foolish to laud the man who realizes these ambitions, and class as extravagant and thriftless those who do not. Our preaching must have a closer relation to the economic situation of the families.

In years gone by the family was the industrial unit, the work was done in the house, was close to the problem of the home, and the two developed together. The family ties were strong and the industrial conditions strengthened them. Now the situation is changed, and the industry is dominant. More and more the very nature of the family, its ideals, and its every-day existence are alike molded by the opportunities for work. If we are to keep any abstract ideals of what family life should be, and are to translate these into actualities, our primary query must be whether our industrial system makes them possible. Without the development of the personal virtues economic prosperity might be futile, but the converse is also true. In Homestead at least, I believe, there are more ideals than the industrial situation allows to become realities.

The Pittsburgh Survey represents one way of studying family life in an industrial and urban community. The method of personal observation by an individual investigator is obviously inadequate to such an undertaking. Life is too short, prejudices too ineradicable, individual qualifications too specialized, the personal equation too disturbing, to permit any single individual however gifted to see for himself the community as a whole, and to measure the influences and forces that shape the family destiny. The writer who boasts that he has known many cities, if by that he means that he has known them intimately by the method of first-hand observation, invites distrust. The Chicago stockyards district alone, or the lower East Side of New York, or the Pittsburgh steel district, affords a problem too complex and difficult for any single-handed observer and reporter of social conditions. Individual inquiry and personal interpretation have brought us a certain distance but they cannot take us much farther. Their limitations have suggested the plan which we have tried in the experiment the results of which you have asked us to lay before you. That plan is in a word to organize a staff to survey the community as a whole, a group working under common direction, and rapidly enough so that the results refer to a particular period and to relatively definite conditions which can be clearly described.

Whether in this first experiment we have succeeded is of course still to be determined, but this was the underlying idea of the Pittsburgh Survey. In attempting thus to reckon at once with the many factors of the life of a great industrial community, we may not have been able to go so deeply into most of them as, for example, special inquiries have gone into tuberculosis, child labor, housing, or the standard of living; although on the other hand we may have gone into others, such as the cost of typhoid, the effect of industrial accidents, the status of the steel workers,

the boarding-boss system, and the place of women in modern industries, more deeply than has heretofore been attempted. In any case our main purpose has been to offer a structural exhibit of the community as a whole and not to make an exhaustive investigation of any one of its aspects. We have not dealt with the political mechanism, and we have not to any great extent dealt with vice, intemperance, or the institutions by which the community undertakes to control them. We have dealt in the main with the wage-earning population, first in its industrial relations, and second in its social relations to the community as a whole.

There are certain immediate, tangible results in Pittsburgh. An Associated Charities, an increased force of sanitary inspectors, a comprehensive housing census, a typhoid commission, and a permanent civic improvement commission are certainly very tangible and striking results, especially as they are in the nature of by-products to an investigation concerning which very little has as yet been published.

These developments, however, interesting and gratifying as they are from the point of view of social progress in the community, are probably not the results of the survey which are in your minds, as you forecast this discussion. I take it that what is of interest to the Economic Association and the Sociological Society, is rather the answer to the question: Have you really found out anything about Pittsburgh that we did not know per-.. fectly well before? What are the results of your survey for students of society and of industry? The discoveries, then, which I have to report, are as follows, taking the adverse results first:

I. An altogether incredible amount of overwork by everybody, reaching its extreme in the twelve-hour shift for seven days in the week in the steel mills and the railway switchyards.

II. Low wages for the great majority of the laborers employed by the mills, not lower than in other large cities, but low compared with the prices-so low as to be inadequate to the maintenance of a normal American standard of living: wages adjusted to the single man, not to the responsible head of a family.

III. Still lower wages for women, who receive for example in one of the metal trades, in which the proportion of women is

great enough to be menacing, one-half as much as unorganized men in the same shops and one-third as much as the men in the union.

IV. An absentee capitalism, with bad effects strikingly analogous to those of absentee landlordism, of which also Pittsburgh furnishes noteworthy examples.

V. A continuous inflow of immigrants with low standards, attracted by a wage which is high by the standards of southeastern Europe, and which yields a net pecuniary advantage because of abnormally low expenditures for food and shelter, and inadequate provision for sickness, accident, and death.

VI. The destruction of family life, not in any imaginary or mystical sense, but by the demands of the day's work, and by the very demonstrable and material method of typhoid fever and industrial accidents, both preventable, but costing last year in Pittsburgh considerably more than a thousand lives, and irretrievably shattering many homes.

VII. Archaic social institutions such as the aldermanic court, the ward school district, the family garbage disposal, and the unregenerate charitable institution, still surviving after the conditions to which they were adapted have disappeared.

VIII. The contrast-which does not become blurred by familiarity with detail, but on the contrary becomes more vivid as the outlines are filled in-the contrast between the prosperity on the one hand of the most prosperous of all the communities of our western civilization, with its vast natural resources, the generous fostering of government, the human energy, the technical development, the gigantic tonnage of the mines and mills, the enormous capital of which the bank balances afford an indication, and, on the other hand, the neglect of life, of health, of physical vigor, even of the industrial efficiency of the individual. Certainly no community before in America or Europe has ever had such a surplus, and never before has a great community. applied what it had so meagerly to the rational purposes of human life. Not by gifts of libraries, galleries, technical schools, and parks, but by the cessation of toil one day in seven and sixteen hours in the twenty-four, by the increase of wages, by the sparing