make special inducements for the worthy poor to return to the deserted farms," and provide employment on three sets of farms, if it comes to be necessary: on one kind in or near the cities, for the honest workmen temporarily out of work;* on another, that need not be suburban, for adult incapables; on another for wilful paupers these two last, of course, being tenanted by compulsory commitment.

The greatest, because most practical, of Christian sociologists, General William Booth of the Salvation Army," has made a way of escape from the loneliness of farm life, which was the most repellent and expellent objection to it, by the successful establishment of "farm colonies,"" a form of cooperation" which ought to be attractive to honest workmen who have grown weary of wolf-fighting in city tenements. Such farm colonies

have been established by the state in Germany, Holland, and New Zealand; family life being preserved in the case of Holland, with mental and manual education for the children."

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Some of our college professors, preachers, and editors are teaching that rights to life and liberty include the right to work, which is perhaps true, but is not yet a pertinent reason why American governments should provide work, since "means of production," in the shape of farms rentable on shares that will at least yield an honest living to the tenant, are yet abundantly available."1

20. But pending permanent provision for the unemployed they must often be assisted by the charitable, who

* The happy thought of Mayor Pingree of Detroit, that vacant city lots might be utilized as gardens for the unemployed, has started a movement of great possibilities. Its success in Detroit in 1894 has prompted New York, Cincinnati, St Louis, and other cities to try it in 1895. Onethird of an acre, it is said, will supply a family with potatoes for the year, and other vegetables for their season. It is to be hoped that the experi ment will also give to many a taste for farming.

should study to conserve this self-respect by giving them work rather than alms, so far as possible.

Scientific

1894.

During the winter of 1893-94 our privileged classes took up the problem of the unemployed with devotion of brain as well as heart, and produced results which Charity of 1893- showed that the science of charity has made great progress." Merchants and ministers in every large city sat down together to solve the following problems: "(1) To find some form of work that would give employment to the greatest number of people, and, by means of the wages thus earned, would enable them and their families to keep alive through the winter. (2) To prevent self-respecting working men from being compelled to accept alms, whether in the form of money, food, or clothes. (3) To find a form of work at which men of every trade could be employed, and in which the expenses of management should be relatively small, so that the bulk of the money might go to the men as wages. (4) To find work the results or product of which would not interfere with a market already overstocked. (5) So to manage and conduct the work that only those who needed it the most should receive it, and that no one should be attracted to it from other cities. (6) To secure the financial support necessary to carry on such an undertaking."

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Some American cities supported the unemployed by a draft of charity upon the taxpayers, undertaking, to this end, municipal works, such as new city buildings and park improvements. Many educated citizens lost their heads in their hearts and approved the claim, just disproved, that government owes every man a city job. It was plausibly argued that it was better to support the unemployed with work than without it. But this was not the alternative. Few of the self-respecting poor would have gone 66 on the town." Some would have gone back to the old farm, others to the old country, and voluntary charity would have provided for the remainder;

as in Pittsburg, where many thousands of dollars were raised by private subscription and used to pay workmen a dollar a day for improvements in the parks, which the taxpayers, as such, were not yet ready to make.

Money thus bestowed to supply necessities to workmen and their families should be safeguarded against being diverted to the saloons. A pastor in Pittsburg, who lived in sight of a saloon on the opposite side of the way, told me that every night the workmen who had been employed by private benevolence in work on the parks, on their return trip filed into that saloon by the score to spend a part at least of the dollar they had just received in what would embitter and degrade the homes for whose benefit the money had been provided. Such cases would seem to afford a good opportunity for introducing the "labor check" of the industrial millennium, which should be exchangeable, in these charitable uses of it, only for food and fire and clothing.

Ohio has set a good example in its recent law establishing free employment bureaus in the chief cities," after the French pattern, although the antagonism of non-union by union labor has confined the work of the bureaus mostly to unskilled labor and domestic service.

Another exemplary charity is the pawn-shop of the Charity Organization Society of New York City, which is called by the less odorous name of "Loan Bureau," sometimes also, "The Poor Man's Bank." I saw the Bureau, when first opened, doing a brisk business with people not ragged, but respectable, who feel more keenly than any others financial stringency, and are glad to pawn their luxuries to secure necessities in the assurance that, at the moderate rate of interest charged, they can redeem their pledges when good times return."

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21. But while we administer such temporary relief, we should earnestly seek a permanent solution of this problem of the unemployed. The radical difficulty is

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not overproduction, as superficial appearances suggest, but underconsumption.' Two incidents will suggest the chief cause and also one of the cures

Overproduc

tion or Under

of this underconsumption. One night when consumption? I was in the Midnight Mission of New York City, the missionary pointed out, during the meeting, a well-dressed man of whom he wished to tell me a story afterward. This man, dressed in rags, had been converted in the meeting a few weeks before. When the new life had enabled him to earn a new suit, he determined to ascertain how much his last suit in the devil's service would bring. On going the rounds of the second-hand stores he was able to get only seven cents for it. "That," said he at the next meeting, "is what the devil's service brings you to-seven-cent suits." It makes a very considerable difference to the clothing industry whether men wear "seven-cent suits," or better ones; a difference which should lead political economists to give larger attention to the economic waste of the drinking usages and other vices of our times."

Among many interesting incidents connected with the closing of the saloons in Kittanning, Pa., a leading merchant tells the following:

A woman came into his store very timidly. She was evidently unaccustomed to trading.

"What can I do for you?" inquired the merchant. "I want a pair of shoes for a little girl."

"What number?"

"She is twelve years old."

"But what number does she wear?"

"I do not know."

"But what number did you buy when you bought the last pair for her?"

"She never had a pair in her life. You see, sir, her father used to drink when we had saloons; but now that they are closed he doesn't drink any more, and this

morning he said to me, Mother, I want you to go up town to-day and get sissy a pair of shoes, for she never had a pair in her life.' I thought, sir, if I told you how old she was, you would know just what size to give me." The wives and children of drunkards, gamblers, libertines, and underpaid workers "consume," in the economic sense, too few clothes, too little food, reading, music, and art. If the billion dollars a year worse than wasted in the purchase of alcoholic beverages, and the vast sums spent on gambling and lust, should be diverted by law and gospel to the purchase of necessities and luxuries for impoverished homes, as it surely will some day, every factory in the land would need to work night and day,

PROPORTION OF FARM PRODUCTS USED FOR LIQUORS. New York Voice (February 7, 1895) Chart prepared by George B. Waldron, based on Reports of Departments of Agriculture and Internal Revenue for 1893-94.

BARLEY, 82.91%...

WHEAT, 0.023%....

RYE, 12.31%..

CORN, 0.84%.......

OATS, 0.001%.

MOLASSES, 25.44%..

Each diagram as a whole represents the entire crop; the black the proportion used for manufacturing liquors.

Only three per cent. of more than one billion dollars' worth of the farm products of 1894 used by the brewers and distillers, but the American people spent a billion dollars for the liquor produced.-The Voice, February 7, 1895.

(See also table making a yet more unfavorable showing as to the farmer's relation to the liquor traffic, in The Voice of April 23, 1893. For statistics of cost of drink and revenue from it, see The Voice of April 4, 1895.)