desired for townsite speculation, and strategic points controlling valuable rights of way. This practice has been stopped in the National Forests and prob ably the chief benefit is felt by the min ing industry itself. Besides its inducements to homesteaders and miners the National Forests welcome the sheep and cattle men with their flocks and herds. 1 Every year nearly 10,000,000 sheep, cattle, and hogs find feed in the forests. In many portions of the Western forests nutritious grasses grow plentifully among the trees and in the parks, meadows, and other openings. This grass is utilized under a system of regulated grazing. Every settler has a few animals which run on the forests without charge or permit, and in addition grazing permits are issued to more than 25,000 stock owners for a nominal fee. The regulation of the use of the forage has produced very quick results in the improvement in the condition of the range. In many places. overgrazing had reduced the carrying capacity for stock to less than 50 per cent. of the normal, and it was seriously interfering with the reproduction of the forest. In some sections where cloudbursts occur from time to time, over-grazing has resulted in serious erosion and increased flood damage which would have been checked under normal conditions of surface cover. By the right use of the grass, forest growth and stock-grazing now go hand in hand; the carrying capacity for stock is increasing and the stock comes off the mountains in better condition than formerly. Under public control of the range the old sheep and cattle wars have been stopped, monopoly is prevented, and the small man is protected against unfair competition. The introduction, through the Government's efforts, of improved methods of handling stock, the development of water supplies, the construction of drift fences, the extermination of rodents which injure the range, and of wolves, coyotes, bears, mountain lions, and other predatory animals, has enormously aided. those who use the National Forest forage. Already there is a sharp contrast in the condition of the forest range and those areas outside which are still unregulated 1 and subject to constant abuse. It is a matter of vital public interest that the open ranges be brought under a similar system of control in order to maintain the supply of meat for the country's needs. The lumbermen, homesteaders, miners, and stockmen all benefit from the forests directly. The public benefits from their activities and from the improvement and maintenance of the Nation's timber supply. This, of course, is the primary object of the Service. But this brings with it a hardly less important benefit to the public: Practically all the important rivers and streams of the West: rise in the National Forests. Water from the forests supplies more than : 1,200 irrigation projects and more than 300 water-power projects. Nearly 1,200 cities and towns derive their domestic supply of water from the forests. and this number will constantly increase. This public service is automatically furnished by ther very existence of the forests under: proper protection. only do they conserve the waters so vital to life and industry, but they are more and more coming to be used as a playground of the public, just as are the national parks. Already at least a half million people use the National Forests for recreation during the summer months. 3 Not The National Forests are standing proof that tree conservation is the right use of our resources and not their withdrawal from use, for with increasing use under proper regulation now the forests are im proving and increasing in value and usefulness for the future. It would seem as if forestry ought not to be a subject of controversy. Yet the fight over conservation has centred very largely about the National Forests and the Federal Forest Service. There are still many persons who do not believe that the Nation should continue to own the public forests but should distribute them among private owners as was being done with great rapidity at the time of the establishment of the National Forests. The present system of administration of the National Forests was created eight years ago. The success of this system is no longer in doubt. The country can judge by the results which the Service has achieved. IMMIGRANTS WHO HAVE NOT SENSE ENOUGH TO KEEP WELL OR TO KEEP OUT OF ACCIDENTS · - WHAT THEY COST THEIR EMPLOYERS A AND WHAT THEY MEAN TO THE NATION BY ARNO DOSCH NEW aspect of the immigration problem is opened by some remarkable facts that recent industrial investigations have brought to light. These investigations seem to prove two startling propositions: (1) That the immigrants who now come to this country in the largest numbers are not being assimilated but are being “lumped" in undigested foreign quarters at the great centres of industry. (2) That "cheap foreign labor" is not cheap, even to the manufacturers who have eagerly encouraged the importation of unskilled foreigners to do the "muckers'" work. This class of eastern European peasant lacks the intelligence and initiative either to avoid the ordinary dangers of rough labor or to keep in efficient health; and their employers have to pay the bills for teaching them. Of 40 cases of lead-poisoning found in the lead mills of New York City last year by the partial survey of the Factory Investigating Commission, the disease. had in 38 cases attacked men of foreign birth. Of these, 29 were immigrants from eastern Europe. Considering the large recent Slavish immigration, this may not at first glance seem remarkable, but it takes on its real significance when it is understood that half the employees of the mills are of American birth and have worked in the lead industries for years. Among them occurred only onetwentieth of the cases of lead-poisoning. The explanation for this disparity is significant. The Americans know how to take care of themselves. Most important of all, they wash their hands and faces when they stop work. The immigrants from eastern Europe do not, unless some one stands over them and makes them do it. As the dangerous trades in this country are rapidly falling into the hands of immigrants of this type, it is easy to see why industrial poisoning, and industrial disease in general, presents a pressing national problem. The victims are chiefly among the most ignorant and helpless people. The danger is there for the others, but they usually have sufficient initiative to escape it. Take lead-poisoning, which we hear most about. Twenty years ago in the lead mills the work was far more dangerous than it is to-day, but the amount of lead-poisoning was apparently less. This was because, so the old lead workers say, the class of men formerly employed understood the danger and took precautions to escape it. These men were western Europeans or Americans. Negroes also did much of the dangerous work in some of the old mills and were looked upon as practically immune because they could see the white poisonous flecks on their dark skins and wash them off. I have cited the case of lead-poisoning because it is the least complicated of industrial diseases. It finds its victims among otherwise healthy men in the prime of life. But the same racial disparity holds true in all the dangerous trades. Those who are the worst sufferers from all industrial diseases in this country are immigrants from eastern Europe. If it were not for the difficulty of making them look out for themselves, industrial disease would be very much easier to handle. This gives the problem a new angle from which it has not previously been considered. It shows that, without letting up in the fight for better preventive measures, the immigration aspect must not be neglected. In this respect an incident that occurred in a Brooklyn lead mill is illuminating. The workmen in this mill are largely recent Slavish immigrants and, in spite of many admirable precautionary measures, the mill has had an unusual number of lead-poisoning cases. The victims become stevedores on near-by wharves and work when they can. The condition of many of these men is pitiful, but there is little sympathy to be gained for them around the lead works. Perhaps this story will explain. A foreman in the works discovered one day that a Slav workman who had been with him several months was famished. Inquiry brought out the fact that on the last pay-day, as he left the works with his fellow countrymen, he had been seized by three neighborhood hoodlums and robbed. Several dozen other Slavs had seen him robbed, but none had interfered. He was merely the latest of a long line of victims. This had been going on for weeks. To stop the practice the American foreman, an Irish foreman, and the American engineer dressed themselves like "hunkies" on the next pay-day and went up the street with the workmen. At a convenient spot the three hoodlums selected a victim and were about to rob him when the two foremen and the engineer fell out of line and attacked them. The fight lasted several minutes before the hoodlums were driven off, but the workmen offered their protectors no assistance. Even the man whom they had saved from being robbed stood dumbly by. So it is easy to see why the "leaded" stevedores on the Brooklyn docks receive so little sympathy. They have only the contempt of their former foremen, and their own countrymen pass them by indifferently. The foremen who come in closest contact with these people do not understand that they are just emerging from serfdom, that they have become so inured to bad treatment by superior power and have had to stand by through so many generations while their fellows were mistreated that they cannot be expected to stand up and fight for either themselves or ther friends. The Poles, in particular, have had their nation broken up and put under the iron rule of foreign emperors. Ther spirit has been all but crushed out of ther They cannot regain it in a day. And yet half a million of these pe pie are entering the United States every year to be mistreated and exploited, to become helpless victims of industrial accident and industrial disease. If they come through their experience and develop into Amen can citizens it is through no effort of their own, but through the enlightened selfinterest of their employers. Comparatively few of these people ever get more than a glimmering of American ideals. It is almost too much to expect that they should. Their children are quick to learn, but they, children themselves, are slow to rise. The fact that they are in this country means nothing in itself. A Slav village in northern Michigan can be just as benighted as it was in Roumania. Its people have to be made to eat right and sleep right. Mothers must be taught the simplest measures for protecting the health of their babies. Grown men have to be forced to wash their hands to prevent them from poisoning themselves. Welfare work of this kind can be done, and is being done. But it cannot be done for half a million of these people a year. The task is too great. The result is that the American people are not absorbing these immigrants from eastern Europe. To To borrow a figure from cookery, they are lumping. They have lumped in the mines, in the steel mills, in all the dangerous trades. And the lumps grow larger by half a million a year. Whole sections of the United States have become essentially foreign. The melting-pot is not assimilating the raw material that is being dumped into it. In these unassimilated lumps the individuals are forever shifting, though the lumps remain hopelessly un-American. Dr. Alice Hamilton, who surveyed the lead industries for the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases, found that from 10 to 40 per cent. changed their employers every pay-day. Usually they went to other mills for similar or equally dangerous work. One lead mill with a pay-roll of eighty had had five hundred men in its employ during the year. There was no knowing how many of these men became lead-poisoned. There was hardly an opportunity to teach them care. Many of them went from one lead mill to another and became "leaded" before any symptoms were discovered. It frequently happens in the lead industries that one of these men who has been discharged for his own good because he has shown early symptoms of lead poisoning has gone on to the next mill without explaining why he was discharged from the last one, and, when discovered there to be a lead victim, has sought employment at the third or fourth mill until hopelessly poisoned. To discharge a man when lead-poisoning begins to show on him may not be the right way to meet the difficulty, but it is at least better than to keep him at work that will soon paralyze him. He accepts his fate with animal-like resignation, ignores the warnings of the company's doctor, and heads straight for the next lead mill. He does it because he does not know what else to do. There is no advantage in either blaming or pitying him. He belongs to one of the great unassimilated lumps in American life. The work of philanthropic surveys, examinations into the condition of workmen by large corporations, and, particularly, the spread of welfare work has shown the urgent necessity for dissolving these lumps before they get any larger. It means restriction of immigration down to the point where it will not lump. Two forces oppose this large employers of common labor and all those who, believing that liberty should be denied none, offer strong sentimental objections to restriction in any form. But the country as a whole is waking to the fact that immigrants from eastern Europe and southern Europe must for their own protection be admitted into this country in smaller numbers. This is shown in the intelligent support given the bill introduced into Congress by Senator Dillingham restricting the annual immigration from any country to 10 per cent. of the number of the natives of that country already in the United States. This will affect only the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and, denying real liberty to no one, will help to prevent lumping. Those who offer sentimental objections do so because they do not understand the real condition. They do not know that these people are not enjoying the liberties of a free country. The best they get is paternalism, an enlightened sort of despotism. There is no blame attached to the people who practise this despotism. Indeed, they are only to be praised. They are doing the only work that is being done to prevent the lumps from degenerating into hopeless masses. Having lured these peasants from the remote corners of Europe and huddled them in rough camps, their employers have soon discovered that, socially speaking, they have laid and rotted. Filth, drunkenness, and disease have followed one another in rapid succession. So they have seized upon modern scientific welfare work, and the welfare workers, finding a slow but docile people to handle, have been delighted with their progress. Welfare workers, doctors, and visiting nurses are the kindly autocrats over millions of men and women in the mining camps and great industrial centres. Every bit of work they do is good, but it is paternalism. It is all done with company money, spent on the company's employees for the company's benefit. In towns like those of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which have advanced rapidly in welfare work, children are born into the world with the assistance of doctors paid by the company; they are baptized in churches built by the company and by ministers largely supported by the company; they go to company schools, they are kept clean by the company's nurse, they grow up to live in the company's houses, work for the company, and get their social life in club houses provided by the company. For the present it is necessary work and will have to be done in that same paternalistic way so long as the foreign immigration continues to lump. But it is not making independent American citizens. It is making a class of people used to control in all their every-day activities. They are not the basis of a self-governing republic. The answer of welfare workers to the charge of paternalism is that these people are not ready for democracy. They have to be led toward it gradually. Welfare workers look for signs of initiative as for the break of day. They cherish and repeat the stories of success. One of these is told by a doctor in the employ of the United States Steel Corporation in charge of the sanitary conditions and general health of a coal town in West Virginia. Finding a sick man in a hut with his family in a frightful state of filth and foul air, he removed the man to the hospital and kept him there a week. Some time later he visited the man again in the hut and was surprised to find it clean and wholesome. The man's Polish wife had visited him in the hospital and had had there a vision of cleanliness and sweetness that was entirely aside from her life's experience. She had been in America a number of years but the American ideal of cleanliness had never reached her before. No amount of good example, however, can lift some of these people from the degradation of centuries. Consider the tenements on the East Side in New York City where the bathtubs are used as receptacles for coal. Bathing is the most trying problem, especially in the dangerous trades where it is necessary. One lead manufacturer in Philadelphia pays his men twenty cents a bath and finds it a profitable investment in health and efficiency. The Chicago mill of the National Lead Company pays five cents a bath. At its Brooklyn mill the same concern has so arranged the lockers in which the men keep their street clothes and their working clothes that they can hardly pass from one to the other without getting a shower-bath, but it is not working very well. The men object on the point of modesty, and that old-world delicacy, which seems absurd to us, is counting its lead victims, too. This can all be changed. The Slav, the Greeks, and the southern Italians can all be made into American citizens if they are handled in sufficiently small quantities and have an opportunity to live among and associate with Americans or Europeans who have already become assimilated. But they are not having that chance now. The best they are getting is paternalism and, if kept up for any length of time, that is good for neither employer nor employee. Paternalism is dangerous. If the employer has power for good over his employees he has power for evil. It draws hard and fast lines between classes. It means industria aristocracy and a conscious working class that will eventually provide the raw material for just such revolutionary movements as the I. W. W. is now leading in this country. The most complete case of paternalism ever attempted in this country was the town of Pullman, and it failed. It is to be hoped that the paternal mining camps will also fail. Nor is there any slur in this. Every enlightened welfare worker looks forward to it. He wants to see his charges chafe under his autocracy. Until they do they will never be Americans. The chief difficulty in the way of restricting immigration lies in the need for common labor. The United States Steel Corporation could have used last year ten thousand more Slavonians than it was able to get. Every other big mining and milling concern is in the same predicament. But, from the national point of view, it is better that they should be. They are devoting their energies toward the production of raw material, much of which is shipped out of the country raw or in only the first stages of manufacture. The less raw material leaving the country the better. Common labor is used almost exclusively to handle it, so the less common labor the better we are off as a nation. Compare the industrial condition of the United States with that of Germany. The exports that leave our ports show only one fourth the skill and workmanship and consequent value of the exports that leave Germany. In Germany common labor is becoming steadily scarcer. In ten years, it is said, there will be not an untrained man in the German Empire. This is practically true to-day of Bavaria. Common labor is much less of a necessity |