POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY. WH FRIENDSHIP AND POLITICS. WHEN the suburban missionary society was engaged in the manufacture of school bags for the little Zulu children, it was only expressing in a picturesque way an almost universal attitude of mind. My needs are your needs, my methods must be your methods. The European railroad running over the Chinese royal graves is not so much an outrage as it is a dramatic instance of a general point of view. When a religious tract is proffered a Bowery "bum," we are perhaps far enough advanced to smile; but a solemn complacent hopefulness pervades our spirits when we circulate through the tenements reform political literature, and we feel that we have exercised much subtlety by printing the pamphlets in five different languages. The fluent talk of the sociologist, the ceaseless repetitions of the informed social pedagogue, the annual reports of the societies that deal with our city majorities at first hand all affect us little or not at all. But while we are failing both to understand and to interpret, there are others who, understanding, do not interpret. Why should they? Is it their place to inform the ignorant? And for that matter it can hardly occur to those who do understand, that the polished, the cultivated, the reformed and the reforming classes still walk in darkness. Broadly speaking there are two methods of social education: one is the impress from above, working for conformity to a rigid, inelastic standard; the other is an inductive process of understanding and interpreting and then acting. The latter method we have begun to apply seriously in most branches of learning and of life. We are, however, only on the threshold of its application to politics; and not until we do apply this method shall we know what path to take to lead us toward the goal of social righteousness. We shall have set out on the right track when we learn something of the actual underlying mechanism of city politics, when we recognize the primal factors in the civic dishonor that sits enthroned in more than one of our great American cities. In last analysis our municipal politics has its source in the "job" that necessary centre around which life turns for the great majority, and especially for those who live on the margin. Somewhere the job dispenser meets the job seeker. The former is receiving a great deal of contemporary attention. He would be nobody if he did not meet the latter. It is the latter that makes the former possible. What is he? Where does he come from? Is he a stationary or a changing factor? The job seeker is born in a tenement house. He is a product of the conditions of education and industry that flourish there. In New York (and it is of New York alone that I can speak at first hand) he has grown up in a steadily deteriorating environment. The evolution of the tenement house through all its six painful stages to the crowning evil of the dumb-bell double-decker has produced its stunting effects. More and more has industry infested the tenement house until the home has too frequently become the shop. Where the woman has had to help the man with his work, the child has been left to its own resources. The job has its menacing and sinister aspects in many tenement-house quarters. The spread of immorality through tenement houses, caused by crusades against vice and by the immunity from the payment of protection money to the police, has had its saddest and most revolting effects in the corruption of children. These children, also anxious for a job, increase the family income by being the instruments and agents of vice. The early acquaintance with infamy gradually stunts all the finer feelings. The prostitutes who give out their |