Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

purchaser of a piece of property had no security whatever of the validity of the transaction. He was compelled to depend entirely upon his confidence in his lawyer. In New York City alone there are each year nearly 15,000 land conveyances, amounting to well over $100,000,000: no city in this country has more to gain from such a simplification, for in no other city is the number of transfers in proportion to the total number of holdings so large. Yet this reform, long tested in Australia, and in use in many parts of Continental Europe for hundreds of years, which has been adopted in Massachusetts for the last two years, which has been tried with eminent success in Chicago, which Minnesota will put into operation this month, which is under consideration in half a dozen other states, and the adoption of which in New York was agitated fifteen years ago-seems as far away as ever at this date.

It has been objected that the original Torrens Act gave a judicial and discretionary power to the Register not in conformity with American law; and this caused the law in Ohio and the first Chicago statute to be pronounced invalid by the courts. But the necessary adaptation to American institutions is really a simple matter and has been successfully carried out elsewhere; and the causes for the slowness of adoption seem to be the usual extraordinary conservatism of legal enactments, and the fact that the people who know most of the absurdities of the present law, the lawyers and title guarantee companies, are constant beneficiaries by its provisions. A general change to the Torrens system would inevitably drive out of business the private companies who guarantee titles, and it would make the services of a lawyer quite unnecessary in land transference. Few classes of men can believe desirable any change in long-established custom which would dispense with their own services; but it is an evidence of the hurry and absorption of our time and country, as well as of the lack of interest in public matters, that the people have not before this demanded this reform.

[blocks in formation]

hours, or too little pay; the Association met the officials of the sheet-steel and tin-plate companies with the one demand, that a union scale be signed for all mills, or they would tie up every plant controlled by the United States Steel Corporation. Many of these mills are operated by non-union workmen under special agreements between company and laborers: to unionize them in the face of these contracts would have been grossly unjust to both; and after offering everything possible except this, the ultimatum was refused. The very success of the strikers in calling out men from unionized mills would in the end have proved the ruin of their cause, for their resources were pitifully inadequate even for their immediate organization during a protracted term of idleness, and the grim realities of need have always proved too much after a while for the men, except when they were sustained by public opinion and the consciousness of resistance to unfair conditions. Both were lacking in this case, and as this is written the talk of settlement is upon a basis less advantageous to the workmen than that offered them a month ago.

THE REAL ISSUE OF THE STRIKE

THE

HERE has been a larger crop than usual of the customary hot-weather labor troubles. The sweatshop tailors in New York, the Reading firemen, the iron foundry workers at Derby, Conn., the machinists in half a dozen cities, the Frazer river salmon fishers, the miners of Colorado and Washington, the Troy collar makers, the egg candlers, the teamsters, longshoremen, packers, porters, warehousemen and dock workers of every kind in San Francisco-all have been on strike during the past month; in Chicago a large force of carpenters struck because they were not allowed to have as much lemonade as they wanted. But none of these had the significance of the steel strike, in which the powerful Amalgamated Association tried to wrest from the largest combination of capital in the world the right to manage its business affairs. Had it succeeded, a long step would have been taken towards the trades-unionism which has for years throttled English industry, reducing labor to a dull dead level, putting a premium on mediocrity, resisting to the uttermost the introduction of labor-saving machinery and latest improvements in manufacturing - by which alone can industrial

supremacy be maintained in these days of world competition. It appears clearly that the non-union mills of the steel corporation in this country are better equipped and more economically conducted than those in which the management has been hampered by the jealousies and the obstructive policy of the labor unions.

Nobody questions nowadays the desirability of combinations of workmen. But if America is to attain the great commercial and industrial destiny for which she seems marked out, she must go into the conflict free from any hampering restrictions. Most of the men who are actually managing the vast steel business today are in these positions because they have proved themselves more competent than their fellows, and stagnation and decay are the inevitable results of a transfer of power from the true generals of industry to less able hands. The country is to be congratulated, therefore, that the steel plant owners have stood firm on this point, and decisively defeated a tendency so deplorable in its effects.

SWEEPING INJUNCTIONS

URING the labor troubles in Connec

ticut, Judge Gager granted one of the most comprehensive injunctions yet issued. The strikers were restrained from interfering in any way with the new laborers, from boycotting, intimidating, persuading or threatening them, from picketing or patrolling the factory, and from all concerted action interfering in any way with the employees or business. This seems almost too sweeping a prohibition, for it forbids lawful actions as well as unlawful ones; and the judicial opinions in other sections concur in enjoining only acts which are violations of established statutes. In Paterson, for instance, a temporary injunction against picketing by the vice-chancellor was overruled on this ground, and other judges—while upholding firmly the right of any company to employ whom it choose, on any terms it can make, and the inviolable right of laborers to work for anybody for whatever pay they are willing to accept are careful to draw the same distinction. While human sympathy is apt to obstruct one's judgment in such a case as that of the poor fellow who committed suicide because his friends ostracized him for returning to work, it is clear that nothing could be more unfortunate and conducive to lasting

friction than legal injustice toward organized labor, or a conviction on its part that it would find the courts prejudiced in favor of its adversaries. Our law must be above reproach as a respecter of persons or vested interests. THE WESTERN DROUGHT

AS

S this record is closed, news comes of the breaking of the prolonged drought in the Central West which has occasioned many sensational estimates of crop failures. For about a month the temperature in Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and adjacent states ranged from ninety to one hundred and ten degrees. At Topeka the Kansas River was so dry that grass grew in the centre of the channel, and fish were scooped out with shovels in parts of the Platte. Pastures were burnt so severely that growers of stock rushed cattle, sheep and hogs to market lest they would be left with no food for the animals. The unprecedented heat and a flood of alarmist reports sent the price of corn up to nearly sixty cents a bushel on the Chicago Exchange, about double the average price at this date, and the consequent reaction caused a panic on a small scale. Since the long-hoped-for rains have reduced the temperature and checked the withering drought in the corn belt, it has been possible to get a saner opinion of the situation. The early corn crop is ruined and is being gathered for fodder, while the farmers are hurriedly replanting in hopes of late fall harvests. experts figure that about a third of the total corn crop is gone, and look for a total figure of 1,500,000,000 bushels, the estimate on July 1st having been for something over 2,000,000,000. Fortunately the yield of wheat, even in the drought-stricken states, is the largest on record, the present indications for the entire harvest showing an aggregate of over 700,000,000 bushels, or 25,000,000 more than the high-water mark set in 1898. It is believed that the Russian wheat crop will be greatly below the average, since it has been greatly injured by much the same conditions which have prevailed in Kansas and Missouri.

Ο

A LESSON IN IRRIGATION

The

NE unexpected result of this great disaster to western agricultural interests has been to furnish the sufferers with an object lesson of the value of irrigation more

effective than all the literature ever published on the subject. While the winds have for weeks blown steadily from over the arid plains upon the cornfields, destroying probably five hundred million dollars' worth of farm produce, the irrigated valleys of western Kansas and eastern Colorado, where droughts have no terrors and water supply is under scientific control, have been producing unusually plentiful crops of alfalfa, which yields three or four harvests a season, and which is now worth almost twice its ordinary price. Moreover, it is evident that had these desert lands been even partially reclaimed, much of the damage to adjacent regions would have been avoided. It is a lesson which the practical Westerner will take to heart, and the result should be a new impetus to the irrigation of arid lands on a large scale.

It is a striking evidence of our agricultural prosperity that this blow is received so calmly by the western farmer. He is in better financial condition than ever before; and while there may not be as much for luxuries this year in some sections, and the railroads will hardly have the business they expected, there is a noticeable absence of talk about panic or mortgage foreclosures or the consequent political restlessness which was a feature of the trans-Mississippi country after the bad times of 1894. The farmer now has a reserve fund of money and hope; and he is neither grumbling nor discouraged.

THI

THE GROWTH OF TELEPHONES

HIS altered status of the formerly mortgage-ridden agricultural region is evidenced in many ways, but by none more forcibly than by the farmer's adoption of the improvements of modern science. He has been setting up automobiles in Kansas and the Middle West; improved farm machinery and implements find a ready sale; personal and household luxuries recently unheard of are now everyday matters; rural free delivery of mails and long-distance trolleys are putting him into closer communication with the cities; and, above all, he has been solving some of the most difficult social and industrial problems of agricultural life by the use of the telephone. The extension of independent telephones has been much accelerated by a recent decision against the parent concern in the matter of the "Berliner patent," which, while not basic, is a very important and com

prehensive instrument; and though the fight will in all probability be carried to the Supreme Court, the small companies, especially in the rural districts, are multiplying with astonishing rapidity. A monopoly or large combination is necessary to get the benefits of the long-distance telephone, or of the ordinary local system in very crowded communities, where its efficiency depends upon any business man's ability to call up any other telephone subscriber without having more than one installation; but the isolated country residents and farmers have found their small organization of the utmost service in putting them into communication with one another, and with the nearest centre of population. They are enabled to shop; to keep in touch with what is going on, particularly as to the vitally important commercial happenings and movements of prices which used to be a closed book; and to ameliorate, especially by evening talks, the loneliness and social isolation which have been one of the greatest drawbacks to farm life. Within a radius of thirty miles around Chicago there are eighteen hundred farmers who can be reached by telephone; where they do not adopt the three-tothe-mile arrangement, giving a joint service at a dollar a month apiece, many farmers in this region rig up a home-made line, two or more stringing wires between their houses, along the fences, or on bean-poles, at an expense of about ten dollars each. In Maryland, and indeed all over the country, there are thousands of rural subscribers to small local independent systems which gradually grow and form connections with each other. The result has been many minor improvements and simplifications which have reacted and still further increased the ramifying network of telephone wires, each little centre spreading out arms to the other adjacent ones like a great system of nerve ganglia. The Department of Agriculture reports that the demand for rural free delivery has been greatly lessened by the advent of these country telephone systems.

In the cities the telephone is also making its way with a speed which needs only the inevitable further cheapening of the service to double or quadruple. We are still far behind some European countries in this matter; in Stockholm, Sweden, for instance, the low rates have increased the use of telephones till there is now one for every fourteen inhabitants. An important judicial decision in

South Carolina (due to competition between two companies, one of whom refused to continue a citizen's telephone unless he gave up the other service) has pronounced the telephone a common carrier, subject to all the regulations of such corporations

DESPATCHING TRAINS BY TELEPHONE

THE

HE newest field which has been invaded by the telephone is that of traindespatching. The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad is to substitute a telephone system throughout its lines, in place of the present telegraphic one, as soon as the longdistance wires can be erected. It is claimed that the existing method can be enormously simplified, and that by a phonographic attachment, permanent records of the orders can be taken which should eliminate many of the present causes of accident. When one considers the possibilities of long-distance communication which follow in the wake of Prof. Pupin's discoveries, it becomes evident that the telephone is still in its infancy as an annihilator of distance.

A

MORE LIGHT FOR THE TENEMENTS

[ocr errors]

EUROPEAN scientist claims to have discovered in "sunlight baths a direct and permanent cure for lupus and many other diseases and has founded a hospital in which his patients can be scientifically treated with sunlight on every portion of the body. That disease appears in the absence of sun and air is a sad scientific truth impressed upon the public mind ever since the great cities began to huddle people together-in a manner in which no farmer would house his pigs. From the point of view of one who believes in the brotherhood of man, the condition of the poor of New York or Chicago or San Francisco is simply a nightmare. To the philosopher it is a barbarously unenlightened waste of human strength and life. From a purely selfish standpoint, this state of affairs is a constant menace to the health of every one of the city's more fortunate residents.

It may safely be said that the New York Legislature of 1901 was responsible for nothing else so important as the "Tenement House Law," the two final sections of which (relating to prostitution in the tenements) became operative on the first of July.

Among the provisions of this statute is one that does away with the horrible "dumbbells"

-that is, houses "with two-feet airshafts having no outlet to the yard or the street, and no intake at the bottom permitting the free circulation of air, and which are thus chiefly useful as a vent for the conveyance of the bad odors from the lower apartments to those above, and as receptacles for the collection of indescribable filth." The new law requires that every living room shall have a window upon the street or yard or upon an airshaft of not less than twenty-five square feet opening to the sky without roof or skylight-and apartments already constructed must have either this or an opening sash window leading into a room so situated. No room in a cellar or basement can be occupied for living purposes without a written permit from the Board of Health, water must be furnished in reasonable quantity on every floor, and the spaces beneath all sinks must be left open. The height of houses, the percentage of lot occupied, the width of yards, the ventilation of courts and halls, the size of rooms-even the privacy of new apartments is carefully regulated. The Tenement Commissioner who,. with the department he will organize, is to carry out this admirable law will not be appointed until the first of next January; and it is probable that the Health Board, which is meanwhile entrusted with its enforcement, will do little besides circularizing house-owners to familiarize them with its provisions. It will put into the Commissioner's hands the power to reach the pockets of those miserable creatures who squeeze high rents out of the unfortunate and degraded occupants of their tenements, and it will present the consideration of a thousand dollar fine to the owners who through careless ignorance permit their agents to do the same thing.

The first effect of the enactment was the hurried filing of more than a thousand plans between January 1 and April 12, to take advantage of the old law. It transpired last month that in this rush an unscrupulous architect filed from fifty to a hundred "dummies," taking any plan he happened to have and entering it for some vacant lot, regardless of the fact that it did not at all fit the space. He subsequently altered these radically, thus filing and erecting old style tenements long after the law was in force; and the connivance of some official of the Building Department seems to have been secured in this dishonest practice. The publicity given to the evasion

of the law by Mr. Robert W. DeForest and his associates has probably frustrated the scheme; and it will merely serve to make the Tenement House Committee watch such

neglect any agency which so surely and vitally improves public health and morals.

matters even more carefully. The reputable TH

builders and architects, many of whom declared the new statute would be ruinous to both owner and tenant are now finding little difficulty in meeting its provisions-with plans for apartments and tenements which must rejoice the heart of any one familiar with the existing conditions.

A "prominent architect" has made in the Real Estate Record and Guide some very interesting predictions as to the ultimate effects of the measure. He looks for a great movement to the suburbs and two-family dwellings in place of tenements; indeed he asserts that in twenty years New York will be "a city of big apartment houses and small one and two story dwellings."

FLOATING HOTELS AND FREE BATHS

MR.

[R. JOHN ARBUCKLE, the famous merchant, has been doing a good work for the dwellers of the city, and carrying out a pet scheme of his own, by opening to the public a fleet of "floating hotels" during the heated term. Each evening the staunch fullrigged ship Jacob Stamler and two attendant yachts have sailed down the bay, carrying its patrons to pure air and a healthful night's rest away from the city's smoke and roar. On Saturdays the trip is prolonged till Monday morning.

It is an interesting and novel experiment, which should succeed, and which emphasizes the loss to the great city's residents, of the water-front as a location of homes. Almost universally the choicest dwelling-places have been given over exclusively to docks and manufactories and business, while the workers who do not get away to summer resorts swelter and lose strength for lack of the breezes which might be found by the waterside.

Less novel, but even more important, is the movement for free public baths and the establishment of shower baths in connection

with the city's school-houses. Lack of conveniences and of privacy in the crowded tenement homes make the extension of New York's present inadequate system-two overcrowded bath houses-a crying necessity from every point of view. We cannot afford to

THE GROWTH OF CITIES

HE movement of our population to the great cities instead of slackening continues with accelerated speed. During the last decade the United States added thirteen million to the sum of its inhabitants. There

has been an enormous movement of both immigrants and native Americans to the sparsely settled regions of the West and Northwest, yet the percentage of the total population living in cities of 8,000 inhabitants or more has risen from 29 to 32.9. A hundred years ago this percentage was only 4. In the 116,000 square miles occupied by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, seventy-two people out of every hundred are to be found in cities of over 4,000. This is a logical outcome of the extraordinary industrial activity which has lately characterized American effort; and it is surely not fanciful to see in the movement merely another application of that principle of combination which now dominates the whole world of business and industry. The world seems to have just waked up to the unlimited application of the copy-book maxim as to the strength of union, and the City is merely a Residence Trust.

It is difficult to look forward in this direction, for one feels instinctively that some counter influence must arise to check this mad rush townwards. Otherwise that dismal prophecy which Mr. H. G. Wells introduces into one of his stories will become a reality, and the monstrous city, swollen to incredible proportions, will drain every vestige of life from the country. Even today the realization comes upon one with something of a shock that over twenty-eight million of our people are living in a space probably aggregating not more than 5,000 square miles, while the other forty-eight million are spread over 3,000,000 square miles.

AMERICA'S GREATEST POPULATION CENTRE

still less than twenty-six inhabitants to each square mile of our territory, the following data by Mr. J. H. Pence are impressive:

EEPING in mind the fact that there are

The accompanying map shows the number of persons to each square mile in America's greatest population centre-New York, Kings,

« AnteriorContinuar »