playground is the very highest type of community-insurance against the perils of unhealthy, stupid, unmoral, and immoral human life. As such it is an investment worthy of generous consideration and support by all citizens. It is the magnet drawing to it by count- less ties the lives whose experiences measure the richness and poverty of both present and future. THE COMMUNITY OF BOYS AND GIRLS Childhood is a distinct world. It remains ever with the children. Grown persons who try to be children are childish freaks just as freakish as would children be if embodying the experiences of mature life. Every child has a right to be understood as a child, known by sympathetic insight for what it is and not for what is not and cannot be. False standards of judging chil- dren are set up and maintained by women who, when attention is called to it, invariably admit their unconscious but far-reaching mistake. "The 76 Essentials of Community Efficiency baby is so good! He doesn't give me the least bit of trouble." That judgment lies at the root of a vicious mistake. Babies and children are judged good or bad according to the discomfort or inconvenience which they cause to grown per- sons, wholly regardless of any sense of goodhess or badness experienced by the little life. Pro- fessor Patterson DuBois has been conspicuous among effective leaders in teaching parents and teachers the penalties which they heap upon themselves and the cruelties which they pile with crushing weight upon the little ones who cannot, in any slightest degree, understand the basis of judgment by which they are misjudged. The history of parental discipline and of criminal law is one page of utter blackness, quite probably the blackest of all pages in human history, writing into imniature and inexperienced lives the harsh and unfeeling judgments of adults to whom chil- dren "gave trouble." They have been whipped, beaten, struck, starved, tortured in body and anguished in soul, imprisoned, hung by the neck till dead and killed in countless ways — all be- cause they did not know and respect abstract notions of property rights, personal privileges, and the whole world of adult notions. Boys have been beaten with clubs until unconscious for stealing when they did not have one slightest notion of theft within them. Contemplating this vast iniquity of injustice thrust down into the The Child-Community 77 child-world, men who doubt the reality of judg- ment beyond death feel in their inmost souls that there ought to be a time for the restitution of all things, an occasion when the shameless brutalities of men, the bruised bodies and quiv- ering souls of children may stand up as wit- nesses of deeds done in the flesh. Boys are not little men. Girls are not little women. They are simply little bundles of accumulating experiences, of child-experiences, of lives a-hungered for contacts with life. They do not at all know nor can they know the world of abstractions, of principles and laws and rules which adults manufacture for themselves. What can a boy know of physical or moral parenthood until the physical organs and moral equipment of parenthood are part of his positive expe- riences? What can a girl know of the expe- riences of a woman's life? Without the expe- riences, what have they in themselves by which to set up standards of judgment or moral con- duct? They do have, boys and girls, inexorable standards of judgment for themselves and others of their kind. Given even a decent chance to develop and exercise these "standards they moral- ize each other, socialize each individual, and punish each other with pitiless severity — and when they get this punishment they take it from each other and profit greatly by it, provided no cowardly and blundering male or female giant 78 Essentials of Community Efficiency comes bolting into their world with alien stand- ards. Grant the fact that their biting ridicule or stinging blows are hard things for interested parents and teachers to endure — ^they are actually harder for those who look on or who hear about it than they are for the youngsters them- selves to endure." They have their world. They sort out good stuff from driftwood with unerr- ing skill, and they can do more to make good wood of spoiled material than can all the adults in the community. -One of the most successful business men in America testifies that he owes most of his success to the fact that his fond mother compelled him to wear his beautiful yel- low curls till he was almost twelve : and he liad to thresh every boy in the whole school and combinations of boys and make every last one of them want to wear long hair and be a Sam- son. The truth cannot ,be too frequently repeated nor too strongly insisted upon, that the first twelve years of human life is, above all else, the material-gathering period. Experiences — repeti- tion of such experiences as are "liked," avoidance of such experiences as brought or left an un- pleasant impression, eager hunger for new and untried ones, a ready inclination to try anything once at least, a new word, a new act, a new impression — ^here in the child- world is the chal- lenge to the whole community to make much of The Child-Community 79 the child-community. Schools must be more and more this sort of a life. Homes must share more largely in it. Churches must not only be more childlike but make themselves great feeders to the child-Qommunity. All institutions and enter- prises of the community must share a lively part in filling up to the limit of possibility the sort of world-life which the community chooses to see lived out within it by its boys and girls. Those who are fit for companionship with children will make it a special privilege to be with them in the fruitful hours between supper time and bed- time, preferably on the playground, sharing their experiences, suggesting new ones, stimulating, inspiring, guiding. "We cannot bring Utopia by force. But better, almost, be at work in sin, Than in a brute inaction, browse and sleep." CHAPTER V The Youth-Community The Human Problem Childhood puts big responsibilites upon par- ents and citizens generally. What, then, shall be said of the social responsibility put up to these same parents and citizens by youths? If the first twelve-year period of human lives is a challenge tothe spirit of efficiency in community life, how shall the challenge of the second twelve years be measured and made clear? Physicians cannot yet tell all the significance of the structural changes which mark the passage from childhood to full manhood and womanhood. The psysiological revolution is striking. Even more striking is the inner change which comes upon the life. Childhood is being left behind to other children. The traditions of the child-world are growing weaker: the instincts of man-world and woman-world are growing stronger. The old and familiar foundations of life are being broken up — and no new foundations are yet laid on which to build. Where the child knew itself to be a creature of parental control, the youth resents control by anybody outside of himself but has no anchorage of self-control fixed in his 80 The Youth-Community 81 new body. And the changes keep crowding from within. The youth is no more the child he was ; he is unknown to his parents and to every- one else, even to himself. New notions seize him, new impulses move him, new passions pos- sess him — and he is stranger to them all. Notice of the new order of parental relations usually takes the form of maternal notice to the so-called he£(d of the house in somewhat this fashion: "John, you've got to take charge of that boy. I don't know what has come over him. He used to be such a good boy but now he won't mind anything I say to him. He never has disobeyed me so persistently before. He didn't get that from my side of the house, and you must control him from now on." Wise fathers smile only inside at this announcement, especially if they knew mother's side of the house in former years. There never was a woman who understood a male youth in the process of growing into and managing his manhood, and the intuitions of the sex prompt them to recognize this truth. But father himself cannot now control the boy as father — the beginning of the end of parental re- sponsibility has come. Wise fathers know this and adjust themselves to the new relationship of confidential friend, chum, interested companion, big brother — and in this new relationship they go with the lad till he has found his own balance, his own moral standards, his real self. 82 Essentials of Community Efficiency Mothers strike the tragedy of parenthood here with both boys and girls, except they be un- usually wise mothers. They yearn more than ever before to play a large part in the life of son or daughter, but find new interests closing doors to them moment by moment. Being women, mothers of their own children through the years of childhood, they feel that they have a right to be consulted,, to receive gratitude for privations and pains endured, to keep first place in daughter's life and in ' son's consideration. Disappointment and heartache are bound to be their portion unless they have been definitely preparing themselves for years for precisely this crisis in the life of the home. Many mothers grieve deeply because they find themselves tak- ing second place to some other woman in the confidences of the girl. Skilled insight and intel- ligent sympathy only can lead a mother to cut the strings of the past as rapidly as the growing girl is cutting them in her inner self; to treat the girl — self-conscious young woman now — for what the lass sees in her mirror and not for what the mother sees in her memory. Father being more away from home and less in the companionship of the children finds it far easier to adjust himself to the young woman who has come to live where the girl used to be; he finds it not so easy to adjust himself to the young man and his exaggerated ways and expensive The Youth-Community 83 tastes. Insistence is usually laid upon the fact that mother ought to be the sponsor for the daughter and father for the son. Natural human conditions, as they are found in most homes where parents are parents, indicate the opposite. Father can enter more directly into the young woman's estimate of herself and treat her so than can the mother. Her sex instincts make it possible for the mother to sympathize intelli- gently with her youthful son more directly than can the father whose sex instincts are. far from youth. Social justification of this truth is found in the fact that almost never is there a willing prostitute who had a chum father, a man on whom she could pour out with abandon the wealth of her new womanly nature without sug- gestion or thought of physical passion. It is the girl whose whole affectionate nature is outraged by neglect, starved into abnormal clamor, who "goes wrong" with riotous abandon. All that can properly be said of the importance of inti- mate companionship between father and son ap- plies with equal or greater force to the same relationship between father and daughter. Occasional companionship with parents is sought by youths of both sexes; constant com- panionship with others of their own kind is a demand of their natures. This truth opens the way of largest parental opportunity and points out, at the same time, the way of chief com- (T) 84 Essentials of Comthunity Efficiency munity duty in their behalf. The seVitiment of the community has need to be thoroughly aroused to recognize that the problem bf , the community of youths is, ever and always, a human problem grounded in the qualities of human life as these manifest themselves in males and females between thirteen and twenty-four years of age. What pictures they are in all communities, rural, urban, and suburban, these youths during the first and second halves of this twelve-year period! Backward, bashful, shy, forward, bold, self-poised; vain, vulgar, mean, modest, chaste, noble; scorning memories of childhood, seeing ideals more real than substantial realities; lured this way and that, drawn by invisible pulls and pushed by invisible urges ; consciences more deli- cately balanced and more sensitive than ever before or ever later; seeing themselves magni- fied, glorified, exalted even by their outstanding miseries; depressed unto desperation; driven to choose but fearing each choice, and standing stoutly for choice once made whether right or wrong; walking before others' opinions as in a world set with mirrors to reflect what others think; walking in lonely deserts and wavering as to whether to let the chin drop or to shove it grimly forward as a sign of will-to-Power ; mak- ing and receiving most lasting impressions; shaping unconsciously or half consciously their The Youth-Community 85 tendencies to conduct by.what they do or leave undone — ^be their gods many or but one true and living God of all earth and time, here is a picture in flesh tints worthy of his workmanship! In these shambling, awkward boys, athletic and combative youths, lassies quick turning from girls to women, in these and their kind as they work, study, play, saunter, fight, dream, pray, lie the hopes of the community and the hope of the world. Youths by millions might have been saved in this and past generations had grown folk been willing and honest to face the present problem of youthful life as a human problelm before and above all else, even though the science of adolescence had not been begun. Just as play is a law fixed by the Creator for the growth and development of the child so is companionship a law fixed by the same hand for the life and vigor of youth. All that the infant is comes to maturity in the child : all that maturity is has its infancy in youth. Where the child was one ceaseless question mark, accumulating the ma- terials of later life, the youth is using these materials, trying out first one implement and then another, starting to shape up his materials now in one fashion and now in another, always choosing, seeking, trying to find the tools of a career and the whetting the tools of self-govern- ment, for this is life's tool-choosing period. 86 Essentials of Community Efficiency Because of this constant choosing or refusing to choose, the character which could not be shaped in childhood is now being slowly but surely formed. These youths in each community are human beings trying to find themselves, human- ity deciding what to do with what it finds. Adults have poor memories of this period through which they all came. They, like youths now, were a general jumble of ideas and impressions, of ideals and impulses, of lingering childhood and of aspiring adulthood. They were in their day and for' their generation what youths are to-day and for this generation — the moral battle- ground where personal character and the morals of the race are shaped and determined. Take from all the armies of Europe all the youths between seventeen and twenty-four — and how long would any of the armies endure? Take from the struggle for moral conquest of our race the ideals and pulsing visions of youths during the second twelve-year period of life^ — ^who would care to endure? Let parents, teachers, ministers, citizens look at their common human problem of the community's youths, and wage a fair fight: recognize that never in human history have human beings been made morally good by not doing things ; that dolessness and docility are not good in themselves, but that youths are good in proportion as they are good for something. Let the fight be pitched here, in Youth. Let the The Youth-Community 87 issues be joined here and the fight be unto death for moral victory in the community, the nation, and the world. If this fight can be won, human- ity can be made moral like unto God. If this fight is not won-s-it must be won, for defeat here means defeat everywhere and finally. The issue of creation in the quality of human creatures is at stake, depending on the standards of self- government and self-control set up by youths between thirteen and twenty-four years of age. Challenges put in words cannot be too strong. They are not strong enough to waken American citizens from lethal sleep and sleep-walking. Millions upon n^illions, women and men, living on latest market » reports and newest fashion sheets! Each community in the American na- tion needs some upheaval to jam its citizens up against the rock wall of realities, compel them to look fair in the face the human facts which they have begotten and borne, and then say with soberness and sanity what grown citizens owe to these youthful lives in the swirl of moral turmoil. Solutions are idle talk till the bare fact of a real problem is seen and admitted. Up to the present moment plans for community better- ment and for practical patriotism are made to cover streets and sewers, theaters and golf links, playgrounds for little children — ^helps for grown- ups and children. Is there a religious denomi- 88 Essentials of Community Efficiency nation, sect, congregation, or Church organiza- tion, a community by its municipal government or any official or semiofficial body, which has planned permanent concrete and definite better- ments for its youths outside school equipments? Children change much between the end of child- hood and early maturity: few persons change .the bent of their characters after they pass twenty- five. Where is the real community problem on which social responsibility and efficiency rest? The ptoblem is a human one; the solution must be of like kind. SOLVING THE PROBLEM The "boy problem" has received considerable attention through the* activities of the Young Men's Christian Association and the secondary division of the organized Sunday School — ^but boys keep growing out of boyhood and grown folk kee^ forgetting or ignoring the fact that boys are their problem. Getting on the inside of these institutions one is bound to appreciate the ideals which lie bfehind the expenditure of millions of dollars annually — ^but to feel the hope- less impotence of holding a generation of boy- men by any sort of institutional activity. Those who are highest in the counsels of association work are foremost in urging the helplessness of any few workers to solve the problems which deserve and demand the active help of all. The organized Bible class of young men has proved The Youth-Community 89 to be the most flexible and useful of all institu- tions among young men, wherever the Church is willing to give the young men a free hand and widest opportunity. The selfish question, What is the Church going to get out of this? has driven out, and will continue to drive out an uncounted multitude of youths. Not many insti- tutions made up of human beings are willing to live only in the hearts of those they help. The experience of very many Churches joins with that of the Young Men's Christian Association in demonstrating that athletics are good for the health but poor bait to lure young men toward religion. The new mind in the Church, that it exists not for the benefit pf a few saints but for the help of all citizens, is promise of a wider usefulness than for many centuries. The solution of the boy problem must be largely religious, mainly masculine and along the line of definite achievement. Boys are more spontaneously and sensitively religious between fourteen and eighteen or nine- teen than at any other time or during any other period of their lives. They rarely indicate this state of being either by their vocabulary or gen- eral demeanor, but these are usually misleading and put on to hide hearts more sensitive than those of little girls. Boys are not so churchly as girls but far more religious. They may be harsher in speech and act but their consciences 90 Essentials of Community Efficiency are more delicately balanced and their moral standards more fixed and unbending than those of the girls. For lack of guidance in self-control young fellows are much given to holding other folk to account by their new standards of moral judgment and to be generously indulgent toward themselves — ^but the princit)les of right conduct are growing within them. They are always more religious than their parents even when parents are convinced that they are most godless — and all the power of religion means more to inspire, regulate, and restrain them in youth than it can possibly mean to the child or to the grown man. These youthful males are more jealous of their masculinity, more proud of its powers, more eager to be rated as strongest among their kind, more ready to display their prowess in any line which promises to tax them to the utmost, more virile and more loyal than at any other time of iltheir lives. The last thing they care for is any- Bthing which will be "good" for them, something Iwhich will help them to "be" this quality or I that; they want to do, to show their ability, to ' be known as doers of heroic deeds. Being males their whole youth stretches out after masculine ideals, strong, vigorous, manful lives who found a big job and hung to it till it was done. The solution of the boy problem is inherent in the nature of it. Males must solve it. It must be free of conventionalities and conformities, a The Youth-Community 91 ceaseless challenge to male sentiments and attri- butes. It must be religious, moral, dynamic, present, worthful now rather than after death, significant to those who are alive to this present world rather than to those who are dead or al- most dead. Young males must solve it among themselves — ^the older of them, from eighteen to twenty-four, getting into the lives of the younger ones and showing them how to do strong things in a masculine way. The moral parenthood of young men, the sentiments of chivalry and strength, of protection of the weak and needy, of companionship with their own kind in process of making — these are the living factors iii the solution of the problem. It must be done by communities, by all of the male youths of the community reckoned as present or prospective citizens of the community and nation. It must be larger than any one Church or group of Churches, as large as the locality, reaching as far as the community of males ought to reach. Its activities are those of citizenship, of social responsibility to the last degree, of community betterment in all its immediate acts and remote purposes. Groups of all sorts will naturally spring up in this association of young lives, ath- letics, music, literary, religious, secret, chivalric, and the like. The whole group knows most how to meet and solve its own problems if given any- 92 Essentials of Community Efficiency thing like a fair chance. Selfish institutions of all sorts and all kinds of self-seeking adults will want to jump in and engineer the association — and succeed only in breaking it up and driving boys and young men away from them and their cherished organizations. The "girl problem" is less talked about but more important. Women must solve it — too many men don't care to have it solved, and alto- gether too many women have less concern for the highest welfare of girls than do most men. Folk who face human facts in community and home life have slight patience with the academic squabbles of schoolmen over adolescent psychol- ogy. They know that girl babies are potential mothers, every one of them ; that physical mater- nity is a monopolizing interest and not an inci- dent; that when nature fits any organism for a given function the most powerful compulsions within that organism look to the discharge of that function according to nature regardless of social customs, and that, therefore, one hundred per cent of the youthful woman's life is social, seeking companionships which satisfy conjugal and parental propensities; that girls are not so consciously sexual as boys but unconsciously pluming and gowning and parading themselves with sex appeals almost constantly; that a phys- ical basis accounts for most of their mental states and rnoral notions; that a wayward ^irl is a The Youth-Community 93 vastly more uncertain and puzzling problem than is a willful boy; and that, because she is what she is, a girl can undo faster and more effectively than any other agent on earth the work of moral parenthood by parents and teachers and real pas- tors. Thoughtful citizens never can compre- hend how many girls actually glory in their ignorance of things they ought to know, rely upon their helplessness to win protection, and go out to find protectors as youthful and ignorant and primal as themselves. The dramatic inci- dents which give setting to the suicide or murder of young women shock all adults, throughout the nation, with consciousness of total inability to understand the sex duplicities of girls in the early and middle teen years. But exactly the same sort of deceptions can be seen almost every- where in animal maternity. Changes in fashions, in social customs, in topics of conversation, in freedom of social intercourse between the sexes of all ages, make it more difficult for girls of this generation, than for any in the past, to bring themselves into clean, chaste, womanly woman- hood, unstained and unspoiled by false ideals and perilous habits. And if the girl problem is left unsolved not all the nice old people on the planet are able to help boys and young men solve safely the boy problem. What can be done? What ought to be done? Probably more citizens are asking themselves 94 Essentials of Community Efficiency questions of this sort than are raising any other public problems for consideration. The nature of the problem indicates the only possible way of solving it. Recognize, first of all, that there is a com- munity of youth, a distinct period of life when young persons are not children and not adults, and yet childish impulses and mature promptings are mixed within them inextricably. This is a community of persons, persons with many com- mon interests,N persons who can do more with each other and for each other than can be done by. any possible number of adults. Within this .community are two distinct groups, sex com- Imunities marked by sex traits which mathemat- ical psychologists are likely to overlook. They 'are human beings living over within themselves the whole ethical history of humanity, some- times living the extremes of it in successive mo- ments, spanning the life of man from cave crijdity and cruel savagery to tehderest sensibilities of utmost refinement. This community has rights. These rights are the duties of those who are outside the scope of . their common ties. These duties rest upon what the youths are, what they want to be and to do, what the experience of the ages shows they are able to do and ought to undertake. The chief barrier to discharge of these duties is the most ancient adult prejudice toward youth, an in- The Youth-C ommunity 95 grained tradition that only adults have rights which adults are bound to grant, social and reli- gious as well as economic and educational rights. "Adultomania" is the descriptive term sometimes uied to designate the attitude of mind which drives youths away from the Church, away from the community, away from homes, out into the streets and dark corners where adult comfort and convenience will be undisturbed. Communi- ties throughout the civilized and uncivilized world exhibit the most shameless and — ^in Amer- ica at least — inexcusable indifference to the human rights of youths. Club rooms, assembly rooms, gymnasiums, swimming pools, parlors, athletic fields, directors of physical education, social centers, social enterprises — so many varied opportunities for this community of youth to become a self-conscious group working out the solution of self-help to their own live problems — these are simple community duties toward its youths. No money? More money is wasted by communities in needless duplication of stores, meeting-houses, and lodges than is required to finance generously the beginnings of public rec- ognition of the world of youth. More than that, ther^e is more money left, after adults have wasted cash to their heart's full satisfaction, idle money or cash bringing in only a paltry rate per cent, enough to give the community of youths such 96 Essentials of Community Efficiency facilities as the community has never dreamed of. Lack of money only comes from lack of interest : interested attention of jparents and all adults directed to the needs and rights of youths will bring fortunes to lay anew the foundations of life in the community and for all the world. Cure for all the evils of democracy is declared to lie in more democracy. It is sure that the only cure for the moral ills and perils of the world of youth lies in more mingling of youth with youth, in more opportunities for the njeet- ing of the sexes in free and open sharing of play and work. Segregation of youths of high school age is always urged when some flagrant misstep calls public attention to the situation. Shutting young folk away from each other has been tried without avail since parents first made themselves accountable for the conduct of their young. Shutting the sexes apart just when the clamors are most insistent for them to be together is a sort of brute-force discipline. It may succeed for a time sometimes; it is more likely to aggravate the very malady it is supposed to cure. Play, open play, much organized play; work, coeduca- tional work which throws the sexes into closest conference on projects and plans cherished by both of them; through-the-week activities which identify the motives and ideals of religion with the common interests of life ; separation of The Youth-Community . 9/ groups with sufficient frequency to make any one separation appear not unusual; practicable projects of public moment committed to the com- munity of youth for discussion and determina- tion; simple human honesty in recognition of natural rights in the lives of youthful citizens is sufficient to work a complete transformation of community life within a decade. A high school senior was nominated in a mass meeting for membership on a specially chosen body to work for public welfare through a period of years. The nomination met with grins of incredulity by most of the wise citizens assembled, and an older and wiser person was substituted. By 1926, barring accident, that youthful citizen will prove himself worth more to the community in 1916 than the whole assembly of dignified wiseacres who do not know and would not believe the balanced energies of leadership inside that lad. The case is one of millions like it. Adultomania is not yet so chastened as to be willing to give the com- munity of youths a chance — suggestions and a chance. The stress of human reality will be clear or muddy as it approaches parenthood, exactly in i proportion to the chance given to it to clarify itself by motion, by organized and directed activ- | ities. Youthful men and women will bring to '* each other at the marriage altar clean competence to perpetuate the race and to make it more fit / 98 ' Essentials of Community Efficiency i I to be perpetuated as they are guided into whole- some companionships. No possible number of purchasable things can take the, place in youth- ful lives of friendships which are priceless. This then is the debt of the community as a whole to the group of youths, the solution of the problem — multiplication of opportunities for youths to find themselves, to find each other, to find abun- dai^t life in a life of social intercourse and service. CHAPTER VI The Parent-Community "In the day that God created man, in the. like- ness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name MAN, in the day when they were created." Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce. The an- cient Hebrew oracle and modern science are agreed in this, that maleness and femaleness are complements in the constitution of animal life. Extremists, like Otto Weininger, would deny separate being and existence to all women just as British and American law denied it to mar- ried women. Professor Thorndyke, in "Individ- uality," sees much akin in sex traits: "It appears that if the primary sex characters — ^the instincts directly related to courtship, love, child-bearing and nursing — are left out of account, the aver- age man differs from the average woman far less than many men differ one from another." Com- mon experience joins Scripture and science: coni-j plete Man requires blending of sex attributes./ A man alone is essentially incomplete; a woman alone, whether by choice or chance, crucifies her deepest nature and truest impulses. Creationally the male and female require each other for their completeness. Racially they must mate. In 99 (8) 100 Essentials of Community Efficiency mating the man and the woman become, both physically and ethically, one flesh. They two constitute the one gateway into life on this planet. Their physical urge to parenthood, the passions which prompt men to beget and women to bear babies, are primal, powerful, indispens- able. If these incentives to parenthood should weaken, disappear, or be overmastered by the now clamorous demand for universal use of con- traceptives all our human problems would be speedily and finally solved. The fact of parent- hood is behind them all. A fair degree of unqualifled assertion is war- ranted, then, in this particular field, for parental sentiments underlie both race perpetuation and the worth of the race perpetuated. The measure of intelligence with which these sentiments are understopd and guided determines not only the fact of human society but also the savagery or reflnement of the civilization which that society chooses to make. Coming closer to familiar local conditions as they affect the mating of the sexes and resulting parenthood we may look with rea- sonable expectancy to find the social womb out of which <:ivilization issues. Courtship, commonly, is concealed as of some- thing to be socially ashamed ; weddings are often the scene of rudeness and of vulgarity — as of women climbing down through coal chutes to enter church buildings and get surreptitious The Parent-Community 101 views of the bride ; babies are cheap, cheaper than personal comfort and social convenience ; concep- tion is avoided; the marriage relation is turned over to the region of physical appetites and lust. Deaths outnumber births in very many localities, and usually in what are known as high social circles. Provision by the community for the] meeting and courtship of its young women and young men measures the level of community I sentiment toward this process of incalculable so- cial importance. One look up and down Main Street in the early evening shows the commu- nity's answer to this human quest. Boys and girls come up through youth to early maturity, citizenship and parenthood hopelessly unin- formed or viciously misinformed concerning things they have most right to know fully, and without dynamic motives dominating their intel- ligence. If the policy of silence led parents to sow to the wind, they and all society are reaping whirlwind. Divorce has come to be not merely a national scandal but a real peril. Legislators, and even many churchmen who ought to know better, multitudes who are shocked by results but blind to causes, clamor for uniform divorce laws. As ' if uniform painting of pesthouses would cure smallpox ! The number of divorces granted is appalling. The fatal social malady is disclosed more surely. 102 Essentials of Community Efficiency however, by the comparison of the number of applications for divorce with the number of wed- ding ceremonies licensed. The increasing pro- cession of disappointed wives and husbands ap- pealing to the court to untie their legal bonds is one of the saddest pictures of contemporary life. Court calendars have had to be consulted in great numbers because these statistics are not commonly separated in judicial reports of \l vital statistics. For a period of five years end- ing with 1915, records in the north Central States show an average of one divorce granted for each I live and two- thirds marriages, and one divorce f applied for to each four and three-tenths mar- riages. In a number of counties there was either a divorce applied for or one pending in court for each two and four-tenths marriages. The num- ber of children made orphans or half orphans appears not to be so great as in California, where Protestant Episcopal Bishop Moreland reported forty per cent of the children in the orphanages of the state as children of divorced parents. This state of affairs might, possibly, not have become so disastrous if young people had been taught, generally, to know the difference between a wedding and a marriage, and for this ignorance ministers of the gospel are more blamable than anyone else for they all know that any preacher in good, standing can fill an auditorium with an audience of interested young folk as often as he The Parent-C otnmunity 103 announces a message on courtship and marriage and home life. It is little short of an insult to millions of families broken up by needless igno- rance when churchmen resolve and resolute bravely over the consequences of their shameless ^leglect of public duty. Marriage is a process. A wedding is an event.' Anyone designated by law can perform a wed- ding ceremony to legalize or solemnize a mar- riage, pronounce the sanction of society and the Church upon the mating of a man and a woman —but they, ministers or civil officers, can never marry anyone. If a man and woman want to marry each other it is their task to fulfill the con- ditions of the process by which two lives are blended into one and two bodies become, physio- logically and racially, one flesh. This process is ] continuous, a process of subordination of each | one not to the other but to their union which is the home. Where two persons are wedded but this process is thwarted, they are living in a state of moral adultery even if their cohabitation is made legal by a civil contract. A wedding is possible only by the joining of right hands — under western customs — indicative of a union of wills to enter upon the marriage process and rela- tion. If this union of wills persists the union of persons is consummated (luring the passing of years. In their physical parenthood their union is physically consummated with relation to the 104 Essentials of Community Efficiency race; in their moral parenthood, the fulfillment of paternal and materned relations with the off- spring, their ethical union is consummated with relation to society and civilization. If the union of wills is balked for any cause 'there can be neither union of persons nor of personalities; they do not blend but clash more or less noisily. By the abuse of the marriage relation both the man and the woman may fall to a level of lust not to be found elsewhere in the whole animal creation. The possibility of highest happiness through the intelligent use of the marriage rela- tion carries with it the possibility of unhappinesS to the same extreme. In immoral parenthood and discordant family life the two cannot become one, except as a legal fiction, but they abide separate, discontented, disappointed, fruitless, thwarted of all life's choicest happiness. These are not abstruse propositions of philos- ophy but plain statements of observable and verifiable fact. The breakdown of the Church as a public institution contributing to public wel- fare is nowhere more marked than in her past failure to teach the truth which has most of all to do with human happiness and well-being. The fact that Protestantisiti rejected the sacra- mental view of marriage is no excuse for almost unforgivable ignorance and unconcern toward truths so close to the foundations of individual and social welfare. The deplorable facts of the The Parent-Community 105 whole divorce business do not rise at the court- house but at the church house, and no amount of zeal to get people marvelously converted will ever excuse one minister at the bar of final judg- ment for failure to do his part in helping young folk to be intelligently fit for marriage and par- enthood, nor will it make up for the individual and social misery due to plain neglect of minis- terial duty toward young people and the com- munity. A distinctively home-centered civilization, such as was handed over to this generation, may not be ideal nor fitted to endure the strain of revo- lutionized social relations. The solemnity with which marriage vows were taken may have been artificial, the beauty of home life a fancy, and constancy of affection a pretense. This genera- tion may simply be more "natural" than its for- bears. Candor compels the admission that the community does not now insist upon either con- stancy or fidelity to the explicit and implied obli- gations of parenthood and race culture. Mar- riage is often regarded as respectable when it is as loveless and legal as a partnership contract to peddle fish. The marriage is almost never thought of now as a means of sanctification ; it is a convenience subject to sexual compatibility. A \ civil officer in a Michigan county seat has per- formed in the courthouse nearly a third of the two thousand wedding ceremonies licensed re-^ 106 Essentials of Community Efficiency cently. Compliance with legal requirements and no thought of sacredness is mainly sought. An Ohio minister asked a shrinking bride-to-be if the marriage about to be consummated were her first. Without a tremor she said that it was. The groom, unable to stand the steady gaze of the minister, prompted her to tell him the truth. With perfect unconcern she said, "I have been married nine times." Conditions like these are not confined to back- ward sections. They are found in counties hav- ing largest per capita wealth and high average of agricultural civilization. Roman Catholic com- munities are being invaded with lowered marital fidelity despite the age-long hostility of that Church for nonobservance of the marriage sacra- ment. The fact of drifting is unmistakable; where the drift is taking the communities of America is not clear. If sexual promiscuity and barnyard ethics increase much more social hon- esty may compel the legitimating of polygamy and polyandry. Pagan polygamy cannot be greatly different from the kind now possible under our customs and laws. It is more a ques- tion of physical endurance than of morals if marriage partners are preferred four-abreast rather than tandem. A few old-fashioned folk, like Professor F. W. Foerster of Ziirich, insist that religion is the only • final solution of marriage and the sex problem. The Parent-C ommunity 107 I£ this is true it is the urgent duty of teachers] of personal religion, in both class room and pulpit, to come down out of the clouds and stay this side of the hereafter, teach with absolute' plainness a religious View of the human body,' and show young folk, before it is everlastingly too late, how to glorify God in their bodies of ] flesh or find out that there is nothing else in this world with which they can glorify him. If home ' life becomes increasingly pagan, can either Church or state build a civilization either Chris- tian or religiously moral? Or ought we to do in domestic relations what August Comte believed science would ultimately do, "conduct God to the frontier and dismiss him with thanks for his pro- visional services"? Pessimists might be made happy by contem- plating only this side of American community life. The actual situation is not all dark. False optimism alone denies that there is any real darkness. True optimism fears no fact but faces whatever is, with determination to make it bet- ter. Parents, thousands of them in America, are the chums and confidants of their children, keep- ing themselves pure by constant contact with the innocence of childhood, meeting the perfectly natural curiosity of children with equally nat- ural candor and truth, planting in the children as occasion ofifers, sacred truths which take root in the emotional groundwork of chivalry. 108 Essentials of Community Efficiency loyalty, self-respect, and consideration for others, attitudes and motives which, fortunately, nature plants afresh in each new youthful life. Such parents and children are the pledge and proph- ecy of a cleaner and worthier social life. They are the nucleus in each community of a general sentiment which must shame the willfully child- less, inspire and instruct the ignorant among young parents, adopt truer standards of value of childhood and parenthood, and above all else fit boys and girls for intelligent conjugal and parental relations, for physical and moral par- enthood, and not let youths blunder their way to the marriage altar in blind sex impulse and uncontrolled passion. Valuable agencies are available for precisely such work in all Amer- ican communities, social and religious groups, and these will be mentioned in the proper chapters. PHYSICAL AND MORAL PARENTHOOD Sweeping condemnatibn of all divorces is easy,' .popular and — ^foolish. Divorce is often a wom- 1 an's protective tariff against male brutality and 1 a man's final recourse against incurable female* \ animalism. The male brute and the female ani- ' mal, not the divorce, are the real problem. All the laws on marriage and divorce capable of being compiled will never prevent vulgar igno- rance from prostituting possibilities of utmost happiness and making of them a living hell. The Parent-Community 109 Needless ignorance and callous indifference to the simplest truths of sex physiology and sex hygiene probably account for more applications for di- vorce, and for more family rows that never get to the courts, than all other causes combined. Untold numbers of physical and mental invalids would be saved to health and happiness by a community sentiment which would insist upon definite preparation for parenthood before ever young folk are permitted to marry. Physical parenthood includes the ability to be- get or give birth to children and to provide food, shelter, and protection during the period of infan- tile helplessness. The intimate nature of the facts involved in physical parenthood has led, during the past, to some most damaging, assump- tions. It has been generally assumed, for ex- ample, that it is the height of indelicacy to discuss, except in the privacy of medical consul- tation, the facts involved in the possession, exer- cise, and control of primary organs of sex; but not at all indelicate to know in silence of fright- ful cruelties perpetrated upon helpless, ignorant folk close by. Prostitution as a profession has been assumed to be necessary to sate the more vigorous sex powers of males and to make it safe for ladies to go abroad. Illicit congress has been assumed to be necessary to the health of unmarried males but not at all essential to the physical well-being of unmarried females — 110 Essentials of Community Efficiency wherefore a double standard of morals tacitly agreed upon even in the face of much noisy agi- tation on the surface demanding continence from both sexes. Males, of course, according to as- sumption, are always the seducers and females their passive and irresponsible victims — so deeply ingrained is this assumption that it is regarded as impossible to convict a woman of murder in Cook County, Illinois, twenty-three of them, some cold-blooded self-confessed female murder- ers, having been acquitted without one convic- tion. It has been assumed that young girls are always as innocent as babes but young boys and young men are impure wolves. Venereal- dis- eases are assumed to be private, not to be men- tioned as social perils, and that reporting and segregating all cases of gonorrhoea and syphilis in pesthouses is a preposterous intrusion into per- sonal liberty. Enlightened public opinion, community senti- ment, is the one force competent to dethrone these false assumptions and to put in their places rational conclusions based upon the plain facts of physical human nature. The facts must be- come generally known and be related, in the minds of a majority of local citizens, to common welfare. Mn F. H. Whitin strikes directly to the heart of all these problems of physical sex relations in an address published in "Social Hygiene" for April, 1916, As secretary for the The Parent-Community 111 Committee of Fourteen, Mr. Whitin speaks with abundant first-hand knowledge as well as with the gjithority of wide research. Concerning seg- regation of prostitution Mr. Whitin declares: "There is a rising tide of opinion that continence, while not the normal sex life of the male, is possible and hygenic," and he adds, "the evil will continue to exist so long as any influential part of the community believes in a masculine sex necessity." So long, in other words, as the com- munity assumes that abnormal male lust must be accommodated just so long will some males cultivate abnormal lust and find equally lustful females who will sell or give their bodies till lust is glutted. The poor half-wits sold in commer- cial prostitution, known as white slaves, are not the chief sex peril, as everybody knows who gets to know community life from the inside. The whole business roots back into abnormal pas- sions fired by stimulants. Commercialized pros- ^ titution could not exist six months without alcohol — and brewers, distillers, and their dance- hall agents know it. The immense sums paid for "protection" come more from sales of liq- uors at high prices than from the bodies of girls, even though these are speeded up like mill hands to entertain as many guests as possible each twenty-four hours. Final social conviction crys- tallizing into vigorous public sentiment will be possible only when all obscurities of words are 112 Essentials of Community Efficiency banished and facts are looked at in their bald plainness — depraved men buying the bodies of girls for lust. Social peril from venereal poisons must like- w^ise be dragged out of concealment. Lists of the diseases, defects and deformities directly due to these filthy poisons are easily obtainable and always frightening. Official figures show the nation becoming insane faster than it is growing in population. State boards of health make insistent appeals to citizens to take note that increasing feeble-mindedness is undermining the stability of the state. City health officials have appealed for state aid to combat the ravages of tuberculosis and sexual diseases. Rural districts have been shocked over disclosures of the cause of prevalent female diseases, death in confine- ment, premature births, and infants born blind or hopelessly deformed. This in the years 1915 and 1916! Communities have more at stake here than in almost any other item of public welfare. Pesthouse segregation of cases of venereal dis- eases is vastly more important than in cases of smallpox; only with the latter its disfigurements appear on the face while the results of the peril- ous sexual diseases are more likely to appear in the bodies of wives and children. With more than fifteen million school children reported to the United States Commissioner of Education as physically defective, and with officials rejecting The Parent'C ommunity 113 the great majority of applicants for enlistment in army and navy, some sort of moral earthquake ought to be loosed to rouse community senti- ment from its civic lethargy and direct it power- fully to causes which are not at all hard to locate and remove. The time is far past when citizens \ can be dignifiedly ignorant of duty and pray piously over human depravity — in other places.) Citizens generally will find a new attitude on the part of physicians. Preventive measures now occupy more medical attention than does the dis- pensing of drugs, community health rather than dosing for symptoms. A changed community sentiment toward the character and function of physicians will set community welfare forward^ by leaps. Communities ought, for example, to set up and hold to as high moral standards for physicians as for ministers or bankers. That done, the determination of divorces would most fittingly be left to a board of one or two physi- cians and a judge. A physician can go more directly to the heart of the situation and find out more quickly the real cause of domestic brawls and incompatibilities than can all the legal wolves who batten on open-court divorce proceedings. Physicians on salary as servants of the commu- ' nity — a wise step already taken by some spe- cially favored communities — ^have it in their power to act as counselors to youths, to young parents, and older folk and, in this capacity, to 114 Essentials of Community Efficiency prevent multitudes from making shipwreck of their physical and moral health. The work of I physician-ministers has been a benediction to ' many communities, men who brought personal friendship and friendly counsel into their prac- tice along with their professional skill. Enlight- ened community sentiment can hasten better con- ditions covering the whole field of physical parenthood. Moral parenthood, in some of its phases, is already the most popular community sentiment in America. It underlies the whole of public school and Church school education, for all true teaching, wherever and by whomsoever it is done, is an expression of parental instincts and passion. Communities already say to parents. Your boy and girl are to be more than son and daughter to you, they are to be citizens of the community ; this social relation is so important that we insist upon taking your children, at whatever age we agree upon, and parenting them during the best of their waking hours during the entire educable period of their lives : we will provide generously for their higher education and surround it with all possible lures to them, but their primary and secondary education for efficient citizenship is our community duty to them and to you and to our whole social group; we will call young women and young men to this job of parenting all our children, pay them as little as possible. The Parent-C ommunity 115 and encourage you to feel increasingly confident that your duty is mostly to furnish the children and school taxes to keep up the system. Much confusion in the minds of both parents and teach- ers would be cleared away if only this commu- nity message were made thus explicit, plain, and true to facts. The institution-loving instinct of most folk past twenty years of age would get a wholesome jolt. Homes and schools would un- doubtedly be of higher grade and not so far apart in processes of instruction and modes of disci- pline. Unified education of children would be more certain in place of the parts of several different kinds of education so commonly perpetrated on helpless children by parents and teachers and playmates. Memorizing of bare and unrelated facts and juggling with abstract synibols would give' way in schoolrooms to a more parental, and therefore more natural and normal guidance of all _ the experiences of all children. Relations of confi- dential friendship, between children and the teachers who come into their lives as moral par- ents, and between the physical parents of boys and girls and those who help to carry the respon- sibilities of moral parenthood, would become inevitable. Identical oversight would be main- tained in home and school over everything that pertained to the physical growth and moral devel- opment of all the community's growing citizens. (9) 116 Essentials of Community Efficiency Better than all else, perhaps, would be the wider recognition of the truth so happily discovered by some parents, that when parents make an intelli- gent business of the job of moral parenthood both public schools and Sunday Schools of the traditional sort are superfluous and tremendously costly luxuries. But the "would be" and the "is" are far apart, needlessly so. Women all over the world are rearing babies, women who are not fit to raise poultry. Hundreds of babies are born into this world unwelcome accidents to one born as the result of prayerful parental design. Mil- lions, as Olive Shriner notes, are not so much born into this world as damned into it, and the privilege of being damned into existence is by no means monopolized by the babies of poverty- beset parents. Poor little rich children and poor little middle-class babies join some of the poor little slum infants in the great democracy of in- fantile misfortune. Strange as it may appear at first glance, biting condemnations from pulpit and platform of par- ents and public schools are quite popular and provoke grateful approval and applause from the mob. Nods of approbation greet vigorous denun- ciations, often by those who are themselves most guilty and don't know it. Those who get close to many parents and teachers, who talk with them informally about babies and children and youths, who touch the springs of parental solicitude and The Parent-Community 117 uncover the heart of parental responsibility — these find a surprising and significant situation. Even the parents and teachers who make the most cotispicuous failure at the job of moral par- enthood, most of them are doing the best they know how and deplore their insufficiency often in tears. No one taught them how. Refigionij has been so occupied with futurism and educa- tion with symbolism that the priceless arts of parenthood were almost never brought within the j apprehension and comprehension of young folk.| They blindly blundered into parenthood and with sinking heart see the field of parental folly — too late. An almost hysterical determination to sup- ply deficiencies in practical education prompts many to try the opposite extreme from silence and thrust upon boys in some vigorous way the meaning of a male body, and to force girls to know the creational stewardship implanted in the body of every girl child born into the world. Sex Education. A disastrous policy of silence may easily be followed by a yet more disastrous policy of talk. The rights of children to know all the facts of their own bodies cannot be disputed. The immediate right of young folk to know all the facts of physiology and hygiene is equally clear. Discussion rises over whose is the duty to meet these rights, and when and how. The wide chasm between common adulthood and all childhood creates most of the discussion. 118 Essentials of Community Efficiency Many children always have and likely always will know far more than their parents suspect of sex facts and sex relations, but it is a knowledge of the intellect and not of experience. The lan- guage in which this knowledge is gained and expressed may be vile, to adults, but the chil- dren's knowledge is more innocent and less vul- gar than that of most adults. Indeed the very innocence of the child mind is often the most bafifling element confronting grown folk who would talk with little ones. Even the shockingly vulgar language common among boys represents a more innocent mind and a less evil heart than much of the more guarded speech of adults. This holds good even during many of the years when boys are held criminally accountable for their pranks. Children, furthermore, like adults, are not withheld from indiscretions by knowing the facts which are involved. The driving impulse to seek adventure, to find new experiences, is much stronger in them than in older and more ,1 chastened folk. The urge of the procreative in- I stincts lies wholly outside of intellect and depends i' not at all on how much or how little one knows. ' No one is ever "old enough to know better." When this urge is coupled up with the spirit of physical and moral adventure the resulting com- bination of social impulses is sufficient to account for perfectly natural consequences among healthy young animals even in the best-regulated fam- The Parent-C ommunity 119 ilies. In other words, young folk and older folk are able to exercise self-control and "hold steady" in circumstances where control and steadiness are hardest, not by reason of any quantity of knowledge but by motives rooted in the emo- tional groundwork which underlies action. Adult notions of what a child ought to know are likely to be the usual grotesque misapprehen- sions of child life. A child ought to know whatj it wants to know: the immediate curiosity of a young child is the measure of what it .wants to know — and it has a sublime right to be told the truth, as much as can be assimilated then and there, and not be made the victim of outrageous lies. * A youth has a right to know and ought to know all that can be known without physical experience, the whole truth without sugai-coat- ing of any sort ; and the youths will get it if it is to be had, if not openly and with mutual understand- ing at home then secretly and perilbusly away from home. Youths of both sexes have an inde- feasible right to know all that can be known out- side the marriage relation. They are infinitely'^ more interested in this field of truth than in lit- erature and mathematics, emd they ought to be if they are normally healthy human beings. Per- sonal hygiene, care of the body, diet, bathing, exercise, and study is an eminently proper sub- ject for class room instruction either iviih or without the sexes meeting apart. But a class 120 Essentials of Community Efficiency room, at any time or in any building, is about the last place on this earth where any specific in- struction in sex hygiene ought to be given — and anyone who has not wholly forgotten what it meant to be boy or girl in middle teen years would know it without argument. Formal lec- tures on sex anatomy, physiology, and hygiene are always fraught with peril when given to groups of unmarried folk, and tragedies which have shocked the continent show it. Real par- ents wisely resent the intrusion of anyone into the sacredest of all parental and filial privileges ■ — ^the binding close by interchange of confidences of mothers with sons and fathers with daughters. Under all circumstances this needed instruction of the young should be in the way of informal and quiet conversation with small groups or individuals. Real boys and girls, flesh and blood youths, are to be fitted for intelligent physical and moral parenthood. There is no mythical "typical" youth or "average" pupil. Young women and young men ought to be healthly em- bodiments of virile masculinity under control and yearning femininity also under intelligent con- trol. What they know must be anchored deep in strong motives to hold them chivalrous and chaste. It is the first business of parent-teachers and teacher-parents to find this anchorage and fasten knowledge there. Efficiency begins there and ends there^^not in scientific knowledge. The Parent-Community 121 American civilization not less than European civ- ilization and world social order is at stake in the outcome of sex education in physical and moral parenthood. SUMMARY The eternal triangle of the race is one man, one woman, and the child. Physical parenthood brings man in closer cooperation with the Creator than any other physical act. Moral parenthood brings man in closer cooperation with the Creator than any other spiritual conduct. Parenthood is at once the highest realization of individual ex- perience and the fundamental social fact : all that lies behind it culminates in it; all that follows, racially and socially, depends upon it. Communities in which babies are infrequent and unpopular are already smitten with fatal blight. Community welfare must begin with exaltation of parenthood and conservation of childhood. For herein is the one only stream of human reality: infants becoming children, chil- dren becoming youths, and youths becoming par- ents. Right ideals of marriage and of the marriage relation are essential to fine family life. Wrong ideas of marriage and false ideals of the marriage relation destroy ■ individual happiness, disrupt homes, destroy community spirit, imperil the state and civilization. Communities made up of happy homes and friendly families are most blest. 122 Essentials of Community Efficiency the only abiding foundation of a righteous society and a brotherly humanity. A religious view of the human body is essential to intelligent religion, to individual and social self-control. Social vices cannot live in its pres- encej they flourish in its absence. Where this view is lost from sight, God is commonly super- fluous to daily life and social intercourse and is decorously dismissed to the soft lights, soft music, and soft worship of Sundays. Where this view is uppermost God is glorified by men hold- ing him in their knowledge. Community recognition of the dignity of phys- ical and moral parenthood is needed to stop the consequences of prostitution, venereal diseases, and all other elements of racial and social degen- eration. The moral parenthood of the whole community includes wider responsibility than supplying school-teachers. It covers the entire physical and mental, spiritual and social well- being of all the community's children. Sex education is essential to the "self-knowl- edge, self-reverence, and self-control" which lead life on to sovereign power. As a parental priv- ilege it is priceless ; as a delegated duty to teach- ers or others it is of doubtful value. Commu- nity sentiment has no more urgent field of duty than the formulation of definite plans for this work to be wisely done. CHAPTER Vn The Religious Community The Community Problem "Leave religion out." "Don't try to do any- thing with the Churches." "Keep out of trouble ; stick to commercial and general conditions." These are the invariable comments of commer- cial promoters and of local commercial interests whenever a program of community welfare dis- cussions is proposed. "By all means come in and help us," is the almost invariable request of local religious leaders. "If you can do anything to help us get a grip on the life of the community, that is what we want above all things," declare all thoughtful churchmen. "Religion has done more than any other force in history to retard social progress and prevent social integration," declare many of the leading students of social life. "Re-/ ligion is the only possible basis on which society \ can safely be constructed or reconstructed," de- j clare all religious leaders. In the midst of these conflicting claims and pleas, policy always sug- gests the coward's path, "When in doubt, do nothing; let someone else do it." Long before the outbreak of the European war far-seeing men claimed to foresee the pass- 123 124 Essentials of Community Efficiency ing of Protestantism and the coming in of a new religious Catholicism. The war postponed but did not stop the serious effort to bring about a world conference on faith and order, looking to an organic union of Churches and a visible re- union of Christians of even the most diverse sects. Other efforts equally daring in their vi- sions and plans were under way. The daze of the war is still on. The spectacle of Christian nations combing the continents for heathen to help them butcher each other, all of them crowding the Jews to the fore or trampling them with incredible fury under foot; with mil- lions of Church members joining the non-Church population of America in an unofficial but effect- ive churchlessness, such as France tried officially a century ago; with the world never so full of I religious aspiration and never so little of it con- 1 trolled by the Church, as President Fitch of • Andover declared to the Ministerial Union of /Chicago; with religious conditions in country and city challenging the best statesmanship of all the religious leaders in the land — ^with world condi- tions as they are, national life as it is and com- munities as they are, if ever in the history of mankind the Christian faith had a constructive message for practical immediate application, its moment has come. And for once there is general agreement that the religious problem is not to be solved by bringing the top branches together but The Religious Community 125 by working at the root — community appropria- tion and expression of the message of religion. But at once a series of questions arises which the aggregate and local Churches have not been trying to answer clearly, and it looks as if abso- lutely nothing could be accomplished till all hands get back to the beginnings of things and answer root questions first. What is religion? What is Church? What is the difference be- tween religions? What are the differences be- tween Churches? Is there a common factor ,in the Jewish, Roman Catholic, and multitudinous Christian faiths and fellowships? If the three! sons of Lazarus and Sara Straus, Isador, Nathan, | and Oscar, were, until the "Titanic" carried Isa- ' dor down, the most conspicuously patriotic, pub- lic-spirited, and practically religious family of brothers in America, why do Christian nations persecute the Jews and why does sectarian preju- dice sway the minds of so many Americans? If Father O 'Callahan, Rabbi Hirsh, and representa- tives of all Protestant sects could work alongside Charles R. Henderson in his life and weep to- gether in common grief at his bier, why cannot all fathers, and rabbis and reverends and common Christians work in common joy and weep in common sorrow? If the child of the Jewish mer- chant is sick and the wife of a Methodist minister nurses the little lass, and the Presbyterian min- ister meets the priest, as they two happen to 126 Essentials of Community Efficiency call upon the distressed father, and they join in expressing sincere human sympathy, why can't they all keep it up when the girl gets well? To the last of these questions there is but one honest answer — they are kept apart by abstrac- tions. The speculative element of religion has played such an exclusive part, while the world has been mostly given up to abstractions, tha* the concrete human element has been almost lost to sight. Theories about what happens to dead folk, and how and why, have split humanity into jangling and discordant classes, while bald facts about what happens to live folk, patent outstand- ing and terrible human facts have been pushed aside. If the religious problem is actually to be worked out in communities, rather than in con- claves and asseniblies and seminaries, then, clearly enough, the human element and not the specula- tive element must play the dominant part in the solution. For common citizens are moved by com- mon sympathies and not by deep philosophical reasonings or dogmatic affirmations. The com- mon loves and hates, common hopes and despairs, common joys and sorrows of common citizens make up the factors of the solution. Not "The Man in the Streets" whom Richard Roberts exalts in "The Renaissance of Faith," not the ab- stract Average Citizen, but the actual men and women, youths and children, as they are at their best and worst in daily life, are the human fac- The Religious Community 127 tors to be considered. What is religion to them? What is Church to them? What are the dif- ferences between them when they are simply trying the best they know to be religious? Since they themselves are the Church, the only con- crete Church there is in all the world for them, their habitual attitudes toward God and their actions toward each other built into their daily conduct, why cannot they be as close kin in health as in sickness, in joy as in sorrow, as neighbors in daily contact and intercourse, even i if they do worship God differently? Or is it the | same God they worship? Do they actually have ) the same God? Do any two persons on earth! conceive God precisely alike? And must each^l person, to be true to himself, worship the best \ God he can conceive? If they do think differ- ! ently of God, will they help themselves or each l other or any God they have by wrangling and ) quarreling and being unneighborly? Keep close [ to human facts in facing such questions. If the Creator intended people to be all alike in their emotions and thoughts and actions he could more easily — humanly speaking — have made each per- son an exact duplicate of all other persons, every- body loving alike and hating alike, thinking alike and acting alike — but he did not make any two persons duplicates, gave to no two of them the same quantity or quality of brains or the same quantity or quality of tissues by which to exer- 128 Essentials of Community Efficiency cise the brains. We're here. We are close by each other. Geographically we are neighbors. Why not treat each other as equally privileged to have a square deal from all the rest? In the very nature of human physical organisms agreement in the speculative elements of religion is hope- lessly impossible. Why not try to work out agreements in the region of concrete human ele- ments where agreement is not only possible but demonstrated spontaneously every time human sympathies are put squarely to the test? Those who, dearly love to philosophize, clum- sily or clearly, would dearly love to point out innumerable flaws and weaknesses in a program so humanly simple. A religion which has no philosophy could not be, of course, in a world of reasoning creatures. But philosophy is not reli- gion. Dr. James Denny long ago pointed out the fact that men needlessly multiply difficulties for themselves by imagining that there are many religious difficulties when in fact there are not. There are very many practical perplexities, many scientific skepticisms and a world full of philo- sophical difficulties — ^there is only one religious difficulty, the simple human problem of being ^religious. Now if citizens in each community come to think of each other" and to treat each other as common human beings, all of them to- gether faced by the one difficulty of being simply and humanly religious, of living out in daily The Religious Community 129 intercourse as much as each one knows of God and human duty, who shall say that immense practical steps are not being taken to solve the problem of the world's religious chaos? Fasten the problem of religion to the one changeless stream of human reality to be found in every community, and note the startling re- sults which are at once apparent. Take the extremes — a heathen baby and a Christian baby ! As a human fact there is not now, never has been, and never will be such a thing as a heathen baby : its parents may be steeped in the traditions and customs of heathenism but the baby is not, it is only— baby; and the same influences which will make the offspring of Christian parents Christian will make the child of heathen parents Christiain. The whole modern missionary enter- prise is built on this truth. The whole of reli- gious instruction and Christian education will be built, sooner or later, on the corresponding truth that the same influences which make heathen the child of heathen parents will make heathen the child of Christian parents; for heathenism is a matter of influences, not of latitude or of longi- tude. Carry the same kind of process out in another direction — who ever heard of Roman Catholic infancy, Anglican childhood, or Protes- tant adolescence? The description, Jew, might be used because that implies racial as well as religious marks. But the other adjectives simply 130 Essentials of Community Efficiency do not fit and cannot be made to fit — ^they repre- sent distinctions among adults who are classified / by the sets of abstractions to which they sub- scribe, and they apply to infants and chil- 1 dren and youths only as grown folk undertake to \ shape the habits of thought and conduct of I youngsters away from concrete realities and \toward speculative abstractions. \ Insistence upon sticking to human realities sounds revolutionary. It is. It will absolutely reconstruct the whole basis of religion in com- munities, the nation, and the world. But the revolutionary elements of the plan are not at all modern. On the contrary they were the religion lived by, and constitute the foundation laid by, the Founder of the Christian faith and fellowship. They sound ominous to modern ears only where the Church has lost its Lord. What other thing, for example, did He do than precisely this, when he gathered up the bitterest of all prejudices of race and of religion, including in their scope all lesser prejudices, when the law of eternal life was illustrated for all time by the classic human sympathizer, the Good Samaritan — ^the character so honored in preaching and so dishonored in practice ! Or take His still more explicit teaching. Vis- ualize the scene portrayed by Matthew 18:1-14, and put that series of affirmations down on any page of Church history between then and now: The Religious Community 131 with a boy in his arms the Teacher turns upon his politically ambitious companions and utters such revolutionary sayings that if the Churches have heard them they have neither cared nor dared to heed them : "Except you — grown men — become like this little boy, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." We and our fathers have been telling boys during the cen- turies that except they behave like nice old men they can in no wise go to heaven. He put the child in the midst of attention and effort : we and our fathers have put almost every other conceiv- able thing in the midst and have put the child in almost every other conceivable place — in the basement or in outer darkness only so they might be seen occasionally and not heard. He charged straightly that men should despise not one of these little ones: we and our women folk have treated them with unspeakable contempt, crowned now by the general clamor that all girls shall be taught the use of contraceptives to set farther on the purposes of abortion "and infanti- cide; we have regularly given more expert care to calves and colts and crops than to these little ones. He declares it is not the will of the Father that one of these little ones should perish : we and our fathers have made it almost impossible for uncounted millions of them to do anything else but perish, physically, mentally, morally, socially — ^we unconcernedly let them die when (10) 132 Essentials of Community Efficiency we do not actually compel them to perish. Now grant the possibility that, in spite of our philoso- phies, there is a continuous Personality, an affec- tionate Mind like Him in the universe — and what other fate could overcome a Church which em- bodies a mind like our practice and past history show? He founded the faith and fellowship on Reality. Through the centuries we have chosen to go groping through unrealities crying Lo, here ! and Lo, there ! He declared that, "whoever receiveth one such child in my name receives me." Dean Shailer Mathews showed, in the first issue of the Constructive Quarterly, that the reli- gious problems of the present day are not those of the Reformation, They reach back to the first days and raise once more the question, if there is vitality and vigor in Christian faith and fellow- ship to take men of divers minds and make a com- munity of them, a fellowship in fact, a brotherli- ness based on the common fatherliness of the head of the 'community? All this sounds alien and foreign to many Protestants — but it is far more familiar than most Protestants have realized. Who is the one great hero of modern crusading for religious commit- ments? Billy Sunday. There is none other like him. Strange, isn't it, that while he has been criticised from almost every standpoint, most of his critics should have overlooked the real secret The Religious Community 133 of his success, his ruthless upsetting of all the cherished "distinctive messages" of Protestant parties. Billy Sunday commands complete sup- pression of all divisive notions and practices, ab- solutely impartial cooperation of all Church workers for months before he comes — systematic cooperation without distinctions under expert non-denominational organizers and leaders. When he comes he lashes all parties with equal energy, holding up to open derision and contempt the divisiveness which has been the glory of Protes- tant churches, while he preaches a theology which few or none of them actually believe. He would have been burned at the stake, not so long ago, by devout churchmen. But the Protestantism that was is not going — it has gone beyond recov- ery, and religious leaders are hunting for the right thing to put in its place. Past centuries are much farther away than indicated by calendars. Let Philip Schaff tersely tell the story. In the seventeenth century the Romanists ex- cluded the Protestants, the Lutherans the Cal- vinists, the Calvinists the Arminians, from the kingdom of heaven; how much more all those who never heard of Christ. This wholesale dam- nation of the vast majority of the human race should have stirred up a burning zeal for their conversion; and yet during that whole period of intense confessionalism and rigid orthodoxism there was not a single Protestant missionary in 134 Essentials of Community Efficiency the field except among the Indians in the wilder- ness of North America. That sort of religion had gone in America long before religion itself began to be torpedoed and shelled from the clouds and be smothered in liquid gas and die in awful anguish, in Europe. Let men not deceive themselves, religion has been smashed — not merely art glass and cathedral chimes. If religion has no clear-cut message for this day — a plainer message than the past has brought — serious men will be driven toward atheism. A God of almost any sort and one man can make a religion. It takes a God of a particular sort and at least two men to make the Christian religion: a God whose affectionate authority is expressed by his fatherliness and whose worship ' is human brotherliness. That religion is as sim- ple and winsome as the daily life of Jesus Christ, and men in all the sixty-three generations be- tween then and now have proved it to be so. The religion is at once a trustful confidence in the Father and helpful friendliness between the Father's children, a faith and a fellowship. Men do not have to be profound philosophers to un- derstand it, but simple human beings living it. The very simplicity of it baffled men in the first generation when it was set to work, and it baffles the same kind of men now. For example, Greek logic gave the faith an intellectual framework The Religious Community 135 and Roman authority gave the fellowship a me- chanical framework, and from then till now men who have learned to think only in terms of phi- losophy or politics have insisted in shoving either one or both of the frameworks into first place regardless of the life in the faith and the love in the fellowship which lay back of both of them. Most of the plain folk never have understood, and do not care now what all the pother of dog- mensgeschichte and ecclesiastical politics is about. Given half a chance to work the thing out without interference and common citizens could quickly find the faith and fellowship a very practical and workable program of cultivating neighborly spirit with each other. If they cannot be free from interference by rigid logicians and intense institutionalists they solve the problem in a crude but effective way, ignoring churches and being religious the best they know how out- side of all organized societies. They have done that, they are doing that by wholesale to the utter distraction of formal religionists, and it looks very much as if they would continue to foster religious aspirations uncontrolled by either logic or power. It is all very distracting to those who have put institutional loyalty ahead of hur man companionship and the common interests of neighbors. But it looks like the true human way of finding a common sentiment of highest values. 136 Essentials of Community Efficiency and this, as Professor King shows, is religion looked at from the social viewpoint. The consternation of those who think of reli- gion only as church is not yet complete. Thought- ful citizens, both inside and outside of churches, have been taught in great numbers to think of religion and religious relations in terms of family life rather than of the law court or deductive logic. The idea of organizing a family with an outfit of political officials, of calling a family into formal session and electing a father, an older brother, a serving mother or sister, "all of whom shall serve until their successors are elected and duly installed" — why the whole thing looks farcical and absurd. Those who are looking toward an organic union of the Christian family are bound to find a world full of non-conformists. Those who are looking for agreement on formal statements of articles of faith will also meet non- conformists in crowds till the Creator changes his plan of outfitting human creatures with diverse thinking powers. Those who are looking for actual agreement among citizens of helping each other, in all possible ways, to be as religious in daily life as each one's own highest aspirations and the contagion of personality can produce — why these are already finding the ground ready at hand, fertile and fallow, in every city ward and country district in America. The Religious Community 137 As a matter of very candid and very unpleasant fact, there is a widespread and growing convic- tion that churches have been dabbling in so many things that have nothing whatever to do with religion, especially as Jesus lived it, that the very, heart and essence of religion has been left largely to go unguided and uncontrolled by the organized bodies of religion. Now in focusing the power of religion on personal well-being and community welfare, a simple and practicable "departure for a new beginning" is made in a way that citizens can understand, support, share and profit by. It looks like a breaking up of the foundations of the great deep to trained theologians — ^but if they only com- prehended the simple theology of merchants and farmers and housewives and young folk their logical anguish would be tempered by vast hu- man sympathy and they might not be so sensi- tive about the church's leadership up in the clouds. Uncompromising churchmen, too, when once they get cl6se to the folk who pay the bills, might say with Cromwell: "The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change; Then let it come: I have no dread of what Is called for by the instinct of mankind. Nor think I that God's world will fall apart Because we tear a parchment more or less." 138 Essentials of Community Efficiency COMMUNITY RELIGION AND COMMUNITY CHURCHES All over America a healthy movement is under way to merge or federate or unite all local con- gregations into one church for the community. Overchurched villages and towns along with un- derchurched cities and rural districts had come to be an intolerable scandal, inexcusable even by the aggressive secretaries who caused much of it. After nine years of agitation the Laymen's Missionary Movement succeeded in getting sev- enty-five paid denominational officials to come together and take counsel on the dire situation of the nation in 1915. The Commission on the Rural Church and Country Life, of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, has brought about such agitation and crystallized sentiment that the conservatism of the Federal Council leaders plainly cannot long withstand an open and direct appeal for church union in behalf of community religion. The next decade prom- ises to be one of unparalleled changes in Church life in America. A demand is almost invariably voiced, when citizens are called to confer in mass assembly on the religious welfare of the com- munity, for a united Church for the whole com- munity and provision for unified worship and work by religious citizens. Obstacles which seem insuperable hold 'back the realization of this The Religious Community 139 dream in most cities and towns. But meanwhile another very practical step is open and possible. Local churches need not violently cut the ties of venerated traditions and prized fellowships in order to turn their attention away from Church to community as the immediate object of effort. Doctrinal and organic uniformity is not at all a condition of making the Church an agency for the furthering of the well-being of all persons in the parish and the promotion of community wel- i fare. Indeed it is easily possible for a Church to be the only organized religious body in a com- munity and still not be, in any true sense of the term, a community Church. A Church which lives for itself, fdr its own upbuilding and strengthening for its own welfare and party ends, is not, and cannot possibly be, a community Church. The very expression implies rightly that the Church lives for the community, for the upbuilding and strengthening of the community in all moral and material ends, for the welfare of the whole community. An Ohio Church of this sort illustrates the point. In a territory of about one hundred and eighty square miles, twenty-riine churches have been started and died. The one Church survives. In its membership are representatives of eleven different communions. One denominational ser- mon would wreck it, although it maintains de- nominational relations in good standing. It lives 140 Essentials of Community Efficiency for the vital interests of the whole big parish. Several members of resident Roman Catholic families avail themselves of many of its activities. The spirit of social responsibility and community welfare has been carefully cultivated during most of the past decade. Sixty miles west of Chicago is another Church of similar life, but with differ- ent past history. Here, too, Roman Catholic cit- izens share in many of the public enterprises fostered by the community Church. Very many such churches sprang up in the Canadian north- west, during the period of negotiation looking to the union of several Protestant bodies in the do- minion, and those community churches now de- cline to become identified with any of the still [ separate bodies. In many states there are an increasing number of such churches, fostered ' almost universally by the representatives of agri- cultural colleges, most of which are more reli- gious in practical matters than some theological I seminaries. In towns and cities where churches I are already working, the supreme need is that all of them shall be imbued with the community spirit, work together in absolute harmony and unselfishness in all matters of public concern, and let the one which serves most be greatest of all. This life of serving and not being served is practical, it makes live worship live, and brings full blessings of the living God. Where local churches work thus together their ministers and The Religious Community 141 leading minds will be in frequent conference on community affairs, each group being free to do its work in harmony with its own polity and disci- pline. The life of the community and its mem- bers is the true point of Church attack. And none need fear that this but substitutes a community selfishness for the smaller one of party groups. If men once learn how honestly to love their hu- man brothers whom they see there may be larger chance for them to know real love of God whom they have not seen. Loveless and unloving self- ishness might make a religion fit for dead folk, but not for those Christ died to save. SOCIAL SERVICE AND MISSIONS The missionary enterprise kept the Church alive during the past century. A stranger enter- ing a town can tell without asking a question if the local churches are full of missionary passion or if church-membership and help-to-pay-ex- penses is all they have to offer the community. For missions and social service go always hand in hand. They cannot be kept apart because they are two sides of the self-same thing. Missions is only social service which someone else is sent to do: social service is missions done first-hand. Missions is social service by proxy ; socia l service is mi ssions pe r sonally performed . Missions"is a zeatiorhumanity expressed with cash: social service is an enthusiasm for humanity expressed 142 Essentials of Community Efficiency through hands and feet and tongues. Love for the children of men is the motive power in both. When missionaries began to come back from alien lands and told simple stories of appalling human needs, of infants exposed and sacrificed by ignorance, of awful treatment of women in confinement, of helpless child wives and more wretched child widows, of incantations and weird treatments of the sick, of filthy homes and stinking towns and city streets^ of children who did not know how to laugh but had to be taught, — of all the injustices and inequalities and inhu- manities, the spirit of compassion was born in many hearts. But compassion for creatures on the other side of the world cannot be held there — being compassion it is bound to be more alive to human need across the alley than that across the seas, more eager to help concrete cases which can be seen with one's own eyes than those which have to be seen through others' eyes. So it comes about that wherever the missionary passion pos- sesses any Church group the lively human com- passion becomes a restless agitatoi: for the fullest possible chance at health, happiness, and a useful life by every baby, boy, girl, youthful man and maid in the whole community. Churches devoid of missionary and social service passion are sure to need paint — and several other things — to make them sweet and wholesome. Missions let the Church get out of the meetinghouse to go abroad : The Religious Community 143 social service coaxes the Church to come out of doors, where all the folks are, to live with them, share life and love with them, and help to be their own answer to the prayer they all pray, "Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. As in heaven, so on earth. — " It seems more like a long forgotten century than less than three decades when men literally took their Church lives in their hands as they V lifted up clear voices with a social message to the churches. So long had religion been identified either with folk long dead or with those who shortly would be for long time dead, that men woke with a resentful start to the old challenge that "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living," and that the churches' supreme mission is to all the little ones, for whom "it is not the will of the Father that one of them should per- ish." No wildest dreamer dare indulge himself i the privilege of trying to imagine what this / planet will be like when the whole tremendous \ energy of religious power shall be withdrawn i. from dress performances and centered on the well-being of all the babies and little children and budding, blossoming youths, and parents. But if it starts in this community and that one and then others, all vying with each other as to 144 Essentials of Community Efficiency which is the best community in each state and nation in which to rear healthy,- wholesome citi- zens for the community and the world — ^why not ! RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND CHRISTIAN EDUCATION Because it has been so engrossed in the con- version of adults and the perpetuation of abstract frameworks of all sects, the simplicity of the work and the bigness of the real task of making a righteous society has been almost wholly over- looked. A righteous society can be made only where society is in the process of making, which hap- pens to coincide with the place in human growth and development where tendencies to Conduct are being formed — the second twelve-year period of human life. If society is ever to be righteous, right tendencies to conduct must be built into lives who are just then choosing and fixing ten- dencies. In other words, ever since the child was put out of the midst of religious interest and attention. Churches have been kept up by adults for the benefit of adults and their prep- aration for glory after while. Jewish faith and fellowship were anchored at the start in reli- gious instruction of children. The Jewish com- munity through ninety tragic generations has I been grounded in parenthood and childhood. The Roman Catholic communion also has been, The Religious Community 145 through many centuries, perpetuated by building the Church into the child and the child into the Church. The very nature of the Church which emerged from the long reformation period, a doc- trinal, divided, sermon-centered, and competitive Church of adults, fixed the interest of Churches on grown folk and made them blind to the plain facts of childhood. During the decades between 1830 and 1850 the primary education of all .chil- dren in America came to be centered under state control. Educational development in America makes it increasingly certain that public school- teachers can never be held responsible for the personal religion and morals based in religious motives of any school child. Many influences had joined, before 1914, to make the problem of the religious instruction of the school population of America by far the livest problem in both edu- cation and religion. The religious -instruction of schoolchildren is as much a community task as the nonreligious instruction of the same children. But citizens, acting in the capacity of the educational arm of the state, the public school, cannot be the teacher of religion; the same citizens, acting as the edu- cational arm of the Church can do it, ought to do it, must do it. But with the Churches of the past it could not be done — and Protestant min- isters are the only ones who have opposed the doing of it when straight-out efforts were being 146 Essentials of Community Efficiency made to provide religious instruction for the whole school population of a city or school dis- trict. The urgency of getting religious instruc- tion to young America is bringing the whole matter of Church and community directly before the bar of community judgment. Churchmen who are able to stand off to one side and look at the whole community in all its aspects see that the divided, doctrinal, compet- itive Church, however great its past history, is a present calamity. A unified, practical, coopera- tive, service-centered Church can work alongside the public school, supplying what the state can- not supply, coupling religious instruction with the daily school life of pupils and help to make the citizenship of the nation intelligently and efficiently religious. The immoralities of youth are not at all evidences of human depravity but of Church blindness and Christian leaders in all sects and denominations confess it. The immo- ralities and criminalities of America, in the judg- ment of the great religious editors of the nation, are so many evidences of the impotence and insufficiencies of the Church. The cause for dis- trust of the vision and ability of the Church might be seen through the days spent in June, 1916, by great religious assemblies over "mala prohibita," negatives, thou-shalt-nots, while the whole world is literally crying out to know what to do to be religious, to put out of human nature The Religious Community 147 its bitterness by putting in whatever it is that is needed to sweeten the waters mankind must drink. The demands on the Church might be stated thus: 1. Be the live body of a living Christ or give up the Name. 2. Embody the unified spirit of the one body and quit seeking selfish advantage for the tongue over the foot. 3. Square up against the real job of the Church, showing folks of all ages, especially young folk, how to be intelligently and efficiently religious in daily life and in all social re- lations. 4. Become qualified for leadership of the whole community in all good works or quietly drop out of the community and disappear in the desert. 5. Guide the pervasive influences of religion into expression through all the activities of social life, give up the impotent hermit- like exclusiveness of the past, and make civic government and commercial inter- course as religious as Church life. Easy enough to say this. Grant that what is said is true and that the Church, like the Cross, must justify itself by the human necessities it meets and satisfies. How is the Church to be and to do so that it shall command itself by its good works to the good conscience of every man? Religious instruction of the young! If the Church do this task adequately and well the whole field of world service lies like an open 148 Essentials of Community Efficiency book before her : if she fail in this no other serv- ice can make good for generations of children and youths trained to make their morals on the spot, tricky little liars become trained big liars. Given a unified, practical, service-centered, and cooperative Church — ^then what? What is reli- gion? Can it be taught, or only caught? What is instruction in religion? What is its content? What are its processes? How are boys and girls, untaught, unguided, and unguarded, to be made honest, considerate, square-dealing citizens with a God whose worship is in the spirit with which one lives with others and in the truth one feels and thinks and does? The Religious Edu- cation Association has been compelling increas- ing numbers of churchmen and educators to face these problems during the years of this century. Now what do common and humble citizens think? What is the sentiment of the commu- nity? Is religion" popular? How many know clearly enough what it is to have an intelligent opinion and make it either unpopular or popular? There can be no doubt but there is vast igno- rance about what everybody is supposed to know. Religipn is — ^what? Suppose children were taught simply to try to be like the very best person they knew? That does not go very far, to be sure, but how much farther than that do they actually go or can they ^o? It is recorded that in order to show every- The Religious Community 149 body how to be religious God did just that thing, gave folk a Life to know, to love, to live; gave them that Life till they knew it was sweet and strong, too proud to fight for some things and too brave not to die for some other things; and set things going in just that same simple, natural way — ^men trying to be like that Life and making others want to be like them so that they could say, "Be ye followers of me, as I am of Christ?" Now, as a matter of human fact, proved by experience and observation, is not some positive religious instruction always going on wherever a truly religious person is in the presence of immature and growing minds, regardless of what that person happens to be doing? If the secret of religious instruction is not in ideals which appeal, in motives which move, in purposes which inspire persons to be never less than their best, then where is it? If the process of reli- gious instruction is not companionship in effort and friendly intercourse, then what is it? If the agency of religious instruction is not human hands and feet and tongues made active by the desire to be like the best one is able to conceive, then what is that agency? In short, when the human side of religion is put foremost instead of the abstract and specu- lative side, when religion is personalized and made a human thing, when the influence of formed lives upon unformed lives is understood 150 Essentials of Community Efficiency and heeded, are we not justified to suppose that the whole business of religious instruction and Christian education will appear a far simpler and vastly more effective thing than we have been trying to make it with our fussy machinery and hysterical methods? The National Education Association had four hundred and thirty-two essays submitted in 1915 on "The Essential Place of Religion in Education and an Outline of a Plan to Introduce Religious Teaching into the Public Schools." The monograph published by the Association contains the five best essays with a synopsis of all the material presented by other essayists. The work shows an intense interest throughout the nation in the task and puts before teachers and parents about the best wisdom of America on the subject. With general interest roused and with widespread determination to give the children of to-morrow an opportunity of higher grade than past generations of youth- ful citizens had, it is very sure that some plan of efficient religious instruction will be wrought / out. In one of the residence sections of Chicago school children have regularly stopped at various churches on their way to school each morning of the school week and had a chapel service. One pastor reports that the years he has given to this work have been the happiest period of his already fruitful ministry. The work has been conducted successfully during several years. One The Religious Community 151 of the principal features of the project is that pastors and their coworkers plan to use the time to fill the children's minds with religious ideals and aspirations, and then send them on to school prepared to make the whole school-day expres- sional activity of their religious ideas. The plan is admirable, both as an experiment and as- a theory. It makes it possible for religious per- sons to show immature and growing persons how to make study and play, recitation arid work, all the relations with teachers and playmates and classmates wholesomely religious. When tend- encies to religious conduct are fixed — that is re- ligious character, the whole objective of religious instruction. Community sentiment, the sentiment of the whole religious group in any community, will solve many of the vexed problems of religious history and life when it insists upon and secures the chance, the incentive, and the means for religious instruction of the whole school popula- tion of the parish. SUMMARY Religion is a community problem, an affair of deep concern to all citizens regardless of Church membership. It has to do with the highest wel- fare of every living person as well as with those who shall yet live. Linking religion to human needs and necessities brushes away the whole 152 Essentials of Community Efficiency field of abstract ideas which have divided reli- gions from each other and divided Churches against themselves. Treating all fellow men as human kin is the touchstone of highest religious life. Only one religious difficulty confronts each human being, the difficulty of maintaining a right attitude toward God and right conduct toward others: on the success with which one does this hang all the law and the prophets. Jesus founded a community. The whole spirit of his faith and fellowship is the community spirit, social respon- sibility and efficiency and betterment. His view of his own place in the world is set by himself when he identified himself more intimately with the child than with any other object in the created universe, and by declapng that whoever received one such child received him. The com- munity spirit therefore makes no mistake when it becomes enwrapped in child welfare. The trend of Protestantism is to a complete breakdown of divisive lines and eager search for an organizing center and impetus. A religion centered in Christ with the child in his arms is different in every way than one centered in a Christ beyond the clouds. The religious message must be religious. Churches must be religious, living messengers of religion, practical and everyday religion, a The Religious Community 153 religion of neighborliness. Common people hear this religion gladly. The community, not the denomination or sect, must be the one outstanding aim of religious effort. The Church which lives only to help folk ' can count on being taken care of by the folk i helped. The social message is the recovery, in this world crisis, of the same gospel sounded to ancient Israel and later founded on his own brotherliness by the Galilean, i Missions and so- cial service are the way of life. Religious instruction is the pervasive power of personality at work. The Church, wakened and energized, is suiHcient. CHAPTER Vm The Commercial Community Commercial Principles The impulse which led most young men and women into business pursuits was the very prosaic desire to make a living, to be able to buy decent food and clothes and recreations, and to have a home. Men like Thorold Rogers and Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman may not be far wrong when they insist that this commonplace desire to live well in one's surroundings is the real clue to the right understanding of all human history. At all events a majority of each suc- ceeding generation of young Americans "get into business" quite eai;ly in life. Some of the boys and girls hctve to get out and help make a living for the family. Some of them simply cannot Stand it to remain in school — at least they think they cannot, and this amounts to about the same thing — and they hunt for a job or take the first one offered to them. The immediate pay and What can be done with it, the measure of independence it confers, release from home and school discipline, sense of actually getting a start toward achievement, all sorts of lures tempt young folk to "cut the strings which hold the 154 The Commercial Community 155 past" and set out to make a new world for them- selves. Deliberate choice, careful preparation, and thoughtful study of all the facts involved in the business or in the youth's relation to it are almost never made. The ability to get money and have so many dollars each week or month to spend looks so alluring that immature reason- ing powers go down in the swirl of impulses, and the first step is taken in the tragic struggle of the multitude for a foothold and a competence "in business." The full measure of the tragedy appears only at the other end of the line. Not counting those who remain wage-earners, official figures indi- cate that by the time they reach fifty years of age ninety-seven out of each hundred who em- bark in business have lost all their accumula- tions: by the time they are sixty years of age ninety-five out of each hundred men are depend- ent either on their children or on day's wages for support. The way into business is so wide open and easily entered that few who enter ever stop to realize that vastly more than mere energy and integrity are the price of success, that busi- ness is terribly exacting and its penalties inex- orable. Many men who have reaped large com- mercial profits undertake to tell schoolboys how to succeed when, as a matter of fact, not very many of them understand the secret of their own success as accumulators of cash. 156 Essentials of Community Efficiency Business in all its forms is the use of facts in the production of other facts. Some men suc- ceed because they see facts where they are not — ^yet, and then proceed to make the dream facts real. James J. Hill saw the great Northwest as "his" and society paid him vast sums for mak- ing others see it. The looseness, indefiniteness, world full of surmises and guesses, have no place in business, and when business men have to guess, as they often do, and stake their all on the outcome, the only secret of their success is that they happened to guess right. If they guess wrongs-? The widow of a wealthy banker clerks in a big department store. When he opened a telegram one morning telling him he had guessed wrong, he fell dead leaving the widow penniless with three children to support. The exactions of business are the crushing judgments of facts. The retail merchant in rural communities faces the most difficult task in the whole field of busi- ness enterprises. This fact is the more serious because of the close relation of local business men to the material prosperity of the surroui^d- ing locality. Their difficulties may be conven- iently grouped under three headings : changes in general business principles; problems of admin- istration and organization ; local competitions. Salesmanship has come to be one of the special sciences and advertising is one of the fine arts. The men with whom the merchant deals for his The Commercial Community 157 supplies are among the keenest and best trained minds of the land. Most of them hold their positions by being able to get "orders" for lines of goods. A few of them know more about a) merchant's business after an hour or two of con- versation and observation than the merchant himself knows. Not all of them will sacrifice' orders and save merchants from making bad guesses in buying — and bad guesses here mean slow but certain death to the business. Unfor- tunately, too, most merchants know very much more about selling articles across the counter than they do about putting the right goods at a right price behind the counter. Invisible losses from dead stocks and slow moving stocks have driven many more merchants into bankruptcy than have the visible losses of bad accounts. The art of advertising, so far as local retail merchants are concerned, is closely related to an entirely new principle developed in the world of retail trade, shopping by mail and ordering supplies from catalogues showing net prices. Energetic merchants have developed this prin- ciple of trade to such an extent that it causes con- sternation in many localities throughout Amer- ica. The great mail order houses in Chicago alone have built up an aggregate trade of about six million dollars weekly, nearly one million dollars a day. The principle underlying the busi- ness is simple, sound, according to human nature. 158 Essentials of Community Efficiency and it promises to grow more and not less valu- able to local trade as well as to mail order enter- prises. The exasperation which the business causes found expression at the meeting of the Illinois Press Association in Chicago, in April, 1916. The association had been invited to a dinner and a visit of inspection to one of the leading mail order houses. An editor from the southern part of the state wrote a caustic resolution which was unanimously adopted after a brief discus- sion. It read: Whereas, We, as newspaper men, owe it to the communities in which we live to discourage any- thing which tends to pull dqwn our community life, therefore, Be it Resolved, That the Illinois Press Asso- ciation decline this invitation, believing as it does that the mail order business as a class is the greatest enemy of country communities. In the discussion an editor from central Illinois was reported as saying, "Enough business goes to the mail order houses from S — and vicinity to support eight good stores, each doing a business of fifty thousand dollars a year." There can be no question but that the advent of the mail order catalogue into millions of American homes has rudely interrupted the even tenor of retail trade relations in many commu- nities and added another great difficulty to the The Commercial Cammunity 159 already full stock of troubles carried by local merchants. And since merchants have come to be not only indispensable to local newspapers but to every other community enterprise, Churches, lodges, clubs, charities, schools, and all public improve- ments, it is clear that the editors did not over- state the seriousness of the community problem involved. The hopelessness of meeting this new and suc- cessful business principle with angry denuncia- tions may drive all who are interested in local trade prosperity to examine more closely into the business of retail merchandising and see if old methods are efficient, if old ways of trade can stand competition with new and powerful meth- ods and if the waste of traditional competitions in supplying community needs cannot be changed to community cooperation. Churches and j preachers have been so much derided during re- / cent years for wasteful competitive methods that / it is almost a satisfaction to find that, as a rule,/ ministers are far more ready to cooperate and work unselfishly together for community life and! upbuilding than are bankers, merchants, and\ physicians. The onesided view so often and so superficially taken came to light in an Illinois city of about forty thousand population. A mer- chant took a minister to task for the wastefulness of too many churches and salaried workers. The 160 Essentials of Community Efficiency minister happened to be ready with significant facts: the fifty-five salaried religious workers in the city received an average of one dollar. and eighty-four cents per day for their services ; two hundred E^nd four retail stores with more than eight hundred merchants and employees lived o£F the same community at a much higher average of daily compensation. The commercial waste vastly overtopped the money waste of competi- tive religious bodies. Difficulties of retail trade growing out of faulty business organization and administration are matters of personal preparation and mastery of the principles of scientific management. They are not at all peculiar to rural sections, as the department of economics in Harvard University discovered. Many retail merchants in Boston were found to be losing money without being at all able to discover the invisible losses which were eating up their capital. Each community suffers as its merchants suffer; their hardships are a blow at community prosperity; their wel- fare is a large and important part of common weal. But the community can educate its mer- chants only in a crude and harsh way. If they will not prepare, will not get command of all the facts and make wise use of the facts of successful trade — ^they find business exacting and its pen- alties inexorable. The Commercial Community 161 Difficulties of local competitions are by far the hardest to meet and overcome. The mere statement of them may help to show the variety of subtle influences confronting merchants and the communities they serve and point out some needed steps toward the solution of material prosperity for the whole community. 1. Multiplication of stores. Generally speak- ing, anyone can get a stock of goods, rent a store on Main Street and go into business within sixty or ninety days. In the field of big business, co- operation, combination, and gentlemen's agree- ments have largely replaced the cut-throat com- petition of former days. In the field of local retail business, the way of competition is wholly unguarded and as many business enterprises as can find room can come in and claim a share of community patronage. Neither the merchants already on the ground nor the buyers of the locality are organized to fprm or express any decided opinion on the need for more sfores. Survival of the fittest is the only rule. And here as elsewhere in nature this law sometimes works to the survival of the best fighters and least fit. The best that can be said of it is that it helps to keep merchants from becoming drowsy store- keepers. 2. Occasional competition. The business of conducting "Fire Sales" or "Bankrupt Sales" by traveling sharks who rent a store building for a 162 Essentials of Community Efficiency month or two, bolster their business on flaming advertising and fiery sales methods, completely disorganizes local trade conditions and throws reputable and orderly business into chaos. Local merchants are rarely organized to protect them- selves and the community from these disastrous invasions. 3. Duplication of stocks. Jewelry in hard- ware stores, hardware in drug stores, drugs in harness shops, and restaurants in churches are coming to be quite the rule in many localities. New demands for electrical and automobile sup- plies bring in not only garages but additional stocks into many stores not nominally in the gasoline, glass, and brass-goods business. This duplication of articles of common use makes it impossible for many merchants to carry respect- able stocks of their own particular ' lines, and shoppers are driven, often against their inclina- tions, to resort to automobile or mail buying. 4. Out-of-town trading. The automobile is just as ready to hit local trade as local religion. The ease with which most people can now reach stores at a distance of twenty to fifty miles, the lure of the ride and inspection of new stocks of goods, the element of surprise and the hunt for "bargains" are all favorable conditions for con- sumers but distinctly unfavorable for merchants with capital tied up in stocks pf goods and idle clerks waiting for trade. This diificulty would The Commercial Community 163 not fall so hardly upon merchants if it were not that out-of-town shopping is almost always cash business while stay-at-home trade is very largely credit business. In some cities this feature of out-of-town trade is a very serious commercial problem. 5. Department store and chain store competi- tion. Within the scope of free department store deliveries the menace to local trade is severe. Diversion of a proportionately large volume of trade to points out of town makes it necessary for many local merchants to "charge all the traffid will bear," regardless of normal rate of profits. A local merchant asked thirty-five cents a pound for a commodity, from a man then on his way into the city. The same brand of goods in identical package was delivered the same evening to the man's door, nearly forty miles away, at twenty-five cents a pound. The whole trade of that citizen was driven from local stores by exorbitant charges — and the suburban city is one of the finest samples of a starved community to be found on the continent. Chain stores, operated under one management, goods bought by wholesale, sold at the counter for cash only and nothing delivered; operating expenses cut to the minimum and purchases made at the maximum of advantage ; appealing to the "personal inspection" instincts of housewives — these, too, are adding troubles to local mer- (12) 164 Essentials of Community Efficiency chants of the old school. Almost never are local merchants organized as a commercial group or unit to meet either of these active forms of com- petition. 6. Mail order trade. Part of this has already been noted as a new principle of business. Along with the established mail order houses are the big enterprises all over the land which, by the development of the advertising art, have entered the realm of current literature, taken captive some widely circulated magazines and are mak- ing these periodicals more read for their adver- tising than for the "reading matter" which they contain. The amount of trade attracted by these publications is unknown but it is vast or the volume of quite extraordinary advertising could not be maintained. Unorganized local merchants cannot hope to duplicate the scientific advertising sent in to local papers by out-of-town merchants, and even when local publishers decline profitable advertising contracts with distant merchants they are only delaying, at their own cost, the delivery into local homes of the most alluring advertise- ments which trained skill can contrive. 7. Long-time book accounts. In agricultural sections this difficulty, created chiefly by mer- chants themselves, is a stupendous barrier to commercial success. Many merchants count themselves fortunate to command the trade of patrons who are known to be financially "good" The Commercial Community 165 and sure to pay some time, even if they have to wait till the farmer or wealthy customer feels in the mood to sign up a bunch of checks for the benefit of local creditors. Not many merchants go into business anticipating that they will do a kind of banking business, and do it in a way that would quickly bankrupt an ordinary bank or money-lending institution. When a merchant sells goods on credit, 'v^hat he actually does is to lend the customer money to buy goods. The open account is the only evidence of indebted- ness between the lender and borrower. By some peculiar twist of human nature, when the account has stood for some time many debtors feel a sort of proprietary right in it and are highly offended if the merchant asks for his money. They often assume that their ability to pay is questioned and they feel, or affect to feel, resentful if they get a "dun." Merchants don't want, of course, to offend good customers — and continue to encour- age about the lowest possible form of theft. Sneak-thieves do not put up their friendship or acquaintance as a bait to the victim they rob, they only outwit him by superior cunning. Ordinary collection agencies do not reach much of this very tangible source of invisible loss to merchants. Profits come from frequent turns of stock, not from desultory and inefficient money-lending. But unorganized merchants are helpless in the web of their own weaving and find 166 Essentials of Community Efficiency themselves frequently unable to break bad habits which have been built into the traditions of an established business. In many localities it is not uncommon to find merchants with one stock of goods on their shelves and another stock, almost as large, on the back or in the bodies of their customers, while the merchants are themselves borrowing money at banks to cover their bills. A few merchants in all localities are making headway in the face of all these difficulties, mak- ing a decent living and helping to build up the community. But the great majority of trades- men are not making headway even in these piping times of prosperity. They are making a living, most of them. They are helping, usually, to build up the community, but they sacrifice more to do it than any othe;? class of citizens. Their difficulties, very real and very numerous, are a challenge to the whole of every community which regards material prosperity as a definite and worthy element of community welfare and effi- ciency. Left to the traditional each-merchant- for-himself policy the struggle for existence would simply have to continue its merciless grind of individuals while the business of the town is at a standstill. Agricultural prosperity is often more marked just outside the town than is com- munity prosperity inside town limits. Mer- chants, unable to move as one mind to meet any situation or condition and compelled to attend - , The Commercial Community 167 strictly each to his own business, are simply the victims of facts and not their masters, less pros- perous and less competent often than the farmers who are strangling the life out of the town. Here, again, angry denunciation of farmers is as futile as bitter hate toward mail order houses. The interests of merchants, farmers, and of all citizens of the locality require that some plan be undertaken that will help to build up the town center of the community and not starve it to death or condemn it to die of dry rot. CREATING A COMMERCIAL COMMUNITY Some merchants are big enough to see the interests of the whole community first and their own commercial welfare as an inevitable part of generally prosperous conditions. These mer- chants will, of course, invite the cooperation of all local tradesmen in a systematic cooperation, for an offensive and defensive organization of their interests: offensive in the way of an agressive campaign to develop for themselves all the trade in territory immediately at hand which is now going to out-of-town points ; defensive in the way of mutual protection by means of cooperative methods of deliveries, buying, storing, stocks and specialties. Systematic cooperation in all these phases of trade does not imply an abandonment of the principle of self-interest but it does imply a vigorous use of that principle by entirely dif- 168 Essentials of Community Efficiency ferent means than cut-throat local competition to finish what the same sort of competition from oiitside is vigorously promoting. There is a much larger field of common' inter- ests before the merchants in each locality than most of them realize, and systematic cooperation in common interests means the creation of a commercial community at the heart of the social community. The trade center of a certain county seat city fronts the railroad for about half a mile. Eighty tradesmen make up the group, like logs make up a raft. Their stores are close together— they're not. Their one common interest is to make a living off the several thousand residents of the locality. They are confronted by all the diffi- culties listed above-J-and more. They do not compete with each other — ^they haven't life enough or money enough to make the game inter- esting, for outside competition is sharp. Within a radius of five miles is a big permanent farm trade, much bigger than half a dozen ordinary factories would bring, but practically none of it comes to the county seat. Local merchants do not aim to compete with the big stores forty or fifty miles away. They deliberately choose to be content with the little trade which customers have not time or inclination to take elsewhere. Someone persuaded most of the merchants to join in a plan for cooperative deliveries. That The Commercial Community 169 cut down expenses. Seven who handled one line got together and bought bulk goods in car lots, one of the number making all the purchases. That cut expenses and saved valuable time. They used one storehouse for bulk shipments in and out. More expense saved. They agreed, after many informal conferences, not to duplicate stocks and specialties but to divide the trade among them and play into each other's hands in promoting local trade. This released much cap- ital, increased each line of stocks, and started an era of friendliness which reached throughout the locality. They promoted a "one check" club among customers so that housewives could send one check with all local accounts to any of the banks before the tenth of each month and distri- bution of the total amount would be made at the bank. This increased convenience encouraged promptness of payment, cut down open accounts, and increased the volume of cash trade. The people, of the locality are split into about as many factions as Churches, lodges, clubs, and politics can make with only a few thousand people to work with — ^ut at the heart of the social chaos a real commercial community has come into being and it can make one of the finest communities in America out of the present poor material. An energetic Iowa merchant is creating a com- mercial community consisting of himself and all the customers within a radius of ten miles of his 170 Essentials of Community Efficiency big out-in-the-open department store. His cat- alogues come out immediately after the issues of his big competitor in Chicago and they go into each home in the trade territory. He invites comparison of catalogue prices and shows that the same goods can be bought for less money and better goods' for the same money at home than in any out-of-town center. This competitive trade is spot cash and no produce taken in ex- change. Twice each year a specially trained representative goes out with a car of samples, visits each home, takes orders for forty-five and sixty days' future delivery, and makes it possible for the merchant to go into the open market and buy according to orders in hand. Practically every dollar of out-of-town trade is now anchored by personal ties and self-interest to the store- centered community. A southern Ohio merchant does practically the same thing with his trade territory, except that he sends out a popular and expert salesman to make house-to-house canvass of the big trade district three or four times each year. During the bad roads period of winter this salesman often does a larger volume of cash- on-delivery trade than any dozen stores in the county. Systematic cooperation will enable any group of merchants to do successfully what, with rare exceptions, they cannot do alone. This coopera- tion, in not a few instances, must be started by The Commercial Community 171 6ther initiative than their own, be forced upon them, in other words, by interested citizens who are not merchants. The plain truth might as well be told flatly: there is neither reason nor sense in any body of consumers anywhere in America being compelled to send to Chicago or any other city to get goods by mail ; cooperation by local merchants makes possible successful competition with any out-of-town sources of sup- ply; merchants have no more right to ask con- sumers to pay higher prices for goods in order that they may more successfully fight each other than have Churches to ask communities to sup- port competitive organizations when the period of religious feudism is past. There is a basis of mutual square deal between merchants and their customers as well as of customers toward their local tradesmen. In not a few communities the merchants are their own worst enemies, blindly creating the very conditions which make it in- creasingly hard to make a living in business. Merchants have it in their power, almost more than any other one body of citizens, to make com- munity welfare a vs/orthy rallying cry and to lead off in the commercial field with a demonstration of community efficiency in commercial and social relations. People at large are disposed to con- sider favorably any projects which promise com- mon prosperity. The, call of better conditions for all is popular — it must not be abused. 172 Essentials of Community Efficiency Several cities in the north Central States are raising large sums to be used as bonuses and other benefits in securing the location of manu- facturing plants — ^for community welfare. One such city did secure a fine factory. Its manager and an increasing number of employees do all the buying which can be done by mail and have their supplies sent in from Chicago. A neighbor- ing city is in a factional row because the local improvement association emptied its treasury to help buy a free site for a rival factory to one already on the ground. Another neighboring county seat is raising tens of thousands of dol- lars to bid for the location of industries, while in the county round about is more trade done by mail in Chicago than would be done by the force of three or four ordinary factories, and not a finger is being lifted by local merchants to de- velop this trade territory, to tie the country folk to their proper commercial center, or to create a real commercial community as a basis for per- manent social efficiency. Now the question must be raised, is it efficient or even practical to make generous bids for factories and let permanent trade go uncared for? Industries which can be bought to come can also be bought to go or to close down, as industrial history abundantly proves. The same energy spent in raising money and securing factories would produce amazing results in breaking down barriers between coun- The Commercial Community 173 try folk and town folk, between merchants and rural consumers and producers, and ins replacing these barriers by numerous ties of live, common interests. Property values in many cities and towns are lower than they were a generation ago. Property in both town and country elsewhere has been appreciably raised in desirability and, in consequence, in actual value by the establish- ment of more neighborly relations throughout an entire trade territory. An entirely new spirit is coming into modern business, especially in re- tail trade relations. The fact that commercial activities alone cannot create permanent material prosperity in any locality has been proved at vast cost. Social ties binding men and women by many common interests are the only sure con- ditions of general welfare which experience ap- proves. Communities can commit social suicide but they cannot be commercially assassinated when they are grounded in fruitful social inter- ests. The lesson of social welfare is needed fully as much by merchants in larger cities as in the smaller cities and towns. Secretaries of cham- bers of commerce and commercial clubs are fre- quently in despair over the reluctance of mer- chants to pull together systematically either for their own particular interests or for the larger interests of common welfare. Merchants need to face the truth that their carelessness and pre- 174 Essentials of Community Efficiency occupation with private cares make them the hardest oLall groups to bring to conference and deliberation even for their own commercial self- protection, to say nothing of broader community concerns. The new organization of the world, the nationalization of commerce and industry, of capital and labor, of the instruments of produc- tion and distribution, and of trade expansion reaching out from Europe are compelling Amer- ican citizens to think in larger terms and of wider interests. The old age of private initiative and aggressive self-interest in little lines must merge into a new age of social initiative and aggressive self-interest in community lines. Mer- chants who cannot or will not cooperate with their neighbors will find an increasing coopera- tion of neighbors working against them. If the principles of business were exacting and its pen- alties severe in the former age of the world, they will not be less so when they are based on the broader social foundations of common well-being and efficiency. Leadership has a definite price. Merchants who pay the price of leadership will find surprising aid springing up from unsuspected sources to help them make community prosperity permanent. If local commercial representatives do not take the lead in putting community wel- fare on sure and stable foundations, those who are leading may not be merciful — they are not now — to trailers in social progress. Conspicuous The Commercial Community 175 success by merchants, in such cities as Trenton, Missouri, in leading out to make a whole county a self-conscious social and commercial unit, dem- onstrates beyond argument the price which must be paid and the splendid compensations awaiting those who will put brains and time into the busi- ness of community development. It will not come by accident nor will it come in a month or a year. It will come as true^ success always does, by whole-hearted devotion to a worthy cause, by loyalty to the interests of mankind. CHAPTER IX The Industrial Community Industrial' Principles The Age of Machinery! Natural forces in- creasingly harnessed and guided! Workmen becoming impersonal like the machines they operate and tend ! C^wners hid behind impersonal legal fictions! Employers and employees con- cealed by abstract Capital and Labor ! Industrial feudalism, social aristocracy and an ideal of political democracy! This was America at the close of the old age. But solid foundations had already been laid on which to build a new age, when science and inhumanity joined hands to drown the old age of the world in blood and un- utterable anguish. Efficiency was the agent. Elimination of waste, utilization of waste products, reduction of costs, maximum energy from least power, least friction and lost motion, absolute command of all relevant facts — ill the ideals of efficiency were simply business sense applied to all achieve- ments with the impersonal exactness of applied mathematics. Owners and operators of ma- chines would, quite naturally, be first to seek out and use every principle of scientific manage- 176 The Industrial Community 177 ment. But once set a passion for efficiency in motion and it is bound inevitably to come face to face with the changeless human factors of infants and children and youths and adults, and with their place in a scheme of things basedi upon efficiency. The value to industry of human beings capable and competent could not be shoved to one side whenever any phase of con- versation came up for discussion. Natural re- sources are worthless except in relation to the human beings whose resources they are. Con- servation of human energies is of immensely greater importance, even in industries, than the saving of latent powers in mineral and vegetable resources. Effective efficiency drove industrial engineers to the consideration of human well- being as an element of progress, and this brought welfare work to the fore as an indispensable part of scientific industry. A good working nucleus of employers with lively human sympathies had already anticipated the welfare work of others who came to it by the roundabout efficiency route. Multitudes of men who hired the skill and energies of other men never lost the human touch with the men they employed, never lost their way in the sea of abstractions and did not allow their coworkers to lose their way in wordy fogs about "class" dis- tinctions and antagonisms. These men kept alive the spirit of friendly interest with the other 178 Essentials of Community Efficiency human beings who lived on the income of in- dustrial work. America contained vast numbers of such employers, some of them being among the much viUified millionaires. These men were not startled when, in discussing the legal status of corporations, President Wilson declared that all guilt is personal, that corporations cannot be criminals and do criminal acts. Neither were they shocked and astounded when Mother Jones and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., met as a woman and a man who had very many human interests in common. Only those, and they are many, who lost touch with the race of infants and boys and girls and youths and parents felt themselves to be a very superior kind of human beings, stew- ards by grace of God — some kind of a god — of special privileges and opportunities and rights. Considerable progress had been made in the industrial world in the matter of scientific man- agement of machines and materials. Not much progress had been made in the scientific manage- ment of men — ^but it was an incalculable advance over the past when it was fully discovered that this was a fundamental problem to every leader in the field of industry. The general principles of efficiency are familiar to nearly all the heads of industrial concerns; the importance of wel- fare work is generally recognized by them. Upon them, therefore, in very large measure de- pends the responsibility of leadership in every The Industrial Community 179 effort to set the same factory principles of effi- ciency to work in the community outside the factory and to put social welfare projects on a sound and scientific basis. "What Scientific Management Means to America's Industrial Position" is admirably discussed in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, by Frank B. Gilbreth and Lillian Gil- breth. What scientific management of commu- nity welfare means to the industrial and social life of America ought to be written in live letters during the next decade by men who seem to be called for such a time as this. Patience, however, is demanded in a more than usual degree. While efficiency has been built into industry and it seems quite the simplest and most natural thing to those who understand it and adopt it, slip- shod habits of inefficiency have become ingrained in the conduct of municipal government and public interests. These habits rooted in the minds of a whole citizenship cannot be broken up and new habits built so readily as under indus- trial compulsion. Men who know sometimes for- got wholly how they felt and acted before they knew. Chasms are more easily made in commu- nity life between citizens with souls set on effi- ciency and those to whom efficiency means chiefly interference with personal liberty to do as one pleases — such chasms are more easily made (13) 180 Essentials of Community Efficiency ths^n bridged or closed. But leadership in social efficiency does not balk at ;:hasms. Two outstanding motives impel industrial lead- ers to be foremost in promoting community wel- fare and efficiency : the increasing handicap which inefficient factories must face in the new age makes it imperative that every industry be manned throughout by the most efficient help to be had; factory workers who are hopelessly inefficient in all relations outside the factory can never be wholly efficient in any of their relations inside of it. In other words, industrial condi- tions demand efficiency in local factories; fac- tory efficiency demands community efficiency and welfare. And community efficiency is simply a systematic cooperation of all citizens for the best interests and complete well-being of all the babies and children and youths and parents in the locality. LOCAL INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS Communities as a rule desire to have one or many factories located within them. Greatness, in an age of machinery, is bound to be measured mainly by chirring wheels, clouds of smoke or vapor and rapidly circulating sums of money — and what American community does not long to be great among its fellows! Location of industries in communities and na- tions is governed by the natural or artificial The Industrial Community 181 advantages which the industry can command. Natural advantages are held to be indispensable but, in America at least, advantages purely artifi- cial are most eagerly sought and demanded. Abundant power at hand, steady supply of raw materials, accessible markets, transportation at reasonable cost for both materials and products, a sure supply of workmen who are unskilled, skilled, or capable of becoming skilled, and facil- ities for meeting the human needs of employers and employees in their domestic and social rela- tions — these are natural advantages without which it is increasingly difficult either to secure the location of factories or to hold those which are located. Control of markets and of raw ma- terials by great industrial combinations have made it altogether efficient to buy up and put out of business thousands of superfiuous fac- tories or to move machinery to a few central localities where cost of operation might be re- duced to a minimum. This condition powerfully affects the artificial advantages which commu- nities in the past have been wont to urge upon manufacturers. Free sites, free power or water, exemptions from taxes, sums of money called subsidies or bonuses, preferential treatment by transportation companies, protective tariffs'^— all such expedients are temporary, incapable of giv- ing stable foundation to industry, likely to give subtle and misleading appearance of prosperity. 182 Essentials of Community Efficiency and almost certain, in America, when they have once been given as a grace to be demanded later as a duty. In the case of industries of increasing returns, industries which need artificial props to start them going but which gather power of self-support with their own momentum, the giv- ing of artificial advantage is justified. But the rank selfishness of American manufacturers has filled both local and national politics full of in- visible governments and the confusion of endless I dishonesties. Because government during the I centuries has been mostly organized selfishness it has been a most convenient tool of industrial leaders of the public-be-damned type. This im- perious feudalism and blind selfishness has caused acutely or chronically nearly all the wars since governments ceased to be mainly military enterprises. Navalism and militarism had be- come only the two strong arms of organized brute force backing up business ambitions. War will continue to be inevitable among men so long as the causes of war are knowingly or blindly promoted. To thrust artificial advantages into the hands of one group of citizens or to recog- nize the right of one group of citizens to demand artificial advantages over all others, whether these groups are made up of industrial managers or industrial workmen, is to continue to create undemocratic relations, to undermine democracy, to foster the forces of conflict. And, in an age The Industrial Community 183 of machinery, a combination of political democ- racy, social aristocracy, and industrial feudalism or monarchy will never make one community a democratic leader of other communities nor make America a trusted leader among the na- tions. Public attention has been widely forced to consider this issue through the unparalleled clearness with which the issue was drawn be- tween President Wilson and a group of great newspapers: humanity or selfish nationalism, democracy or feudalism, the rights of men or the rights of a few men, brotherliness or brutality. Communities do well to advertise and exploit their natural advantages. Recent industrial his- tory shows the peril of creating artificial advan- tages and, in a few years, have the industry moved or close down and leave the last state of the community much worse than the first. Far better is it for the citizens of all communities to plan systematic cooperation among themselves to make their locality the best of its natural kind, domestic, agricultural, educational, a distributor of supplies, or any other, than to seek by bonuses or subsidies to become something which, for lack of permanent natural advantages, they cannot be sure of remaining permanently. One of the worst features of creating artificial advantages in a community is that it diverts both commercial and social attention from exploiting to the full the permanent conditions of material and moral 184 Essentials of Community Efficiency prosperity which lie all around the imaginary political line dividing town from country. Take a concrete case, the city of M — . It created fine artificial advantages and succeeded in get- ting one large factory and several smaller plants to locate there. The possession of special favors and advantages of visible kind put the owners and managers of the plants in a class apart from all other citizens. Regularity of pay and big weekly pay rolls are an unqualified commercial help to a city, provided there is a community spirit, a common civic pride and purpose, in the citizens. Local merchants at once began indi- vidually to capture as large a share as possible of the new local trade. The workmen who were brought in were of high class. They promptly resented what looked like commercial exploita- tion of their necessities. The managers were highly trained to the ideals of efficiency and of welfare. Employees were encouraged to put their best into the business and the business put its best into their welfare: trained nurses, free medical and dental service, finely equipped and supervised playgrounds and indoor gymnasium facilities for employees and their families, sym- pathetic help in all the emergencies which rise in the course of life, all that properly enters into a sense of social responsibility and mutual duty to be efficient. The town had none of these for its citizens : its parks were a joke, its playgrounds The Industrial Community 185 a peril, its schools archaic, its churches dignified, its stores selling seconds at first-grade prices. The big trade of the factories was done in Chi- cago, and the chasm between local citizens and factory folk remains unbridged. On one side is efficiency and welfare ; on the other side is com- mercial self-interest, social inefficiency and no concerted sentiment and plans for common wel- fare. Factory managers are increasingly impa- tient with community conditions and citizens are exasperated with managerial bruskness and un- sparing criticism. These factories are in the locality but no part of the community. The community paid some thirty-thousand dollars to get the factories located -there. There is a per- manent, farm trade practically untouched by the merchants of M' — within five miles of the city ; the farmers know the city is there, they read of it in the papers. Its doctors and bankers are known to most of the farmers, its school-teachers known to some of the children; otherwise it might as well be nonexistent. The diversion of/ energy and money to factory bonuses blinded the community yet more to its own inefficiency and made it less inclined to cultivate a solidarity of social and commercial interests with its own natural customers. K — is a manufacturing city. It is also the cen- ter of a large agricultural district. Its factory owners and managers are closely identified with 186 Essentials of Community Efficiency all local interests. They set up and maintain systematic cooperation in all civic interests. They keep themselves largely in the background, using their brains while others make the speeches and bask in the spotlight of publicity. When local charities fall into the hands of sentimental- ists, a piece of civic machinery is shoved in to take over this public work and good-hearted busybodies scarcely realize how they happened to be shelved. When local religious conditions get in the doldrums another piece of civic coop- eration is set to work, and religious emotions and activities are set on new centers without friction or public notice. Farmers are identified with all local enterprises and civic projects. Mer- chants find themselves thrown into contact with farm families both in town and out in the coun- try — and neither farmers nor merchants could tell just how the new lines of association were laid and occupied by them. K — , in other words, is run, without knowing it, by industrial leaders of the new type, human beings who make it a point to know all other human beings within the range of influence. It has no wars between workmen and owners, between factory and town, and no chasms between industrial leaders and any other group of citizens. The only thing lack- ing to make it one of the finest cities of its type to be found on the continent is an equally intel- ligent and active community sentiment — and The Industrial Community 187 this is growing. Lack of natural advantages and of artificial helps is all overcome by putting fac- tory brains into community interests and by setting in motion in the whole community the principles of efficiency and welfare by which in- dustries must be run in the new age. CO-OPERATION IN COMMUNITY EFFICIENCY AND BETTERMENT Cooperation is only operation with a Co., work done by united effort, each worker contributing j a definite part to a positive result. » Responsibility is a concrete idea to men who stand up under it. Efficiency is a clear idea to men who study it and apply it. Betterment is immensely significant to men who are harshly driven to learn the difference between healthy, cheerful, and happy coworkers and those who are sickly, sullen, and discontented. Such men have, as a rule, escaped or overcome the handi- cap of an education based on bookishness, a false notion of human culture which has worked so powerfully to anchor most of the citizenship of America in a mild and harmless mediocrity. Men who succeed in industries must grapple raw ) facts, master them, dominate and guide them. They must be seers, foreseers, able to anticipate i the future and discount it, to see what ought to f be and then bring it to pass. They must possess the elements of practical leadership, understand 188 Essentials of Community Efficiency men, and know how to guide men to discover what they can do and what they most like to do, what they will do successfully and what they will not do. The very nature of the age of machinery makes men who are vastly more than mere makers and operators of machines, it makes men who are makers and operators of conditions, of relations which make for the upbuilding of the finest machines in the universe, live human mechanisms. Industrial leaders then, in the nature of the case, are the citizens to whom each community and the aggregate of communities, the nation, must confidently look for wisest, practical guid- ance. America in the old age was a miscel- laneous jumble of ideas and institutions. War relentlessly showed us to ourselves. The "New Republic" voiced the general conviction: "As a matter of plain fact in the past the American .nation has been prepared for nothing — ^neither for prosperity nor adversity, neither for doing things well nor for doing them at all, neither for peace at home and abroad nor for war at home and abroad. If it is to be prepared in the future, it must begin by putting into the work of prep- aration some of the energy and determination and some of the disposition to pay the costs of preparation which have been characteristic of the propaganda." A nation consisting of shiftless and inefficient communities, communities The Industrial Community 189 split and selfishly sectional, communities with- out organization, plan or program — such a nation is neither able to lead the world nor to be an effective follower in any plan for reshaping the human relations of all mankind. "Our Amer- ican organization has actually been breaking down at the mere prospect of serious complica- tions with a foreign country." A machine which goes to pieces when most is at stake on its hold- ing together is worse than no machine — it is a paper sham built on bluff. More than an obligation of opportunity, then, confronts those citizens who know what organ- ization is, what it means, what its power is, and how to make it. The new world and the place in it of a new America put the challenge to the patriotism of the entire citizenship, a challenge to leadership by those who are qualified to lead, a challenge to loyalty by those who are only waiting to be led. And the place of leadership is not away off among imaginary abstractions— the place is with those who work in the fac- tories, their wives and babies and young folk, the citizens who make up the actual or potential social world in which both employers and em- ployees will find their chiefest satisfactions, the whole community which is to be guided to sys- tematic cooperation in working out the largest well-being of all its human members. Leader- ship here brings double reward; leadership di- 190 Essentials of Community Efficiency rected elsewhere while this is ignored is vain and fruitless. Only men who must see their own business years ahead can see community conditions for ' years in advance. Only men who must see the whole of an industry, from the first source of its raw material to the last market of its finished products, can see the whole of a community from its first human needs to its last satisfac- tions. Only men who must patiently endure i present blunders, in the certainty that more ex- perience in thoughtfulness will never make the same blunder twice, can tactfully endure the zig- zag course of untrained citizens trying to make a real community out of themselves. Public sentiment is coming to declare more and more tlearly that, in view of the exigencies of the age, those who can, must; those who can lead, ought to lead; those who can see, must use their sight for the help of those who are only learning to see and to whom men are as trees walking. The burden of duty joins every claim of self-interest in putting directly before industrial minds the leadership in guiding citizens into a more com- pact, simpler, saner, less noisy and smoky and effusive patriotism, a civic responsibility which emulates charity and begins at home. Any plan of community organization seems formidable to citizens who are not accustomed to blueprints. A program of concrete better- The Industrial Community 191 ments and improvements extending over a period of years an^ requiring united action by citizens looks fearsome to folk not used to detailed anal- yses and comprehensive specifications. Govern- ment bulletins and university outlines of commu- nity organization are about as plain as railroad time-tables to citizens not given to travel. Ex- planation from platforms of systematic coopera- tion in turning out a finished product of civic wel- fare leaves multitudes of citizens looking dazed and dubious. But these plans and programs and social organizations of citizens for concrete tasks of citizenship are as absolutely essential to com- munity efficiency and permanent welfare as are blueprints and specifications and schedules to in- dustrial success. Who shall consider them and lead oif in the prosaic task of translating dream into reality, theory into fact, mental images into factories of human conduct and character and citizenship? Community efficiency may be dreamed out almost anywhere: it can be worked out only in the actual community with whatever human stuff is on the ground. Community wel- fare may be idealized at a distance: it can be realized only through direct contact with the folk whose well-being is at stake. Social respon- sibility may be blueprinted in the sanctum or study: it will be a tangible affair when commu- nities of folk are led to make themselves actually responsible for the well-being of babies and chil- 192 Essentials of Community Efficiency dren and youths and parents. Neither a factory plan nor a community plan will run itself. Neither a factory nor a community will plan itself except as brains are dedicated to the specific job of making plans. Community sentiment will generate itself just as steam will in a boiler without an engineer. Community sentiment un- organized may be worked to white heat but it will get just as far as tremendous steam power turned on a scrap heap — it will create lots of commotion but no motion. All these simple truths point to one focus — the place of industrial brains in doing the most needed piece of work in all the world at this crisis, adopting all that is good and applying all that is possible of the "social-responsibility-efii- ciency-and-betterment" idea to the community at hand. CHAPTER X The Agricultural Community The County Agents' Programs The whole world lives off the farmer: the world owes to farm families vastly more than mere money for their products. Congress was moved to pass what is known as the Smith-Lever Bill, putting the power of the national and state governments behind county organizations of farmers. By this general co- operation an assistant secretary of agriculture is made a county agent or adviser to the farmers of each county who will organize themselves as a cooperating association. Several hundred of these important public servants were called into the field as soon as the national and state appro- priations were made available in 1913. Nearly eleven million dollars annually will be devoted to the work of these men by 1923. Their pro- grams cannot be uniform, naturally, but they follow common outlines based upon the unchang- ing phases of farm life and work. The county agent has back of him the immense storehouse of information gathered during the past by the department of agriculture, the invaluable infor- mation being developed by government and state specialists and scientific experimenters, agricul- tural colleges and papers, and the practical re- 193 194 Essentials of Community Efficiency suits being gained by careful farmers in all parts of the land. In front of him each county agent has the whole needs of all the farm families, owners, and renters and hired help. His pro- grams are the funnels by which the intelligence of the world is made immediately available wherever two or more farmers can be brought together to consider their mutual interests. The programs follow mainly the following outlines : PRIMARY PROGRAM 1. Soil Building. 2. Crop Development. 3. Stock Improvement. 4. Marketing Products. 5. Farm Accounting. 6. Pests and Parasites. 7. ScientiBc Experiments. SECONDARY PROGRAM 1. Practical Education. 2. Social Intercourse. 3. Health and BeautiHcation. 4. Community Life and Welfare. Each item of these programs deserves ex- tended discussion with respect to its relation to a general community and national plan of social responsibility and community efficiency. Rea- sonable limits of space require however that only a few of the items be briefly noted as illustra- tions of the very wide significance of all of them. Soil fertility, for example, is the final capital of the nation. Soil depletion robs the nation of The Agricultural Community 195 its choicest active wealth. With a whole fertile continent at hand the farmers of the old age had no need to bother with problems of soil building. If the soil of New England or New York was run down, depleted, almost beyond hope of restoration, it made little difference. Those who wanted to farm could go west. Dr. C. G. Hopkins, one of the leading soil experts of the world, declares that practically all of the so-called profits taken from American soil up to the present have been dividends declared out of capital and not out of soil earnings. This proc- ess might go on indefinitely if there were endless quantities of new and fertile soil to be exhausted. Warnings had been sounded toward the closq of the last century. They became, more im- perative during the first part of the present cen- tury. As soon as men could get their breath and begin to look for their bearings after August, 1914, warnings concerning methods of farming which depleted soils became positive and direct. Workers who spent largely of their time and energies in rural surroundings unearthed in- justices and inequalities which compelled them to see worked out again the impoverishment of soils and communities which marked the middle ages. Social, educational, and religious workers did not hesitate to emphasize that title to a plot of land does not carry with it the right to skin the soil, destroy its fertility, rob the community (14) 196 Essentials of Community Efficiency and nation of its final capital and leave economic aiid social wreckage behind. They joined stu^ dents in calling attention to the vast tracts oi tillable land in America which can be bought for less than the cost of the buildings and improve- ments. They contrasted soils in Europe, which have been farmed for hundreds of years without depletion, with soils in America which show the ravages of only two or three generations of al- most insane profligacy in squandering soil energies. They pointed out the incredible waste- fulness of a nation which permitted ignorant greed to appropriate common wealth and leave dire consequences of all sorts to follow their blundering. National prominence was given, in December, 1915, to the place of the rural Church in community and national life and to the devas- tations in religion and all social life which are direct results of soil robbery. Rather drastic legislation covering operation of land by owners and tenants is bound to be made effective in the immediate future as an element of national and community efficiency. Marketing of products is another item of well- nigh incalculable importance to the community as well as to individual farmers. Only those who have done it know the emotions in a farmer's soul when he goes to the bank and borrows money to pay freight charges on crops he has shipp,ed to market, or as he watches tons upon The Agricultural Community 197 tons of fruits and vegetables decay within a hun- dred miles or so of hungry millions, or is com- pelled to "dump" his crops at prices which do not cover actual cost of production, realizing the while that fortunes of produce speculators and great financial institutions are being built out of the obscure increments which his crops pass through after they leave his hands. Market con- ditions are so wholly out of the farmer's control — and the organized commercial world is so generous in safeguarding his interests — that his love for his community and nation frequently make him gnt his teeth. Those who are won- dering that political socialism has shifted from the proletariat of factory sections to the great agricultural sections of the west, southwest and northwest, would have much of their wondering fully answered if they could hear farmers dis- cuss their helplessness in turning their crops into a fair share of cash. There can be no "eiffi- ciency" in agricultural sections until this ele- ment of general welfare is adjusted. Local sys- tematic cooperation of farmers for marketing by united action would not solve all the diffi- culty — but it does solve a great part of it. The cause of farmers' reluctance to cooperate even for their own financial profit has long puz- zled a great many folk even many thoughtful farmers. If they could play the marketing game by united action — ^but as a rule they simply can- v° 198 Essentials of Community Efficiency not play any game by united action. And that is the real secret, as Professor T. N. Carver has pointed out, of their whole difficulty. As boys they never learned to play group games, never had drilled into their tissues the habit of sinking self in the team, of working for group success and not for individual achievement. They simply never learned the art of united action. Great ublicity has been given to the most successful marketing cooperation of growers in the country, the California Fruit Growers' Association. Those who have written of it give fine descrip- tions of its outside characteristics. Its inside history is the history of men unlearning one set of habits and learning — ^most of the time under compulsion — an entirely new set of habits. Part of its compulsions were gigantic losses; part of them were the human powers by which some men compel other men to volunteer to do what they demand shall be done. And it will continue to be so until supervised play is a compulsory part of the education of all boys, till all of them build into their habits of thought and conduct group action and not^^s^rperformapcgs^ The present generation of f arniers haveit in their power to free their children from at least this set of exasperations which have robbed them of millions upon millions of dollars. Centralized or consolidated schools, with teachers of physical education as well as of agriculture and domestic The Agricultural Community 199 science, can completely revolutionize marketing conditions by farmers in less than a generation. Sir Horace Plunkett insists, along with many other wise leaders, that farm accounting lies closest to the solution of most of the problems which beset the individual farmer and farm com- munities, that it is indeed the chief element in solving the rural problem of the United States. Mathematical schooling, as it was doled out to boys and girls during the old age, laid great stress upon practical matters like memorizing the table of apothecary's weights and the ex- traction of the cube root of decimals. If young- sters could memorize abstract symbols enough to get as far as the problem of the lights they could get a diploma and go to raising corn and pigs. The incredible; stupidity of much that passed — and in some places still masquerades — as education in America will undoubtedly ap- pear in future generations as one of the sublime wonders of human history. Until very recently not one farmer in multiplied thousands could know whether he was going up or down or side- ways in his business. He could not know whether any one of his cows was a producer or only a boarder. And none of the school- teachers could tell him how to find out. A few men who had been drilled in practical affairs, who had the genius of systematic accounting in them, still intact in spite of their schooling. 200 Essentials of Community Efficiency coiild and did measure their soil cost, labor cost, investment cost and were able to approximate their business status. They discovered that the bank-book was not only a clumsy but a very misleading index of actual profits and losses. More than a hundred farmers in an Ohio county made a systematic accounting of their business of the preceding year, working under the gen- eral direction of the county agent. Although the county is one of the best agricultural coun- ties in the state, some of the farmers were astounded to discover that they had actually made a loss of about fifteen hundred dollars dur- ing the year. Only one or two had made that much profit.- The great majority of those who made any profit showed a profit of about ten dollars per week in return for their labor. Churches with, the new social ideal, many con- solidated or centralized schools aiid many social centers have been providing courses in syste- matic farm accounting, and all the county agents, of course, are trying to bring in a new era of business management by the business men who run the farms of the land. The effect of this new development upon ideals of community effi- ciency and social responsibility will inevitably be of vast advantage, "fhe importance to each farmer of his monthly and yearly statement of assets and liabilities cannot fail to put away to the front the far-reaching importance of a contin- The Agricultural Ctimmunity 201 uous inventory of the community's assets and lia- bilities, a survey of its resources kept up to date. The ramifications of all the items in the pri- mary program of county agents reach into all phases of community efficiency. But it is in the secondary program that the organized power of national and state governments is brought to bear most directly with local associations in shaping ideals of social responsibility and of con- crete plans for community efficiency and better- ment. And of all places in the world rural dis- tricts need to be roused and put upon a basis of higher social cooperation. Millions of slum children in cities have better provisions for their health, social life and prac- tical education than do most of the country chil- dren in America, even in sections of agricultural wealth and culture. For sheer social poverty the slums of cities are not to be compared with country school districts in every state in the union and province of the dominion. Social set- tlements, neighborhood houses, commons and all sorts of helpful institutions are promoted by private generosity and public zeal in the poorer sections of cities. The discovery and rapid ex- tension of play life as related to physical health and moral education have made equipped and supervised playgrounds more numerous than schoolhouses, and city schoolhouses are com- monly used for social centers and night-school 202 Essentials of Community Efficiency activities. Such privileges are as rare in country districts as they were in cities fifty years ago. The one-room country school-building has been pilloried by educators and health ofEcials. It represents the stubbornest waste of school- money and energy to be found anywhere in America. Taxpayers pay as much for thirty to fifty tninutes of a teacher's time as they would have to pay for full five hours of adapted teach- ing in a centralized or consolidated school. The custom of putting rural education under the di- rection of politically elected superintendents instead of educationally selected and appointed supervisors may be, as Professor EUwood P. Cubberly insists, in "The Improvement of Rural Schools," a large part of the trouble; the rest of it may be taken care of by public money set apart to supplement the niggardly school- revenues of backward districts. The proper education of all its citizens is a state concern, of national importance, and ought not to be left subject to the inabilities, real or fancied, of in- dividual school districts, townships or of polit- ical county officials. Much agitation and edu- cation of public sentiment needs to be done to aid this item of the county agent's program. It can be described as nothing less than im- mensely unfortunate that the religious dissen- sions of past ages have made such cleavages among citizens that county agents cannot be- The Agricultural Community 203 come active in the reconstruction of religion and religious forces in rural districts. But these civil officers, like school-teachers, must keep hands off of churches and religious conditions except in their capacity as private citizens. The secondary program of county agents is inherently weak in one other respect. They can do much to help farmers and their families to discover, create and enjoy larger and better social life and intercourse among themselves. But this is not enough. The American nation can no more endure two distinct civilizations, city and country, than it could endure half slave and half free. Distinctions between town folk and country folk, between the children of city folk and of farmers, are as preposterous as the proposed cleavage between children choosing vocational education and those choosing class- ical culture, a project fought bitterly by public school-teachers and educators generally when it was proposed before the Illinois legislature in 1915. Equality of educational opportunity, a cherished principle of American education, im- plies an equality of social opportunity which is not yet achieved. Country folk have not sought it and town folk have not tried, as a rule, to offer it. The sense of difference makes lasting im- pression on youthful minds and does leave un- fortunate permanent results in American citizen- ship. County agents have already done much to 204 Essentials of Community Efficiency bring farmers into the membership of commer- cial clubs and chambers of commerce. But this is not enough. The heed is far deeper and wider than the commercial contact of farmers and mer- chants. Towns and cities, especially citizens in county-seat cities, must have their social re- sponsibility for all contiguous rural districts brought plainly, forcefully and repeatedly to their attention. Little profit comes from emphasizing rural backwardness and social privations so long as town ostriches of both sexes hide themselves in their own little functions and refuse to hear or heed the mute appeals which come to them from the neighborhood just outside. Rural social squalor is not the fault of the folk who are doing the best they know how in the midst of a misfit situation — that squalor is the condemnation of those nearest at hand who know better — ^but don't care. Social selfishness in town folk might not be so conspicuous were it not that some live communities in different states have broken through this wall of division and set up fine and fruitful sbcial intercourse with practically every family in the county — and this in populous counties. The fact that it is being so happily done shows that it can be done. But the urge of combined commercial and social motives has not yet been in any general way brought home to the only responsible parties, the women and men who can knit town life and country life into The Agricultural Community - 205 a beautiful fabric of community organization and national solidarity. RETIRED FARMER^CITIZEN He is a problem to himself, to the town he lives in and to the farm he left behind him. The farmer who sells out and quits being a farmer when he moves into town is one kind of a citizen. He may be one of the best, provided he keeps busy at something worth while and don't become a town loafer. The farmer who rents his farm, goes into town and lives from his rentals and accumulations, unless these are un- commonly large, is quite another sort of citizen, quite frequently one of the worst obstacles to progressive community life. No other one factor has done so much, perhaps, to paralyze com- munity enterprise, retard community improve- ments and to imperil the whole rural civilization of the nation as has the misunderstanding, by himself and other citizens, of the position and situation of the retired farmer-citizen. His case seems simple and easily stated. He does not now have to work hard for a living. Why shouldn't he quit work? If he wants to leave the isolation of the farm and find congenial cronies in town, why shouldn't he? If he wants to build a home in town, ought not the town to welcome his coming? If interest and rentals are enough for him and his wife, whose business is 206 Essentials of Community Efficiency it if they want to spend their own money in their own time and way? If he opposes all public im- provements on the ground that taxes are already all he can pay, who is to stop him? When he insists, "We don't need sewers, paved streets, garbage incinerators, school and municipal play- grounds, ample school equipment for domestic science, manual arts, agriculture, music and other foolishness," and that no sane citizen would think of getting such folderols unless he had plenty of money ready in hand or knew where he could put his hand on it at once — ^why he is perfectly true and right according to life as he has learned its duties. Who, then, should' call him the poorest sort of citizen to be found outside public institutions? The deans of some prominent agricultural colleges say that the progress of scientific farm- ing and the beginnings of a wholesome stay-on- the-farm movement make it reasonably sure that the nation is suffering its last inflictioli of this sort. Others as intimately concerned with rural interests fervently wish they could believe this to be true. The retired-farmer-citizen is a factor to be reckoned with at the present in almost every city and town in the agricultural parts of the nation. Abuse of him is fruitless. It only hardens his shell. Arguments are vain. He en- joys discussion and has plenty of time to think up new justifications and keep the game going. The Agricultural Community 207 To kill him before the Lord sends for him is full of perilous consequences. He's here. He lives long. He will vote against progress till the end — most of him will. Few folk in town or country stop to realize that town life and country life are based on en- tirely different principles and that success on the farm works all the time to unfit the farmer i for successful town citizenship ; and that private J finance and public finance are also built upon[ directly opposite principles. To see both of these facts clearly helps greatly to understand, and therefore to solve, the retired farmer-citizen problem. Farmer s are. the most dependent otall citizens. Those who know farming only from car win- dows and auto rides are always talking about the beautiful independence of farm life. Men in no \ other vocation have to face so many conditions so entirely beyond their control and so absolutely determining success or failure financially. Ex- tremes of weather, all kinds of old and new in- sects and all the forty thousand fungi which attack vegetable and animal life, markets and transportation — the farmer works always on a precarious margin between certain expense and uncertain income. More than in any other voca- tion men who run farms must constantly be answering the questions. Can I get on without it? Can I make it turn back more than its cost? \l 208 Essentials of Community Efficiency Can I pay for it now? If they fail to guess right in answering such questions someone else will be running that farm without the farmer's con- sent. One who cannot be constantly conserv- ative cannot be a permanently successful farmer. Farmers have little use for theories of social utility and public finance. If a thing is abso- lutely necessary — and money in bank to pay for it is a condition of its necessity — ^the farmer can- not help. Ignoring the weight of what others want and are willing to pay for during the next twenty to fifty years, and putting to the fore his in- grained habits of measuring the cost of public goods in terms of private wants and costs. He always had to keep income up and expenses down to the lowest point. Now with income at a standstill and expenses going up and citizens clamoring for more improvements and better- ments — it is enough to make retired farmers swear, and it does occasionally. Town life has almost none of the hazards of farm life. All the resources of the tax unit are its backing. If any improvement is socially useful the community ought to get it immediately and spread the cost out over as many years as may be expedient. High taxes judiciously spent are the price of community life. Low taxes spent only for bare necessities are the rule in farm life — and country schoolhouses show it. In short, when men leave the farm for the town they leave one life which The Agricultural Community 209 they know intimately for one they know little about and many of them cannot and will not learn: they did not learn team-work as boys, young men or men — how can a man be born again when he is old? The idea of measuring intangible social satisfactions over against higher taxes is not in their world. To spend five thousand to six thousand dollars of public money annually on free lectures and concerts and entertainments, as is done in Houston, Texas, looks to groups of farmers like a long step toward civic insanity. A man who has made a pronounced success in one career cannot lift himself by sheer act of will into an entirely un- like set of principles, policies and plans of action, and be quite at home from the first Two plans have grown up within recent years to help bridge the chasm between town life and country life. Courses of popular lectures in prac- tical citizenship, discussing the fundamental principles of rural and urban life, and doing it in a thoroughly enjoyable way, are now avail- able in nearly all of the states. These courses are specifically designed to lift the whole level of community sentiment to higher planer of co- operation and do multiply the appreciative con- tacts with life which are the soul of culture. Mr. Ford's inventions have helped greatly to make the other plan a huge success — ^to bring farms so close to all the advantages of towns that the new '210 Essentials of Community Efficiency homes are being built on the old farms and all the joys and pleasures, conveniences and com- forts, privileges and opportunities of both town and country are immediately at hand for those who ought to quit hard work and turn its grind- ing tasks over to hands not yet knobbed and weather-beaten. Combination of these plans is bringing into many parts of America a new spirit of cooperation and of social unification. TENANTRY AND ABSENTEE LANDLORDISM Problems of country life in districts abandoned by owners are graver than community problems, where the owners have gone. Conditions much like mediaeval feudalism have appeared in Amer- ica, a landed aristocracy and serfs too wretchedly poor to be even valuable appurtenances to the soil. If these conditions fell only upon men they might get up and get out between days. The full weight of the burdens fall on babies and children and women. Farmers leaving for towns think of conditions as they were. They seldom realize clearly what an entirely different situation confronts tenants^ with no old-time neighbors. Leases are so drawn that landlords often unwittingly do grave injustice to tenants, condemning them to accept most meager educational facilities for their chil- dren and still more barren religious and social privileges for themselves and their families. The Agricultural Community 211 Principal P. T. Forsyth emphasized the diffi- culty, years ago, which one who loves his fellows found in trying to keep down hot indignation when walking through parts of cities and noted the waxen-faced and weazened babies condemned by society to early death or abnormal life. He ought to go out into the social deserts in the rich farm districts of populous states in free America and mingle for a time with the starved and sodden child minds, with the wistfulness of young women who have not yet been starved into social insensibility and who still hope for better days for the little ones "when John gets ahead." Young farmers of self-respect, religious, and worthily ambitious, have had all their self- respect and religion and ambitions hammered out of them by landlords whose Church mem- bership is unquestioned and who may not con- sciously have joined the ranks of inhuman driv- ers of fellow human beings. Small owners of heavily mortgaged farms are in nearly as deplor- able conditions and it will be many years before the new rural credits privileges reach down to where they are most urgently needed. Remedial legislation has already been pro- posed. Landlords may think it drastic. But the nation, the state, and the community have rights in the persons of present and future citizens as well as in the fertility of the soil. Justice seems to dictate that tenants shall have full value of all 212 Essentials of Community Efficiency improvements they put into the soil or upon the surface of it; that they shall have long-term leases; that tenants shall have it made possible for them to buy land leased out of the labor income froin that land. The Country Life Com- mission, appointed by President Roosevelt, un- covered part of the need and drew national atten- tion to the problem. Many social and religious organizations are following up the work. Steps to relieve the oppressions now resting upon many rural sections are sure to be urged upon Congress and Legislatures. Provisions are already under way to provide teachers of domes- tic science and agriculture in centralized schools by national and state aid. These teachers, work- ing twelve months in each year instead of by short school terms, along with the active help of county agents have proved the wisdom of put- ting the organized power of the nation and state behind the weakly-organized power of rural communities. Physical and moral stability of state and nation are involved in the welfare of its remote and relatively helpless citizens. An efficient nation cannot allow any of its citizens to be condemned, through no fault of their own, to be imperiled by social destitution and spiritual barbarism. Local school revenues can be so pro- vided that the incidence of taxes will fall on the soil income of landlords and not on the labor income of tenants. The right of absentee land- The Agricultural Community 213 lords to shirk responsibility for the social, domes- tic, and educational welfare of tenants is being openly and vigorpusly challenged, as at the open sessions of the Commission on the Rural Church and Country Life, in December, 1915. The con- solidated school and the rural Church with new social visioti appear to be the most promising agencies of a new day in tenant farm life. TOWN AND RURAL SOCIAL CO-OPERATION The size of the community, as citizens gener- ally are learning, is not measured by the imag- inary political lines which make political units. Political and geographical boundaries are only for purposes of taxation and suffrage. A com- munity is as big as the reach of the relations which are shared in common. Some minds find it not easy to forget geography and politics when they use the word "community" and to think only of relations. But minds which have to stretch to think in this way are undergoing exercise which is good for the soul. People may live near each other as everybody knows and yet have nothing in common but the air they breathe and the certainty of death. A local- ity might be thickly populated "and yet be no community if the people were hermits or closely buttoned-up folk. To become a community such a locality would have to witness tremendous social conversion or be repopulated by people who have juice and not pith in their souls. 214 Essentials of Community Efficiency Town folk have a duty to make a community out of themselves. " To scientize acquaintance" is the published purpose of one unique organiza- tion in America and it ought to be the avowed purpose of all citizens. Unhappily for everyone a very superficial acquaintance commonly passes for knowing one's neighbors. "You know me more in one hour," declared a citizen to a vis- itor, "than any business man in this town, al- though I have been among them in business for ten years." The motto adopted at Trenton, Missouri, " Get acquainted with y our neighbor ; y ou might like h im," will work social wonders in any locality where it is made a working fact. It is a matter of very common observation that few citizens actually know their own town or more than a very few of the folk whom they easily call by name. Knowledge of persons and personalities comes only by close association in playing together or working together. Now, in this new age, there is especial duty resting on all citizens to make communities of themselves by multiplying the lines of association and inti- mate acquaintance. Immediately confronting citizens who set out to get acquainted with their neighbors, to make themselves likable and find out all likable traits in their neighbors, is the age-old question, "Who, then, is my neighbor?" And there is only the same age-old answer, the The Agricultural Community 215 fellow who needs you even if he would curse you for helping him. The economic urge of material prosperity is now driving multitudes of citizens into many new associations and impelling them to form many new and close relations with other citizens. Commercial ties are drawing business men in town and on farms into closer relations. A world of new public interests is opened and need for frequent discussion of matters of public wel- fare is pressing throughout America. Town folk, if they only knew it, actually need the friendship aad personal support of country folk even more than farmers and their families need them. Even in some tenant districts of America the tenant farmers are better farmers and more compan- ionable citizens than the original owners who have gone into the towns to live. And even the least bookish and most uncouth farmers have to use more brains in their daily work and use all their brains all the time to succeed in their business more than do the vast majority of folk who live and work in towns and cities. They may not scrupulously observe all the niceties of artificial social proprieties, wear dress suits and decollete gowns at their social functions, or dis- sipate like ladies and gentlemen. But the folk who have in mind only the "Reubs" of cartoons, when they think of country neighbors, have much 216 Essentials of Community Efficiency need to cultivate intimate friendly relations with many farm families. County seat cities are the legal and fiscal cen- ters of county communities. Most county seats are known as "dead" towns, self-satisfied, self- contained, self-satisfying. • Their citizens are frequently visionless, nerveless, doless. The. presence of a courthouse and a jail seems to have a paralyzing eif ect on commercial enterprise and social energies. The group of citizens which ought to be the responsible social and educa- tional and religious stewards for all the people of the county most frequently content themselves with their own nice respectabilities. One city, already mentioned, is conspicuous among the county seats which have pioneered the new age in cultivating the sense of social responsibility and community efficiency throughout the sur- rounding county. Social ties between town folk and farm fam- ilies were planned for and developed. Seventy- five boys from farms were guests of business and prof essional folk in town during the sessions of a Farmers' Institute. One young fellow walked thirteen miles through a blizzard so as not to disappoint the merchant whose guest he had promised to be. Large automobile parties of town folk accepted invitations for two even- ings of each week during an entire season to go out to various points in the county. Part of The Agricultural Community 217 the conditions of accepting such invitations were that suppers should be served at conven- ient places and the town folk would pay regular prices for meals so served ; that the suppers should be followed by informal social greetings and conversations ; the social hour to be followed by a program in which contributions to good fel- lowship should be made by everybody who could and would take part. Similar festivities were planned for in town. A clubhouse for impartial use of town and country members aided greatly to obliterate social distinctions. Such commu- nities are not bothered by mail-order competi- tion or any other disruptive force. A continu- ance of such social interchanges during the lifetime of one generation will make Grundy County, Missouri, a marked community in the heart of the nation — and like systematic coopera- tion for definite social ends will make any other city and county worthily renowned, for it is pre- cisely such human groundwork as this on which the community life of the future must be built. Rural communities are not wholly dependent, fortunately, on the initiative and enterprise of neighboring county seats. Had the residents of the Hesperia community waited for social im- pulses to reach out to them from Hart and White Cloud they would never have become noted for their rich community life nor have made themselves a benediction to both Oceana 218 Essentials of Community Efficiency and Newago counties in Michigan. Similar com- munities are springing up in many states and putting to shame the social seUishness, the snob- bish indifference and unconcern of town folk which would be social indecency if it were will- ful and not the result of thoughtlessness. "But evil is wrought by want of thought, as well as by want of heart." In one of the wealthy counties of central Illi- nois several rural Churches in one district have gone out of business during recent years, and several more are going. Away out in the open country, more than a mile from the nearest dwell- ing, an enterprising native built an ordinary and plain dance hall. The only advertising he did was to post a notice of the "opening." ' He recov- \ ered the whole of his investment in an incredibly I short time and still ministers to the social hunger of the young folk of the vicinity. Meanwhile the Churches in the county seat are losing hold on most of the young people who find nothing challenging them to serve humanity in any prac- tical way. Which thing is both fact and alle- gory. This social hunger which moves the world is what is sometimes called " instinct for compan - i onship with kind." It woiild be refreshing if local leaders of social life and sentiment would grip some of these universal characteristics of mankind and work out social relations on these The Agricultural Community 219 lines, instead of going ahead blindly and then deplore failure and repeated lack of success. Children require and seek companionship with other children. Young folk require social con- tacts with young folk. Women have social ties with women, and men with men. According to female standards men are socially uncivilized if I not uncivilizable, even if Heinrich Schurtz is right in insisting that human society had its .beginning not in the family but in the associa- tion of men. The ties of companionship with others of like kind are immeasurably stronger than the purely artificial bases on which group life is so often sought to be grounded. There can ] be no question that groups formed within the \ one common bond of citizenship, regardless of/ all sectional and sectarian divisions, groups formed of men, women, youths and children is the kind of community society of which the American nation is to be mainly formed. Na- tional ideals, then, as well as the moral and material prosperity of the locality, are involved in the growth of a richer, closer, and more enjoy- able association of town folk and country folk, of neighbors all in each distinct community. Where the question has been directly raised to groups of citizens, what, in your judgment, does your community most need to make it an ideal one of its kind? The first answer from thought- ful minds invariably is, "A more active spirit of 220 Essentials of Community Efficiency cooperation." This spirit can come only from a habit of playing together or of working to- gether ; it is created by conduct and is, in turn, a creator of character. It cannot be willed into being as a thing apart. Farmers and their wives have, on their part, a work of initiative. Thousands of towns and small cities are having the spirit of cooperation 1 literally crushed out of them by the ruthless self- lishness of farmers in the surrounding territory. , JThe grange or the gleaners is a force far more (powerful than individual farmers realize to make lor break the spirit of the town which is their * natural center. One successful farmer com- plained, "We have to sit outside and see our town die out for lack of enterprise and commu- nity spirit." He did not realize then what he learned later, that the several hundred members of the grange regularly diverted so large a part of their trade to out-of-town points that local merchants could not make a decent living from their trade. Men who face bankruptcy and are at their wit's end to make commercial ends meet are not likely to be effusively social or enthu- siastic in promoting public enterprises. A few wisely placed invitations by farmers' wives to merchants and their families for a friendly visit at farmhomes, a few conferences of friendly and informal nature between purchasing agents or business committees of farmers' organizations The Agricultural Community 221 with local merchants would actually work toward the commercial and social salvation of many rural towns and cities which at this moment are on the verge of starvation. Farmers are now widely recognized as busi- ness men no less than bankers and merchants. The rapidly socialized increase in farm values puts a great number of farmers in the forefront of business interests in their localities. It may have been, in the old age, enough for farmers to be responsible for the successful conduct of their own private agricultural enterprises. Now they are responsible for all the duties and obliga- tions which fall upon any class of business men, the promotion of all the interests which mark civilized society^ Among these interests are those of their own natural trading center, the rural town or city. Its prosperity is their gain. Its general run-down-at-the-heelativeness is their loss and shame. The cultivation of productive social relations is their duty fully as much as it is of merchants and town folk. Public interests, public welfare, public sharing in all available in- struments of culture, social responsibility and com- munity efficiency are their civic duty, the practical patriotism without which waving flags and noisy horns are worse than meaningless. The habitual conduct of citizens by communities is the only character of the American nation. And the eyes of the world are hungrily turned toward America. CHAPTER XI The Social Community GommunitT House ActiTities A new piece of architecture has come into being within recent years. It is no more elab- orate for its purposes, and no more costly in proportion to community wealth than the town halls in the early settlements of pioneer days. The modern building has been made necessary by human necessities and needs. Private initia- tive and social demands have moved municipali- ties to build for to-day and to-morrow. State Legislatures have passed enabling acts, making it possible for communities to levy taxes to build and to maintain municipal coliseums or com- munity houses or social center structures. In localities where community sentiment has been created in advance these community houses have proved to be an unqualified benefit. , Where the community house has been thrust in ahead of intelligent social sentiment in the locality, it has proved to be of only qualified value, usually no more than a municipal dance hall. Social sentiment needs to be crystallized. It is volatile till harnessed and set to work. It seeks a definite home just as does the religious spirit, education, law, and group fraternity. The spirit of neighborliness which will take note of 222 The Social Community 223 citizenship only and be identified with the human relationships which bind all citizens into social unity seeks and should find positive and visible expression. In some rural localities, when the organization of a grange was proposed to meet a definite social need, objection has been made on the ground that the whole community ought to be organized and housed in such a way that no citizen or group of citizens could ever vote on the membership or rights of any citizen; that the social center and the social organization should be as unqualified as residence in the locality. There is real pathos in the efforts of many communities to struggle into social freedom against the barriers of traditions handed down from the unsocial or antisocial past. Citizens are sometimes awed into submissiveness by school boards who act as if they owned the property and graciously permit the actual taxpayer owners to use it as a special favor. Schoolhouses of the old-time sort were intended to be used almost exclusively for memorizing the contents of books. They were ill-suited to social purposes. School- houses of the new kind are built expressly to serve some of the purposes of a community house; some of the old schoolhouses are being remodeled for such use. Where centralized or consolidated schools mark an educational com- munity center either the school buildings or a separate community house is an imperative 224 Essentials of Community Efficiency necessity. The oldest centralized school in Ohio has already been mentioned, the Wayne town- ship school at Lees Creek in Clinton County. The use of the school buildings there for social purposes is creating such a sense of social unity in the township that a building expressly for community house purposes is inevitable. Citi- zens from many different states visit that coun- try school, unable to believe reports from afar that a whole communfty can actually use and enjoy their investment in school buildings and grounds. While school buildings and grounds ought to be used, as a matter of economy, in as many ways and during as many hours as they are needed and adapted for use, many communities have found that the social sp^it often seeks expression in ways that are not compatible with school purposes especially during school hours. Experience shows clearly that a community house built expressly for social and civic pur- poses is a necessary addition to public utilities. Everything in direct harmony with educational activities by children and youths can properly be brought into schoolhouses at any time when the rooms are not in use by teachers and classes. Many activities of mature citizens would nat- urally seek greater seclusion than is possible in school buildings. The same causes which justify the expenditure of public money for class rooms, desks, and blackboards for children and youths, The Social Community 225 justify a like expenditure of funds for the social and civic education of both youths and parents. Conscience, that most eminently desirable per- sonal quality, can be educated only by bringing people together so that they con-scia know to- gether, fix itogether on highest values, reach social agreements concerning things socially desirable. This makes it appear that th^re is even more justification for^ spending public money for a well-equipped community house than for buildings in which children merely memorize together. The building of corfimunity houses or social centers has gone far enough to call into being annual sessions of a Conference on Community centers. The Wisconsin idea, that these centers are to be supported solely by public funds and kept under tight rein by the authorities, is just now opposed by the New York idea, that char- ters subject to revocation be issued to respon- sible citizens who may be privileged to supple- ment public funds by charging admission to various amusements and entertainments. Illi- nois authorizes by law, tax levies for the erection and maintenance of coliseums by any commu- nity desiring to avail itself of such privileges. Democratic tendencies seem to make it reason- ably sure that citizens by communities will be, in the long run, absolute masters of their own policies and practices. Authorities outside a 226 Essentials of Community Efficiency community are as prone to become bureaucracies in America as elsewhere, and citizens as a whole are not likely to be amenable to outside jurisdic- tion even to so slight a degree as is common among Young Men's Christian Associations. The important fact is that the social spirit is increasingly active in communities ; that it seeks and will find expression, and that communities planning to give a center to their social energies have the opportunity to profit by some rather costly experience. The whole field of social life ought, clearly, to be canvassed and plans for a community house be made to fit a future larger than the present. Common prudence counsels that all the social activitiesT in which the community is even remotely likely to engage, and especially such activities as are not fittingly centralized in the schoolhouse, should be well provided for. Activ- ities already housed in community houses in- clude the following: 1. A Municipal Motion Picture School. 2. Permanent Community Exhibit. (a) Historical, (b) Educational, (c) Ag- ricultural, (d) Mineralogical. (e) Floral and Faunal. (f) Arts and Crafts. 3. Commercial Club and Headquarters. 4. Civic League. 5. Consumers' League. 6. Child Welfare Bureau. 7. Playgrounds Association. The Social Community 227 8. Child-Study Clubs. 9. Day Nursery. 10. Parent-Teacher Associations. 11. Fathers' Clubs. 12. Story Tellers' League. 13. Free Clinic, Dispensary, and Emergency Hospital. 14. Bureau of Festivities and Celebrations. 15. Physical Education Classes. 16. Vacation Bible Schools. 17. Religious Day Schools. 18. United Church Associations. 19. Choral and Orchestral Unions. 20. Arts and Crafts Clubs. 21. Library. 22. Women's Clubs and Rest Rooms. 23. Young Women's Classes, Clubs, and Guilds. 24. Young Men's Clubs. 25. Municipal Government Bureau. 26. Bureau of Associated Charities. 27. Employment Bureau. 28. Credit Bureau. 29. Permanent Survey Bureau. Many other temporary and minor permanent associations find congenial home in the municipal coliseum or some of these activities are wisely cared for in schoolhouses provided each school- room is seated, as it ought to be in any event, with movable and adjustable chair desks. Some of them, again, are not at all needed in strictly rural districts while some other activities not mentioned in this list would be needed in place of them. Wherever it is impossible to forecast what may be required twenty-five or fifty years (16) 228 Essentials of Community Efficiency from now in the way of social facilities, ample ground space should at least be provided so that additional equipment may be had as needed. A brief explanation of some of the activities listed may be found helpful in putting present local conditions in the light of what the com- munity might be now and ought to be made as rapidly as well-planned effort can bring it to pass. 1. The motion picture school is a municipal school as really as the common or public school. It is a municipal enterprise. Its students are all the people in the locality who can be instructed or entertained by motion pictures. Its faculty is chosen from local representatives of all interests who have lively concern in the broadest and highest education of people — superintendent of schools and two or three public school-teachers, one or more pastors or religious leaders, one or two physicians, specially appointed representa- tives of the federation of women's clubs, the mayor or someone representing the local govern- ment, and the health officer. The studies are from history, science, literature, the drama, com- edy — all the fields of action now being put in picture form by the mightiest educational device ever discovered by human wit, the cinemato- graph. Tuitions are fixed by what the commu- nity desires, free admissions or the customary charges made by private owners of commercial- The Social Community 229 ized amusements. In this latter case the com- munity can finance many of its community house projects from the proceeds of the school, and at the same time insure to local citizens the choic- est and best films to be had. Tl^e Social Service Review, Woodward Building, Washington, D. C, puts itself at the command of any community desiring help in securing lists of desirable films. The problem of adequate censoring of films for the entertainment and enlightenment of a com- munity is absolutely assured by this means. But the operation of a motion picturb school deter- mines at once a large part of the architectural requirements of the community building. It must contain the largest auditorium in the local- ity suitable for picture displays, lyceum attrac- tions and other meetings of large representations of the population to be served. 2. Displays of a people's history, environment and achievements have been one of the great features of public life in America since the Cen- tennial Celebration in 1876. Exposition, fairs, and shows of this nature have drawn millions of dollars from American pockets and put an en- tirely new outlook on the world into millions of minds. Nothing could more fully demonstrate the worth of a permanent exhibit of local life than these national and international shows along with the perennial drawing power of county and city fairs. Local pride is stimulated in the place 230 Essentials of Community Efficiency of residence by a well-kept and constantly en- riched and freshened museum of the natural and human history of the community. This feature adds another requirement to the architectural qualities of the coliseum or community club- house. It must be built with a view of display- ing to best advantage before the whole public the handiwork of nature and men in making the site a community of homes. 3. Local commercial interests have been kept apart and prevented from becoming a definite commercial community by many causes. But chief among these is the common lack of a meet- ing place and of regular times of meeting to- gether. The community clubhouse, center of all the common life and activities of the locality, is the most ideal of all places for the regular meet- ing of local business men and for the entertain- ment of out-of-town guests who need to be shown why the town is proud of itself and its history. Club features for such purposes fix yet another architectural requirement for the build- ing. Business and professional men in all Amer- ican communities know that most of the enter- prises which have made the nation commercially great have been discussed and promoted at luncheon and dinner conferences. Modern church buildings are notoriously incomplete with- out more or less elaborate preparations for such social functions. There is enough money tied The Social Community 231 up in duplicated dinner equipment in churches to furnish a most complete outfit for a commu- nity clubhouse outside the place of worship. All considerations of religious propriety and of com- mercial enterprise unite in favor of this feature of the community house. 4. A new civic spirit is stirring in the heart of American communities. As soon as the women emancipate the movement for woman's civic privileges from the existing charge that it is a movement of middle-class women, ignoring wage-earning women and wives of wage-earners, there appears to be no valid reason why all cit- izenship will not b« on a higher basis. Persons and personal relations lie at the heart of reality and all welfare, and to these the line of female interest must be committed if there is to be a human race. The insistence of women on prying into realities which men commonly hide from themselves by a wall of abstractions is discon- certing to men in politics as well as in domestic affairs. Men affect to hold the ability of women in slight esteem-^they are simply afraid of them and their peculiar unmasculine ways. Female emancipation is far from complete either in women's attitude toward themselves or in the masculine mind. While the processes of eman- cipation are being carried on it may continue to be woman's lot to feel, to see, and to agitate for a higher level of public welfare. They have al- 232 Essentials of Community Efficiency ready done marvelously well considering the short distance they have come from a sex com- pulsion to living duplicity and the long distance they have yet to go to possess and exercise the rights of self-control — which is freedom. In most American communities they are foremost and will continue to be foremost in promoting most phases of civic welfare. Most male voters and officials would continue to sacrifice lives of infants and children on the altar of political indifference to enforced regula- tions protecting health. If the world waited for America to become beautiful, full of beautiful and harmonious architecture, landscapes limned in blending colors and lined in graceful art — the world would simply have to wait till women took the whole work out of the hands of men, or reared a generation of young men of different caliber than those who have filled the continent with indescribable ugliness. He did not exag- gerate , who said that the external marks of American towns, with few exceptions, looked as if the heavens had 'been opened and the archi- tectural garbage of some celestial city had been dumped down on the desolate prairie. Nature's beauty is uniformly marred by men who thrust buildings up without regard to taste, make streets more wretched than the open road, insult all sense of joy in perspective as they build homes and barns and stores and public works, and flaunt The social Community 233 desecrations where decorations ought to be. The land which nature has adorned with lavish hand ought to be made by man a wonderland yielding loveliiless and comeliness beyond the fertility of her soils. Trees, plants, shrubs, flowers, and clambering vines are nature's profuse offering to hide stone walls, bare foundations, bleak lines, and all outbuildings. But marks of heedless neg- lect stare nature in the face. Trees along the way, worth in money one dollar for each square inch of surface, dying, wasting, bearing the marks of some vandal's hacking path — unseen by men of unconcern. The rubbish of a hundred homes, dry garbage from the whole locality, dropped where convenience points without re- gard to pains of souls it smites. Unspeakable indecencies left to defy all laws of health as well as claims of culture and of reRned life. Such things as these are common marks of man's strong leadership — in abstractions and imper- sonal affairs. If women will it so men will abide on or below the level line of savagery. If women will it otherwise, men grumblingly and reluc- tantly will undertake, for woman's sake, to make the home, the barn, the street, the city, and the nation beautiful. Civic leagues have set before them the work of forming voluntary associations, groups having special interests at stake, to learn what facts lie close at hand and what distant facts these can be 234 Essentials of Community Efficiency made to yield; to investigate and agitate; to set the leaven of live sentiment at work to demand and justify all wholesome elements and embel- lishments of civic life. The "home where we all live" is a present challenge to the home-making soul of womankind. The cash value of beauty will rarely move the men to earn the award which comes that way; the urge of those who will not be denied the rights of beauty-loving life are ever needed to make the home commu- nity clean, winsome, and full of beauty. For purposes such as these the community center is preeminently the proper home, and the claims of the civic league should surely help to shape the fashion of the house. 5. Consumers found it, years ago, important to act together in order to secure desirable changes in conditions of retail trade. The Na- tional Consumers' League with headquarters in New York City has been instrumental in bring- ing about many reforms for the help of clerks and of merchants themselves, improvements which could be secured only by united action of a representative body of consumers. Early clos^ ing, shorter working hours, early shopping, half- holidays, and better shopping facilities are a few of their activities in behalf of public welfare in the health of employed people. The leadership of local branches of the league is greatly needed in most localities, sometimes even to help mer- The Social Community 235 chants overcome faults in the system of trade which they unaided cannot correct. The need of the local league is chiefly for a place of meet- ing aijd the widest possible opportunity for pub- licity of their plans and projects. The commu- nity house furnishes these. 6. Child welfare bureaus are fundamentally important in all communities. The bulletins and reports of the secretary of the Bureau of Child Welfare of the national government ought to be discussed by groups of citizens everywhere. The display provided by the Child Welfare Exhibit Company of New York ought to be given fullest publicity and widest opportunity to do its silent but effective work. Community welfare in all its permanent forms depends on the steady pull of public sentiment demanding all conditions of well-being for the little ones whose helplessness is the coi^ant challenge to adults. Space for exhibits in the most favorable place of publicity, rooms for conference and discussions, and per- manent headquarters are the needs of this group. The desirability of having all of these in the com- munity hoiise is fully apparent. 7. The work of establishing and maintaining adequate playground facilities is vastly more than the mere purchase of grounds and equip- ment. The publications of the National Play- grounds Association of America have need to be prominently displayed. Public interest must 236 Essentials of- Community Efficiency be widened and clarified. The local group which always acts as the promoter and sponsor for this important work needs the community house as much or more than any other one group of cit- izens. And the community house ought to be so built as to serve best the needs of this public interest. 8. Child-study clubs are increasing more rap- idly, perhaps, than any other one sort of serious group bodies of citizens. The study of books takes on new meaning and delight when living children are used as illustrations and demonstra- tions of printed statements. A new and won- drously interesting body of literature has come into being in recent years, books, magazines, and periodicals, designed to make a delight and not a drudgery of the close observation and thought- ful consideration of child life. This is one of the most hopeful features of modern conditions. Abundant facilities for special library and confer- ence privileges, access to children of different types and ages, and rooms fitted for demonstra- tions as part of group study, ought to be taken into consideration when a community house is planned. Where public school-teachers can give time and energy to the direction of the study some of it can profitably be done in the school- house. But until schools become more closely identified than in the past with community life outside of class-room interests, most young folk The Social Community 237 who are not in school and most parents would prefer to meet almost anywhere rather than in a schoolroom. The community house is ideally the place for it. 9. The day nursery is almost a public neces- sity in every community; Mothers are so often called to go where it is impossible or inexpedient to take the little ones with them or prevented from going where they ought to go by the incon- venience of taking the babe with them. This utility is one of the first in many communities to be provided by the thoughtful care of citizens. It is of very special help in agricultural commu- nities where mothers from out of town are com- pelled to drag their children from store to store as they do their necessary shopping. A creche is a community necessity and not a luxury. Mother- hearted women will always know what conven- iences ought to be made part of it when the com- munity house is being planned and built. 10. The parent-teacher section of the Amer- ican Congress of Mothers has come to be an indispensable part of the public school system in all communities where parents and teachers take seriously their common stewardship in chil- dren. It is customary for an association to be formed in connection with each school building, sometimes even for each grade, and for all the associations in the community to be federated and working along uniform lines. It is fre- 238 Essentials of Community Efficiency quently best to hold meetings of the association in the schoolhouse but never unless the school- rooms are equipped with modern chair-desks. Male parents resent being crowded into old-fash- ioned desk seats. Docile mothers, being accus- tomed to discomforts, do not mind it, but it is a noticeable fact that fathers almost invariably have urgent engagements elsewhere when the parent- teacher association meets in the schoolhouse. When it meets in the usual center of community life fathers are as eager as mothers for associa- tion meetings. The presence of club privileges in the same building promises easy escape from boredom. At all events the community house should be constructed with a view to housing the parent-teacher association. 11. Fathers' clubs, associations of fathers to take counsel together on matters of mutual con- cern, are a new and promising feature of com'- munity life in some cities. In one Iowa city, for example, ievery father is a member by being a father — ^he is never asked to join but informed of his membership and duties as a member. The schools in this city are administered along lines discussed and decided upon in meetings of fathers. The club wisely refrains from mixing directly into politics but there is a general underr standing that no man is eligible for any munici- pal office unless he stands for the welfare of all the children in the city and uses his official posi- The Social Community 239 tion to conserve that element, of community wel- fare. Club privileges in the community house, suited to male sense of proprieties and conven- iences, make it the ideal meeting place of these associations of fathers. 12. Only within recent years has the National Story Tellers' League come into existence and fostered the extension of its work through local circles. The universal popularity of the well- told story and the practical disappearance of the art of conversation make the work of story tell- ing of unusual importance in all communities. The community house furnishes both opportu- nity and incentives to the work of local circles or (;hapters of this league. 13. Compulsory dental and medical examina- tion of all schoolchildren has come to be an "indispensable part of school life in American communities. Instances have been found where parents desired this to be done and physicians offered to contribute their services to this public clinic as a service to the community, but the school board would not allow it to be done or make provision for the doing of it in the school- house. The community house, property of the community, ought to be built with the view of providing for free clinics for all citizens of all ages. This carries with it by necessity the equip- ment for a dispensary. The district or visiting nurse should have her headquarters here and 240 Essentials of Community Efficiency follow up physicians' recommendations to see that children are not made still further the victims of thoughtless and careless parents and denied needed attention. An equipment for emergency care of people unexpectedly stricken or overtaken by accidental injury completes this absolutely essential group of public utilities. The nature of the work to be done makes it imperative that skilled attention be given to proper planning for it in the plans for the community house. 14. The local bureau of community fun and festivities needs only permanent headquarters. Play festivals, pageants, seasonal celebrations, and all sorts of popular functions are well-nigh indispensable in creating a lively sense of com- munity interest and social pride. But these things never come by accident — ^they are planned for and worked out months, and sometimes even years, in advance. Where localities make no, sort of provision for their own general play life they must expect to be victimized by all sorts of commercial amusements. The play-instinct will seek and find expression and citizens who become playfellows are better citizens. The work of cementing the population of a locality into true community spirit is in very great meas- ure the stewardship of those who volunteer to guide the play life of' the people. The commu- nity house ought, in the very nature of its func- tion, to be the permanent headquarters of the The Social Community 241 bureau of festivities — and licenses for street car- nivals and all similar popular appeals to sportive tendencies should be issued only on the approval of this bureau. 15. Physical education implies both outdoor playgrounds and indoor gymnasium facilities with a full equipment of lockers, shower baths, swimming pools, and lounging rooms. Social changes and different habits of life are rapidly undermining the physical stamina of American people. A sound and healthy body is the very unusual exception among adults as well as among children. When health is precarious all accom- plishments and attainments fall into secondary importance. A vigorous agitation throughout the nation is greatly needed to arouse public sense and conscience to the urgency of provi- sions for adequate health-building facilities. Money now wasted ^in perpetuating superfluous institutions ought to be diverted to channels of high-grade and constructive fun. Religious, fra- ternal, and commercial interests would all be im- mensely advanced by a wholesome reconstruction of local and social ideas and ideals. The Young Men's Christian Association has created many times the wealth it has cost by making itself a minister of physical education. It has almost completely withdrawn from the field of com- petitive athletics in order that the interests of physical education of the many should not be sac- 242 Essentials of Community Efficiency rificed to the training of a few star performers of exceptional skill. Now what the associations, both Young Men's and Young Women's, have done for a few of each sex the community as a whole ought at once to do for the whole citizen- ship—provide generously for the physical educa- tion, by groups and classes, of the whole body of citizens who are not so provided for by well- administered school playgrounds and gymna- siums. The most profitable investment of money for public welfare is the building of a community house complete to the last detail for building up health in the bodies of all growing and grown persons in the locality. The community house can be built, as experience abundantly shows, where it is either impossible or impracticable to support a Young. Men's or Young Women's Christian Association. The calling of one or two directors of physical education — not coathes for athletic teams — to direct the use of the com- munity house facilities is one of the most urgently needed of comiiiunity reforms. The quality of citizenship which must bear the burden of a changed world is to be as largely determined by community action on this line as by any other popular action. 16-17. The progress of both vacation Bible schools and of religious day schools has been hindered mostly by lack of suitable meeting places. Church buildings have not been built The Social Community 243 with educational vision, everything in them cen- ters in the pulpit or in the dining tables in the basement. Yards about church buildings have almost never been adapted for play by children or anyone else. Furthermore, traditional differ- ences among parents make it difficult for children of Jewish or Roman Catholic parents to feel at home in a Protestant meetinghouse, and repre- sentatives of different sects of Protestants do not feel equally at home in all church buildings. Schoolhouses are frequently not open for use by teachers of any religion. A community house, the property of the whole community and open for use by any constructive influence or force in the community, solves the problem. Where the ' religious day school becomes as popular as it has in many places even the community house would be inadequate for it. Daily chapel services might also be held in it for the, convenience of school- children who would have to go far out of their way to reach a church building. For the reli- gious health of a community a community house is almost as essential as for its social welfare. 18. For lack of common meeting place church- men have been kept apart as have merchants. The community house can perform a most impor- tant function, serving as the one common meet- ing place for religious leaders and workers, an institution identified with all the interests of the whole community. Differences between local (17) 244 Essentials of Community Efficiency Churches are mostly social and temperamentali and the field of common interest and common effort is constantly enlarging. By having one common center, a property belonging to all on equal terms, a most desirable advantage is gained for the religious peace and prosperity of the com- munity. Religious freedom in America guar- antees to everyone a right to get off in a corner, fence one's self in and others out, and die in peace, but religious exclusivei|ess will be all the harder when whole communities are organized for fellowship in all good work without prejudice toward any. The game of religious solitaire has unique attractions for ascetic souls who cannot worship God unless they can get away from folk, the common herd, and rise unseen on their own pinions. Needless to say that this religion will not help communities, shape nations, nor save humanity. The community house will be, as it is wherever it stands, a silent rebuke to all unso- cial and nonsocial individuals and groups of cit- izens. 19. Cities and villages in different parts of the Union are famed for their music, like the little city in Kansas whose music-loving souls have given eighty-two public renditions of the oratorio, "The Messiah." When such a fact is mentioned minds spontaneously conceive a com- munity knit together by countless ties other than music. The judgment is always justified. Music The Social Community 245 is the one universal language, appealing to emo- tions, conscience, intellect, and social propen- sities. Music stands foremost among the forces which reach out' entwining arms and bring indi- viduals into social consciousness. Lack of a music center, of a place where all the active and latent musical abilities of a community could be assembled, developed, trained, and built into so- cial harmonies, has done more perhaps than any other one thing to retard the musical life of the nation and to hold back a richer recognition of community rights and duties. Church choirs have been almost the only saving grace in many American communities, so far as the power of music in concerned; but deplorable divisions be- tween Churches have prevented the .whole mu- sical power of tlie community from being devel- oped for the enrichment of the whole, community. When community houses are being planned and built much attention should be given to the re- quirements of the whole locality for the varied development of its unified musical life. 2jD. Studios, as many in number and as varied in equipment as the community may need, ought to be provided fpr popular education and expres- sion in all lines of artistic handiwork. Our Puri- tan ancestors robbed life of all its aesthetic appreciations except the orie doleful pleasure of long-drawn minor melodies fit to bewail the god- lessness of man. Traditions of their day and 246 Essentials of Community Efficiency atrabiliar mood continue to make many folk feel sure that what is exquisite and full of high de- light cannot be related to religion or be a needful factor of home and social life. Some commu- nities fortunately have learned to the contrary and have found that energies are most profitably spent when finding out and multiplying appre- ciations and contacts with the gentle arts. Na- ture always makes thousands able to appreciate to where one is able to create ; but the apprecia- tions of the thousands must wait on the creative activities of those who toil that others may enjoy. To encourage the latent creative abilities in the lives of youths is to make active the appreciative abilities whose lives are thus enriched. The community-house should make provision for free studios for the encouragement of those who are happiest when ministering to gt)od taste. Drawing, sketching, painting, ceramics, weaving, needle work, photography, and the like are all deserving of public recognition and public sup- port. The community house is the ideal way by which to lend popular aid to these forms of finer art. If the chief business of all communities is to make its members virtuosos in the fine art of liv- ing life to the full, one of the chief values of the community house to the community is the instigation to excellence which it holds out. 21. The public library is, like the schoolhouse, a community enterprise, ministering to common The Social Community 247 happiness and common good. Despite the men- tal disintegration marked by the popularity of the more flippant and worthless films, more books, more thoroughly good books are being read in proportion to population than ever be- fore. The community's first concern ought to include the welfare of the library which houses the public's books and incites to wider use of them. The library, where it is not already housed in its own separate building, might most fittingly be installed in a place of honor in the community house. 22. Rest rooms for out-of-town women are required by law in some of the states. Common courtesy on the part of the commercial interests and social courtesy on the part of city and town women would prompt them to provide such hos- pitality. General social thoughtlessness has pre- vented the custom from becoming a community habit. Since women's clubs have come to be a large factor in community life demands have multiplied for club rooms for a headquarters, a general center of woman's activities for public weal. These two facilities ought to be closely associated, the rest room for out-of-town women and their home folk, and the club rooms for all the women of the big community. Women's social activities have so much to do with deter-* mining the social possibilities of knitting com- munity relations into many and happy bonds that 248 Essentials of Community Efficiency the closer their activities are brought together the better for the objectives they seek to achieve. The community house affords opportunity for housing these separate activities, making it the easier to extend hospitalities to guests and to bring far-reaching influences to a meeting point. It is of course understood that gambling clubs of either male or female membership would nat- urally prefer more privacy than a community house could give. Reference to women's clubs in connection with civic affairs always contem- plates only those which have to do with some phase of culture or efficiency. 23. The most important and most neglected part of community life has to do with the social life of girls and young women. With the waken- ing of community conscience it always becomes a first matter of concern that the young women shall have generous provision made for their training in all the arts of hospitality and social leadership, The need is a crying and claimant one throughout the continent. If women remain close to primal instincts and impulses it is the fault of the community which gives them no chance to learn a finer and higher exercise of their powers. Parlors must be provided suited to all sorts of meetings of groups of young women and their guests. There is a sort of grim humor behind the flaying of popular amuse- ments, particularly of dancing and card-playing. The Social Community 249 which often issue from platforms and pulpits. If a fraction of the energy thus uselessly spent would be given to showing folk how to do some- thing more enjoyable and more worth while the problem would solve itself. Grant that most popular amusements appeal to primal instincts, that they are selfish, that they minister to less than the best in those who indulge in them, that they are fraught with social and moral peril- grant all that the most puritanical opposer of them may say, what follows?- If folk know nothing better and no one cares enough to show them how to do anything better, why expect them to do anything else? The modern craze for weird dances is only a lapse into customs on a plane of much of the barbarism thin gilt with artificial culture into which modern civilization has been led. When life itself is mainly sen- suous, social life is bound to be both sensuous and sensual. When young folk are thrust out to walk the streets and gain their social culture where they happen to find it, there is no human reason for looking for them to know how to do more than the -simplest, easiest, and least cul- tured things. If social leaders really mean what they think they do, they have it in their power to raise up a generation of young folk full of social resources, well-poised, refined. But it is not written in history that such results have ever been brought to pass by telling folk what not to 250 Essentials of Community Efficiency do and scolding them for doing the only things they had had a chance to learn. American preparedness must lie in the customs of cooperation which citizens learn. Under such pressure as has never been put before any demo- cratic people Great Britain found it impossible, even until now, to will its citizens into efficiency, social and moral readiness, instant and respon- sive to conserve their human resources. The absence of millions of men under military orders let loose unfamiliar opportunities for personal license — and the end cannot be foreseen and will not -be measured for a generation. Democratic America, if the nation is to be made fit and able to endure, must "take up the slack," must plan with forward-lobking zeal for wiser ways of life. Shaping the youthful womanhood of the nation into social power is even more important than training girls in higher mathematics and classic languages — it is fashioning the motherhood whose sons ought to be race leaders and whose daughters ought to be the emancipators of the girlhood and womanhood of all mankind. Such results come not by wishing them nor dreaming them but by well-planned causes which produce them. American communities are doing far more for the nation by generously providing so- cial privileges for their young women than they could do by the more spectacular act of sending their sons off to join the army. Community The Social Community 251 houses worthy of the name will embody the best ideals of social parlors and club facilities for the girl's and young women of the entire locality. 24. Boys and young men make their own club rooms if the community fails to provide them — in barns, caves, abandoned buildings, and in most unlikely places. Fond parents are sometimes horrified to find their sons off gambling some- where — ^they might better be horrified with their own stupidity. One friend of boys in Chicago has had one hundred and twenty-eight boys in his "bunch." Most of them were of the city's most unlikely material, alley rats and pick-ups. He has lost not one of them. Many of them are now in college. Many of them are leaders of other "bunches" of fellows. They are, without one exception, on the way to splendid citizen- ship. How does he do it? He does not do much for the fellows — ^he only lives with them, rents an apartment and makes it the club headquarters. The fellows mostly discipline each other. He is out with them by day and by night. When they need discipline from an older mind or hand they get it and get it so straight that they know pre- cisely what it is they got. He is simply one of them. Chicago has many names printed daily in her papers but it is a question if any citizen in the millions there is doing more for the com- munity and the nation than has been done by the almost unknown Adolph Hammesphar. 252 Essentials of Community Efficiency What can be dbne in Chicago can be done in any community in America. All the young fel- lows need is suggestion and a chance. Budding criminals can be turned to ripened citizens by trivial things, as men count trivialities. What the youthful males most need is companionship and tasks which strain their muscles and their moral souls. A visitor of the right sort can find in a few hours enough hid vice in almost" any town or city in America to throw prim citizens of both Sexes into spasms. These are the human facts plain to those who look for them. The remedy is to pull social life into the open, have so much that is worth while going on that youth- ful animals have neither time nor inclination to meet in dark corners and slink away together. The planners and builders of community houses miss most of the value of these structures when they fail to provide game and recreation rooms of all desirable sorts for male associations. This fixes another demand of life upon the building plans of the structure designed to be a social center for the whole community. 25. A municipal government bureau is one of the newest demands. It rises out of the same spirit which has caused Oregon to plan courses in practical civics to fit young folk for political service in local governments. Experiments are being tried out in all parts of the land to end effectively the era of municipal shiftlessness and The Social Community 253 corruption. Citizens of American communities have need to be enlightened and made ready for the new order of things. A separate section of a public library ought to be set apart for the re- ports, bulletins, magazines, and general publi- cations which have to do with successful changes wrought out in the business of municipal affairs. Smaller assembly rooms ought to be available for group meetings having to do with local gov- ernment. Bringing government out of politics and into the field of business makes new and large drafts on the attention of citizens generally and makes it necessary to provide for meeting places where women as well as men may attend. This points directly at the municipal function of the community house. 26. Charities, too, are being wholly taken out of the region of sentiment and put under busi- ness oversight and management. The convic- tion has become general that gifts to poor people, undiscriminating charity, are the poorest of all forms of poor relief, creating more poverty than they alleviate. This makes it imperative that the records indispensable to the conduct of the • business shall be readily accessible and in a con- veniently located place. The community house appears to be the best of all places in which to center its activities. 27. The problem of unemployment has come to be considered one of the most important 254 Essentials of Community Efficiency phases of efficient community life. The national government is giving more attention to the solu- tion of it than at any earlier time in history. The causes of unemployment must be sought out — the production of unemployable persons, harsh and inhuman methods of employers, misfit work-^ men, seasonal employment — all of these big problems come back to local community condi- tions for causes and consequents. Even in small communities there is need for expert supervision of an employment bureau and the community house offers best opportunities for keeping its activities in closest touch with conditions throughout the locality. Planning for public works at the usual time of seasonal employment brings the work close to that of the municipal government bureau. 28. Credit bureaus are becoming more and more a practical necessity, not as collection agencies but as means for expanding the scope of safe credit to consumers and of raising the standard of moral citizenship throughout the trade territory. This feature is of especial im- portance in county seats where the trade of a locality naturally centers and where public rec- ords are immediately available to keep ratings in constant touch with all property transfers and personal conditions of commercial significance. Wherever the credit bureau is not a private en- terprise it is most fittingly kept as close as pos- The Social Community 255 sible to the center of community life, in the community house. ' 29. Public affairs have in the past been run with little regard to facts. Auditors of cities and counties have been almost the only officials whose duties were exclusively with the facts of the case. The moment municipal government and the conduct of public interests are put on a business basis the very first requirement is for a complete showing of all the community's assets and liabilities in property and in persons. A permanent survey bureau is absolutely essential to efficiency in community welfare. Many items , of the survey are of class interest, that is, some of the facts obtained are of particular importance to ministers, others to school boards and school- teachers; others to retail merchants. There is abundant reason why special attention should be given in the building of a community house for fire-proof vaults, cabinet cases, and all the needed equipment for housing the most impor- tant of all current community records and re- ports. This brief sketch of some of the uses of a community coliseum or house may serve as a suggestion to many other important functions it may be made to serve. Enough is shown to point out how close- the community house idea lies to the .whole field of social responsibility and community betterment. Wherever local sen- 256 Essentials of Community Efficiency timent is sufficiently developed to justify the building of a center for the social, religious, and civic life of the whole community, its presence will be a spur to the development of social spirit and conscience. The new age of community life and the spread of a nearer approach to the ideals of democratic society will make increased, use of a community center invaluable in maintaining the close relations of the big community family. CHAPTER Xn The Political Community Goyernmeiit by Neighbors The Puritan town communities of New Eng- land began the most persistent and probably the most important experiment ever made in the popular control of practical morals. Ancien^t and modern nations alike have brought within the scope of their criminal laws a great many acts which properly are sins or vices rather than crimes. But outside of the United States the inclusion of sins and vices among the mala pro- hibita of statute law has been at the dictation of a ruling class which has held itself superior in character and intelligence, as in wealth and in power. The object has been to impose upon the governed rules that would insure not only social order and general well-being, but also the su- premacy of the dominant estate. In the Puritan towns of Massachusetts Bay there was a domi- nating group, but it was not a ruling class in- trenched in privilege, and as the community became miscellaneous and democratic the habit of making private conduct an affair of public concern persisted. I am not aware that this transfer of power to dictate morals from the classes and the potentates to the masses has ever been described as a revolution. It did not come with observation, and the violent took nothing by storm; but it was a revolution in fact, one of the most momentous revolutions in history. Its 257 258 Essentials of Community Efficiency consequences have been and are far reaching. They are seen now in every commonwealth of the Union. Year after year Legislatures busy them- selves with all possible questions of individual behavior. Throughout the length and breadth of the nation the whole public has become cen- sor and arbiter. * * * -phe important fact to remember is that this and all related develop- ments of social control through the organs of government are manifestations of a popular pur- pose and an essentially democratic method which had their first important tryout in the Puritan town communities of New England. In the foregoing words, taken from the "West- ern Hemisphere in the World of To-morrow," Professor Giddings shows indirectly the cause of most of the appalling inefEciency in local gov- ernments in the past. Neighbors set out to gov- ern themselves with traditions of control ex- tended to cover ethical vices and religious sins as well as legal crimes; with political ofBce an honor conferred upon one neighbor by his fellow citizens, and with yet older traditions handed down from monarchical society to the effect that the best government was the one which gov- erned least. Public officials were loth to offend the neighbors who had conferred honor upon them or who might confer yet higher honor if they were pleased with the official's sins of omis- sion and harmless deeds of commission. Follo,w the health officer of almost any American com- munity on his official rounds and watch the faces The Political Community 259 and hear the voices of the neighbors whom he offends by asking them to please live like civ- ilized white folk — if he dares as a matter of official duty to say a word. The habit of candi- dates assuming vigorously any position which would "leave me frontin' South by North" be- gun when Jaalam was first wrested from the simple red men. It has taken almost three full centuries for Americans to find out that local government is business and not politics, that public office is a job dependent on efficiency in service and not on a man's title to be honored by his neighbors. The widened scope of official re- sponsibility and the narrowed field of actual authority wherewith to meet that public duty, the anomalous position of being held publicly responsible for what one's neighbors p^rivately protested against having done at all, had two related effects: it alienated the interest of men who actually had most at stake in effective gov- ernment, and turned politics over to sporting men who could and did make a poker game of public interests. So ingrained is this political habit of mind that the chief presidential candi- dates in 1916 are ruefully described in political circles as "the ten commandments alive and walk- ing around," giving promise of "poor picking" for the faithful followers of the game. The recovery in industry of the simple ideas of efficiency opened the way to a recovery in (18) 260 Essentials of Community Efficiency politics of common sense. To hire trained men to manage the business of the whole public, and to hold these managers accountable for results in precisely the same way as industrial managers and foremen are hired and dismissed is the only really democratic way' of conducting public busi- ness. The whole body of citizens are the inter- ested stockholders in public control and enter- prise. A body of representative citizens chosen by preferential ballot are the board of directors, trustees subject to recall by the body of citizens. The .municipal manager is the business manager of all the municipal business, no more amenable to private pulls than is the cashier of the bank or any other bonded accountant. Party politics has had such a deep hold on citizens that mil- lions of them even yet seem to prefer to be plun- dered according to the traditions rather than to' assert the rights and assume the duties of non- partisan business citizenship. When the project was broached of eliminating all party names from ballots in the state of California a majority of the voters of the state concluded that they could not trust themselves unless they were tied to some party standard. The new age is making such strikingly new demands that social and political control is sure to become a matter of business, both in spirit and in admin- istration rather than of gambling on public weak- ness or ignorance or indifference. The Political Community 261 This emancipation of municipal government promises more than release from the practice of government by the best fighters and least fit to govern. Government has been mostly, from the beginning of its history, organized selfish- ness. Naturally enough those who have private or party interests to protect or promote have al- ways made it a point to govern or control those who did govern. Permanent financial and reli- gious interests have not been slow to seek all the advantage which might be gained through secret use of governmental machinery. It is sometimes noticeable that these interests are not at all eager to have municipal government put on a basis of absolute regularity and openness. As a matter of history "invisible governments" have often been the real power behind the machinery driving the unthinking and indifferent human herd into all sorts of dire situations. Secret, diplomacy, greatly reviled at the present, is nothing more than a characteristic policy and program where citizens are held to be unfit to know all the facts, unfit to form judgments on far-reaching policies, unfit for self-government. If Americans are ever to be made wholly fit for self-government in national and international relations it must be by the development of that fitness by a more efficient self-government in local affairs. The scientific management of pub- lic business under the direction of municipal 262 Essentials of Community Efficiency managers whose sole right to tenure of office is their fitness for the work, seems, for the first time, to put all thoughtful citizens in position to know with certainty and precision what govern- ment is doing and how and why. . More than one third of the cities in America having a population of 30,000 or more persons are now governed by commissions. The plan, as is generally known, grew out of the devastation of Galveston and the emergency business organ- ization created to rehabilitate the city. Des Moines gave it wider popularity. It has advan- tages over the former aldermanic form of admin- istering public business but its results have not been always permanently good. As a step toward municipal sanity and civic efficiency it has everything to comniend it. The rapid spread of the municipal-business-manager idea gives reason to hope that the stigma will not always rest upon American municipalities of being the worst governed and of having the most corrupt governments to be found on earth. NEW CONDITIONS IN POLITICS New conditions had already become manifest in America before the pressure of changed world conditions made, it imperative that closer atten- tion should be paid to local governments. The projection of the maternal conscience into public affairs is one of these conditions. Stan- ton Coit, in the "Soul of America," writes : The Political Community 263 The women of America, so far as I am aware, are the only class of human beings in the world who have equipped themselves intellectually with no scope for action. For, wljile America has provided and lavished upon them opportu- nities of intellectual discipline and acquisition, it has furnished no more outlet for the will of women than any other country has provided. * * * It seems a moral enormity that the women of America, who have no more scope for volun- tary self-realization in politics, law, medicine, religion, business, or handicraft than the women of the Old World, yet constitute the intellectual aristocracy of their nation. The men of the country so will it. This, on their part, is either a national madness, or else they have been, un- consciously, prophetically, and without knowing it, preparing their womankind for some great and significant responsibility which they had not designed and have not even foreseen. * * * jf^ now, the vote should be granted to all women in America, they will be the best-prepared class in the world, as regards their knowledge of the ulti- mate ends and ideals of human existence. * * * In the interest of democracy and of humanistic religion I rejoice that the half of the population which has the better intellectual equipment and the more leisure and is the more respected and trusted is about to enter into full civic oppor- tutiity. Wholly regardless of the usual arguments for and against femqle suffrage it must be apparent that when government, like all other elements of community efficiency, is set to work in the 264 Essentials of Community Efficiency stream of human realities, in the conservation of the forces which make for the well-being of children and youths and parents, government in the hands of an aggregation of Ladies' Aid Soci- . eties could scarcely have missed the m^rk more completely and more disastrously than our boasted male governments have done. Closely related to this conspicuous new condi- tion is that of child welfare as one of the most important of governmental functions, national as well as local. And closely related to both of them is the rise of an entirely new civic con- science. Measuring time from the national cen- tennial is only four decades: nleasuring the change in civic conscience which has come about during those decades is almost like passing from one wQrld into one wholly different. Regular practices of that day are the irregular and uni- formly condemned practices of the present. Press criticisms of the national party conven- tions in 1916 compared with those of 1876 illus- trate both the new political conscience and pop- ular esteem of methods conserved by famous "old guards" and reactionaries in general. The new conscience is quickened and made more active and sensitive because of the clearer sense of individual human values and of the social values which politics either endangers or en- hances. A return to the old order of things is impossible. \ The Political Community 265 Another condition which makes the old life of the world impossible is the development of the scientific method of thought and action, of the determination to know things from their sources and origins on to their ends, to see clearly what- ever falls within the scope of attention, to report accurately whatever is observed, and to react honestly in the face of facts. In Huxley's day this was a most brave and courageous attitude of mind and determination of will; to-day a man is made ashamed before the bar of his own judg- ment if he is confessedly unwilling to face any fact from whatever source it comes and give it impartial consideration. This habit of mind is surely extending, the more so as education is focused upon objects more than upon subjects. Insistence upon kndwing facts as they are with- out embellishment puts an entirely new face upon local governmental responsibility. The sense of civic stewardship reposing in pri- vate citizens as well as in officials is another con- dition which appears to have found permanent rooting in community sentiment. Where ruling classes, kings, hereditary rulers of all sorts, are found, there the common citizen has responsi- bility only to the extent of not getting caught at infraction of the laws handed down from above. In a democracy obedience to self-made laws is a test of the democratic spirit in individuals and groups. Deliberate conviction that the present 266 Essentials ol Community Efficiency is not the end of existence but only a step "in the steady growth of truth," and that, with its proper increase, it is to be turned over to those who resistlessly come after — this conviction, that the community is what it is now only that it may be vastly better ten years from now, is the urge which leads men on to larger and truer plans. On the human side the sense of stew- ardship is breaking through domestic and social bounds. People are beginning to feel a sense of personal guilt in the presence of the wayward, weak, misfortunate, and criminal. More folk are asking themselves. What right have I to be claiming all protection of government for myself and my property when this protection is with- held from those who need it a thousand times more than I do? The unemployed, the infant death rate, the clumsy efforts 6f children and youths to find a place to play, the thousand and one things which now challenge the whole cit- izenship to act through government for the help of its individuals and groups are deepening, hour by hour, the sense of civic stewardship. Closely allied with this is the slow waking into activity of the neighborly spirit, the commu- nity consciousness, the sense of social responsi- bility which must underlie the beginning and growth of community conscience. In the mat- ter of youthful criminals, for example, tens of thousands of citizens protested vigorously The Political Community 267 against the hanging of the fifteen-year-old mur- derer in Arkansas; the success of Mr. Ford in demonstrating that a good 'job in decent sur- roundings will reform men on whom the com- munity has put its brand; the work of RoUo McBride in showing society how to give its offenders a square deal both before sending them to prison and afterward; the disclosures of Thomas Mott Osborne and others that the crime and prison system of America has been a fac- tory for making criminals and not for conserv- ing the power of citizenship ; the pervasive teach- ing that changes in criminal laws, registering as they do the attitude of the community toward offenders, are a sure index of advancing or retro- grading civilization — these emotions are leaven- ing communities throughout the nation and set- ting conditions for municipal officials and gov- ernmental functions. The rise of the humanitarian movement in gen- eral is another source of conditions which mu- nicipal officials sense even where they do not clearly understand. The community is quick to give approval to all acts of government which tend to ameliorate conditions of existence for those who cannot master their own environment, to mitigate the hardships which too often fall on those least able to stand up under them. The community is equally quick to give evidence of disapproval when government is cold and unre- 268 Essentials of Community Efficiency sponsive to human needs. Back of the whole movement for labor legislation, for the scientific examination of all delinquents and criminals, for the treatment of defectives and dependents with all the consideration which their unfor- tunate state prompts, back of most of the com- pulsion now being put upon government to reach out many protections in many directions is the humanitarianism whose roots ramify like those of a great tree. Unfortunately, it must be confessed, religion as organized in Churches did not play a very large part, indeed a quite negligible part, in the early stages of modern humanitarianism. At the same time it is to be regretted that writers who set out to hold religion to account, as does Mr. Maurice Parmelee in the "American Journal of Sociology" for November, 1915, do not show as much familiarity with either the psychology or the history of religion as their thesis deserves. There never has been a time when most or even much of the Christian religion has been organ- ized in intellectual and meclianical frameworks, as indicated in an earlier chapter. He makes heavy drafts on his imagination for his facts who would set wholly to one side the quiet power of inconspicuous religion in fostering humanitarian- ism. John Calvin could subordinate his human sympathies to his logical conclusions, and burn Servetus — ^but there have not been many John The Political Community 269 Calvins. Doctrines and dogmas rise and fall but human sympathies cling close to the stream of human realities — ^women never could have in- vented the doctrines of total hereditary depravity and infant damnation and not one female heart ever sanctioned them even when male logic de- manded assent and conformity. Emancipation of religion from churchism, the recovery of real Christianity out of the grave cloths of churchianity in which it has been laid in the tomb, is a condition which municipal gov- ernments must take note of. The notion is boldly proclaimed now, where recently it was vi^hispered, that running a city is as religious a work as running a Church, that oiKcials and pri- vate citizens who are not religious in their civics are not religious even when they sit at the com- munion table, that pious whining in prayers is no recompense for plundering wage-earners or renting property to professional prostitutes. There is a real vigor in much of the emancipated religion and politicians of the old type, gray wolves and plunderbunds, are finding to their consternation that, ministerial associations are not always composed, as they have assumed, of nice old male sisters. Even if religion played an obscure part in the rise of humanitarianism it is playing anything but an obscure part in fostering and extending it. 270 Essentials of Community Efficiency All of these conditions are summed up, along with others which are not mentioned here, in the revival of social democracy. It may be for the best that this spirit is not institutionalized, crystallized in one political party. It is needed as a yeasting force in all parties political and religious. Its vigor may be dependent on its remaining a movement, retaining its fluidity, maintaining its complete mobility. What is left of French male life is more democratized than any other group of men on earth. The whole available manhood of France has gone into the trenches, extremes of culture and wealth made comrades unto death. More than all other peo- ples, not excepting the Belgians, French women and men and youths have commanded the ad- miration and profound esteem of the Western world. It may be part of the compensations for sufferings as unmerited as they are immeasur- able that France may show to mankind such a social democracy, a human equality to which America was dedicated but at which Midas now shivers when he thinks of it — and Mrs. Midas refuses even to think of it. But the social consciousness is born, is grow- ing, is become strong. Human beings, babies and children and youths and parents, are kin throughout the earth. Racial distinctions there are which none but fools in blind folly would deny or seek to ignore. But race prejudices, as The Political Community 271 ancient as the race and as wide as the habitations of man, can no more blind men to the horror of all inhumanities. The four outstanding preju- dices which have caused most bitterness and shock and clash in human hearts and minds, race, sex, religion, and the social place which economic status wins, must all give way, along with adult prejudice toward children and youths to the knowledge of the fact that — "Mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along. Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong; Whether conscious or unconscious, yet Human- ity's vast frame Through its ocean-sundered fibers feels the gush of joy or shame — In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim." Great Asia wakens with industrial zeal un- known through all her uncounted ages. While Europe is committing suicide and piling up Him- alayas for her weakened children to surmount, the Soul of the Far East is waking to a new sense of duty and of destiny. The Western Hemis- phere has a world-wide stewardship. North America seems to face a challenge which national selfishness will not even try to hear and heed. The states and provinces, such kin that between them stretches the longest international bound- 272 Essentials of Community Efficiency ary on the planet with no gun$ nor fortresses nor sense of need for mutual defense, these by the high level of self-governing communities devel- oped within them share a lessoti for the teaching of all communities beneath the sun. Business, Big Business, cruel, brutal, inhuman Economic Enterprise, has used navalism and militarism, German social organization and British disor- ganization, Balkan cupidity, Italian subtlety, imbruted Russia, lustful Turkey, made itself crazy with the blood df boys and men, let loose such an orgy as never was in hell — and now plans more war of tariffs to suck the last drop of weal from stricken sufferers. The biggest business in any community is the business of the community. Community cit- izens, when they will, can put the, administration of community affairs on a basis of personal well- being and social welfare. When the whole com- munity is pervaded by humane ideals and of thoughtful consideration, when government is a true public trust and no blind agent of privilege and lust for power, the enterprises within the community will conform to the spirit of the place and time. When not one but all communities are harnessing the powers of wealth production and wealth distribution to the work of building health in babes and children and youths, to the work of replacing all ugliness' with beauty and all filth with cleanliness; when those who most The Political Community 273 need help are first set upon their feet to be help- ers of themselves and others ; when business men put honor and a square deal ahead of profit and dishonesty; when the obscure processes of busi- ness are kept brotherly and not brutal, and brotherly men will refuse to be enmeshed in a system whose cruelties they confess; when young folk learn, in short, to be human in their purposes and aims, human in their plans and projects, human in their relations all — when young folk carry into their vocations and avoca- tions minds "wide open on the Godward side," and prove it by their openness on the human side, the shell of selfishness cannot harden fast enough to make them base and bitter toward their fellow men. Municipal government, the means by which the whole group of citizens transact their public intercourse and protect their common interests, ought to be and can be the best expression of the best sentiment in the com- munity. As this is done the ends of creation are being served.