Exploring the Dangerous Trades

The autobiography of DOCTOR ALICE HAMILTON

EXPLORING THE DANGEROUS TRADES

by ALICE HAMILTON

25

QUICKSILVER was mined in Almadén, Spain, in Roman times, and even then mercurial poisoning was rife among the slaves who worked those mines. Later on, convict labor was used and then free labor, but always there was much sickness among the miners. Since nobody knew how to get rid of the danger, they did the next best thing: they shortened the hours of work. A tradition grew up in these Spanish mines which was still in force when the last published description appeared (in 1921), that eight days of four hours each should constitute a month’s work. The same method of protection was introduced as long ago as 1665 in the Austrian mercury mines of Idrla in the Upper Isonzo, now Italian, This is said to be the very earliest instance of legislation to deal with the poisonous trades.

One reason why work in the Spanish mines is so dangerous is the presence in the ore of droplets of pure quicksilver. Mercury ore is chiefly red cinnabar — mercury sulphide — which is quite harmless. That is the form in which it is found in most of our mines, in California, Nevada, Texas, Oregon, but there are some in which “the silver runs free,” as the miners say. During the First World War, when there was a tremendous demand for mercury fulminate to make detonators for high explosives, these mines were opened for a while, but work in them was so dangerous that they had to be closed down again. I talked with a man who had worked in such a mine in Sonoma County where the silver runs free and the temperature is over 90 degrees. He became severely poisoned after two weeks’ exposure.

One of the doctors told me of miners who not only became poisoned themselves but carried home so much quicksilver in their overalls that their wives contracted poisoning through washing the clothes. Drilling for the charge and blasting the rock produces a fine dust which is full of tiny droplets of mercury; these flow together and collect in pools on the floor to be scooped up. The heat volatilizes the mercury so that the air is full of it. They tried working the men in two-hour shifts with two hours off, then another short shift; they provided hot sulphur baths; they posted signs urging the men not to exert themselves too much, but it was all of no avail.

In mercury poisoning there are swelling and pain in the gums and lips, jerking of the limbs, a fine tremor which growls worse the more one tries to control it, and a characteristic psychosis which has been called “erythrism” from the Greek word for red, because of the blushing embarrassment so often seen in the victims. If you try to examine such a man, you find that instead of dwelling on his distressing symptoms, as most nervous persons do, he will make every effort to hold his arms steady, to speak distinctly, and then perhaps he will suddenly fling away, declaring that he won’t stand being looked at.

I have seen hatters, who could do their work satisfactorily at the accustomed bench when nobody was noticing them, go to pieces and shake like a leaf if I asked them to stop and show me something. In one of the Oranges I heard of a hatter whose muscles jerked so violently that he could walk to work only if he pushed a baby carriage in front of him, but once his mates had guided him to his sizing bench, he could carry on.

The mental symptoms caused by chronic mercury poisoning have been know n for centuries as a feature in the hatters’ trade — witness the old phrase “mad as a hatter.”Nowadays a mercurial psychosis rarely progresses to actual insanity, but it is bad enough to rob the victim of his zest in life, his contentment, his initiative. His disposition changes he is depressed and full of fears, of a sense of unworthiness, or he is irritable and easily angered; he wall not take orders, he cannot work in peace with others, or he is dull, apathetic, even somnolent. Withdrawal from the poisonous fumes usually brings recovery. Nowadays one rarely sees a serious case of mercurialism even among metallurgists.

This country is the third most important source of mercury in the world, Spain coming first and Italy second. Rut although there was plenty of opportunity to discover all about our mercury production, especially during the war, I could find in the literature only one reference to mercurialism in California miners and that was from the Eleventh Census Report. Of course I was keen to explore this unknown area and in 1923 I got the chance. Dr. Henry S. Forbes of Boston had become interested in this form of industrial disease and, being struck by the scarcity of information about its occurrence in this country, he offered to finance a study of mining and metallurgy and the making of felt hats, trades in which we should find cases.

So I went out that summer to California, knowing only that I wanted to visit the New Almaden mines in Santa Clara County and those of Idria in San Benito. The first was easy to find, but nobody seemed to know where Idria was — neither the railway people, nor the hotel clerks, nor the automobile association. They all assured me that California’s mercury mines were the biggest in the country, which was of course what one would expect of everything in that state, but the nearest to directions I could secure was the advice to get to Fresno and inquire there. I reached Fresno at seven in the morning and hopefully asked the stationmaster where to find the mines. “Well now,” he said, “I ought to know. They use this station all the time, but I never thought to ask them how they get here. The best thing you can do is to take a taxi. I’ll find you a good man, and see if he can’t find the way.” The taxi man was willing but hazy and we traveled till nightfall before we found Idria, which was really only seventy miles from the station by the right road.

It was a wonderful drive over mountain and desert — only it was not. really desert. My driver resented my calling it that. “Why, this is pretty good land,” he said. “Forty acres will feed one head of cattle.” I was just as stupid about recognizing highways. Our directions at the last ranch — they were miles apart —would be “when the road forks keep to the highway.” Then when we came to the fork, one road would have the tracks of two cars, the other of only one. We decided that the two-car road must be the highway and followed it. We were almost twelve hours finding Idria.

I had assumed that there would be at least a small commercial hotel where I could spend the night, but the young engineer-manager who came to meet me was overwhelmed at the suggestion. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “There are only three American houses here — mine, the storekeeper’s, and the doctor’s. I’d love to invite you to my house, but my wife has gone to the rodeo in Stockton”— and he paused uncertainly. I told him that I was old enough to be his mother, needed no chaperon, and would be glad to accept his hospitality. He brightened at that and said we should have supper with the storekeeper’s wife and breakfast too, so all was settled.

They were an intimate group at supper that night, like a little colony of aliens in a strange land, for the miners were Mexicans or California Spaniards and there was no settlement near-by. They were very likable and glad to talk and I learned a great deal about mining and ore reducing and mercurialism. I learned that it takes only a moderate heat (less than 400° centigrade) to reduce the ore and get quicksilver. Therefore it is risky for a man to handle his tobacco, to roll his cigarettes; for if ore dust is on his hands and gels into the tobacco, the heat will free the quicksilver and then volatilize it. Spanish miners insist on doing this and Americans always advise them to take to chewing tobacco instead. I learned also that the metallurgical works are always close to the mines because it is much cheaper to get the quicksilver out and ship it in flasks than to transport the ore.

Many curious stories were told me about this fascinating metal. It can penetrate anything — iron, vitreous tiles, firebrick, and, of course, wood. It has been found thirty feet down under an old furnace; and all the wooden floors and the condensers have to be torn up and put through the furnace sooner or later. Mercury begins to volatilize at about 40° Fahrenheit, so that it is impossible to keep the air clean unless all the work is done in an airtight apparatus — and this is simply impossible.

I saw plenty of opportunity for poisoning when I went over the premises the next day, and my talks with the men brought out many stories of cases, most of them in men who had had to quit because they did not know how to protect themselves or were oversusceptible. The experienced men were very careful to have their working clothes washed often and never to wear them home, not even the cap. When they felt an attack coming on — usually soreness of the mouth was the warning symptom — they would ask to be transferred to the mine for a spell to “sweat it out.” Fortunately the buildings of these California recovery works are very open, some of them mere sheds, so that the dangerous fumes are diluted. But furnace doors must be opened to feed in the charge, condensers are rarely completely fume-tight and they must be cleaned out once in so often because the fumes from the furnace carry soot as well as quicksilver and it must be treated to get the metal out. Even filling the flasks for transport is not free from danger.

The making of electrical apparatus and of mercury lamps requires the use of mercury, and of course much is used in laboratories; in fact, laboratory technicians are often exposed to dangerous fumes because of careless spilling of quicksilver on benches and floors. I had a curious experience, which showed the penetrating power of this metal, in a large factory for electrical supplies. On the second floor I had seen a process that required fairly large quantities of quicksilver and I had warned the manager of the danger of having a wooden floor in that room. Then I went downstairs to see, right under this room, the shower baths for the women employees. At the door I met the matron carrying a piece of stiff paper with a big globule of quicksilver on it. I asked her where it came from. “Off the floor,” she said. “Don’t ask me how it gets here from that room upstairs. All I know is I find some every morning and I scoop it up and carry it back to them.”

In one such plant, the Cooper-Hewitt, which makes mercury lamps in New Jersey, I saw what appeared to be complete protection for the workers against poisonous fumes. The apparatus is closed and every precaution is taken against the escape of mercury — but all the same a man sweeps the smooth linoleum floor all day long with a soft brush, and every day the workers are looked over by a nurse, to detect the first sign of a sore mouth.

None of the other mercury-using trades is so interesting as mining and recovery. The most important one, if we consider the quantity used, is making mercury fulminate, which I had already studied among the explosives. Next to that, I believe, comes the making of felt hats. Real felt, as distinguished from wool felt, is made from the soft fine hairs of animal skins, chiefly rabbit skins — those soft hairs you see when you brush back the surface coarse hairs. The legend is that St. Clement the Roman, who is the patron saint of felt hatters, once on a pilgrimage lined his sandals with fine hairs to ease his feet and that the heat and sweat and pressure produced a sole of firm felt. Those are the factors still used in making felt.

Making felt means matting fine hairs together and shrinking and pressing them till the mat is firm and hard. How early the acid nitrate of mercury was introduced to help the process I have not been able to discover, but we know that in the seventeenth century this method of preparing skins for felting was a secret of French Huguenot hatters. When they were driven out of France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, they carried the secret to England and for almost a century thereafter the French were dependent on England for their felt. In France the mercurial fluid is still called le secrét, the process is sécrétage, the workers are sécréteurs. But in English-speaking countries the term “carrot” is used, because the pelts take on a carroty yellow color, and we speak of “carroters” and “carroting.”

The function of the carrot is to make the hairs of fur limp and twisted and rough, which renders felting easier. As soon as the long hairs have been removed (by hand plucking in Europe, by machine shaving in this country) the carroters brush the pelt with the mercury solution and from then on, through all the complicated process, mercury is slowly given off, until the finished hat is practically free from it.

I saw in Russia the primitive method of felting, still used in the Orient. A pile of loose fur, cut from the skin by hand, lies beside a cone-shaped form. The hatter fills his mouth with water, strikes a bowstring, the vibrations of which blow fur into the air, and as it settles on the cone he squirts water over it from the corner of his mouth, presses it gently with a moist cloth, and carries on till the cone is covered with a thick layer. This is what we now do through a series of complicated machines. Nevertheless, hand work does persist somew-hat. The hand-plucked pelts are still considered the best, and, although one finds sizing machines widely used, the most expensive hats are sized by hand. Sizing means shrinking the soft, floppy cone down to the proper size and thickness, which is done by repeated plunging in hot water and kneading and pressing.

After the First World War a change for the worse came in the hatters’ trade and serious cases of mercury poisoning reappeared. This was because in every country very cheap felt hats were made, and that means using all sorts of shoddy mixed with a little real fur: to make felt, of it the carroting fluid must be much stronger. Not long ago I saw a New Jersey hatter who had worked for years in an excellent factory and had never been ill, but then a branch was opened for making cheap felt, and after only eighteen months there he was poisoned. When I saw him he was helpless; the least disturbance or effort would start arms and legs jerking violently, and he was so ashamed of his want of control that the tears ran down his cheeks as he talked to me. It is certainly one of the most distressing of the industrial diseases.

There have been many efforts made to get rid of mercury in the making of felt hats, especially in France, and a number of chemicals have been found which act on fur much as mercury nitrate does. But the use of the latter is completely entrenched in the industry — all the processes, all the timing, the different temperatures, the periods of ripening, are based on the use of mercury carrot. I was always told that to give it up would be to revolutionize the methods. Only in Russia did I see felt made without mercury. There, before the Revolution, this was a home industry and there was a shocking amount of poisoning, family poisoning really, in those peasant homes. Now they use caustic potash. The felt they showed me was pretty stiff and ugly, but when I said so I was told severely that in Soviet Russia human lives were more precious than pretty hats. I felt justly rebuked.

That was in 1924. Now, some seventeen years later, what we thought was impossible is taking place here in this country. American manufacturers of felt hats are about to give up the use of nitrate of mercury and substitute some non-poisonous carroting fluid. This great reform must be put to the credit of the industrialists themselves and of the Division of Industrial Hygiene in the Public Health Service and the Connecticut Bureau of Occupational Diseases. So one more poisonous trade promises soon to pass over the border into the safe trades.

26

One of the most striking results of the Second World War is the change in our attitude toward narrow nationalism, and the general acceptance of the fact that after this war some kind of international organization must emerge. Surely, among the first tasks that will face such an organization will be the control of epidemics and the restoration of public health service, and that is why I wish to describe briefly the way this work was carried on between the two great wars.

In 1924 two very exciting things happened to me — the first, an invitation from the Public Health Service of Soviet Russia to visit that, country and see what they were doing in the way of industrial hygiene; the other, my appointment by the Council of the League of Nations to the Health Committee of the League. I accepted both eagerly and in the fall of that year I went to Geneva.

The Covenant of the League had made provisions for an international commission of medical experts which the Council of the League was to appoint, for they knew well that of the pressing problems facing Europe in 1919 none was more urgent than that presented by the epidemics which had invaded Russia and were threatening that vague line separating Poland and the Baltic States from Russia; and the strict sanitary cordon which Germany had maintained during the war had broken down. Across the boundaries everywhere, returning soldiers and refugees were pouring, most of them diseased and half starved, and there was an appalling dearth of doctors and nurses, many having died in epidemics. There were no medical supplies, no disinfectants, no soap even.

I was full of eagerness to see the League and to meet the group of eminent experts from all over the world, but I did not look for anything exciting in the meetings, where I should probably have to hear reports, largely statistical, sent in by health inspectors, with all the human interest carefully deleted. But from the very first meeting I found myself in for an extremely interesting experience.

Through all the discussions, especially of plans for future activities, the Health Committee was faced with the difficulty of finding physicians and sanitary engineers adequately trained for public health work. Here again the Rockefeller Foundation stepped in and furnished traveling fellowships for men and women who were to be selected by their governments and sent to whatever country offered the best instruction in the particular field to be studied, the students pledging themselves to return home and enter the public health service. I had a number of these men and women in my classes at Harvard and it was a pleasure to teach them, for they were so eager to learn. I remember one class which had representatives of thirteen different nationalities, among them a Chinese, the ablest of them all. He told me of the appalling need of public health work in his country where, for over 400,000,000 people, there wore only some 4000 doctors trained in Western medicine, and almost all wore In the coastal cities. He was not the only student who gave me a picture of primitive conditions. When I asked a Serbian what was the most pressing public health problem in his country he replied, hydrophobia from the bites of dogs who had been bitten by rabid wolves.

In addition to the program for the training of public health experts, that 1924 meeting saw the inception of a great scheme to obtain and broadcast all information concerning the outbreak of epidemics. Never had it been possible to make governments exchange this sort of information; on the contrary, every effort had always been made to conceal an outbreak of cholera, plague, typhus, smallpox. People of my generation will remember the time when California refused to recognize an epidemic of bubonic plague, lest tourist and realestate interests suffer, so that Washington had to send William Welch and Simon Flexner out to the Coast with authority to deal with the situation.

That had been the way all the countries had acted, but suddenly, perhaps because of the terrible experiences during the war, that form of isolationism broke down and the governments of the Asiatic countries as well as the European, and our own for the Philippines and the Canal Zone, agreed to exchange as promptly as possible all information concerning the five epidemic diseases, cholera, typhus, smallpox, bubonic plague, and yellow fever. In later years others were added — encephalitis, meningitis, infantile paralysis, influenza. Singapore was selected as the center for these reports, which came from Vladivostok on the north to the Southern Archipelago and from Suez on the east to the Canal Zone, and were transmitted from Singapore by wireless to public health stations everywhere. In this way, an outbreak of cholera or plague in a remote part of China or India could be broadcast all over the world. The monthly printed reports used to come to me regularly. It is tragic to think that all that service is now at an end.

The League of Nations was in principle an international organization devoted to the welfare of all, but nationalism is deep-rooted, and “sacred egoism ” is to most “patriots” the first duty. I went to some meetings of the Opium Control Committee and I met some members of the Committee on the White Slave Traffic, and in both it was only too clear that certain delegates had the interests of their countries in mind far more than the welfare of the whole world. They could not forget that they represented their countries and must defend national interests.

But when I entered the great room where the Health Committee met I could breathe at once a different air. For here nobody represented his government; all had been chosen on the basis of their scientific standing, and all were working for the control of disease no matter where. Countries were rated only according to their need for help or their ability to give help. Those nations which had received help understood its importance and when, in 1928, England, under Sir Austen Chamberlain, began to sabotage the League and attempted to cut the budget of the Health Committee, a storm of protest arose, especially from the countries of South America and the Far East. These delegates said that the only activity of the League their people knew anything about was the health work. The budget was saved.

The Health Committee still exists though it has not met since the autumn of 1939. There are still some four or five members of the Secretariat left in Geneva, and epidemiological reports were still sent from Singapore to Geneva and from Geneva to the United States up to December 7, 1941. Then that last international service ceased.

But it will be restored some day. The task that will face us after this war will be far, far heavier and more widespread than in 1919, When the First World War ended we discovered the ravages that starvation had caused in Germany and Austria. But what shall we find in Poland, Greece, and Spain? Indeed almost all of Europe has suffered as much from lack of food as did Germany and Austria under what we then called the greatest mass starvation the civilized world had ever known. If Serbia and Montenegro were typhus-ridden then, they must be so now, and to them are added the Baltic States and Poland, and probably Rumania.

We know much less now about life in the conquered countries than we knew in the First World War, but it is not hard to imagine the plight, of refugees who have spread over all the face of Europe and much of Asia. We need only think back to Greece after the Turkish war, when the hordes of Near Eastern Greeks and Armenians were driven into that little country, and then multiply that number by hundreds of thousands in country after country. But we know that the task that will face us can be done; we can point to the work of the Health Committee of the League of Nations as a proof, and we can go forward on the path it blazed.

27

In the summer of 1924, as I have said, I received an invitation to visit Russia. It came from Dr. Kalina of the Department of Health, writing on behalf of the chief of that department, Semaschko, who wished me to make a personal survey of what Soviet Russia was doing in industrial hygiene. This was a very tempting invitation. Russia was still a land of mystery and terror; few outsiders had come back with descriptions of it which one could accept without question, for if they were not uncritically enthusiastic, they were uncritically condemning. It seemed to me unfair to expect much from a country which had gone through what Russia had — seven years of war, foreign and civil, and the complete destruction of her social system and her commercial relations with the outside world. We did not think it strange that the South took years to recover from a like experience which was far less deep-reaching and prolonged.

So I was prepared to view tolerantly a great deal of inefficiency and did not expect to find industrial medicine on a high plane. But tHe chance to visit the factories and to see for myself what life there was really like attracted me enormously. I had not the courage, however, to go alone; I persuaded three friends to come with me, three whom I could describe to Semaschko as “experts in social administration”: Mabel Kittreclge, who started the housekeeping centers of the public schools in New York City and was connected for years with the public school lunches; Edith I lilies, who was working with a fruit raisers’ cooperative in Pennsylvania; and Louise Lewis, who lived at the Lighthouse Settlement in Philadelphia and had specialized in work for the unemployed. We decided to go in the fall, when I was due to go to Geneva for the meeting of the League of Nations Health Committee, whose work I have just described.

Our country did not then — nor for years after — recognize Soviet Russia. Americans who wished to enter that country had to get visas from a Russian embassy in one of the European countries which did recognize it. We decided on Warsaw, and as soon as my work in Geneva was over, we journeyed to that city via Berlin. Dr. Rajchman, the Polish director of the Geneva office oi the Health Committee, had been very much interested in our venture. He strongly advised us to join the Quaker groups in Russia. “You will find, he said, “that they are the only foreigners the Russians trust. There were several foreign groups who went in to help during the great famine of 1921, but though they did wonders in feeding the children, especially the American Relief Administration, the Russians never believed they were disinterested. They thought these people had come to spy out the land and report its weaknesses. But they trust the Quakers.”

It was a long journey from Berlin to Warsaw. We left in the evening. I woke early and watched from the window the sunrise over that great, sad Polish plain that the Tharauds describe in L’Ombre de la Croix. The shadow of the Cross was often to be seen, a great wooden cross, so poor it was not even painted, but very high, towering over the roadside. It was a poor land, sandy to the west, with scrubby pine trees, miserable little farms with too many people to a field, working barefoot and in rags. It made me think of the West Country in Ireland for poverty, but it must have been partly the result of war, for we saw old trenches and ruined houses only half rebuilt. It was perfectly flat, marshes here and there, no forests, nothing. Then farther east the land grew better and there were big estates, well farmed, even with machinery and grand houses surrounded by trees. The big estates had not been partilioned in Poland; partition had been promised but the aristocracy fought it bitterly and successfully.

We went to the Hotel Bristol, an amusing mixture of attempted gorgeousness and actual shabbiness and primitiveness — plenty of plush curtains but filthy rags on the floor, broken, chipped tableware on the breakfast tray, pillowcases for towels when the latter gave out, and a water supply which consisted of a tap out in the gilded corridor.

We went at once to call on the Quakers and met there a Russian-Polish refugee, a Pani Jagman (Pani is “Madame”), who took us completely under her wing for the whole week, which meant that we met many Polish people informally and saw everything we were interested in. The Poles were very friendly and all of them spoke some language besides Polish, sometimes skipping from French into German into English and back again.

The day after our arrival I had to present my letters to the Minister of Health and of Labor, and then go all over the building of the Hygienic Laboratory and meet every single man and woman and look at every rabbit. By two o’clock my face was stiff from smiling and making polite speeches. But they were really dears, especially Wrodzinski, the Minister of Health. The men were mostly American-trained, and the Rockefeller Institute had helped them to put up a fine building, the first effort of the new government. I got a deep impression of their eagerness to make their country fine and the equal of others, to do all the things that civilized countries do but that Russia never let them do. They were struggling with such overwhelming problems, with malaria and tuberculosis, which had never even been studied in Poland, and typhus on the Russian border, and typhoid in Lodz, where with half a million people there was no sewage system and only wells and rain water.

It took us a week in Warsaw to get our visas, and Warsaw was a trying place for Americans. For breakfast we had very poor coffee with milk, and rolls, and butter which we usually could not eat. By eleven o’clock we were hungry but we could not get a real meal before two, when apparently one was supposed to eat enough to last for the whole twenty-four hours. The food was abundant — but it did not last for twenty-four hours, and suppers were very late and unsatisfactory.

In the restaurant we frequented was a man who sat in the same corner each day and I could not help watching him. He had the face of one who has been through hell and bears the marks thereof, and I wondered what his life had been. So I was much interested when I met him at a coffee party in the house of one of our Polish acquaintances. He told me that he had been professor of astronomy in the University of Tiflis. One evening when he was working in the observatory he heard a tap on the window. He guessed that it was one of the political suspects whom he, like many of the intellectuals, often helped to hide.

When he opened the door he found he was right. The man was a Georgian, swarthy, heavily built, secretive, asking for shelter for a short time but saying nothing about himself. He worked in the laboratory for a month, then disappeared as silently as he had come. “That was Dzugashvili, Stalin,” the professor said. “Why then,” I exclaimed, “if he is under such obligation to you, surely you can appeal to him and get permission to return to the university.” He smiled and shook his head. “You do not know him,” he said. “Nobody who knows Stalin would ever appeal to him on personal grounds or expect him to feel gratitude.”

The professor had fled at the beginning of the Kerensky revolution, when the hordes of returning soldiers roamed through the country, pillaging and murdering. It was that experience, with its horrors which he would not speak of, that had left that look on his face.

When finally word came that our visas wore in order and we might take the train for Moscow, we had only a few hours in which to get photographed and to make out pages of “protocol” in Russian. The photographer was almost hysterical when confronted with the job of producing ten prints of each of us in three hours’ time and kept repeating, “This is not America. We do not work that way.” The porter at the hotel undertook to make out our papers in Russian and that was a terrible job, for his English was not what he claimed it was. The greatest difficulty came with our fathers’ Christian names — always a matter of such crucial importance in Europe. Louise Lewis’s gave no trouble. Lawrence is a saint’s name and known in all lands, but Edith Hilles’s Allen, Mabel Kittredge’s Abbott, and my Montgomery were too much for him and I don’t know what he really wrote down. We made the train, however, and the next evening we reached the Russian border.

It is amusing to look back on that entrance into Russia, which was even more exciting and frightening than the visit to occupied Belgium in 1915 because it was much more unknown — none of us had ever been there, none of us could speak the language — and for the first time we should be outside the protection of our own government. There would be nobody to appeal to, nobody to defend us if we got into trouble — only the Quakers. We clung to the thought of the Quakers.

Russia in 1924 was so unlike the Russia under the Five-Year Plan and the Russia of today that in later years when I have heard returning travelers describe what they saw, I have felt that it was not the same country. At that time Russia was still suffering from the “imperialist” war, the civil wars, the war against Poland, and the great famine; it was struggling, not very efficiently, to start up industry and to get the people housed and fed, but everything was fairly chaotic and the Russians admitted it with a humility that was disarming.

They believed that, since we were Americans, we had never seen anything but the most highly mechanized processes, and when I said that in my Connecticut home oxen were still used to plow and harrow, they smiled incredulously and said I was very kind. They told us a humorous story that was going around Moscow, about the Commission for the Electrification of All Russia, which bore on its office door the notice, “Please knock. The electric bell does not work.” Where I had expected defiance and a Martin Chuzzlewit kind of bragging, I met rarely anything but this engaging self-deprecation. Dr. William Thayer, who went over during the Kerensky regime, told me he had the same experience, but judging from the reports I have heard since then, all that has passed away.

When one lives with a Quaker relief group one does not “live soft.” We were four in one fairly large room, with four army cots, one tin washbasin, and a great porcelain stove which served as chimney for the stove on the first floor and was always warmish, so that one could thaw out one’s hands against it and dry one’s towel. Even in October Moscow was bleak and cold and I remember no sunny days. There was, however, one warm room, which served as living room and dining room, and there we could have an open fire of birch wood. All Moscow was heated with wood; we saw great piles of it around the buildings of the Kremlin. As for food, I can remember only that I was hungry a good deal of the time, that I got the most satisfaction out of the heavy, damp, strong-tasting black bread, that kasha, a queer sort of cereal, was rather horrid; but most of all, I remember that the tea was not tea and the coffee was not coffee.

Our host was a most likable young Englishman, Edward Balls, the only Quaker left in Moscow, though there were still a few in the famine districts beyond the Volga. Later on, Dr. Effie Graef, an American, came back from the Volga region and added much to our little household. Our housekeeper was a gracious lady of the old regime, who spoke of her position with great thankfulness and said nothing at all about any trials she had been through before she came to the Quakers. Mr. Balls, however, told us that she was just back from Siberia, where she had gone to visit her exiled daughter.

The girl, only eighteen years old, had been arrested because she was frequenting the British Trade Commission, going there on Sunday afternoons to tea dances to which the young men invited these girls of the former aristocracy. The charge against her was “unconscious espionage,” which seems quite impossible to refute, and she was exiled to Siberia, to some village which must not have a school higher than a primary. This sort of sentence was quite common, apparently to guard against any contact with the intelligentsia. The poor mother could not share her daughter’s exile, for they would have had nothing to live on, but her old peasant nurse went with the girl, back to her own Siberian village, where it would be easiest, to look out for her.

That first evening we had two interesting visitors. One was a tall, distinguished-looking Englishman dressed in the very becoming Russian clothes which our host also had adopted, for comfort and ease: a Russian blouse of black velvet, buttoned high around the throat and belted at the waist, high leather boots, and a flowing cape instead of overcoat. His name was Wickstead and he was a passionate devotee of Soviet Russia. “It is the only country in which life is really free,” he said. We gasped at that. Mr. Balls had just finished a long speech of caution, warning us that each would have her spy following and reporting; that careless words, even in English, might cause grave danger to others, if not to ourselves; that we must walk on eggs always.

“Oh well,” said Mr. Wickstead, “if you are thinking of politics, all right, but I care nothing for politics. The Russian mind is so open and free from inhibitions that talk about real things can be freer than anywhere else. If I should go into my club in London and ask a member what he thought about immortality, for instance, he would simply stare at me and think me mad. Here you cannot get off a theory so preposterous that the Russian will reject it. He will say, ‘Now that is strange. I have never heard of such a thing. Let’s sit down and discuss it.’ And look at the freedom of social life. If in England I am asked to dinner and accept I must remember to go that particular night whether I feel like it or not, and I must be on time. Here I can go or not and at the hour I please. Ten chances to one my hostess has forgotten she asked me, and the meal is never on time.”

The other visitor was a Russian, a man who had worked with the Quakers during the famine, acting as interpreter and liaison man with the government. I asked him if he was a Party member. “Not at present,” he said. “I have been expelled but I hope to win my way back.” “Should I be impertinent if I asked you why you wore expelled?” “No, I can tell you that. It was for disobedience to orders. I was in the Volga region, at the height of the famine, when a summons came for me to return to Moscow. But the Quakers simply could not spare me. Few of them spoke any Russian. I was urgently needed, so I disobeyed the order, and for that I was expelled.” “Was the job in Moscow’ very urgent?” I asked. “Not at all,” he said. “The summons was just a bureaucratic blunder. But,” he went on very seriously, “you see I followed my own judgment, and that one must not do. One must bow always to the decision of the Party.” “Even if you believe it. to be wrong?” I asked. “Even then. Indeed a Communist must rejoice to sacrifice his own judgment and his own will to that, of the Party.”

The days in Moscow were bewildering, exciting, exhausting. Since neither Mr. Balls nor our Russian guides ever thought of taking a cab — the funny little horse cabs with their bearded istvostchiks in enormous overcoats were the only remnant left of Czarist Russia — and since the streetcars were usually full up, we tramped for hours over cobblestones slippery with mud. The first thing that struck us in the streets was the contrast with Warsaw, for here in Moscow we saw neither wealth nor abject poverty, except for the spectacular beggars, old men and women looking as if they were made up for the stage. The crowds were uniformly shabby, the women hat less, the men in Russian blouses, but they were much more warmly dressed than the poor in Poland and they looked well-fed.

We had come fully expecting to find everything topsy-turvy, but all the same it was exciting to see the beautiful Galitzin Palace turned into a Museum of Safety and the great white marble Noblemen’s Club housing the trade-unions. We were taken to the Red Square and joined the procession of the faithful who were worshiping at Lenin’s tomb, among them a crowd of awe-struck school children, shepherded by their teachers. We visited schools and told each other we must not be critical if much that we saw was crude and even ridiculous. To try to carry out John Dewey’s theories with no equipment and with only ignorant young Bolshevists or bewildered elderly White Russians for teachers could not produce anything but a queer mess.

I felt, as I visited the schools, that I was witnessing the birth of a new religion. Everywhere, from kindergarten to medical school, each room must have its Lenin corner, containing usually a redcovered altar with a picture or bust of Lenin, and with various “Thus spake Lenin” texts on the wall. For the little children the altar had a picture of the child Lenin and often a vase of flowers standing before it. Under the Czar, children had been taken to church; now they were taken to Lenin’s tomb — not once only, but again and again.

I also saw the birth of a new aristocracy. We visited a school which formerly had taken only the daughters of the nobility; when we were there it took the children of Party members, and among them T found a ten-year-old girl whom I had known at Hull-House, the daughter of a very interesting Russian refugee. “How do you happen to be in this school, Sonya?” I asked. “They told me only Party members’ children were admitted and your mother tells me she is not yet a member.” “But I am an exception,” replied Sonya. “You see, Mother was a hard-labor convict; she assassinated the Governor, so I can come to the school without waiting for her to be admit ted to the Party.” After all, the basis for this new aristocracy is not essentially different from that of the old regime. It is only more recent.

Moscow was terribly overcrowded. There were no new buildings to house the great influx of people since the Revolution, and though the houses and apartments of the Whites had been taken over and divided among the workers, there were not nearly enough and the government was rationing space very strictly. A commissar came to measure our bedroom — characteristically he did it with a tape measure instead of a yardstick — and if he had found it too large for four, we should have been obliged to put in a fifth cot for Dasha, our heavyfooted housemaid. Luckily he found we had a little less space than we were entitled to. In a way it was curiously satisfactory to be able to feel, for the first — and last — time in my life, that I was no better off than anyone else.

The Minister of Health, Semaschko, was a big, ruddy, pleasant-mannered Russian. He knew no word of any language but his own, and he passed me on to two German-trained and German-speaking Jewish doctors, Guelman and Gilewitch, who were very good to me and showed me hospitals and factories. There were not many of the latter to interest me, but I saw some excellent, newly equipped rubber and electrical works, and some old, primitive textile mills. Pottery, felt hats, paint grinding, were still largely home industries carried on by peasants during the winter months, and there was no eagerness to show me that sort of work. The most impressive sight was the Obuch Institute, the first hospital in the world devoted to occupational diseases only, with seventy-five beds, five laboratories, and a staff of thirteen physicians. They told me that Leningrad and Kharkov had similar institutions. Indeed, it seemed to me that there was more industrial hygiene in Russia than industry.

My guides were deeply absorbed in their work and enthusiastic over it. As we tramped over the cobbles or sat in tramcars I learned a good deal about the life of a physician in Russia. They were both frankly shabby — Dr. Gilewitch’s overcoat was fastened with a safety pin and he was literally “on his uppers.” But he had what an American doctor does not have, independence of money, for in Russia money does not spell success. The Russian doctor has no need to sacrifice the research work he loves and go into practice in order to make more money for his family; he does not need to have an office on a good street, drive an expensive car, send his children to private schools, carry a heavy life insurance — he is free from all those compulsions. And though he lives in scant comfort, he knows that if he breaks down, or his wife or child is ill, the best sanatoria and rest homes in the country are open to him. Above all, he is free from the drive of competition.

I looked with a little envy at the women doctors, for never before had I been in a country where men and women in medicine are absolutely equal. The head of the best hospital in Moscow, the one devoted primarily to textile workers, was a tall, blonde woman who had a mixed staff under her. The Medical School was full of girl students and I have been told since then that some 70 per cent of the graduates now are women. The Russians say women are readier to take up the hard life in the villages than men, and that they are for the most part interested in practical medicine, not research. Russia needs practicing physicians far more than pure scientists.

The Obuch Institute had already begun to make routine examinations of groups of workers exposed to certain dangers, and at that time they happened to be working on the men who handled benzol in a rubber factory. The men would pass the night in the hospital so that all the tests could be made without any interruption of their work.

I recalled an incident which had happened just before I left home on this trip. Some cases of severe benzol poisoning had occurred in a Massachusetts city, in men applying a coating to patent leather. I was very keen to study them, to discover just what conditions had caused the trouble, but it. was impossible. The employer was hurt and indignant at the implication that his plant was at fault, the company doctor was secretive. The hospital, which at first was eager to help me, suddenly drew back after being notified by the insurance company that il any information was given out, their cases would thereafter be sent to anot her hospital. In Russia, worker, employer, doctor, insurance carrier, were responsible to the government only.

Madame Rykova, the wife of the then Premier, took me to see some of the eighteen centers lor the treatment of tuberculosis, it was the only time I traveled in a really good automobile in Russia. Dr. Guelman once drove me in a patched-up Ford, the two front doors of which were tied together with a clothesline to keep them shut. The tuberculosis dispensaries were excellent; they deserved to be copied widely. They were for ambulatory patients, men and women still able to work, who would come for a two-hour midday pause. There they had a nourishing meal and a siesta on an open porch, and then again at night they came for a good meal and a bath. They slept in great while bearskin sleeping bags in a ward with open windows.

Moscow’s indust ries were for the most part more interesting to the student of personnel management and general factory hygiene than to a specialist in poisons, and my friends found a great many things to interest them while I was hunting for lead and benzol. It was a surprise to us all to find that the piece-work system was in force everywhere, as it is not in capitalist countries. We were told frankly that if he were paid by the day, the Russian would not work. Probably now it is quite different., but in those days Russian factories had none of the ordinary comforts one expects to find proper seats for women at work, rest rooms, a pause for lunch in the seven-hour day. When we spoke of this last, we were told that no break in the working day was needed; the women did not get tired as they would under a capitalistic system, for they were working for their own benefit.

Our evenings we spent at the opera, or ballet, or theater. Lunacharsky was keeping up the Czarist traditions in the arts and we saw beautiful ballets and heard good music. We might have seen the Moscow Art Theatre but chose instead Meyerhold’s, as something we could not hope to see at home. They were giving Revolutionary plays, most hilarious for us, though the audience took them seriously. There was much satire about the bourgeois nations who were repeatedly taken off, especially the Poles and the Americans. The former would be shown in medieval costume, bowing and kissing the ring of a prelate, or reciting poems with great fervor to ladies who swooned with emotion. Our countrymen were instantly recognizable; they wore tortoise-shell spectacles and high, shining collars, and were constantly having their shoes shined by little bootblacks. They sat in enormous rocking chairs with a telephone in each hand, and plotted the destruction of Soviet Russia. The women tilted across the stage in highheeled slippers and rifled the men’s pockets.

One American woman who came to see us several times made a rather dreadful impression on me. She was the first one of that class of American Communists whom I came to know later at home, who are ready to go to any lengths for the sake of the Cause.” One evening we got to discussing the universal espionage and I said Russia could never hope to have a united people till she got rid of it and restored people’s trust in each other, that mutual suspicion and mutual betrayal spoiled human relations. She insisted il was necessary.

“But,” I said, “don’t you value at all a sense of honor, respect for truth-telling, loyalty.'”

She smiled in a pitying way. “ Petty bourgeois ideology,” she said.

“And you are not revolted at all by the cruelty, the midnight arrests, the shooting, without real trials, of hundreds?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “The one question I ask is, ‘Does that help the Party?’ If it does, it is right; if not, it is wrong.”She was a beautiful creature, with gold-red hair and a profile like Duse’s, but I found her a horror.

After a fortnight we decided that we must see more of the country than only Moscow, so we separated. Louise Lewis and Edith Hlilles went to Leningrad and Kiev, while Mabel Kitlredge and I accepted Mr. Balls’s offer to pilot us to the Quaker stations near the Siberian border.

We left with Mr. Balls at noon, and I was a little disconcerted to find that we three were in one compartment with two lower berths and two which could be made into uppers, but Mabel Kitlredge said she had often traveled that way in France during the war and it was perfectly easy. I must sav that it was. Of course it was not what we should call a real sleeper. It was “traveling soft” — that is, the seats were cushioned, but nothing else and not much of that. There was a filthy little table which was also a stepladder for the upper berth, and a box for a candle which was lighted about an hour after dark and went out some time after midnight.

We had a lunch basket, well stocked by Hr. Graef in Moscow, and every now and then when the train stopped we would pile out with all the others and run to a hot-water spout and fill our teapot and drink more tasteless Russian tea. We spread our food on a clean towel and used the unconsumed tea for dishwater. It was squalid, but nothing to the squalor of the toilet room. I thought of the grand Instit ute of Sanitary Hygiene where they were doing research on germs, and wished they would tackle some simpler and more immediate problem.

At eleven o’clock the next night we reached Buzuluk, the center for the Quaker famine work, and Mr. Balls left us, for it had been arranged that we should keep on three hours more to one of the villages, where Alice Davis was keeping open one of the Quaker centers. I had not felt so young and timid in almost half a century as I did when he left us and two young Red soldiers came in to occupy the other two berths. They were nice boys and went to sleep at once, but we spent a rather long three hours, trying not to wonder what we should do if Alice Davis had not got the telegram and was not there to meet us. I kept dozing off and waking in a panic thinking I had forgotten the nameof the town, which is none too easy, Sorotchinskoi, with the accent on the “rot.”

The conductor, however, came to put us off, and thereon the platform with a lantern was Alice Davis in a great fur coat and cap. She explained that her Ford was out of order but she had brought the cart. She piloted us out to a country cart filled with straw covered with burlap and we swung ourselves up and sat flat, with our feet out, and bounced along to the village, two miles away, a scattering of brown mounds with a vast space which was called a street.

Presently we entered a courtyard, a door opened, and we entered a lovely little house — clean and white and empty and warm and sweet, after dark, stuffy, crowded, untidy Moscow. The big white stove was warm and a samovar was humming and Alice Davis’s Russian friend and housemate, Nadezhda Victorovna Danilewska, was there. She was of the old regime and had her own tragic story, which I heard later. They gave us tea and we went to bed in narrow wooden beds, with ropes for springs, but heavenly comfortable after the shelves in the train. The wind howled all night and I kept dreaming of wolves, for there are many around these villages and it seemed just the night for them.

The next morning we had breakfast at a white deal table scrubbed till the surface was silver, and we drank real coffee, wonderful after the roasted wheat we had in Moscow. As we ate, the village priest was shown in, a gentle man who asked for help to send a blind child to Orenburg for operation. Alice Davis promised it to him. She worked with all of them — with the Soviet, giving a ration of fats to the hospital and of food and clothing to the children’s home, with the Central Health Department by maintaining the malaria clinic, and even with the Tartars, for she found them worshiping in a mosque where all the windows were broken during the famine. She gave them new ones because the poor things got pneumonia or a relapse of malaria, and they had to pray. She had a dozen villages under her, where she supervised malaria work, and she raised cabbages and carrots and potatoes for her child feeding. She ran three tractors. A fourth tractor she had had harnessed to mill machinery which cleaned millet and ground sunflower seed for the villages.

She took us to the children’s home where we found a siekly-looking youth with fanatic blue eyes instructing the youngsters in “political knowledge.” He was a young Communist and as such his duty was to go to schools and orphanages and teach Bolshevist doctrine. Then we went to the school, across mud such as I have never seen. It was black, soft on top, greasy and slippery underneath, so that all one’s mind had to be concentrated on one’s footing for fear of being precipitated into the awful filth. The school was small and all the children were crowded into one room, watching a rehearsal of a play to be given on the great, day, November 7. It had been sent from Moscow and the teachers were ordered to train the children to perform it. Mrs. Danilewska murmured a translation to us as we watched.

We saw a peasant family, parents, grandparents, children, and we saw the conflict between the rigidly orthodox and superstitious old people and the cheeky young generation boasting of the new Science learned in school and ridiculing the old beliefs, while father and mother looked on in bewilderment, not knowing which was right. At last the old man gave up. “Well,” he said, “ I can see it is time for us old ones to turn our faces to the wall and die. There is no place left for us.” And on that note the play ended. Later we heard some children singing in the street and their song was: “Get out of the way, you old folks. There’s no place for you but the grave.”

It was indeed at that time the avowed policy of the Kremlin to do everything possible to break up family ties and get the children away from parental influence into the pure air of Bolshevist doctrine. The ideal was to bring all children up in great communal homes, but this could not be realized at once; it cost too much. If one suggested that it would be hard to substitute loyally to an abstraction for love of one’s own family, and that impersonal discipline would be less effective than a father’s authority, one was smiled upon. Youthful delinquency, one was told, was the product of capitalism; there would never be any need for juvenile courts in Soviet Russia.

Some thirteen years later, a friend of mine who is a passionate admirer of Soviet Russia came back from one of her many visits there and told me that she had been bewildered to find a complete reversal of the government’s attitude toward children and the family. Now all the st ress was laid on the close relation between parent and child, even to the point of sentimentality. She had never heard so many songs about mother love and home, sweet home. Evidently the ruling group had seen during those years that there were causes for youthful delinquency which could not be brought under the head of capitalism and, as dictators can do, they declared a new policy: discipline and order in the family and in the school, loyalty and obedience to individuals, not to an abstraction.

The meeting in celebration of the November Revolution was held that evening in Sorotchinskoi, and it was impressive. There was much oratory, which was not worth translating, but it was well worth while to watch the faces of the men and women gathered there, so clearly filled with a sense of their new dignity and importance.

We went back to a most luxurious dinner of cabbage soup with a big spoonful of thick sour cream in it, fresh rye bread, and homemade sweet butter, roast chicken and baked apples, and then to bed for a long sleep. The next morning was clear and cold. The mud had frozen hard and for the first time I could really see the village as I walked through it. The streets were ridiculously wide; it seemed to me that one could run from twelve to sixteen trolley lines through them and have plenty of room, It reminded me a little of a town in Colorado, near the border of New Mexico, Alamosa, where I once spent a night — a village with wide streets out of all proportion to the little houses and stores, and beyond it the desert.

The steppe is so like the desert. The houses were of adobe too, like those in New Mexico, but with thatched roofs, the windows tiny with irregular panes of glass, and the walls very thick, making charming deep window recesses. More pretentious ones would have the clay covered with boards, which gave them the cold, thin look of frame houses. Some had a heavy basketwork woven out of birch branches with clay piled between it and the wall, so as to have more protection against the cold. Sheds and barns ran in a square connecting with the house and making a courtyard inside. All along the street at short intervals were wells with long well-sweeps such as one sees still in New England.

We made rounds with the visiting nurse, who had been trained in Moscow, making calls in peasant houses, the poorest of the poor, people who had survived the famine but had lost many of their family in it. But even in those houses it was not squalid, never close and odorous, not even in one where the woman was washing clothes in a big trough in front of the stove, her two little boys peering down from the top at us, and a little brown calf tethered beside her and a little white pig sitting in front. I thought of the heavy, human odor in Chicago tenements. If people are to be poor, there is an advantage in living in the country.

We went into one Tartar house, beautifully clean, where we saw a pretty young girl dressed in burlap which had been carefully sewed into a full skirt and scant waist, and with a clean kerchief on her head. Her father explained to the nurse that he hoped to sell her soon, for tea, sugar, and rye — a good deal of rye. We told the nurse to beg him to find a good man for her, — she was quite unmoved throughout the conversation, — but he said there were no good men left since the war.

We took a Maxim Gorky to Buzuluk, a three-hour journey. That is a fourth-class car, or rather an accommodation train with third-class seats. They call it a Maxim Gorky, some say because it turns everyone into pessimists à la Gorky, some say because he wrote so much about such trains. Along one side of the car runs a long bench, and opposite are rows of shelves, three deep, placed at. right angles to the car. You can climb up to the top or to the middle one and lie there all day, if you like, but if you choose the bottom one you must be prepared to let your upper neighbors come down and sit with you sometimes. Our car was full and quite dark, except for a candle at one end. The train burned wood and ran slowly but very steadily, not wasting time at stations. One get s a little hypnotized by the slow , steady jogging and the endless plain outside. There seems no reason why it should ever stop or why one should ever get out. The men were eagerly curious about us, after we had shaken our heads and said “Amerikansky,” and I did long to talk to them. It is missing half of the interest of a country not to be able to talk the language.

Buzuluk is a town, but not radically different in appearance for the most part from a village. The Quaker headquarters were large and comfortable, in charge of an American woman with two White Russian ladies as assistants, one of them with an adorable six-year-old daughter. There we had our first experience of a Russian bath. The household had just completed theirs, having gone into the big shed in two groups, first the women, then the men. It was still hot and we eagerly accepted the invitation to use it.

We found it cloudy with steam from a great caldron into which hot stones had been put and then water poured over them. You sit on a bench and soap yourself thoroughly, then you wash wdth dipper after dipper of hot water, and then you sit and steam a long time and then repeat the process. I wondered if it was not this weekly soaking that explained the surprising sweetness of the air in the peasant houses.

The day came to an end with a lovely church service, to which we went by bright moonlight, making me think of the description in Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Little Natucha adopted me and chattered Russian without caring at all to have me answer. We walked together to church and once there she edified me by her crossings and bowlings and prostrations, though the last did make me squirm, the church floor was so dirty for a nice little child’s face.

The train for Moscow left at half past three in the morning, but it was an hour late, which meant an uneasy night for us and for our hostess. Then we could not be sure till it came whether we could get on, for they only sell a ticket if there is a vacant place. As a matter of fact there was only one vacant, but they let us on. Mabel and I stretched out, feet to head, on the single lower berth of a two-berth compartment, and the man in the upper left us at Samara, at nine the next morning. It was a long journey, till six of the following evening, but. I never tired of it. A snowstorm came up and the steppe and the villages were altogether different from those we had seen on our way east. The carts now were lowsleds, making a wonderful background for the scarlet skirts of the women; the villages were white blobs; the rivers were dark green; the few pine forests were like fairyland. We got very expert in taking care of ourselves, running for hot water, buying little loaves of rye bread and chunks of roast chicken which the peasant women were selling.

A visit to a prison was one of our most exciting experiences in Moscow. The younger Tchertkoff — the son of Tolstoy’s closest friend — came to ask me if I would request permission to visit a prison in which one of the conscientious objectors had recently been placed. This prisoner was a physician, a Tolstoyan, and he refused to do military service. Tchertkoff had heard that the doctor was to be sent to an agricultural colony to do farm work instead of practicing his profession. He wanted to find out if the story was true. So we went to the Prison Department to get a permit. That was the only government service which shocked me profoundly. The chief, named Korngold, looked like a gorilla ; his neck was thicker than his head and there was almost nothing of a head above his eyes. Even worse was a woman who came in and stared at us. She also had no forehead; she was cross-eyed, her hair streaked down over her cheeks, and her mouth was half open. I thought her an idiot, but Korngold presented her as chief psychiatrist for the prison system.

We got our permits and Dr. Graef, Mabel Kittredge, and I went to the prison, escorted by a young official and two doctors. Of course it was a fairly good prison or we could not have seen it, and most of the politicals were not there. The lack of ventilation and of cleanliness would make most Americans think it a dreadful place, but what struck me most was the informality and humanness of it all. I would far rather be there than in any of our prisons I have seen.

The men were all working except those who were practicing for a concert, but not one was in uniform, nor were the guards, so that we could not tell guards from convicts. They were allowed to talk to each other and when we came in they would all stop work and cluster around us, together with their guards, and chatter eagerly. They were allowed to smoke, too. We went into one of the cells, a big one, wdth fifteen squalid cots, a clay stove with the inevitable teakettle on it, a long table, books, checkers and chess. I met the doctor and found that he was practicing his profession there and also allowed to abstract medical articles. He was in for five years, but at the end of half the time he might petition for release if he had a good record.

Before we left Russia, people brought me letters they dared not mail. Dr. Kalina had offered to wrap up and seal, with a government seal, all the pamphlets I had accumulated, and some of our party thought the best thing to do with the letters was to slip them inside, then they would be safe. But my instinct was against that and I made a tight little package of them and put it inside the bosom of my dress — luckily, for at the border the Red Guards were so intrigued by the government seal that they broke it and searched through the pamphlets.

We crossed into Poland with a feeling of indescribable relief, and that is an experience which many travelers have since told me they also had, even when, as has been true now for many years, thev were carefully shielded throughout their stay in Russia from any contact with people of the old regime. But there is for many people, as there was for us, a sense of underlying terror which they cannot explain — not fear of any danger to themselves, but a sense of mysterious and dreadful things going on under the surface. The convinced Bolshevists among our friends kept on by losing themselves in work, very necessary work, and not thinking of anything else; so did the Quakers. But to people only looking on, as we were, it seemed a terrifying land, and we were thankful to be back in shabby, safe, unenlightened Poland.

In Paris I delivered my letters, one of them to Prince YussoupofF, the assassin of Rasputin, a tall, distinguished-looking man, whose great hands I looked at with fascination, seeing them in imagination doing their work on that powerful peasant. Paris was a great contrast to Moscow but, as I wrote Miss Addams, “though I love to see gayety again and to have comfort and ease, there are lots of things in Moscow that are finer. It is fine to see people all alike plain and shabby, never to see a flapper or a woman with a made-up face (the Russian girls with their knitted scarfs are far more attractive than Paris women in fashionable hats), to see no rich people and few abjectly poor. But certainly a soft bed and warmth and light and delicious food are delightful.”

The aftermath of my Russian visit was a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association in Boston where I spoke, together with Maurice Hindus, Father Edmund Walsh, Donald Stevens, and James M. Landis, then a. Research Fellow at Harvard Law School. I remember the meeting vividly, for it is the only time I was ever hissed. The papers made a good deal of the hissing but it was really not very bad, only it gives one a strange feeling.

I had said that modern history had seen three great revolutions and in every case there was one country that underwent the greatest upheaval and one country that succeeded in remaining untouched by it. First came the intellectual revolution, the Protestant Reformation. Germany was torn by it, Spain shut it out. Then came the political. France was torn by it, Russia shut it out. Now we had the economic revolution, with Russia the seat of the greatest upheaval. Was our country to follow the example of Spain and of Czarist Russia and refuse to let any influence from that movement reach our land? If we did, might we not come to the same fate as those two backward nations? There was some hissing then, but more when I quoted the Magnificat: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.” Clearly one must not bring communistic sentiments in the Bible to bear on modern life.

28

In 1935 Harvard made me a Professor Emeritus, which is a great honor, and the Latin ending nicely ignores my sex. It meant leaving Boston, except for yearly visits, and making my home in Hadlyme, Connecticut, where I had already spent some eighteen happy summers. After the home in Fort Wayne was sold we sisters longed for a place which would be home for all the year round, especially for the time when we should be old and no longer working, and I wanted to get it soon, so that when that time came we should have struck our roots deep, and retiring from professional life would not be a bewildering shock but a release to a home that had grown very dear. So in 1916 I began to look about for a place in New England, not too far from Baltimore and not too solitary for our old age. Katharine Ludington found it for me at Hadlyme Ferry, some twelve miles from her family home in Old Lyme.

Hadlyme is not even a village; it has no legal existence except that we are allowed a fourth-class post office in the store at Brockway’s Four Corners. It is a loose collection of groups of houses, at the Ferry where wc live, at the Center, at the Four Corners, and at Town Street, a long road with scattered houses and Hadlyme Church. It seems that in the old days of bad roads and primitive vehicles, the people of this region found it almost impossible to get to church either in Lyme to the south or in Haddam to the north, so they petitioned the Ecclesiastical Society for permission to have a church of their own. This was granted and the new community was given a name made up from the names of the two old ones.

The house where Margaret and I live is one of the old Brockway houses. It was lived in for many years by Airs. Samantha Brockway Comstock, who is still vividly remembered by my older neighbors as a lady of strong will, some eccentricities, and a great love of flowers. We still have dozens of her white trilliums which we are told must be more than fifty years old. The house is lovely, spacious and dignified, built by people who loved beauty and were ready to take a lot of trouble to achieve it.

When one climbs to the top of the cliff, one sees a wide stretch of the river with its deeply wooded banks, and the dark, winding creek, bordered with blue pickerel weed and rosy-purple loosestrife. That creek is as lovely as any little “river” which English poets have sung. You can go up it with the inflowing tide, swinging gently around the curves, between banks where the wild rice grows high and the birds come in flocks to feed on it, where white goose-neck and scarlet cardinal flower and the hardier joe-pye weed and white boneset make vivid patches close to the stream. The marsh, covered with wild rice, spreads out on both sides and the creek takes a winding, wandering course through it. High tide is the best time to go, for at low water the muddy banks show, and if you linger long enough for the turn to come, you can float silently out with only now and then a touch of the oars to keep her headed right.

Then there is the River. On the creek a motorboat is sacrilege, but the River is wide enough to stand the chugging of the engine and you can go up to Chapman’s Pond for white watcrlilies or, better still, you can slip into Selden’s Cove at high tide (at low tide you can enter only if you get out and wade, pushing the boat through the shallow channel), go through the long, lovely stretch of Selden’s Creek, out again to the River and to the great granite rocks at Broekway’s Landing. Here you can build your lire and cook your supper and watch the sunset, then go softly up the River and home in the gathering darkness.

Connecticut seems to me an autumn country, at its loveliest when the year is coming to its close and the beauty of blue haze and golden and crimson leaves has that touch of impermanence which makes it what Wordsworth called “an aching joy.” Spring is excitingly charming; each day brings something new and lovely — the loveliest, perhaps, the sudden flowering all over the hills of the dogwood. Summer is steady, deep green, little change except when the south wind with its soft purple hazes gives way to the north wind and crystal clearness.

Most changeable of all is winter, for nothing else can so transform the scene overnight as can a fall of snow. In winter the granite cliffs come out, one can see the very bones of the land when their soft green covering is gone, and then the pines and hemlocks come into their own, no longer green but a purple black. The marsh is a frozen lake, the River is an intense blue, filled with ice cakes which go swinging up and down with the tides. Life becomes something of an adventure in winter, when roads are icy or deep in mud and the nearest chain grocery store some fifteen miles away. But nothing in summer can be as purely delightful as a snowy walk against the north wand, coming back to the welcome of a cup of tea before an open fire.

This home of my declining years is a place for meditation on many things, for looking back and for looking forward. It is not that I think my years have brought me wisdom; my thoughts about labor and government and war are of value only as they are based on an experience which goes back to a time now so remote and different that it might be a century ago. That experience gives a background, a yardstick, a basis of comparison, to my meditations on the world as it is today.

As I look back over the history of labor during the years which followed my discovery at Hull-House that there was a labor question, I can see an advance that is truly amazing. In my own field, the dangerous trades, I have shown repeatedly in the course of these chapters that the reforms, already great, are continuing.

No matter what new dangers may be brought about by new methods of manufacture, they can be controlled and they will be. Even if, after this war is over, a wave of reaction sets in as it did after the hirst World War, even if, as an investment counselor said to me the other day, “we shall be in a position to put labor back in its proper place,” even then the setback will not be so serious nor will it last so long. The medical profession will never again neglect industrial diseases, the employer will never again refuse to assume responsibility toward them. Our progress in this field has been great and it will keep on.

With this issue we conclude the serialization of Dr. Hamilton’s Autobiography. In four installments the Atlantic has published approximately 53,000 words — a little over one third of the book, which will appear in April.

With each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR