FOR A BETTER SOCIAL ORDER

...Such a great army of those expert in problems of the child, the delinquent and the defective, of the questions of housing, sanitation—noted physicians, judges, lawyers, settlement workers, ministers, etc., etc.,—as described by one of themselves, "social doctors who heal and teach, who desire to improve upon a charity which is only a sentimental money giving and productive of mere temporary relief," brought their stores of knowledge and experience to this gathering, that a list of their names alone is enough to engender sociologic congestion of the brain...

...Louis and Miss Agnes Nestor of Chicago...

...If to all these bulwarks against economic weakness we add the rights of full citizenship we shall then have a human being equipped by training and in a right and sane political relation to the community...

...Second, the need for a vocational training which should give the girl under fourteen the happy familiarity with the common domestic operations of cooking and dusting and sewing that comes of early practice, and which could be easily enough obtained with a rational system of school dinners...

...In conjunction with Miss Addams' presidency another fact to rejoice the hearts of the progressive was that cleverly pointed out by a young newspaper woman, that among the hundreds of organizations represented at the National Conference and those smaller conferences constellated around it, all earnestly imbued with the ideal of bettering humanity, there was not one anti-suffragist present...

...The speaker then showed that unskilled labor was to all intents and purposes child labor, the workers having received no protection in the way of commercial equipment and that the burden of their incapability rested upon the community...

...For a Better Social Order Impressions of the 37th National Confe ence on Charities and Corrections By S. M. FRANKLIN THOSE privileged to attend the thirty-seventh National Conference of Charities and Corrections in St...

...Louis, could not fail to be impressed with three points—the economic or wage note, as it might be called, the inter-relation of all social movements, and the clearly-defined recognition of the worth of prevention as compared with mere cures or alleviatives that do not strike at fundamental economical causes of pathological social conditions...

...This note struck at the beginning was maintained with certain fluctuations throughout the week...

...This would promise independence and self support during the wage earning years of the girl and would leave on hand a trade training for the mature woman who goes on working or who perhaps as wife or widow has to return to wage earning...

...She covered jiany points...

...As one who has had grim acquaintance with "the toxin of fatigue" engendered by unlimited hours of toil and who believes that all wrongs rest largely upon an economic foundation, the plea for shorter hours, coupled with Father Ryan's advocacy of a minimum wage, was very refreshing at a Conference with the title of this one...

...First, the need for humane and considerate arrangements within the factory itself including hours, sanitary conditions and adequate wages...

...Johnson, the industrious and imperturbably good-humored secretary would several times a day relate the list of overlapping meetings and their various locations, usually concluding with the humorous injunction that the seeker after knowledge finding himself in the wrong hall should stay there, as disappointment was impossible in any...

...No less impressive was Mrs...

...Third, after fourteen a trade training, for domesticity has very little money value in the open market...

...By no one was it more irrefutably presented than Mr...

...This was the burden of Jane Addams' opening address given before a large audience reportedly the most auspicious the conference has ever had...

...Before she had closed Miss Addams had sketched in* rough outline her hopes of social regeneration and shown how every department of the conference was linked with every other and had its place in the great general scheme...

...A Practical Aim THE spirit and aim of the conference as a whole, as it impressed an interested layman, seemed to be to stimulate earnest thought, to awaken the public to the necessity of sensible action in a more sane and humane adjustment of industrial and consequently social conditions, and to collect and tabulate reliable scientific data that shall form .the basis of such systematic action, rather than to lay down dogmatic rules and recipes...

...Miss Hannah Hennessy of St...

...Co-relate all your social puzzles, seek first to abolish their economic causes and then you will be ready for the next step...

...In short, everything went to illustrate the truth of the epigram that the charity of today is the justice of tomorrow...

...Anna Garlin Spencer, "What Machine Dominated Industry Means in' Relation to Women's Work...

...It was by happy arrangement that the National Women's Trade Union League held a meeting of its executive board during the week and the interest in its work was so great that by special request an open session was held and those wishing to learn of industrial facts at first hand were able to hear such generals and captains in the struggle for industrial freedom as Miss Mary Dreier, Rose Schneidermann and Melinda Scott of New York...

...Conferences seem to wax more gigantic with each year...

...This one enjoyed the hospitality of so many churches and other edifices that it was likened by the flippant to a ten-ringed circus, and Mr...

...Surely it was no mere coincidence that the National Conference which before all others struck the insistent note of common responsibility for all social •;vils, and of the simple plain question of wages as the great help to the solution of all social problems, should have been the first of such gatherings to have been presided over by a woman...

...An Army of Experts Foregather FROM the woman's point of view, no address made a deeper impression than that of Mrs...

...Owen Lovejoy who instanced the case of 11,000 unskilled laborers in an Eastern city whose amount of wages during a year lacked $2,338,000 of keeping them from starvation...

...Joseph E. Bowen's beautiful plea for the young people of the cities who are very naturally craving a little of the excitement and beauty and joy of life and whose only outlet is in the unwholesome fivi-cent theatre, the crowded street or the disreputable dance hall...

...The charity organizations of the city gave them $21,000 but there was still owing them from the community a deficit of over two million dollars in the irreducible minimum of a living wage...