In the first place, it means the overhauling of our whole unrelated, unco-ordinated system, which at present contains incongruous elements brought in from England and Germany, in the main, with very little left which is strictly indigenous; and build an out-and-out American system, the foundation of which shall be a citizenship school, the indigenous common school of our forefathers, if you please. We ought to agree to exclude from that school everything which has not a perfectly clear claim to be an effective agency in the upbuilding of intelligent, useful, happy citizenship. We ought to insist that that school shall have its place for everybody, and that it shall in no wise be hampered or controlled by the requirements of higher institutions. I can think of it as a very thorough-going enterprise, extending up to the end of the compulsory school period-not eight grades, nor six grades, nor ten grades, but a single school.

Just after the war there came over the country a very much belated wave of financial recognition of the teacher's calling. For the first time in history a great many communities are paying the teachers adequately-adequately even for trained people. When young normal school graduates can start at an initial salary of from $1,500 to $2,000, it is hard to say that they are not adequately paid. It is doubtless true that veteran teachers are not yet paid enough to make teaching an object of the ambition of the best American stock. Nevertheless, failure to do so represents no lack of willingness on the part of our people but a lack of means.

We are living in a fool's paradise if we expect the school and the school system to contribute to the public welfare except we guarantee that none but the well-educated and well-trained shall enter the schoolroom. Better no school at all than a school with an incompetent behind the teacher's desk. As I see some of the young people today who are going into the schoolrooms at salaries which seem almost beyond the dreams of avarice to those of us who began a quarter of a century ago, I sometimes wonder if we are not "paying too much for our whistle." People who expect to be well paid in money, and other of this world's goods, must expect to be worthy and well qualified. Having given them a substantial initial salary, the public has a right to demand the most thorough-going kind of training and for that purpose the public must provide practical, thorough-going institutions for the training of teachers for our citizenship school, and that requires money.

Whatever question may be raised as to the economic possiblity of supporting our whole program of free education, we can raise no question as to the citizenship school and the training of its teachers. The school must be free; it must be universal; the opportunities for all children must be equal. We can do no less and still keep American institutions. Whatever may finally be the part of the federal government in education, we have got to depend upon the federal government in the main for the training of teachers, for the simple reason that it has appropriated to itself the only source of taxes out of which schools in general can be expanded. We are so accustomed to look at education in a parochial, or at least in a provincial way, that we fail to realize that public education for the public welfare is more a national concern than it is a local concern.

One is impressed with what might be if the national government would do its duty, when he compares the cost of our proposed armament program with what it costs to train teachers. We have a single item on our naval program-to wit, six battle cruisers at an estimated cost of $240,000,000. Do you realize that the cost of those six boats alone would furnish every state in the Union with a school of educa

tion as good as that with which I have the honor to be connected, not as good as it is, but as good as we should like to have it? More than that, it would surround these schools of education with regional state normal schools as good as the best we now have, so far as we can make them the best. To me that is a very clear picture of the choice which lies before this country: a mad race for military supremacy, or teachers really trained to make really free and really intelligent citizens.

This brings me to my final point and one which is more intimately related to the activities with which this conference is specially concerned. We ought to have teachers who are trained not only to teach but also trained to be intelligent about the wreckage of humanity. You are concerned with the dependent, the defective, the delinquent. A large number of these cases might never exist if the school had been equipped to do what it might do. In your generosity you think that if the school educates (vague term), that is all it need be asked to do. The school is there to make citizens-intelligent, free, happy. There is no social agency we have in which all the lines of social work cross as they do in the school. The teacher may know an incipient case of delinquency or a distressful family situation before any other worker in the community. She might be able to identify the moron before he has committed the misdeeds which have led to his ultimate diagnosis. Nor am I picturing any ideal situation. We have the material, the procedure, the technique. It only needs to be taught to the teacher to such an extent that she can be intelligent about her welfare cases, make proper diagnosis and bring them to the attention of the proper specialist. And so I think it is only common sense that we should have in all our schools of education and in all our state and city normal schools, thorough-going courses in social work, with the thought in mind that the essential part of teaching is oversight, care, and guidance of the human material committed to the teacher's charge, not merely assigning and hearing the lesson.

Democracy makes a queer world. We think it the most obvious of statements to assert that what is everybody's business is nobody's business. In truth, actuality compels us to reverse that statement. What is everybody's business will never be done unless everybody does it himself. I fancy that you think it strange that the educator should appeal to a social work conference for help in education. In the long run, public education, social work, every kind of endeavor which makes for the betterment of society, can get things done only as each understands the other's aims and as each supports the other.

DIVISION VI-INDUSTRIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT

Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Chairman

This division does not present a formal report. To do that would require an estimate of the misery and dislocation of the industrial and economic order as they weighed upon our hearts and challenged our intelligence a year ago, and a comparison of that estimate with the corresponding estimate of the chaos and disorganization prevailing today.

The third year since the armistice was signed is now half gone. We are not yet at peace with Germany, nor can we trade with Russia with whom we were never at

war. Great masses of men, women, and children are in want and wretchedness, while with us and the least one of our associated powers great masses of men and women are suffering that demoralization of skill and dignity which is an inseparable incident to unemployment. Many are naked while our wool cannot be marketed. Many are hungry while our harvest brings the farmer no gain; and the sound of the footsteps of the unemployed man and woman haunts our ears that had hoped never again to be compelled to listen to that especial evidence of misery.

Moreover, the world, exhausted from the world war, has not yet recovered its emotional and nervous equilibrium. To review our misery would be neither profitable nor timely. During the war, however, under the emotional impulse of the patriotic motive and the institutional pressure of the federal government, certain collective agencies were developed. We have therefore asked the representatives of those divisions of the federal government that have survived the armistice, or have been created since then, to be represented on our program and tell us of their status, their activities, and their outlook. The Women's Bureau, the Children's Bureau, the Bureau of Labor, the Federal Employment Service, and the United States Housing Corporation have all been represented in their relation to the great problems of unemployment, women's work and wages, children's care, and housing. The state government, too, has been called on to report. The effort to enlarge the field of state government has been laid before the division. The interest of the consumer in his protection against monopoly exploitation of the need for food, and the results of the great migration of colored labor, are some of the experiences to which attention has been called. They seem slight in face of the hideous stoppage of normal processes of production and distribution that still characterize our international situation, but they are all problems which must be attacked collectively and issues we should face as a people. But whether we deal with the greater problems of international nonintercourse and the industrial and social aspects of that non-intercourse, or whether we set our hand to the smaller and nearer tasks, there are two things essential to the success of our effort. The first is understanding, and the second is leadership.

These two essential attributes of national progress are represented in the program of this general session, the first peculiarly in the person of Mr. Whiting Williams who has gone into the mine and into the mill in order that he may learn, and know, and understand, and report what is on the worker's mind. The second-constructive leadership is represented to an extraordinary degree in the person of Mr. Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, to whose statesmanship in the industrial field is due in large measure the substitution for anarchy of law and order in the clothing industry.

WHAT'S ON THE WORKER'S MIND?

Whiting Williams, Cleveland, Ohio

I can very easily understand and forgive any of you who have in your minds a question as to my right to answer that very great question of what is on the worker's mind, because I have very much in mind the same question that was in the minds of my friends at Cleveland when I told them of my plan to try to get at the feelings of the

worker. You cannot interview a man for his feelings, yet it is his feelings that are much more important than his thinkings; they practically, one and all, began to raise exception; they all said, "You cannot possibly grow any beard that will be heavy enough, and you cannot put on any overalls that will be thick enough, and you cannot use profanity fluently enough to get at these feelings." I have to smile when I recall their doubts, and I would smile a great deal more if it were not for the fact, as a matter of actuality, and greatly to my own surprise, that the laborers in the labor gang, and my buddies in the mills, and my buddies in the mines went so far to the other extreme and took me so thoroughly for granted in these strange surroundings, that it positively hurt my feelings.

In my seven months of experience in this country, there was only one man sufficiently considerate of my college education and the money spent on trying to make me at least look like a gentleman, to see the inner culture that was so apparent to my friends; and I felt he was not playing me fair because at the moment he was intoxicated. He said, "Oh, there is something wrong here, stranger; either you have committed some serious crime and are a fugitive from justice, or else you are the sad victim of some disgraceful secret, or you would not be in this God damn town, and for $4.00 a day."

On the other hand, a young fellow of eighteen, who had only one year of a high school education, was proud of the fact that he was getting $8.00 a day while I, with my four-year high school education was getting only $4.00 a day; and in a moment of self-forgetfulness I said, "Well, don't you think you would have been better off to get more education; don't you think that would give you a better job eventually?" He drew himself up in amazement and said, "You get one-half as much as I am getting, and you got your job, and I got mine, and I get twice as much as you do on mine. Hell, I would say you ain't no argument for education."

On the other hand, I felt I was getting along pretty well in Great Britain when I found one chap that was willing to tell me just how it came about. He said, “Of coorse, there's pilferin.' Yer see, 'ere durin' the war there wuz so much cargo piled up on the docks that there wuz Californy fruit a-roonin' all over the plice! Wull, Ga Blime, with every one o' the bloody rats eatin' off every one o' the bleedin' labels, yer 'ad to open um up and 'ave a look and a tiste ter see wuz they pineapples or plooms!" And still later a chap up in the north of England, Middlesborough, the Pittsburgh of Great Britain, said to me, after I had been asking him some questions about how to get a job one morning, "Wull, yer awsked me a w'ile back ter 'ave a drink with yer, didn't yer?-Awnd I said, 'No', didn't I?-Wull, that were becuz I wuz considerin.' Yer see, I allus mikes it a rule never ter 'ave a drink with a stringer without considerin.' Wull,-wull,-wull, now I've considered!"

So that while I cannot take the time to read my diary to you, I can, I think, ask you to take my word for it that I did get pretty close to the mind and to the heart of the unskilled worker in this country and in Great Britain. So that you have a perfect right to ask what did I find there on the mind of the unskilled worker that is of interest for us as social workers to know.

I believe that the one big thing without which we cannot possibly make even a beginning toward understanding the mind of the unskilled worker is this: the tremendous, the colossal importance to him of having and holding a job. I got that into my system by arriving in the great steel center of this country in January of 1919 with

$25 in my pocket. The agreement with my friends was that if that $25 were gone before I succeeded in getting a job, then it would be up to me to spend at least six months as a hobo; and to my amazement I found there in the streets of that city in January of 1919 hundreds and thousands of men walking the streets of the city, on whose faces you could read as plainly as if it were written there with indelible ink, these terrible words, “When you haven't anything, there ain't no job for you." And after I had gone out into the suburbs, and everywhere had been told the same thing, that through all the war contracts having been cancelled and the big peace orders waiting on cheaper steel, there were no jobs to be had, I was in a position to appreciate just exactly how awful it was. I came into the labor gang employment office one morning, and I heard the clerk say, "Where was you, Bill? I just gave out twentyeight whites and twenty-eight blacks by the railway job, and I was looking for you. Where was you?" Bill said, "Oh, my God, I have been here hour after hour, day after day, and I just stepped out for five minutes to see a friend, and now this has happened. Oh, my God!"

A few days later I was in a position to appreciate just how terrible the experience was for I had the same thing happen to me, and then the clerk added, "Well, if you will be here tomorrow morning, you and Bill, you might take your chance on a job for the day in the labor gang in the place of a man or two that don't happen to come out for that one single day."

You bet your life I was there. I was there half an hour ahead of time; and I give you my word that I got the shock of my young life when I found seventy-five others ahead of me waiting for the same chance. I think it was one of the longest and one of the most serious hours I ever put in, because, just the day before, I had passed the gang warming their hands by the stoves furnished by the railroad company and had been able to count almost to the hour the length of time that I had before me before I would have to join their open-air country club. Something of that same thing seemed to be in the mind of everyone of these men, because everybody stood there, waiting, with his eyes glued right on that place where the labor gang-boss was to appear, ready and hunched up, hoping that they might be taken on for todayeverybody waiting, hoping, but mostly fearing. When he came, this silence was broken; for after he had taken his men-"I will take you, and you there, and you big fellow come on," and he had gone in-then you should have heard a lot of polite conversation about Columbia the Gem of the Ocean. "Look at those hands," one fellow said; "look at those hands! Ain't them good enough to earn a living for my wife and kids? And I have been praying day after day for a job, and I can't get it. Ain't this a hell of a country?"

One fellow said, "It is the blanked Democrats doing it." Another fellow said "Oh, 'ell, it's the Republicans"; and a third man grew very much worse in his tirade about the capital of the country. There he stood with all the capital he had in the world, mostly his muscles, ready to take a job anywhere, and ready and willing to put it down in exchange for the bread and butter and the self-respect that go to the possessor, to the proud possessor of a job.

You cannot begin to see the world as the unskilled workman and even the skilled man must see it, except as you look at it through his eyes or through those of the man who must have a job today, and who must also, if at all possible, have a job tomorrow; and if we could somehow get that into our system, then we could begin to understand