It is a little strange, and yet it seems to be true, that for a long time America was better understood by the French than by the English. This may be partly due to the fact that the French are more idealistic and more excitable than the English; in both of which qualities the Americans resemble them. It may also be due in part to the fact that the American Revolution was in a certain sense a family quarrel. A prolonged conflict of wills between the older and the younger members of the same household develops prejudices which do not easily subside. The very closeness of the family relation intensifies the misunderstanding. The seniors find it extremely difficult to comprehend the motives of the juniors, or to believe that they are really grown up. They seem like naughty and self-confident children. A person outside of the family is much more likely to see matters in their true light.

At all events, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Dr. Samuel Johnson was calling the Americans “a race of convicts, who ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging,” and declaring that he was willing to love all mankind except the Americans, whom he described as “Rascals—Robbers—Pirates,” a Frenchman, named CrÈvecoeur, who had lived some twenty years in New York, gave a different portrait of the same subject.

“What then is the American,” he asks, “this new man? He is either a European or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a Frenchwoman, and whose present four sons have now wives of four different nations.... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the East. They will finish the great circle.”

This is the language of compliment, of course. It is the saying of a very polite prophet; and even in prophecy one is inclined to like pleasant manners. Yet that is not the reason why it seems to Americans to come much nearer to the truth than Dr. Johnson’s remarks, or Charles Dickens’s American Notes, or Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans. It is because the Frenchman has been clear-sighted enough to recognize that the Americans started out in life with an inheritance of civilized ideals, manners, aptitudes, and powers, and that these did not all come from one stock, but were assembled from several storehouses. This fact, as I have said before, is fundamental to a right understanding of American character and history. But it is particularly important to the subject of this lecture: the sentiment of common order, and the building-up of a settled, decent, sane life in the community.

Suppose, for example, that a family of barbarians, either from some native impulse, or under the influence of foreign visitors, should begin to civilize themselves. Their course would be slow, irregular, and often eccentric. It would alternate between servile imitation and wild originality. Sometimes it would resemble the costume of that Australian chief who arrayed himself in a stove-pipe hat and polished boots and was quite unconscious of the need of the intermediate garments.

But suppose we take an example of another kind,—let us say such a family as that which was made famous fifty years ago by a well-known work of juvenile fiction, The Swiss Family Robinson. They are shipwrecked on a desert island. They carry ashore with them their tastes, their habits, their ideas of what is desirable and right and fitting for decent people in the common life. It is because their souls are not naked that they do not wish their bodies to become so. It is because there is already a certain order and proportion in their minds that they organize their tasks and their time. The problem before them is not to think out a civilized existence, but to realize one which already exists within them, and to do this with the materials which they find on their island, and with the tools and implements which they save from their wrecked ship.

Here you have precisely the problem which confronted the Americans. They began housekeeping in a wild land, but not as wild people. An English lady once asked Eugene Field of Chicago whether he knew anything about his ancestors. “Not much, madam,” he replied, “but I believe that mine lived in trees when they were first caught.” This was an illustration of conveying truth by its opposite.

The English Pilgrims who came from Norwich and Plymouth, the Hollanders who came from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Huguenots who came from La Rochelle and Rouen were distinctly not tree-dwellers nor troglodytes. They were people who had the habits and preferences of a well-ordered life in cities of habitation, where the current of existence was tranquil and regular except when disturbed by the storms of war or religious persecution. And those who came from the country districts, from the little villages of Normandy and Poitou and Languedoc, of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and Cornwall, of Friesland and Utrecht, of the Rhenish Palatinate, and of the north of Ireland, were not soldiers of fortune and adventurers. They were for the most part peaceable farmers, whose ideal of earthly felicity was the well-filled barn and the comfortable fireside.

There were people of a different sort, of course, among the settlers of America. England sent a good many of her bankrupts, incurable idlers, masterless men, sons of Belial, across the ocean in the early days. Some writers say that she sent as many as 50,000 of them. Among the immigrants of other nations there were doubtless many “who left their country for their country’s good.” It is silly to indulge in illusions in regard to the angelic purity and unmixed virtue of the original American stock.

But the elements of turbulence and disorder were always, and are still, in the minority. Whatever interruption they caused in the development of a civilized and decent life was local and transient. The steady sentiment of the people who were in control was in favour of common order and social coÖperation.

There is a significant passage in the diary of John Adams, written just after the outbreak of mob violence against the loyalists in 1775. A man had stopped him, as he was riding along the highway, to congratulate him on the fury which the patriots and their congress had stirred up, and the general dissolution of the bonds of order.

“Oh, Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues done for us. We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there will never be another.” Upon which the indignant Adams comments: “Is this the object for which I have been contending, said I to myself, for I rode along without any answer to this wretch; are these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in this country? Half the nation for what I know: for half the nation are debtors, if not more; and these have been in all countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, our health, and everything else?”

But the fears of the sturdy old Puritan and patriot were not realized. It was not into the hands of such men as he despised and dreaded, nor even into the hands of such men as Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s imaginary American,

“Enslaved, illogical, elate ...
Unkempt, disreputable, vast,”

that the power of the country fell. It was into the hands of men of a very different type, intelligent as well as independent, sober as well as self-reliant, inheritors of principles well-matured and defined, friends of liberty in all their policies, but at the bottom of their hearts lovers and seekers of tranquil order.

I hear the spirit of these men speaking in the words of him who was the chosen leader of the people in peace and in war. Washington retired from his unequalled public service with the sincere declaration that he wished for nothing better than to partake, “in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever favourite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labours, and dangers.”

In these nobly simple and eloquent words, the great American expresses clearly the fourth factor in the making of his country,—the love of common order. Here we see, in the mild light of unconscious self-revealment, one of the chief ends which the Spirit of America desires and seeks. Not merely a self-reliant life, not merely a life of equal opportunity for all, not merely an active, energetic life in which the free-will of the individual has full play, but also a life shared with one’s fellow-citizens under the benign influence of good laws, a life which is controlled by principles of harmony and fruitful in efforts coÖperant to a common end, a life rangÉe, ordonnÉe, et solidaire,—this is the American ideal.

With what difficulty men worked out this ideal in outward things in the early days we can hardly imagine. Those little communities, scattered along the edge of the wilderness, had no easy task to establish and maintain physical orderliness. Nature has her own order, no doubt, but her ways are different from man’s ways; she is reluctant to submit to his control; she does not like to have her hair trimmed and her garments confined; she even communicates to man, in his first struggles with her, a little of her own carelessness, her own apparently reckless and wasteful way of doing things. “Rough and ready” is a necessary maxim of the frontier. It is hard to make a new country or a log cabin look neat.

To this day in America, even in the regions which have been long settled, one finds nothing like the excellent trimness, the precise and methodical arrangement, of the little farmsteads of the Savoy among which these lectures were written. My memory often went back, last summer, from those tiny unfenced crops laid out like the squares of a chess-board in the valleys, from those rich pastures hanging like green velvet on the steep hillsides, from those carefully tended forests of black firs, from those granges with the little sticks of wood so neatly piled along their sides under the shelter of the overhanging eaves, to the straggling fences, the fallow fields, the unkempt meadows, the denuded slopes, the shaggy underbrush, the tumbled woodpiles, and the general signs of waste and disorder which may be seen in so many farming districts of the United States. I asked myself how I could venture to assure a French audience, in spite of such apparent evidences to the contrary, that the love of order was a strong factor in the American spirit.

But then I began to remember that those farms of New England and New York and New Jersey were won only a few generations ago from a trackless and savage wilderness; that the breadth of their acres had naturally tempted the farmer to neglect the less fruitful for the more productive; that Nature herself had put a larger premium upon energy than upon parsimony in these first efforts to utilize her resources; and that, after all, what I wished to describe and prove was not an outward triumph of universal orderliness in material things, but an inward desire of order, the wish to have a common life well arranged and regulated, tranquil and steady.

Here I began to see my way more clear. Those farms of eastern America, which would look to a foreigner so rude and ill-kept, have nourished a race of men and women in whom regularity and moral steadiness and consideration of the common welfare have been characteristic traits. Their villages and towns, with few exceptions, are well cared for physically; and socially, to use a phrase which I heard from one of my guides in Maine, they are “as calm as a clock.” They have their Village Improvement Societies, their Lyceum Lecture Courses, their Public Libraries, their churches (often more than they need), and their schoolhouses, usually the finest of all their buildings. They have poured into the great cities, year after year, an infusion of strong and pure American blood which has been of the highest value, not only in filling the arteries of industry and trade and the professions with a fresh current of vigorous life, but also in promoting the rapid assimilation of the mass of foreign immigrants. They have sent out a steady flood of westward-moving population which has carried with it the ideals and institutions, the customs and the habits, of common order and social coÖperation.

On the crest of the advancing wave, to be sure, there is a picturesque touch of foam and fury. The first comers, the prospectors, miners, ranchers, land-grabbers, lumbermen, adventurers, are often rough and turbulent, careless of the amenities, and much given to the profanities. But they are the men who break the way and open the path. Behind them come the settlers bringing the steady life.

I could wish the intelligent foreigner to see the immense corn-fields of Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas, the vast wheat-fields of the Northwest, miles and miles of green and golden harvest, cultivated, reaped, and garnered with a skill and accuracy which resembles the movements of a mighty army. I could wish him to see the gardens and orchards of the Pacific slope, miles and miles of opulent bloom and fruitage, watered by a million streams, more fertile than the paradise of Damascus. I could wish him to see the towns and little cities which have grown up as if by magic everywhere, each one developing an industry, a social life, a civic consciousness of its own, in forms which, though often bare and simple, are almost always regular and respectable even to the point of monotony. Then perhaps he would believe that the race which has done these things in a hundred years has a real and deep instinct of common order.

But the peculiarly American quality in this instinct is its individualism. It does not wish to be organized. It wishes to organize itself. It craves form, but it dislikes formality. It prizes and cherishes the sense of voluntary effort more than the sense of obedience. It has its eye fixed on the end which it desires, a peaceable and steady life, a tranquil and prosperous community. It sometimes overlooks the means which are indirectly and obscurely serviceable to that end. It is inclined to be suspicious of any routine or convention whose direct practical benefit is not self-evident. It has a slight contempt for etiquette and manners as superficial things. Its ideal is not elegance, but utility; not a dress-parade, but a march in comradeship toward a common goal. It is reluctant to admit the value of the parade even as a discipline and preparation for the march. Often it demands so much liberty for the individual that the smooth interaction of the different parts of the community is disturbed or broken.

The fabric of common order in America is sound and strong at the centre. The pattern is well-marked, and the threads are firmly woven. But the edges are ragged and unfinished. Many of our best cities have a fringe of ugliness and filth around them which is like a torn and bedraggled petticoat on a woman otherwise well dressed.

Approaching New York, or Cincinnati, or Pittsburg, or Chicago, you pass first through a delightful region, where the homes of the prosperous are spread upon the hills, reminding you of a circle of Paradise; and then through a region of hideous disorder and new ruins, which has the aspect of a circle of Purgatory, and makes you doubt whether it is safe to go any farther for fear you may come to a worse place. This neglected belt of hideous suburbs around some of the richest cities in the world is typical and symbolical. It speaks of the haste with which things have been done; of the tendency to overlook detail, provided the main purpose is accomplished; of the lack of thoroughness, and the indifference to appearance, which are common American faults. It suggests, also, the resistance which a strong spirit of individualism offers to civic supervision and control; the tenacity with which men cling to their supposed right to keep their houses in dirt and disorder; the difficulty of making them comply with general laws of sanitation and public improvement; and the selfishness with which land-owners will leave their neglected property to disfigure the city from whose growth they expect in ten or twenty years to reap a large profit.

Yet, as a matter of fact, this very typical mark of an imperfect sense of the value of physical neatness and orderliness in American life is not growing, but diminishing. The fringes of the cities are not nearly as bad as they were thirty or forty years ago. In many of them,—notably in Philadelphia and Boston and some of the western cities,—beauty has taken the place of ugliness. Parks and playgrounds have been created where formerly there were only waste places filled with rubbish. Tumble-down shanties give way to long rows of trim little houses. Even the factories cease to look like dingy prisons and put on an air of self-respect. Nuisances are abolished. The country can draw near to the city without holding its nose.

This gradual improvement, also, is symbolical. It speaks of individualism becoming conscious of its own defects and dangers. It speaks of an effort on the part of the more intelligent and public-spirited citizens to better the conditions of life for all. It speaks of a deep instinct in the people which responds to these efforts and supports them with the necessary laws and enactments. It speaks most of all, I hope, of that underlying sense of common order which is one of the qualities of the Spirit of America.

Let me illustrate this, first, by some observations on the average American crowd.

The obvious thing about it which the foreigner is likely to notice is its good humour. It is largely made up of native optimists, who think the world is not a bad place to live in, and who have a cheerful expectation that they are going to get along in it. Although it is composed of rather excitable individuals, as a mass it is not easily thrown into passion or confusion. The emotion to which it responds most quickly is neither anger nor fear, but laughter.

But it has another trait still more striking, and that is its capacity for self-organization. Watch it in front of a ticket-office, and see how quickly and instinctively it forms “the line.” No police are needed. The crowd takes care of itself. Every man finds his place, and the order once established is strictly maintained by the whole crowd. The man who tries to break it is laughed at and hustled out.

When an accident happens in the street, the throng gathers in a moment. But it is not merely curious. It is promptly helpful. There is some one to sit on the head of the fallen horse,—a dozen hands to unbuckle the harness; if a litter is needed for the wounded man, it is quickly improvised, and he is carried into the nearest shop, while some one sends a “hurry call” for the doctor and the ambulance.

Until about forty years ago, the whole work of fighting fire in the cities was left to voluntary effort. Companies of citizens were formed, like social or political clubs, which purchased fire-engines, and organized themselves into a brigade ready to come at the first alarm of a conflagration. The crowd came with them and helped. I have seen a church on Sunday morning emptied of all its able-bodied young men by the ringing of the fire-bell. It is true that there was a keen rivalry among these voluntary fire-fighters which sometimes led them to fight one another on their way to a conflagration. But out of these free associations have grown the paid fire-departments of the large cities, with their fine tradition of courage and increased efficiency.

If you wish to see an American crowd in its most extraordinary aspect, you should go to a political convention for the nomination of a President. The streets swarming with people, all hurrying in one direction, talking loudly, laughing, cheering; the vast, barn-like hall draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and packed with 12,000 of the 200,000 folks who have tried to get into it; the thousand delegates sitting together in solid cohorts according to the States which they represent, each cohort ready to shout and cheer and vote as one man for its “favourite son”; the officers on the far-away platform, Lilliputian figures facing, directing, dominating this Brobdignagian mass of humanity; the buzzing of the audience in the intervals of business; the alternate waves of excitement and uneasiness that sweep over it; the long speeches, the dull speeches, the fiery speeches, the outbreaks of laughter and applause, the coming and going of messengers, the waving of flags and banners,—what does it all mean? What reason or order is there in it? What motives guide and control this big, good-natured crowd?

Wait. You are at the Republican Convention in Chicago. The leadership of Mr. Roosevelt in the party is really the point in dispute, though not a word has been said about it. A lean, clean-cut, incisive man is speaking, the Chairman of the convention. Presently he shoots out a sentence referring to “the best abused and the most popular man in America.” As if it were a signal given by a gun, that phrase lets loose a storm, a tempest of applause for Roosevelt,—cheers, yells, bursts of song, the blowing of brass-bands, the roaring of megaphones, the waving of flags; more cheers like volleys of musketry; a hurricane of vocal enthusiasm, dying down for a moment to break out in a new place, redoubling itself in vigour as if it had just begun, shaking the rafters and making the bunting flutter in the wind. For forty-seven minutes by the clock that American crowd pours out its concerted enthusiasm, and makes a new “record” for the length of a political demonstration.

Now change the scene to Denver, a couple of weeks later. The Democrats are holding their convention. You are in the same kind of a hall, only a little larger, filled with the same kind of a crowd, only more of it. The leadership of Mr. Bryan is the point in dispute, and everybody knows it. Presently a speaker on the platform mentions “the peerless son of Nebraska” and pauses as if he expected a reply. It comes like an earthquake. The crowd breaks into a long, indescribable, incredible tumult of applause, just like the other one, but lasting now for more than eighty minutes,—a new “record” of demonstration.

What are these scenes at which you have assisted? The meetings of two entirely voluntary associations of American citizens, who have agreed to work together for political purposes. And what are these masses of people who are capable of cheering in unison for three-quarters of an hour, or an hour and a quarter? Just two American crowds showing their enthusiasm for their favourites.

What does it all prove?

Nothing,—I think,—except an extraordinary capacity for self-organization.

But the Spirit of America shows the sense of common order in much deeper and more significant things than the physical smoothing and polishing of town and country, or than the behaviour of an average crowd. It is of these more important things that I wish to give some idea.

It has been said that the first instinct of the Americans, confronted by a serious difficulty or problem, is to appoint a committee and form a society. Whether this be true or not, I am sure that many, if not most, of the advances in moral and social order in the United States during the last thirty or forty years have been begun and promoted in this way. It is, in fact, the natural way in a conservative republic.

Where public opinion rules, expressing itself more or less correctly in popular suffrage, no real reform can be accomplished without first winning the opinion of the public in its favour. Those who believe in the reform must get together in order to do this. They must gather their evidence, present their arguments, show why and how certain things ought to be done, and urge the point until the public sees it.

Then, in some cases, legislation follows. The moral sense, or it may be merely the practical common sense, le gros bon sens de mÉnage, of the community, takes shape in some formal statute or enactment. A State or municipal board or commission is appointed, and the reform passes from the voluntary to the organic stage. The association or committee which promoted it disappears in a blaze of congratulation, or perhaps continues its existence to watch the enforcement of the new laws.

But there is another class of cases in which no formal legislation seems to be adequate to meet the evils, or in which the process of law-making is impeded or perhaps altogether prevented by the American system of dividing the power between the national, State, and local governments. Here the private association of public-spirited citizens must act as a compensating force in the body politic. It must take what it can get in the way of partial organic reform, and supply what is lacking by voluntary coÖperation.

There is still a third class of evils which seem to have their roots not in the structure of society, but in human nature itself, and for these the typical American believes that the only amelioration is a steady and friendly effort by men of good-will. He does not look for the establishment of the millennium by statute. He does not think that the impersonal State can strengthen character, bind up broken hearts, or be a nursing mother to the ignorant, the wounded, and the helpless. For this work there must always be a personal service, a volunteer service, a service to which men and women are bound, not by authority, but by the inward ties of philanthropy and religion.

Now these three kinds of voluntary coÖperation for the bettering of the common order are not peculiar to America. One finds them in every nation that has the seed of progress in its mind or the vision of the civitas Dei in its soul,—and nowhere more than in France. The French have a genius for society and a passion for societies. But I am not sure that they understand how much the Americans resemble them in the latter respect, and how much has been accomplished in the United States by way of voluntary social coÖperation under an individualistic system.

Take the subject of hospitals. I was reading the other day a statement by M. Jules Huret:—

This is wonderfully incorrect. There are thirty-three hospitals at Pittsburgh, fifteen public and eighteen private. In 1908, thirteen of these hospitals treated over ten thousand free patients, at a cost of more than three hundred thousand dollars.

In New York there are more than forty hospitals, of which six are municipal institutions, while the others are incorporated by associations of citizens and supported largely by benevolent gifts; and more than forty free dispensaries for the treatment of patients and the distribution of medicines. In fact, the dispensaries increased so rapidly, a few years ago, that the regular physicians complained that their business was unfairly reduced. They said that prosperous people went to the dispensary to save expense; and they humbly suggested that no patient who wore diamonds should be received for free treatment.

In the United States in 1903 there were 1500 hospitals costing about $29,000,000 a year for maintenance: $9,000,000 of this came from public funds, and the remaining $20,000,000 from charitable gifts and from paying patients. One-third of the patients were in public institutions, the other two-thirds in hospitals under private or religious control. There is not a city of any consequence in America which is without good hospital accommodations; and there are few countries in the world where it is more comfortable for a stranger to break a leg or have a mild attack of appendicitis. All this goes to show that the Americans recognize the care of the sick and wounded as a part of the common order. They perceive that the State never has been, and probably never will be, able to do all that is needed without the help of benevolent individuals, religious bodies, and philanthropic societies.

How generously this help is given in America, not only for hospitals, but for all other objects of benevolence, may be seen from the fact that the public gifts and bequests of private citizens for the year 1907 amounted to more than $100,000,000.

Let me give another illustration of voluntary social coÖperation in this sphere of action which lies at least in part beyond the reach of the State. In all the American cities of large size, you will find institutions which are called “Settlements,”—a vague word which has been defined to mean “homes in the poorer quarters of a city where educated men and women may live in daily contact with the working people.” The first house of this kind to be established was Toynbee Hall in London, in 1885. Two years later the Neighbourhood Guild was founded in New York, and in 1889 the College Settlement in the same city, and Hull House in Chicago, were established. There are now reported some three hundred of such settlement houses in the world, of which England has 56, Holland 11, Scotland 10, France 4, Germany 2, and the United States 207. I will take, as examples, Hull House in Chicago, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York.

Hull House was started by two ladies who went into one of the worst districts of Chicago and took a house with the idea of making it a radiating centre of orderly and happy life. Their friends backed them up with money and help. After five years the enterprise was incorporated. The buildings, which are of the most substantial kind, now cover a whole city block, some forty or fifty thousand square feet, and, include an apartment house, a boys’ club, a girls’ club, a theatre, a gymnasium, a day nursery, workshops, class rooms, a coffee-house, and so on. There are forty-four educated men and women in residence who are engaged in self-supporting occupations, and who give their free time to the work of the settlement. A hundred and fifty outside helpers come every week to serve as teachers, friendly visitors, or directors of clubs: 9000 people a week come to the house as members of some one of its organizations or as parts of an audience. There are free concerts, and lectures, and classes of various kinds in study and in handicraft. Investigations of the social and industrial conditions of the neighbourhood are carried on, not officially, but informally; and the knowledge thus obtained has been used not only for the visible transformation of the region around Hull House, but also to throw light upon the larger needs and possibilities of improvement in Chicago and other American cities. Hull House, in fact, is an example of ethical and humane housekeeping on a big scale in a big town.

The Henry Street Settlement in New York is quite different in its specific quality. It was begun in 1893 by two trained nurses, who went down into the tenement-house district, to find the sick and to nurse them in their homes. At first they lived in a tenement house themselves; then the growth of their work and the coming of other helpers forced them to get a little house, then another, and another, a cottage in the country, a convalescent home. The idea of the settlement was single and simple. It was to meet the need of intelligent and skilful nursing in the very places where dirt and ignorance, carelessness and superstition, were doing the most harm,—

“in the crowded warrens of the poor.”

This little company of women, some twenty or thirty of them, go about from tenement to tenement, bringing cleanliness and order with them. In the presence of disease and pain they teach lessons which could be taught in no other way. They nurse five or six thousand patients every year, and make forty or fifty thousand visits. In addition to this, largely through their influence and example, the Board of Education has adopted a trained nursing service in the public schools, and has appointed a special corps of nurses to take prompt charge of cases of contagious disease among the school children. The Nurses’ Settlement, in fact, is a repetition of the parable of the Good Samaritan in a crowded city instead of on a lonely road.

These two examples illustrate the kind of work that is going on all over the United States. Every religious body, Jewish or Christian, has some part in it. It touches many sides of life,—this effort to do for the common order what the State has never been able to accomplish fully,—to sweeten and humanize it. I wish that there were time to speak of some particularly interesting features, like the Children’s Aid Society, the George Junior Republic, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Kindergarten Association. But now I must pass at once to the second kind of social effort, that in which the voluntary coÖperation of the citizen enlightens and guides and supplements the action of the State.

Here I might speak of the great question of the housing of the poor, and of the relation of private building and loan associations to governmental regulation of tenements and dwelling-houses. This is one of the points on which America has lagged behind the rest of the civilized world. Our excessive spirit of laissez-faire, and our cheerful optimism,—which in this case justifies the cynical definition of optimism as “an indifference to the sufferings of others,”—permitted the development in New York of the most congested and rottenly overcrowded ten acres on the face of the habitable globe. But the Tenement House Commission of 1894, and the other commissions which followed it, did much to improve conditions. A fairly good Tenement House Act was passed. A special Department of the municipality was created to enforce it. The dark interior rooms, the vile and unsanitary holes, the lodgings without water or air or fire-escapes, are being slowly but surely broken up and extirpated, and a half-dozen private societies, combining philanthropy with business, are building decent houses for working people, which return from 3 per cent to 5 per cent on the capital invested.

For our present purpose, however, it will be better to take an example which is less complicated, and in which the coÖperation of the State and the good-will of the private citizen can be more closely and simply traced. I mean the restriction and the regulation of child labour.

Every intelligent nation sees in its children its most valuable asset. That their physical and moral development should be dwarfed or paralyzed by bondage to exhausting and unwholesome labour, or by a premature absorption in toil of any kind, would be at once a national disgrace and a national calamity.

Three kinds of societies have been and still are at work in America to prevent this shame and disaster. First, there are the societies which are devoted to the general protection of all the interests of the young, like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Then there are the societies which make their appeal to the moral sense of the community to condemn and suppress all kinds of inhumanity in the conduct of industry and trade. Of these the Consumers’ League is an example. Founded in New York in 1890, by a few ladies of public spirit, it has spread to twenty other States, with sixty-four distinct societies and a national organization for the whole country. Its central idea is to persuade people, rich and poor, to buy only those things which are made and sold under fair and humane conditions. The responsibility of men and women for the way in which they spend their money is recognized. They are asked to remember that the cheapness of a bargain is not the only thing for them to consider. They ought to think whether it has been made cheap at the cost of human sorrow and degradation, whether the distress and pain and exhaustion of overtasked childhood and ill-treated womanhood have made their cheap bargain a shameful and poisonous thing. The first work of the leagues was to investigate the actual condition of labour in the great stores. The law forbade them to publish a black list of the establishments where the employees were badly treated. That would have been in the nature of a boycott. But they ingeniously evaded this obstacle by publishing a white list of those which treated their people decently and kindly. Thus the standard of a “Fair House” where a living wage was paid, where children of tender years were not employed, where the hours of work were not excessive, and where the sanitary conditions were good, was established, and that standard has steadily been raised.

Then the leagues went on to investigate the conditions of production of the goods sold in the shops. The National League issues a white label which guarantees that every article upon which it is found has been manufactured in a place where, (1) the State factory law is obeyed, (2) no children under sixteen years of age are employed, (3) no night work is required and the working-day does not exceed ten hours, (4) no goods are given out to be made away from the factory. At the same time the Consumers’ League has been steadily pressing the legislatures and governors of the different States for stricter and better laws in regard to the employment of women and children.

The third class of societies which are at work in this field are those which deal directly with the question of child labour. It must be remembered that under the American system this is a matter which is left to the control of the separate States. Naturally there has been the greatest imaginable diversity among them. For a long time there were many that had practically no laws upon the subject, or laws so defective that they were useless. Even now the States are far from anything like harmony or equality in their child-labour laws. Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin are probably in the lead in good legislation. If we may judge by the statistics of children between ten and fourteen years who are unable to read or write, Tennessee, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama are in the rear.

It must be remembered, also, that the number of children between ten and fifteen years employed in manufacturing pursuits in the United States increased from 1890 to 1900 more than twice as fast as the population of the country, and that the Census of 1900 gives the total of bread-winners under fifteen years of age as 1,750,000. A graphic picture of the actual condition of child labour in the United States may be found in The Cry of the Children, by Mrs. John Van Vorst (New York, 1908).

Here is a little army—no, a vast army—of little soldiers, whose sad and silent files are full of menace for the republic.

The principal forces arrayed against this perilous condition of things have been the special committees of the Women’s Clubs everywhere, the Child-Labour Committees in different States, and finally the National Child-Labour Committee organized in 1904. Through their efforts there has been a great advance in legislation on the subject. In 1905, twenty-two States enacted laws regulating the employment of children. In 1906 there were six States which legislated, including Georgia and Iowa, which for the first time put a law against child labour on their statute-books. In 1907 eight States amended their laws. In the same year a national investigation of the subject was ordered by Congress under direction of the Federal Commissioner of Labour.

A bill was prepared which attempted to deal with the subject indirectly through that provision of the Constitution which gives Congress the power to “regulate commerce.” This bill proposed to make it unlawful to transport from one State to another the product of any factory or mine in which children under fourteen years of age were employed. It was a humane and ingenious device. But it is doubtful whether it can ever be made an effective law. The best judges think that it stretches the idea of the regulation of interstate commerce beyond reasonable limits, and that the national government has no power to control industrial production in the separate States without an amendment to the Constitution. If this be true (and I am inclined to believe it is), then the best safeguard of America against the evils of child labour must be persistent action of these private associations in each community, investigating and reporting the actual conditions, awakening and stimulating the local conscience, pushing steadily for better State laws, and, when they are enacted, still working to create a public sentiment which will enforce them.

It is one thing to love your own children and care for them. It is another thing to have a wise, tender, protecting regard for all the children of your country. We wish and hope to see better and more uniform laws against child labour in America. But, after all, nothing can take the place of the sentiment of fatherhood and motherhood in patriotism. And that comes and stays only through the voluntary effort of men and women of good-will.

The last sphere in which the sense of common order in America has been expressed and promoted by social coÖperation is that of direct and definite reform accomplished by legislation, as a result, at least in part, of the work of some society or committee, formed for that specific purpose. Here a small, but neat, illustration is at hand.

For many years America practised, and indeed legally sanctioned, the habit of literary piracy. Foreign authors were distinctly refused any protection in the United States for the fruit of their intellectual labours. A foreigner might make a hat, and no one could steal it. He might cultivate a crop of potatoes, and no one could take them from him without paying for them. But let him write a book, and any one could reprint it, and sell it, and make a fortune out of it, without being compelled to give the unhappy author a penny. American authors felt the shame of this state of things,—and the disorder, too, for it demoralized the book-trade and brought a mass of stolen goods into cheap competition with those which had paid an honest royalty to their makers. A Copyright League was formed which included all the well-known writers of America. After years of hard work this league secured the passage of an international copyright law which gave the same protection to the foreigner as to the American author, providing only, under the protective tariff system, that his book must be printed and manufactured in the United States.

But the most striking and important example of this kind of work is that of the Civil Service Reform Association, which was organized in 1877. Here a few words of explanation are necessary.

In the early history of the United States the number of civil offices under the national government was comparatively small, and the appointments were generally made for ability and fitness. But as the country grew, the number of offices increased with tremendous rapidity. By 1830 the so-called ‘Spoils System’ which regarded them as prizes of political war, to be distributed by the successful party in each election for the reward and encouragement of its adherents, became a fixed idea in the public mind. The post-offices, the custom-houses, all departments of the civil service, were treated as rich treasuries of patronage, and used first by the Democrats and then by the Republicans, to consolidate and perpetuate partisan power.

It was not a question of financial corruption, of bribery with money. It was worse. It was a question of the disorder and impurity of the national housekeeping, of the debauchment and degradation of the daily business of the State.

Notoriously unfit persons were appointed to responsible positions. The tenure of office was brief and insecure. Every presidential election threatened to make a clean sweep of the hundreds of thousands of people who were doing the necessary routine work of the nation. Federal office-holders were practically compelled to contribute to campaign expenses, and to work and fight, like a host of mercenaries, for the success of the party which kept them in place. Confusion and inefficiency prevailed everywhere.

In 1871 the condition of affairs had become intolerable. President Grant, in his first term, recommended legislation, and appointed a national civil service commission, with George William Curtis at its head. Competitive examinations were begun, and a small appropriation was made to carry on the work. But the country was not yet educated up to the reform. Congress was secretly and stubbornly opposed to it. The appropriation was withdrawn. The work of the commission was ridiculed, and in his second term, in 1875, Grant was obliged to give it up.

Then the Civil Service Reform Association, with men like George William Curtis, Carl Schurz, Dorman B. Eaton, and James Russell Lowell as its leaders, was organized. A vigorous and systematic campaign of public agitation and education was begun. Candidates for the Presidency and other elective offices were called to declare their policy on this question.

The war of opinion was fierce. The assassination of President Garfield, in 1881, was in some measure due to the feeling of hostility aroused by his known opposition to the Spoils System. His successor, Vice-President Arthur, who was supposed to be a spoilsman, surprised everybody by his loyalty to Garfield’s policy on this point. And in 1883 a bill for the reform of the Civil Service was passed and a new commission appointed. The next President was Grover Cleveland, an ardent and fearless friend of the reform, who greatly increased its practical efficiency. He fought against Congress, both in his first and in his second term, to enlarge the scope and operation of the act by bringing more offices into the classified and competitive service. In his second term, by executive order, he increased the number of classified positions from forty-three thousand to eighty-seven thousand.

Presidents Harrison and McKinley worked in the same direction. And President Roosevelt, whose first national office was that of Civil Service Commissioner from 1889 to 1895, has raised and strengthened the rules, and applied the merit system to the consular service and other important departments of governmental work.

The result is that out of three hundred and twenty-five thousand positions in the executive civil service one hundred and eighty-five thousand are now classified, and appointments are made either under competitive examination or on the merit system for proved efficiency. This is an immense forward step in the promotion of common order, and it is largely the result of the work of the Civil Service Reform Association, acting upon the formation of public opinion. I believe it would be impossible for any candidate known to favour the Spoils System to be elected to the Presidency of the United States to-day.

A moment of thought will show the bearing of this illustration upon the subject which we are now considering. Here was a big, new, democratic people, self-reliant and sovereign, prosperous to a point where self-complacency was almost inevitable, and grown quite beyond the reach of external correction and control. They had fallen into wretched habits of national housekeeping. Their domestic service was disorderly and incompetent. The party politicians, on both sides, were interested in maintaining this bad service, because they made a profit out of it. The people had been hardened to it; they seemed to be either careless and indifferent, in their large, happy-go-lucky way, or else positively attached to a system which stirred everything up every four years and created unlimited opportunities for office-seeking and salary-drawing. What power could save them from their own bad judgment?

There was no higher authority to set them right. Everything was in their own hands. The case looked hopeless. But in less than thirty years the voluntary effort of a group of clear-sighted and high-minded citizens changed everything. An appeal to the sense of common order, of decency, of propriety, in the soul of the people created a sentiment which was too strong for the selfish politicians of either party to resist. The popular will was enlightened, converted, transformed, and an orderly, just, business-like administration of the Civil Service became, if not an accomplished fact, at least a universal and acknowledged aim of national desire and effort.

It is to precisely the same source that we must look with hope for the further development of harmony, and social equilibrium, and efficient civic righteousness, in American affairs. It is by precisely the same process that America must save herself from the perils and perplexities which are inherent in her own character and in the form of government which she has evolved to fit it.

That boastful self-complacency which is the caricature of self-reliance, that contempt for the minority which is the mockery of fair play, that stubborn personal lawlessness which is the bane of the strong will and the energetic temperament, can be restrained, modified, corrected, and practically conquered, only by another inward force,—the desire of common order, the instinct of social coÖperation. And there is no way of stimulating this desire, of cultivating this instinct, at least for the American republic, except the way of voluntary effort and association among the men and women of good-will.

One looks with amazement upon the vast array of “societies” of all kinds which have sprung into being in the United States during the last thirty years. They cover every subject of social thought and endeavour. Their documents and pamphlets and circulars fill the mails. Their appeals for contributions and dues tax the purse. To read all that they print would be a weariness to the flesh. To attend all their meetings and conferences would wreck the most robust listener. To speak at all of them would ruin the most fluent orator. A feeling of humorous discouragement and dismay often comes over the quiet man who contemplates this astonishing phase of American activity.

But if he happens also to be a conscientious man, he is bound to remember, on the other side, that the majority of these societies exist for some practical end which belongs to the common order. The Women’s Clubs, all over the country, have been powerful promoters of local decency and good legislation. The Leagues for Social Service, for Political Education, for Municipal Reform, have investigated conditions, collected facts, and acted as “clearing-houses for human betterment.” The White Ribbon, and Red Ribbon, and Blue Ribbon Clubs have worked for purity and temperance. The Prison Associations have sought to secure the treatment of criminals as human beings. The City Clubs, and Municipal Leagues, and Vigilance Societies have acted as unpaid watchmen over the vital interests of the great cities. The Medical and Legal Societies have used their influence in behalf of sanitary reform and the improvement of the machinery and methods of the courts.

There is no subject affecting the common welfare on which Congress would venture to legislate to-day until the committee to which the bill had been referred had first given a public hearing. At these hearings, which are open to all, the societies that are interested present their facts and arguments, and plead their cause.

Even associations of a less serious character seem to recognize their civic responsibilities. The Society of the Sons of the Revolution prints and distributes, in a dozen different languages, a moral and patriotic pamphlet of “Information for Immigrants.” The Sportsmen’s Clubs take an active interest in the improvement and enforcement of laws for the protection of fish and game. The Audubon Societies in many parts of the country have stopped, or at least checked, the extermination of wild birds of beauty and song for the supposed adornment of women’s hats.

It cannot be denied that there are still many and grave defects in the common order of America. For example, when a bitter and prolonged conflict between organized capital and organized labour paralyzes some necessary industry, we have no definite and sure way of protecting that great third party, the helpless consuming public. In the coal strike, a few years ago, the operators and the workmen were at a deadlock, and there was a good prospect that many people would freeze to death. But President Roosevelt, with the approval of men like ex-President Cleveland, forced or persuaded the two warring parties to go on with the mining of coal, while a committee of impartial arbitration settled their dispute.

We have no uniformity in our game laws, our forestry laws, our laws for the preservation and purity of the local water-supply. As these things are left to the control of the separate States, it will be very difficult to bring them all into harmony and good order.

The same thing is true of a much more important matter,—the laws of marriage and divorce. Each State and Territory has its own legislation on this subject. In consequence there are fifty-one distinct divorce codes in the United States and their Territories. South Carolina grants no divorce; New York and North Carolina admit only one cause; New Hampshire admits fourteen. In some of the States, like South Dakota, a legal residence of six months is sufficient to qualify a person to sue for a divorce; and those States have always a transient colony of people who are anxious to secure a rapid separation.

The provisions in regard to re-marriage are various and confusing. A man who is divorced under the law of South Dakota and marries again can be convicted of bigamy in New York.

All this is immensely disorderly and demoralizing. The latest statistics which are accessible show that there were 25,000 divorces in the United States in the year 1886. The annual number at present is estimated at nearly 60,000.

But the work which is being done by the National League for the Protection of the Family, and the united efforts of the churches, which have been deeply impressed with the need of awakening and elevating public sentiment on this subject, have already produced an improvement in many States. It is possible that a much greater uniformity of legislation may be reached, even though a national law may not be feasible. It is certain that the effective protection of the family must be secured in America, as elsewhere, by a social education and coÖperation which will teach men and women to think of the whole subject “reverently, soberly, and in the fear of God, duly considering the causes for which marriage was ordained.”

In this, and in all other things of like nature, we Americans look into the future not without misgivings and fears, but with an underlying confidence that the years will bring a larger and nobler common order, and that the Republic will be peace.

In the minor problems we shall make many mistakes. In the great problems, in the pressing emergencies, we rely upon the moral power in reserve. The sober soul of the people is neither frivolous nor fanatical. It is earnest, ethical, desirous of the common good, responsive to moral appeal, capable of self-control, and, in the time of need, strong for self-sacrifice. It has its hours of illusion, its intervals of indifference and drowsiness. But while there are men and women passionately devoted to its highest ideals, and faithful in calling it to its duties, it will not wholly slumber nor be lost in death.

If there is to be an American aristocracy, it shall not be composed of the rich, nor of those whose only pride is in their ancient name, but of those who have done most to keep the Spirit of America awake and eager to solve the problems of the common order, of those who have spoken to her most clearly and steadily, by word and deed, reminding her that

“By the Soul
Only, the Nations shall be great and free.”

VI
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION