American spread-eagleism has matured notably in the past ten years, but there is still youth and ginger enough in it to make my first postulate simply this,—that the civic responsibilities of democracy in an industrial district are to come abreast of and improve upon any community standards reached under any other system of government; and, second, to do this in a democratic way as distinct from a despotic or paternalistic way.

It was my good fortune to spend a week the past summer in Essen and other industrial towns of the Rhenish-Westphalia district of Germany, following something over a year spent in the Pittsburgh district. I fancy that in our attitude toward the old countries, we are inclined to regard their cities as long established and to find justification for any lapses of our own in the newness of America. But Essen, for instance, as an industrial center is new. The chronology of the development of the steel industry there is not altogether different from that of the same industry in Pittsburgh; and one of the great problems of Fried. Krupp was to mobilize and hold within reach of his furnaces and rolls a large and efficient working population. Entering the industrial field generations later than England, German manufacturers have not had a trained working force ready to hand. Krupp had to draw his men from the country districts,—healthy, unskilled peasants, unused to the quick handling of their muscles, unused to working indoors, unused to machinery, unused to living in large communities. The wages offered, as against the wages of agricultural districts, drew them there; he must keep them there out of reach of his competitors, and he must see that they worked at the top notch of their efficiency. It was a loss to Herr Krupp when a man with five years' training in his works left Essen, or was sick, or was maimed.

As a town, Essen was unprepared to absorb this great new industrial population. There were not houses enough; the newcomers were sheltered abominably and charged exorbitant rents by the local landlords. There weren't food supplies enough within reach of the growing city, and the workers had to buy poor bread and bad meat, and to pay heavily for them. The town had not enough sanitary appliances to dispose of the waste which a congregation of individuals sloughs off and which, if not properly disposed of, breeds disease. The rents and high provisions pared away most of the incentive in the wages which must attract this working force to Essen; poor houses and poor food made directly for stupid, half-roused workers and for poor work. Primarily as a business proposition, then, Herr Krupp started that group of social institutions which have since been expanded from one motive or another, until they supply an infinite variety of wants to the Essen workers. The firm bought up successive plots of land, laid them out, sewered them, parked them, and to-day, at the end of fifty years, over thirty thousand persons are living in houses belonging to the Essen works (ten thousand of the sixty thousand Krupp employes are thus supplied). There has been a growth in quality as well as in numbers of houses. The buildings of the first workmen's colony, West End, are rough, crude boxes; the new colonies of Alfredshof and Friedrichshof are beautiful, with their red roofs, graceful lines, lawns, housekeeping conveniences and modest rents. Not less than seventy-seven Krupp supply stores, operated on a profit-sharing basis, sell meat, bread, manufactured goods and household furniture. One of the greatest bakeries in Germany is operated on a cost basis, and there are slaughter houses, flour mills, ice making establishments, tailor shops, etc. Hospitals, convalescent homes, pensions, and invalidity and accident funds have been instituted, and have since been fortified and expanded under the imperial scheme of industrial insurance, which governs throughout Germany.

This welfare work of the Krupps has not succeeded in keeping either trade unionism or socialism out of the ranks of the working force; it has tended to put the workers in a position of semi-feudal dependence for comforts and to sap their initiative; and in those bearings it is not in accord with American ideas; but it has served to gather at Essen, to keep there, and to keep there at a high standard of working efficiency, one of the most remarkable labor forces in Germany.

It is solely the latter aspect of the case that concerns us here. I think it is agreed that when it comes to armor plate, I-beams, tubes, or rails, the Pittsburgh steel plants can beat the world. But a week's stay among the Krupp colonies at Essen brings with it the conviction that we in America have considerable distance to go if we are to match the Germans in the science of improved community conditions. The question is how some of these higher standards can be worked out in an American industrial district where one corporation does not dominate; where you are dealing with a much greater aggregation of people spread over a much greater territory, and where you must work out your solution in democratic ways through democratic agencies.

It must be borne in mind that much that I say of Pittsburgh is true of practically all our industrial centers; our severest criticism of any one comes not from a comparison with its fellows, but from a comparison of the haphazard development of its social institutions with the splendid organic development of its industrial enterprises. And more, in the methods and scope of progressive business organizations we have some of the most suggestive clues as to ways for municipal progress.

My first point has to do with administrative areas. The most effective city administration cannot act to advantage unless the units through which it operates are workable and bear some relation to the function they are designed to perform. The radius of the old time city, as one English writer has pointed out, was the distance you could walk from your work in the center to a home convenient in the outskirts. To-day, for most purposes, a city is a rapid transit proposition. For most purposes, a municipal area can be governed most effectively if it includes all such districts as can be reached by city workers, by subway, steam, or surface lines. The movement for a greater Pittsburgh, which, within the last year, has been advanced by the merging of Allegheny and the movement for a greater Birmingham, which is now in progress in the corresponding English industrial center, are recognitions of this fact. The police, fire,—in fact, every department of municipal activity is cramped and rendered less effective by restricted bounds.

But for certain functional activities much wider areas must be covered. The sanitary inspection force of Cleveland, for instance, inspects dairies and slaughter-houses throughout all that part of Ohio that supplies the Cleveland market; in contrast with the Pittsburgh inspection service which is at present able to inspect supplies only as they come into the city and sources in the immediate neighborhood. Again, the sewer and water problem of Pittsburgh is a water-shed problem. One hundred and twenty-nine towns and boroughs are dumping their sewage into the rivers which run past Pittsburgh and from which Pittsburgh must draw its water. No one of these governmental units can work out its sanitary problem alone. Close co-ordination of sanitary work is needed throughout the whole river district.

There is necessity, then, for increasing our municipal administrative areas and for relating them to the functions which must be performed through them; and this very fact raises the distinctive civic problem of creating this enlarged municipal machinery, without sacrificing that local loyalty and interest which in neighborhoods and smaller districts make for good government. In Pittsburgh we have a central city,—a market and office center with groups of outlying mill towns and half-agricultural districts between. The opponents of city congestion would break up all our big urban centers into such an open work structure; and if the citizenship of the Pittsburgh steel district can work out effective methods of government and high standards of community well-being for this ganglion of working communities, it will have made an original contribution to municipal science.

But let us look more carefully at this question of area as applied to the functioning of particular social institutions. We have the theory in America, for instance, that common school education should be supplied by the public, and to this end, besides state subsidies and other revenues, a general millage is laid on all taxable property in Pittsburgh for the salaries of teachers and for other general expenses. But the actual operation of the schools continues on an old vestry system of ward control,—a system given up by Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities of Pittsburgh's class, because the ward has proved an ineffective administrative unit. Let us see how it works in Pittsburgh. Each ward lays and collects a tax on property within its limits for the erection and maintenance of school buildings. Thus, ward two in the business district, with a total of only 363 pupils, can draw on property with an assessed valuation of $37,491,708; while ward fourteen, with 2,423 children, can draw on property worth $34,264,077 (less taxable property and seven times as many children); while ward thirty-one has 1,173 children and only $3,074,085 in assessed property (or three times as many children as ward two and not one-tenth the taxable property). No wonder, then, that the valuation of school buildings and equipment ranges from approximately $41 per school child in the thirty-first ward to $1,033 per school child in the second; and the income for maintenance of buildings, etc., from $6 per school child in the thirty-fifth ward to $84 per school child in the first. No wonder, then, that in these ward-school buildings and their equipment there is the utmost divergence. Our investigators found buildings every room of which was overcrowded, with children sitting on benches, with chairs in the aisles; wards in which basement rooms were thrown into commission without adequate heat, light, desks or ventilation; schools unconnected with the sewer; schools without fireproofing, without fire escapes, without fire drills;—all these in contrast to progressive schools in other wards with first-rate equipment, small classes, good plumbing and adequate light. Wards which have the most children, whose children have the least cultural environment and stimulus at home, have, many of them, the least resources to tax for school purposes. By an out-worn system of ward control and taxation, then, the teaching force of Pittsburgh is supplied in districts where the work is hardest with schoolhouses and other tools which are least effective. Some districts have schools which in equipment and spirit rank with any in the country; while in some the school plants ought to be scrapped offhand.

Turn to another social institution,—the hospitals. We may conceive that the first service of hospitals is to be accessible to the sick and injured, and that an adequate hospital system should be at all times quickly available to the people who may have use for it. We may compare it with the efficiency of the telephone company which, through sub-exchanges, centrals and private connections, effectively reaches every district. How stands the case with the hospitals of Pittsburgh? The city is served by a group of private institutions, many of them adequately equipped and progressively managed; but there is no system of co-ordination between them, either in the operation of their free wards or in the maintenance of an effective ambulance service. New hospitals are erected under the eaves of old hospitals. Sick and injured people are carried long, unnecessary distances at great risk. Seven new hospitals are going up in Pittsburgh and yet, when they are all completed and other changes which have been decided upon are carried out, there will be a great belt of river wards, thickly populated, without a convenient hospital plant,—wards in which we shall see disease is most rife. This failure of a co-ordination of hospital work in Pittsburgh is appreciated by a number of the most progressive superintendents, and no one would welcome more than they a movement to interlock the hospital service of the city in some effective way.

Another point of contrast between Pittsburgh, the industrial center, and Pittsburgh, the community, lies in the progressiveness and invention which have gone into the details of one and the other; for instance, aldermen's courts which dispense justice to the working population of Pittsburgh and deal with the minor civil business of a city of half a million. They serve very well in an agricultural district. They are of the vintage of the village blacksmith. But with the exception of a few well conducted courts, the forty or more ward courts may be said to clutter up and befog the course of minor justice, and to be an exasperation in the conduct of civil business. They add to rather than subtract from the business of the higher courts, and there is no effective supervision of their operation. They compare with the new municipal courts of Chicago about as the open forges of King John's time compare with a Bessemer converter.

Again,—Pittsburgh is the second city in Pennsylvania in point of population; in some respects it is the center of the most marvelous industrial district in the world. Thousands of men and women are engaged in hundreds of processes. But the state factory inspection department has not so much as an office in this city. There are inspectors, but they are not easily get-at-able for the workingman who may be laboring under unsanitary conditions or with unprotected machinery, or for the citizen who may know of violations of the factory acts which he conceives it his duty to report. My conception of an adequate labor department office in Pittsburgh is more than that of an industrial detective bureau. My conception is rather that of a headquarters, with an adequate force of technical experts and physicians who would be constantly studying the work processes of the district with the idea of eliminating wherever possible, those conditions which make for disease; with laboratory facilities for experiment and demonstration of protective devices calculated to reduce accidents; drawing, to this end, upon the industrial experience of the whole world. The factory inspector's office in Birmingham, for instance, is in close co-operation with courts, with employers and with workmen. Within three years, its suggestions have reduced the number of deaths due to one variety of crane from twenty-one to three.

The old time city built a wall about it. That kept out invaders. The invaders of a modern city are infectious diseases. In the development of sanitary service and bureaus of health of wide powers and unquestioned integrity, the modern city is erecting its most effective wall. In Pittsburgh, the health authority is still a subordinate bureau without control over appointments under the civil service, and without that final authority which should go with its supreme responsibility toward the health of 500,000 people. Until the present incumbent was appointed, there had seldom or never been a physician at the head of this bureau. For five years there had not been so much as an annual report. Two-thirds of the appropriations to the Pittsburgh Health Bureau are to-day engrossed in a garbage removal contract; only one-third is free for general health purposes. With such an inadequate barricade, we can imagine that disease has sacked Pittsburgh throughout the years; and comparison of death rates with four cities of corresponding size,—Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis,—for five years, shows this to have been the case. In her average death rate per 100,000 for typhoid fever, for diarrhoea and for enteritis, Pittsburgh was first and highest. Pittsburgh was only fourth or next to the lowest in the list in pulmonary tuberculosis; but in pneumonia, in bronchitis and in other diseases of the respiratory system; and in violence other than suicide, Pittsburgh was highest. To retrieve the lost ground of years of neglect of health conditions has been a task upon which the present superintendent of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health has entered, but it is a task in which the city must invest increasing resources. For such work it needs more than a health bureau. It needs a health department.

My point, then, is that democracy must overhaul the social machinery through which it operates if it would bring its community conditions up to standards comparable to those maintained by its banks, its insurance companies and its industrial corporations.

There are at least two tests to which the community can put such social machinery. The first is that of operating efficiency. In hospitals, in schools, in municipal departments, units of work and output can be worked out as definitely as are the tons of the steel workers, the voltage of the electricians, the dollars and cents of the banks. By vigorous systems of audit and intelligent systems of budget-making, understandable to the ordinary citizen, the community can see to it that the output of these social institutions is comparable with the investment it makes in them; that the taxpayer gets his money's worth. The Bureau of Municipal Research in New York embodies this idea in its program.

There is another, equally intensive test to which social institutions and sanitary conditions can be put. It is conceivable that the tax payer may get his money's worth from the municipal government, while the families of the wage earning population and householders may be suffering from another and irreparable form of taxation, which only increased municipal expenditure along certain lines could relieve. So it is that while I subscribe to the movement for stiffer standards of municipal accounting as a basis for effective government, for knowing the waste of a city's money, I subscribe further to the movement for such methods of social bookkeeping as will show us the larger waste of human life and private means; and will stand out not only for honesty and efficiency, but for the common well-being.

Let me illustrate by the case of typhoid fever which has been epidemic in Pittsburgh for twenty-five years. To eliminate typhoid Pittsburgh has erected a 5-1/2 million dollar filtration plant,[14] for the years of delay in the erection of which the city has suffered a terrible toll of deaths and misery. There were 5,421 cases of typhoid fever in Pittsburgh last year and 622 deaths. Computing death rate per 100,000 population for the larger cities having the highest rates in 1901, Pittsburgh was first with 124, New Haven second, Allegheny third; in 1902, Pittsburgh was first, Allegheny second, Washington third; in 1903, Pittsburgh first, Cleveland was second, Allegheny third; in 1904, Columbus was first, Pittsburgh second, Allegheny third; in 1905, Allegheny was first, Pittsburgh second and Columbus third; in 1906, Pittsburgh was first, and Allegheny second. But even these figures, startling as they are, fail to afford a grasp of the meaning of this typhoid scourge in the lives of the wage earners of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Survey undertook to gauge this. In co-operation with Columbian Settlement, we collected data as to 1,029 cases in six wards reported in one year; 448 cases were found and studied. Of these 26 died. 187 wage earners lost 1,901 weeks' work. Other wage earners, not patients, lost 322 weeks,—a total loss in wages of $28,899. The cost of 90 patients treated in hospitals at public or private expense was $4,165; of 338 patients cared for at home, $21,000 in doctors' bills, nurses, ice, foods, medicines; of 26 funerals, $3,186; a total cost of $57,250 in less than half the cases of six wards in one year,—wards in which both income and sickness expense were at a minimum. But there were other even more serious drains which do not admit of tabulation. A girl of twenty-two, who worked on stogies, was left in a very nervous condition, not as strong as before, and consequently she could not attain her former speed. A blacksmith will probably never work at his trade with his former strength. A sixteen-year-old girl who developed tuberculosis was left in a weakened physical condition. A tailor who cannot work as long hours as before, was reduced $1 a week in wages. A boy of eight was very nervous; he would not sit still in school and was rapidly becoming a truant. A mother developed a case of pneumonia from over-exposure in caring for children who had the fever, and she has not been well since. So the story goes,—very real to the lives of the many who are so intimately concerned. The money losses can be replaced. My figures include no estimate of the value of human lives lost. And it is impossible to compute in terms of dollars and cents, what it means to a family to have the father's health so broken that he cannot work at his old job, but has to accept easier work at less pay. It is impossible to put in tabulated form the total value to a family of a mother's health, and strike a proper balance when typhoid has left her a physical or nervous wreck. It is impossible to estimate what is the cost to a boy or girl who is obliged to leave school in order to help support the family, because typhoid has incapacitated the natural bread-winners. Such facts as these show the drain that typhoid has been on the vital forces of the community. It is only one of such drains.

Such facts as these bring home concretely to the average workingman his stake in good government.

It is not possible here to enter into a discussion, even briefly, of the democratic methods by which a community can improve the quality and lessen the cost of its food supplies as an integral part of the program for building up a vigorous working population. There is a direct bearing between these costs of living and the holding power of the wages paid in the Pittsburgh District.

But there is one necessity of which there is a paramount shortage; that is shelter. I should like you to compare the efficiency to perform the function for which it is devised of a modern blast furnace and the shacks which house some of the families in the Pittsburgh District. The output of the one is pig iron; the output of the other, home life and children. According to the tenement house census carried on by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health the past summer, there are 3,364 tenement houses in the greater city. Nearly fifty per cent of these are old dwellings built and constructed to accommodate one family and as a rule without conveniences for the multiple households now crowded into them. Let me give you an example,—a house on Bedford avenue, with three families in the front and three in the rear, Negroes and whites. The owner was notified over a year ago that the building must be repaired and certain alterations made, but nothing has been done, and by the veto of the governor of Pennsylvania of a bill which passed the last Legislature, the Bureau of Health has no power to condemn such unsanitary dwellings. In this building, two-room apartments rent for twelve dollars a month. Water has to be obtained from a hydrant in the yard, shared by eleven families; the foul privy vaults are also shared by neighboring families.

Under Dr. Edwards's administration 5,063 such privy vaults have been filled and abandoned in Pittsburgh and 8,281 sanitary water closets installed in their place. The work is less than half done. The census of only the first twenty wards of the older city shows a total of nearly 6,000 vaults still existing in these wards alone. Consider the contrast,—these old, ramshackle, unwholesome, disease breeding appliances of the back country here in Pittsburgh, the city of the great engineers, of mechanical invention and of progress. In a typhoid-ridden neighborhood, a vault is an open menace to health. Investigations in army camps and in given neighborhoods in Chicago have proved that insects carry disease from such places to the tables and living rooms of the people.

There are three points which I should like you to consider in connection with this problem of shelter. The first is that the Bureau of Health, however efficient in its supervisory work, cannot meet it single handed. Even if through the activities of the Health Bureau, Tammany Hall, Yellow Row and other old shacks have been torn down, even if the owners of other old buildings are made to install sanitary appliances, the situation is still unmet, unless new houses,—vast quantities of new houses,—are erected to care for the increased population which has flooded into Pittsburgh in the last ten years and which, there is every indication, will multiply as greatly in the next ten. Real estate dealers and builders have not been inactive in Pittsburgh, but the situation is so serious as to demand the development of a constructive public policy that will comprehend such elements as town planning, tax reform, and investment at "five per cent and the public good."

My second point is that this haphazard method of letting the housing supply take care of itself is a monetary drawback to the merchants of the city. In the first place, it radically reduces the margin which the workingman's family has to spend for commodities. Especially is this true of immigrant tenants, who are obliged to pay more than English-speaking. For instance, on Bass street, Allegheny, we found Slavs paying twenty dollars a month for four rooms, as against fifteen dollars paid by Americans. In the second place, it puts a premium on the single men, drifters, lodgers, as against the man with a family. The immigrant boarders who rent from a boarding-boss, and sleep eight or ten in a room or sleep at night in the beds left vacant by the night workers who have occupied them throughout the day,—such fellows can make money in the Pittsburgh district. But the immigrant who wants to make his stake here, bring his family over, create a household, must pay ten or fifteen dollars a month for rooms; and must pay high prices for all the other necessities of life. If I were asked by what means the merchants of Pittsburgh could increase the volume of purchases of the buying public, I should say that no one thing would affect that so impressively as the multiplication of households, through the multiplication of low cost, low rental, sanitary houses to meet the needs of stable family groups as against the transient lodger.

My third point is that the housing problem is not a city problem alone. It is repeated in each of the mill towns. I could cite instances in Braddock, Duquesne, McKeesport, Sharpsburg, where old buildings are filthy and overcrowded and where new buildings are put up in violation of every canon of scientific housing,—back-to-back houses such as were condemned in England seventy-five years ago as breeding places of disease. Homestead, for instance, has no ordinance against overcrowding, no ordinance requiring adequate water supply, or forbidding privy vaults in congested neighborhoods. The foreigners live in the second ward between the river and the railroads. In twenty-two courts studied in this district, only three houses had running water inside. One hundred and ten people were found using one yard pump. Fifty-one out of 239 families lived in one room each. Twenty-six of the two-room apartments are used by eight or more people; one two-room apartment sheltered thirteen; two, twelve; two, eleven. A crude reflection of the effect of these conditions is indicated by the death rate in this second ward. Of every three children born there one dies before it reaches two years of age, as against one in every six in the rest of Homestead, where detached, and livable dwellings prevail.

This comparison of health conditions in a small town is true in a large, cruel way of Pittsburgh itself. In co-operation with the Typhoid Fever Commission we have analyzed by wards the death certificates of people dying in Pittsburgh for the past five years. We have grouped these wards into districts, the living conditions of which are more or less of a kind. Let me compare the mortality figures of wards nine and ten and twelve,—a group of river wards in the old city, near the mills, peopled for the most part with a wage-earning population of small income,—compare these wards with ward twenty-two, a new residential district in the East End. What are the chances of life of the men, women and children living in the one and in the other? The chance of a man's dying of bronchitis in the river wards is two and a half as against one in the East End; it is four of his dying from pneumonia as against one in the East End, five of his dying of typhoid as against one in the East End, six of his dying a violent death as against one in the East End. These are rough proportions merely, but they are of terrific significance. Our American boast that everybody has an equal chance falls flat before them. The dice are loaded in Pittsburgh when it comes to a man's health; his health is the workingman's best asset; and the health and vigor of its working population are in the long run the vital and irrecoverable resources of an industrial center.

This brings us to a point where we can define more concretely the plain civic responsibility of democracy in an industrial district. That responsibility is to contrive and to operate the social machinery of the community, and to make living conditions in the district, such as will attract and hold a strong and vigorous labor force, for the industries on which the prosperity of the district must depend. Here lie the responsibility of the community to the individual manufacturer,—and the responsibility of the community to its own future:—that the efficiency of its workers shall not be mortgaged before they go to work in the morning.

This carries a counter responsibility. In the interests of the community as a whole, in the interests of all the industries as against the interests of any single one, the public cannot afford to have such a working force impaired or wasted by unsanitary or health-taxing conditions during the working hours. What I mean will perhaps be clearest by illustrating in the case of industrial accidents. Pittsburgh cannot afford to have over 500 workingmen killed every year in the course of employment, or the unknown number of men who are seriously injured. During the past year, the Pittsburgh Survey has made an intensive inquiry into the facts surrounding the deaths of the entire roster of men killed in industry during twelve months, and of the accident cases treated in the hospitals of the district during three months,—not with the idea of raising anew the question of responsibility for particular accidents, but to see if there are any indications as to whether these accidents could be prevented and whether the burden of them falls where in justice it should. The work has been done by a staff of five people, including a lawyer, an engineer and interpreters, and we have had the co-operation of claim agents, superintendents, foremen, trade union officials and others. We found that of the 526 men killed in the year studied in Allegheny county, the accidents fell on Americans as well as foreigners; 224 were native born. The ranks of steel workers and train men suffer most,—the pick of the workmen in the district. There were 195 steel workers killed, 125 railroad men, seventy-one mine workers, and 135 in other occupations. It was found that it was the young men of the district who went down in the course of industry. Eighty-two were under twenty years of age, 221 between twenty and thirty. Over half the men killed were earning less than fifteen dollars a week, a fact which raises the question if the law is fair in assuming, as it does in Pennsylvania, that wages cover risk. Fifty-one per cent of the men killed were married with families to support; an additional thirty per cent were single men, partly, or wholly, supporting a family. It was shown that the greatest losses were not due to the spectacular accidents, but to everyday causes. In the steel industry, for instance, forty-two deaths were due to the operation of electric cranes, thirty-one to the operation of broad and narrow gauge railroads in the mills and yards, and twenty-four to falls from a height or into pits, vats, etc. Pittsburgh has stamped out smallpox; its physicians are fighting tuberculosis; the municipality is checking typhoid. Cannot engineers, foremen, employers and workmen come together in a campaign to reduce accidents? Considerable has already been done in this direction by progressive employers. The problem is that of bringing up the whole district to progressive standards.

On the other hand we have put these industrial accident cases to that same test of human measurement which we found of such significance in gauging the losses due to typhoid fever. This steady march of injury and death means an enormous economic loss. Is the burden of this loss justly distributed? What takes the place of the wages of these bread-winners? What resources of their own have these families to fall back on? What share of the loss is shouldered by the employer? What share falls in the long run upon the community itself, in the care of the sick and dependent? Is the Pennsylvania law fair that exempts the employer from paying anything to the family of a killed alien if that family lives in a foreign country? Are the risks which the law supposes that the workman assumes when he hires out for wages, fair risks under modern conditions of production? Is it in the long run, to the interest of the employer to leave to the haphazard, embittered gamble of damage suits, this question of meeting in a fair way the human loss which with even the best processes and the greatest care, is involved in the production of utilities? I am not in a position here to put forward the economic facts brought out by our inquiries; but I can say that on every hand, among employers and claim agents and workmen, there is profound dissatisfaction and an increasing open-mindedness toward some such sane and equitable system of working-men's compensation as those in operation in Germany and in England.

But this question of industrial accidents is only part of another and larger question of the relation of industry to health. The workers of Pittsburgh are dealing not with simple ploughs and wash tubs and anvils, but with intricate machines or in great work rooms where hundreds work side by side; dealing with poisons, with voltage, with heat, with a hundred new and but half mastered agents of production. Are the conditions under which some of this work is carried on directly inimical to health? Could they be bettered without serious loss to the trades and with great gain to the workers?

In the rapid development of factories in America, we have only begun to devise our plants with reference to the health of the worker as well as with reference to output. Let me illustrate from the women employing trades. In only two of the twenty-eight commercial laundries in Pittsburgh, is the wash room on the upper floor. In twenty-six, rising steam and excessive heat not only cause discomfort in the other departments, but tend to induce diseases of the respiratory organs. Tobacco dried in many of the stogy sweatshops, makes the air heavy with nicotine, fills the room with fine dust and increases the danger, always present in the tobacco trades, from tuberculosis. In foundries and machine shops, the custom of placing annealing ovens in the rooms where the cores are made, causes excessive heat in the work room and fill the air with a black dust. We have the statements of old employes that not more than twenty-five girls of the 300 in the coil winding room in one of the Pittsburgh electrical industries have been in the plant as long as three or four years. The speeding-up tends to make the girls nervous, weak and easily overcome by illness.

Apart from dangers of accident, of speeding and of injurious processes, the health of a working force bears a direct relation to the length of the working day. The tendency with respect to both hours and Sunday work in the steel industry in Pittsburgh has been, for fifteen years, towards an increase, and there is no indication that the end has yet been reached. There is not the opportunity here to analyze the time schedule of the varied departments of the steel industry, but in a majority of them the day of twenty-four hours is split between two shifts of workers; and the men work not six days, but seven a week. And a very considerable share of them, once a fortnight in changing shifts, work a long turn of twenty-four hours.

Employers may differ as to whether they can get the most work and the most effective work out of a man if he works twelve hours a day, or ten, or eight. But I hold that the community has something at stake here. How much citizenship does Pittsburgh get out of a man who works twelve hours a day seven days a week? How much of a father can a man be who may never see his babies except when they are asleep; or who never gets a chance to go off into the country for a rollick with his boys? The community has a claim on the vigor and intelligence of its people, on their activity in civic affairs, which I believe it is letting go by default. It is getting only the tired out leavings of some of its best men.

My argument, then, is that if the civic responsibilities of democracy in an industrial district are to be met, the community should do what a first-rate industrial concern would do, figure out the ground it can cover effectively and gear its social machinery so to cover it. By social machinery I mean hospitals, schools, courts and departments the city structure, and all that wide range of activities that have a direct bearing on the living conditions of a people. Second, to hold these agencies as closely accountable as are enterprises in the business world; and to bring them to the ultimate touchstone of their effect on the welfare of the average citizen. Unless a wage-earning population is so insured against disease, its vigor and effectiveness so conserved, the community is not meeting its responsibilities toward the industries which must depend upon these workers for output and profit. In turn, the public should see to it that the industries do not cripple nor exploit the working force which constitutes the great asset of the community. And further, if such a program is to be carried out in an American and democratic way, the workers themselves must have greater leeway and leisure in which to bear their share of the burdens and responsibilities of American democracy.

I bear a message to Pittsburgh from John Burns, president of the Local Government Board of England, one of the foremost labor leaders of Great Britain, who has been hailed this fall as one of the conserving forces of the present Liberal ministry in dealing with the vast economic problems which are facing the British Empire. He has visited America and Pittsburgh as a member of various commissions, and it was on the basis of his knowledge of our situation here that I asked him for suggestions as to ways of advance, which would lead to the improvement of civic and labor conditions in the Pittsburgh steel district. "Six days work a week instead of seven," he said. "Three shifts of eight hours instead of two shifts of twelve; no twenty-four hour shifts; better housing; counter-attractions to the saloon; more parks,—open spaces; the improvement of the river front;—the humanizing of labor instead of the brutalization of toil. There you are. Those are Pittsburgh's marching orders."

Pittsburgh's three rivers and the great mineral resource's they tap brought the people here. Environment is inevitable as a selective agency; but the people once here, can by their willing, mould and perpetuate or destroy the holding power of the district. Other cities have large admixtures of clerks and trading classes. I doubt if there is such another working force in the country as that which peoples these valleys. Therein lies a civic resource worth conserving to the utmost of its potential goods. Will Pittsburgh as a community, as a democratic community, meet that responsibility?

Will the industrial communities of the nation, as democratic communities, meet their responsibility?