VOL. XXVII.

No. 1.

The

It is a good practice, whether in Meaning of private or in public affairs, to take "Progress." account of stock at the beginning of a new year, to review and consider the past, to give some thought to the future. Every year must have its difficulties to cope with, and there promises to be no surcease, in this world, of perplexity and of struggle. But if it can be seen, as past events fall into perspective, that right principles are gaining more general recognition in private and in public life, and that true civilization makes some solid gains as each year goes by, there is room for hope, and the optimist is vindicated. The great public concerns are the progress of peace and good-will among men; the diffusion of that kind of true education among the children of the people that fits for all the relations of life; the growth of justice and of tolerance; the narrowing of the domain of tyranny and of oppression in the world; the advance of science and of new kinds of useful knowledge that alleviate human distress; the increase of efficiency and productiveness in agriculture and industry,-giving a larger sum total of wealth and a steady rise in the workingman's standard of living, with such improvements in the economics and mechanics of distribution as may insure the widest possible spread of prosperity and comfort among the people. In these things there has been progress.

Economic High Tides.

If we mistake not, the year 1902 has witnessed in the United States by far the highest total of economic productivity ever attained in any single year. It has also witnessed the widest diffusion of comfort and prosperity. In town and country alike, there has never before been so much lucrative employment for all who are willing and able to work. In spite, for example, of the great anxiety in New York and other large cities on account of the shortness of the coalsupply, there has been very little need for distribution of fuel as a matter of charity. Work

ingmen's families have been able to pay a standard price for coal, and the trouble has been due simply to the lack of a sufficient amount to supply the demand. If the purchasing power of the people had been far less,—as in some former seasons of industrial depression, -the coal famine would not have been so formidable, because the demand from all classes would have been smaller. With factory and business establishments of all kinds running at full pressure, and many of them operating with shifts of labor by night as well as by day, the shortage of fuel has been due in part to the uncommonly large demand for it in boiler-rooms, growing out of a high state of general prosperity.

Good Times

Earner.

This condition that we call "good and the Wage- times," moreover, has been widely extended throughout the country. The autumn crops of no State or section were seriously below the average when taken as a whole, and this, in a country of such diversity. of climate, soil, rainfall, and other physical conditions, is a remarkable fact. The iron and steel manufacturers have had the largest year in their history by an enormous margin of gain over the banner year 1901. Nearly all our other industries have good reports to make. The earnings of the railroads have been much larger than ever before, and many of them have advanced the wages of their employees by from 10 to 20 per cent. There cannot, of course, be a brisk demand at good, profitable prices for what everybody has to sell without some corresponding increase in the price of those things that everybody has to buy. The consequence is, that along with abundant labor and good wages there has been a noticeable increase in the average cost of living. The advantage that the community, as a whole, derives from these periods of industrial activity with profitable prices consists, most of all, in the abundance of employment for every body. The dread of the poor man is not so much the high cost of living as the lack of work.

May

It remains to be seen whether, under "Bad Times" the new economic conditions that Be Abolished ? now prevail, it may not be possible largely to avert those sharp periodical reactions that in other days were attributed by many people to overproduction, but which were in fact due largely to unwise uses of capital and the imperfect organization of credit. With better knowledge and better control of these instruments of production, it ought to be possible to discourage wild speculation, and to keep a fairly normal and harmonious relation between supply and demand, production and consumption. The past year has shown a great growth of understanding and knowledge in the field of practical economics. The protracted discussion of questions having to do with the relations of labor and capital has been highly useful. The discussion of trusts and corporations has also been valuable, and bids fair to lead gradually to some steps for the better public oversight and regulation of these powerful institutions.

Good Lessons

Strike.

The great coal strike has been a very from the costly experience for the country, but the lessons the American people have learned by reason of it could not perhaps be mastered in any less expensive way. The country had looked on rather indifferently at the spectacle of a group of common carriers illegally assuming the business of operating coal mines, and subsequently forming an agreement among themselves amounting to a method for monopolizing the production, transportation, and sale of an article of common and necessary use. This association of interests was able, first, to bring into subjection the independent owners and operators of coal mines; next, to obtain arbitrary profits by increasing the cost of coal to all consumers. Finally, it attempted to put the labor of the coal-mining regions into a position of virtual servitude;--that is to say, into a position where the employer should dictate to the worker the price at which the worker should sell his labor. Such a situation is intolerable in a free country. The first step toward relief was fought successfully by the United Miners, who undertook to vindicate the principle that in the making of contracts of employment each side is entitled to a hearing. The miners were not claiming any right to control the business of the operating companies. They were simply claiming the right to have something to say about the market price and other conditions of mine labor. The trust managers have, many of them, come into places of large power and responsibility by sudden methods that remind one of Arabian Nights tales; and it is not strange

that here and there such men should be so much intoxicated by success as to be arrogant toward certain other forces in the community with which they have not as yet had full opportunity to measure their relative strength. The coal strike has begun to teach them that organized labor can, when necessary, make a very strong stand against organized capital; and that the strongest force of all is the public opinion of the country, to which the agencies of government must sooner or later respond.

Inquiry.

The miners had last month practicalScope of the Anthracite ly completed their testimony before President Roosevelt's strike commissioners. They had introduced testimony which threw much light upon the painful conditions that exist even in those few coal-mining districts that have been noted for their superior treatment of labor, and for the philanthropic activi ties of the operators. It is to be hoped that the commissioners will not flinch from a thorough and symmetrical inquiry into the real causes of this strike. They ought not to come short of a full understanding of the patient efforts made by Mr. Mitchell and the representatives of the miners through nearly two years to arrive at some basis of permanent understanding with the operators. From the public point of view, their inquiry will be incomplete, furthermore, if they do not acquaint themselves with all the facts relating to the combination of railroad companies which alone was responsible for this protracted labor difficulty, and which acted as if it wanted the strike, in the belief that it could once for all break down labor organization in the anthracite regions.

American

the Children.

The greatest underlying task of the Concern for people of any civilized and self-governing country is the transmission of its best wisdom to the rising generation. Our destiny as a nation is bound up with the question of education. We have perhaps never in our history had a year in which so much valuable effort has been made in the educational field. The public schools are improving their methods, and public and private money is being expended as never before,-not merely to prevent the growth of illiteracy, but to make education prac tical and useful, and to make the individual an efficient worker and a good citizen. In the South especially there has been a renewal of effort along educational lines, and this is due in considerable part to the work of certain new educational boards, which have found not merely generous financial backing, but-what is equally necessary—wise methods of obtaining the maxi

mum of educational results with a minimum of expenditure. The growth of cotton mills and other industries in the South, while making for general progress, has involved some incidental evils, such as the considerable employment of child labor. This will sooner or later be ended by the application of such factory acts as exist in Eng. land and in our Northern States. Meanwhile, it is much to be regretted that New England capitalists, who largely own these Southern mills, are to some extent engaged in thwarting the efforts of humane Southern people in their endeavors to

secure proper legislation on this subject. The important thing to note is the splendid determination and spirit of the movement which is opposing child labor, and which is certain to win. its cause in the near future. We have such questions in one form or another always with us, and eternal vigilance is the price of continued progress. It is reassuring, therefore, to note, upon the whole, that there is a steady improvement in social conditions in this and in other regards. Child labor laws need revision and better enforcement in Pennsylvania and New York.

REV. EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY, OF ALABAMA. (Leading advocate of laws against child labor in factories.)

"Free Deliv

We publish an article in this number ery and Rural of the REVIEW upon the remarkable Progress. progress that our Post Office Department has made during the past year in the extension of the free delivery system to rural communities. A movement of this kind once entered upon cannot well be checked. Such advantages cannot be arbitrarily extended to a few favored districts without clamor for like favors from the rest of the country. This postal innovation well illustrates the steadily improv ing outlook in the United States for life in the farming regions and away from the great population centers. With better roads, better schools, the increase of coöperative enterprises like butter and cheese factories, the telephone, and many other of the modern methods and devices that are making life easier and pleasanter in the country, there is a marked improvement in the value of farm lands and a fresh zeal for agricultural education and rural science, and some prospects that there may be established a reasonable balance between city and country. Constantly increasing numbers of city dwellers are finding it possible to spend a considerable part of their time in the country, while, on the other hand, an increasing number of people from the country spend occasional vacations in the large towns and cities. Thus, the peculiar advantages that belong to each mode of life are becoming better distributed.

and transit facilities are accelerating the suburban tendency. The electric trolley is adding large fresh-air zones to all of our populous towns and helping, in a marked manner, to lower the average death rate. In old days, in all of our cities, the death rate was larger than the birth rate, and population was only maintained by accessions from without. That condition is completely changed, and improved sanitation and better understanding of public and private rules of living tend to give us a lowering death rate, large exemption from epidemics, and a prevailingly vigorous and well-favored town population. New York has been the most congested of our great cities, but the past year has seen the development of plans which are to bring about an almost revolutionary improvement in the housing conditions of the people.

ing New York.

Not only is the main underground Revolutioniz- transit system rapidly approaching completion, but there has been adopted a plan which is to give the Pennsylvania Railroad Company a vast terminal station in the heart of the city, with a tunnel connecting Manhattan Island with New Jersey and the American continent to the westward, and with Brooklyn and Long Island to the east. This project, together with another tunnel in course of construction for trolley lines, will make it feasible for many more New Yorkers to live in New Jersey suburbs, while, with new bridges and rapid-transit tunnels now under construction or definitely agreed upon, the residential develop. ment of Long Island will be enormous. New York Central Railroad system, moreover, has within the past year decided upon a plan for greatly increasing its terminal facilities in New York, and for bringing in its suburban as well as its through trains by electricity. Its projected improvements will add greatly to the transit facilities of the adjacent parts of the States of New York and Connecticut. Thus, Manhattan Island will tend more and more to become a place for the concentration of offices and business entérprises, hotels, theaters, and public places of various sorts, while population will spread itself over increasing suburban areas.

Mayor Low.

The

The city of New York has assumed One Year of a metropolitan character of such importance that its chief affairs are no longer of merely local interest. Its well-doing or its ill-doing must in some measure concern the whole country. Even where its problems are peculiar rather than typical, they concern, after all, a city that in some sense belongs to the nation at large. This year it is to go through

one of its biennial municipal campaigns. The chief organized factors in the recurring fight for supremacy in city government are already carefully preparing for the contest. With January 1, Seth Low completes his first year as mayor, following the Tammany administration of Van Wyck. Mr. Low has been handicapped in many ways. The civil-service laws and conditions are such that it has been extremely difficult to weed out inferior and unworthy public servants and replace them with honest and efficient men. The mayor had full authority, however, to name the heads of departments, and, as we explained at the beginning of the year, his choices were remarkably good. In our opinion, his administration has, in its principal methods and results, been a gratifying success. The police situation has been the most difficult to cope with, principally through conditions that no man as chief of police could in one year have overcome. Colonel Partridge, who had served as commissioner of police, now retires, for reasons of ill-health in part, and also in part because his management has been criticised as lacking in vigor. Nobody has said a word reflecting upon his character or his intelligence.

Indorsement.

Mr. Robert Fulton Cutting, the head Mr. Cutting's of the Citizens' Union, made a valuable review late in November of the work of the new administration by departments. His summing up was a remarkable tribute. Even in the police department, he found that much had been done to make things better. High praise, backed up with ample facts and figures, is accorded to the work of the board of education, that of the health department, that of the department of water, gas, and electricity, the park department, the department of charities, that of correction, the new tenement-house department, the dock department, and other branches of the service. The New York public is particularly fond of sensational events; and the vast improvement in the administration of the various departments of municipal government has not been sufficiently spectacular to be fully appreciated. The New York newspapers print scores of columns about some ineffectual raid upon an alleged gambling house, while the public knows almost nothing about the amazingly fine work of the health department, by which thousands of lives are saved, or of the improvements in the educational department, which are of vital consequence to the future of scores of thousands of children. We have no hesitation in pronouncing Mayor Low's administration by far the best in the history of New York since it attained any degree of metropolitan importance.

Conditions of

York.

Apropos of the unprecedented recent Life in New increase in the value of real estate in certain parts of New York, it is interesting to note the fact that the authorities have now determined to assess real estate upon the basis of full valuation. Mr. Andrew Carnegie has come home from Europe to enter his splendid new home on upper Fifth Avenue; and we make this allusion to his New York house because it reminds us of the fact that the building department reports, for the past year, only forty or fifty new private residences on the whole of Manhattan Island. The building of individual residences has practically ceased within what was formerly New York City. Immense business blocks, hotels, and apartment houses have been going up by the hundreds, and population has been growing apace; but the people of Manhattan Island are dwelling more and more in tenement-houses and apartment buildings. The separate house belongs to the dwellers north of the Harlem River, in Brooklyn, and in the Long Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey suburbs. Most of the few houses now built from year to year belong to men of great wealth.

the terms of general law. Ingenious evasions by the Legislature had gradually built up for each city a separate code of charter legislation, so that no two municipalities in Ohio were governed alike. The new system cannot be given unqualified praise; it lacks scientific balance, and fails to focus responsibility. The English system, which centers everything in one board of directors called the town council, is the simplest form of city government; and in the long run, other things being equal, it is the best. The American method has been to divide authority between an elected municipal council and the mayor, with a strong tendency in recent years to centralize in the mayor an almost complete and unrestricted power of appointment and of control over executive business. The new Ohio plan is hard to classify, and difficult to understand, except as it is examined concretely. There is a council, which in the large towns is principally elected from wards, with a small proportion elected on general ticket. The mayor, of course, is elected by the people, and he has considerable power of appointment and removal, and has a veto power upon the acts of the council. But it is neither in the hands of the Mechanism. mayor nor yet in the city council that the principal administrative authority is reposed, but rather in a separate body called the board of public service, consisting of three or five members elected by the people on general ticket, having charge of all public works and contracts, with an immense appointive power

A Complicated