Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

The brook is silvery and glistens beautifully; the waves are
covered with a heavenly grace. Oh, how good it is to bathe
there! How I should enjoy leaping into it! My body is weakened
from the dreadful work,—how they both would refresh me! Oh, you
wish to make your ablution in the brooks? Be not frightened, you
will soon receive your ablution!

The sweatshop is dark and smoky and small. How can my white
blouse be clean there? In the dirty shop cleanliness is unknown
to me. How a pure white shirt adorns a man! How proper for a
noble body it is, in order to be free to work humanely and be
clean withal! You wish now to dress yourself in white? They will
dress you, and dress you quickly enough!

The woods are breezy, in the woods it is cool. How good to dream
there quietly! The little birds sing pleasantly; but in the shop
there is noise, and the air is suffocating! Oh, you wish to be
cool?

Of what avail is a forest to you? It will not be long before you
will be cold.

’Tis good to have a dear companion. In adversity he gives hope,
in misery—courage. A dear companion sweetens your being, and he
gives you a zest for life. And I am orphaned alone like a stone,
there are no companions, I am all by myself—you will soon have
companions without end; they swarm already and are waiting for
you!

The Pale Operator gives a hint of the ravages of tuberculosis in
the garment trade:

THE PALE OPERATOR

I see there a pale operator all absorbed in his work. Ever since
I remember him, he has been sewing and using up his strength.

Months fly, and years pass away, and the pale faced one still
bends over his work and struggles with the unfeeling machine.

I stand and look at his face; his face is besmutted and covered
with sweat. I feel that it is not bodily strength that works in
him but the incitement of the spirit.

And the tears fall in succession from day break until fall of
night and water the clothes and enter into the seams.

Pray how long will the weak one drive the bloody wheel? Who can
tell his end? Who knows the terrible secret?

Hard, very hard to answer that! But one thing is certain: when
the work will have killed him another will be sitting in his
place and sewing.

A desire for life—if it is a feast, he would sit at it; if it is a
dream he would have it a beautiful one—a love of the outdoor
country life which he knew as a boy and which he believed all
should enjoy, mingled with a sense of impotence and despair,
varying with outbursts of wailing and outbursts of hate, these
things characterize the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld. For all his
power to vizualize and voice the world about him, he is never
constructive, never militant, and seldom even virile.[6] In few
poems does he express any hope for the future. In a mood of
despair he writes the beautiful workshop poem:

A TEAR ON THE IRON

I groan and cough and press, and think
My eye grows damp, a tear falls; the iron is hot,
My little tear it seethes and seethes and will not dry up.

I feel no strength, it is all used up; the iron falls from my
hand, and yet the tear, the silent tear, the tear, the tear
boils more and more.

My head whirls, my heart breaks. I ask in woe: “Oh, tell me, my
friend in adversity and pain, O tear, why not dry up in
seething.”

“Are you perhaps a messenger and announce that other tears are
coming? I should like to know it; say, when will the great woe
be ended?”

I should have asked more of the turbulent tear; but suddenly
there began to flow more tears, tears without measure, and I at
once understood that the river of tears is very deep.

In a mood of mingled longing and hate, he writes the Flowers of
Autumn, whose splendor is only for the well-to-do—

Therefore I do not care if I see you dying now.

There is more virility, though nothing really purposeful in the
Garden of the Dead, where the dead worker rises up to claim the
flowers on the rich man’s grave:

Not only the flowers are mine, nay, even the boards of the
coffin are mine!

And not only the boards of the coffin—you shrouds, you, too, are
mine! He has it all through my work, my poor work—oh, all and
all is mine!

Then the dead one passed away in the air with cries:

“You will pay for it yet! And he clenched his fist and
threatened the world.”

The poet’s love for nature, the human longing of the worker
imprisoned in the city for the country, which he has known but
which is now beyond his reach, is expressed in the nightingale’s
challenge to the laborer:

“Summer is here, summer is here! I shall not sing to you
eternally, for finally my hour too will strike—a dark crow will
occupy my branch, the holy song will cease. How long must I sing
to you from the tree of the golden dream of freedom and love?
Rise and let me not urge you any longer! The heaven will not
remain eternally blue! Summer is here, summer is here! Now one
can pass a merry time, for just like you who are fading at your
machine, everything will in the end wither and be carried away.”

The Nightingale illustrates, as Professor Wiener points out, the
poet’s command over poetic form as well as poetic thought. Even in
the English prose translation we can feel the repetition of notes,
the intricate weaving of melody in the bird’s song.

Another poem which is an example of the same power of combining
matter and manner is that drama of the garment worker’s lift, The
Sweatshop, which deserves to be quoted in full:

THE SWEAT SHOP

The machines in the shop roar so wildly that often I forget in
the roar that I am; I am lost in the terrible tumult, my ego
disappears, I am a machine. I work and work and work without
end. I am busy and busy and busy at all time. For what and for
when? I know not, I ask not! How should a machine ever come to
think?

There are no feelings, no thoughts, no reason; the bitter bloody
work kills the noblest, the most beautiful and best, the
richest, the deepest, the highest, which life possesses. The
seconds, minutes and hours fly; the nights like the days pass as
swiftly as sails; I drive the machine just as if I wished to
catch them; I chase without avail, I chase without end.

The clock in the workshop does not rest; it keeps on pointing
and ticking and waking in succession. A man once told me the
meaning of its pointing and waking—that there was a reason in
it; as if through a dream I remember it all; the clock awakens
life and sense in me, and something else—I forget what; ask me
not, I know not, I know not, I am a machine!

And at times, when I hear the clock, I understand quite
differently its pointing, its language; it seems to me as if the
unrest[7] egged me on so that I should work more, more, much
more. In its sound I hear only the angry words of the boss; in
the two hands I see his gloomy look. The clock, I shudder—it
seems to me it drives me and calls me machine, and cries out to
me “sew”!

Only when the wild tumult subsides, and the master is away for
the midday hour, day begins to dawn in my head, and a pain
passes through my heart; I feel my wound, and bitter tears and
boiling tears wet my meager meal, my bread; it chokes me, I can
eat no more, I cannot! O, horrible toil! O, bitter necessity.

The shop at the midday hour appears to me like a bloody
battlefield where all are at rest; about me I see lying the
dead, and the blood that has been spilled cries from the earth.
A minute later—the tocsin is sounded, the dead arise, the battle
is renewed. The corpses fight for strangers, for strangers, and
they battle and fall and disappear into night.

I look at the battlefield in bitter anger, in terror, with a
feeling of revenge, with a hellish pain. The clock now I hear it
aright. It is calling: “An end to slavery, an end shall it be”!
It vivifies my reason, my feelings and shows how the hours fly;
miserable I shall be as long as I am silent, lost, as long as I
remain what I am.

The man that sleeps in me begins to waken—the slave that wakens
in me is put to sleep. Now the right hour has come, an end to
misery, an end let it be! But suddenly—the whistle, the boss, an
alarm! I lose my reason, forget where I am; there is a tumult,
the battle. Oh, my ego is lost! I know not, I care not, I am a
machine!

The prose translation reproduces the thought alone; the Yiddish
original reproduces also the loud insistent stitching of the
machines, and the persistent nagging of the hateful clock. The
machine beats out these lines:

Ich arbeit, un’ arbeit, un’ arbeit ohn’ Cheschben.

Es schafft sich, un schafft sich, un schafft sich ohn’ Zahl.[8]

To what he feels to be the hopeless tragedy of the worker is added
in Rosenfeld’s verse the hopeless tragedy of the Jew—the wanderer
who has lost the power to laugh. In Sephira[9] as well as in other
poems, he brings out the fact that the Jew has set his Passover
and the period of mourning following it, in the happiest time of
the year. This poem, which has been really adequately translated
into verse by Alice Stone Blackwell, is one of his saddest and
most beautiful:

SEPHIRA

Methinks I fain would call upon my lyre
To laugh a little, but in vain the call!
For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now.
Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all.

Oh, God, you laugh? A wail is in the laugh!
Brothers, what is there of reality
In a Jew’s pleasures? Is his laughter real?
’Tis but the mingling of a sob and sigh.

No savor now has Jewish life, no grace
Has Jewish Joy! Above, in heaven’s deep
The silvery clouds are floating; and the woods
Are full of life, but we sit down and weep.

Spicy the forest is, the garden green;
How fresh and cool spring’s breezes blowing by!
But what concern is that of yours, O Jew?
’Tis now Sephira; you are mute and sigh.

The lovely summer, comfort of men’s lives,
Passes in sobbing and in sighs away.
What hopes into the Hebrew can it give?
To him what comfort summer or the May?

A mendicant who has no place to rest
With whom all men make sport—each day, each week, each hour,
Oh, is it meet for him to think of joys,
Of gardens with their balm, of tree or flower?

And if the Jew at times break forth in song,
Does his song seem to breathe of mirth to you?
I, in his music hear but “Roam and Roam!”
In every note I recognize the Jew.

If one who is well versed in music’s art
Should chance to listen to a Jewish song,
His eyes against his will would gush with tears,
Each note would shake him with emotion strong.

The ram’s-horn call to penitence and grief,
Oh, that is now the Hebrew’s favorite strain—
A strain that makes but feelings for the tomb,
A strain to break a heart of steel with pain.

The song of the Atonement, and the Dirge
For the great temple and the Suppliant’s Psalm;
These are his sweetest music, since his joy
Was shattered in his holy land of balm.

Since his foe broke the sweetest instruments
Of music in his Temple, ever dear,
Only the plaintive ram’s-horn to the Jew
Is left, on which he sobs but once a year.

Of drums and cymbals, organs, harps and lyres,
Flutes and guitars, all with their dulcet strains,
The gloomy ram’s-horn, withered, sad and dry,
Is all that now to the poor Jew remains.

Whate’er he sing, however he may laugh
However gay he seeks to make the strain,
There suddenly awakens in his song
The suppliant’s psalm that rends the heart with pain.

Me thinks I fain would call upon my lyre
To laugh a little, but in vain the call!
For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now,
Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all?

For the Rosenfeld of the Songs from the Ghetto, the present is
terrible and the future hopeless; there is always an aching desire
for beauty and happiness, but to him beauty and happiness
themselves wait upon toil and suffering and death—the nightingale
groans “upon the great cemetery of the world.”

But Songs from the Ghetto was written some fifteen years ago. Some
of his later poetry is lighter—some hope and the joy of living
appear to have crept into it. Of these, a hitherto unpublished
poem in English called “If,” has but a gentle melancholy:

IF

If hope would fly and sorrow stay,
If stars were dark and days were gray,
If love would vanish like a breath,
What would be life? What would be death?

If songs would die out in the nests,
And pleasure to the human breasts,
If flowers were to lose their hue,—
Oh! What would be I, What would be you?

Stealings is full of personal joy:

STEALINGS

I steal a smile from thy fair face
And hide it deep within my heart;

I steal a shadow of thy grace
And hide it deep within my soul;

I steal a ray from thy bright eyes
And hide it deep within my mind;

I steal the echo of thy sighs
And weave them softly in my dreams;
A word from thy sweet lips I steal
And hide it deep within my thoughts;

I steal the rapture of thy thrill
And drown it deep within my blood;

And from these thefts, these sacred stealings
Are born the bright flames of my love,

And the fountain of all sweet feelings,
And the stream of my life’s joy.

But even if he can for a time forget the toil and trouble of the
world in a personal joy, his first love is with the workers and
with them he asks to have his Resting Place—

Seek me not ’mid blooming meadows,
Not there my spirit you can trace,
Where workers toil like spectral shadows,
’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.

Seek me not where birds are singing,
Not there my spirit you can trace;
A slave am I—where chains are ringing,
’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.

Seek me not ’mid fountains dashing,
Not there my spirit you can trace,
Where tears are falling, teeth are gnashing,
’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.

And lov’st thou me with love’s true passion,
Thy steps unto my spirit trace,
Bring joy with thee; in love’s true fashion,
Make sweet to me my resting place.

NEW BOTTLES FOR NEW WINE

THE WORK OF ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE

CHRISTINA MERRIMAN

The recent International Exhibition of Art in New York was, from
one angle, at least, a protest against certain set standards of
art generally accepted today as inevitably right because they have
“always been.” Some of the by-products of that stimulating
movement toward freedom have been variously characterized as
“courageous” “self-expressive” and “insolent.” Certainly much of
it was a serious effort toward individual expression—a revolt
against academic rules—partaking in some instances of a defiance
which was a law unto itself, a frank disregard of what impression
the mystified public carried away.

Such, however, was not the attitude or feeling of at least one
exhibitor whose work aroused much interest and comment, and who
was one of the first artists of standing to reflect in her work
the spirit of awakened social consciousness so apparent today.
Abastenia St. Leger Eberle showed two groups, the more striking of
which was The White Slave, reproduced on the cover of this issue
of THE SURVEY. They are the work of a sculptor who has strongly
defined views as to the part the artist should play in the common
life.

“The artist should be _the_ ‘socialist,’” says Miss Eberle. “He
has no right to work as an individualist without responsibility to
others. He is the specialized eye of society, just as the artisan
is the hand, and the thinker the brain. More than almost any other
one sort of work is art dependent on society for inspiration,
material, life itself; and in that same measure does it owe
society a debt. The artist must see for the people—reveal them to
themselves and to each other.”

This is a far cry from “art for art’s sake.” That it is the
viewpoint of an artist of high standing is attested by the early
and generous recognition accorded Miss Eberle’s work from
conservative and radical alike.

Most of her training was received from George Gray Barnard, with
whom she studied for three years. In 1904, she was awarded a
bronze medal at the St. Louis Exposition; the Girl on Roller Skate
was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 1907; the Windy
Doorstep was awarded the Helen Foster Barnett prize at the exhibit
of the New York Academy in 1910; her figure of the veiled Salome
was bought by an Italian Art Society in Venice; and she is one of
the ten women who belong to the National Sculpture Society.

Miss Eberle is best known, perhaps, for her dancing figures, and
her depiction of the everyday picturesque life on the lower East
Side in New York, where she lived for years. Her people live for
us, and speak for themselves,—from the placid, necessitous hunt of
the Rag Picker to the tremulous wistfulness of the loving Little
Mother; from the tender feeling of The Bath Hour to the intense,
joyous absorption of the Rag-time dancer and the exultant balance
of that flying little figure on the Roller Skate—and please notice
that, characteristically, there is only one—borrowed, no doubt for
a precious three-minute “coast.”

THE WINDY DOORSTEP
]

The qualities which art critics first look for—the sure touch and
line of her modelling, the line composition and massing—are
especially apparent in The Windy Doorstep, in which Miss Eberle
touches the high-water mark of her more objective figures.

Here it will be more interesting to note the steps by which social
values have crept into her work.

First of all, her deep and instinctive love for children, and her
appreciation of human values, led her to select types that until
recently have been almost entirely disregarded.

To this keen observer and lover of human nature, the many years of
contact with this vivid, arduous East Side life—reinforced and
interpreted by constant reading and thinking—brought an
ever-increasing sense of social interrelation and interdependence.
Jane Addams’ books have, more than anything else, she says, helped
to clarify and mould her vision of the constructive part the
sculptor may play in social readjustment.

This growth of social consciousness has been reflected in her
work.

THE LITTLE MOTHER
]

Just as The Windy Doorstep, with its fine feeling for the dignity
of everyday homely tasks, outranks the Roller Skater which, she
says, was done in a purely objective spirit, so the White Slave
records a forward step which is a difference of kind even more
than degree.

_THE RAG PICKER_
]

Here she has turned from her more objective work to the graphic
interpretation of a social menace; and it is here, perhaps, that
she finds herself with surest touch. Her conception of white
slavery is as searching in its indictment, as ruthless, cruel and
scourging as the fact itself. One visitor who saw those haunting
figures at the International Exhibition said afterward:

“I was passing through that room of the exhibit when suddenly I
faced it—I could not go on. I had vaguely realized that this
horrible thing was in the world, but it had never touched _me_. I
sat there for perhaps an hour, thinking—and thinking—”

This woman was one who has led what is called a “sheltered”
existence, whose instinct would be to turn from any discussion or
writing on this subject. It is this thought-compelling quality in
such work which links it as a social force with, say, the
dispassionate but terrible report of the Chicago Vice Commission,
or with Elizabeth Robins’ My Little Sister.

It is interesting to know that Miss Eberle worked out the
composition for the White Slave four years ago; but the actual
work of modelling was done in the four weeks’ interval between the
time she was invited to send some of her work to last winter’s
International Art Exhibition and its opening. Until then, she had
felt that the time had perhaps not come when such a group would be
received except as an unwelcome effort toward sensationalism. It
is the first of several such interpretative subjects which she has
in mind, and which, if worked out in an equally sincere spirit,
should be big in social significance.

But after all is said, Miss Eberle consistently holds with the
many who believe that the first function of art is not didactic.
Much of her work besides that shown here is conceived in a spirit
of sheer joy in beauty of form and line, and one may go far to
find a more exquisitely modelled figure than that of the utterly
submissive, despairful child-victim of the white slaver. To use
her own words:

“It is the beauty that is in the world _today_ that appeals to
me—not what may have existed centuries ago in Greece. Though I
love that, too, I will not shut my eyes to the present and
continue to echo the past. No matter how ugly the present might
be, I would rather live in it. After all, ugliness, as well as
beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,—and the present _isn’t_
ugly at all, but full of a wonderful interest, as a few of us
are beginning to find out. We are trying to find new bottles for
new wine—Greek vases are about worn out.”

_THE BATH HOUR_
]

And so we may, as she asks, leave her work to make its own
eloquent plea for what Emerson calls “the eternal picture that
nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars
and fine ladies, ... capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.”

“MY LITTLE SISTER”

HARRIET BURTON LAIDLAW

[_Mrs. Laidlaw is chairman of Manhattan Borough of the Woman
Suffrage Party. Her special interest in the subject of this
review is due, among other things, to her friendship with Rose
Livingston, the rescue worker in Chinatown whose unique
experience gives her understanding sympathy with unfortunate
girls, and who has suffered persecution, unchecked by the
police, on account of her revelations in regard to the white
slave trade._—Ed.]

In My Little Sister[10] Elizabeth Robins has let us hear a great
cry out of the depths—an actual human cry.

True, many snug, comfortable people, shaken for a moment out of
their apathy, dismiss it all carelessly, even contemptuously. Many
who are gripped to the heart as they read brush away the tears
with a sign of relief and say, “Well, it’s only a story.” But what
a “story!”

It is told in a tense, staccato style which hurries the reader
on—on even through the idealistic descriptions of the English
country and the stretching moor, across which, in its little
garden planted by loving hands, stands the “dear home” of the
officer’s gentle widow and her two daughters, the Elder Sister in
whose words the story is told and whose name is never mentioned,
and the Little Sister, Bettina, all golden and bright, a creature
so touchingly exquisite, so like a flower.

Through the sweet, lightly sketched scenes of the childhood,
girlhood and dawning womanhood of these two fair young creatures
there is woven a dark thread of fear, dread, tragedy. Some
experience of brutality this dainty, tenderly devoted mother has
had, an experience which is never more than darkly hinted at. She
forgets the terror of it only in those happy memories that cluster
about her lover-husband. His body was brought home to her from a
fatal tiger hunt. Her only consolation in his loss, she tells the
Elder Sister, was that she knew that there are worse dangers than
those of the jungle! She had the joy of knowing that he died while
all was “bright and untarnished.”

The narrative hastens on, always with a hovering sense of doom.
The innocent, tender love stories of the sisters develop. They are
but seventeen and nineteen, but they are women. It is impossible
to do justice to the telling of this story, so we will pass to the
main event, the invitation of the London aunt, the failing health
and fortune of the mother, which nerves her to accept an offer
that will separate her from her children, and the almost happy
bustle of preparation for the first visit from home, and for that
wonder of wonders—a London season! The sinister part played by
Madame Aurore, the little London dressmaker who, while working for
them in their country home lays the plans that are to decoy them
to their ruin in London, is worked out with sure, rapid touch.
Then comes the arrival in London, the meeting of the girls by the
pseudo “aunt,” who has been dressed for the part by the aid of a
photograph sent on to the procurers by Madame Aurore. Then follows
the terrible scene in the house with the barred windows and the
strange overwhelming scent, the escape of the Elder Sister, the
heart-breaking search for the younger—the madness, the despair!
One of the most pathetic things in the book is the heart-broken
young lover who traces Bettina from London to “their house in
Paris”—thence from one place to another “always too late.” The
merciful death of the mother, and the fixed conviction, the
subliminal inspiration, that comes toward the end to the tortured
brain of the elder sister that Bettina has found her release in
death, alleviate and spiritualize the misery of it all.

Now as to the truth of this tremendous story. I suppose that
having put the very soul of truth and reality into the narrative
itself, having written it from the very depths of her own pitying
heart, the author has not reckoned with the callous incredulity
which the book often meets, or she might well have added an
introductory note in regard to the actual facts in this case from
real life. The story, she told me subsequent to its publication,
was absolutely true, but much softened at many points. In the true
story, for instance, the mother is not dead, but is in a state of
dementia on the continent, whither the family have moved, being
unable to endure England and its memories.

Moreover, although Miss Robins’ experience in working for women
and the woman’s cause in England had brought to her knowledge many
life histories more unspeakable than this, after she had finished
this book she said to herself, “Now here is a story that I know to
be absolutely true, but how valuable is it to give to the world an
individual instance of this kind; how far can it be generalized?”
To test this she went, with that sincerity of spirit that
characterizes all she does, to a noted police justice in London
and laid the story before him, asking him what he would do if a
person came to him with such a story. He answered sadly, with no
show of being at all roused by anything unusual, that he would
begin to take evidence immediately and see what he could do about
it. He added that the story was really a commonplace.

Such is the reticence of the English press, and such is the stern
family pride concerning the “blot on the scutcheon,” and all those
traditions which grow out of the double moral standard whereby the
escapade of the son of the house can even be repeated lightly
while the slightest shadow on the name of the daughter is an
unspeakable disgrace, that no one knows how many tragedies of this
kind are hidden from sight in the records of numerous respectable
families.

To satisfy herself more completely that the story was susceptible
of extensive application, Miss Robins took it to several London
police inspectors. No one for a moment stopped to doubt or
question the facts. The most horrible stories that the human mind
can conceive are old stories to them. When the Home Secretary was
asked a question on this subject in the House of Commons only a
few weeks ago, he answered that in London city alone, to his
knowledge, there had been reported fifty-three girls lost and
never heard of within a few months. Such facts as this explain the
tragic intensity with which the book is written.

Danger! Danger! Danger! That is the dominant note that sounds
throughout the narrative. How pathetically the mother’s poignant
fears contrast with her ineffectiveness. Ever this haunting
danger, whether mother and daughters are walking in the sunset, or
planting in the garden, or sitting by the hearth. What a wonderful
picture Miss Robins gives of the mother’s desperate dependence on
the four walls of her home—“Soon home, now, little girl, soon safe
in our dear home.” The danger signal of the night-bird’s note is
introduced with inimitable art—a subtle suggestion, even in those
early days, of the gray hawk whose shadow hovers over bright young
lives.

The unutterable sadness of it all and the stern warning to mothers
that children’s homes are not just in four walls, but are in towns
and cities and nations! How utterly ineffectual seem an individual
mother’s effort for the safety of her child. How evident is it
that a mother’s care must have back of it power—power in council
and legislative hall. How strongly the lack of social sympathy is
brought out; the mother’s indifference to the great crying needs
of the world. This mother’s “place was the home,” and to what did
all her negative efforts avail in shutting the danger away from
her cherished daughters in a nation, in a world, which holds a
traffic system of such Machiavellian adroitness, a system which
can afford, so great are its profits, to reach into the inner
recesses of a home, to work with endless patience and
resourcefulness and which can enlist on its side such power that
even the London police, perhaps the least corrupt in the world,
can answer evasively to the frantic cry, “Do you know such a
house?”—“We have a great many on the list, but not many such as
you describe;” and follow this statement with the maddening
inactivity which Miss Robins describes with vivid accuracy.

Her book is a terrific arraignment of the conditions which make
such a tragedy possible. Respectability and indifference are
personified scathingly in the monumental aunt, deaf to the world
voices of agony. All society is arraigned as the Elder Sister
storms at her aunt, “sitting massive, calm, with a power of inert
resistance.” Her bewildered answer to the mad cry for help,—“It
isn’t possible, this is England,”—sounds strangely natural to us.
It is the burden of so many recent New York editorials, “such
things don’t happen”!—and that in our land where the record of the
Chicago Immigration League tells of 1,700 girls between the
railroad terminals of New York and Chicago alone, reported lost in
one year. Thus wails the Elder Sister,—“So old and unbelieving, I
felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began....
She rose, O! but slowly;—slow, stiff and ponderous. I felt in her
all the heaviness of acquiescence since time began.”

Thus is the unbelievable apathy of society pictured! Thus Miss
Robins touches lightly, pitifully on the problem of a girl’s
handicap in the lack of preparation for life. What a picture she
gives of the sheltered girl—“Such a little thing, my not knowing
how to telephone, yet it might cost my mother her life.” Again
this motive is sounded when the daughter is begging her mother for
knowledge about her experiences, and the great gray danger—“It is
not the kind of thing you need ever know,” answers the mother with
fatuous finality.

Nor does she make our heart bleed for girlhood alone, but for
manhood, as that blood-curdling conversation, unparalleled in
literature, is gasped out between the Man and the Elder Sister as
they crouch in the shadow in that ghastly room in what he himself
tells her is “one of the most terrible houses in Europe.” Here we
see manhood disfigured, draggled beyond recognition, sitting in
the dust and ashes of a charnel house. How sodden the words fall
from his lips as depraved and perverted manhood defends itself.
“This is a commonplace in the world, in every capital of every
nation on earth. Bishops, old ladies, imagine you could alter
these things.” “Human nature—human nature,” muses the Elder
Sister, “like the tolling of a muffled bell.” Thus are the
wickedest, most deadly of the world’s platitudes on this subject
uttered in this glaring scene of abnormality, so that
automatically they are given the lie.

The unbelieving will say, “But how is it possible that we do not
hear oftener of such cases?” Two elements especially conspire to
suppress such knowledge, both based on a false attitude towards
women. First the double standard of morals which holds men’s
purity so much lower than woman’s; second, the unjust attitude
towards women reflected in the press which is more likely to seize
upon a disappearance story in such a way as to make it reflect
upon the girls’ character rather than to acknowledge it a possible
case of abduction or white slavery.

As I write, Miss Robins sends me letters which she has recently
received from people interested in her book. One speaking of the
“awful traffic that is going on” tells how two girls, daughters of
a clergyman, have disappeared on their journey home from school
and have never been heard of since.

A letter from Miss Robins herself adds the following to her
remarks on her book. “Of all the official people I consulted, not
one of these experts doubted my story, _and all had known similar
cases_. We do not need to be told that the people to whom these
things happen, if they are refined and sensitive, are not eager to
make known their ruin. The natural impulse is to cover the horror
from every eye, even to deny it.”

“If you will consult the findings of your own commissions you will
see that in America ‘no girl of any class is safe.’”

I myself know at first hand an appalling number of cases—wives,
women of standing, college girls on journeys, young girls on their
way to boarding school, and working girls trapped and sold. In
Rose Livingston’s mail in the last few weeks have come
heartrending letters from parents for help in finding their lost
daughters. A letter I read yesterday from a doctor’s wife in
Indiana was so terrible in the lingering pathos with which the
mother dwelt on the beauty and sweetness of this lost daughter
that I handed it back without reading to the end.

In connection with Miss Robins’ letter, I offer the following
quotation from a paper by Stanley Finch of the Federal Department
of Justice where he speaks of the operation of the Federal White
Slave Traffic Act. “The number of complaints and prosecutions is
rapidly increasing.... Such crimes are more numerous than was
first believed possible.... It has become evident that thousands
of people[11] in practically all parts of the country were
violating the law.... [We found] girls were being transported in
such interstate and foreign commerce solely for the purpose of
prostitution and were being treated as mere articles of
merchandise for the profit of those who handled them and who were
willing for the profit involved to sacrifice both the bodies and
the souls of their victims.... As we extend this work [of federal
prosecution] throughout the country the awful interstate trade in
women and girls for immoral purposes which for years has been
going on almost without let or hindrance, has now become a very
dangerous occupation.... The practices of people engaged in the
white slave traffic involves in a considerable number of cases the
actual physical detention of women and girls against their will in
this vilest form of involuntary servitude.”

Would that there were space to reinforce these remarks by New York
newspaper headlines dealing with such cases for the month of March
15 to April 15.

How many fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and
lovers throughout this country, have lived through the agony
endured by the Elder Sister and the lover in Miss Robins’ book?
That which had been their greatest care and burden, the frail
health of Bettina, becomes the Elder Sister’s one comfort and
hope. How many a bereft father and mother today not only cling in
anguish to that hope, but desperately refuse to believe but that
their girl is dead! And with reliable students estimating the life
of the white slave in this country at five years, we know that
many a flower-like highly organized Little Sister has met
mercifully her release in a few weeks—a few months.

To those who know how considerable a factor in the whole problem
of the white slave traffic is the girl who is taken, not the girl
who goes, the girl who is under compulsion, not the girl who
stays, this book is a great contribution. THE SURVEY printed some
time since a poster that has been used in this country from ocean
to ocean: “Danger! Mothers, beware! 60,000 innocent girls wanted
to take the place of 60,000 white slaves who will die this year in
the United States.” If My Little Sister will only make the truth
of this warning more real, more individual more poignant, then, in
the pain-soothing words that close this book, “She will not have
suffered in vain, and others will thank her too.”

Such a book is not merely a literary production, an exquisite work
of art: it is a high, sincere human service. Front a literary
point of view it is a great book. One is reminded of the
Aeschylean definition of tragedy: “That which purifies the heart
through pity and terror.” But this book not only reaches great
tragic and dramatic heights, but its subtle art is such that it
blends with the tragedy in an almost eerie way a lyric chord which
echoes throughout, an unbroken strain of hope and pity, of the
essential dignity and sanity and rightness of life.

MOTHERHOOD

ISABEL KIMBALL WHITING

_I see them come crowding, crowding,
Children of want and pain,
Dark sorrow their eyes enshrouding
Where joy’s touch should have lain._

_They stand in silence beseeching,
Gaunt faces lifted up
And wan little hands outreaching
For Love’s forbidden cup._

_Their hearts are restless with yearning.
The hearts of my own are stilled,
Their lips are parched and burning
The cups of my own are filled!_

_I cry in love unsatisfied
For these without the fold,
My mother’s arms are open wide
These weary ones to hold._

_What though my arms are open wide,
Only mine own lie near.
Without still stand those long denied,
Compassed in want and fear._

_Bowed with the crown of Motherhood,
I seek that Shepherd of old;
“How can mine own receive the good
With some left out of the fold?”_

IN THE HANDS OF THE POLICE

A PLEA FOR A NEW LEGISLATURE TO MAKE AND ENFORCE LAWS AGAINST VICE

A. LEO WEIL

[_Mr. Weil, one of the best known attorneys of western
Pennsylvania, is known outside of his profession as the militant
President of the Pittsburgh Voters’ League, the organization
which exposed the graft scandals of three years ago, sent
councilmen and bankers to jail and brought new and invigorating
spirit into Pittsburgh municipal life. Last Year the Voters’
League successfully brought charges against the head of the
Department of Public Safety, and provoked a situation which led
to the creation of the Pittsburgh Morals Commission, a
semi-official body without governmental authority, and the
cleaning-up of the big numbered district._

_It is on the basis of this experience that Mr. Weil reaches the
conclusions here set forth. He was a witness before the Wagner
commission which has recommended legislation now pending in New
York (with every prospect of passage) that will create a
separate public welfare department, largely divorce it from the
city administration and entrust its commissioners, appointed by
the mayor, with powers with respect to vice somewhat similar to
those held by the Board of Health with respect to sanitary
conditions._—Ed.]

The police, a body of men selected primarily to preserve order,
protect life, prevent crime, apprehend the criminal, and perform
other administrative duties—men perhaps wholly unfitted as a body
for anything else—have been expected to solve, by legislation,
problems which have confounded the wisest from the time whereof
the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.

That the police have failed could not be otherwise.

That they have aggravated the evil was to be expected.

That ultimately legislation must be placed in competent, qualified
hands, must be apparent.

That it will require the greatest minds, the best thought, the
highest statesmanship, and almost a divine perception, to
apprehend and deal with those complex, involved, intricate
questions having to do with the passions of men and the strongest
laws of nature, urging defiance of human laws, seems to be
axiomatic.

Nevertheless, on the subject of vice as generally understood in
our cities, the police are expected not only to administer the
laws, but to make them; not only to enforce enactments, but to
frame them. And herein lies, in my judgment, the root of the evil
in present day conditions which has brought our police into
disrepute.

All countries, from the most despotic to the most liberal, from
the most conservative to the most radical, have left this question
of the social evil to the police, and have not dared, through
their legislative bodies, to thoroughly consider and pass laws to
eradicate it. Such meager legislation as has been passed has been
ignored in the congested centers of population, and generally such
legislation has not been supported by the public sentiment of
those communities. Legislation has been generally of a merely
prohibitive character, ignoring existing conditions, together with
the army of human beings living upon vice, for whom some provision
must be made.

Even if the legislatures could be induced to take up this question
and pass general laws, it would necessarily follow that such laws
in their generality must look to the future, rather than to the
present, and existing conditions would have to be left to some
other authority.

In every large city there are thousands engaged in prostitution.
They can neither be exterminated by the fiat of law nor reformed
by the passage of proclamations. Public morals, like private
morals, can be improved only gradually. It is not so much the
theoretical question of to be or not to be, but the practical
situation summed up in such phrases as: It is—it will for a time
remain. The future—what is it to be?

Would it not be wise to ask the legislature to pass a law
requiring every city to appoint a body of men to draft, and from
time to time revise, a code of laws to regulate, suppress,
exterminate, and generally to deal with, this problem of
prostitution? To it must be given authority. It must be vested
with legislative power. It should have its own employes—call it a
morals police force, if you wilt—to carry into effect the rules,
regulations and laws passed by this commission. That men could be
obtained to act upon such a commission, public-spirited,
representative students of social questions, I fully believe. No
one would accept a place on such a board who was not interested in
the welfare of his community. The responsibilities would be
fearful; the criticism would be severe. No one without a blameless
life would dare to act. Whether or not ultimately the regular
police force could be used by such a commission would be a
question of policy. At any rate, for the present, I believe it
would be unwise.

Such a commission would collect data of inestimable value, data
that was reliable, and of which there is now none worth while.
Such a commission would doubtless make mistake after mistake,
perhaps would depart from all its preconceived notions at the
start. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that step by step
it would gradually and slowly work out a solution. Looking the
country over, we see that voluntary organizations have
accomplished temporary good, but their effort has never been
persistent, continuous, permanent, authoritative, legal.

The adoption of the plan suggested would take out of the hands of
those wholly unfitted for so great an undertaking this momentous
question, and place it in the hands of others who we would have
the right to assume would ultimately be found to deal with it, so
far as human intelligence, study, observation and experiment can
enable and qualify men to deal with it.

Another and a greatly to be desired result would also be
accomplished. It would remove from the police that which today
contaminates the organization, so that in every city they have
been brought under a suspicion unfortunately too frequently
deserved, an opprobrium too justly applied.

The casting of this burden upon the police, more than any other
cause, sows the seed of corruption, furnishes the opportunity for
profit, brings into alliance the law officers and the
law-breakers, disgraces the police force, and keeps off of it many
men who would otherwise be glad to serve their communities in a
position that should command the respect and consideration of the
people.

This police burden has in turn been the biggest rock upon which
self-government has capsized in our American cities.

THE BELGIAN STRIKE

[_The mass strike of the Belgian workers was carried to an issue
last week. The motion of the Liberal member which brought the
strike to a close, while it does not specifically grant the
reform asked for by the Socialists, is considered such a lien on
government action as to amount to a victory for them. These
interpretations of the larger significance of the strike from
different angles were, of course, written while the struggle was
going on._

_Mr. Walling, who is a member of the radical wing of the
Socialist party, is a student of international Socialism, his
most recent book being The Larger Aspects of Socialism. He was
in Russia during the Revolution, and knew intimately the details
of the great Russian general strike of 1905._—Ed.]