Chapter XIX: Part II (4)

The capitalist had called upon the specialist braced for a possible sentence of death, prepared at the least to be informed that he was suffering from a progressive mental malady. Now, while a tremendous weight was lifted from his mind with the information that he might anticipate a complete return to health, the idea of devoting his trained intelligence, accustomed to cope with great problems of trade and finance, to such trivialities as basket-making or modeling in clay appeared preposterous. Nevertheless, when the physician told him of a resort near at hand, established for the treatment of cases just such as his, where he might be under continuous medical supervision, without confinement indoors or being deprived of any of the comforts or luxuries of life, he decided to put himself in the other's hands unreservedly. The specialist informed him that the length of time required for his cure would depend largely upon himself. He might, for instance, even keep in touch with his office and have matters of import referred to him while he was recuperating his mental and physical strength, but such a course would inevitably retard his recovery, and possibly prevent it. To get the best results from the treatment he ought to leave every business interest behind him, he was told.

The fee that the capitalist paid the specialist made his advice so valuable that the other followed it absolutely. The next evening saw the patient in the home of the "occupation and exercise cure." He arrived just in time to sit down to dinner with a score of other patients, not one of whom showed any outward sign of illness, though all were taking the cure for some form of nervous trouble. There were no cases of insanity among them, however, none being admitted to the institution under any circumstances. The dinner was simple and abundant, and the conversation at the tables of a lively and cheerful nature. As everybody went to bed by ten o'clock--almost every one considerably before that hour, in fact--the newcomer did likewise, he having secured a suite with a bath in the main building. Somewhat to the surprise of the capitalist, who was accustomed to be made much of wherever he happened to be, no more attention was paid to him than to any other guest of the establishment, a condition of affairs that happened to please him. He was told on retiring that breakfast would be served in the dining-room from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning, but that, if he preferred to remain in his room, it would be brought to him there at nine o'clock.

The capitalist had a bad night, and was up to breakfast early. After he had concluded that repast the medical superintendent showed him about the place, but did not encourage him to talk about his symptoms. The grounds of the "occupation and exercise cure" comprised a farm of forty acres located among the hills of northern Westchester County in the Croton watershed, with large shade trees, lawns, flower gardens, and an inexhaustible supply of pure spring water from a well three hundred feet deep in solid rock. The main building, situated on a knoll adjacent to a grove of evergreen trees, contained a great solarium, which was the favorite sitting-room of the patients, and the dining-room was also finished with two sides of glass, both apartments capable of being thrown open in warm weather, and having the advantage of all the sun there was in winter. In this building were also the medical offices, with a clinical laboratory and hydro- and electro-therapeutic equipment, and accommodations for from twelve to fifteen guests. Two bungalows under the trees of the apple orchard close at hand, one containing two separate suites with baths, and the other two living-rooms with hall and bath-room, were ideal places for quiet and repose. Situated at the entrance to the grounds was a club-house, with a big sitting-room and an open fireplace; it also contained a solarium, billiard-room, bowling alleys, a squash court, a greenhouse for winter floriculture, and the arts and crafts shops, with seven living-rooms. Every living-room in the main building, the club-house, and the bungalows was connected with the medical office by telephone, so that in case of need patients might immediately secure the services of a physician at any hour of the day or night.

The arts and crafts shops being the basic principle of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist was introduced to an efficient and businesslike young woman, the instructress, who explained to him the nature of the avocations in which he might choose to interest himself. Here he found his fellow-patients busily and apparently congenially employed. In one of the shops a recent alumnus of one of the leading universities, who had undergone a nervous breakdown after graduation, was patiently hammering a sheet of brass with a view to converting it into a lampshade; a matron of nearly sixty, who had previously spent eight years in sanatoriums, practically bedridden, was setting type in the printing office with greater activity than she had known before for two decades; two girls, one sixteen and the other twelve, the latter inclined to hysteria and the former once subject to acute nervous attacks, taking the cure in charge of trained nurses, were chattering gayly over a loom in the construction of a silk rug; a prominent business man from a Western city, like the New York capitalist broken down from overwork, was earnestly modeling in clay what he hoped might eventually become a jardiniere; one of last season's debutantes among the fashionables, who had been leading a life of too strenuous gayety that had told on her nerves, was constructing a stamped leather portfolio with entire absorption; and half a dozen others, mostly young women, were engaged at wood-carving, bookbinding, block-printing, tapestry weaving, or basket-making, each one of them under treatment for some nervous derangement.

The new patient decided to try his hand at basket-making; and, although he figured out that it would take him about four days to turn out a product that might sell for ten cents, he was soon so much interested in mastering the manual details of the craft that he was disinclined to put the work aside when the medical superintendent suggested a horseback ride. When, at the advice of the specialist, the capitalist had decided to try the occupation and exercise cure, he did so with little faith that it would restore him to health, though he felt that there was perhaps a slight chance that it might help him. The remedy seemed to him too simple to overcome a disease that was paralyzing his energies. To his great surprise, he began to improve at once; and though for the first week he got little sleep, and his dizziness, with the pain in the back of his neck and his apprehensions, continued to recur for weeks, they did so at always increasing intervals.

He learned bookbinding, and sent to his library for some favorite volumes, and put them into new dress; he made elaborate waste-paper baskets, and beat brass into ornamental desk-trays, which he proudly presented to his friends in the city as specimens of his skill. Work with him, as with the others of the patients, was continually varied by recreation. In the summer months there were lawn-tennis, golf, croquet, canoeing, rowing, fishing, riding, and driving. In winter, such outdoor sports as skating, tobogganing, coasting, skeeing, snowshoeing, and lacrosse were varied by billiards, bowling, squash, the medicine ball, and basket and tether ball. The capitalist was astonished to discover that he could take an interest in games. The specialist, who called upon his patient at intervals, told him that a point of great importance in the cure was that exercise that is _enjoyed_ is almost twice as effective in the good accomplished as exercise which is a mere mechanical routine of movements made as a matter of duty.

The net result was that, after four months of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist returned to New York sound in mind and body, and feeling younger than he had before in years. Complete cures were effected in the cases of the other patients also, which is the less remarkable when the circumstance is taken into consideration that only patients capable of entire recovery are recommended to take the treatment.

Of course the institution that has been described is only for the well-to-do, and physicians are endeavoring to bring the "occupation and exercise cure" within the reach of the poor, and to interest philanthropists in the establishment of "colony sanatoriums," such as already exist in different parts of Europe, for those suffering from functional nervous disorders who are without means. Contrary to the general opinion, neurasthenia, particularly among women, is not confined to the moneyed and leisure class; but, owing to the fact that women have taken up the work of men in offices and trades as well as in many of the professions, working-women are continually breaking down under nervous strain, and many, under present conditions, have little chance for recovery, because they cannot afford the proper treatment. As a speaker at the last annual meeting of the American Medical Association declared, "Idiots and epileptics and lunatics are many; but all together they are less numerous than the victims of nervousness--the people afflicted with lesser grades of psychasthenic and neurasthenic inadequacy, who become devoted epicures of their own emotions, and who claim a large share of the attention of every general practitioner and of every specialist."

Scientists declare that this premature collapse of nerve force is increasing to such an extent as to become a positive menace to the general welfare. The struggle for existence among the conditions of modern life, especially among those found in the large centers of industrial and scientific activity, and the steady, persistent work, with its attendant sorrows, deprivations, and over-anxiety for success, are among the most prolific causes--causes which are the results of conditions from which, for the large mass of people, according to a leading New York alienist, there has been no possibility of escape.

"Especially here in America are people forced into surroundings for which they have never been fitted," the alienist asserts, "and especially here are premature demands made upon their nervous systems before they are mature and properly qualified. The lack of proper training deprives many of the workers, in all branches, of the best protection against functional nervous diseases which any person can have, namely, a well-trained nervous system. This struggle for existence by the congenital neuropath or the educationally unfit forces many to the use, and then to the abuse, of stimulants and excitants, and herein we have another important exciting cause. This early and excessive use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco is especially deleterious in its action upon the nervous system of those very ones who are most prone to go to excess in their use.

"Therefore, predisposition, aided by the storm and stress of active competition and abetted by the use of stimulants, must be looked upon as the main cause for the premature collapse of nerve force which we call neurasthenia; so it will be found that the majority of neurasthenics are between twenty-five and fifty years of age, and that their occupations are those which are attended by worry, undue excitement, uncertainty, excessive wear and tear, and thus we find mentally active persons more easily affected than those whose occupation is solely physical. Authors, actors, school-teachers, governesses, telegraph and telephone operators, are among those most frequently affected, and the increase of neurasthenia among women dates from the modern era which has opened to them new channels of work and has admitted them more generally into the so-called learned professions. But whatever may be the occupation in which persons have broken down, it is never the occupation alone which has been the cause.

"This cannot be too often repeated. The emotional fitness or unfitness of an individual for his occupation is of the utmost importance as a causative factor, and overwork alone, without any emotional cause and without any errors in mode of life, will never act to produce such a collapse. It is therefore not astonishing that this class of functional nervous diseases is not confined to the wealthy, and that the rich and the poor are indiscriminately affected. But certain causes are of greater influence in the one class, while different ones obtain in the other. Poverty in itself, with its limitations of proper rest and recuperation, is a very positive cause. Years of neurological dispensary work among the poor have convinced me that nervousness, neurasthenia, hysteria, etc., are quite as prevalent among the indigent as among the well-to-do."

Physicians agree that the prime requisite in the treatment of these disorders is the removal of the patient from his or her habitual surroundings, where recognition of the existence of actual disease is generally wanting, where the constant admonitions of well-meaning friends to "brace up" and to "exert your will power" force the sick man or woman to bodily and mental over-exertion, and where the worries about a livelihood are always dominant. Such a change alone, however, the experts say, will help but few, for it is being recognized more and more that these functional diseases of the nervous system can receive satisfactory treatment only in institutions, where constant attention may be had, with expert supervision and trained attendants.

The "occupation and exercise cure" is applicable also to epilepsy, and is the therapeutic principle of the Craig Colony for Epileptics at Sonyea, in Livingston County, supported by the State, and that institution furnishes a general model for the "colony sanatoriums" suggested for indigent patients suffering from functional nervous disorders. The Craig Colony was the idea of Dr. Frederick Peterson, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, and former President of the New York State Commission of Lunacy and of the New York Neurological Society, which he based upon the epileptic colony at Beilefeld, Germany, that was founded in 1867. The Craig Colony was founded in 1894, and there are now being cared for within its confines more than thirteen hundred patients, who have turned out this year agricultural products, with bricks, soap, and brooms, to the value of $60,000. The colony is named after the late Oscar Craig, of Rochester, who, with William P. Letchworth, of Buffalo, purchased the two-thousand-acre tract of land on which it is situated from the Shaker colony at Sonyea and presented it to the State, Dr. Peterson devoting several months of each year for nine years to getting the institution into working order. The first patients were housed in the old Shaker buildings, which were well constructed and fairly well arranged for the purpose, but as additional applications for admission have been made new buildings have been erected. To-day there are eighty buildings in the colony, but a thousand patients are waiting for admission, eight hundred of whom are in New York City.

Epilepsy, the "falling sickness," is a most difficult malady to treat even in an institution for that purpose, and it is impossible to treat it anywhere else. An epileptic in a family is an almost intolerable burden to its other members, as well as to himself. The temperamental effect of the disease takes the form in the patient of making frequent and unjust complaints, and epileptics invariably charge some one with having injured them while they have been unconscious during an attack. Then, too, living at home, they are often dangerous to younger members of a family, and they are fault-finding, exacting, and irritable generally. The seizures frequently come on without warning, and the patient drops where he stands, often injuring himself severely. The last annual report of the Craig Colony records more than four hundred injuries within the year to patients during seizures which required a surgeon's attention, the injuries varying from severe bruises to fractures of the skull.

The object of the Craig Colony is to remove the burden of the epileptic in the family from the home without subjecting the patient to the hardship of confinement with the insane. "Very few epileptics suffer permanent insanity in any form except dementia," says the medical superintendent of the Colony. "Acute mania and maniac depressive insanity not infrequently appear as a 'post-convulsive' condition, that generally subsides within a few hours, or at most a few days. Rarely the state may persist a month. Melancholia is extremely infrequent. Delusions of persecution, hallucinations of sight or hearing, systematized in character, are almost never encountered in epilepsy."

Only from six to fifteen per cent of epileptics are curable, and hence the work of the Craig Colony is largely palliative of the sufferings of the patients. Each individual case is studied with the utmost care, however, and patients are given their choice of available occupations. The Colony is not a custodial institution. There are no bars on the windows, no walls or high fences about the farm. The patients are housed in cottages, men and women in separate buildings some distance apart, about thirty to each cottage. In charge of each of these families are a man and his wife, who utilize the services of some of the patients in the performance of household work, while the others have their duties outside. Kindness to the unfortunates under their care is impressed upon every employee of the Colony, and an iron-bound rule forbids them to strike a patient even in case of assault.

Besides the agricultural work in the Craig Colony, and that in the soap and broom factories and the brick-yard, the patients are taught blacksmithing, carpentry, dressmaking, tailoring, painting, plumbing, shoemaking, laundrying, and sloyd work. It is insisted on that all patients physically capable shall find employment as a therapeutic measure. The records show that on Sundays and holidays and on rainy days, when there is a minimum of physical activity among the patients, their seizures double and sometimes treble in number. Few of the patients know how to perform any kind of labor when they enter the Colony, but many of them learn rapidly. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that boys from eighteen to twenty years of age can spend two years in the sloyd shop and leave it fully qualified as cabinet-makers, and capable of earning a journeyman's wages.

There are about two hundred children in the colony of epileptics at Sonyea, more than half of whom are girls. As children subject to epileptic seizures are not received in the public schools of the State, the only opportunity for any education among these afflicted little ones whose parents are unable to teach them themselves or provide private tutors for them is in the schools of the Colony. Some of the children are comparatively bright scholars, while the attempt to teach others seems a hopeless task. For instance, it took one girl ninety days to learn to lay three sticks in the form of a letter A.

Every effort is made to encourage recreation among the patients in the Craig Colony, both children and adults. The men have a club of 250 members, with billiards, chess, checkers, cards, and magazines and newspapers. The boys have their baseball and football, and play match games among themselves or with visiting teams. The women and girls play croquet, tennis, and other outdoor games. There is a band composed of patients that gives a concert once a week, and there are theatricals and dancing, with occasional lectures by visiting celebrities. As the Colony, with the medical staff, nurses, and other employees, has a population of 2,000, there is always an audience for any visiting attraction. The maintenance of the Colony is costing the State $225,000 the present year.

Since the founding of the Craig Colony similar institutions have been established in Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kansas, and other States are preparing to follow their example. There are other private sanatoriums throughout the country similar to the one in Westchester County, where the nervous or neurasthenic patient who is well-to-do may obtain relaxation and supervision, but there is no place at all to-day where the man or woman suffering from curable nervous disorders who is without means can go for treatment.

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_(McClure's Magazine)_

Five illustrations: two wash drawings by André Castaigne showing mono-rail trains in the future, five half-tone reproductions of photographs of the car on its trial trip, and one pen-and-ink diagram of the gyroscopes.

THE BRENNAN MONO-RAIL CAR

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

It was November 10, 1909--a day that will surely have its place in history beside that other day, eighty-five years ago, when George Stephenson drove the first railway locomotive between Stockton and Darlington. In the great square of the Brennan torpedo factory at Gillingham, where the fighting-tops of battleships in the adjacent dockyard poise above the stone coping of the wall, there was a track laid down in a circle of a quarter of a mile. Switches linked it up with other lengths of track, a straight stretch down to a muddy cape of the Medway estuary, and a string of curves and loops coiling among the stone and iron factory sheds. The strange thing about it was that it was single--just one line of rail on sleepers tamped into the unstable "made" ground of the place.

And there was Brennan, his face red with the chill wind sweeping in from the Nore, his voice plaintive and Irish, discoursing, at slow length, of revolutions per minute, of "precession," and the like. The journalists from London, who had come down at his invitation, fidgeted and shivered in the bitter morning air; the affair did not look in the least like an epoch in the history of transportation and civilization, till--

"Now, gentlemen," said Brennan, and led the way across the circle of track.

And then, from its home behind the low, powder-magazine-like sheds, there rode forth a strange car, the like of which was never seen before. It was painted the businesslike slatyblue gray of the War Department. It was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty feet long, with a steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of moving machine-parts.

It ran on the single rail; its four wheels revolved in a line, one behind another; and it traveled with the level, flexible equilibrium of a ship moving across a dock. It swung over the sharp curves without faltering, crossed the switch, and floated--floated is the only word for the serene and equable quality of its movement--round and round the quarter-mile circle. A workman boarded it as it passed him, and sat on the edge with his legs swinging, and its level was unaltered. It was wonderful beyond words to see. It seemed to abolish the very principle of gravitation; it contradicted calmly one's most familiar instincts.

Every one knows the sense one gains at times while watching an ingenious machine at its work--a sense of being in the presence of a living and conscious thing, with more than the industry, the pertinacity, the dexterity, of a man. There was a moment, while watching Brennan's car, when one had to summon an effort of reason to do away with this sense of life; it answered each movement of the men on board and each inequality in the makeshift track with an adjustment of balance irresistibly suggestive of consciousness. It was an illustration of that troublous theorem which advances that consciousness is no more than the co-relation of the parts of the brain, and that a machine adapted to its work is as conscious in its own sphere as a mind is in its sphere.

The car backed round the track, crossed to the straight line, and halted to take us aboard. There were about forty of us, yet it took up our unequally distributed weight without disturbance. The young engineer threw over his lever, and we ran down the line. The movement was as "sweet" and equable as the movement of a powerful automobile running slowly on a smooth road; there was an utter absence of those jars and small lateral shocks that are inseparable from a car running on a double track. We passed beyond the sheds and slid along a narrow spit of land thrusting out into the mud-flanked estuary. Men on lighters and a working-party of bluejackets turned to stare at the incredible machine with its load. Then back again, three times round the circle, and in and out among the curves, always with that unchanging stateliness of gait. As we spun round the circle, she leaned inward like a cyclist against the centrifugal pull. She needs no banking of the track to keep her on the rail. A line of rails to travel on, and ground that will carry her weight--she asks no more. With these and a clear road ahead, she is to abolish distance and revise the world's schedules of time.

"A hundred and twenty miles an hour," I hear Brennan saying, in that sad voice of his; "or maybe two hundred. That's a detail."

In the back of the cab were broad unglazed windows, through which one could watch the tangle of machinery. Dynamos are bolted to the floor, purring under their shields like comfortable cats; abaft of them a twenty-horse-power Wolseley petrol-engine supplies motive power for everything. And above the dynamos, cased in studded leather, swinging a little in their ordered precession, are the two gyroscopes, the soul of the machine. To them she owes her equilibrium.

Of all machines in the world, the gyroscope is the simplest, for, in its essential form, it is no more than a wheel revolving. But a wheel revolving is the vehicle of many physical principles, and the sum of them is that which is known as gyroscopic action. It is seen in the ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope revolving horizontally. The apparatus that holds Brennan's car upright, and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new purpose. It is a gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three thousand revolutions to the minute.

Now, the effect of gyroscopic action is to resist any impulse that tends to move the revolving wheel out of the plane in which it revolves. This resistance can be felt in a top; it can be felt much more strongly in the beautiful little gyroscopes of brass and steel that are sold for the scientific demonstration of the laws governing revolving bodies. Such a one, only a few inches in size, will develop a surprising resistance. This resistance increases with the weight of the wheel and the speed at which it moves, till, with Brennan's gyroscopes of three quarters of a ton each, whirling in a vacuum at three thousand revolutions per minute, it would need a weight that would crush the car into the ground to throw them from their upright plane.

Readers of MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE were made familiar with the working of Brennan's gyroscope by Mr. Cleveland Moffett's article in the issue of December, 1907. The occasion of that article was the exhibition of Brennan's model mono-rail car before the Royal Society and in the grounds of his residence at Gillingham. For a clear understanding of the first full-sized car, it may be well to recapitulate a few of the characteristics of the gyroscope.

When Brennan made his early models, he found that, while the little cars would remain upright and run along a straight rail, they left the track at the first curve. The gyroscope governed their direction as well as their equilibrium. It was the first check in the evolution of the perfect machine. It was over ten years before he found the answer to the problem--ten years of making experimental machines and scrapping them, of filing useless patents, of doubt and persistence. But the answer was found--in the spinning top.

A spinning top set down so that it stands at an angle to the floor will right itself; it will rise till it stands upright on the point of equal friction. Brennan's resource, therefore, was to treat his gyroscope as a top. He enclosed it in a case, through which its axles projected, and at each side of the car he built stout brackets reaching forth a few inches below each end of the axle.

The result is not difficult to deduce. When the car came to a curve, the centrifugal action tended to throw it outward; the side of the car that was on the inside of the curve swung up and the bracket touched the axle of the gyroscope. Forthwith, in the manner of its father, the top, the gyroscope tried to stand upright on the bracket; all the weight of it and all its wonderful force were pressed on that side of the car, holding it down against the tendency to rise and capsize. The thing was done; the spinning top had come to the rescue of its posterity. It only remained to fit a double gyroscope, with the wheels revolving in opposite directions, and, save for engineering details, the mono-rail car was evolved.

Through the window in the back of the cab I was able to watch them at then; work--not the actual gyroscopes, but their cases, quivering with the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and tilting accurately to each shifting weight as the men on board moved here and there. Above them were the glass oilcups, with the opal-green engine-oil flushing through them to feed the bearings. Lubrication is a vital part of the machine. Let that fail, and the axles, grinding and red-hot, would eat through the white metal of the bearings as a knife goes through butter. It is a thing that has been foreseen by the inventor: to the lubricating apparatus is affixed a danger signal that would instantly warn the engineer.

"But," says Brennan, "if one broke down, the other gyroscope would hold her up--till ye could run her to a siding, anyway."

"But supposing the electric apparatus failed?" suggests a reporter--with visions of headlines, perhaps. "Supposing the motor driving the gyroscopes broke down; what then?"

"They'd run for a couple of days, with the momentum they've got," answers the inventor. "And for two or three hours, that 'ud keep her upright by itself."

On the short track at Gillingham there are no gradients to show what the car can do in the way of climbing, but here again the inventor is positive. She will run up a slope as steep as one in six, he says. There is no reason to doubt him; the five-foot model that he used to exhibit could climb much steeper inclines, run along a rope stretched six feet above the ground, or remain at rest upon it while the rope was swung to and fro. It would do all these things while carrying a man; and, for my part, I am willing to take Brennan's word.

Louis Brennan himself was by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson. He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his Irish voice. There is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five or fifty-five. As a matter of fact, he is two years over the latter age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his work which is to engineers what passion is to a poet.

The technicalities of steel and iron come easily off his tongue; they are his native speech, in which he expresses himself most intimately. All his life he has been concerned with machines. He is the inventor of the Brennan steerable torpedo, whose adoption by the Admiralty made him rich and rendered possible the long years of study and experiment that went to the making of the mono-rail car. He has a touch of the rich man's complacency; it does not go ill with his kindly good humor and his single-hearted pride in his life work.

It is characteristic, I think, of his honesty of purpose and of the genius that is his driving force that hitherto he has concerned himself with scientific invention somewhat to the exclusion of the commercial aspects of his contrivance. He has had help in money and men from the British Government, which likewise placed the torpedo factory at his disposal; and the governments of India and--of all places--Kashmir have granted him subsidies. Railroad men from all parts of the world have seen his model; but he has not been ardent in the hunt for customers. Perhaps that will not be necessary; the mono-rail car should be its own salesman; but, in the meantime, it is not amiss that a great inventor should stand aloof from commerce.

But, for all the cheerful matter-of-factness of the man, he, too, has seen visions. There are times when he talks of the future as he hopes it will be, as he means it to be, when "transportation is civilization." Men are to travel then on a single rail, in great cars like halls, two hundred feet long, thirty to forty feet wide, whirling across continents at two hundred miles an hour--from New York to San Francisco between dawn and dawn.

Travel will no longer be uncomfortable. These cars, equipped like a hotel, will sweep along with the motion of an ice-yacht. They will not jolt over uneven places, or strain to mount the track at curves; in each one, the weariless gyroscopes will govern an unchanging equilibrium. Trustful Kashmir will advance from its remoteness to a place accessible from anywhere. Streetcar lines will no longer be a perplexity to paving authorities and anathema to other traffic; a single rail will be flush with the ground, out of the way of hoofs and tires. Automobiles will run on two wheels like a bicycle. It is to be a mono-rail world, soothed and assured by the drone of gyroscopes. By that time the patient ingenuity of inventors and engineers will have found the means to run the gyroscopes at a greater speed than is now possible, thus rendering it feasible to use a smaller wheel. It is a dream based on good, solid reasoning, backed by a great inventor's careful calculations; H.G. Wells has given a picture of it in the last of his stories of the future.

Practical railroad men have given to the mono-rail car a sufficiently warm welcome. They have been impressed chiefly by its suitability to the conditions of transportation in the great new countries, as, for instance, on that line of railway that is creeping north from the Zambesi to open up the copper deposits of northwestern Rhodesia, and on through Central Africa to its terminus at Cairo. Just such land as this helped to inspire Brennan. He was a boy when he first saw the endless plains of Australia, and out of that experience grew his first speculations about the future of railway travel. Such lands make positive and clear demands, if ever they are to be exploited for their full value to humanity. They need railways quickly laid and cheaply constructed; lines not too exacting in point of curves and gradients; and, finally, fast travel. It is not difficult to see how valuable the mono-rail would have been in such an emergency as the last Sudan War, when the army dragged a line of railway with it down toward Omdurman. Petrol-driven cars to replace the expensive steam locomotives, easy rapid transit instead of the laborious crawl through the stifling desert heat--a complete railway installation, swiftly and cheaply called into being, instead of a costly and cumbersome makeshift.

The car went back to her garage, or engine-shed, or stable, or whatever the railway man of the future shall decide to call it. Struts were pulled into position to hold her up, the motors were switched off, and the gyroscopes were left to run themselves down in forty-eight hours or so. When the mono-rail comes into general use, explained Brennan, there will be docks for the cars, with low brick walls built to slide under the platforms and take their weight.

While his guests assembled in a store-shed to drink champagne and eat sandwiches, he produced a big flat book, sumptuously bound, and told us how his patents were being infringed on in Germany. On that same day there was an exhibition of a mono-rail car on the Brennan principle taking place at the Zoölogical Gardens in Berlin; the book was its catalogue. It was full of imaginative pictures of trains fifty years hence, and thereto was appended sanguine letter-press. While there sounded in our ears the hum of the gyroscopes from the car housed in the rear, I translated one paragraph for him. It was to the effect that one Brennan, an Englishman, had conducted experiments with gyroscopes ten years ago, but the matter had gone no further.

"There, now," said Brennan.

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(_Everybody's Magazine_)

A NEW POLITICAL WEDGE

THE WAY ST. LOUIS WOMEN DROVE A NINE-HOUR DAY INTO THE LAW

BY INIS H. WEED

It was the evening before the state primaries--a sweltering first of August night in the tenement district of St. Louis, where the factory people eat their suppers and have their beds. Men in shirt-sleeves and women with babies sat on the steps for a breath of air, and the streets were a noisy welter of children.

Two of the most enthusiastic girls in the Women's Trade Union League stopped before the group silhouetted in the gaslight at No. 32 and handed the men in the group this card:

REPUBLICAN VOTERS
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It is the Women and Children that are the Victims of Manufacturers
and Manufacturers Associations
and it is the
WORKING WOMAN AND CHILD
that demands your protection at the
PRIMARIES, TUESDAY, AUGUST 2nd
Scratch
-------
E.J. Troy
Secretary St. Louis Manufacturers Association and run by them on the
Republican Ticket for the Legislature in the 1st District Comprising
WARDS 10, 11, 2,13, and 24. Precincts 14 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 1,
2, 3 of the 23rd WARD. Precincts 1, 2 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 6, 7,
10, 11, 12, 13 of the 14th WARD. Precincts 1, 4, 5 of the 9th Ward

"So yez would be afther havin' me scratch Misther Troy?" Mike Ryan ran his fingers through his stubby crop with a puzzled air. "Oi'm always fur plazin' the loidies, but Misther Troy, he's a frind o' mine. Shure, he shmokes a grand cigar, an' he shakes yer hand that hearty."

So Mike belonged to the long, long glad-hand line. Well, _personal_ arguments were necessary in his case then. That was the way the girls sized up Mike Ryan.

"But this ticket has something to do with your oldest girl."

"With Briddie?"

"It sure does, Mr. Ryan. Didn't I hear your wife tellin' what with the hard times an' all, you'd be puttin' Briddie in the mill this winter as soon as ever she's turned fourteen? Wouldn't you rather they worked her nine hours a day instead o' ten--such a soft little kid with such a lot o' growin' to do? There's a lot of us goin' to fight for a Nine-Hour Bill for the women and children this winter, an' do you think a manufacturers' representative, like Troy, is goin' to help us? Look at his record! See how he's fought the employees' interests in the legislature! That's a part of his job! _He_ won't vote for no Nine-Hour Bill!"

And the two girls went on to the next tenement.

They were only two of the hundreds of Trade Union girls who were "doing" the First Electoral District (about one-third of St. Louis) on the eve of the primaries. They were thorough. They had the whole district organized on the block system, and they went over each block house by house.

_A new move, is it not, this carefully organized effort of factory women to secure justice through the ballot-box?_

How have St. Louis women attained this clear vision that their industrial future is bound up in politics? It is a three years' story. Let us go back a little.

St. Louis is essentially a conservative city. First, it was an old French town; then a Southern town; then a German tradesman's town. With such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other than conservative. In addition, St. Louis was crippled in the war between the states. She lost her market. This made her slow.

In the 'eighties, this old French-Southern-German city began to recover from the ruin of her Southern trade. Little by little she took heart, for the great Southwest was being settled. There was a new field in which to build up trade. To-day St. Louis is _the_ great wholesale and jobbing depot, _the_ manufacturing city for that vast stretch of territory known as the Southwest.

Since 1890, great fortunes have been amassed--most of them, indeed, in the past ten years. There has been a rapid growth of industry. The old Southern city has become a soft-coal factory center. A pall of smoke hangs over the center of the city where the factories roar and pound. In the midst of this gloom the workfolk are creating rivers of beer, carloads of shoes and woodenware, millions of garments and bags, and the thousand and one things necessary to fill the orders of hundreds of traveling salesmen in the Southwest territory--and in the South, too, for St. Louis is winning back some of her old-time trade.

And the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools. The men who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks. "Yes, St. Louis is a grand old business town. Solid! No mushroom real-estate booms, you know, but a big, steady growth. New plants starting every month and the old ones growing. Then, when we get our deep waterway, that's going to be another big shove toward prosperity.

"Nice town to live in, too! Look at our handsome houses and clubs and public buildings. Never was anything like our World's Fair in the history of men--never! Look at our parks, too. When we get 'em linked together with speedways, where'll you find anything prettier?" Thus the money-makers in this heavy German town.

But what about the employees--the clerks and the factory workers? Have they been "in" on this "big shove toward prosperity?" Have they found it a "nice" town to live in?

No, to each count. For the people at the bottom of the ladder--for the people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion counter--St. Louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of taxation have their consequence of more than New York city rents. A town whose slums, says Lee Frankel, are the worst in the country. A town where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than in New York City); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing, and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale and the standard of living.

The average wage of the shoe-workers in the East is $550 per year. In St. Louis it is $440 if work is steady--and rents are higher than in New York City.

It must be remembered that this sum is an average, and that thousands of shoe-workers earn, less than $440, for full-time work. The same is true of thousands engaged in other kinds of manufacture and in department stores.

Somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder.

The government of Missouri and St. Louis has been about as little adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be. Men have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government protection for money-making schemes.

Business opportunity has depended much on _pliable state and municipal laws_. How the interests fought to keep them pliable; how St. Louis and Missouri became a world scandal in this steady growth to riches, we all know.

We know, too, the period of political reform. People thought the killing trouble in Missouri lay largely with the governmental machinery; and the optimists' faith in a state primary law, in the initiative and referendum as panacea, was white and shining. _They did not see that the underlying problem is industrial_.

After the reform wave had spent itself, the crooked people who had kept out of jail crept from their holes and went back to their old job of beating the game. The only essential difference is that their methods to-day are less raw and crude. They play a more gentlemanly game; but the people are still robbed of their rights.

Thus it came to pass that when the cheerful optimist went to the cupboard to get his poor dog a bone, why, lo! the cupboard was bare.

Meantime the dog has taken up the struggle for social justice on his own account, not singly but in groups and packs. As yet, although a deal of snuffing, running to and fro, barking, yelping, and fighting has been done, little has been accomplished; for one reason, because labor has lacked great organizers in St. Louis.

It has remained for the working women of St. Louis to make the industrial idea effective and to reach out with united single purpose to bend the political bow for their protection.

The Women's Trade Union League, whose real general is Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, the most dynamic woman in St. Louis, received its first impetus only three years ago in the idealism of a brilliant young Irish girl, Hannah Hennessy, who died at Thanksgiving, 1910, a victim of exhausting work in a garment shop and of her own tireless efforts to organize the working girls of her city.

Hannah Hennessy was sent by the Garment Workers' Union to the National Labor Convention of 1907 at Norfolk, Virginia.

There she glimpsed for the first time the inevitable great world march of women following industry as machinery takes it out of the home and into the shop--saw these women, blind, unorganized, helpless to cope with the conditions offered by organized capital. The vision fired this Irish girl to a pitch of enthusiasm peculiar to the Celtic temperament. Back she came to St. Louis with the spirit of the Crusaders, her vision "the eight-hour day, the living wage to guard the home."

For the first time she saw the broken physical future of women who label three thousand five hundred bottles of beer an hour, and accept their cuts and gashes from the bursting bottles as inevitable; of women who put eyelets on a hundred cases of shoes a day, twenty-four pairs to the case; of women who must weave one thousand yards of hemp cloth a day to hold their job in a mill where the possible speed of woman and machine is so nicely calculated that the speediest person in the factory can weave only twelve hundred and sixty yards a day; where the lint from this hemp fills the air and is so injurious to eyes and throat that the company furnishes medical attendance free.

To undertake the huge task of organizing these thousands of St. Louis women would require not only vision but time and energy. Hannah's return meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing, whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy speed ten hours a day. Vision she had, but training, time, energy--no!

It was at this point that she met Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, a leisure-class young woman, who had been gripped by a sense of the unevenness of the human struggle. Cynthelia Knefler was groping her way through the maze of settlement activities to an appreciation of their relative futility in the face of long hours, low wages, and unsanitary shops.

Then the idealism of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who toil and spin for the great Southwest.

Both women possessed fire and eloquence. Hannah's special contribution was first-hand experience; Mrs. Knefler's the knowledge of economic conditions necessary to an understanding of our complicated labor problems. Wise, sane, conservative, Mrs. Knefler not only helped Hannah to organize branch after branch of the Women's Trade Union League in the different industries, but set out at once to train strong, intelligent leaders. She stimulated them to a critical study of labor laws with the evolution of industry for background.

Night after night for two years Mrs. Knefler and Hannah were out organizing groups of girls. Mrs. Knefler's friends finally stopped remonstrating with her. Hannah, utterly self-forgetful despite ten hours a day in the mills, hurled herself into the new work. Evening after evening her mother protested anxiously, but Hannah, heedless of her own interest, would eat her supper and hurry across the city to help groups of new girls--American, Russian, Roumanian--a confused mass, to find themselves and pull together.

One June morning in 1910 the papers announced that the Manufacturers' Association and the Business Men's League had decided on E.J. Troy as their candidate to the State Legislature for the First District. His candidacy was also backed by the Republican machine. The papers went on to say that E.J. Troy was one of "our ablest and most popular fellow townsmen," that he had grown up in his district, had a host of friends, and might be expected to carry the primaries by a big majority.

That evening at the weekly dinner of the officers of the Women's Trade Union League at the Settlement, Mrs. Knefler hurried in: "Girls, have you seen the morning papers? Do you know that we've got E.J. Troy to contend with again?"

At the same moment in dashed Hannah Hennessy by another door, calling out, "Girls, they're goin' to put Troy on the carpet again!"

To both speeches came half a dozen excited replies that that's just what they were talking about!

Over the potatoes and meat and bread-pudding the situation was discussed in detail.

"Yes, 'twas him, all right, that thought up most of those tricky moves when we was tryin' to get our Nine-Hour Bill before," reflected a wiry, quick-motioned girl during a second's pause.

"Don't it just make you boil," began another, "when you think how he riled 'em up at every four corners in Missouri! He had every old country storekeeper standin' on end about that Nine-Hour Bill. He had 'em puttin' on their specs and callin' to mother to come and listen to this information the manufacturers had sent him:--how the labor unions was tryin' to get a Nine-Hour Bill for women passed; how it would keep their youngest girl, Bessie, from helping in the store when the farmers drove in of a Saturday night; and how it was a blow at American freedom."

"E.J. Troy's got to be squenched at the primaries," said a third, quietly and decisively.

"But how?" asked a more timid officer.

Bing! Mrs. Knefler got into action. There never was a woman for whom a difficult situation offered a more bracing tonic quality. The business meeting that followed fairly bristled with plans.

The girls' first move was to go before the Central Labor Body and ask them to indorse their objections to E.J. Troy. Definite action beyond indorsement the girls did not ask or expect. This much they got.

One day a little later, when Mrs. Knefler's campaign was beginning to take form, a representative of E.J. Troy called Mrs. Knefler on the telephone. The voice was bland, smooth, and very friendly. Wouldn't she--that is--ah--er--wouldn't her organization confer with Mr. E.J. Troy? He felt sure they would come to a pleasant and mutually helpful understanding.

Mrs. Knefler explained to the mouthpiece (take it either way) that it would be quite useless; that the stand of the League was taken on Mr. Troy's previous record and on the "interests" he represented; that while they had nothing against him in his private capacity, as a public servant they must oppose him. All this in Mrs. Knefler's suavest fashion. She feels intensely, but she never loses her self-possession. That's why she is such a formidable antagonist.

It was the last week in June--they had just a month before the primaries in which to rouse public opinion. The newspapers must help, of course.

Mrs. Knefler went to the editors. They were polite, they admitted the justice of her stand, but they were evasive. Mrs. Knefler opened her paper the next morning after she had made the rounds, to find not a single word about the danger to the working woman's interests.