Chapter II: Part 2

How has this remarkable result been achieved? How, bereft of two out of three of the essentials of nationality, has the Jew been enabled to perpetuate his social consciousness? Is the superior force of religion, perhaps abnormally developed, alone able to account for it all? Is it a case of compensatory development, analogous in the body to a loss of eyesight remedied through greater delicacy of finger touch? Or is there some hidden, some unsuspected factor, which has contributed to this result? We have elsewhere shown that a fourth element of social solidarity is sometimes, though rarely, found, in a community of physical descent. That, in other words, to the cementing bonds of speech, tradition, belief, and contiguity, is added the element of physical brotherhood--that is to say, of race. Can it be that herein is a partial explanation of the social individuality of the Jewish people? It is a question for the scientist alone. Race, as we constantly maintain, despite the abuses of the word, really is to be measured only by physical characteristics. The task before us is to apply the criteria of anthropological science, therefore, to the problems of Jewish derivation and descent. Only incidentally and as matters of contributory interest shall we consider the views of the linguists, the archæologists, and the students of religious traditions. Our testimony is derived from facts of shape of head, color of hair and eye, of stature, and the like. These alone are the data indicative of racial descent. To these the geographer may add the probabilities derived from present distribution in Europe. No more do we need to settle the primary racial facts. Further speculations concerning matters rather than men belong to the historian and the philologist.

The number and geographical distribution of the chosen people of Israel is of great significance in its bearing upon the question of their origin.[2] While, owing to their fluid ubiquitousness, it is exceedingly difficult to enumerate them exactly, probability indicates that there are to-day, the world over, between eight and nine million Jews. Of these, six or seven million are inhabitants of Europe, the remainder being sparsely scattered over the whole earth, from one end to the other.

Their distribution in Europe, as our map opposite shows, is exceedingly uneven. Fully one half of these descendants of Jacob reside in Russia, there being four or five million Jews in that country alone. Austria-Hungary stands next in order, with two million odd souls. After these two there is a wide gap. No other European country is comparable with them except it be Germany and Roumania with their six or seven hundred thousand each. The British Isles contain relatively few, possibly one hundred thousand, these being principally in London. They are very rare in Scotland and Ireland--only a thousand or fifteen hundred apiece. Holland contains also about a hundred thousand, half of them in the celebrated Ghetto at Amsterdam. Then follow France with eighty thousand more or less, and Italy with perhaps two thirds as many. From Scandinavia they have always been rigidly excluded, from Sweden till the beginning and from Norway until nearly the middle of this century. Spain, although we hear much of the Spanish Jew, contains practically no indigenous Israelites. It is estimated that there were once about a million there settled, but the persecutions of the fifteenth century drove them forth all over Europe, largely to the Balkan states and Africa. There are a good many along these Mediterranean shores of Africa, principally in Morocco and Tripoli. The number decreases as we approach Egypt and Palestine, the ancient center of Jewish dispersion. As to America, it is estimated, although we know nothing certainly, that there are about a half million Jews scattered through our cities in the United States. New York city, according to the last census, contained about eighty thousand Poles and Russians, most of whom, it may be assumed, were Jews. But they have come since in ever-increasing numbers, with the great exodus from Russia, at the rate of scores of thousands annually. A recent writer places their present number in New York city at a quarter of a million. The British provinces, on the other hand, do not seem to offer great attractions; as late as 1870, for example, the census in Nova Scotia could not discover a solitary Jew.

A more suggestive index of the problems of Jewish distribution, however, is offered in the ratio of the number of Jews to the entire population. This is directly illustrated by our map. To be sure, this represents the situation twenty years ago, but no great change in relativity is to be suspected since that time. Even the wholesale exodus from Russia of recent years has not yet drawn off any large proportion of its vast body of population. Inspection of our map shows that the relative frequency of Jews increases in proportion to the progressive darkening of the tints. This brings out with startling clearness the reason for the recent anti-Semitic uprisings in both Russia, Austria, and the German Empire. A specific "center of gravity" of the Jewish people, as Leroy-Beaulieu puts it, is at once indicated in western Russia. The highest proportion, fifteen per cent, more or less, appears, moreover, to be entirely restricted to the Polish provinces, with the sole exception of the government of Grodno. About this core lies a second zone, including the other west Russian governments, as well as the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Germany, as it appears, is sharply divided from its eastern neighbors, all along the political frontier. Not even its former Polish territory, Posen, is to-day relatively thickly settled with Jews. Hostile legislation it is, beyond a doubt, which so rigidly holds back the Jew from immigration along this line. _Anti-Semitismus_ is not, therefore, to-day to any great extent an uprising against an existing evil; rather does it appear to be a protest against a future possibility. Germany shudders at the dark and threatening cloud of population of the most ignorant and wretched description which overhangs her eastern frontier. Berlin must not, they say, be allowed to become a new Jerusalem for the horde of Russian exiles. That also is our American problem. This great Polish swamp of miserable human beings, terrific in its proportions, threatens to drain itself off into our country as well, unless we restrict its ingress. As along the German frontier, so also toward the east, it is curious to note how rapidly the percentage of Jews decreases as we pass over into Great Russia. The governments of St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and Moscow have no greater Jewish contingent of population than has France or Italy; their Jewish problem is far less difficult than that of our own country is bound to be in the future. This clearly defined eastern boundary of _Judenthum_ is also the product of prohibitive legislation. The Jews are by law confined within certain provinces. A rigid law of settlement, intended to circumscribe their area of density closely, yields only to the persuasion of bribery. Not Russia, then, but southwestern Russia alone, is deeply concerned over the actual presence of this alien population. And it is the Jewish element in this small section of the country which constitutes such an industrial and social menace to the neighboring empires of Germany and Austria. In the latter country the Jews seem to be increasing in numbers almost four times as rapidly as the native population. The more elastic boundaries of Jewish density on the southeast, on the other hand, are indicative of the legislative tolerance which the Israelites there enjoy. Wherever the bars are lowered, there does this migratory human element at once expand.

The peculiar problems of Jewish distribution are only half realized until it is understood that, always and everywhere, the Israelites constitute pre-eminently the town populations.[3] They are not widely disseminated among the agricultural districts, but congregate in the commercial centers. It is an unalterable characteristic of this peculiar people. The Jew betrays an inherent dislike for hard manual or outdoor labor, as for physical exercise or exertion in any form. He prefers to live by brain, not brawn. Leroy-Beaulieu seems to consider this as an acquired characteristic due to mediæval prohibition of land ownership or to confinement within the Ghetto. To us it appears to be too constant a trait the world over to justify such a hypothesis. Fully to appreciate, therefore, what the Jewish question is in Polish Russia, we must always bear this fact in mind. The result is that in many parts of Poland the Jews form an actual majority of the population in the towns. This is the danger for Germany also. Thus it is Berlin, not Prussia at large, which is threatened with an overload of Jews from the country on the east. This aggregation in urban centers becomes the more marked as the relative frequency for the whole country lessens. Thus in Saxony, which, being industrial, is not a favorite Jewish center, four fifths of all the Jewish residents are found in Dresden and Leipsic alone.[4] This is probably also the reason for the lessened frequency of Jews all through the Alpine highlands, especially in the Tyrol. These districts are so essentially agricultural that few footholds for the Jew are to be found.

A small secondary center of Jewish aggregation appears upon our map to be manifested about Frankfort. It has a peculiar significance. The Hebrew settlers in the Rhenish cities date from the third century at least, having come there over the early trade routes from the Mediterranean. Germany being divided politically, and Russia interdicting them from 1110, a specific center was established, especially in Franconia, Frankfort being the focus of attraction. Then came the fearful persecutions all over Europe, attendant upon the religious fervor of the Crusades. The Polish kings, desiring to encourage the growth of their city populations, offered the rights of citizenship to all who would come, and an exodus in mass took place. They seem to have been welcomed, till the proportions of the movement became so great as to excite alarm. Its results appear upon our map. Thus we know that many of the Jews of Poland came to Russia as a troublesome legacy on the division of that kingdom. At the end of the sixteenth century but three German cities remained open to them--namely, Frankfort, Worms, and Furth.[5] Yet it was obviously impossible to uproot them entirely. To their persistence in this part of Germany is probably due the small secondary center of Jewish distribution, which we have mentioned, indicated by the darker tint about Frankfort, and including Alsace-Lorraine. Here is a relative frequency, not even exceeded by Posen, although we generally conceive of this former Polish province as especially saturated with Jews. It is the only vestige remaining to indicate what was at one time the main focus of Jewish population in Europe. It affords us a striking example of what legislation may accomplish ethnically, when supplemented, or rather aggravated, by religious and economic motives.

Does it accord with geographical probability to derive our large dark area of present Jewish aggregation entirely from the small secondary one about Frankfort, which, as we have just said, is the relic of a mediæval center of gravity? The question is a crucial one for the alleged purity of the Russian Jew; for the longer his migrations over the face of the map, the greater his chance of ethnic intermixture. A moot point among Jewish scholars is, as to the extent of this exodus from Germany into Poland. Bershadski has done much to show its real proportions in history. Talko-Hryncewicz[6] and Weissenberg,[7] among anthropologists, seem to be inclined to derive this great body of Polish Jews from Palestine by way of the Rhone-Rhine-Frankfort route. They are, no doubt, partially in the right; but the mere geographer would rather be inclined to side with Jacques.[8] He doubts whether entirely artificial causes, even mediæval persecutions, would be quite competent for so large a contract. There is certainly some truth in Harkavy's theory, so ably championed by Ikof (1884), that a goodly proportion of these Jews came into Poland by a direct route from the East. Most Jewish scholars had placed their first appearance in southern and eastern Russia, coming around the Black Sea, as early as the eighth century. Ikof, however, finds them in the Caucasus and Armenia one or two centuries before Christ. Then he follows them around, reaching Ruthenia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, arriving in Poland from the twelfth to the fourteenth. The only difficulty with this theory is, of course, that it leaves the language of the Polish Jews out of consideration. This is, in both Poland and Galicia, a corrupted form of German, which in itself would seem to indicate a western origin. On the other hand, the probabilities, judging from our graphic representation, would certainly emphasize the theory of a more general eastern immigration directly from Palestine north of the Black and Caspian Seas. The only remaining mode of accounting for the large center of gravity in Russia is to trace it to widespread conversions, as the historic one of the Khozars. Whichever one of these theories be correct--and there is probability of an equal division of truth among them all--enough has been said to lead us geographically to suspect the alleged purity of descent of the Ashkenazim Jew. Let us apply the tests of physical anthropology.

STATURE.--A noted writer, speaking of the sons of Judah, observes: "It is the Ghetto which has produced the Jew and the Jewish race; the Jew is a creation of the European middle ages; he is the artificial product of hostile legislation." This statement is fully authenticated by a peculiarity of the Israelites which is everywhere noticeable. The European Jews are all undersized; not only this, they are more often absolutely stunted. In London they are about three inches shorter than the average for the city. Whether they were always so, as in the days when the Book of Numbers (xiii, 33) described them "as grasshoppers in their own sight," as compared with the Amorites, sons of Anak, we leave an open question. We are certain, however, as to the modern Jew. He betrays a marked constancy in Europe at the bodily height of about five feet four inches (1.63 metre) for adult men. This, according to the data afforded by measurements of our recruits during the civil war, is about the average of American youth between the ages of fifteen and sixteen, who have still three, almost four, inches more to grow. In Bosnia, for example, where the natives range at about the American level--that is to say, among the very tallest in the world (1.72 metre)--the Jews are nearly three inches and a half shorter on the average.[9] If we turn to northern Italy, where Lombroso has recently investigated the matter, we apparently find the Jew somewhat better favored by comparison. He is in Turin less than an inch inferior to his Italian neighbors. But why? Not because taller than in the case of Bosnia, for his stature in both places is the same. The difference decreases, not because the Jew in Piedmont is taller, but solely because the north Italians are only of moderate height. So it goes all over Austria and Russia: the diminutiveness is plainly apparent.[10] There is in all Europe only a single exception to the rule we have cited. Anutchin finds them in Odessa and Riga slightly to exceed the Christians. In order to emphasize this point it will repay us to consider the adopted fatherland of the Jews a bit more in detail.

Our map herewith shows a general average of stature for Poland by districts. This unhappy country appears to be populated by the shortest human beings north of the Alps; it is almost the most stunted in all Europe. The great majority of the districts, as our map shows, are characterized by a population whose adult men scarcely average five feet four inches (1.62 metre) in height. This is more than half a head shorter than the type of the British Isles or northern Germany. What is the meaning of this? Is it entirely the fault of the native Poles? We know that the northern Slavs are all merely mediocre in stature. But this depression is too serious to be accounted for in this way; and further analysis shows that the defect is largely due to the presence of the vast horde of Jews, whose physical peculiarity drags down the average for the entire population.[11] This has been proved directly. Perhaps the deepest pit in this great "misery spot," as we have termed such areas of dwarfed population elsewhere, is in the capital city of Warsaw, where Elkind found the average stature of two hundred male Jews to be less than five feet three inches and a half (1.61 metre).[12] The women were only four feet eleven inches tall on the average. Compare the little series of maps given on pages 172 and 173 if further proof of this national peculiarity be needed. Two of these, it will be observed, give the average height of Jews and Poles respectively, dividing the city into districts. The social status of these districts is shown upon our third map. Comparison of these three brings out a very interesting sociological fact, to which we have already called attention in our earlier papers.[13] The stature of men depends in a goodly measure upon their environment. In the wards of the city where prosperity resides, the material well-being tends to produce a stature distinctly above that of the slums. In both cases, Poles and Jews are shortest in the poorer sections of the city, dark tinted on the maps. The correspondence is not exact, for the number of observations is relatively small; but it indicates beyond a doubt a tendency commonly noticeable in great cities. But to return to our direct comparison of Poles and Jews; the deficiency of the latter, as a people, is perfectly apparent. The most highly favored Jewish population socially, in the whole city of Warsaw in fact, can not produce an average stature equal to that of the very poorest Poles; and this, too, in the most miserable section of the capital city of one of the most stunted countries in Europe.

We may assume it as proved, therefore, that the Jew is to-day a very defective type in stature. He seems to be susceptible to favorable influences, however; for in London, the West End prosperous Jews almost equal the English in height, while they at the same time surpass their East End brethren by more than three inches.[14] In Russia also they become taller as a class wherever the life conditions become less rigorously oppressive. They are taller in the fertile Ukraine than in sterile Lithuania; they sometimes boast of a few relatively tall men.[15] These facts all go to show that the Jew is short, not by heredity, but by force of circumstances; and that where he is given an even chance, he speedily recovers a part at least of the ground lost during many ages of social persecution. Jacobs mentions an interesting fact in this connection about his upper-class English Jews. Close analysis of the data seems to show that, for the present at least, their physical development has been stretched nearly to the upper limit; for even in individual cases the West End Jews of London manifest an inability to surpass the height of five feet nine inches. So many have been blessed by prosperity that the average has nearly reached that of the English; but it is a mean stature of which the very tall form no component part. Thus perhaps does the influence of heredity obstruct the temporary action of environment.

Whether this short stature of the Jew is a case of an acquired characteristic which has become hereditary, we are content to leave an open question. All we can say is, that the modern Semites in Arabia and Africa are all of goodly size, far above the Jewish average.[16] This would tend to make us think that the harsh experiences of the past have subtracted several cubits from the stature of the people of Israel. In self-defense it must be said that the Christian is not entirely to blame for the physical disability. It is largely to be ascribed to the custom of early marriages among them. This has probably been an efficient cause of their present degeneracy in Russia, where Tschubinsky describes its alarming prevalence. Leroy-Beaulieu says that it is not at all uncommon to find the combined age of husband and wife, or even of father and mother, to be under thirty years. The Shadchan, or marriage broker, has undoubtedly been an enemy to the Jewish people within their own lines. In the United States, where they are, on the other hand, on the up grade socially, there are indications that this age of marriage is being postponed, perhaps even unduly.[17]

A second indication in the case of the Jew of uncommonly hard usage in the past remains to be mentioned. These people are, anthropologically as well as proverbially, narrow-chested and deficient in lung capacity. Normally the chest girth of a well-developed man ought to equal or exceed one half his stature, yet in the case of the Jews as a class this is almost never the case. Majer and Kopernicki[18] first established this in the case of the Galician Jews. Stieda[19] gives additional testimony to the same effect. Jacobs[20] shows the English Jews distinctly inferior to Christians in lung capacity, which is generally an indication of vitality. In Bosnia, Glück[21] again refers to it as characteristic. Granted, with Weissenberg,[22] that it is an acquired characteristic, the effect of long-continued subjection to unfavorable sanitary and social environment, it has none the less become a hereditary trait; for not even the perhaps relatively recent prosperity of Jacobs's West End Jews has sufficed to bring them up to the level of their English brethren in capacity of the lungs.

At this point a surprising fact confronts us. Despite the appearances of physical degeneracy which we have noted, the Jew betrays an absolutely unprecedented tenacity of life. It far exceeds, especially in the United States, that of any other known people.[23] This we may illustrate by the following example: Suppose two groups of one hundred infants each, one Jewish, one of average American parentage (Massachusetts), to be born on the same day. In spite of all the disparity of social conditions in favor of the latter, the chances, determined by statistical means, are that one half of the Americans will die within forty-seven years; while the first half of the Jews will not succumb to disease or accident before the expiration of seventy-one years. The death rate is really but little over half that of the average American population. This holds good in infancy as in middle age. Lombroso has put it in another way. Of one thousand Jews born, two hundred and seventeen die before the age of seven years; while four hundred and fifty-three Christians--more than twice as many--are likely to die within the same period. This remarkable tenacity of life is well illustrated by the following table from a most suggestive article by Hoffmann.[24] We can not forbear from reproducing it in this place.

_Death Rates per 1,000 Population in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards of New York City, 1890, by Place of Birth._

----------------+--------+-------------+--------+--------+-------------
| |United States| | | Russia and
AGES. | Total. | (includes |Ireland.|Germany.| Poland
| | colored). | | |(mostly Jews).
----------------+--------+-------------+--------+--------+-------------
Total | 26.25 | 45.18 | 36.04 | 22.14 | 16.71
Under 15 years | 41.28 | 62.25 | 40.71 | 30.38 | 32.31
15 to 25 years | 7.55 | 9.43 | 15.15 | 7.14 | 2.53
25 to 65 years | 21.64 | 25.92 | 39.51 | 21.20 | 7.99
65 and under | 104.72 | 105.96 | 120.92 | 88.51 | 84.51
----------------+--------+-------------+--------+--------+-------------

From this table it appears, despite the extreme poverty of the Russian and Polish Jews in the most densely crowded portions of New York; despite the unsanitary tenements, the overcrowding, the long hours in sweat shops; that nevertheless, a viability is manifested which is simply unprecedented. Tailoring is one of the most deadly occupations known; the Jews of New York are principally engaged in this employment; and yet they contrive to live nearly twice as long on the average as their neighbors, even those engaged in the outdoor occupations.

Is this tenacity of life despite every possible antagonistic influence, an ethnic trait; or is it a result of peculiar customs and habits of life? There is much which points to the latter conclusion as the correct one. For example, analysis of the causes of mortality shows an abnormally small proportion of deaths from consumption and pneumonia, the dread diseases which, as we know, are responsible for the largest proportion of deaths in our American population. This immunity can best be ascribed to the excellent system of meat inspection prescribed by the Mosaic laws. It is certainly not a result of physical development, as we have just seen. Hoffmann cites authority showing that in London often as much as a third of the meats offered for sale are rejected as unfit for consumption by Jews. Is not this a cogent argument in favor of a more rigid enforcement of our laws providing for the food inspection of the poor?

A second cause conducive to longevity is the sobriety of the Jew, and his disinclination toward excessive indulgence in alcoholic liquors. Drunkenness among Jews is very rare. Temperate habits, a frugal diet, with a very moderate use of spirits, render the proportion of Bright's disease and affections of the liver comparatively very small. In the infectious diseases, on the other hand, diphtheria and the fevers, no such immunity is betrayed. The long-current opinion that the Jews were immune from cholera and the other pestilences of the middle ages is not to-day accepted. A third notable reason for this low death rate is also, as Hoffmann observes, the nature of the employment customary among Jews, which renders the proportion of deaths from accidental causes exceedingly small. In conclusion, it may be said that these people are prone to nervous and mental disorders; insanity, in fact, is fearfully prevalent among them. Lombroso asserts it to be four times as frequent among Italian Jews as among Christians. This may possibly be a result of close inbreeding in a country like Italy, where the Jewish communities are small. It does not, however, seem to lead to suicide, for this is extraordinarily rare among Jews, either from cowardice, as Lombroso suggests; or more probably for the reason cited by Morselli--namely, the greater force of religion and other steadying moral factors.

[_To be continued._]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the preparation of this article I have to acknowledge the courtesy of Mr. Joseph Jacobs, of London, whose works in this line are accepted as an authority. In its illustration I have derived invaluable assistance from Dr. S. Weissenberg, of Elizabethgrad, Russia, and Dr. L. Bertholon, of Tunis. Both these gentlemen have loaned me a large number of original photographs of types from their respective countries. Dr. Bertholon has also taken several especially for use in this way. The more general works upon which we have relied are: R. Andree, Zur Volkskunde der Juden, Bielefeld, 1881; A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Les Juifs et l'antisémitisme, Paris, 3e éd. 1893; and C. Lombroso, Gli Antisemitismo, Torino, 1894. For all other authorities to whom reference is made by name and year, consult our comprehensive Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe, in a forthcoming Special Bulletin of the Boston Public Library. In its index under "Jews" and "Semites" will be found an exhaustive list of authorities given chronologically.

[2] Andree, 1881, pp. 194 _et seq._, with tables appended; Jacobs, 1886 a, p. 24; and quite recently A. Leroy-Beaulieu, 1893, chapter i, are best on this. Tschubinsky, 1877, gives much detail at first hand on western Russia. In the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Anglo-Jewish Association, London, 1888, is a convenient census, together with a map of distribution for Europe. On America, no official data of any kind exist. The censuses have never attempted an enumeration of the Jews. Schimmer's results from the census of 1880 in Austria-Hungary are given in Statistische Monatsschrift, vii, p. 489 _et seq._

[3] This is clearly shown by Schimmer in Statistische Monatsschrift, vii, pp. 489 _et seq._

[4] See also map in Kettler, 1880.

[5] J. C. Majer (1862) ascribes the shortness of stature in Furth to this Jewish influence.

[6] 1892.

[7] 1895, p. 577.

[8] 1891.

[9] Glück, 1896; and Weisbach, 1877 and 1895 a.

[10] Majer and Kopernicki, 1877, p. 36, for Ruthenia; Stieda, 1883, p. 70; Anutchin, 1889, p. 114, etc.

[11] Zakrezewski, 1891, p. 38. In the October Monthly our stature map of all Russia brings out the contrast very strongly.

[12] Centralblatt für Anthropologie, iii, p. 66. Uke, cited by Andree, 1881, p. 32, agrees.

[13] Popular Science Monthly, vol. li, p. 20 _et seq._ (May, 1897), and vol. lii, p. 602 (March, 1898).

[14] Jacobs, 1889, p. 81.

[15] Talko-Hryncewicz, 1892, pp. 7 and 58.

[16] Collignon, 1887 a, pp. 211 and 326; and Bertholon, 1892, p. 41.

[17] Jacobs, 1891, p. 50, shows it to be less common in other parts of Europe. In the United States, Dr. Billings finds the marriage rate to be only 7.4 per 1,000--about one third that of the Northeastern States.

[18] 1877, p. 59.

[19] 1883, p. 71.

[20] 1889, p. 84.

[21] 1896, p. 591.

[22] 1895, p. 374.

[23] On Jewish demography, consult the special appendix in Lombroso, 1874; Andree, 1881, p. 70; Jacobs, 1891, p. 49. Dr. Billings, in Eleventh United States Census, 1890, Bulletin No. 19, gives data for our country. On pathology, see Buschan, 1895.

[24] The Jew as a Life Risk. The Spectator (an actuarial journal) 1895, pp. 222-224, and 233, 234. Lagneau, 1861, p. 411, speaks of a viability in Algeria even lower than that of the natives.

THE PLAYGROUNDS OF RURAL AND SUBURBAN SCHOOLS.

BY ISABELLA G. OAKLEY.

While the officers and friends of education in large cities are exerting themselves to provide open-air playgrounds for the schools, the villages and smaller towns all over the East are reversing the case. Except in the small district schools, the children's playground has almost ceased to exist.

This is an evil which has crept in with the tendency to centralize the schools. When in any place the schools begin to overflow, a movement to put up a larger building takes place, accompanied by an effort to create a high-school department; not so much the need of the community as the ambitious dream of some principal who would be superintendent, or some sort of central sun to a group of satellites. This dream is too easily realized, because it flatters the people. Then there rises a preposterous structure of stone and brick; a house of many gables, out of keeping with everything, either public or private, in the place; a temple of vanity. Now is rung the knell of the school playground, for the new "high school," although it will house all the children from five to fifteen, must needs be surrounded by a fine lawn, studded with shrubbery, and threaded by bluestone roads. The janitor has to employ an assistant to keep the grounds in order. A shut-in, penitentiarylike place has been evolved by the architect and school committee, gratifying to their pride and a deep wrong to the children. There are many wrongs about it; the one insisted upon here is the abolishing of the recess, that time-honored joy of the American schoolboy and schoolgirl.

The cheerful sounds of play no more re-echo; the little ones march in "lock step" from the doors to the very curb of this immaculate ornate inclosure. If, on this beautiful lawn, any impulsive youngster is caught running, or performing an instinctive hopscotch or leapfrog, he is sure to be seen by a watching and powerful janitor and reported. Leapfrog and profanity, in the true Draconian spirit, are alike visited with the extreme penalty of a visit to the principal's office. However, in default of a playground, the new schoolhouse provides a gymnasium for physical culture. I speak now of a particular school, the pride of a simple village, and a type of many. This gymnasium is a costly room filled with elaborate apparatus, most of which is suited only to the high-school pupils, and never touched by the majority, who leave school at twelve or thirteen; their physical exercises have been chiefly provided for by a box of dumb-bells and wands. In many schools the "gymnasium" is a cavernous and ugly basement, a place full of shadows cast by the gloomy arches on which the building rests, with walls of brick and floors of asphalt. Little troops of silent, pale children arrive and depart all day for their _physical culture_, a dreary repetition of silent dumb-bell exercises. There is no speech nor language among them, no sound is heard but the jingle of the piano and the sharp tones of the monitor's counting. I have never heard the children count aloud or accompany the calisthenics by singing except in a private school. What an alternative for a free recess! No penitentiary drill could be more perfunctory, spiritless, dead. It must be said of the public schools that the thing they most seem to dread is the sound of a child's voice. The rude, untrained intonations, the slovenly speech, the slouching attitude remain rude, slovenly, and slouching, for all the school attempts to do for their improvement is infinitely little. Even the blessed relief of shaking the arm and hand to attract the teacher's attention has been reduced in some schools to lifting two fingers.

The pupils generally hate their calisthenics, or, in the new phrase, physical culture exercises. And they would hate just as sincerely regulated games superintended by some impossible master of sports. What they want is spontaneity in play. Public money is wasted in providing these abhorrent alternatives. Poor little Carthusians as young as six and seven years are kept in their rooms, and principally in their seats, above two hours at each session, and often after that to atone for some delinquency, most likely for speaking. In many schools they do not leave the room for any kind of exercise. If they were capable of demanding their rights they would call for both the abolition of the school lawn and calisthenic basement, and the restoration of their playground and recess.

From the cruelty of this repression nature finds a little way out; the children require of the neighbors what they have been deprived of by the school committee. All around the precincts of the temple of learning the trodden borders of the sidewalk, churned to mire in winter and trampled to rock in summer, speak of the victory of the boys. There are towns, perhaps, where they all go straight home, but in our town, they gather four times a day in knots of twenties and fifties for some kind of fun. The patient neighbors go on removing coats and dinner pails from the pickets, clearing away papers and missiles from their inclosures, yet I discover that even they would vote to keep the school lawn; it improves the town. Very true. But ingenuity could well contrive some way of uniting the playground and the school park. Spaces of grass to rest the eye and decorate the square could be interspersed with inclosures of asphalt, furnished with a few parallel bars and swings, without sacrifice of appearances. Often the school property is so large that it could include half a dozen such special playgrounds. We have but to begin it to find some feasible plan.

If the palatial school and its park is reaction against the "ragged beggar" of Whittier's lovely poem, sunning in the midst of the blackberry vines of Hardscrabble Hill, it is a reaction that has gone too far to suit a generation which loves to read Hosea Bigelow:

"So the old school'us is a place I choose
Afore all others, ef I want to muse;
I set down where I used to set, an' git
My boyhood back, an' better things with it--
Faith, Hope, an' sunthin', ef it isn't Cherrity,
It's want o' guile, an' thet's ez gret a rarity."

If it may be replied, that is not the generation for whom schoolhouses are now built, it is one which may interpret the wants of its children by just such recollections.

Another evil has grown out of the centralization of the schools. The smaller schoolhouses formerly stood within convenient reach, and by abandoning them we have forced many little children to walk farther than they are able to walk. In the absence of street cars and sidewalks this becomes a great hardship in extreme weather. In one village in New York, out of an enrollment of fourteen hundred, there was one month last year an average attendance of four hundred. The new school building, which had cost seventy-five thousand dollars, was more than two miles from some part of the district, and there were no sidewalks; neither were there paved streets or street lamps. In such circumstances a number of children are unable to get home to the noon meal, usually dinner, and most important. Where do they eat their luncheon? In their seats, watched by teachers, who are compelled unwillingly to take turns at this duty, and who have also to eat a cold, unpalatable lunch in bad air for a week at a time. After lunch there is an hour to be disposed of by the children, but there is no place to play in except the basement or the streets of the neighborhood. The teachers frequently read them a story, that they may stretch their minds a little if not their bodies. It is a painful sight--few more painful to me--to see a crowd of young children having their recreation in one of these basements. Running and loud talking are forbidden; a police of teachers armed with symbols of authority and punishment keep the restless little prisoners within bounds.

Another objection to the central school is the rainy-day half-session. Though the daily instruction may be managed so that the pupils do not miss anything, it is still a fact that the majority of parents expect the school to take charge of their children, and are often much dissatisfied to have them thrown back upon their own hands on rainy days.

How has it come about that the playground and school recess have been so generally given up? Is it altogether on account of appearances? Teachers plead that the children ought to be preserved from association with objectionable playmates. This may do for the touch-me-not, only child, but in American society it is never a strong plea. That small fraction which seeks to educate its children as a class can do so in a few schools limited to church, plutocracy, Quakerism, or some such narrow basis. But the schools of a free State are, above everything, founded on the essential equality of individuals in the State, and the possibility of every one to rise to a successful and honorable manhood. If there is one conviction above another strengthened by experience, it is that, in their choice of companions and susceptibility to influence, children are governed by their innate qualities, and these qualities are fixed by heredity and home influences long before the school age. In so large a community as a public school there is companionship for all, for it certainly represents the town itself. Let no one be afraid of the democratic instincts of childhood.

I believe the playground is abolished because it interferes with that deadly order and craze for supervision which is sought for as the prime condition both inside and outside the schools. Order of a wholesome sort is not inconsistent with the free recess of a big school. I watched in Los Angeles a great school as it was marshaled out to play and back again at the sound of a drum. After a quarter of an hour of unrestrained sport, several hundreds were gathered in lines at the tap of the drum, facing the cheerful schoolhouse in the mild bright sun, their faces radiating contentment and good will while they straightened up at the mere hint of the teachers on duty. In San Francisco I once found a certain primary school keeping doll's day, when every girl brought her doll to school and exhibited her at recess. The school yard was a barren inclosure within a high board fence, but a joyful place to that young company. To what purpose are teachers urged to study psychology? The children in their seats are emptied of everything that pertains to their souls. Not to study, because the teacher will explain everything, and to behave just well enough to get safe out of school, is the simple code which covers the conduct of average children. To extend this code to ideas of social duty--the highest--is not possible while they do not form a society. Cultivation of friendship is just as much out of the case; awakening of ideals, an impossibility. But thrown together half an hour or more each day, the dead machinery that pulls the bells and adds the marks within the school walls gives way to life; and here a man who sympathizes with childhood has all the opportunity he needs, and probably much more than he can use, in providing for that life where a code of reciprocity and honor must be established. It is not as the magistrate he will successfully rule, but as the sympathetic general in the field, whose very name is a talisman and an inspiration to every man. In the school yard, the bully, who comes to the front in about every tenth child, needs to be repressed; the foul mouth must be cleansed; against these prevailing evils the playground has a protection the street can not possess. The boy's world is a peculiar world, certainly, making laws for itself as rigorous and about as barbarous as those of a gang of pirates; but it is through his _esprit du corps_ he can be uplifted and educated; the individual may be a selfish animal; as one of a body he is capable of heroism and devotion to a noble idea. He can be a friend; the playground is the field for the natural growth of friendships, and youth the generous time of their birth.

I recall another scene in a schoolroom in a Western city long ago. A gentle girl, magnetic, deep-hearted, large-eyed, sat after school at her table in tears. On a seat in front of her platform were piles of slates which she had been correcting, for she instructed all day a succession of arithmetic classes coming to her from the different grades. At the same time she was in charge, for all particular purposes of their order and conduct, of about forty boys in their early teens. Her tears were in consequence of a quarrel at recess between two of her boys. They had settled their quarrel by a fight; not unlikely it was a wholesome fight, for they were not boys of the mean sort, and were friends. It is an affair of long ago, but of a time when, in a large city, a teacher shed her influence upon the school playground, and took account of its moral standards, its friendships and breaches of friendship.

* * * * *

Although white men, if they take due precautions, may live and
do certain kinds of work in tropical Africa, it will never be
possible, Mr. J. Scott Keltie concludes from the results of past
experience and study, to colonize that part of the world with
people from the temperate zone. Even in such favorable situations
as Blantyre, a lofty region south of Lake Nyassa, children can not
be reared beyond a certain age, but must be sent home to England;
otherwise they will degenerate physically and morally. A plan has
been proposed of bringing Europeans down into the tropical regions
by degrees, and acclimatizing them by successive generations to
more and more torrid conditions till they are finally settled in
the heart of the continent. But the experiment would be a very
long one, if tried; and the ultimate result would probably be a
race deprived of all those characteristics which have made Europe
what it is.

UP THE SKEENA RIVER TO THE HOME OF THE TSIMSHIANS.[25]

BY GEORGE A. DORSEY, PH. D.,

FIELD COLUMBIAN MUSEUM, CHICAGO, ILL.

In a recent number of the Monthly I described some of the incidents of a visit to the Haida and Tlingit villages about Dixon's Entrance; now I am to speak of the Tsimshian villages on the Skeena River. The Tsimshian Indians are one of the five great stocks which make up the aboriginal population of the coast of British Columbia and southern Alaska. They are shut in by the Tlingits on the north and by the Kwakiutls on the south, while on the head waters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers they come in contact with the great Tinneh or Athabascan stock. The Tsimshians are probably the most progressive of all the coast Indians, and are one of a few stocks on the American continent which are holding their own in point of numbers.

Desiring to visit those villages which are least contaminated by modern influence, we ascended the Skeena River to the village of Kitanmaksh or Hazelton. The Skeena is the historic river of British Columbia; its name signifies the "Water of Terrors." Nearly every rock, every bend, every cañon is the scene of some mythical tale. The scene of the birth of the Tsimshian nation lies in its valley; the rock is still revered upon which rested the Tsimshian ark after the flood, and the "Dum-lak-an," "the new home and place of dispersal," is still a Mecca to which pilgrimages are made. In the modern development of the Omenica and Cariboo gold fields the Skeena has been the highway to the sea. For hundreds of years canoes have been paddled up and down its waters; it has been the highway for intertribal trade from time immemorial, and when the Hudson Bay Company's post was established at Hazelton, and merchandise began to pour into the upper country in a steady stream, the Tsimshians with their canoes enjoyed for a long time a monopoly of the carrying trade. Gradually, as they learned the ways and methods of the white man, the price per ton of freight from the coast to Hazelton began steadily to rise, until in 1891 the tariff of sixty dollars a ton was declared ruinous by the company, and they decided to build their own steamer with which to carry their freight up the river.

Port Essington is the chief port of the mouth of the Skeena, and in Essington we found ourselves on the twenty-third day of July. The Caledonia was up the river on her third trip, but was expected back any hour, but so delightfully uncertain is the river voyage that, as we were informed, "there was no telling when she would be down--in fact, she might be caught above the cañon and wouldn't be down for weeks."

The town of Essington dates back to 1835, when the Hudson Bay Company established a post there. Its only rival for preeminence on the coast is Port Simpson. The town in summer is completely given over to fishing, the salmon cannery of Cunningham & Son being one of the largest on the coast, and the river for twenty miles is dotted with canneries. In one day, while we were in Essington, the catch of salmon on the river was ninety-two thousand fish. In addition to the cannery the town boasts of a good hotel and a Salvation Army. An Indian Salvation Army is worth going miles to see, for the Indian is a natural-born salvationist; the army permits him to make all the noise he chooses, sing as loudly as he pleases, and, best of all, he is entitled to make a speech every time it comes his turn.

In the afternoon, about four o'clock, on the day after our arrival, a long, shrill blast of the whistle aroused the entire town, for the Caledonia was in sight. Down we went to the wharf, and the entire town followed. What a motley crowd you will find on one of these British Columbia wharves! What coloring, what a Babel of tongues--Tlingits from Alaska, Haidas from the Queen Charlotte Islands, Tsimshians from the Skeena, Kwakiutls from Vancouver, Chinamen, Japanese, Greeks, Scandinavians, Englishmen, and Yankees; men, women, children, dogs, and from two to six woolly bear cubs. The Caledonia is the exclusive property of the Hudson Bay Company; she is not a common carrier, and does not encourage either passengers or freight, as the tariff rates prove. There is a feverish haste and hustle about the movements of the steamer which are fairly contagious. She makes her first trip early in the spring, as soon as the ice has left the rivers, on the Stickene; then it is a wild, eager ambition of the company to have her make four trips up the Skeena before the river closes up in the fall.

We had as passengers two prospectors from Spokane, a mining expert from Victoria, a native evangelist from Essington, and about fifty Indians, mostly women and children, each one with a varied assortment of boxes, bales, bundles, and dogs; the crew numbered twenty, and we had about one hundred tons of freight on board.

From Essington to Hazelton is one hundred and fifty-two miles, a panorama of unending and unbroken beauty; never monotonous, always interesting, it presents a river voyage which is probably not equaled, certainly not excelled, by any other river voyage of the same length on the American continent or in the world. We began the voyage on Sunday morning, we tied up in front of Hazelton on Saturday night. To recount in detail the haps and mishaps of each day's progress would take more time than I can command. In one day we made forty-eight miles, on another day we made one hundred yards, on another day we didn't make a foot. With plenty of water under her keel the Caledonia could run twenty miles an hour; she could cut her way through a sand bar at the rate of a yard or so an hour; and at either rate of progress she burned each hour from one and a half to two cords of wood.

For the first ten miles the scenery does not differ materially from that which we are accustomed to in the inland sea from Victoria to Alaska. Then we enter fresh water and for the next forty miles steam through one long mountain gorge, for here the river has cut completely through the Cascade Range. The mountains begin at the water's edge and rise almost perpendicularly to heights of from three to four thousand feet. Their lower limits are covered with dense green forests, which seem to grow out of the solid rock. The summits are smooth and glistening, and often covered with snow and ice. Here and there we can trace some tiny rivulet issuing from an ice bed high up among the clouds, and every portion of its course can be traced down the steep mountain wall until it gives one final and headlong plunge into the river. At times these streams, taking their rise in some extensive glacier, are of considerable magnitude, and fairly roar as they leap and hurl themselves downward from their dizzy height. And here we learned a curious fact about the river: in summer it falls when it rains, and rises when the sun shines, so rapidly do the pent-up snows of winter disappear and rush down the mountain sides under the heat of the spring sun.