with him and they liked him. Which is a sound, bed-rock beginning for a statesman in a democracy.

Mr. McCormick, as alderman, opened an aldermanic office in the Bush Temple in the heart of his ward and proceeded to listen to complaints from constituents whose garbage had not been removed. To these details of ward-life he gave industrious attention, but at the same time he did not neglect the larger questions which concerned the whole city. At the end of his very first year as alderman he had made such an impression on his colleagues that he was appointed a member of the steering committee and also of the local transportation committee, the two most important committees in the whole council.

These honors would have been enough for the second year of his term, but a newer and a larger honor was coming his way. In November, 1905, before the expiration of his first term as alderman, he was nominated and elected to the Presidency of the Board of Trustees of the Chicago Sanitary District.

Some opposition was stirred up against him during the campaign by a judicious exploitation of the fact that his relatives, the McCormicks of the International Harvester Company, had a lease of land from the Sanitary District down along the banks of the Drainage Canal and that Mr. McCormick was being put forward in order to grant them other favors. The only result of Mr. McCormick's election, however, so far as the Harvester Company is concerned, has been that Mr. McCormick has dug up a forgotten clause in the Harvester Company's lease and has obliged his cousins to construct an extremely expensive dock along their canal frontage. It will be a long time before the Harvester Company will want to see another cousin in office.

When Mr. McCormick was installed in his new office he found that all the jobs at the disposal of the Sanitary District, which controls and operates the big thirty-two-mile sewage and ship canal from Chicago to Joliet, were divided into nine lots. Why nine? Because there were nine trustees. Each trustee then gave away the jobs in his lot to his friends.

Mr. McCormick put an end to this job

lot system. He persuaded the board and it is much to their credit that they were persuaded- to lodge all appointive power in the hands of the president of the board, subject to the veto of a majority of the other members.

This concentration of authority has brought a concentration of responsibility. From that day to this the candidate for a position connected with the Sanitary District has been obliged to show personal and moral and mental as well as political qualifications.

Mr. McCormick's political qualifications are considerable. He is a matter-offact young man. He knows that politician simply means "citizen interested in politics." He knows that a public man can't depend entirely upon the support of citizens who are not interested in politics. If the politicians can give him the right man for a place he takes him. If they can't, he looks elsewhere. His private secretary, Mr. Hoyt King, for instance, has been known in Chicago principally as an inveterate investigator and prosecutor of criminal politicians. Mr. King's appointment was a rather broad hint.

The removals and appointments made in the Sanitary District during the last two years have been quiet, steady and successful. A department which used to be the happy feeding-trough of incompetent precinct captains has been raised to a high level of honesty and capacity. It has been plain, hard, every-day, matterof-fact administrative labor. But from it has emerged a governmental body capable of governing.

Mr. McCormick does not rank as an extreme radical. When he was in the city council for instance he was not a municipal-ownership alderman of the "immediate "kind. He believed strongly in submitting all traction ordinances to a referendum vote of the whole people and in accepting their decision, but he did not personally believe that "immediate" municipal ownership was financially feasible.

It is not as an extreme radical that Mr. McCormick has reformed the Sanitary District. It has been a matter simply of business sense and of public honor. But no extreme radical in the town has resisted the encroachments of unscrupu

lous corporations more systematically or more enthusiastically than Mr. McCormick.

The latest instance has been that of the Economy Light and Power Company. Through a scandalous political waterpower lease secured from the commissioners of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the Economy Light and Power Company, at Joliet, got in the way of the Drainage Canal of the Chicago Sanitary District and also in the way of the projected deepwater ship canal from the Lakes to the Gulf.

Mr. McCormick proceeded to attack the Economy Light and Power Company in the press and in the legislature. But the Economy Light and Power Company is the same thing as the Chicago Edison Company, and the Chicago Edison Company is intimately allied with many of the largest financial interests in Chicago. Mr. McCormick was fought in the back as well as in front. He raised up enemies for himself in Chicago as well as in Joliet, among financiers as well as among politicians. He found that he had friends who believed in reform when it consisted in preventing policemen from taking a drink in a barroom on a cold night but who felt chilled to the bone when they thought of preventing the Chicago Edison Company from continuing to enjoy the quiet and profitable possession of a water-power lease belonging rightfully to the public.

Mr. McCormick left these friends behind him, some of them his own relatives, and persevered. It has been a long fight and it is not yet ended. But it can have only one conclusion. It is being waged by a gentleman unafraid of family influence, financial influence or political influence. When it began Mr. McCormick stood almost alone. Now there are others in growing numbers with him. At the wind-up there won't be enough left of the dams of the Economy Light and Power Company to stop a chip on the way to New Orleans.

Mr. McCormick's battles have all been with facts. He may be a political philosopher but he has given no scintillating evidence of it. He is not a particularly good speaker. He is simply a clear-headed, clean-blooded, immensely vigorous, practically capable young man. He has al

ways done "the next thing." His conception of the ultimate destiny of society he has never divulged.

But there is one respect in which his career, practical as it is, touches the philosophy of contemporary politics. There is a great deal said nowadays about “controlling" corporations, especially quasipublic corporations, and even of owning and operating them. And in various parts of the United States we have witnessed the spectacle of governmental bodies which couldn't control a fruitstand, or operate a wheelbarrow, trying to coerce gas companies, electric light companies and traction companies. These efforts have thrilled the public and amused the companies.

But we are beginning to perceive a glimmer of light. We are beginning to apprehend that corporations, which are efficient, will never be controlled by governmental bodies which are inefficient. This is the reason why many corporation officials are dropping their subscriptions to reform societies.

A reformed governmental body means. one which is not only honest and amiable but one which is strenuously and ruthlessly efficient. And therefore every really reformed governmental body means cne which will control the corporations with which it comes in contact because otherwise the corporations will control it. It is always a battle to the death. One of the two sides must be on top. It is usually the corporation side. It is the public side only when the governmental bodies through which the public operates are as strong and as remorseless as the corporations themselves. "Sympathy with the people," "hatred for the oppressor" and "a heart in the right place" won't be enough. It is going to be a struggle that will demand sheer, brutal, administrative strength.

In making his particular department of government honest, capable and strong, Mr. McCormick has taken a long stride toward the day of public control of corporations in Chicago. The actions of a man of action always have a philosophy in them even if his words do not reveal it.

Mr. McCormick is now twenty-seven, going on twenty-eight. He is a party politician and in his reform work he has had the cordial support of many of his

fellow-politicians. He is a regular and he has worked along regular lines. He He doesn't care for the side-lines. He is a matter-of-fact young man who can't shut

his eyes and play that government by parties doesn't exist. He is making his part of his party good and his part of his local government strong.

T

HE rate of suicide in this country has long been steadily upon the increase. Within recent years, and notably since 1900, this steady rate of increase has become a rapid one.

In Figure 1 are displayed curves show ing the increase, during the forty years, from 1864 to 1904, inclusive, in the chances of one's dying by suicide rather than by some other method. The curve marked A shows the increase for the United States from the vital statistics of the United States census. Curve B shows the comparative growth of the suiciderate in Great Britain.

Curve B, it should be explained, does not show Great Britain's rate on the same

scale as that for the United States. The scale for Curve B was so arranged that it should coincide with Curve A in 1860. Thereafter it shows that the rate of growth of suicide in Great Britain is closely what it has been here; but the average number of suicides per thousand of population in Great Britain has always been considerably less than that here.

Curve A has been arranged to extend from one of the darkest periods of our national history to one of the brightest, for the last point of the curve applies to only the first half of 1907. Even in 1900 the outlook was brilliant in comparison with the hesitating self-deprecation which characterized this country in its comparison with other governments previous to the Spanish War of 1898. Yet from 1864 to 1900 the suicide-rate had

Four

multiplied by two and one-half. years of progress into the promise of the new century saw this multiplier further increased to 3.4, or at a rate of growth of 0.22 per annum.

Curve C shows the growth of the suicide-rate for Manhattan alone, from 1866 to July 1, 1907, year by year. For so small a territory the rate of course fluctuates widely from year to year. Part of this fluctuation is due to changes in political outline of the district, and part is due to economic causes. But the general result is seen to be much like that for the two nations.

The curve for Great Britain should show that our increasing burden of despair is due to causes which can not be peculiarly local in any way. And if Great Britain were not enough to corroborate this view, statistics might be entered from all of the prominent commercial nations. After Great Britain, Germany certainly comes second on this score. And in Germany suicide is so rapidly on the increase that it has become the subject of special governmental investigation. Even the schools for younger children are permeated, and the Minister of Education has published a special report concerning suicide among the young.

Yet, in order to show beyond doubt that the increase of suicide in this country has not been confined to the peculiar conditions of any one locality, Figure 2 displays the suicide-rates for several states and cities separately, from 1866 to 1906. The states contrasted are New York, as a state combining city life, agriculture and manufacture in fairly even proportion; Massachusetts, as a state almost exclusively citified and having very little agriculture, yet at the same time governed, it is admitted, with unusual justice, purity and efficiency; and Indiana, as a state almost exclusively agricultural in its activities, as nearly as a great state can be, and at the same time standing high in the general thrift and intelligence of its population. The cities chosen are New York, Boston and Chicago, as the greatest representative metropolitan centers.

Of all these Massachusetts alone ever reveals a decrease in its suicide-rate, for more than a year or two at a time. From

1860 to 1880 her rate decreased somewhat. But by 1900 it had regained, and by 1904 it had exceeded, its rate for the rough days of 1860.

All the other rates have increased remarkably. That of New York State had become, in 1900, 3.5 times what it was in 1860; by 1904 this multiplier had risen to four. Indiana's rate, although generally lower than any of the others, is increasing more rapidly than any of them. From 1860 to 1900 it had multiplied itself by three and two-thirds. In four years more this ratio had risen to seven and onethird! In other words, during each of the first four years of the new century Indiana's suicide-rate had increased by an amount almost equal to the entire suicide-rate for 1860! It is to be remembered, too, that this refers, not to the number of suicides, which would naturally increase with increasing population, but to the number per thousand of population.

It is impossible to say just how far Indiana is better or worse than her neighbors in this respect, for the statistics are not equally complete for all. But to prove that this state is not exceptional in its showing, the statistics for ten eastern states and several hundred cities scattered all over the land, averaged together, are displayed in the Curve DD of Figure 2. Over this wide tract of country, constituting a material fraction of the entire United States, the increase of suiciderate during the first four years of the century was 6.5, 4.4, 10.0 and 8.2 per cent per annum respectively, a remarkably steady increase, averaging 7.3 per cent per annum. For the four years taken together, Indiana's increase was almost exactly equal to the average for this large territory above mentioned. But the following year, for which there are no available data from the larger territory, Indiana's rate jumped 43.6 per cent further, and during the first half of 1907 was 55 per cent greater than it was in 1904!

During these first four years of the century, Boston, alone among the cities, showed a decrease in suicide-rate. Yet from even this oasis in the desert of despair comfort is denied us, for the result was even then fifty per cent higher than it had been in 1880.

Some of the wide fluctuations in the

other curves of Figure 2 are due to academic causes, such as changes in political outline, plan of classification, etc., in part. But Chicago shows a phenomenal increase in suicide-rate extending over twenty-four years, too long a period for artificial factors to be appreciable in their effect. During the two decades from 1880 to 1900 the growth of suicide-rate was 82.5 per cent, and in three years more had reached 113.5 per cent, as compared with 1860. But 1904 witnessed a drop below the rate for 1900, and for 1905 and 1906 the figures are not yet available.

Statistics of suicide are not only an excellent general indicator of a country's unhappiness, but they are a more accurate measure of its moral forces than almost any other means of estimate. The figures as to deaths and their causes extend over long periods of our history, with an accuracy never to be hoped for from statistics as to crime, lunacy or pauperism. There have been wide variations, as the decades rolled by, in the idea as to what constituted a crime, a lunatic or a pauper; and especially the first two. But there has never been any doubt as to what constituted a death, nor as to the importance of recording it. There have been doubts in many cases as to whether a death were suicidal or homicidal, but this

has not materially affected the records. For this reason it seems well, in connection with suicide, to consider also the other forms of violent death. Their statistics are equally reliable. The causes are much the same. Pressure upon life may result in any one of several forms of violence. Whether the distressed spirit turn upon itself or upon others, in its frenzy, is much a matter of chance. At least, it depends upon the internal conformation of the unfortunate individual, rather than upon the sort of pressure put upon him by his environment.

The "violent" class of deaths in the reports includes not only the suicides and homicides, but also the accidents, drownings, poisonings, etc. In many of these cases it is impossible to ascertain whether the death were purely accidental, or whether suicidal or murderous intent were present. The same remark holds true of many of the "double" murders and suicides which are now so common. Where it is obvious which party did the killing, the other's death is classed as a murder; yet it is, in many cases, in reality a suicide. Where illuminatinggas is the destructive agent chosen, the uncertainty is still greater. Often whole families are involved, by a frenzy of despair on the part of one or two mem