PART II (continued 2)

SPECIAL FEATURE ARTICLES

(New York World)

One illustration, a half-tone reproduction of a photograph of the exterior of the theater.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE

A Gift to the East Side—How the Settlement Work of Misses Irene and Alice Lewisohn has Culminated at Last in a Real Theatre—Its Attractions and Educational Value

The piece is the Biblical "Jephthah's Daughter," adapted from the Book of Judges. The hero, "a mighty man of valor," has conquered the enemies of his people. There is great rejoicing over his victory, for the tribe of Israel has been at its weakest. But now comes payment of the price of conquest. The leader of the victorious host promised to yield to God as a burnt sacrifice "whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house to meet me when I return from battle." And his daughter came forth.

In the last act, the girl herself, young and beautiful, advances toward the altar on which fagots have been piled high. In her hand is the lighted torch which is to kindle her own death fire.

The chorus chants old Hebraic melodies. Even the audience joins in the singing. The play takes on the aspect of an ancient religious ceremonial. Old men and women are in tears, moved by the sad history of their race, forgetful of the horror of human sacrifice in the intensity of their religious fervor.

Such is the artistry of the piece; such the perfection of its production.

Yet this is no professional performance, but the work of amateurs. It is the opening night of the new community theatre of New York's densely populated East Side.

At No. 466 Grand Street it stands, far away from Broadway's theatrical district—a low-lying, little Georgian building. It is but three stories high, built of light red brick, and finished with white marble. All around garish millinery shops display their showy goods. Peddlers with pushcarts lit by flickering flames, vie with each other in their array of gaudy neckties and bargain shirtwaists. Blazing electric signs herald the thrills of movie shows. And, salient by the force of extreme contrast, a plain little white posterboard makes its influence felt. It is lit by two iron lanterns, and reads simply, "The Neighborhood Playhouse."

The Misses Irene and Alice Lewisohn of No. 43 Fifth Avenue have built this theatre. It is their gift to the neighborhood, and symbolizes the culmination of a work which they have shared with the neighborhood's people.

Eight years ago the Henry Street Settlement started its scheme of festivals and pantomimes, portraying through the medium of color, song, and dance such vague ideas as "Impressions of Spring." It was the boys and girls of the Settlement who performed in these pantomimes. It was they who made the costumes, painted the necessary scenery, sang and danced.

And both daughters of the late Leonard Lewisohn were always interested and active in promoting this work.

Out of it, in due time, there developed, quite naturally, a dramatic club. Plays were given in the Settlement gymnasium—full-grown pieces like "The Silver Box," by John Galsworthy, and inspiring dramas like "The Shepherd," a plea for Russian revolutionists, by an American author, Miss Olive Tilford Dargan. Such was the emotional response of the neighborhood to this drama that four performances had to be given at Clinton Hall; and as a result a substantial sum of money was forwarded to "The Friends of Russian Freedom."

Then, in 1913, came the famous Pageant, which roused the entire district to a consciousness of itself—its history, its dignity and also its possibilities.

That portion of the East Side which surrounds the Henry Street Settlement has seen many an invasion since the days when the Dutch first ousted the Indians. English, Quakers, Scotch have come and gone, leaving traces more or less distinct. The Irish have given place to the Italians, who have been replaced by the Russians. In the Pageant of 1913 all these settlers were represented by artistically clad groups who paraded the streets singing and dancing. No hall could have held the audience which thronged to see this performance; no host of matinée worshippers could have rivalled it in fervor of appreciation.

When the Misses Lewisohn, then, built their new playhouse in Grand Street, it was not with the intention of rousing, but rather of satisfying, an artistic demand among the people of the neighborhood. And in the new home are to be continued all the varied activities of which the Henry Street Settlement festival and dramatic clubs were but the centre. It is to be a genuine community enterprise in which each boy and girl will have a share. Miss Alice Lewisohn herself thus expresses its many-sided work:

"The costume designers and makers, fashioners of jewelry, painters and composers, musicians and seamstresses, as well as actors and directors, will contribute their share in varying degree.

"Putting aside for a moment the higher and artistic development which such work must bring, there is the craftsman side, too, which has practical value. The young men will become familiar with all the handiwork of the theatre, the construction and handling of scenery, the electrical equipment and its varied uses. It will be conceded, I think, that in this respect the community playhouse is really a college of instruction in the craft of the stage."

It is a college with a very efficient and well-trained staff of professors. Mrs. Sarah Cowell Le Moyne, already well known as a teacher of elocution and acting, will be one of its members. Miss Grace Griswold, an experienced co-worker of the late Augustine Daly, will act as manager.

The pupils of this novel school are to have amusement as well as work. The third floor has been planned to meet many more requirements than are usually considered in a theatre. Across the front runs a large rehearsal room, large enough to make a fine dance hall when occasion demands. Here, too, is a kitchenette which will be used to serve refreshments when social gatherings are in progress or when an over-long rehearsal tires out the cast. In warm weather the flat-tiled roof will be used as a playground. It will be the scene, too, of many open air performances.

The Neighborhood Playhouse has been open only a few weeks. Already it is in full swing. On the nights when the regular players do not appear the programme consists of motion pictures and music. There is a charming informality and ease about these entertainments; there is also genuine art, and a whole-hearted appreciation on the part of the neighborhood's people.

(New York Evening Post)

THE SINGULAR STORY OF THE MOSQUITO MAN

BY HELEN BULLITT LOWRY

"Now you just hold up a minute"—the bungalow-owner waved an indignant hand at the man in the little car chug-chugging over the bumpy road. "Now I just want to tell you," he protested, "that a mosquito got into my room last night and bit me, and I want you to know that this has happened three times this week. I want it to stop."

The man in the car had jumped out, and was turning an animated, and aggressive, but not at all provoked, face on the complainer.

"Are you certain your drains are not stopped up?" he asked.

"Oh, those drains are all right. It's that damp hollow over in Miss K's woods that's making the trouble."

"I'll go there immediately," said the aggressive one. "She promised me she would fill that place this week."

"All right, then," answered the placated bungalow-owner, "I thought you'd fix it up if you found out about it. I certainly wouldn't have bought around Darien if you had not cleared this place of mosquitoes."

The aggressive one plunged into the Connecticut woods and began his search for possible mosquito-breeding spots. He was the "Mosquito Man," the self-appointed guardian of the Connecticut coast from Stamford to Westport.

He was not born a Mosquito Man at all—in fact, he did not become one until he was forty years old and had retired from business because he had made enough money to rest and "enjoy life." But he did not rest, and did not get enjoyment, for the mosquitoes had likewise leased his place on the Sound and were making good their title.

Came then big fat mosquitoes from the swamp. Came mosquitoes from the salt marshes. Some lighted on the owner's nose and some looked for his ankles, and found them. Three days of this sort of rest made him decide to move away. Then, because he was aggressive, he became the Mosquito Man. The idea occurred to him when he had gone over to a distant island and was watching the building of houses.

"This place," he said to the head carpenter, "is going to be a little heaven."

"More like a little other place," growled the head carpenter. "Here they've dug out the centre of the island and carted it to the beach to make hills for the houses to be built on. One good rain will fill their little heaven with mosquitoes. Why don't the people around here drain their country?"

That night the Mosquito Man telephoned to a drainage expert in New York and demanded that he come out the next day.

"I don't like to work on Sunday," the expert objected.

"It is absolutely essential that you come at once," he was told. "Can you take the first train?"

The first train and the expert arrived in Darien at 5:51. Before the day was over a contract had been drawn up to the purport that the expert would drain the salt marshes between Stamford and South Norwalk for $4,000.

The Mosquito Man now began to talk mosquitoes to every one who would listen and to many who did not want to listen. "That bug," the old settlers called him at the time—for old settlers are very settled in their ways. The young women at the Country Club, whenever they saw him coming, made bets as to whether he would talk mosquitoes—and he always did. Every property-owner in the township was asked for a subscription, and some gave generously and some gave niggardly and some did not give at all. The subscriptions were voluntary, for no one could be forced to remove a mosquito-breeding nuisance from his property. This was in 1911, and only in 1915 has a mosquito law been passed in Connecticut. The Mosquito Man was forced to use "indirect influence," which does not expedite matters.

A subscription of $1,000 came from the big land corporation of the neighborhood, after the "indirect influence" had rather forcibly expressed itself.

"I want $1,000 from you," said the Mosquito Man to the representative of the president—the president was in South America. The representative laughed, so the Mosquito Man spent several days explaining to him why property is more valuable when it is not infested with pests. But every time that the $1,000 was mentioned, the representative could not restrain the smile.

"Well," the Mosquito Man said, at last, "I will make the drainage on your property anyway, and it will cost me $2,000. If you want it left you will have to pay me every cent of the $2,000, not just the $1,000 that I am asking now. Otherwise I shall fill up my ditches and let you enjoy your mosquitoes."

The representative did not laugh at this, but cabled the president in South America. As the president had just been at Panama, and had seen the mosquito extermination work, the $1,000 subscription came back by return cable.

The Darien Board of Health also was a spot against which in direct influence was knocking, for it was a rich Board of Health with $150 at its disposal—and the Mosquito Man wanted that appropriation to flaunt in the faces of the old settlers.

"God sent mosquitoes," objected one member of the Board of Health, "and it is going in the face of Providence to try to get rid of them."

All in all, the money was raised. Some whom he asked for $100 gave $25, and some whom he asked for $25 gave $100, and some millionaires did not give at all—but a sail-maker is still telling proudly of how he gave $5, and "I haven't regretted a cent of it since."

The draining now commenced, and the expert and the Mosquito Man were of the same stripe. The work was completed in six weeks. Just about this time people stopped calling the Mosquito Man "a bug," and the members of the Country Club even tried to make him talk mosquitoes to them, while the sail-maker felt sure that his $5 had done the whole job. Hammocks were swung out in the yards—and a hammock hung outside of the screens is the barometer of the mosquito condition.

The Mosquito Man was feeling very satisfied the night he went to a dance at the Country Club. But the east wind blew in the mosquitoes from the Norwalk marshes.

"It was the most embarrassing experience I have ever had," said the Mosquito Man. "I sat right behind a big fat lady whose dress was very low and I watched the mosquitoes bite her; her whole back was covered with red lumps. That night I telegraphed to the man who had done the draining and he telegraphed back that all of Norwalk township must be drained."

Norwalk proved to be a much severer task than Darien. In Darien the Mosquito Man had found only indifference and prejudice; in Norwalk he met active opposition. Property owners and city councils seem to be afraid that the value of property will be brought down if any sanitation scandal is advertised. It really appeared to be simpler and better business to ignore the fact.

To do away with this opposition, the Mosquito Man handled his campaign in a popular manner. The cooperation of the newspapers was gained and every day he published articles on the mosquito question; some of the articles were educational and others were facetious—while one came out that brought the property owners crying "murder" about his ears. This was the article in which he gave the statistics of Norwalk's health rate in comparison with other Connecticut towns. The smallest subscriptions were encouraged, for, after a man has given a dollar to a cause, that cause is his. Many a child was received with a welcoming smile when he brought to the campaign offices a ten-cent donation.

True, ten-cent donations were not suggested to adult contributors, and the Mosquito Man did much to induce the well-to-do citizens to subscribe according to their means. He still tells with relish of the club of women which took up a collection, after his talk, and presented him with two dollars, in small change.

"The women, though, were my greatest help," he adds; "I found that the women are as a rule better citizens than the men and are glad to be organized to fight the mosquito and fly menace. Of course, I found some uneducated ones that owned a piece of property a foot square, and were afraid that I would walk off with it in my pocket if I came to look it over—but, as for the educated women, I could not have managed my campaign without them."

A large contributor to the fund was the monastery at Kaiser Island. For years this had been a summer resort for the monks, who filled the dormitories in the old days before the mosquitoes took the island. Only one priest was there when the Mosquito Man visited the place to ask for a subscription.

"Very few come any more," said the priest. "It is because of the mosquitoes."

"Will you contribute $500 to get rid of them?" asked the Mosquito Man.

Briefly, the Mosquito Man offered to repay the $500 himself if he did not exterminate the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes went; the monks came back to Kaiser Island.

Yet, in spite of the occasional generous giver, the $7,500 was never quite raised, and the Mosquito Man himself had to make up the deficit. The citizens of Norwalk, for instance, contributed only $150.

This all happened three years ago, and now not a child in the twelve miles but can tell you all about mosquitoes and how a community can avoid having them. The Mosquito Man is appreciated now, and the community understands what he has done for them and what he is still doing—for the contract merely drained the salt marshes, doing away with the salt-water mosquitoes. There were still the fresh-water mosquitoes, and there was still much work for some one to do. That some one has been the Mosquito Man.

During the three years, he has made it his business to drain every inland marsh within his territory, to turn over every tub which may collect water, to let the plug out of every old boat which is breeding mosquitoes, and to convince every ancestor-encumbered autocrat that his inherited woods can breed mosquitoes just as disastrously as do the tin cans of the Hungarian immigrant down the road. The Mosquito Man has an assistant, paid by the towns of Darien and Norwalk—and together they traverse the country.

"It was difficult finding a man who would go into mud to the waist when need was," said the Mosquito Man, "but I finally found a good man with the proper scorn of public opinion on the clothes question, and with a properly trained wife who cleaned without scolding."

You can find traces of the two men any place you go in the woods of Darien or Norwalk. In a ferned dell where you are quite sure that yours is the first human presence, you come upon a ditch, as clean and smooth as a knife—or you find new grass in a place which you remember as a swamp. Perhaps you may even be lucky enough to come on the two workers themselves, digging with their pick and spade—for all summer long the Mosquito Man is working eight hours a day at his self-appointed task.

You might even find him in New York some off-day—and you will know him, for surely he will be telling some rebellious apartment-house owner that the tank on his roof is unscreened. For they do say that he carries his activities into any part of the world where he may chance to be; they do say that, when he was in Italy not so very long ago, he went out to investigate the mosquitoes which had disturbed his rest the night before.

"Now you must oil your swamp," said he to the innkeeper.

That night there was no salad for dinner, for the innkeeper had obeyed the order to the best of his ability. He had poured all of his best olive oil on the mosquito marsh.

(Country Gentleman)

Five half-tone illustrations, with the following captions:

1. "A Traction Ditcher at Work Digging Trench for Tile."

2. "Ditch Dug With Dynamite Through Woods."

3. "Apple Packing House and Cold Storage at Ransomville."

4. "Nelson R. Peet, County Agent and Manager of the Niagara County Farm Bureau, New York."

5. "Part of the Crowd Listening to the Speakers."

A COUNTY SERVICE STATION

Where New York Farmers Get Help in Their Fruit Growing and Marketing Problems

BY D. H. WILLIAMS

You've got to look into the family closet of a county and study its skeletons before you can decide whether that county's farming business is mostly on paper or on concrete. You've got to know whether it standardizes production and marketing, or just markets by as many methods as there are producers.

As a living example of the possibility of tightening up and retiming the gears of a county's economic machinery to the end of cutting out power losses, Niagara County, New York, stands in a distinct class by itself.

Here is an area of 558 square miles, with Lake Ontario spraying its northern line. A network of electric and steam railways and hundreds of miles of splendid state highways make up a system of economic arteries through which the industrial life-blood of the county circulates.

Forty-eight hours to Chicago's markets, the same distance to New York's; three wealthy industrial and agricultural cities within the county itself—Lockport, Niagara Falls and North Tonawanda—operating with a wealth of cheap electric power generated at Niagara Falls—these are some of the advantages within and without the county, the value of which is self-evident.

Beginning with the southern plain section, Niagara's agriculture changes in type from general hay and grain farming to a more intense fruit-growing industry as the northern plain section is approached, until within the zone of Lake Ontario's tempering influence the fruit industry almost excludes all other types of farming.

There is hardly a more favored fruit section in the country than the northern half of Niagara County. Apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, cherries, quinces make up the county's horticultural catalogue. The latest available figures rank Niagara County first among the counties of New York in the number of fruit trees; second in the total number of bushels of fruit produced; first in the quantity of peaches, pears, plums and prunes, quinces and cherries; third in the number of bushels of apples.

Yet there are things about the county which no statistics will ever show, such things, for instance, as the condition of the orchards, the market value of the fruit, the earning capacity of the land as a whole—in other words, the bedrock rating of the county. You have to get at these things by a different avenue of approach.

A rather close auditing during 1914 of the accounts of some eighty-seven typical good farms in perhaps the best section of Niagara County brought out the fact that labor incomes from these farms, on the whole, could not be classed as strictly giltedge. One diagnosis made by a Niagara County investigator is recorded in these words:

"Though Niagara County has many of the best fruit farms in New York State, there are numbers of orchards that have been abandoned to the ravages of insects and disease. There is also a tendency toward extensive rather than intensive fruit growing, which has resulted in many large plantings being made.

"Niagara County does not need more orchards, but rather cultivation and spraying of the present orchards; it does not need to produce more fruit, but rather to insure better grading and marketing of the present production."

This observation is dated 1914, one year after leading farmers and business men of the county, convinced that all was not so well with them as the lifeless census figures would have one believe, made the move to set up and operate for the county a farm bureau. New York is the national hotbed of farm-bureau enthusiasm and propaganda.

Almost six years to the day after the inauguration of this bureau, I went into Niagara County. And before I left I was able to sketch a rather vivid mental picture of what a farm bureau really can do for a county, be the raw material with which it must work good, bad or indifferent.

Up in the office of the Niagara County Farm Bureau at Lockport I waited some two hours for an interview with its manager, Nelson R. Peet. That wait was an eye-opener.

Three women clerks and stenographers and the assistant manager occupied this room. The clerks were trying to typewrite, answer the continuous ringing of the phone, respond to buzzer summons from Manager Peet's private office and talk with a stream of visitors, all at the same time.

I spent two whole days and half a night in these offices and not once save at night was there a let-up in this sort of thing. It was business all the time; the business of service! Niagara County farmers are using the bureau.

Nelson Peet, manager, is a spectacled human magneto. His speech and his movements fairly crackle with energy; his enthusiasm is as communicable as a jump spark. A young man in years, yet mature in the knowledge of men and the psychology of service, he never wastes a minute dilating upon the philosophy of farm management; but he has worked twenty hours a day to see that Niagara County farmers got all the labor they needed during rush seasons.

This man has been with the bureau three years. When he came to it the bureau had a paid-up membership of 325. In March this year, when I was in Niagara County, the membership stood at 2185, and was increasing daily. It led by a good margin, I was told, the fifty-five New York county farm bureaus. These, in 1918, had a total membership of 60,000. More than half the farmers in Niagara County are members of the Niagara Bureau.

When Peet first took charge there were two broad courses open to him. He might have planned a program of paternalistic propaganda in behalf of the farmers of the county. Such a program calls for a tremendous amount of talking and writing about coöperation and community interests, better economics and better social conditions, but too often results in the propagandist doing the "coing," while the "operating" is left to somebody else.

The other course was to find out what the farms and farmers in the county needed most and then set to work with little ado to get those things. Peet chose the latter course. And in so doing he has staged one of the best demonstrations in rural America. He has shown that a farm bureau can be made into a county service station and actually become the hub of the county's agricultural activities.

With the aid of state-college men, one of Peet's foremost lines of bureau work has been that of taking inventories of the farming business of Niagara County. For four years these records have been taken on some 100 typical farms. Group meetings are regularly held at the homes of the bureau's community committeemen. Here, with the records they have been keeping, the farmers assemble. Here they work out their own labor incomes and compare notes with their neighbors. The farm bureau helps the men make these business analyses—it does not do the work for them. Now the farmers ask for the blank forms and are themselves as enthusiastic over farm-management records as the men who specialize in such.

These figures serve the bureau as an index to the county's progress. More than once Peet has referred to them and discovered where leaks could be plugged. For example, these records showed an average labor income of $182 a farm for the four years ending 1916.

"This fact," Mr. Peet explained, "we put to work as the reason for doing something to benefit the fruit industry. What could be done? The answer in other highly specialized fruit sections seems to have been central packing houses. We held a meeting, inviting one very influential fruit grower from each loading station in the county. We showed charts of the farm-management records. It didn't take long for the meeting to go on record as favoring the central-packing-house plan.

"Later meetings were held in each community, the farm-management charts were again shown, and at every loading station the meetings went on record as favoring central packing houses. To make a long story short, sites and methods of financing these houses were worked out. There were already two old central packing houses in operation. They took on new life. Five new ones have been formed. All were incorporated and federated into a central parent association, which owns the brand adopted and makes the rules and regulations under which the fruit is packed.

"From the very beginning the proposition has been pushed not as a means of beating the selling game by selling coöperatively, but as a means of securing the confidence of the consuming public, which must ultimately result in a wider distribution and better prices. In fact, the matter of selling has not been fostered from the farm-bureau office. We have concerned ourselves solely with uniform grading and central packing. We believed from the start that the selling of properly graded and packed fruit will take care of itself, and this stand has been justified.

"Each association makes its own arrangements for selling, and in every case has secured better prices than the growers who sold under the old system. The most satisfactory feature of this work centers round the fact that the best and most influential growers are heart and soul behind the proposition. The personnel of coöperative movements, I believe, is the main feature."

When I visited Niagara County the seven central packing associations were doing a splendid business, handling about $1,000,000 worth of apples between them. Only two of the associations were more than one year old. Many of the associations were dickering for additional space for packing and for extensions for their refrigerator service. Other communities in Niagara and in other counties were writing in for details of the plan, to the end of getting the same thing started in their sections. And inquiries were coming in from states outside of New York.

Even with the best of selling methods, no commodity will bring a profit to the producer unless the greater portion of it is eligible to the A-1 class. Too many seconds or culls will throw any orchard venture on the rocks of bankruptcy. It came to Manager Peet's attention early in 1917 that the farm bureau had a golden opportunity to put on another service, which alone, if it worked out in practice as well as it did on paper, would justify the existence of the bureau.

He noticed that though orchardists were following spraying schedules—the best they could find—some had splendid results in controlling apple scab and other pests, but others got results ranging between indifferent and poor. This seemed paradoxical, in view of the fact that one man who followed the same spraying schedule as his neighbor would have more scabby apples than the other.

At that time L.F. Strickland, orchard inspector for the state department of agriculture, had paid particular attention to a limited number of apple orchards in Niagara County with a view to controlling scab by spraying. He discovered that, though the average spraying calendar is all right, climatic conditions in different parts of the same county often upset these standard calculations, so that a difference of one day or even a few hours in time of spraying often meant the difference between success and failure. In other words, it was necessary to study all contributing factors, watch the orchards unremittingly and then decide on the exact day or even hour when conditions were right for a successful spray treatment. He found that one must strike the times between times to get the optimum of results.

So Mr. Strickland, in conjunction with his regular work, kept an eagle eye on a few orchards and would notify the owners when it seemed the moment for spraying had come. It worked out that those favored orchardists had magnificent yields of A-1 fruit; others in the same sections, following the rather flexible spraying calendars, didn't do nearly so well.

All this set Manager Peet to thinking. "Strickland hasn't got an automobile and has lots of other work to do," he reasoned; "but why, if he had a car and could give all the time necessary to such work, couldn't the same results be had in orchards all over the county? Why can't this farm bureau put on a spraying service?"

He put the idea up to the executive committee of the bureau. The idea was good, they agreed, but it would cost at least $500 to try it out the first year. The bureau didn't have the available funds.

"Tell you what," they finally said: "If you want to get out and rustle up 500 new members at one dollar each to pay for this thing, we'll authorize it."

Peet was telling me about it. "Here the bureau had been working for four years with a paid-up membership of about 375," he said, "and if I believed in my idea I had to get 500 more by spring. It was February eighth when the committee gave me this decision. Well, I did it in time to start the ball that spring!"

He got the new members because he had a service to sell them. Arrangements were made whereby the county was divided into six zones, varying in soil and topographic conditions. Criterion orchards were selected in each zone. The inspector, with the aid of daily telegraphic weather reports and through constant inspection of the criterion orchards, decided when the hour struck for the most effective spraying of these orchards.

In the meantime Manager Peet and the inspector had worked out a code system for spraying instructions and put this into the hands of the growers in the six zones. When it came time to spray, the telephones from headquarters in Lockport were put to work and the code message sent to certain orchardists; these in turn repeated the instructions to a number of other orchardists agreed upon, until every member had received the message.

The scheme has worked. The first year there were 800 members who took this service; the second year—1918—there were 900; this year there are 1500. It is paying for itself many times over. One central packing house with nine grower members reports that eight of the members used the spraying service and that none of these had more than five per cent of their fruit to cull out. The ninth member sprayed, but not through the service. He culled forty-five per cent of his crop. There are scores of similar instances.

Seeing how quickly he could get the support of the Niagara farmers for any move which had practice and not theory to recommend it, Manager Peet next began to agitate for an improvement in city-marketing conditions in Lockport. Up to August, 1915, the system—if system it might be called—of distributing farm produce for Lockport's consumption consisted of sporadic visits by producers to the city with produce to be sold at prices largely controlled by the local grocerymen. Likewise retail prices to consumers were chiefly regulated by the same standard.

A grower might drive into Lockport with 100 quarts of strawberries. He would stop at a grocery and offer them.

"No," the grocer would say, "I don't want any. Say, how much do you want for them anyhow?"

"Ten cents a quart."

"Too high; I'll give you six."

Whereupon the man would drive on to see the next grocer. But the man who offered six cents might go straight to his phone, call up the rest of the trade and inform it that there were 100 quarts of strawberries on the streets for which he had offered six cents against ten asked. The result would be that the farmer would get no better offer than six cents.

So Manager Peet joined hands with the Lockport Board of Commerce and went at the job of righting this condition. He proposed a city market for farmers. The nearest approach to a market was a shelter for teams which the local food dealers had rented.

To 700 farmers in the vicinity of Lockport Manager Peet wrote letters, calling their attention to these conditions and offering the city-market idea as a remedy. And he used publicity among Lockport's population of consumers, showing them the economy of such a move. The farmers held a get-together meeting, decided on a location for a market in Lockport, decided on market days and market hours. After this the farm bureau got the city's common council to pass an ordinance prohibiting the huckstering of farm produce on the streets during market hours; also an ordinance setting the market hours, marking off a street section which should be used as a market stand, and putting the superintendent of streets in charge.

That was all. Not a cent of appropriation asked for. The market opened August 10, 1917, with fifty farm wagons in place. Before the summer was over it was common to find more than 100 at their stands. The local war-garden supervisor acted as inspector. He looked over the produce, advised the farmers how to pack and display it, and used every energy in the direction of popularizing the market among producers and consumers alike.

Between Manager Peet and the inspector a scheme was worked out whereby every Thursday was bargain day in market. They would get a certain number of farmers to agree to pack and offer for sale on those days a limited number of baskets of their finest tomatoes, say. Or it might be corn. In the case of tomatoes the bargain price would be ten cents for baskets which that day were selling regularly for eighteen to twenty-five cents. To each of these baskets—no farmer was asked to sacrifice more than ten—was attached a green tag noting that it was a bargain.

Each bargain day was advertised in advance among Lockport consumers. Thursday mornings would see an early rush to the market. The bargains would be cleaned out and then business at normal prices would continue at a brisker rate than usual.

The first year of its operation this market was held on fifty-one days. During this period 1300 rigs sold out their produce for a total of $13,000. This simple move has resulted in stabilizing prices in Lockport and has encouraged the bringing in of farm produce. Prices automatically regulate themselves. If they begin to get too low in Lockport, the supply in sight is immediately reduced through action by the producers in shipping the stuff to Niagara Falls or Buffalo by motor trucks.

The distribution of Lockport's milk supply, as happens in hundreds of cities, has been attended by considerable waste and expense as a result of duplication of delivery routes, breakage of bottles and uneconomic schedules.

The first night I was in Lockport, Manager Peet was holding a meeting of the milk producers supplying the city for the purpose of settling this inequity once and for all. A little agitation had been carried on ahead of this meeting, but only a little. Peet had a plan.

"It's all wrong to plan for a municipally owned central distributing system," he was explaining to me the next morning; "these are too likely to get mixed up in politics. So last night we just about clinched our arrangement for having our city distributing system owned by the producers themselves. In the past we have had eight distributors with fifteen wagons handling the milk supplied from fifty dairy farms. There has been a big loss in time and money as a result of this competition.

"The farm bureau got the producers together on the plan of securing options on these distributors' interests, and last night we just about wound up all the preliminaries. We already have our limited liability corporation papers. We're incorporating under the Membership Corporation Law. Our organization comes under the amendment to the Sherman Antitrust Law, you know, following closely the California law under which the California fruit growers' associations operate.

"We figure that we will need between $20,000 and $30,000 for the purchase of buildings, wagons, equipment and good-will now in the hands of the distributors. At first we thought it would be a good plan to have every member of the association subscribe to the amount proportioned by the number of cows he keeps or the amount of milk he has for sale. But for several reasons this wouldn't work. So we hit on the scheme of having each man subscribe to the amount he personally is able to finance.

"We already have $24,000 subscribed in sums between set limits of $100 and $1000. We're issuing five-year certificates of indebtedness bearing six per cent interest. Our producers will have about $9000 worth of milk a month to distribute. We plan to deduct five per cent every month from these milk checks to pay off the certificates. Then later we'll create a new set of certificates and redistribute these in proportion to the amounts of milk produced on the members' farms."

Manager Peet and the producers are making it perfectly plain to Lockport consumers that this is no move contemplating price control. In fact, they expect to sell milk for a cent a quart under the old price.

The farm-labor shortage which antedated our entrance into the war became a national menace about the time our selective draft began to operate. New York farmers were as hard hit as any other farmers, particularly in the fruit sections, where a tremendous labor supply falls suddenly due at harvest time. Niagara County came in for its full share of this trouble and the Niagara County Farm Bureau went its length to meet the emergency.

In 1917 Western New York produced the biggest crop of peaches in its history, and in the face of the greatest labor famine. There were nearly 8000 cars of the fruit in danger of spoiling on the trees and on the ground. Peet anticipated the crisis by converting the farm bureau into a veritable county labor department. He was promised a good number of high-school boys who were to help in the peach harvest and who were to be cleared through a central office in Buffalo.

Manager Peet worked out arrangements for the care of these boys in forty-two camps strategically located. The camps were to accommodate thirty boys each. The farmers had asked Peet for 4500 hands. He applied for 1500 boys and had every reason to expect these. But at the critical moment something went wrong in Buffalo headquarters and of the 1500 asked for he got only 200!

"I was in Buffalo at the time the news was broken," Manager Peet was saying to me, "and my first impulse was to jump off one of the docks!"

Here was a nice kettle of fish! The fruit was ripening on the trees, and the phones in the bureau offices were ringing their plating off with calls from frantic farmers. Peet didn't jump off a Buffalo dock; he jumped out of his coat and into the fray. He got a Federal Department of Labor man to help him. They plastered appeals for help all over Western New York—on the walls of post offices, railroad stations, on boarding houses. They worked on long-distance phones, the telegraph, the mails. They hired trucks and brought city men and boys and women and girls from cities to work in the orchards over week-ends. Labor, attracted by the flaring posters, drifted into the bureau's offices in Lockport and immediately was assigned to farms; and hundreds of laborers whom Peet never saw also came.

By working seven days a week and often without meals and with cat naps for sleep the bureau cleared 1200 laborers through its office, to say nothing of the loads brought overland by motor truck and which never came near the office. Business houses in the towns closed down and sent their help to the orchards. Lockport's organization of "live wires"—lawyers, doctors, bankers—went out and worked in the orchards.

"Well," was Peet's comment, "we saved the crop, that's all!"

Last year the bureau placed 1095 men and four women on farms in Niagara County. In addition, 1527 soldiers were secured on two-day furloughs from Fort Niagara to help harvest the fruit crops. "We did this," said Manager Peet, "mainly by starting early and keeping persistently at it with the War Department, in order to cut the red tape."

This fall there will go into effect in New York State an amendment to its drainage law which is going to do more properly to drain the state than all the steam diggers that could have been crowded on its acres under former conditions. This action came out of Niagara County, through the farm bureau.

To realize the importance of drainage in this county one must remember that it lies in two levels broken by the ridge which forms the locks at Lockport, the falls at Niagara Falls, and which extends across the county from east to west. In each plateau the land is very level, there being but few places in the county having a difference in elevation of twenty feet within a radius of a mile. Good drainage is very necessary and in the past has been very hard to secure.

"Practically no man can secure adequate drainage without being concerned in the drainage of his neighbor's land," said Mr. Peet. "If the neighbor objects the situation is complicated. And our drainage laws have been woefully inadequate to handle these problems."

But recently the farm bureau put it up to a conference of county agents of New York to get the "state leader" to appoint a state committee to work this thing out and persuade the state legislature to make the necessary amendments to the drainage law. The plan went through, and one of the laws passed compels an objecting property owner to open drains which are necessary for the relief of his neighbors. This law goes into effect next fall.

Farmers are looking to the farm bureau for help in the cleaning and repairing of some sixty drainage ditches constructed in the past under the county-commissioner plan. But the records on file in the county clerk's office are in bad shape. The farm bureau has taken it upon itself to arrange all this material so that it is available on a minute's notice, and as a result has drawn up petitions to the supervisors for the cleaning out of three of these ditches.

Cooperating with the New York State Food Commission, the farm bureau had a power-tractor ditcher placed in the county last summer. Peet placed his assistant in full charge, and the machine never lost a single day as a result of lack of supervision. It has dug over 4000 rods of ditch for tile on twenty-eight farms.

For four years Niagara County farmers had not made expenses in growing tomatoes for the canneries. The farm bureau called a meeting of some fourteen growers and together they figured the cost of production. The average cost for 1917 was found to be $85 an acre; the estimated cost for 1918 was $108 an acre. The average crop was set at six tons to the acre. A joint committee went out of the conference and laid these facts before the canners. The result was that the growers got $20 a ton for their crops in 1918.

These are some outstanding features of the service rendered its farmers by the Niagara bureau. Here are some of its "lesser" activities:

Taking an agricultural census by school districts of each farm in the county and completing the job in one week.

Effecting an interchange of livestock and seed.

Distributing 1000 bushels of seed corn among 383 farmers, twenty-two tons of nitrate of soda at cost among sixty-two farmers, and securing and distributing six tons of sugar to fifty beekeepers for wintering bees.

Indorsing 200 applications for military furloughs.

Assisting in organizing Liberty Loan campaigns, especially the third.

Assisting in the delivery of twenty carloads of feed, fertilizer, farm machinery and barrels, which had been delayed.

Holding twelve demonstration meetings, attended by 602 farmers.

Conducting two tractor schools, attended by 125 farmers.

Arranging eight farmers' institutes, attended by 900 farmers.

Organizing a Federal Farm Loan Association which has loaned $125,000 to nineteen farmers.

The bureau keeps its members posted on what is going on in the county and what the bureau is doing through the medium of a well-edited monthly "News" of eight pages. The best feature of the handling of this publication is that it costs neither bureau nor members a cent. The advertisements from local supply dealers pay for it, and two pages of ads in each issue settles the bill.

The bureau's books show that last year it spent five dollars in serving each member. The membership fee is only one dollar. The difference comes from Federal, state and county appropriations.

The success of this bureau comes from having at the head of it the right man with the right view of what a farm bureau should do. Manager Peet sees to it that the organization works with the local chamber of commerce—the one in Lockport has 700 members—which antedates the farm bureau and which always has supported the bureau. Peet's policy has been to keep the bureau not only before the farmers but before the city people as well.

The "live-wire" committee of the Lockport chamber, composed of lawyers, doctors, bankers, merchants, and the like, has made Manager Peet an ex-officio member. The Niagara Falls and Tonawanda Chambers of Commerce get together with the Lockport chamber and the farm bureau and talk over problems of inter-county importance. These conferences have worked out a unified plan for road development, for instance. The Niagara Farm Bureau helped the Niagara Falls city administration to secure the services of a Federal market inspector. In this way all rivalry between different sections and towns in Niagara County is freed of friction.

About the only criticism I heard against the farm bureau of Niagara County was that Peet was the wrong man. The farmers want a man who will stay manager. But some of the best members hinted that Peet will not stay because he's just a bit too efficient. They seem to fear that some business corporation is going to get him away. And when you look over the record of his work as organizer and executive, you must admit there's something in this.

(Detroit News)

Four half-tone illustrations:

1. The Settling Basin at the Water Works.

2. Interior of the Tunnel Through which the Water is Pumped.

3. Where Detroit's Water Comes From.

4. Water Rushing into the Settling Basin.

GUARDING A CITY'S WATER SUPPLY

How the City Chemist Watches for the Appearance of Deadly Bacilli; Water Made Pure by Chemicals

BY HENRY J. RICHMOND

"COLON." The city chemist spoke the one significant word as he set down the test tube into which he had been gazing intently. The next morning the front page of all the city papers displayed the warning, "Citizens should boil the drinking water."

Every morning, as the first task of the day, the city chemist uncorks a curious little crooked tube containing a few spoonsful of very ordinary bouillon, akin to that which you might grab at the quick lunch, but which has been treated by the admixture of a chemical. This tube begins in a bulb which holds the fluid and terminates in an upturned crook sealed at the end. Into this interesting little piece of apparatus, the chemist pours a small quantity of the city drinking water, and he then puts the whole into an incubator where it is kept at a temperature favorable to the reactions which are expected if the water is contaminated.

After a sufficient time the tube is inspected. To the untrained eye nothing appears. The bouillon still remains in the little bulb apparently unchanged. Its color and clearness have not been affected. But the chemist notices that it does not stand so high in the closed end of the tube as it did when placed in the incubator. The observation seems trivial, but to the man of science it is significant.

What has happened? The water contained some minute organisms which when acted upon by the chemical in the tube have set up a fermentation. Gradually, one by one in the little bulb, bubbles of gas have formed and risen to the surface of the liquid in the closed upper end of the tube. As this gas was liberated, it took the place of the liquid in the tube, and the liquid was forced downward until there was quite a large space, apparently vacant but really filled with gas.

It was this phenomenon that had attracted the attention of the chemist. What did it mean? It was the evidence that the water which was being furnished to the city for half a million people to drink contained some living organism.

Now that, in itself, was enough to make an official of the health department begin to take an interest. It was not, however, in itself a danger signal.

Not all bacterial life is a menace to health, the chemist will tell you. Indeed, humanity has come to live on very peaceable terms with several thousand varieties of bacteria and to be really at enmity with but a score or more. Without the beneficent work of a certain class of bacteria the world would not be habitable. This comes about through a very interesting, though rather repulsive condition—the necessity of getting rid of the dead to make room for the living.

What would be the result if no provision had been made for the disintegration of the bodies of all the men and animals that have inhabited the earth since the beginning? Such a situation is inconceivable. But very wisely providence has provided that myriads and myriads of tiny creatures are ever at work breaking up worn-out and dead animal matter and reducing it to its original elements. These elements are taken up by plant life, elaborated into living vegetable growth and made fit again for the nourishment of animal life, thus completing the marvelous cycle. And so we must not get the notion that all bacteria are our mortal foes. We could not live without them, and our earth, without their humble services, would no longer be habitable.

Neither need we fear the presence of bacterial life in our drinking water. Drinking water always contains bacteria. We, ourselves, even when in the best of health, are the hosts of millions upon millions of them, and it is fair to suppose that they serve some useful purpose. At any rate, it has never been demonstrated that they do us any harm under normal conditions.

And so, the chemist was not alarmed when he discovered that the formation of gas in his crooked tube gave indication of bacteria in the drinking water. He must ascertain what type of bacteria he had entrapped. To this end, he analyzed the gas, and when he determined that the fermentation was due to the presence of colon bacilli in the water, he sent out his warning. Not that the colon bacilli are a menace to health. The body of every human being in the world is infested with millions of them. But the presence of colon bacilli in drinking water is an indication of the presence of a really dangerous thing—sewage.

Thus, when the city chemist turned from his test tube with the exclamation, "Colon!" he did not fear the thing that he saw, but the thing that he knew might accompany it.

There has been much discussion of late of the possibility that the great lakes cities may suffer a water famine. The rapid increase of population along the borders of these great seas, it has been said, might render the water unfit for use. This fear is based upon the assumption that we shall always continue the present very foolish practice of dumping our sewage into the source of our water supply. The time may come when we shall know better how to protect the public health and at the same time husband the public resources. But even at that, the city chemist says that he hardly expects to see the time when the present intake for water near the head of Belle Isle will not be both safe and adequate.

No doubt he makes this statement because he has confidence that the purification of water is both simple and safe. There are two principal methods. The first, and most expensive, is nature's own—the filter. The application of this method is comparatively simple though it involves considerable expense. The trick was learned from the hillside spring which, welling up through strata of sand and gravel, comes out pure and clear and sparkling. To make spring water out of lake water, therefore, it is merely necessary to excavate a considerable area to the desired depth and lead into it the pipes connected with the wells from which water is to be pumped. Then the pit is filled with successive layers of crushed stone graduated in fineness to the size of gravel and then covered with a deep layer of fine sand. This area is then flooded with the water to be filtered, which slowly percolates and comes out clear and pure. The best results in purification of contaminated water supplies have probably been attained in this way; that is, as measured by the improvement of health and the general reduction of the death rate from those diseases caused by the use of contaminated water.

But when the alarm was given this spring by the city chemist there was no time to excavate and build an extensive filtering plant. The dreaded typhoid was already making its appearance and babies were dying. Something had to be done at once.

If some afternoon you take a stroll through Gladwin park your attention may be attracted to a little white building at the lower end of the settling basin. It is merely a temporary structure yet it is serving a very important purpose. Approach the open door and your nostrils will be greeted by a pungent odor that may make you catch your breath. The workmen, too, you will notice, do not stay long within doors, but take refuge in a little shelter booth outside. Strewn about here and there are traces of a white, powdery substance which seems to have been tracked down from a platform erected on the roof. This is hypochlorite of lime, the substance used for sterilizing the city drinking water.

This is so powerful a disinfectant that it destroys all bacteria in water even in an extremely dilute solution. The method of applying it is interesting. The city water comes in from the river through a great tunnel about 10 feet in diameter. The little chlorinating plant is situated on the line of this tunnel so that the solution is readily introduced into the water before it reaches the pool called a settling basin.

The hypochlorite reaches the plant in iron cylinders containing 100 pounds. These are carried up to the roof and poured into the first mixing tank through a hopper fixed for the purpose. There are within the building four of these mixing tanks. In the first, up near the roof, a very strong solution is first made. This is drawn off into a second tank with a greater admixture of water and thence passes into the third and fourth. From the last it is forced out into the main tunnel by a pipe and mingles with the great flood that is pouring constantly into the wells beneath pumping engines. And this is the strength of the chemical: five pounds of it mingled with one million gallons of water is sufficient to render the water fit for drinking purposes. Nearly 98 per cent of the bacteria in the water is destroyed by this weak solution. The water is tasteless and odorless. Indeed, probably very few of the citizens of Detroit who are using the city water all the time, know that the treatment is being applied.

But the chemist continues his tests every morning. Every morning the little crooked tubes are brought out and filled and carefully watched to ascertain if the telltale gas develops which is an index of "death in the cup." Thus is the city's water supply guarded.

No more important work can devolve on the board of health. Before science had learned to recognize the tiny enemies which infest drinking water, typhoid and kindred diseases were regarded as a visitation of divine providence for the sins of a people. We now know that a rise in the death rate from these diseases is to be laid rather to the sins of omission on the part of the board of health and the public works department.

(The Outlook)

THE OCCUPATION AND EXERCISE CURE

BY FRANK MARSHALL WHITE

The nerve specialist leaned back in his chair behind the great mahogany desk in his consulting-room and studied the features of the capitalist as that important factor in commerce and industry explained the symptoms that had become alarming enough to drive him, against his will, to seek medical assistance. The patient was under fifty years of age, though the deep lines in his face, with his whitening hair—consequences of the assiduity with which he had devoted himself to the accumulation of his millions and his position in the Directory of Directors—made him appear ten years older. An examination had shown that he had no organic disease of any kind, but he told the physician that he was suffering from what he called "inward trembling," with palpitation of the heart, poor sleep, occasional dizziness, pain in the back of the neck, difficulty in concentrating his attention, and, most of all, from various apprehensions, such as that of being about to fall, of losing his mind, of sudden death—he was afraid to be alone, and was continually tired, worried, and harassed.

"You present merely the ordinary signs of neurasthenia," said the specialist. "These symptoms are distressing, but not at all serious or dangerous. You have been thinking a great deal too much about yourself and your feelings. You watch with morbid interest the perverted sensations that arise in various parts of your body. You grow apprehensive about the palpitation of your heart, which is not at all diseased, but which flutters a little from time to time because the great nerve of the heart is tired, like the other great nerves and nerve-centers of your body. You grow apprehensive over the analogous tremor which you describe as 'inward trembling,' and which you often feel all through your trunk and sometimes in your knees, hands, and face, particularly about the eyes and mouth and in the fingers."

The capitalist had started at the mention of the word neurasthenia, and had seemed much relieved when the physician had declared that the symptoms were not dangerous. "I had been under the impression that neurasthenia was practically an incurable disease," he said. "However, you have described my sensations exactly."

"One hundred per centum of cases of neurasthenia are curable," responded the specialist. "Neurasthenia is not, as is usually supposed, an equally diffused general exhaustion of the nervous system. In my opinion, it is rather an unequally distributed multiple fatigue. Certain more vulnerable portions of the nervous system are affected, while the remainder is normal. In the brain we have an overworked area which, irritated, gives rise to an apprehension or imperative idea. By concentration of energy in some other region of the brain, by using the normal portions, we give this affected part an opportunity to rest and recuperate. New occupations are therefore substituted for the old habitual one. A change of interests gives the tired centers rest."

"I have heard the 'rest cure' advocated in cases like mine," suggested the capitalist.

"In the treatment of neurasthenia we must take the whole man into consideration," said the physician. "We must stimulate nutrition, feed well the tired and exhausted organism, and, above all, provide some sort of rest and distraction for the mind. The mind needs feeding as well as the body. The rest cure is a kind of passive, relaxing, sedative treatment. The field is allowed to lie fallow, and often to grow up with weeds, trusting to time to rest and enrich it. The 'exercise and occupation cure,' on the other hand, is an active, stimulating, and tonic prescription. You place yourself in the hands of a physician who must direct the treatment. He will lay out a scheme with a judicious admixture of exercise which will improve your general health, soothe your nervous system, induce good appetite and sleep, and of occupation which will keep your mind from morbid self-contemplation. One of the best means to this end is manual occupation—drawing, designing, carpentry, metal-work, leather-work, weaving, basket-making, bookbinding, clay-modeling, and the like—for in all these things the hands are kept busy, requiring concentration of attention, while new interests of an artistic and æsthetic nature are aroused. The outdoor exercise, taken for a part of each day, if of the right sort, also distracts by taking the attention and creating interest."

The capitalist had called upon the specialist braced for a possible sentence of death, prepared at the least to be informed that he was suffering from a progressive mental malady. Now, while a tremendous weight was lifted from his mind with the information that he might anticipate a complete return to health, the idea of devoting his trained intelligence, accustomed to cope with great problems of trade and finance, to such trivialities as basket-making or modeling in clay appeared preposterous. Nevertheless, when the physician told him of a resort near at hand, established for the treatment of cases just such as his, where he might be under continuous medical supervision, without confinement indoors or being deprived of any of the comforts or luxuries of life, he decided to put himself in the other's hands unreservedly. The specialist informed him that the length of time required for his cure would depend largely upon himself. He might, for instance, even keep in touch with his office and have matters of import referred to him while he was recuperating his mental and physical strength, but such a course would inevitably retard his recovery, and possibly prevent it. To get the best results from the treatment he ought to leave every business interest behind him, he was told.

The fee that the capitalist paid the specialist made his advice so valuable that the other followed it absolutely. The next evening saw the patient in the home of the "occupation and exercise cure." He arrived just in time to sit down to dinner with a score of other patients, not one of whom showed any outward sign of illness, though all were taking the cure for some form of nervous trouble. There were no cases of insanity among them, however, none being admitted to the institution under any circumstances. The dinner was simple and abundant, and the conversation at the tables of a lively and cheerful nature. As everybody went to bed by ten o'clock—almost every one considerably before that hour, in fact—the newcomer did likewise, he having secured a suite with a bath in the main building. Somewhat to the surprise of the capitalist, who was accustomed to be made much of wherever he happened to be, no more attention was paid to him than to any other guest of the establishment, a condition of affairs that happened to please him. He was told on retiring that breakfast would be served in the dining-room from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning, but that, if he preferred to remain in his room, it would be brought to him there at nine o'clock.

The capitalist had a bad night, and was up to breakfast early. After he had concluded that repast the medical superintendent showed him about the place, but did not encourage him to talk about his symptoms. The grounds of the "occupation and exercise cure" comprised a farm of forty acres located among the hills of northern Westchester County in the Croton watershed, with large shade trees, lawns, flower gardens, and an inexhaustible supply of pure spring water from a well three hundred feet deep in solid rock. The main building, situated on a knoll adjacent to a grove of evergreen trees, contained a great solarium, which was the favorite sitting-room of the patients, and the dining-room was also finished with two sides of glass, both apartments capable of being thrown open in warm weather, and having the advantage of all the sun there was in winter. In this building were also the medical offices, with a clinical laboratory and hydro- and electro-therapeutic equipment, and accommodations for from twelve to fifteen guests. Two bungalows under the trees of the apple orchard close at hand, one containing two separate suites with baths, and the other two living-rooms with hall and bath-room, were ideal places for quiet and repose. Situated at the entrance to the grounds was a club-house, with a big sitting-room and an open fireplace; it also contained a solarium, billiard-room, bowling alleys, a squash court, a greenhouse for winter floriculture, and the arts and crafts shops, with seven living-rooms. Every living-room in the main building, the club-house, and the bungalows was connected with the medical office by telephone, so that in case of need patients might immediately secure the services of a physician at any hour of the day or night.

The arts and crafts shops being the basic principle of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist was introduced to an efficient and businesslike young woman, the instructress, who explained to him the nature of the avocations in which he might choose to interest himself. Here he found his fellow-patients busily and apparently congenially employed. In one of the shops a recent alumnus of one of the leading universities, who had undergone a nervous breakdown after graduation, was patiently hammering a sheet of brass with a view to converting it into a lampshade; a matron of nearly sixty, who had previously spent eight years in sanatoriums, practically bedridden, was setting type in the printing office with greater activity than she had known before for two decades; two girls, one sixteen and the other twelve, the latter inclined to hysteria and the former once subject to acute nervous attacks, taking the cure in charge of trained nurses, were chattering gayly over a loom in the construction of a silk rug; a prominent business man from a Western city, like the New York capitalist broken down from overwork, was earnestly modeling in clay what he hoped might eventually become a jardiniere; one of last season's debutantes among the fashionables, who had been leading a life of too strenuous gayety that had told on her nerves, was constructing a stamped leather portfolio with entire absorption; and half a dozen others, mostly young women, were engaged at wood-carving, bookbinding, block-printing, tapestry weaving, or basket-making, each one of them under treatment for some nervous derangement.

The new patient decided to try his hand at basket-making; and, although he figured out that it would take him about four days to turn out a product that might sell for ten cents, he was soon so much interested in mastering the manual details of the craft that he was disinclined to put the work aside when the medical superintendent suggested a horseback ride. When, at the advice of the specialist, the capitalist had decided to try the occupation and exercise cure, he did so with little faith that it would restore him to health, though he felt that there was perhaps a slight chance that it might help him. The remedy seemed to him too simple to overcome a disease that was paralyzing his energies. To his great surprise, he began to improve at once; and though for the first week he got little sleep, and his dizziness, with the pain in the back of his neck and his apprehensions, continued to recur for weeks, they did so at always increasing intervals.

He learned bookbinding, and sent to his library for some favorite volumes, and put them into new dress; he made elaborate waste-paper baskets, and beat brass into ornamental desk-trays, which he proudly presented to his friends in the city as specimens of his skill. Work with him, as with the others of the patients, was continually varied by recreation. In the summer months there were lawn-tennis, golf, croquet, canoeing, rowing, fishing, riding, and driving. In winter, such outdoor sports as skating, tobogganing, coasting, skeeing, snowshoeing, and lacrosse were varied by billiards, bowling, squash, the medicine ball, and basket and tether ball. The capitalist was astonished to discover that he could take an interest in games. The specialist, who called upon his patient at intervals, told him that a point of great importance in the cure was that exercise that is enjoyed is almost twice as effective in the good accomplished as exercise which is a mere mechanical routine of movements made as a matter of duty.

The net result was that, after four months of the "occupation and exercise cure," the capitalist returned to New York sound in mind and body, and feeling younger than he had before in years. Complete cures were effected in the cases of the other patients also, which is the less remarkable when the circumstance is taken into consideration that only patients capable of entire recovery are recommended to take the treatment.

Of course the institution that has been described is only for the well-to-do, and physicians are endeavoring to bring the "occupation and exercise cure" within the reach of the poor, and to interest philanthropists in the establishment of "colony sanatoriums," such as already exist in different parts of Europe, for those suffering from functional nervous disorders who are without means. Contrary to the general opinion, neurasthenia, particularly among women, is not confined to the moneyed and leisure class; but, owing to the fact that women have taken up the work of men in offices and trades as well as in many of the professions, working-women are continually breaking down under nervous strain, and many, under present conditions, have little chance for recovery, because they cannot afford the proper treatment. As a speaker at the last annual meeting of the American Medical Association declared, "Idiots and epileptics and lunatics are many; but all together they are less numerous than the victims of nervousness—the people afflicted with lesser grades of psychasthenic and neurasthenic inadequacy, who become devoted epicures of their own emotions, and who claim a large share of the attention of every general practitioner and of every specialist."

Scientists declare that this premature collapse of nerve force is increasing to such an extent as to become a positive menace to the general welfare. The struggle for existence among the conditions of modern life, especially among those found in the large centers of industrial and scientific activity, and the steady, persistent work, with its attendant sorrows, deprivations, and over-anxiety for success, are among the most prolific causes—causes which are the results of conditions from which, for the large mass of people, according to a leading New York alienist, there has been no possibility of escape.

"Especially here in America are people forced into surroundings for which they have never been fitted," the alienist asserts, "and especially here are premature demands made upon their nervous systems before they are mature and properly qualified. The lack of proper training deprives many of the workers, in all branches, of the best protection against functional nervous diseases which any person can have, namely, a well-trained nervous system. This struggle for existence by the congenital neuropath or the educationally unfit forces many to the use, and then to the abuse, of stimulants and excitants, and herein we have another important exciting cause. This early and excessive use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco is especially deleterious in its action upon the nervous system of those very ones who are most prone to go to excess in their use.

"Therefore, predisposition, aided by the storm and stress of active competition and abetted by the use of stimulants, must be looked upon as the main cause for the premature collapse of nerve force which we call neurasthenia; so it will be found that the majority of neurasthenics are between twenty-five and fifty years of age, and that their occupations are those which are attended by worry, undue excitement, uncertainty, excessive wear and tear, and thus we find mentally active persons more easily affected than those whose occupation is solely physical. Authors, actors, school-teachers, governesses, telegraph and telephone operators, are among those most frequently affected, and the increase of neurasthenia among women dates from the modern era which has opened to them new channels of work and has admitted them more generally into the so-called learned professions. But whatever may be the occupation in which persons have broken down, it is never the occupation alone which has been the cause.

"This cannot be too often repeated. The emotional fitness or unfitness of an individual for his occupation is of the utmost importance as a causative factor, and overwork alone, without any emotional cause and without any errors in mode of life, will never act to produce such a collapse. It is therefore not astonishing that this class of functional nervous diseases is not confined to the wealthy, and that the rich and the poor are indiscriminately affected. But certain causes are of greater influence in the one class, while different ones obtain in the other. Poverty in itself, with its limitations of proper rest and recuperation, is a very positive cause. Years of neurological dispensary work among the poor have convinced me that nervousness, neurasthenia, hysteria, etc., are quite as prevalent among the indigent as among the well-to-do."

Physicians agree that the prime requisite in the treatment of these disorders is the removal of the patient from his or her habitual surroundings, where recognition of the existence of actual disease is generally wanting, where the constant admonitions of well-meaning friends to "brace up" and to "exert your will power" force the sick man or woman to bodily and mental over-exertion, and where the worries about a livelihood are always dominant. Such a change alone, however, the experts say, will help but few, for it is being recognized more and more that these functional diseases of the nervous system can receive satisfactory treatment only in institutions, where constant attention may be had, with expert supervision and trained attendants.

The "occupation and exercise cure" is applicable also to epilepsy, and is the therapeutic principle of the Craig Colony for Epileptics at Sonyea, in Livingston County, supported by the State, and that institution furnishes a general model for the "colony sanatoriums" suggested for indigent patients suffering from functional nervous disorders. The Craig Colony was the idea of Dr. Frederick Peterson, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, and former President of the New York State Commission of Lunacy and of the New York Neurological Society, which he based upon the epileptic colony at Beilefeld, Germany, that was founded in 1867. The Craig Colony was founded in 1894, and there are now being cared for within its confines more than thirteen hundred patients, who have turned out this year agricultural products, with bricks, soap, and brooms, to the value of $60,000. The colony is named after the late Oscar Craig, of Rochester, who, with William P. Letchworth, of Buffalo, purchased the two-thousand-acre tract of land on which it is situated from the Shaker colony at Sonyea and presented it to the State, Dr. Peterson devoting several months of each year for nine years to getting the institution into working order. The first patients were housed in the old Shaker buildings, which were well constructed and fairly well arranged for the purpose, but as additional applications for admission have been made new buildings have been erected. To-day there are eighty buildings in the colony, but a thousand patients are waiting for admission, eight hundred of whom are in New York City.

Epilepsy, the "falling sickness," is a most difficult malady to treat even in an institution for that purpose, and it is impossible to treat it anywhere else. An epileptic in a family is an almost intolerable burden to its other members, as well as to himself. The temperamental effect of the disease takes the form in the patient of making frequent and unjust complaints, and epileptics invariably charge some one with having injured them while they have been unconscious during an attack. Then, too, living at home, they are often dangerous to younger members of a family, and they are fault-finding, exacting, and irritable generally. The seizures frequently come on without warning, and the patient drops where he stands, often injuring himself severely. The last annual report of the Craig Colony records more than four hundred injuries within the year to patients during seizures which required a surgeon's attention, the injuries varying from severe bruises to fractures of the skull.

The object of the Craig Colony is to remove the burden of the epileptic in the family from the home without subjecting the patient to the hardship of confinement with the insane. "Very few epileptics suffer permanent insanity in any form except dementia," says the medical superintendent of the Colony. "Acute mania and maniac depressive insanity not infrequently appear as a 'post-convulsive' condition, that generally subsides within a few hours, or at most a few days. Rarely the state may persist a month. Melancholia is extremely infrequent. Delusions of persecution, hallucinations of sight or hearing, systematized in character, are almost never encountered in epilepsy."

Only from six to fifteen per cent of epileptics are curable, and hence the work of the Craig Colony is largely palliative of the sufferings of the patients. Each individual case is studied with the utmost care, however, and patients are given their choice of available occupations. The Colony is not a custodial institution. There are no bars on the windows, no walls or high fences about the farm. The patients are housed in cottages, men and women in separate buildings some distance apart, about thirty to each cottage. In charge of each of these families are a man and his wife, who utilize the services of some of the patients in the performance of household work, while the others have their duties outside. Kindness to the unfortunates under their care is impressed upon every employee of the Colony, and an iron-bound rule forbids them to strike a patient even in case of assault.

Besides the agricultural work in the Craig Colony, and that in the soap and broom factories and the brick-yard, the patients are taught blacksmithing, carpentry, dressmaking, tailoring, painting, plumbing, shoemaking, laundrying, and sloyd work. It is insisted on that all patients physically capable shall find employment as a therapeutic measure. The records show that on Sundays and holidays and on rainy days, when there is a minimum of physical activity among the patients, their seizures double and sometimes treble in number. Few of the patients know how to perform any kind of labor when they enter the Colony, but many of them learn rapidly. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that boys from eighteen to twenty years of age can spend two years in the sloyd shop and leave it fully qualified as cabinet-makers, and capable of earning a journeyman's wages.

There are about two hundred children in the colony of epileptics at Sonyea, more than half of whom are girls. As children subject to epileptic seizures are not received in the public schools of the State, the only opportunity for any education among these afflicted little ones whose parents are unable to teach them themselves or provide private tutors for them is in the schools of the Colony. Some of the children are comparatively bright scholars, while the attempt to teach others seems a hopeless task. For instance, it took one girl ninety days to learn to lay three sticks in the form of a letter A.

Every effort is made to encourage recreation among the patients in the Craig Colony, both children and adults. The men have a club of 250 members, with billiards, chess, checkers, cards, and magazines and newspapers. The boys have their baseball and football, and play match games among themselves or with visiting teams. The women and girls play croquet, tennis, and other outdoor games. There is a band composed of patients that gives a concert once a week, and there are theatricals and dancing, with occasional lectures by visiting celebrities. As the Colony, with the medical staff, nurses, and other employees, has a population of 2,000, there is always an audience for any visiting attraction. The maintenance of the Colony is costing the State $225,000 the present year.

Since the founding of the Craig Colony similar institutions have been established in Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kansas, and other States are preparing to follow their example. There are other private sanatoriums throughout the country similar to the one in Westchester County, where the nervous or neurasthenic patient who is well-to-do may obtain relaxation and supervision, but there is no place at all to-day where the man or woman suffering from curable nervous disorders who is without means can go for treatment.

(McClure's Magazine)

Five illustrations: two wash drawings by André Castaigne showing mono-rail trains in the future, five half-tone reproductions of photographs of the car on its trial trip, and one pen-and-ink diagram of the gyroscopes.

THE BRENNAN MONO-RAIL CAR

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

It was November 10, 1909—a day that will surely have its place in history beside that other day, eighty-five years ago, when George Stephenson drove the first railway locomotive between Stockton and Darlington. In the great square of the Brennan torpedo factory at Gillingham, where the fighting-tops of battleships in the adjacent dockyard poise above the stone coping of the wall, there was a track laid down in a circle of a quarter of a mile. Switches linked it up with other lengths of track, a straight stretch down to a muddy cape of the Medway estuary, and a string of curves and loops coiling among the stone and iron factory sheds. The strange thing about it was that it was single—just one line of rail on sleepers tamped into the unstable "made" ground of the place.

And there was Brennan, his face red with the chill wind sweeping in from the Nore, his voice plaintive and Irish, discoursing, at slow length, of revolutions per minute, of "precession," and the like. The journalists from London, who had come down at his invitation, fidgeted and shivered in the bitter morning air; the affair did not look in the least like an epoch in the history of transportation and civilization, till—

"Now, gentlemen," said Brennan, and led the way across the circle of track.

And then, from its home behind the low, powder-magazine-like sheds, there rode forth a strange car, the like of which was never seen before. It was painted the businesslike slatyblue gray of the War Department. It was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty feet long, with a steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of moving machine-parts.

It ran on the single rail; its four wheels revolved in a line, one behind another; and it traveled with the level, flexible equilibrium of a ship moving across a dock. It swung over the sharp curves without faltering, crossed the switch, and floated—floated is the only word for the serene and equable quality of its movement—round and round the quarter-mile circle. A workman boarded it as it passed him, and sat on the edge with his legs swinging, and its level was unaltered. It was wonderful beyond words to see. It seemed to abolish the very principle of gravitation; it contradicted calmly one's most familiar instincts.

Every one knows the sense one gains at times while watching an ingenious machine at its work—a sense of being in the presence of a living and conscious thing, with more than the industry, the pertinacity, the dexterity, of a man. There was a moment, while watching Brennan's car, when one had to summon an effort of reason to do away with this sense of life; it answered each movement of the men on board and each inequality in the makeshift track with an adjustment of balance irresistibly suggestive of consciousness. It was an illustration of that troublous theorem which advances that consciousness is no more than the co-relation of the parts of the brain, and that a machine adapted to its work is as conscious in its own sphere as a mind is in its sphere.

The car backed round the track, crossed to the straight line, and halted to take us aboard. There were about forty of us, yet it took up our unequally distributed weight without disturbance. The young engineer threw over his lever, and we ran down the line. The movement was as "sweet" and equable as the movement of a powerful automobile running slowly on a smooth road; there was an utter absence of those jars and small lateral shocks that are inseparable from a car running on a double track. We passed beyond the sheds and slid along a narrow spit of land thrusting out into the mud-flanked estuary. Men on lighters and a working-party of bluejackets turned to stare at the incredible machine with its load. Then back again, three times round the circle, and in and out among the curves, always with that unchanging stateliness of gait. As we spun round the circle, she leaned inward like a cyclist against the centrifugal pull. She needs no banking of the track to keep her on the rail. A line of rails to travel on, and ground that will carry her weight—she asks no more. With these and a clear road ahead, she is to abolish distance and revise the world's schedules of time.

"A hundred and twenty miles an hour," I hear Brennan saying, in that sad voice of his; "or maybe two hundred. That's a detail."

In the back of the cab were broad unglazed windows, through which one could watch the tangle of machinery. Dynamos are bolted to the floor, purring under their shields like comfortable cats; abaft of them a twenty-horse-power Wolseley petrol-engine supplies motive power for everything. And above the dynamos, cased in studded leather, swinging a little in their ordered precession, are the two gyroscopes, the soul of the machine. To them she owes her equilibrium.

Of all machines in the world, the gyroscope is the simplest, for, in its essential form, it is no more than a wheel revolving. But a wheel revolving is the vehicle of many physical principles, and the sum of them is that which is known as gyroscopic action. It is seen in the ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope revolving horizontally. The apparatus that holds Brennan's car upright, and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new purpose. It is a gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three thousand revolutions to the minute.

Now, the effect of gyroscopic action is to resist any impulse that tends to move the revolving wheel out of the plane in which it revolves. This resistance can be felt in a top; it can be felt much more strongly in the beautiful little gyroscopes of brass and steel that are sold for the scientific demonstration of the laws governing revolving bodies. Such a one, only a few inches in size, will develop a surprising resistance. This resistance increases with the weight of the wheel and the speed at which it moves, till, with Brennan's gyroscopes of three quarters of a ton each, whirling in a vacuum at three thousand revolutions per minute, it would need a weight that would crush the car into the ground to throw them from their upright plane.

Readers of MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE were made familiar with the working of Brennan's gyroscope by Mr. Cleveland Moffett's article in the issue of December, 1907. The occasion of that article was the exhibition of Brennan's model mono-rail car before the Royal Society and in the grounds of his residence at Gillingham. For a clear understanding of the first full-sized car, it may be well to recapitulate a few of the characteristics of the gyroscope.

When Brennan made his early models, he found that, while the little cars would remain upright and run along a straight rail, they left the track at the first curve. The gyroscope governed their direction as well as their equilibrium. It was the first check in the evolution of the perfect machine. It was over ten years before he found the answer to the problem—ten years of making experimental machines and scrapping them, of filing useless patents, of doubt and persistence. But the answer was found—in the spinning top.

A spinning top set down so that it stands at an angle to the floor will right itself; it will rise till it stands upright on the point of equal friction. Brennan's resource, therefore, was to treat his gyroscope as a top. He enclosed it in a case, through which its axles projected, and at each side of the car he built stout brackets reaching forth a few inches below each end of the axle.

The result is not difficult to deduce. When the car came to a curve, the centrifugal action tended to throw it outward; the side of the car that was on the inside of the curve swung up and the bracket touched the axle of the gyroscope. Forthwith, in the manner of its father, the top, the gyroscope tried to stand upright on the bracket; all the weight of it and all its wonderful force were pressed on that side of the car, holding it down against the tendency to rise and capsize. The thing was done; the spinning top had come to the rescue of its posterity. It only remained to fit a double gyroscope, with the wheels revolving in opposite directions, and, save for engineering details, the mono-rail car was evolved.

Through the window in the back of the cab I was able to watch them at then; work—not the actual gyroscopes, but their cases, quivering with the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and tilting accurately to each shifting weight as the men on board moved here and there. Above them were the glass oilcups, with the opal-green engine-oil flushing through them to feed the bearings. Lubrication is a vital part of the machine. Let that fail, and the axles, grinding and red-hot, would eat through the white metal of the bearings as a knife goes through butter. It is a thing that has been foreseen by the inventor: to the lubricating apparatus is affixed a danger signal that would instantly warn the engineer.

"But," says Brennan, "if one broke down, the other gyroscope would hold her up—till ye could run her to a siding, anyway."

"But supposing the electric apparatus failed?" suggests a reporter—with visions of headlines, perhaps. "Supposing the motor driving the gyroscopes broke down; what then?"

"They'd run for a couple of days, with the momentum they've got," answers the inventor. "And for two or three hours, that 'ud keep her upright by itself."

On the short track at Gillingham there are no gradients to show what the car can do in the way of climbing, but here again the inventor is positive. She will run up a slope as steep as one in six, he says. There is no reason to doubt him; the five-foot model that he used to exhibit could climb much steeper inclines, run along a rope stretched six feet above the ground, or remain at rest upon it while the rope was swung to and fro. It would do all these things while carrying a man; and, for my part, I am willing to take Brennan's word.

Louis Brennan himself was by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and space; neither had George Stephenson. He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his Irish voice. There is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five or fifty-five. As a matter of fact, he is two years over the latter age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his work which is to engineers what passion is to a poet.