me a jumble of words. But at the end

of whatever was said I understood the voice to repeat:

"I am the deputy sheriff. You are hereby summoned to immediately appear before the grand jury."

Of course I went. And for two hours I gave that grand jury more stuff than they could digest in many sessions. They threatened to follow up my statements, but I rather think that the enterprise concerned cleaned up, for that was the last that I heard of the entire situation.

The morning paper, which also had been threatened with a libel suit if it copied the story in the evening paper, said editorially a little while later, possibly to get itself into the good graces of E the complainants:

"If you want to land in jail, just start in to make a noise like Stelzle."

The Southern Sociological Congress grew out of these Southern experiences of ours. It has ever since been active in = promoting the welfare of the South in the fields of the subjects discussed in that series of meetings.

Another important result which grew - out of this movement was the closing up of the entire "red light" district in Atlanta by the Chief of Police. This was done mainly through a series of big newspaper advertisements which were prepared by two laymen in the cityJohn J. Eagan and Marion Jackson.

TYPICAL extensive survey was made by the Department of Church and Labor to find out how workingmen spent their spare time. This study was made by the staff of the department under the general direction of George E. Bevans, in connection with work he was doing for Columbia University. Over a thousand workingmen were interviewed, and nearly four months were required to complete the investigation. Among the men studied were found to be 29 different nationalities, 164 trades and occupations. Sixty-four per cent were married. Here are some of the outstanding facts which were revealed:

Men working the shortest number of hours were the most temperate in their habits. It had often been said that if workingmen were given shorter hours and more leisure time they would spend the extra time in saloons. That was clearly proved to be untrue. Long hours, causing over-fatigue, seemed to lower the vitality of workingmen, so that at the end of the day's work they gravitated toward saloons. Books were read by fully twice as many of the eight to nine hour work

Team leaders of the Men and Religion Forward Movement

ers as by the group who worked eleven hours or more.

Married men patronized the saloon more than single men. There was an interesting phenomenon for the moralist, and the psychologist, and the sociologist! Part of the explanation is that the saloon had the most appeal in the dull, drab years of middle age, which were usually the married years. Furthermore, wives suffered limitations by remaining at home with domestic duties, seeing few persons except their families. Husbands had broader experience in the association of other men in their shops and lodges and labor unions. So they were likely to spend their free hours away from home, where talk was more interesting. Workingmen spent more money for beer than for any other recreational item.

The industrial phase of my work was so marked that social service agencies later organized by various denominations gave the same emphasis to their work, although, of course, the field of social service was much wider than that already covered by the Department of Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church. Interest in the work extended to other countries, even as far as Australia. Some of the leading denominations in those countries appointed committees to study the industrial problem in the United States, and particularly to familiarize themselves with what was being done by the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions in this field.

Probably a dozen different denominational bureaus were organized within a few years, with secretaries in charge to The movies were the workingmen's study the social problem, but especially principal recreational centers. the labor question. These churches and moving-picture show hit the saloon departments frankly acknowledged their harder than any other agency.

The

Church and synagogue received the smallest vote as the most profitable way of spending spare time. Men working the shortest hours and those highest in mental attainments were least responsive to the Church. Old men attended church more generally than young men. It was a puzzle that the men who worked the longest hours, conversely, went to church most frequently. It had long been held that workingmen did not go to church because they had not the time.

indebtedness to the Presbyterian Church because of its leadership. The Boston "Herald" said editorially: "When the Presbyterian Church in this country a few years ago established its Department of Church and Labor in connection with the Home Missionary Society, it established a precedent among American Protestant churches and did the most statesmanlike thing to be chronicled in the history of American Protesantism during the past decade. The results have justified the innovation."

L

UCK is an elusive immortal, but guessing his whereabouts often beguiles one, brings freedom from the galling sense of being bound to a wheel or enslaved in a rut. The pervasive legend which has made magic of the very name of Florida is an astonishing example of modern folk-lore, with the high potency of tales spread from lip to lip by people who have plunged and won. This great and growing tradition attracted millions of Americans and a surprising number of foreigners to the fabled new winter home of the slippery little God. Lured by bonanza money, the hosts pursued Luck to his supposed lair, or sent their dollars to find him.

Innocent or hard-boiled Main Street candidates for green spectacles, almost every variety of native, Continental, or Australian adventurer, I met during the summer and fall on those great common carriers, the busses. Over that Statewide gambling table where all the stakes are land I talked with honest investors, hectic winners, desperate losers, outrageous exploiters, and pitiful exploited. On the principle that so far from home one could be frank and still hide one's crimes, nearly every one talked, telling stories that betrayed motive and method. The victims of Florida fever often displayed the very cavities in their spiritual back teeth. Deep hungers of America could often be felt-the appalling starvation of many spirits certainly sturdy if not perceiving, starvation so moving that one yearned to believe that perhaps Florida would yield them means to gain all they blindly sought. Yet I became convinced either that Florida is the one place on earth where economic laws are repealed or that the migratory hosts would shortly find that Luck, the little rascal, had ducked and dodged them again.

$200,000,000 to $300,000,000) and the sale of five-acre and ten-acre tracts to good Northern farmers.

The fact stands out that Florida, on the strength of the large number of great and small who made money there in 1924 and the first half of 1925, is still an opulent optimist. A year ago this spring she expected the usual summer

Do You Know

What Modern

Savages Do?

RUFUS STEELE

in next week's issue of The Outlook tells

of their invasion of our National Parks.

lull. Instead, she received the greatest crowd ever known there, and in torrid heat was reduced to panting activity. In the late fall, when not expected, the lull did come. Sales resistance stiffened. Purchases fell off, and resales completely subsided. Fear grew. With prices high, passing the bag was no longer the simple trick it had been.

Truth was, the vast summer crowd melted away. Not from the almost intolerable sustained heat! It simply went home. These people never intended to stay in Florida. They had merely responded to the Florida legend as men have to hidden-treasure stories down all the ages. Having obtained a piece of this highly valued land, the majority went home to wait for the winter crowd to buy them out. Yet not all of them left "riding high and handsome." left "riding high and handsome." By November towns all over the South began to complain of stranded travelers unable to pay their way farther, a tax on charity. Garage owners reported "tin tourists returning, busted and disgusted." Many found that glittering business op

portunities held out were not based on resident population, but on an illusion of growth created by the real estate rush. Those holding for the expected peak last winter became increasingly nervous.

THE winter crowd came. Its volume

proved to be about ten per cent of that expected. Rumors spread abroad, causing a creeping paralysis of high hopes. To be sure, professionals, with the right sort of exclusive property to sell, reaped a profitable harvest from the winter fashionables. But other old hands at the game suffered, and amateurs discovered that Florida is no longer a pecuniary heaven where they may reap rewards for which they have not worked. Those ambitious salesmen who were once the very life of all towns became disheartened. Last fall eight sub-division salesmen lived together in an East coast city. In December two went broke; Christmas week, a third; in January three more were driven into other lines offering greatly inferior income. The last two, involved with speculative purchases, themselves had payments to meet and continued unsuccessfully to try to find buyers.

A "winter lull" they called it-a sad joke. Perhaps justly, the bad season is attributed to many unfortunate occurrences. Certainly widely circulated news pictures of floods resulting from torrential downpours in Palm Beach and Miami did not increase the confidence of tourists. A member of the Metropolitan Club was asked ninety dollars a day for two in one room. Rich as he was, he declined to pay it, told the story right and left, and went elsewhere for his holiday.

Certainly it was no less than a calamity for the building developments of Miami and the whole Southern peninsula when, on January 10, the Prins Valdemar capsized in the narrow shallow channel of Biscayne Bay, up which one ship at a time must crawl four miles to reach scanty docks and a pitifully cramped turning basin before Miami itself. Ships cannot pass. Poor port as Miami is, it has nevertheless done valiant service. For greatest of Florida's handicaps on both coasts is transportation; excluding new projects for double-tracking and new lines, her rail equipment is slight. On the Atlantic side the pressure has been worse. The Florida East Coast Railroad, sole dependence of the Palm

Although inadequate to supply demand, water shipment to Miami offered grateful relief.

It was bad enough that the Prins Valdemar should cork up the neck of Miami's water-bottle, but before she could be removed the freighter Lake Fairport grounded farther out in the channel. At the end of a week the maritime tie-up included eighty-three vessels. With two corks to be pulled, the reopening of the harbor was not accomplished until a new channel had been dredged out. Miami lost several millions of dollars outright, but the most serious factor was the loss of "prospects." Since tourists by sea could not go directly to that port, they took other cruises.

A

T Lake Mable, close to Miami, General Goethals is constructing a harbor for a private subdivision, the project involving $15,000,000, of which the Government does not contribute a penny; but this port was not nearly ready for use. Palm Beach, although it is now getting some freight by water, has no real harbor. Jacksonville, the best natural East Coast harbor, has done major service, considering its lack of adequate transfer equipment, docks, and river development, but was no great help to the important cities two hundred miles south. Tampa, on the West Coast, most competent port in Florida, is separated by the

from Mobile and Birmingham via Tampa. Even had there been such facilities, however, Tampa was popular neither as a port nor as a resort, smallpox having put her on the blacklist.

Key West unlocked some of Miami's difficulties. Ships destined for Miami were ordered to Key West, where they found strings of empties waiting on the F. E. C. But this single-track railroad could not completely solve so complex a freight congestion. Subdivision experts waited frantically for lumber, stucco, cement, fixtures. Most subdividers counted on selling out completely during the winter. On this expectation they had borrowed necessary capital from their home banks in other States. One subdivision exemplified the sad condition of many others. For months it prayed for the delivery of a large order of lampposts. "White ways," run out through pine barrens, with lamp-posts set thick as thieves, more readily convince prospective buyers that population will soon justify the fancy prices asked for lots. Without them they despaired.

Such essential supplies were in some cases brought in by truck. Had good roads been numerous, the freight situation might have been less calamitous. Other sections are better off, but the East Coast (the Gold Coast) had to depend entirely on the Dixie Highwaybut eighteen feet wide--too narrow, too

steamers or special trains. Small realtors simply had to wait. Certain of those, started late, were in peril of losing not only the payments made on the acreage they had subdivided, but all they had spent on road-making and improvements, such as fancy gates, an "administration building," shops, or what are known as "sucker houses," discreetly planted to give an air of veritable settlement. So much having been paid down, the remainder of the price is usually due in one, two, and three years.

"The third payment is where the rub will come all along the line," commented a great New York banker in January. "The banks usually will lend for the first two, but not for the third. Subdividers depend on lot sales. Lot buyers have thought in terms of resales. If lot buyers fail to make their payments-as many of them will-they will first suffer themselves, perhaps pathetically. Certain well-financed subdivisions have a clause in the contract that they can either foreclose or sue the buyer for the remainder due, the buyer to pay "reasonable attorneys' fees"! The companies usually bought the land so low that if they foreclose they can resell at a lower price and show profit. show profit. But poorly financed promoters, caught short, unable to collect from lot purchasers, cannot meet their own payments, and must lose. I believe in Florida. It has a fine winter climate.

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Its moonlight makes you young again. The beauty rejuvenates-and is salable! But, in my opinion, this subdivision business has been overdone."

A

NOTHER horn of Florida's dilemma is the disease bugaboo, exemplified this year by smallpox in Tampa. Worse epidemics threaten. Florida towns lack proper sewerage systems. Even Miami still depends on separate septic tanks by every house. Each one is supposed to have twenty-five hundred feet of laterals. When the population was small and inspection rigorous, the sand-filtering tank was doubtless adequate. When a town of one hundred thousand, however, is asked to accommodate five or ten times that number, and land grows so costly that space does not permit proper placing of these septic vaults, the danger is obvious. The water supply is artesian, and usually drawn from no tremendous depth. "Those tanks resemble flyspecks," commented a physician. "A few may not matter much, but with a mass there's danger of typhoid." West Palm Beach and several other cities are now installing sewerage systems. To make permanent their resort success, all towns in Florida must do likewise.

Florida's worst condition, without doubt, is the tightening of her credit. In the light of a report made three months ago by J. H. Tregoe to the National Association of Credit Men, an important body of manufacturing, commercial, and banking concerns in our principal centers, this is particularly serious. The Association raised a fund of two million dollars some time ago for purely selfprotective purposes. Mr. Tregoe, long the Association's manager, made an impartial investigation, and then issued an official warning to all members that the high degree of speculation, the fly-bynights all over the State, the probable "levitating" of land values, called for great discretion in granting credit to Florida concerns. He offered as special reasons the congestion, the not infrequent devious practices, and failure to protect and promote industries-particularly the chief one, farming.

The last charge deserves special comment. In many sections farm land in Florida has risen from prices at which it could be used to prices at which it can only be talked about. A Senator bought ten acres of avocado land below Miami three years ago for $150 an acre. The other day adjoining land was offered him at $1,500 an acre. "Nobody could earn interest growing anything at that price," he said, soberly. Yet real estate promoters insist that high prices of farm land are good for farmers. It appears beyond our common conception in the United

States that it is essential to genuine prosperity to keep agricultural land prices low. We ignore the nearly confiscatory policies to which foreign governments have been forced by agricultural crises not dissimilar to our own, to deflate speculative farm-land prices.

While not all Florida acreage is yet costly to buy, most of it is costly to bring to efficient production. Certainly Mr. Tregoe's judgment that farming prosperity is undermined by the boom cannot be doubted by people who understand the factor of land prices in agricultural success. Florida Chambers of Commerce went after Mr. Tregoe's offi cial scalp on all accounts. They labeled his statements "unfair, unwarranted, and untrue." Yet this is the very period when the bulk of third payments on lots is falling due, the crisis, if our great banker's analysis was correct.

THE Credit Men's is the third business

body to have had students on the ground who "have not been sold on Florida." The investment bankers met in Jacksonville in November. The majority were exceedingly critical. "Florida could hardly have done worse for herself than to ask us here," commented one. The Standard Statistical Bureau sent two representatives over the field. While their warnings were bland, their analysis was not strikingly different from Mr. Tregoe's. He, however, although courteous, was forthright and keen-cutting. Whether because of these criticisms or the bad practices incident to booms, all Florida is certainly "scratching for cash." The Florida banks had great amounts on call in New York, but have been steadily withdrawing these funds. Since New York speculators in the stock market had been using this money, its withdrawal is probably one of the factors in the market's recent downward trend. Local Florida banks have never been willing to lend at the new valuations, and now when realty operators (most of them from other States) apply to their home banks for funds to meet even second payments they are looked at askance. It is an open secret that a startling proportion of the buyers of lots are already delinquent in their payments.

Those who earlier escaped creeping paralysis by fear are candidates for sudden paralysis by shock. For example, at the instance of certain lot buyers who find that subdivision promoters have sold what they actually did not own, criminal prosecutions have been initiated. That practice is not outlawed in Florida. Many promoters sold lots to which, if the buyer had insisted on paying down all cash, he could not be given title. Few did insist. But a certain New York pro

moter of a Florida subdivision "bought" land on a binder, and was caught in this very trap. He advertised in a foreignlanguage newspaper and persuaded many of its Slavic readers to go down "free if they bought a lot." He accepted their money in full, and then "delayed" transfer of title until he could buy the land and give deeds to lot purchasers. Embarrassed for cash, he returned later to New York to find sufficient funds, and was arrested. New York does not encourage that sort of real estate trading.

NOR

OR is money so readily available for building as it once was. "Not even the building permits justify Florida's proposed optimism," explained a shrewd Eastern construction man. "Our company paid all cash in October for a choice apartment-house site in the best of East Coast resorts. I took my force down in January to commence work. Got my building permit then. In view of the lack of people, we decided we had overestimated the probable demand for housing. Unless a miracle occurredthe repetition of last summer's migration, we'll say we saw we'd find ourselves out of luck. I know many other buildings and small houses 'temporarily' postponed. As rents are falling and houses already built are selling lower, numbers of those building permits may never be used."

Corroborative evidence comes from both coasts. Moreover, a number of subdivisions, instead of bearing out the assurance that this is the day of development, have canceled their paving and sidewalk contracts and laid off men. It appears that Florida is hoping, and whistling to keep up her courage.

Underpriced in the beginning, Florida herself cannot be blamed for the methods used by outside exploiters to force prices skywards through auction psychology and the best barkers obtainable. The old Florida, a land graciously peopled, has vanished, perhaps forever, with the advent of the almost universal fifty-foot lot and the five-acre and ten-acre ranchlet. The intrusion of a migratory herd upon her gloriously colorful, sunlit quiet, the raucous roar of millions who demanded excessive profit in record time, the unmitigated speculation in a necessity of life, her soil, have changed her character. She is now a gregarious resort where our utmost pretentiousness, immoderation, and restlessness strike the consciousness like strident voices.

And the elusive immortal is at his tricks again. Luck, knowing well that he could not be cornered, lured crowds thither. Amateurs who hereafter share his largess will be fortunate indeed. How long will he bother to shower more millions even upon professionals?