Changes in Government Lag Behind Human Progress, Says Dr. Hamilton

The following article was written for the crimson by Dr. Alice Hamilton, assistant professor of industrial Medicine and a member of Present Hoover's "Committee on Social Trends," whose report was published recently.

The report of President Hoover's committee on Social trends, is contained in two large volumes of some thirty chapters, each of which deals with some phase of present day social life, especially with regard to the changes that have taken place during the last 30 years. Probably the usual reader will content himself with the introduction, written by the committee, and with one or two chapters on subjects which fall in his special field. But whatever part he reads will almost certainly give him the impression of a curious inequality in our rate of progress as a people, for he will see us forging ahead along a certain road with a zeal which is blind to obstacles, while is other directions we shall seem to crawl with unwillingness, even fear, lest we get to some unfamiliar place.

If for instance, we look at the influence of the automobile, on the spread of city into country, on the consolidation of country schools, the loosening of family control over the young, the decline of church congregations, the quick get-away for criminals,--all this shows enormous changes that have been effected in less than twenty-five years; but when we look for consistent alterations in our government machine, they are not there. The automobile has made township and county units obsolete, they are an unnecessary expense, quite indefensible but equally impossible to abolish.

The railroads changed the habits of the country almost a century ago, but it took us more than 20 years to pass the lame-duck amendment, which simply gave public recognition to the fact that men travel nowadays on railroads. Thousands of Americans go to Europe now where one went in Washington's day, but when Americans legislate on international relations they still believe that Washington's said the last word on that subject. The frontier disappeared some time before the nineties of the last century, but our legislators have not discovered that fact, and the law still assumes that a man employed by the United States steel Corporation is a free agent and must be protected in his constitutional right to make his own bargain with his employer.

Striking Changes

In the great basic human, relations, between man and woman, and between parent and child, there have been changes so striking that when we read novels of a century ago we feel we are in another world; but when we try to fit laws to society as it is we meet with stubborn resistance. It is as if men were frightened to see how far they have departed from the ways of their fathers and how impossible lit was to go back, and had therefore determined to hold fast to something. Religion, paternal authority, the family, all may go; but at least we still have the Constitution and the Supreme Court, and so long as we cling to them we may feel sure that in the field of Government we shall still be ruled by the wisdom of our great grandfathers,