factories scattered over the country employers had made small, well-meaning attempts to better the conditions of their employees. There was no system.

Mr. Cyrus H. McCormick, of the International Harvester Company, was one of these employers, and it occurred to him that the right person, given absolute charge of the matter, could handle this "bettering" work far more successfully than he and his various superintendents, with their minds on other matters, could handle it. He said to Miss Beeks, "See what you can do to make the three hundred girls and five thousand men who work for us like to work for us." She didn't get her breath back for a few seconds. Then, "I'll begin on the girls," she said.

The great harvesting machine company was installing a twine mill on its premises. and here the girls worked, making the twine used in binders. "She's a missionary," they whispered, as she walked through the mill. She was not one of them, they did not know her purpose, and they did not want her.

But she continued, making close observations and laying her plans quietly. She saw strange Lithuanian sausages, Islabs of dark Slovak bread, and uncouth Polack pickles emerging every noon from lunch-baskets. The first thing these girls needed was a hot, wholesome lunch. But Miss Beeks realized that the mere announcement of the opening of a lunchroom would meet with no response from girls not at all interested in their own welfare as the trained mind sees it.

She

Therefore she tried another way. announced a dinner and entertainment to be given the next Saturday night. All the girls came. They found a long room substantially furnished with good tables, chairs, and dishes. At the end of the room was a piano. The girls did not know that Miss Beeks had been racking her brain to spread the $1,500 that had been allowed her over all the needs of equipment, and that when only $50 was left she had tramped over Chicago to find a second-hand piano that could be bought for that sum -- for then, as now, dancing as a recreation for the worker was one of the first articles in her creed. There was

a dance that very night, after an excellent dinner, music, and a sleight-of-hand performance. formance. It was altogether the best time these girls had ever had. At the end, when they were in a mood to receive it, came the announcement that lunch would be served in that room every workday thereafter — and at such prices that everybody could afford it.

If anything was left to be accomplished by the hot soups, good stews, baked apples, and well-made gingerbread, that fifty-dollar piano did it The girls took to saving ten minutes after lunch for the dance. They discovered that the nourishing meal and brisk exercise put them in condition for the afternoon work. The lunch room was a success. Those in charge also made a discovery: Efficiency was being increased. At this point Miss Beeks screwed her courage to the point of tackling the five thousand men.

She was the first woman who had ever entered that vast shop, and the men resented her even more than the girls had. She tried in vain for awhile to reach these

murky, child-like natures. It was a queer little incident that turned the tide. She overheard, in the midst of foreign gabble, a remark that her rose was pretty. Instantly she took it from her buttonhole and handed it to the man. The human note was struck. She had their friendship, which is the first essential in welfare work.

"They're a grimy, lot. I wonder if they like to be grimy," she observed to a foreman.

"Oh, that's natural to them," he responded.

Miss Beeks still wondered. To find out, she installed a row of deep white basins, and plenty of soap and clean towels. "They'll go dirty, same as ever,"

the prophecy. But they didn't. They cleaned up!

Later, they showed their appreciation. of improved lockers. They took advantage of the entertainments, lectures, and the like, which she brought to the assembly room. They delighted in the Glee Club which she organized. They came with their families, ten thousand strong, to a picnic which she took forty miles into the country, and their alien voices sounded the

praises of the wonder-working Miss Beeks. They came to know her as a sympathetic visitor in trouble and sickness. And they came to have a new and more friendly attitude toward the employers who had made her work for them possible.

In the two years that she spent in the harvester factory she built the foundation of all her skill. She formulated the five sub-heads into which she divides welfare work, and which she used as her groundplan when Mr. Ralph M. Easley asked her to develop in the National Civic Federation a department of this work. Sanitation, recreation, education, housing, and provident funds she calls the subdivisions of welfare work, which she defines as "the improving of working and living conditions of employees by employers; it is applicable to stores, factories, mines, and railroads as well as to public institutions." Fundamentally, too, she insists that in promoting the work it must be recognized that the first essentials to the welfare of employees are steady work, an equitable wage, and reasonable hours of labor; but that employers have the further obligation to add to the comfort of their employees. And she believes that the beginning of all welfare work should be directed toward meeting the pressing necessities for the physical wellbeing of employees in their work-places.

As the Employers' Welfare Department of the Federation has gone on growing during the last decade, it has crystallized into one big movement the many small movements which were beginning over the United States. It has grown faster than anybody dreamed. It has brought together employers at conferences, so that they could talk over what they were doing along these lines, compare notes, get advice. It has educated employers both by conference and by stereopticon lectures, and by the maintenance of a bureau of advice through which plans, photographs, and literature are furnished. It takes especial pains to bring employers and welfare workers in touch with each other, to arouse emulation. "See what commodious shower baths Jones has," is the surest way to induce Smith to provide still more commodious ones. In going

over the various factories of an enormous electric lighting firm, Miss Beeks suggested to the owner: "Let your superintendents get together for a day and report. We'll send you slides showing what others have done. The doubting Thomases usually coöperate after seeing views. Yes, I know cost is always the first obstacle. But if a man doesn't appreciate the humanitarian standpoint, you can prove economy to him every time in increased efficiency and the greater permanence of employees through better health."

Her activity is prodigious. I spent one day in pursuit of a talk with her, and I know whereof I speak. We had just begun, in the morning, when a man from Ohio arrived. He was from a manufacturing plant there and she had promised to show him how one of the largest insurance companies in New York does it. "Come along," said Miss Beeks.

So I watched the conversion of the man from Ohio. from Ohio. He saw how much happier girls look when lunching in a light room instead of a dark one; how dismissing the men in groups of ten at intervals of two minutes permits them to pass quietly along the corridor without congesting it: how a little emergency hospital with a doctor and a trained nurse and a few cots can nip slight illness in the bud and save petty accidents from becoming serious; she wasn't half through with him yet, and already he was converted.

"Only don't give your employees their lunch, as this firm does," she said, smiling at the great insurance man who conducted us. "It's paternalistic. I'm glad the eye clinic is to offer lenses ground at cost, not free. That's the self-respecting basis for the worker."

It was time for our own lunch. After it, some young welfare workers from neighboring cities arrived for advice. Miss Beeks and I had not talked yet. Telephone calls interrupted us all after

A doctor called up to reply to an inquiry she had made concerning acid poisoning; an architect was ready to take up with her the plans for employees' quarters in a new department store. More calls; suddenly she discovered that it was just time to hurry to her class at the

from a metal, perhaps it is a fine vegetable fibre, as in the twine mill.

New York York University in Washington Washington Square - half a hundred young students in the commercial school awaited her, eager to learn about workmen's compensation, the meaning of trade agreements, the methods of combating industrial poisoning.

"This evening we can talk," I called after her.

"Yes, about ten, after the dinner," she replied. It was to be a gathering of forty employers to discuss ways and means. As usual, she was the only woman present. By the time she had made these forty employers see that it would be not only humane but also good economy in the end to fence machinery, to cover gears, to guard the saws, it was 11.25.

I met her. "If you're not obliged to turn in for a half-hour" I began.

"To turn in!" she cried. "I've got only thirty-five minutes to make the train!" And in that thirty-five minutes I saw her crowd what garments she could into a suit case, hurry into a taxicab, dash to the station, and wave a midnight good-bye. Next morning she would she would waken in another city to be conducted to a huge new office building which was making history by installing welfare work for the employees of its tenants. There were to be rest rooms, lunch rooms, entertainments, and so on, for the army of clerks and stenographers in many offices, and Miss Beeks had been asked to look over the arrangements before they were completed.

Go with her on one of these expeditions and watch her keen eye summarize conditions, never missing a point. It does not take her long. No two of her investigations are alike, but she knows what to look for. For instance, she must have entered a paper mill, or a brass foundry, or a knitted woollen mill for the first time, but what she knew of other industries taught her what to look for in these. In all manufacturing there are only about a score of dangers - from burning, from cutting, from acid, and so on. She knows many of the things a doctor knows. Her eye scours the shops for hints of these dangers. "Are there dust consumers?" she asks at once. Perhaps the dust is

She looks for methods of removing gases, of ventilating, of safeguarding against accident. Does the industry require superheating, as in the watch factory, where girls bake the faces of the watches before furnaces whose interior heat is 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit? Then humidify the air through forced ventilation. Are there shower baths and drying rooms for any molders or stationary firemen employed? There ought to be. How about pure drinking water about the lighting of work-places-about laundries for men's overalls and women's uniforms? How about seats for women, and elevators for their use? They ought not to climb long flights of stairs. "Don't say that the elevator can't handle so many," Miss Beeks insists. It's all a matter of thinking the matter out. Your girls all arrive at seven, you say. Why? Can the pasters paste until the folders have folded? Certainly not. Now let the folders arrive at seven, the pasters at seven-ten, and so on, dismissing at night at the same intervals. The advice of an architect can be called in to help plan the entrances and exits, so that there shall be no time lost by conflicting crowds — but, for that matter, Miss Beeks knows many of the things that expert architectural advisers know, and there is no danger of her planning an entrance, capacity so many persons abreast, and asking it to admit twice as many persons per minute as a builder's estimate will admit; nor will she make the amateur's mistake of counting that more persons per minute can be discharged going downstairs than upstairs, when the exact reverse is true. Here she observes that a bad odor comes from phosphorus in another room, caused by a painting machine; it should be shut off. Attractive white bowls, instead of those few dingy sinks, would encourage cleanliness, she tactfully suggests; you cannot make her believe that the worker does not want to be clean, since a certain wheat-food factory found its wash basin pipes stopped and, upon investigation, found that the girls had been using the rough wheat fibre in place of nail brushes.

You say that your girls loiter in the halls. Give them a brief but complete rest period and see whether loitering is not replaced by brisk work.. All this with infinite tact; there is no use antagonizing an employer who will want to do better, once he is made to understand.

Employers do welcome better conditions she believes that firmly. She finds them humanitarian and willing, once they are awakened. Of course, a few are cruel and narrow; but she can show you sunny rest rooms and libraries in department stores, athletic fields for factory hands, excellent sanitation in cotton mills. And so, suavely assuming the employer's willingness, she goes about suggesting still greater benefits maybe a roof garden would be feasible, or a bowling alley, or a rest house for trainmen. Are there arrangements for wage earners' insurance? Do they include compensation for victims of industrial accidents? Retirement funds, or old age pensions? Are there plans for lending money in times of stress?

These are a very few of the multitudinous points for which Miss Beeks's gray eyes go ferreting through a Southern cotton mill or a Northern shop or altogether underground, for her investigations of the anthracite mines she reckons the biggest job she has ever undertaken, and her recommendations, the result of long study, are now in the hands of the leading mine operators of all the vast anthracite region, who have given her their support and assistance.

Equipped for long, perilous underground journeys, she took her eyes and her camera miles into the earth, adding to the risk by her flash-light. She spent weeks in this way, undergoing every hardship; she clambered all day where there was barely foothold, prowled in darkness, in wetness; ate in poverty-stricken cabins, slept where luck offered a pillow. She found sanitation in need of improvement; and she asked, too, that drinking water be looked to in many a mining community where the mines themselves had polluted it. She quoted the facts of the Cherry disaster and asked why every mine had not a thorough fire drill? She saw the need of education as she came to study

the children of the coal world; teach the breaker boys hygiene in simple terms she suggested, and why not organize cooking classes for miners' daughters? She advocated the building of homes by the mine operators, and more facilities for recreation. Visiting nurses could work wonders in the families of these people, they could teach mothers how to care for babies, how to make their homes sanitary. And if there were changing houses everywhere for the miners; and if two men were placed in every engine room, so that if an operator should faint or die at his post there would be some one to take his place in hoisting; and if a general plan for safeguarding were adopted including the appointment of a safety committee composed of an engineer from every mine to interchange experiences then, said Miss Beeks, let's see what would happen. The operator who installed fine shower baths for his mules did a humane act, she observed; but how glad some of the men would be to be as fortunate as mules! All this stands for weeks, months, of close study, that she might formulate a plan that should be feasible, not visionary.

The Government at Washington se lected Miss Beeks to look over Panama at the time employees were leaving almost as fast as they could be brought there. She traveled for several weeks about the Isthmus, and her acquaintances ranged from the highest officials to the European laborers. How could the la borers be happy, she inquired, in dormitories of 60 to 84 cots and less air space than tenement laws require? WhY shouldn't they have pneumonia when they were without blankets? Why should families like to live in a camp where there were no schools for the children? Why not organize clubs to make the women content? Above all-that "all" ircluded a long list of “Do's" and "Don't's - above all, give the men drying rooms for wet garments! The lack of them was murderous! And the achievement of the drying rooms, apparently a minor deta to the uninitiated, she counts the greate: of all her Panama experience, for it mearthe saving not only of health, but numberless lives as well.

T

BY

HE world's equipment for ocean transportation is now increasing at a more rapid pace than at any time since men first began to go down to the sea in ships. Since June, 1909, Lloyd's Register of Shipping shows an almost uninterrupted succession of advances in the amount of gross tonnage under construction in Great Britain. In the second quarter of 1911 all previous records for the United Kingdom were surpassed, the total reported being considerably more than 1,450,000 tons. Then came a quarter year of slight recession, but after that the rate of production Increased even more rapidly than before, and has continued to do so without a single interruption to the present time. The record for the first quarter of 1913 showed that, excluding warships, there were 563 vessels of 2,063,694 tons gross register then under construction in British shipyards, an

increase of 94,000 tons over the first quarter, and 377,000 tons more than were under construction at the close of the corresponding quarter the year before. Though the final statistics for the second quarter of this year are not available as this article is going to press, preliminary returns indicate that there will be another substantial increase. This continuous record of progress for a period of forty-eight months is so noteworthy that a diagram graphically illustrating it is shown on page 465.

This unprecedented increase in shipbuilding is reflected in the returns from every part of the world. According to Lloyd's Annual Summary of Shipbuilding, the world's output of new tonnage, exclusive of warships, last year was 1,719 vessels of 2,901,769 tons gross. Of this total the United Kingdom supplied 1,738,514 tons — a tonnage only twice