صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

most of those to Japan he didn't avail himself of the customary time which diplomatic usage allowed him for the proper answer. He just tossed the answers off hastily, like any business man in the course of the day's work. This unwonted celerity has given a slight wedge to unkind critics, and it has been asserted, even in print, that Mr. Hughes has taken the bit of foreign affairs in his teeth and is running away with it. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Aside from his personal esteem for the President, Mr. Hughes has

[blocks in formation]

curred, it is practically certain that he would not bring that disagreement to an

issue.

The change in the Hughes psychology is most readily observed in his contacts with newspaper men. Some wag has said that now when he sees a newspaper man in the White House with a lawyer in his proper place as adviser he at last perceives the true merit of the press. It is more likely that political defeat, combined with reflection and financial independence, has broadened his view-point.

In any event, his old manner toward the press is gone. In those days he looked upon newspaper men as a cross between public nuisances and unapprehended criminals. Now his attitude toward them is patriarchal when they

need it and brotherly when they deserve it. In his daily talks with the Washington correspondents one feels that he appreciates their responsibilities, respects their intelligence, recognizes their function, and is willing patiently to become their teacher.

Which is as it should be, but which is not what it always has been.

The result is that on every hand one hears: "Nobody like him in the State Department since John Hay." He does not delay, he does not evade, he does not condescend, he does not orate, and, so far as one can see, he does not play politics, certainly not in the old-fashioned, petty sense. He found a terrific mess; he is grappling with it like a strong man unafraid, and he is in mighty good humor about it.

THE QUATRE-BRAS OF THE WORLD'S WATERLOO

A

CITY missionary found a lone woman in a little room in a narrow, ill-smelling street, took pity on her condition, and with great difficulty found a place for her in the outskirts of a village where was abundant employment for a skillful washerwoman. Two weeks later, making his rounds, he found Bridget back in her solitary chamber. "How is this?" he asked her, and received for reply, "Folks is better than shtoomps." She was right. Folks is better than shtoomps. Ever since man and woman discovered that simple truth they have gathered in villages, towns, and cities. So long as they believe that truth they will continue to gather in villages, towns, and cities. The boys will leave the farms for the towns. The mothers and sisters will want to follow them. For every Thoreau who wishes to live in the woods there are, and always will be, thousands who, like Charles Lamb, will I wish to live in the city. The call is equally irresistible to the ignorant and to the scholar, to the sinner and to the saint.

Responding to this call we always have found and always will find the best and the worst of men flocking to the cities; the bigger and more bustling the city, the more it attracts. Here are the great criminals and the men of wealth on whom they prey; the selfindulgent idlers and the great captains of industry; seductive invitations to vice and open doors of opportunity for service; the great libraries, the great concert halls, the great schools and universities, the great lecture halls, the great churches, the great preachers, and here the dance halls, the saloons, the gambling hells, the houses of vice; and here is the drama at its best and its worst.

The city is always a type of the community in which it is situated. London reflects England, Paris reflects France, Berlin reflects Germany, Rome reflects

BY LYMAN ABBOTT

the two Italys, the ecclesiastical and the political. So, in this country, Boston, despite its Irish population, reflects New England; New York, the Atlantic coast; Chicago, the Middle West; Los Angeles and San Francisco, the two Californias. If we could imagine New York and Chicago changing places, in a decade, certainly in a generation, each would be a changed city.

Therefore the city records the dominating tendencies in the community both for good and for evil. Decaying cities mean a decaying state. Developing cities mean a developing state. The city is a barometer and registers the climate. Catholic Rome bore witness to the emergence of Italy from the paganism of the Cæsars. The city is set upon a hill and cannot be hid. By its prominence it proclaims to all mankind the virtues and the vices of the community. For the community makes it what it is, and it in turn makes the community.

When I came to New York City nearly three-quarters of a century ago, the growing residential region was from Houston to Fourteenth Street. When about that time my uncle Gorham Abbott left his brother's school in Hous. ton Street and established the Spingler Institute in Union Square, he was criticised for going so far uptown by conservatives, who were quite sure that his pupils would never follow him to these northern limits of good society. Even some years later what is now Central Park was a rocky wild given over to the huts of squatters, whose hordes of dogs made crossing that region after dark a disagreeable and even a somewhat perilous enterprise.

At that time the fire companies were volunteer organizations which bitterly resented and vigorously resisted the organization of a paid fire department to be always ready for a call. Occasionally these rival companies stopped on their way to a fire and fought a street battle to determine which should

have precedence on the highway. The police, if I remember aright, were not uniformed; and the police protection was so inadequate that for a time the control of the police was transferred from the City Hall to the Capitol at Albany. The simplest sanitary regulations which herding of a great miscellaneous population always makes necessary had not yet been discovered. Dogs roamed the streets as freely as they did till recently in Constantinople, though not, as there, in herds; cows were stabled in the city and fed on swill from the houses or refuse from the distilleries; none of the streets were kept very clean and some of them were hardly cleaned at all; cases of cholera occurred every summer and an epidemic of cholera was expected every two or three years. The cleaning out of the squatters from the region now devoted to Central Park was accomplished with difficulty; the spending of money in the construction of the park was bitterly resented as a waste of the city's funds, since only the rich would ever use it; and the organization of a paid fire department, the uniforming of the police, the banishing of loose dogs from the streets, the removal of the cows and their sheds from the city limits, and the sanitary regulations required for the city's health were all accomplished by resolute reformers only after a fierce battle in each case with the defenders of so-called vested rights. Leave a great public wrong undisturbed long enough and it becomes a vested right.

The climax of this corruption of the city government was reached under the Tweed Ring some years later. The city government and the courts were corrupted by it, and the foul and fatal control was extending to Albany. Happily, there were brave men who dared hazard their peace and their good name, if not their lives, in furnishing an answer to Tweed's question, What are you going to do about it? They finally put him

behind prison bars and made impossible the repetition of so gross and audacious a robbery by any future ring.

There is a great deal of not unjust complaint of our city governments, and the municipal experience of our great cities justifies the statement that the city government is the most difficult problem which to-day confronts democracy. But if the test of government is a contented and prosperous population under its control, it cannot be said with justice that New York City is the worstgoverned city in the world. At least there is no present indication that German critics have any great desire to return to Berlin, or Irish critics to Cork or Dublin; and when our Government provides free passage across the ocean for Russian assailants of the Government of this their adopted land to return to the land of their nativity, there are not heard from them those expressions of gratitude which might reasonably be expected from them. Our city government is in our own hands. It is as good as we deserve, for it is as good as we care to make it. It is an old saying that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and if we do not care to pay the price we have no reason to complain if we do not get the coveted article.

Law may measurably protect the prudent from criminals, but it is never an adequate protection of the ignorant, the innocent, and the weak from the enticements of vice. Whether there is less or more vice in New York City than there was three-quarters of a century ago I cannot say, but it is certainly less ostentatiously offensive. Then it was not safe for any woman to go out unattended in the streets of the city after nightfall. Women were generally not admitted to the theaters without a male escort, except that in many, I believe most, of the theaters the upper gallery was reserved as a hunting-ground where women of the town might look for their

prey.

Whether there was more gambling then than now I do not know, as I have no means of knowing how much there was then or is now. But saloons of every description, from the highest class of bar to the lowest-class dive, were run without any regulation that was apparent to the inexpert observer. Drunken women were practically never seen upon the streets, as they still are in parts of London, Glasgow, and Edin. burgh, but gentlemen the worse for liquor, though unusual, were not unknown in our public vehicles or on the sidewalks in our best streets. On New Year's Day, which in accordance with an ancient Dutch custom was devoted to social calls by the gentlemen, tipsy men were so frequently to be met with, not only on the streets but in the hospitable parlors of the best society, that the festival use of the day was finally abandoned by common consent. Whether National prohibition is the best method of meeting the evils of the drink traffic I am myself not clear. But that it has been adopted by so large a vote and accepted with so little opposition at least indicates that a very large number of persons who think it quite harmless to drink a glass of beer or wine with their meals have without reluctance given up that pleasure in order to give the experiment of National total abstinence a fair trial. It is quite certain that drunkenness is no longer the common American vice it was a hundred, or even fifty, years ago. And a hundred years ago it was not as bad in New York as it was in the eighteenth century in London, where, the historian tells us, signs might be seen on some of the liquor shops: "Drunk for a penny: with straw to lie on, twopence."

New York in the last seventy years has shared in the general enlargement of popular education which has characterized the Republic. In 1850 there was in all Europe no public school system

outside of Germany and perhaps one or two of the Scandinavian states. In the United States it existed in only half of the country. Slavery and public education do not go well together. I do not think there were either normal schools or high schools in the city. There was no industrial education. My impression is that the school for girls established by my father and his brothers in 1844 or '45 was the first school in the city for the higher and broader education of girls, though there were perhaps one or more Roman Catholic convent schools. There were in the city the three colleges the New York University, Columbia College, and the City College. But these institutions, which had hundreds of pupils then, have thousands now. The public school was still in the experimental stage. The question whether education should be furnished to all free by the State, or by the churches and by private enterprise to such as were able to pay for it, was still a hotly debated question, and Archbishop Hughes earned a deserved unpopularity in most Protestant circles by his vigorous attack upon the Public School System.

Then the schools largely and colleges almost exclusively existed to prepare men for the three learned professions-law, medicine, and the ministry. I do not think there was in either of the colleges a gymnasium or a laboratory for the students, either physical or chemical. I know there was none in my college, the New York University. Now every vocation is a learned profession; men are as well educated for banking or commerce as for the bar or the pulpit. Barnard College furnishes to women an equipment and a faculty not inferior to that furnished by Columbia to men. The training schools for teachers of the city are supplemented by the Teachers College of Columbia and the School of Pedagogy of the New York University. The high schools give ap

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed][subsumed][merged small][subsumed][ocr errors][subsumed]

proximately as thorough an education as was given in the first two years of my college course. And the public school system is so firmly rooted in the public esteem that nothing but the grossest mismanagement or some radical revolution can ever overthrow it. The difference between the incidental institutions of culture, such as the libraries, art galleries, concert halls, and museums, is illustrated by the dif ference between Barnum's American Museum, with its "woolly horse" and its "Japanese mermaid," and the Metropoli. tan Museum and the Natural History Museum in Central Park, each of which is worthy to be described as one of the great museums of the world. The recently created "Town Hall" is itself a testimony to the determination of the American people to maintain the right of free assembly and an open public discussion of all questions which concern the community's welfare. When a group of would-be advocates of Ireland's independence gather in a meeting to howl down a speaker who does not agree with them, they are quite unwittingly furnishing to the American people a stronger argument against Irish independence than any which its most intense opponent could possibly offer.

Is the religious life of the community

waning? Are the institutions of religion losing their usefulness? If so,

one who regards, as I do, religion as the life-blood of the community will regard the loss as incalculable.

It is said that people do not go to church as much as they did seventy years ago. That is probably true. But the churches are going to the people much more. Then the churches were worshiping assemblies which met on one day in each week to unite in prayer and praise and to listen to sermons. There were few or no mission chapels or mission Sunday schools, no parish houses, no men's clubs, no church forums, no social settlements, no gymnasiums for boys, no sewing or cooking schools for girls. There were weekly meetings for prayer, but few or none for work. The Young Men's Christian Association was just born and was hardly out of its cradle, and the churches quite generally looked on it with disfavor as a rival. There was no Young Women's Christian Association, no Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The churches were largely theological schools. The sermons were largely theological discussions. The statement of a gentle critic in the fifties that Theodore Parker denied the divinity of Jesus Christ but emphasized his

precepts, and the orthodox ministers denied his precepts but preached his divinity, was too epigrammatic to be quite true. But it is true that charity and missionary sermons were reserved for special occasions, that temperance sermons were rare, and that in most churches any reference to American slavery was prohibited by an unexpressed but very effective law. If to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, minister to the suffering and the handicapped, is to do Christ's work, then we may say that the churches are talking about him less and working for him more than they did seventy years ago. There is less preaching of Paul's Epistle to the Romans; there is more practicing of Christ's Sermon on the Mount.

Great cities are the strategic points in the world's great battlefield. There the forces of good and evil meet each other face to face for a hand-to-hand battle to the death. The good soldier who be lieves in his cause and in his Leader asks nothing better. A backward glance over seventy-five years in the history of America's greatest city confirms my lifelong faith that the forces of selfish indulgence and selfish ambition are no match for the forces of sobriety and righteousness, of purity, reverence, and loyal love.

I

THE FIFTH LINK

BY SHERMAN ROGERS

INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT OF THE OUTLOOK

WAS finishing a speech before a men's club in Boston when one of the industrial captains of New York City walked into the hall. Speaking on the labor problem, I had assured my audience that the solution of that problem rested in the hands of the employer. I had declared: "You employers will have labor troubles as long as you are indifferent to a settlement on a basis that will be mutually desirable to all elements of American society. You have the power in your hands to command the respect and earnest co-operation of ninety-nine per cent of the workingmen in America if you really desire it. Without even raising your hand you can also gain the suspicion and distrust of a majority of the workmen. But just remember one thing and I am talking to employers: If you have trouble with your workmen, the fundamental cause lies underneath your own hat." I closed my address with the demand for personal-contact relationship based on a whole-hearted desire on the part of the employer to give every workingman in America all that he was entitled to, and at the same time to let him know what the employer is fairly entitled to by placing the industrial cards on the table face up.

The industrial captain referred to was puzzled. He frankly said So. He handed me his card and asked me to

call on him at his New York office the following day. I did so. This great captain, whom for present purposes I will call Mr. Jones, looked me over patronizingly, and then paralyzed me with astonishment, not to say indignation, by bluntly stating:

"Rogers, I couldn't help thinking last night what a great work you could do if you would put as much energy and sincerity into a sane proposition as you do into your chimerical, fatuous theory. Now keep cool," he blurted out as he noticed my face flush. "I didn't mean to hurt you; but I do think it is a pity that you should hypnotize yourself and then others with an idea so wholly devoid of merit. You made a statement that the heart of labor was absolutely square. Do you realize how big the word 'absolutely' is? Whether you do or not, I want to ask you one question which I think will explode your socalled 'solution.' If the heart of labor is square, why do they follow the leadership blindly and whole-heartedly of men like Bill Haywood on one side, and paid disturbers of industrial peace on the other who win their leadership by such malicious falsehoods and gross misrepresentation as to actually make a normal average intelligent man weep? Yet they drink in the idiotic promises of these crack-brained radicals the way a Sahara desert wanderer drinks a can

teen full of cool water. My workmen don't know anything about the company apparently; and that isn't allthey don't seem to want to know the truth. They certainly don't take any trouble to get at the facts. We are in a terrible depression. Hundreds of factories are operating at an actual loss, thousands of others without a cent of profit. Millions of dollars of proposed contracts are awaiting an honest declaration from labor that they will do a dollar's worth of work for a dollar's worth of pay, and the building boom alone will give work to a million men at once if the public can be convinced that they are going to get a run for their money. In the face of all this, labor has absolutely refused, even though millions of their fellow-men are suffering, to give the slightest COoperation to bring conditions back to normal. If that's square, then I'd like to know how you figure it out. I would also like you to enlighten me where the employer is all to blame for a condition of affairs that is caused mainly at the present time by labor itself refusing to accept the slightest responsibility in bringing prosperity to the millions who are now out of work. You say the trouble is under our 'own hat,' and I want to have the pleasure of telling you to your face that you don't know what you are talking about. I want to fur

ther add that if you are sincere you are pathetically blind."

"All right, Mr. Jones," I coolly answered, although every nerve in my body was tingling with suppressed anger; "in the next ten minutes I am going to prove to you that I am neither blind nor foolish. I do not speak on theoretical ideas. I have no 'theory.' I have no illusion about the causes of unrest, neither do I have illusions about the present unreasonable attitude of millions of workingmen. But before I enter into a lengthy explanation, I want you to give me the four principal reasons for the present success of your company."

"Well," answered the industrial captain, "every large successful manufacturing concern builds permanent success on what I usually term a 'four-link industrial chain.' When I first started in business, I never fooled myself. I placed this company on a strong foundation, a foundation of confidence. Confidence of the banker, the wholesaler, the retailer, and the consuming public. The confidence of these four elements was gained by selling the personality, the integrity, and the ability of the executive officer of this company to them. I was a salesman at one time. It made no difference how good an article I had, I couldn't sell it to a retailer until I had first sold the personality and the integrity of 'Jones.' After I had established confidence in my integrity through my personality, I had little trouble in consummating a sale. I have applied the same principle to all my business dealings since starting this company. I firmly established, or rather welded, link No. 1 by selling the personality of 'Jones' to the banker. I never made a statement to my banker in all my business experience that was untrue. I realized that to be successful I had at all times to maintain the confidence of the banker. I maintained that confidence by meeting my banker face to face as often as was necessary, and when we started this company there were times that I was in the bank president's office a dozen times a week. Whenever he wavered, I immediately went right down, fully explained every minor detail of our business, and, as a result, I can truthfully say that this firm always has had, and still has, the absolute confidence and respect of the man who helped finance the company. I then went out personally, remember, and sold the same personality, integrity, and sincerity to the wholesaler. The wholesaler was a big man in our line. His good will and confidence meant success or failure, so I personally visited most of the big wholesalers east of the Mississippi River. When I got through with these men, they knew beyond a doubt that they were perfectly safe in dealing with Jones & Co. simply because they knew that Jones personally would make good any defective material or any loss that could be laid to the doors of our company. I therefore welded link No. 2 by making every possible effort at all times to keep in the closest personal touch with the wholesaler. I

could not of course reach the retailer, and yet we knew it was necessary to have the retailer's confidence in our goods. We knew that if the retailer demanded the Jones line, Jones & Co. would always get his order. So I welded link No. 3 by getting together the highest-class sales force-men of personality that money could buy. We didn't stop there. We spent a million dollars over a period of years in advertising to gain the confidence and good will of the consuming public. We have always taken great care to maintain that confidence, thereby welding the fourth link in the industrial chain of success. Does that answer your question?"

"It does, sir, and proves my 'theory.' You have correctly analyzed four necessary rules to follow to gain success in great industrial enterprise, or, as far as that is concerned, in any kind of enterprise; but you have left out the fifth, and because you have left out the fifth the industrial foundation of this country is being badly shaken today, and get me correctly-the main reason for that is because you totally ignored the fifth link. With all the force of your being, with all the power of your personality, you put the cards on the table to your banker, you sold him Mr. Jones's sincerity, you sold him Mr. Jones's honesty; you then went to work and used that same power of personality and sincerity in gaining the good will and confidence of the wholesaler. Good work. You didn't stop there; you welded the next link in your chain and sold your personality, your integrity, to the retailer, and you still preserved and sold Jones & Co. and their integrity to the consumer, thereby gaining the good will and confidence of the fourth great link in your chain. But the thing that puzzles me, Mr. Jones, is what could possibly have prevented you from going ahead and completing your industrial chain by welding the fifth link, a link that would have completed an unbreakable circle. But, somehow or other, you failed entirely even to try to sell your personality or your honesty to the men who would eventually make or break you the fifth-link men-the men who make your goods. The same Jones sincerity that sold the banker, the wholesaler, the retailer, and the consumer would have had mighty little trouble in selling itself to your workmen if you had applied the same methods in the same vigorous, sincere manner you employed with the other four link men; no trouble at all. If you hadn't tried to sell your personality and integrity and sound judgment to your banker, he never I would have backed you up. If you hadn't tried to sell the same three elements to the wholesaler, he never would have bought your goods in the first place. If you had failed to follow up with the retailer and the ultimate consumer, they never would have heard of Jones & Co. It is incomprehensible to me that you could spend the million dollars that you have spent in advertising and in making good defective material to gain the

good will of the dealer and the public, and yet not one single dollar have you spent to get the good will of your work

men.

And then you wonder why those who have established personal contact, who have sold their personality and their sincerity, the agitator and organizer, can beat you out with your own workmen. Let me tell you one thing, Mr. Jones, and I'm telling you the biggest truth you have ever heard in your life if you had used one-half the energy in selling your personality, your sincerity, and your fairness to the men who make your goods that you have to the men who have financed you and bought your goods, there would be no trouble in your plant to-day, because your workingmen would believe in you just as your banker does, just as the wholesaler does, just as the retailer and the ultimate consumers do; and it wouldn't take half the effort to reach the workingmen that you used to reach the business man. Mr. Jones, you welded a fairly strong chain as far as you went. The trouble is, you didn't go far enough; and just remember one thing all the time, that so soon as you have sold Jones & Co. through direct personal contact to the men who make your goods, just as you have sold Jones & Co. to the other four elements of society, you will find you will have reached a solution to the one thing that . is putting gray hairs in your head right now-trying to find efficiency, confidence, and good will in the men in the workshop."

"But suppose I got in touch with my men," Jones suggested. "Do you sup. pose they would have believed me when I did put my cards on the table?"

"It has been proved in hundreds of plants," I answered, "that men are eager to follow the leadership of the employer wherever personal-contact relations have been established on a sincere, whole-hearted basis. There are several hundred plants operating to-day where the employer and employee are basking in the sunlight of perfect understanding and confidence. The sunlight is so strong that no cloud of suspicion blown from the fanatical mouths of rattleheaded opportunists can obscure it.

"Mr. Jones, any man that can sell a banker should hang his head in shame to believe that he couldn't sell himself to a warm-hearted worker. My ten minutes are up. Do I win?"

"You certainly do," replied the manufacturer; "you have completely sold me your idea, and I really believe that it is a common-sense, workable way out of the present industrial muddle. I am so much impressed that I want you to meet our superintendent. I'll send for him in a few days and have you meet him."

"Never mind your superintendent," I answered. "You didn't send your superintendent to sell your banker; you went down there yourself. And that's what you must do with your workingmen, no matter whether it takes a couple of weeks or a month; if teamwork in your factory isn't worth two weeks or a month of your time, it isn't

« السابقةمتابعة »