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There are measures bearing on the spiritual environment of the poor as well as the material, which are quite as essential as those to which I have asked your attention, schools, libraries, workingmen's institutes, clubs, recreation grounds, gardens. You will think me heretical again when I say that I begrudge to the overcrowded and congested city districts the spacious churchyards. It is a great pity that they should be closed every day of the week. In London they are always open. One of the most admirable reforms of the London County Council was to throw open the churchyards in the East End. For miles, from Trafalgar Square to Stepney, there was scarcely a breathing-place except the Mile End Road in East London. Now, however, every churchyard that had a half-acre, even although planted with tombstones, has been opened to the people, with proper care-takers. St. Martin's-in-the-Fields is now a playground and park. The flagstones have been removed from the paved yard. A few dusty, puny, and sickly plants are being coaxed to grow there. I thought, as I saw them, of our wealth of verdure in America which we shut away from the urchins and little girls who, in great cities, would be so glad to play under the shade of the large trees. Acquaintance with nature, love for the soil, gardening, afford effective ways to reach the children of the poor. Gardens are sometimes planted in the rear of tenements in places formerly abandoned to ash-barrels and tomato-cans. There is no better way of utilizing waste ground than to turn it into garden spaces, and allow the children to cultivate flowers and vegetables.

I should like to see cooking classes, drawing classes, housekeeping classes, established in the meanest neighborhoods. Nothing has so much influence on the moral as well as on the physical condition of the poor as the food which they eat. The women, upon whom depend the lives of husband and children and the building up of their frames, know too little about cooking. In the course of the investigations I have had to make, I have ascertained the exact amount of food consumed, and the diet upon which workers in various trades live; and it was astonishing to find how much money is spent in baking powder, in some cases exceeding that devoted to nourishing fare.

The most delightful spectacle which I saw in Belgium was a large art school in one of the poorest suburbs of Brussels, where there were six hundred little boys and young men of from eight to twenty

five years old, all in wooden shoes and blue blouses, drawing away for dear life. If, in the squalid quarters of our cities, or even in our country districts where life is so dull, monotonous, and uninteresting, you put a well-managed night-school, where the children can see good photographs and where they can learn drawing, have some experiments in chemistry, acquire the use of tools, be taught gymnastics, etc., you will greatly improve the next generation. You may nearly regenerate it. You create practically new lives and new tastes. The boys brought up there will not become toughs, the girls will not be bold. Miss Morgan, of Hartford, told me that the most successful art class she had last winter was the one made up of working-girls, not that of society women. These girls have been so interested in the photographs that she has given them that they are pinching and saving to scrape together enough money to go to New York, and have her go with them, to visit the Metropolitan Museum. I have found factory operatives deeply interested in public questions, and it is our duty to help them to know about all these things.

In a suspender-factory I once discovered that an employer was in the habit of terrifying his young women by lurid descriptions of the tariff, saying that it was certain to destroy them all, body and soul; and one young woman actually believed that the tariff was a horned and hoofed animal that was going to mangle and gore her. We have a mission to fulfil toward these young women. I believe that civic clubs, clubs for good government, are just as important to the poor and working classes as to the rich and educated. We are always complaining of the workingman's ignorant vote, while we do nothing to enlighten that vote.

A library established in the poorest quarters is another necessary improvement. It should not be an architectural wonder, like those in the residential part of a city; but it should be a suitable building erected where the working people reside. If you give them the sense of possession in a library and reading-room, and make them. live up to it, the effect will be ten times greater in their homes than if you establish a library in a convenient tobacco shop or a Charity Organization Society office.

Should a rich man want to establish free baths or give a fountain or a garden to the poor, let him do so on the condition that that part of the city shall be kept clean. Let nothing be given too

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freely. Mutual co-operation, the sense of ownership, the thought of having privileges as rewards of good conduct, will secure the best effect.

The new religion is service. Aloofness from all these great movements means stagnation. If Buddha had lived in the nineteenth century, he would have appreciated his own philosophy: that all individuality is separateness; all separateness, limitation; and all limitation is ignorance and pain. "The individual withers, and the world is more and more."

Sociology in Institutions of Learning.

IS THE TERM "SOCIAL CLASSES" A

SCIENTIFIC

CATEGORY?

BY FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, M.A.,

PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF POLITICAL
SCIENCE, COLUMBIA COLLEGE, NEW YORK.

Science sets herself two tasks: one, to discover new truth; the other, to render more definite and exact the knowledge that we have already in the rough. The second task is but a minor form of the first, since it is through further discoveries in matters of detail that we correct errors once unobserved, and arrive at finer appreciations of the infinitely varied manifestations of cosmic cause and law. The systematic study of science in the university is rewarded now and then by discoveries of great moment, but these are the grand prizes that fall to the few. Not less useful for the purposes of daily life is the patient rectification of empirical knowledge, which must be always the chief function of university work in science.

The systematic study of sociology which, after many years of effort, is now securely established in the leading universities of Europe and America — will be justified, I have no doubt, in fresh discoveries of laws that govern the course of human progress. Its immediate work, however, is to examine critically the conceptions, the classifications, and the rough generalizations that have been made in empirical social science in the course of practical efforts by philanthropists, reformers, and legislators to understand and to ameliorate the conditions of social existence. It is my purpose in the present paper to present certain results of such a criticism, applied to conceptions and classifications that are in constant use in the

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studies and discussions of this National Conference of Charities and Correction.

The term "social classes" is not only a commonplace of every-day speech, in which it expresses sometimes a notion of social superiority or inferiority, sometimes differences in wealth and industrial position it is also in constant use in statistical researches and in theoretical interpretations of the phenomena of progress, social unrest, degeneration, pauperism, and crime.

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What, then, is a social class? Is there any reality corresponding to the phrase? or is it merely one of those expressions that abound in this age of superficial thinking, which slip easily from the tongue, and which sound intelligible, but upon examination turn out to be meaningless?

As a first step toward answering this question, we may look at some of the ways in which the term has been and is employed.

No expression is more familiar to the members of this Conference than the phrase "the defective, dependent, and delinquent classes"; yet I venture to say that you would search in vain through the superb collection of inane generalities and meaningless mysticisms in the five hundred and sixty pages of Max Nordau's "Degeneration" for a phrase more difficult to translate into coherent thought. I do not suppose that in saying this I am telling you anything new. The trouble is, as you are well aware, that defect and pauperism or defect and criminality are terms not of one classification, but of a cross-classification. When you find a blind man or a deaf man, you do not by that mark know that he is not a pauper or that he is not a criminal, as you know, when you find a six-toed cat, that it is not a lobster or a sea-urchin. In a word, it is perfectly evident that, if paupers are a social class or if criminals are a social class, the defective people, as such, are not a social class, and that it is an unscientific and relatively useless statistical inquiry which gives us merely the numbers of the defectives in a class co-ordinate with paupers and criminals, instead of going on to distribute those numbers in a cross-classification with the other groups.

Again, to take another illustration, it is evident that the wagesclass, so called, is not co-ordinate with the defective, the pauper, or the criminal class, and that the gradations of poverty recognized by Charles Booth, in his studies of the "Labor and Life of the People," are not co-ordinate with industrial classes, with political

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