CHAPTER XVII THE ORGANIZATION OF COUNTRY LIFE IN DENMARK

In Europe the man whose situation most nearly corresponds to that of the Negro in the Southern States is the peasant. I had seen pictures of peasants before I went to Europe, but I confess that I was very hazy as to what a peasant was. I knew that he was a small farmer, like the majority of the Negro farmers in the Southern States, and that, like the Negro farmer again, he had in most cases descended from a class that had at one time been held in some sort of subjection to the large landowners, the difference being that, whereas the peasant had been a serf, the Negro farmer had been a slave.

In regard to the present position of the peasant in the life about him, in regard to his manner of living, his opportunities and ambitions, I had but the vaguest sort of an idea. The pictures which I had seen were not reassuring in this regard. The picture which made the deepest impression upon my mind was that of a heavy, stupid, half-human looking creature, standing in the midst of a desolate field. The mud and the clay were clinging to him and he was leaning on a great, heavy, wrought-iron hoe, such as were formerly used by the Negro slaves. This picture represented about my idea of a peasant.

In the course of my journey through Italy and through Austria-Hungary I saw a number of individuals who reminded me of this and other pictures of peasants that I can recall. I saw, as I have already said, peasant women sleeping, like tired animals, in the city streets; I saw others living in a single room with their cattle; at one time I entered a little cottage and saw the whole family eating out of a single bowl. In Sicily I found peasants living in a condition of dirt, poverty, and squalor almost beyond description. But everywhere I found among these people, even the lowest, individuals who, when I had an opportunity to talk with them, invariably displayed an amount of shrewd, practical wisdom, kindly good nature, and common sense that reminded me of some of the old Negro farmers with whom I am acquainted at home. It is very curious what a difference it makes in the impression that a man makes upon you if you stop and shake hands with him, instead of merely squinting at him critically in order to take a cold sociological inventory of his character and condition.

Some of the pleasantest recollections I have of Europe are the talks I had, through an interpreter, of course, with some of these same ignorant but hard-working, sometimes barefoot, but always kindly peasants. The result was that long before I had completed my journey I had ceased to take some of the pictures of peasants I had seen literally. I discovered that the artist whose pictures had made so deep an impression upon me had sought to compress into the figure of a single individual the misery and wretchedness of a whole class; that he had tried, also, to bring to the surface and make visible in his picture all the hardships and the degradation which the casual observer does not see, perhaps does not want to see.

It was not until I reached Denmark, however, that I began to feel that I had really begun to know the European peasant, because it was not until I reached that country that I saw what the possibilities of the peasant were. Before this I had seen a man who was struggling up under the weight of ignorance and the remains of an ancient oppression. In Denmark, however, this man has come to his own. Peasants already own a majority of the land. Three fourths of the farms are in their hands and the number of small farms is steadily increasing. In Denmark the peasant, as a certain gentleman whom I met there observed, is not only free, but he rules. The peasant is the leader in everything that relates to the progress of agriculture. The products of the coöperative dairies, the coöperative egg-collecting and pork-packing societies, organized and controlled by the peasants, bring in the markets of the world higher prices than similar products from any other country in Europe.

The peasants are now the controlling influence in the Danish Parliament. When I was there half the members of the ministry in power were peasants, and half the members of the cabinet were either peasants or peasants' sons.

Let me add that there is a very close connection between the price of the peasants' butter and the influence which the peasants exercise in politics. For a good many years, up to about 1901, I believe, the most influential party in Denmark was that represented by the large landowners. Forty years ago the peasants had all the political rights they now possess, but they did not count for much in political matters. At that time there were two kinds of butter in Denmark: there was the butter made in the creameries of the large landowners, called gentlemen's estates, and there was the butter from the small farmers. In other words, there was "gentleman's butter" and "peasant's butter." The peasant butter, however, was only worth in the market about one half as much as that from the gentleman's estate. When the price of peasant butter began to rise, however, the political situation began to change. Year by year the number of coöperative dairies increased and, year by year, the number of peasant farmers in parliament multiplied. In other words, the Danish peasant has become a power in Danish politics because he first became a leader in the industrial development of the country.

Denmark is not only very small, about one third the size of Alabama, but it is not even especially fertile. It is an extremely level country, without hills, valleys, or running streams worth speaking of. I was told that the highest point in Denmark, which is called "Heaven's Hill," is only about 550 feet above sea level—that is to say about half as high as the tower of the Metropolitan Building in New York. As a result of this a large part of the country is windswept and, in northern Jutland, where the Danish peninsula thrusts a thin streak of land up into the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea, there were, forty years ago, 3,300 square miles of heather where not even a tree would grow. Since that time, by an elaborate process of physical and chemical manipulation of the soil, all but a thousand square miles have been reclaimed. The result is that where once only lonely shepherds wandered, "knitting stockings," as Jacob Riis says, "to pay the taxes," there are now flourishing little cities.

Another disadvantage which Denmark suffers has its origin in the fact that more than one third of the country consists of islands, of which there are no less than forty-four. In going from Copenhagen to Hamburg the train on which I travelled, in crossing from one island to another and from there to the peninsula, was twice compelled to make the passage by means of a ferry, and at one of these passages we were on the boat for about an hour and a half.

Riding or driving through Denmark to-day is like riding through Illinois or any other of the farming regions of the Middle Western States, with the exception that the fields are smaller and the number of men, cattle, and homesteads is much larger than one will see in any part of the United States. I have heard travellers through Denmark express regret because with the progress of the country, the quaint peasant costumes and the other characteristics of the primitive life of the peasant communities, which one may still see in other parts of Europe, have disappeared. One of my fellow-travellers tried to make me believe that the peasants in Europe were very much happier in the quiet, simple life of these small and isolated farming communities, each with its own picturesque costumes, its interesting local traditions, and its curious superstitions.

This seems to be the view of a good many tourists. After what I have seen in Europe I have come to the conclusion, however, that the people and the places that are the most interesting to look at are not always the happiest and most contented. On the contrary, I have found that the places in which the life of the peasants is most interesting to tourists are usually the places that the peasants are leaving in the largest numbers. Emigration to America is making a large part of Europe commonplace, but it is making a better place to live in.

The reorganization of agricultural life in Denmark has come about in other ways than by emigration, but it has left very little of the picturesque peasant life, and most of what remains is now kept in museums. I noticed in going through the country, however, two types of farm buildings which seem to have survived from an earlier time. One of these consisted of a long, low building, one end of which was a barn and the other a dwelling. The other type of building was of much the same shape, except that it formed one side of a court, the other two sides of which were enclosed by barns and stables.

Upon inquiry I learned that the first type of dwelling belonged to a man who was called a husmaend, or houseman; in other words, a small farmer whose property consisted of his house, with a very small strip of land around it. The other type of dwelling belonged to a man who was called a gaardmaend, or yardman, because he owned enough land to have a gaarde, or yard. In Denmark farmers are still generally divided into huse and gaarde; all farmers owning less than twenty-four acres are called "housemen," and all having more than that are called "yardmen," no matter how their buildings are constructed.

As a matter of fact, it is not so long since conditions in Denmark were just about as primitive as they are now in some other parts of Europe. Jacob Riis, whom I learned, while I was in Denmark, is just as widely known and admired in Denmark as he is in the United States, says that he can remember when conditions were quite different among the homes of the people. "For example," he said, "I recall the time when in every peasant's family it was the custom for all to sit down and eat out of the same bowl in the centre of the table and then, after the meal was finished, each would wipe the spoon with which he had dipped into the common bowl, and without any further ceremony tuck it away on a little shelf over his head.

"To-day," he added, "Danish farmers wash their pigs. The udders of the cows are washed with a disinfecting fluid before milking. When a man goes to milk he puts on a clean white suit."

Not only is this true, but the Danish farmer grooms his cows, and blankets them when it is cold. He does this not only because it is good for the cow, but because it makes a saving in the feed. Although Denmark has more cattle in proportion to the number of inhabitants than any other part of Europe, I noticed very few pastures. On the contrary, as I passed through the country I observed long rows of tethered cattle, feeding from the green crops. As rapidly as the cows have consumed all the green fodder, usually four or five times a day, a man comes along and moves the stakes forward so that the cattle advance in orderly way, mowing down the crops in sections. Water is brought to the cows in a cart and they are milked three times a day. All of this requires a large increase of labour as well as constant study, care, and attention. In other words, the Danish peasant has become a scientific farmer.

One difference between the farmer in Denmark and in other countries is that, whereas the ordinary farmer raises his crops and ships them to the market to be sold, the Danish farmer sells nothing but the manufactured product, and as far as possible he sells it direct to the consumer. For example, until about 1880 Denmark was still a grain exporting country; in recent years, however, it has become a grain importing country. Grain and fodder of various kinds to the value of something like twenty-five millions of dollars are now annually purchased by Danish farmers in Russia and neighbouring countries. The agricultural products thus imported are fed to the cattle, swine, and chickens and thus converted into butter, pork, and eggs. The butter is manufactured in a coöperative dairy; the pork is slaughtered in a coöperative pork-packing house; the eggs are collected and packed by a coöperative egg-collecting association. Then they are either sold direct, or are turned over to a central coöperative selling association, which disposes of the most of them in England. The annual exports to England amount to nearly $90,000,000 a year, of which $51,000,000 is for butter, nearly $30,000,000 for bacon, and the remainder for eggs.

As a gentleman whom I met in Denmark put it: "If Denmark, like ancient Gaul, were divided into three parts, one of these would be butter, another pork, and the third eggs." It is from these things that the country, in the main, gets its living. There are in Denmark, as elsewhere, railways, newspapers, telephones, merchants, preachers, teachers, and all the other accessories of a high civilization, but they are all supported from the sale of butter, pork, and eggs, to which ought to be added cattle, for Denmark still exports a considerable amount of beef and live cattle. The export of live cattle has, however, fallen from about $21,000,000 a year in 1880 to about $7,000,000, but in the same period the excess of butter, bacon, and eggs has risen from something like $7,000,000 to over $70,000,000. Meanwhile the raw production of the Danish farms has increased 50 per cent. and more, the difference being that, instead of producing grains for the manufacture of flour and meal, the Danish farmers have turned their attention to producing root crops to feed their cattle. This means that the peasant in Denmark is not merely a scientific farmer, as I have already suggested, but he is at the same time, in a small way, a business man.

The success of the peasant farmer in Denmark is, as I have already suggested, due to a very large extent to the coöperative societies which manufacture and sell his farm products. Through the medium of these the Danish peasant has become a business man—I might almost say, a capitalist. I do not know how much money is invested in these different coöperative dairies, egg-collecting and pork-packing concerns, but all Denmark is dotted with them, and the total amount of money invested in them must be considerable. There are, for example, 1,157 coöperative dairies, with a membership of 157,000. The number of coöperative pork-packing societies is 34, with a membership of 95,000.

As soon as I found to what extent the peasants were manufacturing and selling their own products, I naturally wanted to know how they had succeeded in getting the capital to carry on these large enterprises, because in the part of the country from which I hail the average farmer not only has no money to put into any sort of business outside his farm, but has to borrow money, frequently at a high rate of interest, to carry on his farming operations. I found that when the farmers in Denmark began establishing coöperative dairies some of the well-to-do farmers came together and signed a contract to send all their milk which they were not able to use at home to the community dairy. Then they borrowed money on their land to raise the money to begin operations. In borrowing this money they bound themselves "jointly and severally," as the legal phrase is, to secure the payments of the money borrowed—that is, each man became individually responsible for the whole loan. This gave the bank which made the loan a much better security than if each individual had secured a loan on his own responsibility, and in this way it was possible to provide the capital needed at a very moderate rate of interest.

When the farmer brought his milk to the common dairy he was paid a price for it a little less than the average market price. This added something to the working capital. At the end of the year a portion of the earnings of the dairy were set aside to pay interest charges, another portion was used to pay off the loan, and the remainder was divided in profits among the members of the association, each receiving an amount proportionate to the milk he had contributed. In this way the farmer in the course of some years found himself with a sum of money, equal to his individual share, invested in a paying enterprise that was every year increasing in value. In the meanwhile he had received more for his milk than if he had sold it in the ordinary way. At the same time, out of the annual profits he received from his share in the dairy, he had, perhaps, been able to put some money in the savings bank. The savings banks have always been popular and have played a much more important part in the life of the people than they have elsewhere. At the present time the average amount of deposits in proportion to the number of inhabitants is larger than is true of any other country in the world. For example, the average amount of deposits in the Danish savings banks is $77.88; in England $20.62; in the United States $31.22. At the same time the number of depositors in Danish savings banks is considerably larger than in other countries. For example, there are fifty-one depositors for every hundred persons in Denmark. In England the corresponding number is twenty-seven.

The most remarkable thing about the Danish savings banks, however, is that 78 per cent.—nearly four fifths—of them are located in the rural districts. That is one reason that Danish farmers have not found it difficult to secure the capital they needed to organize and carry on their coöperative enterprises. With the money which they had saved and put in the savings bank from the earnings in the coöperative dairies they were able to borrow money with which to start their coöperative slaughterhouses and egg-collecting societies.

But these are only a few of the different types of coöperative organizations. A Danish peasant may be a member of a society for the purchase of tools, implements, and other necessaries, of which there are fifteen in Denmark, with a membership numbering between sixty and seventy thousand. He may belong to a society for exporting cattle, for collecting and exporting eggs, for horse breeding, for cattle, sheep, and pig breeding. Finally he may belong to what are known as "control" societies, organized for the purpose of keeping account, by means of careful registration, of the milk yield of each cow belonging to a member of the society, and of the butter-fat in the milk, and the relation between the milk yield and the fodder consumed. The value of these societies is found in the fact that the annual yield per cow in the case of members of the control society was 67,760 pounds, while in the case of cows owned outside of the society the amount was 58,520 pounds.

Through the medium of these different societies, some of which are purely commercial, while others exist for the purpose of improving the methods and technique of agriculture, the farming industry has become thoroughly organized. First of all, there has been a great saving in cost of handling and selling farm products. Not many years ago the Danish farmer used to send his butter to England by way of Hamburg, and there were at that time, I have been told, no less than six middlemen who came between the farmer and his customer. Now the coöperative manufacturing and selling societies sell a large part of their products direct to the coöperative purchasing societies in England. In this way the farmer and his customer, the producer and distributer, are brought together again, not exactly in the way in which they still come together in some of the old-fashioned market places in Europe, but still in a way to benefit both classes. For one thing, as a result of this organization of the farming industry, farming methods and the whole technical side of the industry have been greatly benefited. A striking evidence of this fact is found in the following statistics showing the rapid increase in the annual yield of milk per cow in the period from 1898 to 1908:

I might add, as showing the extent to which Danish agriculture has been organized in the way I have described, that now Denmark produces about 253,000,000 pounds of butter every year. Of this amount 220,000,000 pounds come from the coöperative dairies.

Behind all other organizations which have served to increase efficiency of the farming population are the schools, particularly the rural high schools and the agricultural schools. It is generally agreed in Denmark that the coöperative organizations which have done so much for the farming population of that country could not exist if the rural high schools had not prepared the way for them.

I have described at some length, in another place, my impressions of the Danish schools, and shall not attempt to repeat here what I have said elsewhere.[5] I would like to emphasize, however, certain peculiarities about these schools that have particularly impressed me. In the first place, the schools that I visited, and, as I understand, practically all the schools that have been erected for the benefit of the rural population, are located either in the neighbourhood of the small towns or in the open country. In other words, they are close to the land and the people they are designed to help. In the second place, and this is just as true of the rural high schools, where almost no technical training is attempted, as it is of the agricultural schools, the courses have been especially worked out, after years of experiment and study, to fit the needs of the people for whom they are intended. There is no attempt to import into these schools the learning or style or methods of the city high schools or colleges. There is in fact, so far as I know, no school in existence that corresponds to or of which the Danish rural high school is in any way a copy.

In the third place, all these schools are for older pupils. The ages of the students range from sixteen to twenty-four years, and, in addition to the regular courses, conferences and short courses for the older people have been established, as is the case with many of the Negro industrial schools in the South. In fact, everything possible is done to wed the work in the school to the life and work on the land.

Finally, and this seems to me quite as important as anything else, these schools, like the coöperative societies to which I have referred, have grown up as the result of private initiative. The high schools had their origin in a popular movement begun more than fifty years ago by Nicola Frederik Severin Grundvig, a great religious reformer, who is sometimes referred to as the Luther of Denmark.

Denmark was at this time almost in despair. England in the course of the war with Napoleon had destroyed the Danish fleet, and later, in 1864, Germany had taken from Denmark two of her best provinces and one third of her territory. Grundvig believed that the work of reconstructing and regenerating Denmark must begin at the bottom. He preached the doctrine that what Denmark had lost without she must regain within, and, with this motto, he set to work to develop the neglected resources of the country—namely, those which were in the people themselves.

The work begun by Grundvig has been taken up and carried on in the same spirit by those who have followed him. The results of this movement show themselves in every department of life in Denmark—in the rapid increase of Danish exports and in the healthy democratic spirit of the whole Danish population. The Danish people are probably the best educated and best informed people in Europe. This is not simply my impression; it is that of more experienced travellers than myself.

On my way from Copenhagen to London I fell in with an English gentleman who was just returning from five weeks of study and observation of farming conditions in Denmark. From him I was able to obtain a great many interesting details which confirmed my own impressions.

He told me, I remember, that he had noticed in the cottage of a peasant, a man who did not farm more than four or five acres of land, copies of at least four periodicals to which he was a regular subscriber.

"More than that," he continued, "the farmers' journals which I saw in the peasants' houses I visited seemed to me remarkably technical and literary." This remark struck me, because it had never occurred to me that any of the agricultural papers I had seen in America could be described as "technical and literary." If they were I am afraid the farmers, at least the farmers in my part of the country, would not read them.

As illustrating the general intelligence of the farming population, this same gentleman told me that he had at one time called upon a creamery manager in a remote district whose salary, in addition to his house, which was provided him, was about twenty-four shillings, or six dollars, a week. In his house he found a recent copy of the Studio, a well-known English art publication. On his book shelves, in addition to the ordinary publications of a dairy expert, he had caught sight of volumes in English, French, German, and Swedish.

I was impressed with the fact that almost every one I met in Denmark seemed to be able to speak at least three languages—namely, German, English, and Danish. I had been greatly surprised on the Sunday night of my arrival to meet an audience of fully 3,000 persons and find that at least the majority of those present were able to understand my speech. In fact I had not spoken ten minutes when I found myself talking as naturally and as easily to this Danish audience as if I was addressing a similar number of people in America. The people even flattered me by laughing at my jokes, and in the right places. I am convinced that any one who can understand an American joke, can understand almost anything in the English language.

There is a saying to the effect that if you see a large building in Germany you may know that it is a military barracks, in England it is a factory, in Denmark a school. I never saw such healthy, happy, robust school children as I did in Denmark, and, with all respect to Danish agriculture, I am convinced that the best crop that Denmark raises is its children.

While other countries have sought to increase the national wealth and welfare by developing the material resources, Denmark, having neither coal, iron, oil, nor any other mineral, nothing but the land, has increased not only the national wealth but the national comfort and happiness by improving her people. While other nations have begun the work of education and, I was going to say, civilization, at the top, Denmark has begun at the bottom. In doing this Denmark has demonstrated that it pays to educate the man farthest down.

CHAPTER XVIII RECONSTRUCTING THE LIFE OF THE LABOURER IN LONDON

At the end of my long journey across Europe I returned to London. I had seen, during my visit to Denmark, some results of the reorganization of country life. In this chapter I want to tell something of what I saw and learned in London of the efforts to reconstruct the life of the Underman in the more complex conditions of a great city.

In the course of my travels through various parts of the United States, in the effort to arouse public interest in the work we are trying to do for the Negro at Tuskegee, I have frequently met persons who have inquired of me, with some anxiety, as to what, in my opinion, could be done for the city Negroes, especially that class which is entering in considerable numbers every year into the life of the larger cities in the Northern and Southern States. The people who asked this question assumed, apparently because the great majority of the Negro population lives on the plantations and in the small towns of the South, that the work of a school like the Tuskegee Institute, which is located in the centre of a large Negro farming population, must be confined to the rural Negro and the South.

In reply to these inquiries I have sometimes tried to point out that a good many of the problems of the city have their sources in the country and that, perhaps, the best way to better the situation of the city Negro is to improve the condition of the masses of the race in the country. To do this, I explained, would be to attack the evil at its root, since if country life were made more attractive, the flow of population to the city would largely cease.

What is true in this respect of the masses of the Negroes in America is equally true, as I discovered, of similar classes in Europe. Any one who will take the trouble to look into the cause of European emigration will certainly be struck with the fact that the conditions of agriculture in Europe have had a marked effect on the growth and character of American cities.

This fact suggests the close connection between country conditions and the city problem, but there is still another side to the matter. The thing that was mainly impressed upon me by my observation of the lower strata of London life and the efforts that have been made to improve it was this: That it is a great deal simpler and, in the long run, a great deal cheaper to build up and develop a people who have grown up in the wholesome air of the open country than it is to regenerate a people who have lived all or most of their lives in the fetid atmosphere of a city slum. In other words, it is easier to deal with people who are physically and morally sound than with people who, by reason of their unhealthy and immoral surroundings, have become demoralized and degenerate. The first is a problem of education; the second, one of reconstruction and regeneration.

I think the thing that helped me most to realize the extent and the difficulty of this work of regeneration in London was the knowledge that I gained while there of the multitude of institutions and agencies, of various kinds, which are engaged in this work.

I had been impressed, during my visits to Whitechapel and other portions of the East End of London, with the number of shelters, homes, refuges, and missions of all kinds which I saw advertised as I passed along Whitechapel Road. When I inquired of Rev. John Harris, organizing secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, who had at one time himself been engaged in mission work in that part of the city, whether it were possible to obtain a complete list of all the different types of charities and institutions of social betterment in London, he placed in my hands a volume of nearly seven hundred pages devoted entirely to the classification and description of the various charities, most of which were located in London.

This book, which was called the "Annual Charities Register and Digest," I have read and studied with the greatest interest. I confess that I was amazed as well at the number and variety of the different charities as at the amount of time, energy, and money necessary to keep up and maintain them.

In another volume, "London Statistics," published by the London County Council, I found the facts about London charities concisely summarized. From these books I learned that there are something like 2,035 charitable institutions of various kinds in London alone. Perhaps I can best give some idea of the character of these institutions, a number of which date back to the eighteenth century and perhaps to still earlier periods, by giving some details from these two volumes.

There are in London, for example, 112 institutions for the blind, and 143 institutions which give medical aid in one form or another, for which the total amount of money expended is about five million seven hundred thousand dollars annually. There are 214 institutions for the care of convalescents, for which the annual expenditure amounts to nearly a million and three quarters; 220 homes for children and training homes for servants, which are maintained at an annual expense of over four million dollars annually; 257 institutions for "general and specific relief," which are supported at an annual cost of nearly six millions.

There are, besides these, 159 institutions for "penitents," which receive an income of a million per year; 156 institutions for social and physical improvement, which include a multitude of the most varied sorts, as, for example, educational, temperance, and Christian associations, social settlements, boys' brigades, societies for the improvement of dwellings, for the improvement of national health, for suppression of the white slave traffic, etc. These 156 institutions are maintained at an expense of something over three million and a half dollars per year.

Finally, there are 47 so-called "spiritual" institutions which are engaged in propagating in various ways and in various forms a knowledge of the Bible and a belief in the Christian religion. Although the spiritual associations represent less than one seventeenth of the total number of charitable organizations, nearly one fourth of the total amount of the charities is expended in maintaining them.

According to the best estimate that can be made, the amount of money thus expended is not less than fifty millions annually. This does not include, either, the sums collected and expended by the different churches—the Congregational, Catholic, and Established churches. In two dioceses of the Church of England—namely, those of London and Southwark—the sums raised in this way amounted to more than six hundred thousand dollars.

My attention was especially attracted by the number of shelters and refuges where homeless men, women, and children are given temporary aid of one kind and another. In addition to eight shelters maintained by the Salvation Army in different parts of the city, where homeless men and women are able to obtain a bed and something to eat, there is the asylum for the houseless poor, which claims to have given nights' lodging during the winter months to 80,000; the Free Shelter, in Ratcliffe Street East, which has given nights' lodging to 125,000; the Ham Yard Soup Kitchen and Hospice, which in 1908-1909 cared for 343 for an average of sixteen nights; the Providence Right Refuge and Home, with reports of nearly 2,100 lodgings, suppers, and breakfasts every week.

In addition to these there is a considerable number of refuges and shelters for various classes of persons—for sailors, soldiers, Jews, Asiatics, and Africans; for ballet girls; "ladies who, on account of their conversion to the Catholic faith, are obliged to leave their homes or situations"; for "respectable female servants"; homeless boys and girls, governesses; "Protestant servants while they are seeking employment in the families of the nobility," and for "young women employed in hotels and West End clubs."

These are but a few of the many different homes, lodging houses, and shelters with which the city is provided. In most cases it is stated in connection with these institutions that vagrants are rigidly excluded, and the purpose of most of them seems to be to keep respectable but unfortunate people from going to the public workhouses.

In addition to the fifty millions and more spent in charity, nearly twenty millions more is expended by the different boroughs of London for relief to the poor in institutions and in homes. Altogether, it costs something like seventy million dollars annually to provide for the poor and unfortunate of the city.

In the Southern States, where nine of the ten million Negroes in the United States make their homes, practically nothing is spent in charity upon the Negro. In two or three states reformatories have been established, so that Negro children arrested for petty crimes may not be sent to the chain gangs and confined with older and more hardened criminals employed in the mines and elsewhere. At the last session of the state legislature of Alabama a bill was passed providing that the state should take over and support a reformatory for coloured children which had been established and supported by the Negro women of the state. In several of the larger Southern cities Young Men's Christian Associations have been started which are supported by charity, and in certain instances hospitals have been established.

The only purpose for which the Negro has asked or received philanthropic aid has been for the support of education. The people of the United States have been generous in their contributions to Negro education. In spite of this fact the income of all the Negro colleges, industrial schools, and other institutions of so-called higher education in the South is not one fiftieth part of what is expended every year in London in charity and relief, not for the purpose of education, but merely to rescue from worse disaster the stranded, the outcasts, and those who are already lost.[6]

I find, as most people do, I have no doubt, that it is very hard to realize the significance of a fact that is stated in mere abstract figures. It is only after I have translated these abstractions into terms of my own experience that I am able to grasp them. That must be my excuse here for what may seem a rather far-fetched comparison.

The Negro population of the Southern States is at present about nine million. In other words, the number of Negroes in the South is just about one fourth larger than the population of Greater London, which is something over seven million. Four fifths of this Southern Negro population still live on the plantations and in the small towns.

From time to time thoughtful and interested persons—some of them, by the way, Englishmen—have visited the Southern States, talked with the white people and looked at the Negroes. Then they have gone back and written despondently, sometimes pessimistically, about the Negro problem. I wish some of these writers might study the situation of the races in the South long enough to determine what it would be possible to do there, not with seventy nor even fifty, but with one million dollars a year, provided that money were used, not for the purpose of feeding, sheltering, or protecting the Negro population, for which it is not needed, but in educating them; in building up the public schools in the country districts; in providing a system of high schools, industrial and agricultural schools, such as exists, for example, in Denmark; in extending the demonstration farming to all the people on the land, and in encouraging the small colleges to adapt their teaching to the actual needs of the people so that in the course of time Negro education in the South could be gradually organized and coördinated into a single coherent system.

Perhaps I can illustrate in a broad way the difference in the situation of the poor man in the complex life of a great city like London and that of a similar class in the simpler conditions of a comparatively rural community, by a further comparison. The state of Alabama is nearly as large as England and Wales combined. It had, in 1900, a little more than one third the present population of what is known as "Administrative London," which means a city of 4,720,729. Of this population there were, on an average, 139,916 paupers. In Alabama, with a population in 1900 of 1,828,696, there were, in 1905, 771 paupers in almshouses, of whom 414 were white and 357 Negroes. In other words, while in London there were nearly three paupers for every one thousand of the population, in Alabama there were a little more than four paupers for every ten thousand of the population. This does not include the persons confined in asylums or those who are assisted in their homes. In Alabama the number of paupers cared for in this way is very small. As compared with the 2,000 charitable institutions in London, there were twenty such institutions in Alabama in 1904. Three of these, a hospital, an old folks' home and orphan asylum, and a school for the deaf and blind were for Negroes.

I have quoted these figures to show the contrast between conditions in a large city and a comparatively rural community. But Alabama contains three cities of considerable size, which may account for a fairly large number of its paupers, so that I suspect that if the comparison were strictly carried out it would be found that pauperism is a good deal more of a city disease than it seems.

The institutions in London to which I have referred, whether managed by private philanthropy or by the public, are mainly maintained for the sake of those who have already fallen in the struggle for existence. They are for the sick and wounded, so to speak. In recent years a movement has been steadily gaining ground which seeks to get at the source of this city disease, and by improving the conditions of city life do away to some extent with the causes of it.

The work of reorganizing the life of the poorer classes in London seems to have made a beginning some fifty or sixty years ago. The condition of the working population at that time has been described in the following words by Mr. Sidney Webb, who has made a profound study of the condition of the labouring classes in London:

Two thirds of the whole child population was growing up not only practically without schooling or religious influences of any kind, but also indescribably brutal and immoral; living amid the filth of vilely overcrowded courts, unprovided with water supply or sanitary conveniences, existing always at the lowest level of physical health, and constantly decimated by disease; incessantly under temptation by the flaring gin palaces which alone relieve the monotony of the mean streets to which they were doomed; graduating almost inevitably into vice and crime amid the now incredible street life of an unpoliced metropolis.[7]

The first thing attempted was to provide public education for those who were not able to attend private schools, and, as one writer says, "rescue the children of the abyss." It was in this rescue work that England's public schools had their origin. These schools, begun in this way, steadily gained and broadened until now London has an elaborate system of continuation, trade and technical schools, culminating in the reorganized University of London. This system is by no means perfected; it still is in process, but it gives the outlines of a broad and generous educational plan, equal in conception and organization at least to the needs of the largest city in the world.

London already has, for example, 327 night schools, with 127,130 pupils, in which young men and women who have left the day schools may continue their studies at night or perfect themselves in some branch of their trade.

Cooking, household management, laundry work, and iron work are taught in more than half the elementary schools of London. The London County Council supports fourteen schools which give instruction in the arts and crafts, and in the trades. In addition, the Government lends its aid to something like sixty-one other institutions, with an attendance of over 6,000, in which technical and trade education of some kind is given. A number of these schools, like the Shoreditch Technical Institute and the Brixton School of Building, are devoted to a single trade or group of allied trades. In the Shoreditch Institute boys are fitted for the furniture trade. Half their time is given to academic studies and half to work in the trade. At the Brixton School instruction is given in bricklaying and masonry, plumbing, painting, architecture, building, and surveying. In other schools pupils are given instruction in photo-engraving and lithographing, in fine needlework and engraving, bookbinding, and in many other crafts requiring a high grade of intelligence and skill.

With the growth of these schools the idea has been gaining ground that it is not sufficient to rescue those who, through misfortune or disease, are unable to support themselves; that on the contrary, instead of waiting until an individual has actually fallen a victim to what I have called the "city disease," measures of prevention be taken against pauperism as against other diseases.

Along with this changed point of view has come the insight that the efficiency of the nation as a whole depends upon its ability to make the most of the capacities of the whole population.

"Indeed," as Mr. Webb, the writer I have already quoted, says, "we now see with painful clearness that we have in the long run, for the maintenance of our preëminent industrial position in the world, nothing to depend on except the brains of our people. Public education has insensibly, therefore, come to be regarded, not as a matter of philanthropy, undertaken for the sake of the children benefited, but, as a matter of national concern, undertaken in the interest of the community as a whole."

After the schools, the next direction in which an attempt was made to improve the condition of the poor in London was in the matter of housing. The Board of Works first and the London County Council afterward began some forty years ago buying vast areas in the crowded parts of London, clearing them of the disreputable buildings, and then offering them for sale again to persons who would agree to erect on them sanitary dwellings for the working classes. The Metropolitan Board of Works, for example, purchased forty-two acres in different parts of the city for clearance. After the buildings had been torn down and the sites resold, it was estimated that the net cost would be about £1,320,619 or about $6,603,395. There lived on this area 22,872 persons, so that the net cost of cleaning up this area and moving the population into better quarters was something like $281 for each individual inhabitant.

Then the London County Council took up the work and it decided to begin building its own houses. Finally, a law was passed that the buildings so created should rent for more than the rents prevailing in the district and should pay the cost of maintenance, 3 per cent. on the capital invested.

On these terms the Metropolitan Board of Works and the London County Council have cleared in various parts of Central London an area of nearly eighty-six acres, containing a population of 41,584, at a cost which averages about $250 per person. On the property thus acquired the London County Council had in 1907 erected 8,223 tenements with 22,331 rooms. At this time, 1907, there were projected dwellings containing a total of 28,000 rooms, which, with those already erected, make a total of over 50,000 rooms. These tenements rent on an average of about 70 cents a week per room, so that the city of Greater London has an annual income of nearly $760,000 from its rents alone, on which the city earned in 1901, after all charges were paid, a profit of $10,000.

At first the County Council merely sought to replace the buildings which it removed, and the new buildings occupied the site of the older ones. On or near Boundary Street, in the neighbourhood of Bethnal Green, twenty-two acres were cleared of slums and covered with model dwellings, provided with wash houses, club rooms and every modern appliance for health and comfort. The sad thing about it was that after the buildings were completed and occupied it was found that only eleven of the former inhabitants remained. They had poured down into slums in the older part of the city and increased the population in those already overcrowded regions.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the country private enterprise and private philanthropy had gone in advance of the London County Council. Outside of Birmingham and Liverpool garden cities had been erected in which every family was provided with an acre of land, on some of which men employed in the factories, when they were not at work, increased their earnings in some instances as much as £50, or $250, a year.

Then the County Council began to acquire tramways radiating out in every direction into the suburbs. At the present time the city owns something over a hundred miles of tramway within the city, and of the 300 miles or more in Greater London the majority is either owned by London or the suburban boroughs.

At the ends of these lines the London County Council, and more frequently private individuals, have erected model dwellings on a large scale and are thus gradually moving the city population into the country.

In the meantime much has been done in recent years to increase the number of playgrounds and breathing spaces, to supply bathrooms, wash houses and other conveniences which make it possible to keep the city and people in a healthful and sanitary condition. In many of the principal streets in London I noticed signs directing the people to public baths which were located somewhere underneath the street. The different boroughs contributed in 1907 $738,545 in taxes to support these public baths and bath houses, and at the same time the people of London paid over $400,000 for bath tickets and $85,000 for laundry tickets in order to make use of these public conveniences.

Inner London, not including suburbs, has now an area of 6,588 acres in parks large and small, upon which the city has expended a capital of $9,125,910 and upon which it expends annually the sum of $548,065 or thereabout.

Now, the thing that strikes me about all this is that these vast sums of money which London has spent in clearing up its slums, in providing decent houses, wider streets, breathing spaces, bath houses, swimming pools, and washrooms have been spent mainly on sunshine, air, and water, things which any one may have without cost in the country.

I visited some of these wash houses and saw hundreds of women who had come in from the surrounding neighbourhood to do their week's washing. They were paying by the hour for the use of the municipal washtubs and water, but I am sure they were not any better provided for in this respect than the coloured women of the South who go down on sunshiny days to the brook to do their washing, boiling their clothes in a big iron kettle. I saw the boys in some of the swimming pools, but I did not see any of them that seemed happier than the boy who goes off to the brook with his hook and line and by the way takes a plunge in an old-fashioned swimming hole.

Thus it is that London seems to have found that the best if not the only way to solve the city problem is by transporting its population to the country, settling them in colonies in the suburbs, where they may obtain, at an enormous expense, what four fifths of the Negro population in this country already have and what they can be taught to value and keep if some of the money that is now expended or which will be expended on the city slums were spent in giving the people on the farm some of the advantages which the city offers, the principal one of which is a chance for an education.