1914 THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE WAR tan turned to Germany, which has for about ten years been the adviser of the decaying monarchy. Meantime the Ruin of the Sultanate. Christians in the Balkans were helping themselves. In 1878 the Bulgarians were set free by the joint armies of Russia and Rumania, and have ever since been a Christian state; Servia was released some years earlier; Greece was a little enlarged at the expense of Turkey; Bosnia and Herzegovina were pried off by Austria; till by 1908 the Turks had lost about half the area of the Balkans. Then came the sudden, sharp, apparently unexpected revolution of the Young Turks, carried out by Albanian officers who had been the especial favorites of the Sovereign. Abd-ul-Hamid was made a state prisoner, and for five years has lived in captivity, too weak and too despicable even to be feared. In 1911 Italy carried off Tripoli from under the Turkish guns. In 1912 Servia, Bulgaria, and Greece joined to take Macedonia and Novi-Bazar, which lay between Servia and Montenegro. To their surprise, the Turkish power caved in, and in a few months they held all the previous Turkish provinces in Europe except the narrow district including Constantinople. This did not come about without fearful reprisals for the acts of tyranny and blood committed during the ages by the Turks. The Turkish navy was almost helpless, their army captured or dispersed; the Greek islands were occupied up to a gunshot of the coast of Asia Minor; the Asiatic side of the Empire seemed also on the point of breaking up. Meantime the Sultanate was shifted to the inept and incapable Mohammed V, who has far less power in his own Empire than the German or Russian Ambassador. A council of the nation was summoned, and allowed to lapse because it took an interest in public affairs, and assumed that it had the right to conduct them. It was not truly representative of the Turkish people, but came nearer expressing the national mind than the coterie of civil and military officers who divide among themselves places in the Cabinet and military commands. At present the strongest individual in Turkey appears to be Enver Bey [now 595 Enver Pasha], who came to public fame by killing his superior officer, Nazim Pasha, in 1913 at the door of the Council Chamber. The future of Turkey is dark; the line of absolute sultans is impotent. From out of the complex of races in Asiatic TurkeyTurks, Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Syrians, Arabs, Mesopotamians-it is almost impossible to make up a representative government that could hold together. The present self-designated Government has neither morals. nor wisdom. The individual Turks are a fine people who have the respect and good will of most foreigners who live among them. Though they have Asiatic traditions, the race is made up much more of European than of Asiatic elements; and the Turks who have lived in Europe are many of them Western in spirit. The trouble is that when a hundred or a million of these genuinely likable men gather together to frame a government they know none but the worst Asiatic models; and they have shown, especially during the last century, no capacity to keep peace, encourage order and industry, or educate the population either of their own race or of the subject Christian races. In this great European crisis, involving the control of Europe and of Asia, when ships and men are moving north, east, south, and west around what is left of the Turkish Empire, the sultanate and the people are alike helpless. If the Allies are victorious, the Russians will infallibly annex Constantinople and the waterways from the Black to the Ægean Sea; if the Germans and Austrians are victorious, they will eventually build and control a railway line from Budapest to the Persian Gulf, and that will not leave much of Asia Minor. Perhaps wicked old Abd-ul-Hamid, from his prison palace on the Bosphorus, darkly looks across at what was once the Imperial seraglio opposite the Sublime Porte, the lofty gateway which has given a diplomatic name to the country. Perhaps he sees over the Mosque of St. Sophia the fingers of a man's handwriting: "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin "—" God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. . . . Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. . . . Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians." A BY MRS. FLORENCE KELLEY GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE NATIONAL COMSUMERS' LEAGUE LITTLE group of workers in the cotton-mills of the English village of Rochdale, some three-quarters of a century ago, discussed the high cost of living and what was to be done about it. In the end they bought a half-barrel of flour, and each subscriber to the co-operative enterprise took one share. It was cheaper than by the bag (as they had been accustomed to buy it), and, even more important, it was pure. For there is no question of the fact that retail dealers in those days commonly adulterated their flour with plaster-of-paris, which caused disease and death. Little did those humble cotton-mill workers foresee that this modest investment was the beginning of a movement destined to amount almost to an economic revolution. It was the first experiment in co-operation for cheapening and improving the necessaries of life. From that half-barrel of flour has developed a system of stores and factories which, controlled by co-operative societies, are to-day scattered all over the United Kingdom, serving as models for all the world. These societies are, to a steadily increasing extent, determining the quality and cost of goods produced for their members. They have been able to restrict the adulteration of food products and to prevent the fraudulent substitution of inferior material in articles of clothing used by poor working families. In some measure they have brought the cost of living in England under their control. The societies originally bought goods in the open market, and sold them to their members at the full current retail price, eventually dividing the profit among the purchasers. But, with the growth of numbers, they found themselves able to keep their own retail prices closer to the current wholesale prices; and ordinary retailers, in order to stay in business, are now compelled to meet these prices, thus holding down the cost of many kinds of staple merchandise. The influence exerted by the societies in behalf of honest goods is overwhelmingly powerful. They are developing so many factories of their own that competing manufacturers are finding it more difficult to sell fraudulent fabrics. It is largely by reason of the absence of a co-operative system in this country that we have so inordinate a development of department stores, with underpaid clerks and a monstrous flood of adulterated, trashy, perishable fabrics. The latter item represents an immense aggregate of economic waste, and the loss falls mainly upon the poor. A Swiss fellow-student whom I knew long ago at Zurich was afterwards employed for twenty years as chief chemist in a silk-dyeing establishment in Philadelphia. He told me that crude silk arriving from China, Japan, and elsewhere was first boiled to get rid of the gum it contained, thus losing about ten per cent of its weight. The owners of the silk required his employers to return it to them with this ten per cent restored, and with an additional one hundred per cent contributed to it, by" weighting" with metals—lead, tin, or iron. This, of course, is a customary trade practice, and every woman has had opportunity to observe its effects. If a silk dress becomes shiny after a while, that means adulteration of the fabric with lead. If a shirt-waist of silk, though perhaps hanging in a closet unworn, exhibits star-like cuts or gashes, it is tin that is accountable. If a coat lining goes to pieces in straight slits, that is iron. My Swiss acquaintance gave up his employment and took his two boys back to live on a modest farm in the Jura Mountains, in order, as he said, that they should not learn the dishonesties in which their father had been obliged to participate while pursuing the silk-dyeing craft. But, in telling this story, the fact on which I wish to lay emphasis is that such things happen far less when the factory is making goods to be sold to cooperative owners thereof, and, in general, for the co-operative trade in England. To-day the co-operative societies in that country have stores so widely scattered that they are to be found even in many villages, and the influence they exercise over purity of food products and the quality of other merchandise, as well as over prices, has been steadily gaining. Ultimately the co-operative movement in the United States is, I think, likely to take the form of co-operative ordering direct from producers, together with the establishment of municipal enterprises for public supply. WOMEN AND CO-OPERATIVE STORES The Supreme Court of Georgia has decided that municipalities in that State may lawfully carry on the production and sale of ice. New York City, having started milk stations for infants some years ago as a private philanthropic enterprise, now conducts a few municipal stations of the kind, and is soon to have many more. Municipal markets exist in many centers of population. Two cities in Texas and one in Tennessee have municipal abattoirs. We may never have co-operative retail stores precisely on the English plan. But it is easy to imagine the future existence in our cities of sample rooms which will do an enormous mail order business. Such an establishment will not keep a stock of goods on hand for sale, but merely samples of all kinds of merchandise, to be shown or sent out through the mails to intending purchasers. It may serve as an intermediary between the producer and the ultimate consumer, bringing the two into close relations. The parcel post will be of immense assistance, and when the Government takes over the telegraphs and telephones, making electric communication relatively inexpensive, we shall have facilities for instantaneous and cheap ordering. Take the matter of clothes. Shopping women do not know how large a part of the clothing they buy comes from prisons in various parts of the country, where convicts working under an intensive sweating system, from which for them there is no possibility of escape, manufacture shoes, shirts, petticoats, and many other kinds of goods for the benefit of greedy contractors at a cost so low as to render competition by well-paid free labor very difficult. There are some prisons which teach men only women's trades, such as the making of silk petticoats. Yet tuberculosis and venereal diseases are characteristic maladies of prison populations, communicable by garments which the convicts cut and sew. Adulterations of food products sold in inter-State commerce are now required by law to be plainly declared on the containers. Should not a similar demand be made for a convincing guarantee that skirts, petticoats, and stockings are not products of convict labor? It is important that we defend our digestions, but is it not equally worth while to protect ourselves against loathsome disease? The answer to the question is obvious enough; yet at the present time we can 597 look for help in this direction to neither the Federal nor the State governments. The Booher Bill giving each State power to deal according to its own laws with prison goods made in other States has been held up in the Senate. The whole appeal of modern industry to women in relation to buying is an appeal to cupidity. Goods are incessantly offered "below cost "-at once an insult to the intelligence of women and a delusive bait for their imputed meanness. Meanwhile thousands of newspapers fill their pages with offers of bargains; and even the pulpit is confused about the real issue involved, frequently berating women, on the one hand, for bargain-hunting, and, on the other hand, choosing as a favorite theme the extravagance of the wife who tempts her husband to dishonesty by her lavish expenditure. Shopping women are with difficulty induced to exercise sympathetic imagination in behalf of the women and children who serve them in factories and sweatshops-whom they do not see, and with whom they have no contact. They would be more interested if they knew the sources from which many of the things they buy are derived. Recently the New York State Factory Investigation Commission reported that some of the hand-made linen for the "richest babies" in the United States was produced in tenements; likewise a good part of the “French” hand-made and hand-embroidered underwear, and hand embroidery on expensive shirt-waists. At embroidery alone sixtyone thousand "out-workers "-i.e., workers in sweatshops and tenement rooms—are employed in the State, most of them in New York City, which is the great sweating center. In many instances where factories and retailing manufacturers advertise goods "made on the premises " only a portion of the output is so made-the workrooms shown to the professional buyer and to customers being merely masks for sweatshops and tenements in which women and children toil long hours and at night, and in which tuberculosis and other infectious diseases are sadly common. Dr. Annie S. Daniel, practicing medicine in the out-patient department of the New York Infirmary for Women, found in one twelvemonth seventy-nine families of tenement workers suffering from contagious maladies. The Factory Investigation Commission reported that over seventy-six per cent of the families working in the tenements of the metropolis earned less than ten cents an hour as families. Efforts to start a co-operative movement in this country have met with several formidable obstacles. One of these is the speculative element in American life, which causes people to disregard little economies. Another is the floating character of our population, making it difficult to hold a group of workers together for any great length of time. Yet another lies in the fact that retail trade in the United States, taking it as a whole, is in the hands of persons immeasurably abler than corresponding business men in the early days of the co-operative movement in England. Recently an American, going to London and opening a department store there, has made of it a magnificent commercial success, notwithstanding the competition of the co-operative stores. The same qualities which have brought him such success abroad have hitherto enabled merchants in our own country to drive out co-operative rivals. Up to the present time the effort of women in this country to acquire any share in the control of industry has been restricted to educational and philanthropic work. We have the National Consumers' League, which, first organized locally in New York City in 1890, has since become a National movement, with eighty-six leagues in fifteen States. But the League has never attempted to buy and sell or to manufacture goods. It has never undertaken to deal directly with qualities or prices. It has confined itself to efforts to awaken the consciences of consumers; to call their attention to the cruelties of industry; to make them understand their own personal responsibility for such cruelties, and to show how they have in their own hands the power to remedy these mischiefs. Nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed since the Workingwomen's Society was started in New York City, for the purpose of encouraging organization among women wage-earners. With this idea in view, it made a comprehensive inquiry into the conditions under which saleswomen and cash children then labored in the stores. The most important conclusion at which it arrived was that organization among wage-earning women could do little compared with what could be accomplished by organization among spenders of money. Out of this discovery (if it may so be termed) sprang the Consumers' League. For it is the consumer, and not the merchant or the manufacturer, who is the ultimate employer. And the employer controls. Women organized as consumers have only to be numerous enough and sufficiently determined in their stand for better things to accomplish whatever they wish. The principal teachings of the Consumers' League may be summed up as follows: That responsibility for some of the worst evils from which wage-earners suffer rests with consumers who persist in buying in the cheapest markets, regardless of how cheapness is brought about. That it is the duty of consumers to find out under what conditions the articles they purchase are produced, and to insist that the conditions shall be at least decent and consistent with a respectable existence on the part of the workers. That this duty is specially incumbent upon consumers in relation to products of women's work, since there is no limit beyond which the wages of women may not be pressed down. Women are being urgently spurred in the direction of co-operation by the increasing cost of living. The idea is already beginning to make hopeful progress in the United States; and when we do start we shall have the advantage of a more modern point of departure than that of the people in England whose success we are anxious to imitate. We shall not begin with a half-barrel of flour. The great Federation of Women's Clubs, which extends its organization to all parts of the Union, will undoubtedly give a powerful impetus to the movement. We shall have the parcel post, and the inevitable extension of co-operative municipal functions will lend us aid. S THEOPHILUS WITH SOME REFLECTIONS UPON HIS THEOPHILOSITY BY WILLIAM E. BARTON ELDOM have I made a brilliant and original discovery without making another somewhat different-namely, that the discovery had already been made by some one else. Not long ago an entirely original idea occurred to me, but before I could preach it I found it in a new book of Bergson's, and had to proclaim my originality in quotation marks; and when I had preached ít a learned friend said to me: "That fine word you gave us from Bergson was really not original with him; the very same idea in much the same language is contained in the seventh volume of Jonathan Edwards." I borrowed a volume from the library, and there it is on page 334-and that reminds me that the book has not yet returned to the library, and is now drawing a fine at the rate of two cents a day. But I have now made a discovery which, so far as I can learn, no man has made before me, and I want to print it in a hurry. It is that Luke, in giving his reasons for writing his Gospel, gave precisely the reasons which might have justified him in not writing it. They were two-namely, that other people were writing the story of the life of Jesus; and, secondly, that he had no first-hand knowledge of the facts. His opening sentence might easily have ended differently, as for instance : "Forasmuch as many have undertaken to set down in order a record of the things most surely believed among us, it seemed good unto me, most excellent Theophilus, having not been myself an eye-witness of these events, to send to thee under separate cover a copy of the Gospel according to Matthew." My dear and honored friend Edward Everett Hale taught his double four sentences, which would carry a man through life, and one of them was, "So much has been said, and so well said, that I will not add anything further at this time." Luke said, "So much has been said, and so well said, it seemed good unto me, most excellent Theophilus, to add something to the sum total." He might have sent Matthew, which probably was written. He certainly had before him, while he wrote, a copy of Mark; but he did not send either of them. Why? Here again is where my discovery comes in. The old theologians were never long puzzled by the question, "Why is the literary style of Paul different from that of John, since the same Holy Spirit inspired both ?" They answered, "The Holy Spirit indeed inspired both men, but had respect unto the Johnicity of John and the Paulicity of Paul." Yes, verily. And the same Holy Spirit had respect unto the Lucicity of Luke, and (here is my discovery) unto the Theophilosity of Theophilus. Who was Theophilus? I once knew a colored Sunday-school Convention which spent the better part of three days in the discussion of the interesting question, "Who was Melchizedek?" and they left the question in as good condition as they found it. But I intend to find an answer to this question. Hastings's" Bible Dictionary says that "tradition has not been busy with him as it has with most of the obscure men of the New Testament." It is time tradition or some more reliable authority got to work. Sir William Ramsay holds that the Greek word translated "most excellent" was a technical title, indicating a Roman officer of equestrian rank. Very likely. I hope he will learn some more. But I am interested in the pyschology rather than the rank of Theophilus. Why did not Luke send a copy of the Gospel of Matthew to Theophilus? Because Theophilus would not have been interested in a genealogy which began with Abraham nor a point of view which was distinctly Jewish. Luke read Matthew through, I think, and I am sure he read Mark through, word by word, and all the way through asked himself whether that was the kind of book to send to Theophilus. In each case the answer was in the negative. Matthew was a good book for the Jews, but it contained some things which Theophilus would not have cared very much about. Mark was an excellent little tract, but concise to the point of being dry. It had action, but lacked |