Chapter IV (2)

But while change of fashion leaves one or another trade high and dry in turn, lack of change is still more deadly, especially to the textile mills. For two years, 1911-12, women varied the making of their garments only very slightly. The textile mills lost thousands of dollars in consequence, and, at last, in the summer of 1912 began a campaign to alter conditions. Their methods were so flagrant that they would have been funny if they had not been so disgraceful. Everywhere they offered bribes to designers. “Draw full skirts,” they said; “draw pleated skirts, and draped gowns and draped waists; we want to sell our overstock!” The current fashion was taking only six or eight yards of material to a gown, and the obvious way of improving the matter was to establish a demand for gowns which would require fourteen to eighteen yards instead, or gowns which would require the more profitable full-width materials; above all, gowns which the old, straight styles _could not be remodelled to imitate_! The bribery was as well handled as political “favors,” and as to the result, behold the manner in which our women are swathed in mummy fashion to-day!

That people should wear any clothing which is not exactly suited to their need and honest desires seems too ridiculous to be true, and yet that is exactly what most people do, usually without thinking of the matter. How many men really like to wear a stiff collar, or a dress suit? Or how many like to wear dark, thick suits in summer instead of a kind of glorified pajama? And women! How long will they continue to wear corsets? Not one really wants to. But it is not so much these blatant ills of dress which harass one. It is the useless accessories, the keeping up of irrelevant trimmings and embellishments, the elaborate fastenings, which are the real annoyance.

Not for an instant is it suggested that people should cease to make themselves attractive in appearance, or that uniformity of dress ought to be adopted. On the contrary, a greater individuality is to be desired, but, above all, comfort and convenience. One should be able to wear what one pleases without coercion of any kind or the impertinence of criticism from some one whose tastes happen to differ. To one man a collar may be a comfort; to another it is an abomination. And there should be no rule, written or unwritten, which compels either to sacrifice his comfort and tastes to the other.

The true feminist recognizes that one woman may like to swathe herself in draperies, and the next may prefer the plainest, freest form of garment; and that one should be made to feel uncomfortable and ill-at-ease because big financial interests have approved one rather than the other, is an outrage upon the right to mental and physical liberty!

GERMOPHOBIA

HELEN S. GRAY

Several years ago Dr. Charles B. Reed of Chicago obtained considerable notoriety by the invention of a cat-trap or gibbet to be baited with catnip and operated in back yards. The accounts in the newspapers related that he had found four dangerous kinds of germs on a cat’s whiskers and was therefore urging the extermination of cats as a menace to health; that Dr. William McClure, of Wesley Hospital, was examining microscopically hairs from cats’ fur to ascertain how many different kinds of germs there were on it; and that the secretary of the Chicago Board of Health had issued a statement that cats are “extremely dangerous to humanity.” From Topeka came the report that six different kinds of deadly germs had been found on a cat’s fur and that the Board of Health had in consequence issued a mandate that Topeka cats must be sheared or killed! But why stop with shearing them? There are germs on their skins. And now public penholders in banks and post-offices are under suspicion; an investigation is being made by the Kansas Board of Health, _The St. Louis Republic_ states, and individual penholders may have to be supplied. From time to time a health board official or some other doctor gives out a statement for publication condemning handshaking as a dangerous and reprehensible practice.

The hair of horses, cows, and dogs is full of germs, which they disseminate. Germs are everywhere. Why should cats’ whiskers be an exception to the rule? If Thomas and Tabby could retaliate and examine doctors’ whiskers, doubtless numerous virulent varieties of germs would be found there. Doctors are a menace to public health, for they disseminate germs. Therefore, exterminate the doctors! But perhaps, being doctors, they don’t carry germs. Their persons are sacred. Germs are afraid of them and keep at a respectful distance.

All the leading works on bacteriology admit that a person may have germs of diphtheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or any other disease within his body without having any of those diseases. Since that is the case, it is obvious that germs of themselves cannot cause disease. They do no harm in a body that is in a healthy condition. But so prejudiced is the medical profession on the subject of germs that the true causes of disease are overlooked and disregarded.

Among the four kinds of germs found on a cat’s whiskers, Dr. Reed mentions a germ “which causes a variety of infectious diseases, including kidney disease.” As if any one ever got kidney disease because he unwittingly swallowed some germs of the kind found in diseased kidneys, if he had not abused those organs by gross eating or gross drinking! But it relieves the individual of all responsibility for his condition to put the blame on germs and the cat. There is no personal stigma attached to such a cause; for it is commonly supposed that anybody is liable to be attacked by germs, that, like rain that falleth upon both the just and the unjust, germs attack both healthy persons as well as those whose bodies are saturated with auto-toxemia.

An inspection of the family dietary usually reveals the cause of a man’s untimely demise. But his death is piously attributed to an inscrutable visitation of Providence. His wife drapes herself in crêpe, observes all the conventions of grief, and overworks her lachrymose glands for a season. His friends pass resolutions of condolence, lamenting that their dear brother has been “called to his eternal rest,” a flattering implication that he had so overworked himself during his brief span of life that he needed an eternity of rest in which to recuperate, and was entitled to it as a reward. Whereas the only thing overworked was his digestive organs in disposing of his wife’s cooking.

If deadly germs are found on cats’ whiskers, what of it? It is as valuable a contribution to science to know how many and what kind of germs are to be found on cats’ whiskers as to know how many devils can be balanced on the point of a needle. Verily, a fool and his time are soon parted.

That a cat has germs on her fur and whiskers does not prove that she is a menace to health; but doctors are often a menace to life and health. Much of the surgery performed is unnecessary and frequently results in death. Vaccination and the administering of serums and antitoxins are frequently followed by death or impaired health. One of the gravest charges against the prescribing of medicines is that they suppress or mask the symptoms and do not remove the cause of the disease, but leave the patient to continue in the error of his ways until overtaken again by the same trouble or an equivalent that has cropped out in some other place; and by that time the malady has perhaps reached a fatal stage.

In some respects doctors are like cats. They caterwaul, and occasionally they purr. When a woman patient calls at a doctor’s office and he does not know just what is the matter with her or what to do to cure her, if he belongs to a certain type in the profession, he holds her hand and purrs and is so sympathetic that she leaves his office in a transport, walks on air, and goes home convinced that no one understands her case as well as he does. Or else he tells her how beautiful she looked on the operating table. After such a subtle appeal to her vanity she pays without demur his bill of $300 or $400.

He takes great care not to offend his patients by telling them unpleasant truths, but instead resorts to delicate flattery. If a woman comes to his office suffering from some ailment brought on chiefly by eating devitalized foods, he purrs softly while he determines the latitude and longitude of her pain and gently inquires if she has had a shock recently. She thinks hard for a moment and recalls that she has had, that the news of the death of a child of an intimate friend was broken to her abruptly. Yes, that must have been what caused her condition.

Lacking the ability to direct patients headed for perdition by reason of wrong living how to live so that they can regain their health while continuing their work where they are, he sometimes recommends a change of climate or that they take a rest. Change of scene or occupation usually affords some slight temporary alleviation that the patients regard as a cure.

When patients have a cold or the grippe, instead of making plain to them what laws of health they have violated and that their illness is a direct result, the doctor, it not infrequently happens, tells them that it is “going around.” Colds and grippe are consequently in the popular mind of mysterious origin, and the victims complacently regard themselves as blameless but unfortunate.

It is because the medical profession teaches people to look outside of themselves for the causes of their maladies that we see such spectacles as Caruso, obliged to break professional engagements that would have yielded him $100,000, ascribing his case of grippe to external influences. “I like everything in New York except its colds and grippe,” he is quoted as saying in an interview. “I think I can boast that I have had the most expensive case of grippe on record. It has cost me $100,000. The public says I am a great singer. I should be a greater man if I were a scientist who could drive grippe out of the country. See if you can’t drive it out of New York before I come back.”

Note the boast. As if ill-health and operations were something to be proud of! Instead of telling our acquaintances of our ailments in the expectation of getting their sympathy, we ought to be ashamed to be sick. They may understand what internal conditions colds, grippe, and other ailments presuppose, and have a feeling of repulsion toward us, not of sympathy.

The germ theory of disease is in great vogue at present with the regular—or allopathic, as it is sometimes called—school of medicine. Some of the leading physicians of other schools, however, predict that the day is not far distant when the contagiousness and infectiousness of disease through germs, vaccination, the injection of serums as preventives or cures, and the resorting to the use of medicines by deluded people as a substitute for correcting their habits of living, will be generally regarded as superstitions. When that day comes, we shall cease this Pharisaical self-righteous attitude, this dread and suspicion of others as germ-laden, and face the truth that we build our own diseases.

Even some of the regulars do not hold orthodox views; for instance, Dr. Charles Creighton, an eminent English physician. He has made a special study of epidemics and was engaged to write an article for the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on vaccination. At that time he was a believer in it, but changed his views when he investigated the subject. What he wrote was omitted from the American editions. “As a medical man,” he once declared, “I assert that vaccination is an insult to common sense; that it is superstitious in its origin, unsatisfactory in theory and practice, and useless and dangerous in its character.” He testified before the British Royal Commission on Vaccination that in his opinion vaccination affords no protection whatever. He has written several books on the subject.

If germs are not the cause of disease, then what is? To this Dr. J. H. Tilden, of Denver, one of the most distinguished of those who do not accept the germ theory of disease as true, makes answer as follows. I quote excerpts taken here and there from his writings in _A Stuffed Club Magazine_ on the subject of the causes and cure of disease, the germ theory, contagion and infection, and immunity.

“Disease is brought about by obstructions and inhibitions of vital processes…. The basis is chronic auto-intoxication from food poisoning. It is brought about by abusing the body in many ways … by living wrongly in whatever way…. Bad habits of living enervate—weaken—the body, and in consequence elimination is impaired…. The inability of the organism to rid itself of waste products brings on auto-toxemia. This systemic derangement is ready at all times to join with exciting causes to create anything from a pimple to a brain abscess and from a cold to consumption. Without this derangement, injuries and such contingent influences as are named exciting causes would fail to create disease. This is the constitutional derangement that is necessary before we can have such local manifestations as tonsillitis, pneumonia, and appendicitis…. Every disease is looked upon as an individuality; which is no more the truth than that words are made up of letters independent of the alphabet. As truly as that every word must go back to the alphabet for its letter elements, so must every disease go back to auto-toxemia for its initial elements…. There can be no independent organic action in health or disease.”

If drugs, serums, etc., do not cure disease, what does? Correcting whatever habits caused it; for instance, eating too much, bolting food, neglect of bathing, ventilation, and exercise, harboring worry, jealousy, or other destructive emotions, and living on a haphazard dietary of carelessly and ignorantly cooked foods. “Nature cures when there is any curing done, but nature must have help by way of removal of obstructions to normal functioning.” There is nothing spectacular about a real cure. It means self-discipline.

“Germs are in all bodies in health and in disease…. I do not recognize them as a primary or real cause of disease any more than drafts or any such so-called causes; at most germs can be only exciting causes…. They are innocent until made noxious by their environment. They are victims and partakers of it. They act upon it and are reacted upon by it. As they must be amenable to environmental law, the same as everything else, they necessarily change when their environment changes. Because of a change in their habitat, the germs that are native change from a non-toxic state into one of toxicity…. They are not something extraneous to the human organism, but are the products of lowered vitality in the individual, of lost resistance…. Microbes are toxic when the fluids of their habitat have become toxic—when the resistance of the body has fallen below the point at which the fluids maintain their chemico-physiological equilibrium and decomposition sets in; it is at this stage that germs multiply rapidly; they absorb the poison that is generating, and it is not strange that their products are poisonous, for the changed bodily fluids on which they feed are toxic…. My theory is that the toxicity of germs is due to being saturated with poisonous gases. The germs of typhoid fever, for example, are not poisonous until the patient is sufficiently broken down to cause the generation of toxic gases, after which all the fluids and solids of the body take on a septic state, poisoned by the absorbed gas…. Bacteria are not the cause of disease; wrong living, which puts the system into such a condition that the bacteria can readily multiply, is the real cause; the bacteria are simply necessary results…. Germs are scavengers. When an environment becomes crowded with them, it means that there is a great accumulation of waste in a state of decay…. They are normal to a certain limit in our bodies. If they become more numerous, common sense and reason would say that they must be a necessary factor in the process of elimination, or, if not a necessary factor, lost resistance has permitted them to multiply beyond the restrictions set to them by an ideal physical condition or normal resistance.”

To those who accept the germ theory, it seems that there must be specific germs to account for the different types of disease. The leaders among those who reject it are able to explain satisfactorily without it why all sick people do not have the same disease. They give as the reasons for variation geographical location, the domestic and local environment, the season of the year, atmospheric conditions (e. g., hot, humid weather favoring putrefaction both in the digestive tract and in animal and vegetable matter outside it), defective anatomism, congenital or acquired, injuries, age, occupation, temperament, food, habits, and mode of living.

“Immunization means that normal alkalinity of the fluids of the body exists…. Health is the only immunity against disease. If there is any state that man can be put into that will cause him to be less liable to come under disease-producing influences than full health, then law and order is not supreme and the world must be the victim of caprice, haphazard, and chance.”

“Epidemics and endemics feed upon the auto-toxemic and stop where there are none…. The belief of the medical profession that contagion and infection pass from one human being to another—from a sick man to a healthy man—is an old superstition unworthy of this age. Disease will not go from person to person, unless they are in a physical condition that renders them susceptible and unless environmental states favor decomposition—those of the household and the general atmosphere where the proper amount of oxygen is deficient. So-called contagious and infectious diseases are self-limited. If it were not for this self-limitation, the world would be depopulated every time an epidemic of a severe character succeeds in getting a start. But the medical profession believes that vaccination and antitoxin do what nature has been doing since the world began, namely, set a limit to the spread of disease.”

“Tuberculosis is a seed disease. The seed must come _from a previous case_,” Dr. J. N. McCormack, official itinerant lecturer of the American Medical Association and “mouthpiece of 80,000 doctors,” as he terms himself, is wont to declare in the plea that he is sent out to make all over the country for the establishment of a “national department of health and education to bring the benefactions of modern medical science to every household.” But if one contracts tuberculosis from the germs of another case and he in turn from some one else, how did the first case that ever happened originate? ask the leaders among those who reject the germ theory. Did the causes that produced the first case of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, measles, diphtheria, or other diseases commonly regarded as contagious or infectious, quit the business after producing one case, disappear, and go out of existence, or do they still operate and cause all the cases that occur? That troublesome first case is the missing link in the chain of the theory; but it happened so long ago that it has been lost sight of, and doctors are seldom embarrassed by being asked to account for it.

I know a druggist’s family in which all of the six children had adenoids. Adenoids are not regarded as contagious, so far as I have ever heard. So contagion cannot be made the scapegoat in this instance. The children had adenoids because the mode of living was the same for all. In like manner, when several members of a family contract tuberculosis, diphtheria, or measles, do they not get the disease because they all lived in the same manner and were exposed to like influences, instead of through contagion or infection with germs? Disease is sometimes spread, however, through the contagion of fear and suggestion.

The opponents of vaccination and serum therapy deny that the use of vaccines and serums has served to check the spread of disease. They hold that epidemics are less prevalent and less virulent now than formerly because of improved sanitary conditions, such as drainage of the soil, municipal disposal of garbage, street cleaning, water and sewer systems, the consequent increased facilities for bathing and household cleanliness, etc.

A false theory of cause not only leads to a false theory of cure, but diverts attention from the real issue. For example, in the Middle Ages and later, in England people used to empty garbage and other refuse in the yards and streets, and in consequence a plague broke out from time to time. Instead of attributing it to the accumulated filth, they accused the Jews of poisoning the wells. So, too, in the case of a girl on whose neck a gland enlarged to the size of an egg; there was at once talk as to whether it was tuberculous in nature. Her mother wondered, if it was tuberculosis, if Minnie got it from the cat! She had always played with the cat a great deal. In this she reflected current medical talk in the papers. She could not understand how it could happen. There was no tuberculosis on either side of the family, and Minnie had always been so strong and healthy. Before she was twenty-five there was nothing left of Minnie’s front teeth but a few black snags—evidence of her having lived largely on sweets, starches, and meat, and that she had not been healthy. But her mother never thought of looking in that direction for the cause.

So long as people are led to believe that vaccines and serums are a safeguard, they do not seek others, but continue to live in filthy surroundings and to have injurious habits of living. In the mad chase after imaginary protection, real immunity is overlooked and lost sight of.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER

AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,
Of a truth, brave Lord,
I am all the follies and yet
I have sinned not blindly,
But bravely, as a man; so let
My punishment be brave,
Albeit courage win not Heaven.
_What hast thou done, brave man?_
All things that man can do, brave Lord.
_Whatsoever Hell thou choose,
That Hell is thine._

AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,
Of a truth, kind Lord,
I am weak but humble, and yet
I have erred not often,
And kindly have I been; so let
Thy judgment be as kind,
Howbeit meekness gain not Heaven.
_What hast thou done, kind man?_
All things that man would do, kind Lord.
_Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,
That Heaven is thine._

AND ONE ANSWERED: Lord,
Of a truth, O Lord,
Who am I to answer?… And yet …
I have lived, Life-Giver,
And O, how sweet was life! so let
Its sweetness cling and lo,
I shall but live again … in Heaven.
_What hast thou done, O man?_
Thou only knowest true, O Lord.
_Whatsoever Heaven thou choose,
That Heaven is Mine._

THE AMERICAN FARMER AS A COÖPERATOR

E. E. MILLER

When one speaks or hears of coöperation among farmers, it seems the natural thing to think first of Denmark or Ireland. These and other European countries have made so much greater progress in the business organization of farmers and farm life than America has, that it is almost inevitable that they should be held up to us as examples of what we might but do not accomplish. Various reasons are advanced for this American backwardness in what is unquestionably one of the great economic movements of our time. The American farmer’s individualism and dislike of restraint is often given as the reason. Professor G. Harold Powell goes so far as to say that “the investment of the farmer must be threatened by existing social and economic conditions before he can overcome his individualism sufficiently and can develop a fraternal spirit strong enough to pull with his neighbors in coöperative team work.” There is no doubt much truth in this, but I am inclined to think that lack of knowledge as to how to coöperate has been almost as much a hindering factor as has lack of desire to coöperate. The attempts at coöperation among farmers have been sufficiently numerous, if they had been successful, to have made coöperative effort in rural communities a familiar form of activity to us all. As it is, instances of really successful coöperative ventures among farmers, while rather impressive as an aggregate, amount to very little indeed compared with the vast volume of yet unorganized business carried on by them.

Europe seems to have had wiser leaders in the coöperative work, as well as more docile followers. The American passion for bigness has largely ruled both leaders and followers. Where the Old World peoples were content to begin with small organizations for a definite purpose and let these organizations grow and develop into powerful institutions, the farmers of America have thought in terms of a continent, tried to organize nationwide societies to transact every kind of business—and failed lamentably. It has been only a few years since a great noise was made by a society which proposed to unite all farmers in one great society which should fix a minimum price on all farm products and so settle matters out of hand. Just a year or two ago Farmers’ Union leaders in the South were telling the cotton farmers that only a great national organization could be of any real help in the marketing of their crop. The disastrous failures of the big organizations which were going to “finance the cotton crop” and the successes along various lines attained by some local and county organizations have discredited these leaders who mistook rhetoric for business sense and possibly also taught them a few things they needed to know.

The great trouble with farmers’ coöperative organizations in this country has been that they were too loosely organized and attempted to do too much. It is just beginning to dawn on the mind of the average farmer that a coöperative business must be conducted on the same general lines as an individual business and that he cannot secure the benefits of coöperation without giving up some of the privileges of individual action. He is learning, too, not to despise the day of small things.

The lesson has been learned by some, however, in the long years of struggle for fair prices and fair treatment by the commercial world, and here and there all over the country are to be found groups of farmers who have found out the principles of business coöperation and put them into action to their own decided profit. These organizations are interesting not only for what they have done, but also for what they teach.

Take the Southern Produce Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, for example. This association was organized in 1870 and now has 400 members. It handles most of the truck grown in the vicinity of Norfolk, handling for outsiders—at a fixed percentage—as well as for its own members. It not only sells the truck the members grow, but buys their seeds, fertilizers and other supplies. It has bought and equipped an experimental farm near Norfolk, turning it over to the State to run, and lately has erected a six-story office building in the city, building and lot costing $135,000. All this has been done without putting in a dollar except for the capital stock which is limited to $15,000.

Equally notable successes have been attained by the Hood River apple growers and the citrus fruit growers of California. The organization of these growers has not only resulted in better prices to the growers, but in a standard quality of goods and less fluctuation of prices in the retail markets. Since California growers learned to market their oranges and lemons through organization, there has been brought about a uniformity of distribution which “has resulted in a lower retail price to the consumer and gives a larger proportion of the retail price to the producer.” These very successful organizations have one definite purpose—to sell the fruit their members grow. They are organized on strictly business principles. Each member’s crop virtually belongs to the association, and is picked, graded, packed, and sold as the association directs. Details of cultivation and spraying which may affect the quality of the fruit are also looked after by the association, and the grower has no right to sell his fruit except through the association. In the case of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange this right to the privilege of handling the crop is claimed in the first place by the Local Exchange against the grower, next by the District Exchange against the Local Exchange, and finally by the General Exchange against the District Exchange. It is an up-to-date business organization these men have; the grower belongs to a Local Exchange, the Locals form District Exchanges, and these, in turn, the General Exchange. Each is independent in matters that concern it only, but all must submit to the general voice in matters which may be of concern to all.

Fruit and truck crops seem to be especially adapted to coöperative marketing; or possibly the uncertainty of profit in their production and the big share of the final price absorbed by the middlemen have forced fruit and truck growers to coöperate to a greater extent than farmers in most other lines. At any rate there are quite a few successful coöperative associations among these growers. In Texas such an association does a business of $1,500,000 annually. The Grand Junction Fruit Growers’ Association, of Colorado, is another notable success. California nut growers market their product through a coöperative organization. Florida citrus growers claim to have raised the net price received by growers for oranges from $1.15 in 1909-10 to $1.96 for the season 1912-13. Western North Carolina fruit growers have organized, as have Georgia peach growers, and fruit raisers in many other sections. In an Alabama town a truckers’ association with 190 members has standardized its products until it obtains prices considerably above those secured by individuals, and from a small beginning has grown to be the most important business concern of its town.

These stories might be duplicated many times; and it is not too much to say that the fruit growers and truckers are rapidly coming to realize the benefits of coöperative organization. I do not believe it any wild prophecy to say that within a dozen years the trucker seeking a location will inquire into the marketing organization conducted by his fellow truckers just as he now inquires into the locality’s shipping facilities. And some time all the local coöperative organizations marketing perishable truck and fruit will unite to conduct a great central marketing exchange. Then the present-day scarcities of certain fruits and vegetables at one town, while in another these same products are decaying and going to waste, will be avoided.

Coming back from the things that may be to the things that are, it is worth while to note that in 1911 2,120 out of a total of 6,284 creameries in the United States were conducted on coöperative lines, and that of 3,846 cheese factories, 349 were coöperative. In Minnesota 608 out of 838 creameries were coöperative. In Wisconsin 347 creameries out of 1,000 and 244 cheese factories out of 1,784.

In these as in other lines of business coöperative associations are largely localized. A successful coöperative creamery in a locality helps to organize other creameries near it on a coöperative basis, and so on. Similarly, the successful coöperative rural stores of the country are largely grouped in Minnesota and Wisconsin, having spread from one or two unusually successful ventures in small towns. The coöperative grain elevators of the country are mostly located in Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, although Nebraska and Kansas have over a hundred each. Where one farmers’ telephone line is organized another is likely to follow, and whole counties have been covered in this way.

In short, the coöperative spirit is like the little leaven which spreads and spreads until it leavens the whole lump.

It is not only that a successful coöperative enterprise leads to the establishment of similar enterprises in nearby communities. More notable and striking still is the fact that a successful coöperative enterprise in a rural community seems often to put new life into the whole community and to give the farmers entirely new conceptions of their own capacities and the possibilities of their vocation.

Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent visitor to that town—a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits they had from so doing. I quote:

“In Svea they have established and operated thus far without one single failure, a coöperative creamery, a coöperative telephone company, a coöperative grain elevator, a coöperative stock-shipping association, a coöperative store, a coöperative insurance company, a coöperative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result of what we may term coöperative effort, a thoroughly equipped high school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood. Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading matter in proportion.

“In other words, the Svea farmers have become ‘business men’ as surely as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which town life tends to destroy.”

The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It paid so well that the coöperative telephone line came four years later; and, having once learned how much it helped them to work together, they have continued all along to find out new ways in which they could coöperate for the upbuilding of the community. The coöperative store, strictly on the Rochdale plan, was started in 1909, and to show how coöperation pays, the experience of the town pastor may be cited. He took $100 stock in the store, giving his note in payment. He then went on for a year buying goods from the store at the usual retail prices. When settlement was made, ten months later, it was found that the dividends due him—the rebate on his purchases—amounted to $150.60. He had, without spending a cent or paying any extra prices for merchandise, cancelled his note and the interest on it and acquired a balance of $44.60. In other words, if he had bought his goods from a regular merchant, he would have paid that merchant $150.60 in net profits, whereas by coöperating with his neighbors and trading with himself so to speak, he was enabled to return the whole sum to his own pocket. With such examples of the benefits of coöperation before their eyes, it seems but natural that the farmers of Svea should be the prosperous, progressive, broad-minded, hopeful folks they are said to be—the sort of folks who are able and willing to vote upon themselves a tax of $1.70 on the hundred dollars of property to build and equip the kind of high school they want.

Take, as another example of how the coöperative leaven works, Catawba County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair. They got together and had it—a fair with liberal prizes but without entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition, 50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have attended Southern fairs will know at once from the livestock entries that this was truly a good county fair. I doubt if these farmers could have held this fair, however, if it had not been for the coöperative creamery. This institution, established in 1910, when the farmers found themselves developing a dairy industry without a convenient market, has been the coöperative leaven in Catawba County. It was started with a capital of $1,500, the money being borrowed and the machinery purchased from a creamery “promoted” somewhere in Georgia by the agent of a creamery-selling concern which persuaded the farmers that if they got a creamery outfit the cows would somehow come to it. The creamery was a success from the start; soon it began a new work of service by handling the farmers’ eggs on a coöperative basis, teaching them how to produce and market eggs of quality while securing more than the regular market price for these eggs. The lesson was quickly learned: it paid farmers to work together. Now they have a farmers’ building and loan association, a “Sweet Potato Growers’ Association,” rural school improvement associations, women’s clubs, and are preparing for a coöperative laundry. The women meet and discuss the needs of their schools—as many women do—and then lay out a plan of action and go to work to supply the needs—as too many women do not. The Farmers’ Union in one district recently made a complete survey of that district and can now tell just what each farmer reads, what he does for his neighborhood, almost what he thinks, in so far as thoughts may be determined by actions and conditions. In short, “Catawba is a live county,” as any North Carolinian will tell the inquirer, and coöperation among the farmers has made it live.

At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business coöperation among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and boards and sundry group organizations which the city dweller has found so effective in many ways. Once the farmer gets into the habit of working with his neighbor for a common end, he sees all sorts of desirable ends to be worked for, and if a “divine discontent” with existing evils or needs is present in the community—as it usually is—it is almost certain to be no longer hemmed up in the hearts of two or three persons but set free in the consciousness of the whole community. Then action follows.

The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country districts can make no more effective start than to organize the farmers into coöperative business associations. The American farmer has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and whole-hearted coöperator, when once he learns the trick and gets the habit.

And he is learning rapidly. Before me, as I write, are reports from various Southern States of coöperative tobacco and cotton warehouses, coöperative and semi-coöperative stores, produce-selling exchanges, fertilizer and supply buying associations, cotton marketing associations, coöperative buying of machinery and livestock, and so on. There is even an account of a coöperative church—a whole community uniting to make the church a social centre and a help to all. The work of rural organization, either for business purposes or for intellectual development and social improvement, has just begun; but it is something that a beginning has been made, and I, for one, am not yet willing to admit that the American farmer is inferior to the farmers of any other country in either common sense or neighborly feeling. Unless he is so deficient, he will become as good a coöperator as any of them, for both his business interests and his sense of neighborliness demand a new organization of country life to fit the new conditions of our time.

RELIGION IN THE MODERN NOVEL

LOUISE MAUNSELL FIELD

Of all the many accusations brought against our much abused young twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are seldom—perhaps never—synonymous. If this age of ours really is what it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the body and of that generality once known as “the world,” but this is simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of that re-awakened interest in what may for clearness’ sake be defined as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.

That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so slow to recognize it—of course we are in no way concerned here with those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic water-gruel for the senile-minded of all ages—yet in the stirrings of a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas and render them broad enough to contain modern ethics and modern knowledge, as was shown in Mr. Winston Churchill’s _The Inside of The Cup_—a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.

The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The writer no longer says, “This is the truth; no decent or sensible person will deny it”; but instead: “This is my opinion—what experience has given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.” Very frequently it is only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate. Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt Vogler’s advice: “Consider, and bow the head.”

In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr. Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only when _Marriage_ is reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring the fact that his wife and himself have won “no religion to give them”—i. e. their children—“no sense of a general purpose.” And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not until _The Passionate Friends_ of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in the modern novel. Stephen Stratton, who relates the experience, has reached the crisis of his life and knows not where to go nor what to do when, as he phrases it: “The great stillness that is behind and above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with me … commanding me to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind.” And having told him what his share in this work is to be, “the stillness” bids him: “Make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.” And Stephen, though he cries out, “But who are you?” obeys.

Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of communication with the Power outside and beyond “the world of sense” which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the modern novel. Sometimes, as in _John Ward, M. D._, this awareness, usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwright’s able, yet curiously uneven book, _The Trend_, wherein he shows his mystic, purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical, though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and his followers—not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and repudiated the name with the utmost vigor—has been accompanied by a revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism. “We claim and we shall wrest from theology,” said John Tyndall, “the entire domain of cosmological theory.” The event has proved him a true prophet—and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.

The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginations of men, but of a social or humanistic order, has frequently been mistaken for other than its real self. It constitutes, too, a force active in all the affairs of life rather than one principally confined to certain of its details, and this fact can be glimpsed, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, in the more ephemeral as well as in the best examples of our twentieth century fiction. In an article published in the May issue of The Forum attention was called to the change which has taken place in the character of the fiction hero, who has lost his idle elegance and become a worker. That this work should so often be a part of the struggle for human betterment or a joining in the endeavor to right some especial wrong is both a portion of and a testimony to the idealistic spirit which quickens the modern novel, as is also the companion fact that its drama is in many notable instances mainly a psychic one. More and more is the inward effect thrusting the outward event into a position of subordinate interest; the story of a murder becomes an account not of the efforts to trace the slayer, but of the result of the deed upon his soul. The most interesting and important chapter of _The Devil’s Garden_ is that wherein William Dale reviews the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so calm; _The Debit Account_ has little to say of Jeffries’s career in the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward himself and that “world without trifles” in which he lived; despite a charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme importance in _When Love Flies out o’ the Window_.

To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration “religion” may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doing of many generations of devoted men and women, has had even among those who deny it an incalculably powerful effect. It may be too that the new humanitarianism which causes us to view with horror conditions which our forefathers regarded with more or less equanimity and makes reform one of the most familiar of words is to some extent due to the desire to escape from any effort to measure and explain the Infinite with mere finite instruments. Since the days when knowledge destroyed the foundations of that ancient stately tower of faith and authority which men had believed was based on truth’s very rock, this attempt to find a working theory of life which shall not imply any dogmatic response to the riddles of the universe has been made in directions innumerable, and is being so made to-day; only, the way of escape by “practical” social labor has become more popular than any other and is a road along which travel in divers manners all sorts and conditions of men—among them many who would vehemently and even indignantly deny that religious and spiritual problems had anything whatever to do with their chosen path.

In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parents’ time would have been said of _The Trend_, for example, or even of _A Man’s World_?

Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward “the stillness,” “the Ultimate Force,” “the Unknown Power,” or whatever term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of the Infinite and Divine. For “the obstinate questioning of invisible things” which began so soon as man developed from the primeval ape-forms and became Man, still goes on and will go on, in all probability, so long as the race endures; only the shape and manner of the questioning has changed as humanity has slowly learned something of its ability to mould its own destiny, the duty and privilege which it possesses of working out its own salvation. There have been many periods in the world’s history when that questioning found few to voice it aloud, yet always after such a pause it has been renewed with fresh and greater vigor. One of these pauses came in the last century; to-day the questioning resounds all about us, and one of the means through which it is being uttered most clearly is the modern novel.

GIOVANNITTI

_Poet of the Wop_

KENNETH MACGOWAN