STUDY FOR THE WEEK

I

"They build the roadway over which the Pullman car runs, but they never ride in it; they cut the lumber that goes into mansions, but they live in vermin-infected shacks in the woods, and in ten-cent lodging houses in the city; they gather the wheat that nourishes the nation, but they waste away into nameless graves from under-nourishment, exposure, and vice; they harvest the ice that cools the sick child in our homes, but they have no family of their own." So writes an American minister of our wandering seasonal labor group. How much better off are they than a similar group described by an ancient poet?

They go about naked without clothing,
And being hungry they carry the sheaves.

They make oil within the walls of these men ;
They tread their winepresses, and suffer thirst.
From out of the populous city men groan,

And the soul of the wounded crieth out.-Job 24:

I0-12.

"How many of you men have ever been married?" asked a minister who houses every winter three hundred homeless seasonal laborers. Less than ten hands went up. "Why not?" The most intelligent man answered as he pulled out a little note-book: "I have kept a record," said he, "of my income and expenses for the last three years. I have never made four hundred dollars in any year. If I should marry a woman, it would mean that when the kids began to come she would have to go out to the wash-tub. I won't ask any woman to do that." More tragic still is the portion of working women. "You must go to work," said a prosperous business man to the striking garment worker, an immigrant girl. "The community will not support you. If you want to live you must work." "I live not much on forty-nine cent a day," was the answer. "Why are you getting up so early?" said the mother to the daughter in the tenement. "It's not time to go to the mill

yet." "I'm not going today; I'm going to work for Votes for Women. It's not for me; it's for Maggie in there (the thirteen-year-old sister who was asleep). Look at me-I've been three years in the mill. Will any man want me now? I want things to be different for her."

In the rocks along the cliff shores of the Upper Yangtze River are thousands of grooves worn deep in the solid stone made by the friction of bamboo ropes during long centuries as boats have been dragged up the cruel rapids by man power. They are monuments to conditions of labor untouched by Christian ideals in a non-Christian land.

And now comes the exploitation of modern industry. "Each evening along the streets near the mills in Shanghai," reports Robert E. Speer, "two long processions move, the women and the children on their way to the mills, and the women and the children on their way home. It is a tragic company, for the mills run night and day, week-day and Sunday, in two long twelve-hour shifts. Children of eight and ten are trudging along with their rice bowls in their hands, and many of the women with them tramp stiffly on their bound and hampered feet. All day and all night long the women sit by the looms and the children stand before the spindles-little wizened creatures, the threads of whose frail lives are being spun into the cotton, and the guilt of their blood pressed out into the cloth."

If these pictures seem overdrawn, make one for yourself out of the industrial facts to which you have access. When the strength of the factory girl is exhausted by the speedingup process, does she get the same care as the woman who breaks down in the "higher" pursuits? Who cares for the homeless and unemployed working woman? Compare fairly the conditions of life and labor in your own community for the two groups of workers-the business and professional groups and those who do the so-called common labor. Are we satisfied with the contrast? Are we ready to sympathize effectively with the efforts of the workers to protect themselves? After all, in fairness, should not those doing the most dis

tasteful and hardest work receive the higher pay and have the shorter hours?

Conditions among laborers in every part of America, in every part of the world concern us, for multitudes of these workers are, in a very real sense, our employes. We all use the help of masses of laborers: the garment-makers of New York City, the silk weavers of Japan, the rubber porters of Africa, the coffee cultivators of Brazil and the tea pluckers of India and Ceylon. Are we Christian enough to want justice for the workers everywhere?

II

The first expression of the sacredness of personality in the world of work is to give to those who do the common labor the same chance to live as all others. The wives of the Breton fishermen have a saying: "The sea is hungry, we must bear many sons." But the mine and the factory have been just as hungry for the lives of the workers. Appalled by the slaughter of industry, the Western nations have been taking steps to check it. Our nation has begun by safeguarding machinery and making factories more healthy; by its "Safety First" movement, educating both employers and careless work

men.

The risk of preventable accidents, however, is only a small part of the worker's extra hazard. He is constantly exposed to occupational diseases. There are over fifty-seven distinct trade poisons lurking in modern industry to destroy the life and health of its workers. The bad air diseases which claim so large a part of our death rate take their heaviest toll from industrial workers in the dust trades. The dust of the coal mine and the emery wheel, the lint of the cotton mill, the stale air of the tenement, feed upon the lungs of the workers and never go hungry. "Government statistics show," says Dr. Sidney Gulick, "that out of every one hundred girls to enter upon factory work in Japan, twenty-three die within one year of their return to their homes, and of these fifty per cent die of tuberculosis." The pathologists class the largest pro

portion of our present diseases as misery diseases, due to improper conditions of life and labor. From this group the manual workers suffer much more heavily than the rest of the population. Their under-nourished bodies, their ignorance of personal hygiene, make them easy victims to the "pestilence that wasteth at noon-day."

Sum up the extra hazard of the industrial worker from all causes, and it means that he may expect to live only a trifle more than half the average life of the worker in intellectual pursuits. All of us must play the game with death, but when we send ignorant men and women out into modern industry to face death from concealed risks of which they are ignorant, we are forcing them to play the game with death after the dice have been loaded against them. "Thou shalt not kill" is one of the first expressions of religion in community life. Is it not just as binding on the indirect, preventable killings of an industrial civilization as on the primitive blood-lust of the ancient Orient? How does it challenge Christian pioneering in both medical science and industrial management?

III

In the winter of 1913-14 great throngs of unemployed men hammered at the conscience of the nation. The people awoke to the fact that those who want work and cannot find it are a tragic reality in our social order. Statesmen, industrial leaders, and preachers declared that unemployment must be faced and solved. In two years prosperity returned and the unemployed were immediately forgotten. Yet during the regular course of industry there is a permanent fringe of unemployment around every trade and in every community. The tragic figure of the man or woman who wants work and cannot find it is always with us. The seasonal trades continually turn their workers adrift. The pressure of speed in modern efficiency schemes pushes the dead-line back nearer to the beginning of the workers' career. "No man over thirtyfive need apply" is a constantly increasing order, and the further down in the scale of work we go, the less secure is

a man's grip upon his employment. The lower the wage, the less able he is to provide against unemployment, the more likely he is to have to endure it.

Morality sags under unemployment. The saloon becomes more attractive than the dirty and complaining home. What is at first "the bitter bread of charity” comes to be eaten with contentment. No man looks the world in the face with independence when he knows not where his next meal is coming from. The first move of the Christian conscience is to supply relief. But to give men charity when they want work soon brings demoralization. It makes human derelicts.

Valuable programs of public work for the unemployed have been worked out in Europe. But the real solution of the problem lies in the reorganization of industry for the production of men and not simply the making of goods. When industry is humanized, it will be seen to be the maintenance of the whole population steadily at work for the benefit of the whole community.

IV

Modern science has discovered that over-work is just as dangerous as under-work. There is no more brilliant chapter in recent medical and industrial research than that which deals with the results of fatigue. Because it makes for disease and death by lowering vitality and lessening resistance power, the physicians are fighting it. Because of its economic loss, the managers of industry are overcoming it. Because the community has traced its results in depleted motherhood, in sterility, in stunted children, short-hour laws for women have been passed. The moral and spiritual effects of fatigue must be reckoned with by all who seek to Christianize the community. The studies of our twelve-hour industries prove that the exhaustion of over-work is followed by debauch. Fatigue lowers the resistance power of the moral nature to temptation, just as it lessens the resistance of the body to disease. The pressure of monotonous, exhausting industry upon girls is a far more powerful factor in leading to moral down