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"physiology." Such practical things as adequate ventilation, scientific lighting, sanitary privies, organized play, and health inspection have largely replaced the old routine gymnastics and the instruction that did not instruct. Physicians and dentists and sociologists have come to the aid of the schoolmen, and they all are studying together the problems of healthful childhood and coöperating to put into practise the efficient knowledge of science to build a better race. Consider such facts as these, which they have brought to light:

Professor Monroe, of Stanford University, gathered particulars relating to 10,000 children of the public schools of California and found that 3 per cent. of the children were feeble minded and not less than 10 per cent. backward and mentally dull, needing special care and attention.

During 1909 and 1910, 252,254 children were given thorough physical examinations by the New York Committee on the Welfare of School Children. Of this number, 14,255 were found to be suffering from mal-nutrition, tuberculosis nodes, pulmonary diseases, orthopedic defects, and defective mentality.

In Boston, in 1903, of 23,207 pupils examined, 6,571 cases of disease were detected and of these 5,818, or one quarter, were too ill to be in school, and 40 per cent. of them had contagious diseases. Nine months' examination in Philadelphia showed 5,876 cases of diseases, of which 3,446 were contagious.

It has been estimated that of the twenty million pupils in the schools of this country, probably 5 per cent. have tuberculosis of the lungs, more than 5 per cent. have defective hearing, 25 per cent. have defective vision, 25 per cent. are suffering from mal-nutrition, more than 30 per cent. have enlarged tonsils and adenoids or enlarged glands in the neck, and more than 50 per cent. have defective teeth which interfere with their development. In other words, about fifteen million children require attention to their health.

To meet these conditions, many cities now maintain open-air class rooms and even whole schools in the open air to fight tuberculosis, dental clinics to discover and

correct defects of the teeth that lead to mal-nutrition, optical clinics that turn many "dull" pupils into bright pupils, special classes for backward and deficient children, and health inspection and visiting nurses that do an incalculable service toward improving the bodily and mental vigor of the young folk.

These helpful activities lend special significance and interest to the fourth International Congress on School Hygiene which will gather at Buffalo in August. More than 250 doctors and teachers from all parts of the United States and Europe will gather there to exchange information and to compare experiences in this vitally important work of human conservation and uplift. The hopeful advance of American education - especially of rural education — is largely bound up in the knowledge and the inspiring enthusiasm that arise from such gatherings as this.

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PRIVATE PENSIONS FOR
MOTHERS

ENSIONS for mothers are now being tried under state law in Missouri and elsewhere. Whether such aid can be administered as a function of the State without the abuses that grow up under other governmental pension systems can be known only as time reveals results. The results of various kinds of pensions and state insurance abroad should lead us at least to go very carefully in these things. But private philanthropy, acting under the safeguards of a localized administration and of close business scrutiny, is trying a similar experiment in Atlanta, Ga., and thus far with success.

For the last three years, the Hebrew Orphans' Home, of Atlanta, has "subsidized" orphans that were committed to its care. Twenty fatherless children now are being supported in their own homes under their own mothers' care by funds contributed by the institution. There is room for them in the institutional home in Atlanta, but the trustees believe that the new method promises better results for the children and that it is more economical. The Atlanta home has originated the principle of employing this subsidy as a sub

stitute for the old method of institutional care; but the idea of subsidy is several years old. It has been used by two large Jewish homes in New York, and by orphanages of other denominations in New England, at intervals during several years past, but usually as a temporary measure when the homes were too crowded to receive new applicants. The Atlanta home, on the contrary, expects to prove itself unnecessary, wasteful, and a poor makeshift for the natural plan of leaving the orphans to be cared for in their own or in adopted homes.

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Meanwhile, the Atlanta institution continues. There are about 100 children in it, gathered from Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. It represents a non-revenue bearing investment about $100,000, and last year more than $20,000 was spent upon its maintenance. The average cost of support of each child. in it was $216 for the year. The average cost per child under the orphan-subsidy plan has been $150 per year, with far better results. The difference lies in the "overhead" expense of the institution.

Six years ago the Atlanta home first. applied the orphan-subsidy principle with this new purpose in view. It returned a boy to his mother and agreed to pay her a stipulated sum every month toward his support. In all instances but one the method has worked out admirably and is a permanent solution. No motherless children or parentless children yet have been cared for, but the home intends to extend the subsidy to them. No experimenting is done. Every step is taken. carefully and after much deliberation, for the board of trustees is very conservative. The amount of subsidy varies to accord with the child's circumstances and station. It varies, too, with the number of children in a family, being less proportionately for two than for one. As the family becomes less dependent, the subsidy is reduced.

By this new method, home and family are not disrupted, for the children are left in the care of their natural guardian; children under five years of age are subsidized, as well as older children; the responsibility of the institution ends when depen

dence ends; and a minimum of overhead expense permits a wider use of funds.

Eventually, the managers of this institution intend that it shall be diminished in scope and quarters to nothing more than a receiving station for new orphans and to a home for the very few children who have no kin at all and are not attractive enough to be welcomed in other families.

The loveless routine of most orphanages has been called "the curse of institutionalism." This plan of the Hebrew Orphans' Home, if it continue to succeed, will transform the lives of thousands of children and mothers.

ANCIENT CUSTOMS IN COLLEGES HE social life of our colleges, particularly the life at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, has lately been much in public discussion. Mr. Wilson, when president of Princeton, was the centre of a fine struggle for democracy and scholarship. President Lowell, at Harvard, has quietly been making many changes with the same ends in view. Yale, the sophomore class precipitated a revolt against the oligarchy formed by the members of the three senior societies.

A college course is four years, and a practice can become an old and sacred tradition of many generations in less than a generation of the outside world. The sanctity of custom is strong to the college man, particularly in those colleges where undergraduate sentiment looks upon criticism of anything that bears the college name as disloyalty. Moreover, a healthy revolt against ancient absurdities has hardly the time to succeed before the revolters have passed their four years and are gone into the world.

Once in a while, as recently at Yale, an insurgent cause will gain confidence enough to demand a change, but usually "ancient custom" rules supreme. With this situation among the students it is necessary for the authorities to give every encouragement to any initiative and constructive imagination that may come up among the students in the management of their lives in college; to encourage every undergraduate to find out what kind of a place he is

in and to use his own brains and character in determining his ways, in other words to encourage him to be a man with some training in meeting new situations. It is a very happy sign of the times that such a tendency is in sight in many parts of the American college world.

and the ballot has been so simplified that there will be little danger of the voters confusing the issue.

An additional purpose in putting the commission government in Los Angeles County, which may also be characteristic elsewhere, is the desire to get county "home rule," to free the county from rigid

A COUNTY COMMISSION GOVERN- adherence to general state laws that have

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SHORT ballot and a simple and responsible government are hopeful political tendencies. There are

two or three cities with managers and two or three hundred with commission form of government. Eleven governors this spring urged the principles of the short ballot in their annual messages, and the Governor of Kansas believes that "states as well as cities should be ruled by commission."

In the meanwhile in the counties, a most important but somewhat neglected field of government, the new idea has taken hold. On June 2nd last, Los Angeles County, Cal., took advantage of a recent amendment to the state constitution that permits counties to try the simplified form of government. It leaves only three officers besides the supervisors to be elected: the sheriff, the district attorney, and the assessor. The supervisors appoint the other eight county officers from the eligible civil service list. The supervisors can, also, have as many or as few deputies, clerks, janitors, and the like as the county's business requires, instead of a number fixed by the legislature, as had been the case formerly.

The whole machinery that carries on the county affairs is not only given a chance to be pliable and elastic but it is at the same time greatly reduced and simplified. For example, formerly the sheriff and the constables were independent of each other, and as their duties overlapped they were in constant conflict. Now the constables are ex officio deputy sheriffs.

All the authority is in the hands of the supervisors and all the responsibility is upon them. The people can tell whom to praise and whom to blame, whom to defeat at the polls and whom to reëlect;

been framed at the distant capital.

The operation of the provision for a county road commissioner will be watched everywhere with great interest, for the method of road construction and maintenance, now universal in the Western states, by supervisorial districts and under the direction of the several supervisors, is a clumsy confusion of legislative and adminstrative functions that has had lamentable results upon rural highways.

Los Angeles County has entered hopefully upon a most interesting experiment that may very possibly be as important a contribution to democratic government as the commission plan has already proved itself to be in the cities.

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A SURVEY OF OUR ERA

HE Rt. Hon. James Bryce, late ambassador to the United States, world-traveler and historian, recently wrote a brief survey of our era that you will find it hard to match in cosmic grasp of world forces and in graphic power of phrase. It was a few paragraphs of his written address, read (in his absence) before the International Congress of Historical Studies, in London:

What is it that the traveler sees to-day in India, in Africa, in the two Americas, in Australasia, and the isles of the Pacific? He sees the smaller, weaker, and more backward races changing or vanishing under the impact of civilized man; their languages disappearing; their religious beliefs withering; their tribal organizations dissolving; their customs fading slowly away, first from use and then from

memory.

From the blending of others with immigrants streaming in, a hybrid race is growing up, in which, as in the case of the mixture of Chinese with the natives of Tahiti and Hawaii, the stronger and more civilized element seems fated to predominate. In other cases, people

too large and powerful to lose their individuality are nevertheless beginning to be so affected by European influences as to find themselves passing into a new circle of ideas and a new set of institutions. Change is everywhere, and the process of change is so rapid that the past will soon be forgotten. It is a past the like of which can never recur. Ethnologists, philologists, and students of folklore are at work recording those expiring forms of speech and embodiments in custom of primitive human thought; and not a moment should be lost in saving the precious relics.

There is one other aspect of the present age of the world that has a profound and novel meaning for the historian. The world is becoming one in an altogether new sense. More than four centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the European races have now gained dominion over nearly the whole of the earth. The last great step in that process was the partition of Africa between three European Powers a little more than twenty years ago.

Now, almost every part of the earth's surface, except the territories of China and Japan, is either owned or controlled by five or six European races. Eight Great Powers sway the political destinies of the globe, and there are only two other countries that can be thought of as likely to enter after a while into the rank of Great Powers. Similarly, a few European tongues have overspread all the Continents, except Asia, and even there it seems probable that those few European tongues will before long be learned and used by the educated classes in such wise as to bring those classes into touch with European ideas. It is likely that by 2000 A. D. more than nine tenths of the human race will be speaking less than twenty languages.

Already there are practically only four great religions in the world. Within a century the minor religions may be gone; and possibly only three great faiths will remain, with such accelerated swiftness does change now move. Those things which are already strong are growing stronger; those already weak grow weaker and are ready to vanish away. Thus, as the earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at their disposal, and as the larger human groups absorb or assimilate the smaller, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought in each of its regions become more closely interwoven with those of every other. Finance, even more than politics, has now made the world one community, and finance is more closely interwoven with politics than ever before.

World history is tending to become one history, the history no longer of many different races of mankind occasionally affecting one another's fortunes, but the history of mankind as a whole, the fortunes of each branch henceforth bound up with those of the others. In these conditions, the historian of the future will need an amplitude of conception and a power of grouping his figures like that of Tintoretto or Michael Angelo, if he is to handle so vast a canvas.

A LESSON IN INVESTMENTS

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ALF a dozen industrial securities that were floated during the last few years have dwindled in price from 25 to 75 per cent., and there has been a great deal of uneasiness and distrust in Wall Street as a result of this spectacular decline.

Ten years ago, the same thing happened, but on a much bigger scale. At that time, for example, the stock of the United States Steel Corporation dropped to about $8 a share, cut its dividend, and carried misfortune and distrust to the homes of thousands of people who had bought it as an investment security. The present episode is only a smaller repetition of the same phenomenon. But with this difference: The great holding companies of the last decade were floated in the midst of a widespread financial enthusiasm, and their stocks were carried away by the general public and treasured as investment securities until the collapse taught again the old grim lesson that water will run downhill. In this more recent episode the public temper was more critical. Investors had to be coaxed into buying the modern industrial stocks, and evidence is still lacking that any large part of the issues that have had such spectacular declines was held by the general public. Instead, the bankers who floated these stocks sold them mostly to Wall Street people little pools of bankers, brokers, dealers, and business men who are accustomed to take speculative risks. Possibly no great harm has been done, therefore, and if the ger eral investment public has learned again the lesson not to play with speculative "pets" in the stock market, they have bought their knowledge very cheaply indeed.

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AN ARCHITECT'S "INVESTMENT"

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IN STOCKS

NE day, about seven years ago, a well-to-do architect of Paris found in his mail a prospectus which gave rise to an investment experience somewhat out of the ordinary.

It was a prospectus, written after the fashion of such documents, setting forth the details of the formation of a cold storage warehouse concern in New York, and offering stock participation in the enterprise on liberal terms.

The architect read the description carefully and critically in the light of his technical training and became impressed with the apparent plausibility of the scheme. The company was to be modestly capitalized at less than $2,000,000 - with $850,000 preferred and about $1,000,000 common stock, and the preferred could be had at par, with an equal amount of common thrown in as a bonus.

According to the estimates of the promoter a man named Bartlett, who was fairly well known in foreign banking circles -the annual net revenues, when the business of the company got under way, would amount approximately to $325,000. Out of this would have to come, the promoter explained, the interest on a proposed mortgage for $1,000,000, but there would still remain enough to pay the 6 per cent. dividends on the preferred stock, and more than 20 per cent. on the common. Therefore, the terms on which the architect could get in, if he were quick to take advantage of the opportunity, would give him a 26 per cent. investment.

As every experienced investor knows, those figures should have served to put the Frenchman on his guard. But he was either credulous or venturesome, and upon receiving additional assurances that he stood no chance to lose, he invested $5,000 of his own money, and got a friend to put in $20,000.

For a while, things apparently went along to everybody's satisfaction. Fre

quent reports were made from New York on the progress of the stock selling campaign, and finally a circular was issued, saying that the property had been purchased and that before very long actual construction work would be begun. Then, suddenly, information ceased to be forthcoming. The architect and his friend began to worry and, after spending a good deal of time and money in investigating, they discovered they had been duped.

Up to this point in the story of the architect there is nothing to distinguish his experience from that of ignorant investors everywhere, who persist blindly in putting money into enterprises which proper analysis would quickly show to have little, if any, chance of ever getting beyond the prospectus stage. But the Frenchman did not consider this incident closed, as most such incidents are when the investment is found to have vanished into thin air. He told his troubles to his lawyer, and the lawyer, after making inquiry about the men whose names had appeared in the list of directors of the "paper" company, advised that there was a good chance of forcing the restitution of the money paid for the stock. In due time, action was begun in the New York courts, and only a few weeks ago the highest tribunal in the state gave a decision in favor of both complaining investors, the architect and his friend.

At the time of writing this story, it is not a matter of record whether the money has actually been refunded; nor is there any evidence to show that the two investors may not have to content themselves merely with their legal "judgment." But that is not the most important point.

After reaching the decision that the investors had been inveigled into buying the stock by false and fraudulent statements, contained in the company's prospectus, the court refused to listen to the pleas of the directors that they had had no knowledge of such statements, and held

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