Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/381

Rh to take their place. The feeling extended to every sphere of life, and notably to municipal affairs. Attention was everywhere directed to the war, its progress and probable results. In the words of one commentator on the situation:

And who, a Unitarian clergyman (John Haynes Holmes) asks, in quoting the above, "cares a fig about the social movements"? Jane Addams, usually so calm and sane, declared

that all is out of joint, out of character. Human sensibilities were more acute when this war began than ever before. The comradeship, the friendliness between nations had been brought upon a basis of mutual understanding further than ever before. By mechanical means we had been brought closer together in communication and in sympathy. Either we ought not to have equipped ourselves with these fine sensibilities, or we ought not to have to face the horrors now confronting us. It is a too terrible inconsistency against which we should protest. All organized social welfare activities are put back for years. We have to work up public opinion anew.

When a million men are suffering in trenches wet and cold and wounded, what are a few children suffering under hard conditions in the factories? Take old-age pensions, upon which England, France and Germany have been working. With widows and fatherless children numbered by the thousands in each of these countries, what are a few old people more or less? It will be years before these things are taken up again. The whole social fabric is tortured and twisted.

Infant mortality is one of the things which we are just beginning to deal with.

But what are half a million new-born children in comparison with such a slaughter—the hideous, wholesale slaughter of thousands of men a day?

Social and civic workers in large numbers shared this lament and the feeling and conviction back of it. It really did seem in those first days as if all that had been gained through years of toil and painful effort had been lost; that the foundations, as well as the superstructure, of modern society, which is so largely urban in its character, had been undermined—but first a few, and then many more students began to ask questions, and make inquiries. What effect is the European war having' and likely to have upon the municipal situation, and especially in this country? Has it diverted interest? And if so, in what way? Has it interfered with the orderly functioning of the city? Has it stopped public improvements? Has it hurt municipal credit, and the development of sound municipal sentiment? Has the war diverted interest in city affairs?

From a Los Angeles editor (and I may say in passing that the great bulk of the testimony I shall offer will be from well-known editors of