man.

practice of insurance companies to ignore liability for serious cases and delay payment of compensation as far as the legal machinery would allow. Men for their part were often chary about asking for money, as they feared it would affect their standing with their foreIf they applied, they were placed in the hands of an adjuster skilled in the art of smashing claims to nothingness or in that of delay if the workman had a good case. Sometimes the men lost patience and sued the company; legal expenses were heavy on both sides, bad feeling was engendered, and cases were seldom settled within two years.

In the case of minor injuries different tactics were pursued. The adjuster would settle promptly to get rid of a troublesome applicant. My first experience with an adjuster of this type is unforgetable. An incautious Pole damned a husky Irishman and was promptly floored for his temerity. It took him a week to recover, but in spite of the circumstance the Pole applied for compensation, and the adjuster, after haggling over the case for an hour, gave him $15. When I pointed out to the insurance man the injustice of saddling the company with a charge like that, he merely shrugged his shoulders and said that it was easier to settle the case and have done with it.

One day an agent was volubly assuring the tearful wife of an injured man that her husband had no claim, that the company was in no way responsible, and that such an accident could not have happened if the man had been careful. Just as these words left his mouth the office chair slipped and threw him sprawling on the floor. Notwithstanding the obvious absurdity of the situation, the agent went right on with his argument as if nothing had happened, and eventually persuaded the woman that her husband had no case. was hard to get justice when all the knowledge was on one side and all the ignorance on the other.

It

My sense of responsibility for accidents such as the above was intensified by the fact that all injuries were reported by telephone, usually in exaggerated terms. The fear of disaster was so continually present that it impelled me to make periodical dashes around the factory looking for every possible source of danger. Here, it seemed to me, was a vast chess game in which the employees were merely pawns to be protected from capture by an invisible opponent, Accident. Some men, prone to accident through no great

fault of their own, were put on less dangerous work. Others, who were making a business of looking for occasional damages, were dismissed. Heavy drinkers were often injured (their wounds healed slowly), and the fact that some of them had recently been employed impressed me with the necessity of selecting labor carefully. Without controlling the employment of labor, elimination of the "unsteadies was difficult. Many of the bibbers lived in adjacent "hotels," where accommodation was sordid; and it was known that some of our old hands were drinking themselves to death. For the most part they were bachelors, gray-haired and forty, completely demoralized by their environment, and nearly broken down by hard work.

At last the time came when the selection of labor was placed in my charge. Up to this period it was customary for the foremen to go to the "gate "to pick out the help needed, and they did not take kindly to any interference with such a privilege. I felt it would be due more to good luck than to good management if I could escape charges. of incompetence, favoritism, or dereliction of duty. These thoughts prompted me to employ no friend, relative, or even acquaintance. One of the older foremen, however, gave vent to his feelings by exclaiming, "What can a clerk know about hiring labor, anyway!" It was hard to blame him; he had been performing that duty for thirty years.

We had nearly two thousand men of a dozen different nationalities, and because they knew little English it was difficult to gather personal facts about them. Eightyfive per cent were either Russians, Lithuanians, or Austrian, German, or Russian Poles. The superintendent disliked the Russians because he listened to stories the Poles told about them. He failed to take into account the nationalistic difference between those races. It is said that the Polish element drifted into the locality about twenty years ago. One of the race got a job, then his brother arrived, and so on till a whole colony became established in the neighborhood. There they lived, in the shadow of a great city, without sanitation, without drainage, without street or house numbers, as if they were still in the suburbs of far-off Pultusk.

Our timekeepers, men of little education, had much difficulty in translating the unfamiliar foreign surnames into their local patois, so they called the men John Smith, or Billy Martin, or any other common name with

which they might happen to be familiar. The foreigners had little objection to this; in fact, they found it useful at times to take the same liberty. One, Botilovski, was dismissed from the foundry and returned later in the day to seek work in another department, relying on the fact that he had changed his name in the. meantime so as to secure admittance. On being discovered it was found that he had registered as Bluejay, a name which he had selected from some billboards in the vicinity.

As

While engaged in factory inspection I took care to wear "white duck," so that each workman who saw me would be reminded subconsciously of the safety business. the foundry was full of smoke and dust, the men could not understand why I was at such pains to wear the only kind of clothing that seemed to be quite out of place. All such efforts were not without results; but still much remained to be done. Sanitation, proper medical attendance, suitable lockers, and meal-rooms were yet to be provided. Our sanitation, for instance, was primitive like that of the Poles, and it seemed incredible that the head of a concern like ours could give a quarter of a million in charity and neglect to solve the necessary sanitary problems in the concern from which his wealth was derived. Board meetings do not discuss such subjects, and possibly our president had no occasion to advert to the matter; but the city and State authorities were inquisitive, and it began to dawn on us that we were offenders against the sanitary code.

There were no eating-houses near the factory, and few men went home to dinner. Some sat on a barrel or a log of wood, or stretched themselves on the ground in the heat and dust. As the water was warm in summer and apt to be frozen in winter, they acquired the habit of securing beer from a neighboring saloon. The temperate few placed cans of water on red-hot metal or on pots full of molten slag. When the water boiled, they shook powdered coffee from small scraps of paper on the surface. Others hung shovels over molten metal as a substitute for frying-pans, and in a few minutes the sizzling stench would permeate the already polluted atmosphere. After the meal all the débris was left to accumulate or to be thrown into adjacent furnaces. Lunch-rooms would have been a great boon; but in the rush of work there never seemed to be time to consider such improvements.

About this time the fields warmed up, the pastoral lure made the erstwhile peasants un

283

easy, and they declared a strike for more wages. At this juncture the directors, for the first time as far as most of us knew, made their appearance. Hitherto they had been, as the Czar to the moujik, a great invisible power upon whose will our lives depended. One little director professed the most profound humanitarianism, and it looked as if the workers were about to step into a veritable paradise of wash-bowls and dining-rooms. We did not know then that he drew $20,000 annually from the company in dividends and that he never saw the factory more than once a year, though it was no more than five miles away. It was gratifying to know, when he died a few months later, that he had left a million to a hospital. The other directors were, quite sympathetic at the time, till an enforced advance in wages settled, the immediate issue, and we heard from them no

more.

The son of a Polish foreman acted, as interpreter and enabled me to get somewhat familiar with the language. The foremen themselves knew little of the language and were hardly able to give an effective warning in case of immediate danger. Though many toes were injured in the course of work, not a foreman knew the Polish word for toe. The Poles alluded to toes as fingers, and so it seemed as if time would not be wasted in the teaching of at least some common language. The full significance of this struck me in the following manner: I was watching some work in the power-house one day when a heavy chain-block started to fall. A machinist shouted a startled warning to his Polish helper, but, as the latter knew no English, the chain-block hit him on the head and laid him low. Later, by the use of a bilingual card, we were able to make men familiar with a few dozen of the commoner phrases in English and Polish. Up to this time there was not an Englishspeaking man in the plant who understood a dozen words of Polish.

A fatality in the plant at last demonstrated the advisability of having a doctor continually in attendance. Some time before, a fair-haired Russian died from heart disease while engaged in lifting weights, and similar occurrences might be prevented by proper physical examination. The superintendent

asked me to look after this unfortunate man's funeral, so one dreary night I hiked off to the undertaker's establishment, where I found that the deceased was laid out in what seemed to me to be unnecessary grandeur. In an

obvious effort to overcharge us the undertaker estimated the cost of the obsequies at $250, which was as much as the dead man had earned in the last half-year.

When the men were persuaded that the medical examination was in the cause of health betterment, they cheerfully submitted. Though many minor ailments were disclosed, one fact was plain. No matter how inferior the foreigner may be in mentality, physically speaking he is a wonder. Hard labor may undermine some constitutions; but, on the other hand, many of these men were not a particle the worse after many years of steady and strenuous work, though one old Pole maintained that it was the "steady hurry up" that killed. I have seen men look not a day older after ten years of heavy laboring work. In some plants, and this was no exception, proper surface drainage is seldom considered. Workmen have often to stand continuously on damp floors, and rheumatism results. The plant's doctor, in such cases, relieves the sufferer and uses his influence to remove the cause. Thus the number of workmen who were absent on account of illness showed a marked decrease. In this way plants are preparing for the shock which the onward rush of health insurance will bring to the souls of suffering employers in the next few years.

Our industrial army suffers a horrifying aggregate of injuries in the course of a year. Humanitarians would be astounded if weekly lists were published. Red Cross Societies would hasten to study the situation, and caring for Europe's wounded would not appear to be such a vital necessity. A despatch such as the following might be published weekly by the Government in every city of the United States :

THE GREAT INDUSTRIAL WAR

Washington, D. C., Sept., 1916. The Industrial Army of the United States was heavily engaged during the week all along the line. The following casualties are reported:

accident prevention this bad record could be greatly reduced, as our puny efforts abundantly proved. The State does much to guard machinery, backed up by a law which says, "All machines shall be so guarded as to be safe for all persons;" but it has not yet undertaken the training of men in habits of safety; until that time comes it must be only partly successful.

In statistical results we could show no such fine figures as were published by many large corporations that claimed sometimes as much as forty per cent reduction, but our failure was due to the practice of recording even the trivial accidents. This policy, though looking bad on paper, had a good effect, as we knew about: t.every trivial injury and took care of it till cured. Previous to our efforts the cost of compensation and litigation was about $2,000 a month, but the first few weeks reduced that figure to $800, and after a few months we brought this down to a constant of about $300, or a sixth of the former figures. Much of this was due to the Workmen's Compensation Act, which, by its supposed stringency, stampeded employers into reforms which should have been part of the factory routine. They were terrified by the possibility of heavy damages; but safety work showed that prevention was better than cure.

The policy of prevention took unexpected forms. Employers, for instance, were compelled to banish liquor from their shops. I never quite realized the enormity of this traffic till I stood one day at the main gate and counted 550 beer-cans, brought into the factory during the lunch hour. These, at ten cents a can, amounted to $20,000 a year, or about two per cent of the annual pay-roll. With such figures in my possession, it was easy to have a rule passed prohibiting men from bringing beer into the plant. Coffee, at two cents a cup, was provided as a substitute, and most of the men were glad to save, the difference. In many homes the wives have no doubt been pleased at this small reform, provided the husbands have not made up for the alcoholic deficiency on their way home from work. Being a humanitarian in spite of himself is not such a bad thing for the employer, after all.

T

O-DAY the peasants of Thessaly are hearing the thunder of great guns echoing among the mountains over whose flanks the centaurs, swift as the winds, once raced and on whose summits they stood out against the sky. They were so much a part of nature that they shared her radiant vitality, and they were so much akin with men that nature thought in their brains and spoke with their lips. They were strong with the unspent force of the earth, their mother, and they were wise with the wisdom born, not of knowledge, but of companionship with the silence of great hills and of heavens unblurred by the smoke of cities. Theirs was the primitive wisdom which comes before knowledge and must survive it when it has served its turn and no longer spreads a mist over the face of the world and beguiles men with the delusion that they know nature when they are merely organizing information about the appearance of things. Trained to know facts and absorbed in mechanical skills and activities, men have lost the sense of the fathomless life behind the vast order of things and have become specialists instead of poets. They have broken life into fragments and become. the victims of the tricks and artifices of trades instead of the masters of life; they are buried under vast heaps of facts instead of breathing the air of the hills and renewing their strength in the splendor of the world.

This is the thought which Mr. Algernon Blackwood presses home in his eloquent, elusive, and daring story of "The Centaur.'

"1

He has dealt with many difficult themes, but with none so difficult as this. He has thrown himself boldly on his imagination, and it has sustained him. To transform a man gradually into a centaur and give him the freedom of the mountains of Thessaly and the mythical strength of the centaur of Greek fancy would have been beyond the power of an imagination of lesser spread of wing than Mr. Blackwood's and an English style less capacious and resourceful than his. Of course he demands much of his readers, and those who cannot travel comfortably in clouds and on the summits of the hills will find little in him that will give them aid and joy;

I The Centaur. By Algernon Blackwood. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.40.

but those who believe that the modern world has parted with some invaluable resources by the way, and both in education and in the practice of living must regain the vision of the larger ends of life, will find his parable of the centaur invigorating and refreshing.

Eighty years ago and more Maurice de Guérin made a study of the centaur, which is still in insight and form one of the most exquisite interpretations of the Greek spirit. An old centaur, describing his youth to a man, says:

Wandering along at my own will like the rivers, feeling wherever I went the presence of Cybele, whether in the bed of the valleys or on the height of the mountains, I bounded whither I would, like a blind and chainless life. But when Night, filled with the charm of the gods, overtook me on the slopes of the mountains, she guided me to the mouths of the caverns, and then tranquilized me as she tranquilizes the billows of the sea. Stretched across the threshold of my retreat, my flanks hidden within the cave, and my head under the open sky, I watched the spectacle of the dark. The sea-gods, it is said, quit during the hours of darkness their palaces under the deep; they seat themselves on the promontories, and their eyes wander over the expanse of the waves. Even

so I kept watch, having at my feet an expanse of life like the hushed sea.. .. Then I beheld at one time the god Pan descend, ever solitary; at another, the choir of the mystic divinities; or I saw pass some mountain nymph charmstruck by the night. Sometimes the eagles of Mount Olympus traversed the upper sky and were lost to view among the far-off constellations, or in the shade of the dreaming forests. . . . For myself, O Melampus, I decline into my last days calm as the setting of the constellations.

This wide and deep tranquillity, born of that perfect health which is perfect harmony between the living creature and nature, Mr. Blackwood typifies in the centaur in whose eyes the gods are not strangers, and to whom the freedom of the mountains and the unbroken sweep of the stars are as familiar as day and night.

But centaurs are drawn out of the region of the myth and become living creatures racing along the mountains of Thessaly, and there Terence O'Malley, Celt in imagination and indifference to the faith and practice of his prosaic contemporaries, seeks them and extends or stretches his own personality to

take in their cosmic experience. His voyage from London brings him in contact with a man who already has this larger consciousness and with whom he finally clears his eyes of the dust which he was in the habit of saying blinded the eyes of men to the vision. He was useless as a citizen, for he was a born adventurer; but as a roving journalist he not only collected news, but " discovered, revealed, created it." He believed in a more fundamental faculty of understanding than reason, and preached a purified intuition, a spiritual intelligence divorced from mere intellectuality; he looked forward to a state in which man, with the best results of reason in his pocket, will return to the instinctive life, to a sense of kinship with nature.

hood of the earth. . . . The torture and unrest of a false, external civilization that trained the brain while it left wars and baseness in the heart would drop from men like the symptoms of some fierce disease. The god of speed and mechanism that ruled the world to-day, urging men at ninety miles an hour to enter a heaven where material gain was only a little sublimated," would pass for the nightmare it really is.

So believing, he was caught up into the companionship of the free life of the centaurs on the ancient hills and regained the lost unconsciousness of a primitive age. Later, in his stuffy room in London or in a neighboring park, he told his great experience to a friend so far as it could be told in human speech, conveying not so much the details of things indescribable as their atmosphere and cosmic vastness. "The Centaur" is a fantastic tale never anchored in fact, but penetrated and made luminous by a truth of liberating and inspiring potency. In a time. of war and turmoil and the roar of cannon it rests the spirit like a wind from the hills.

THE

BRACES AND HAPPINESS

[The following letter has come to The Outlook, with a dollar bill inclosed for braces for crippled children. We have forwarded the money to the Department of Health, City of New York, for the braces fund, and have the Department's receipt.-THE EDITORS.]

After reading your appeal for funds for braces for the crippled children who were crippled by the late scourge of infantile paralysis, it was suggested to me that only one who had worn braces could appreciate what it means. And this is my only excuse for adding a word in behalf of crippled children.

At the age of three months I was paralyzed and so was not able to use my legs. I could not creep, but pushed myself around on the floor playing with the other children. I was a happy little girl, and as my father spoke of my being lame as calmly as of my black eyes I took it quite as a matter of course. and incessant were the prayers I said, asking for legs that would walk.

But many

When I was five, a lady suggested Dr. Charles Taylor, and I was taken to him. He said, "I can have her walking in six months "-and he did. Well do I remember those first stepshow I cried for joy. And you will not be surprised when I say I was not the only one who shed tears that day.

Life now held new possibilities for meschool; the companionship of children of my age; a happy, normal childhood; out-of-door life, even sliding down hills, climbing ladders and trees. I felt that nothing was impossible now my legs were held in place. Once I even tried jumping rope, with no more disastrous results than a fall.

At ten years of age I made the trip from Dansville, New York, to New York City alone -and since then have been quite a good traveler. I went to college for two years, and now I am able to do as much as, and even more than, some women who have all their powers intact.

To-day, a middle-aged woman, should any one ask me what I could least easily give up, I would say, "My braces." The hardest days of my childhood were the repair days, when two little helpless feet hung down from my chair.

Thanks to braces, my life has not been a useless one, nor has it been unhappy. I hope, dear