Miners Must Eat

I

WE were sitting on the porch of a coal miner’s shack in one of the West Virginia valleys. The amazing glory of the fall was around us. Gentle voices were telling me an ugly tale, and even though I had come to listen, I wished they would stop. I had grown accustomed to hearing such things in city neighborhoods, but now it seemed an affront to beauty. I hated to turn back and look at the miserable gray baby that one woman was rocking.

But they went on: ‘An’ then last spring th’ Red Cross quit givin’ out groceries an’ th’ Quakers had tu go home. There wuz n’t any milk fur th’ children. Most of th’ men wuz n’t workin’ — just a day here an’ a day there.’

‘What did you do?’ I interrupted. ‘Just how did you manage?’

There was a pause, and then, ‘It ’pears like it ’ud be easy tu say, honey, but our ways ’ud be hard fur you tu understand. You see it was gravy soup lots o’ th’ time — just gravy soup.’

‘What is gravy soup?’

‘You puts flour in a pan an’ browns it, an’ then you stirs water inta it.’

‘Is that what you gave your baby?’

I must have sounded accusing, for the mother said apologetically, ‘Oh, no, honey, not when I cud help it. A neighbor up th’ way has a cow, an’ she wuz mighty good tu me. She sent up half a pint o’ milk when she had it over. Sometimes it wuz ev’ry other day, an’ sometimes none fur a week. But it helped a powerful sight.’ And then, ‘ I ’m a-givin’ him bean soup now, from beans we growed this summer.’

The rest of the women joined in: ‘Th’ ones that had gardens did n’t do so bad, an’ I put up seven cans of apples from some that wuz give me.’ ‘Sometimes an odd job was picked up, an’ some got trust from th’ comp’ny stores.’ Each one added something in an effort to make me understand how things went. ‘They wuz sorry-lookin’ children in this county, but they mended like little pigs when th’ Quakers brought th’ milk an’ sandwiches inta th’ schools.’ ‘They wuz n’t so cross when they got that pint o’ milk a day.’ ‘There’s nothin’ like food tu perk a child up.’

II

In his inaugural address in March, President Roosevelt stressed the need for unified unemployment relief as one of the major problems before Congress. He was facing not only new and urgent calls for help, but also arrears of malnutrition and depleted self-reliance due to past neglect and inaction over wide areas. It is gaps in time and space such as these miners’ wives testified to — pits and desperate hollows in what might be called the unemployment relief map of the country — that will put to the test the new federal authority which, in May, was charged by the new administration and the new Congress with the long-drawn task of making our sluggish national responsibility meet our needs.

When the depression came down on us, and for two years thereafter, we in the United States relied for the most part on collecting emergency funds from private sources, city by city, and we resisted moves at Washington to work out a national scheme of public relief for the unemployed. But back in 1931 the Federal Children’s Bureau was asked by President Hoover’s Emergency Committee for Employment to canvass conditions in the bituminous coal fields. The canvass disclosed great privation, and demonstrated, as Grace Abbott put it, how ‘we have been trying to meet modern social and industrial conditions with a system of poor relief which in many states has been little modified since Colonial times.’ As a result of the report, the American Friends Service Committee and the American Red Cross were called in, and President Hoover placed $225,000 at the disposal of the Quakers, from funds left over in the hands of the American Relief Administration. So, interestingly enough, in a period when all efforts to get unemployment relief appropriations through Congress were balked at Washington, succor reached these West Virginia children from funds which, in part, had earlier been appropriated by Congress for the relief of post-war distress in Europe. This money the Friends supplemented by private appeals.

In September 1931, they started work, and by the end of the winter had reached forty-one counties in six states, with a programme of school lunches for children who were 10 per cent underweight, and milk for pre-school children and expectant mothers. It was December before feeding could be arranged for more than 3000 children in the coal fields. By the following April the number had risen to 33,227. But in the early summer of 1932 the work had to be practically discontinued because of lack of money. We have no means of knowing how many children belong to the 200,000 miners who were estimated to be out of work in the bituminous coal fields, and, therefore, what proportion of these children were reached when the school feeding was at its height. At best it could have been but a tragic fraction. In the fortyone counties alone, if 33,227 children needed food in April, that many needed it and did not get it the other eleven months of the year; and they were all still needing it when the help was withdrawn last summer. Babies in this region waited for their milk from May until November.

When, late last fall, on funds turned over to them from loans made to West Virginia by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Friends were asked to take up again their work of school feeding in some of the counties, their examinations showed 20 per cent more undernourishment than prevailed the year before.

‘So far,’ ran one report, ‘it seems that 99 per cent of the children are listed as having more or less serious defects ’ — and malnutrition began the list.

Necessarily much of the work of organization had to be done over again, and much time elapsed before even the previous year’s quota of children could start their lunches. Such lack of continuity is as wasteful in money and effort as it is futile in building up health.

Anyone familiar with the work of the Friends realizes the self-sacrifice and efficiency with which they have gone at their task; but I question whether the rest of us can feel much satisfaction if we consider how long the need originally existed before it stirred our national consciousness, how far short the help has fallen of reaching all those who needed it, how irregular this help has been, and how much besides food has been required. The Friends have stimulated canning kitchens, mountain crafts, and part-time farming; but such work has been handicapped at every point, because their primary task has been to help stave off hunger by feeding school children in those spells when Washington decided that they should be fed.

III

Last October when I visited these coal valleys of West Virginia, the flaming brilliance of the mountain sides intensified the sordidness of the mining camps. The very foliage made the shacks scattered in the hollows seem more than ever colorless and ramshackle. Wherever we stopped, however, the reception was friendly, for a vein of neighborliness runs deep in the lives of the people. It was this neighborliness which kept life going among them before outside help came, and has had to tide them over the recurring breaks in that help since.

I had my first glimpse of it when we drew up at the door of a shack where flowers bloomed in tomato cans. My friends went on, and Mrs. Bent sank into a big rocking-chair and talked. Her husband, who had started life working on a railroad in North Carolina, came to the mines as a young man. The year before, work was so slack, she said, that he did n’t dare to ‘stay out’ when he felt ill. Each day’s work might be the last he would get for a long time. One night when he came home he told his wife that he had loaded five big cars that day, but after each shovelful it had seemed to him he could n’t continue. She put him to bed with all the home remedies she could muster. Then she lay down herself. The last thing she knew he was leaning over, tucking the bedclothes around her. When she awoke he was dead.

‘Th’ County had to bury him,’ she told me, for when mining fell off they had dropped the insurance they had carried for five years. ‘Then I had to get out of th’ comp’ny house, but th’ assessor for our county — he let us in here without any rent.’ There was Mrs. Bent herself, her daughter, and two grandchildren. ‘He’s a Republican,’ she added reflectively, ‘but he’s a good man, an’ th’ whole county sez so.’ Next she went to the County Court in the little town nine miles away and asked for help. They told her they had no money, and referred her to the Red Cross. The husband died in October; but it was not until December that she finally received aid from any source other than her neighbors. Then she was given her first bag of groceries by the Red Cross. These bags she had to carry nine miles over the mountains. Mrs. Bent is small and shriveled, and she had had to depend on the kindliness of friends and strangers along the way to help her get her sixty pounds of groceries home to the children.

‘I went fur my bag ev’ry two weeks till June,’ she told me. ‘Then they told me they wuz goin’ tu break up an’ I ’d better see what th’ County cud do. Th’ County sent me ten dollars each month for three months; then they stopped, an’ they kept tellin’ me tu go tu th’ Red Cross; but th’ Red Cross wuz only givin’ flour then. Th’ Red Cross had give us some seed fur our garden, an’ a bushel of potatoes tu plant. It did us fur th’ summer, but it did n’t raise enough fur this winter. Th’ bugs et up all th’ beans here. They wuz comin’ with stuff tu save th’ beans, but they never did. I sold all my corn tu buy Orrin’s shoes fur school. Right now,’ she brightened up, ‘we think we’re lucky, my daughter an’ me. We’re earnin’ a dollar an’ a half a week washin’ an’ ironin’ over at th’ comp’ny boardin’ house. You’d know how lucky that is if you ever waited fur someone tu bring you food.

‘After my husband died,’ she explained, ‘before th’ Red Cross or th’ County helped us, if we wuz plumb out th’ neighbors used tu bring us somethin’. They’d go around an’ collect fur us, but they did n’t have enough theirselves, an’ we cud n’t bear tu take it.’

In another mining camp, Mrs. Wilcox gave me an idea of how such helping neighbors themselves fared, and of what it means to keep a household going even when a miner shares in the slack work of the district. ‘You have tu be flyin’ tu keep yourself eatin’ nowadays,’ she said. ‘We don’t never buy no clothes an’ we’re nigh onto naked.’ They had only saved enough for a two-dollar pair of shoes out of her husband’s earnings the last two months, she explained. The rest had gone for groceries.

With pits opening and closing, miners in many neighborhoods were subject to periodic unemployment long before the depression. For bituminous coal beds are spread widely in a dozen states, and even in normal times there have been more mines than could operate at a profit. West Virginia, along with Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, make up the new and largely non-union field, where production went forward in the 1920’s at the expense of the older organized fields in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. By the end of the decade, West Virginia had reached almost the tonnage of Pennsylvania, but this stream of natural wealth slipped through the tax systems of the counties where it originated. As we have seen, they had no resources to tide the people over the depression; and West Virginia, like our other industrial states, had set up no system of unemployment reserves or insurance. Efforts to unionize the area were defeated when the strike of 1926 failed, and the commissary system tends to strip the mining communities of even that measure of mutual selfreliance which goes with the neighborhood store.

IV

All this threadbare and tangled web of life was brought very close to me during an afternoon I spent in Sparrow Creek visiting families who live in the little shacks along the brook. Ellie Emerson took particular charge of me that afternoon, and introduced me to her neighbors.

Ellie had reddish-blond hair, blue eyes, and an air of style. Her dress was old, but it had a cut to it, as did her fresh little apron, with its embroidered flowers. When I came in she was putting up white curtains and clean spreads on the two beds. These made the place look gay in spite of newspapers pasted on the board walls and ceiling of the shack.

Her husband unrolled himself from an old quilt on the floor beside the stove. He had dropped there when he came back from work early in the morning — too tired to wash, and not wanting to soil the beds with the grime of the mines. He appeared wild enough after his sleep, with the coal dust deepening the shadows in his face and neck. Just twenty-seven, he looked much older and very frail.

John Emerson’s work had been fairly regular until about three years ago. The winter of 1932 it averaged no more than one day a week, and last summer, to tide them over, they had moved to a near-by town where his wife’s family had a piece of land he could work. In the ‘good days’ he had earned $5.50 a day; now that he was back he was averaging $2.00. Then he drew 33 cents for loading a ton of coal, and 40 cents for ‘company time’; now the rates were 15 cents and 17½ cents for the same work. At these rates ‘a real good loader,’ he explained, ‘could earn as high as $2.75 a day,’ but only ‘if the work was there.’ Moreover, this meant working from ten to sixteen hours a day. ‘The men have been punished so by the hard times,’ he said, ‘they don’t care much if the hours is long and the pay little.’ He himself had been working steadily for a month past, and I was shown his pay envelopes together with ones that stood for earlier stretches of employment. The fortnight before my visit he had worked in water halfway to his knees. Since he was paid a little extra, he had been glad to do it.

Just at this point, Mr. Emerson’s father-in-law came in to tell him that there was to be no work that night. Since he would n’t be going out again, he went off to get washed and dressed, and then, as his wife and I talked, settled himself to read the paper. The children, when they came in, found him reading. They both considered him seriously. Then Billie, the three-year-old baby, went out and came trundling back with his father’s miner’s lamp and tried to put it on him. The six-year-old boy, looking very concerned, offered to help him get off. The father laughed. ‘The kids is worried when I don’t go to work,’ he said. ‘You see, they ain’t so little but they understand. They gets enough to eat when their daddy’s working, and it appears like everything’s different.’

Ellie Emerson was shyly insistent that I have dinner with them. With her husband earning, she could afford to be hospitable. So she set three places in the kitchen, and we had pork chops, bread, and homemade sauerkraut as we talked of life in the camp. John spoke of politics, and of how the bosses in the mines had come in before the primaries and told the men to register Republican or they would lose their jobs.

‘It ’pears like all a man’s got in this country is his vote. Then they take that away from him, for you can’t go to take no chance of losing your job when you’ve got a family. Slavery ain’t over yit, is it?’ he concluded sombrely. ‘ When the company owns your house and you got to buy at the company store, like you do at some, and then the company tells you how to vote, there ain’t much room left for personal preferences.’

V

Six weeks before my visit to West Virginia, I had gone the length and breadth of the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. There, too, I had seen evidence of the collapse of mining. Like the United States, England has had her coal commissions, and, like ours, their reports for the reconstruction and reorganization of the industry have gone unheeded Meanwhile, a quarter of a million people have migrated from the Welsh fields, — one in ten, — and more would have gone had work been plentiful elsewhere. Among the 200,000 miners who remain, the percentage of unemployment runs appallingly high. In one town that I visited in the Rhondda Valley, it was 70 per cent; in many it is more than 40 per cent.

Earlier, in London and other centres, I had studied the operations of the British Unemployment Insurance Acts,¹ which, in contrast to our hand-tomouth plans for emergency relief, have been developing over a period of twenty years. I had broken through the familiar myths as to the ‘dole,’ and seen how the system has reënforced livelihood and purchasing power in a desperate period of transition. However, I could not but wonder whether it really reached to out-of-the-way places, whether there were not areas beyond the rim of British public concern, where, as with us, only spasmodic help got through.

What I found in the Rhondda Valley was that unemployed people were still part of their own local villages, with their nonconformist chapels, their choral societies, and their small shops, and that they were also part of the greater community which is the nation. They had not dropped out of sight, nor been left to depend solely on their neighbors.

Twice a week every miner on benefit reported to his local office of the National Labor Exchange; every week he drew a minimum benefit which gave him something to count on. It was small in our American eyes, and, for a family of three children, would be equivalent in purchasing power in the United States to something less than two dollars a day. But it was not doled out in sacks of flour or in school meals; it was paid in cash for the miners’ wives to spend with their native wit.

You will get an inkling of the security such an insurance system can bring to a mining area if, remembering Sparrow Creek, you will join me on another afternoon of visiting. We started out from Mars-yr-Haf, a settlement in Glamorganshire, founded by William Noble of the Society of Friends. I had been introduced to the mothers’ club as they gathered that afternoon, and they were eager to have me see their homes. Mrs. Wilsey had been appointed my official guide. Tall and spare, she was more appropriately built for the job than her round little friend, Mrs. Donohue, who puffed along, very short of breath, but most determined that I should visit her. As we went, they told me what it had meant to the valley to have some mines close down altogether while others ran slack, and of the part which the unemployment benefit played in their lives.

When we reached Mrs. Donohue’s door, I could see why she wanted me to come. Her house was her pride, and justly so. As we passed the window which looked on to the street, I could see her lovingly eyeing her plants, and when I spoke of them her hand went up involuntarily to pat the window. Behind the flowers hung a bright yellow curtain of lace, crisp and perfect.

‘I ’ve a lady from America! Get oop! ’ she announced breathlessly, as we came into the living room. A young man jumped up from the couch, rubbing his eyes. The ‘Get oop!’ had evidently been meant for him, and he was introduced as the ‘daughter’s young man.’ A delicate, round-shouldered girl rose to greet us. Then the person whom Mrs. Donohue evidently wanted me to meet came inquiringly through the door leading to the kitchen. The man had a ruddy, humorous face, topped off with upstanding bushy white hair.

‘Come and see the lady from America,’ said his wife once more.

‘Sure now,’ he said, ‘I ’d be dirtying your hands if I shake wid ye, for I ’ve been messing about in our bit of a garden. It ’s something to keep a man busy.’

Mr. Donohue, it seemed, had been out of work for five years, so that his case illustrated how far the insurance system reached in time as well as in distance. He was on Transitional Benefit — the group to which approximately one third of the unemployed in Great Britain belong. Since the proportion is far higher for mining districts, my visit to the Rhondda offered a favorable opportunity to observe its workings as an alternative to our various schemes of public unemployment relief.

It should be explained that to be eligible for Standard Unemployment Benefit, which runs for half a year at most, a man must have stamps to show that he has himself made thirty contributions to the insurance fund from his pay within the previous two years. His payments are matched by similar contributions from the employer and the government. Two thirds of the unemployed in England are in this main standard insurance group. When a man has exhausted his rights under it, but still has eight stamps to show for work in the past two years (or thirty stamps at any time in his work history), he goes on to Transitional Benefit. Thereafter he is subject to a Means Test, which is carried out for the insurance system by the local Public Assistance authorities, and which scales down the amount if there is any other source of income in the family. If there is no other income, such as a pension or the wages of children, the amount paid is the same as under the Standard Benefit.

It should be borne in mind that men and women receiving either class of benefit must always be able and willing to accept suitable work; otherwise relief may be denied by the insurance officer, subject to appeal to a committee. Mr. Donohue was put to such a work test. He met it at the Labor Exchange with the rejoinder, ‘The sooner you let me put bread back on me pantry shelf, the better, for I am able and willing to work and only want the chance.’ At the time, the Rhondda Valley was flooded, and, taking him at his word, they mustered him into the flood work. ‘They thought to kill me desire off by putting me in water up to me middle,’ he confided to me, ‘but I stayed the seventeen weeks until the work was finished.’

‘They started the Means Test in the valley last November,’ he went on. ‘Since then the Public Assistance man visits us once a month just to see if things are the same. That’s our phonograph over there, and if it was n’t broke I would be giving you some music.’ Here he gave a knowing chuckle. ‘I don’t, of course, show that to the Means Test man. He might be begrudging us having it and reduce it from our pay, but I says if you don’t have enough grub you can have music.’

At this his wife interrupted, ‘Don’t be saying “ grub” to the lady; it ’s “ food” to her.’

‘Don’t be stopping me flow of talk,’ he retorted, ‘for I know by her face she be understanding me.’

Whereupon he resumed: ‘Them that has work in the Rhondda has radios, and they teaches the ones out of work how to make them. You can see the wires spreading out over the valley.’ We went to the window to look. Then I was taken about to admire the neat shininess of their house. When I remarked on their ability to manage so well on the 23s. 3d. allowed them, Mr. Donohue answered me, ‘We are a proud race, and we keep our poverty in our hearts.’

But his wife interrupted practically: ‘You couldn’t go into debt, because you could n’t pay it back. We know what we have to spend. There’s the rent and the food and the extras, so we’ve to plan accordingly. We’ve paid the rent on the house for twenty-three years, and we would n’t want to be losing it, for we’ve worked on the improving of it the while. It ’s keep on we have to, not go back.’

As we went up and down the hilly streets, my guide stopped to talk with the people we met and bring out bits of their lives. In telling her own story, she gave me an intimate clue as to what thrift means when you live on the dole. As a little girl, when she helped with the scrubbing, her mother had always been at her to use more ‘elbow grease’ and save the soap. She had been rebellious, and thought to herself, ‘Is n’t our mother mingy?’ When she herself was first married, work in the mines had been steady, and she saw to it that they had enough soap to save her strength. But times had changed since then. Now she understood her mother. On the dole one couldn’t ‘waste a farthin’.’

As if to illustrate her point, a boy on a vinegar cart passed us. He was singing in a high young voice, with a soft Welsh accent, the song which American college boys have sung so long: —

The housewives came to their doors with pitchers and had just a penny’s worth of vinegar poured out for them by the young singer.

We paid calls at others of the solid little houses of gray stone, and each had its story. At the Jones home, the husband was out, and the wife explained that he was ‘always going to keep off thinking. You got to do things to have peace.’ He ‘topped boots in the neighborhood,’ and right then was picking up coal from the old mine tips. Others had told me how the unemployed miners gathered fuel in this way; Mrs. Lloyd, for one, said that the men are sometimes killed. ‘The mountain side gives way on them and I see the police going up with their lanterns in the night looking for the bodies. Then we give concerts in our hall for the widows. You see, they goes at their own risk.’

At the George home, I was interested to learn that the husband had attended a government Training Centre. The first of these centres was established in 1925, and another in 1926, for men on the Insurance Register who had had no chance to learn a trade or had no regular employment. The scheme proved so successful that it was extended to the depressed mining areas, with the idea of reëducating young miners to enter other lines. The course is normally six months. By 1931 there were eleven such centres and more than 35,000 men have received training since their inception.

VI

Anyone who has seen unemployment seep into a neighborhood and settle up and down each street knows what a demoralizing effect it has on the community. Nothing is more devastating than to strip people of the chance to make their own go at life. The sense of defeat, of ‘what ’s the use,’ that smothers a household is one of the most excruciating things to come upon in a depression. That was why the spirit I found among the Rhondda miners and their families, of a sort I had seen snuffed out so often at home, seemed precious to me. The longunemployed families subsisting so precariously in America often can do nothing but wait. These people seemed to live while waiting.

That the Rhondda miners themselves had paid into the Insurance fund when they could, and that they stood ready to take a job when the Labor Exchange said the word, saved their self-respect, and gave their self-confidence a toehold. Meanwhile, with something to count on, they were freer to do things on their own for themselves — and the Quakers and others in their communities could bear a hand in that. Rugged individualism seemed to be surviving better on the dole than with us, where we have expected it to be distilled from general insecurity.

At Mars-yr-Haf the neighborhood work centres around self-governing clubs for unemployed men; around weaving, chicken farming, garden allotments, and many other activities. Most of the clubs operate carpentry and shoe-repairing shops in which they make and mend for their own homes and those of their neighbors.

Last year the Society of Friends aided 62,500 men in securing garden allotments. Since my visit, the National Government has not only resumed its grants for this purpose, but has set out to promote community efforts to provide occupation and recreation for the unemployed. The coöperation of voluntary bodies has been enlisted through the National Council of Social Service. Clearly it was because the British Unemployment Insurance System reached to the far-off villages in the Welsh hills, and provided for the primary needs of the miners’ families, that the British Quakers could operate above a mere subsistence level, and that retraining centres and community activities could be projected on a national scale.

VII

It can hardly add to our self-esteem to realize that here in the United States, except for favored areas, we have reached merely the hunger point in caring for the unemployed. Relief standards in many localities have taken no account of rent, light, fuel, or clothes. ‘You can freeze a man to death as surely as you can starve him to death,’ said a relief worker from West Virginia at a Washington hearing last winter. Yet not even a subsistence level has been maintained in much of our relief work during the last four years. In spite of tremendous effort, the generosity of individuals, and the exertions of exceptional officials and legislators, we have merely drawn up plans for three months, for six, for nine — plans presenting devastating gaps not only in time but in geographical space. It is becoming more and more apparent that we cannot face the years ahead with a scheme of protection still based on the Elizabethan Poor Laws. We have clung to them while England has forged ahead with her modern three-ply system of unemployment insurance, transitional benefits, and local public assistance, complemented by her system of labor exchanges.

If, in Mr. Roosevelt’s phrase, we are at last about to have ‘unified unemployment relief’ in the United States, it means that we can no longer sacrifice the helpless to the principle of local responsibility. There may be good in that principle, but the depression has proved that, unless it is thoroughly buttressed by state and national responsibility, it does not work. The experience of states which have set up effective relief administrations goes to show that federal aid, properly dispensed, can in like manner stimulate resourcefulness and organization all down the line, and at the same time save millions of our people from unthinkable neglect. The skeleton of such an integrated system is provided by the Wagner-Lewis bill, which, with the backing of the President, became law on May 12, carrying an appropriation of half a billion dollars, and substituting grants for loans.

The thing which invests this act with greatest significance is that it establishes the principle of national responsibility toward unemployment. If the Federal Government is to exercise its responsibility rightly, there must also be set up in the states modern public welfare departments which will be prepared to deal with unemployment as a permanent problem and which will reach down into the counties. In the last analysis, the effectiveness of relief will depend on what is done or left undone by local units. The states, moreover, should make provision for compulsory unemployment insurance, thereby turning over to industry some share of the burden incurred by its own risks.

If unemployment, then, under the conditions of modern production, is a responsibility of the whole country, and not just of the community in which it may be localized, we cannot much longer ignore the necessity for national moves to prevent it. Two further measures passed in June open the way. The long-fought-for federal-state employment service act should afford a country-wide base for employment planning; the recovery act a framework for concerted action, industry by industry. The little Emerson boy who brought his father his miner’s lamp knew what was wrong in the bituminous regions. Even with the return of normal production, it is estimated that one hundred thousand miners will be unable to find jobs. This merely illustrates and dramatizes our need for a planned economy which can supply opportunities for work.

The people of the Rhondda Valley and of the West Virginia coal fields, as I found them, have two things in common — their worklessness and their helplessness. For their helplessness, England has found a decent answer and we have yet to give one. For their worklessness, both England and America have still to discover solutions.