The schools are financed partly by the company and partly by the parents of the three thousand scholars.  The teachers are, for the most part, graduates of leading colleges—­Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin—­and educational work of great variety is carried on, including instruction in English for foreign employees, and domestic-science classes for women—­separate establishments, of course, for whites and blacks, for the color line is drawn in southern mining camps as elsewhere.  Negroes are, however, better provided for by the corporation than by most southern municipalities, both in the way of living conditions and of education.

On the whole, I believe that a child who grows up in the Docena Village, and is educated there, has actually a better chance than one who grows up in most Alabama towns, or, for the matter of that, in towns in any other State which has not compulsory education.  Moreover, I doubt that there is in all Alabama another kindergarten as truly charming as the one we visited at Docena, or that there is, in the State, a schoolhouse of the same size which is as perfect as the one we saw in that camp.

In another camp old houses have been remodeled, giving practical demonstration of what can be done in the way of making a hovel into a pretty home by the intelligent use of a little lattice-work, a little paint, and a few vines and flowers.  Old boarding-houses in this neighborhood have been converted into community houses, with entertainment halls, shower baths, and other conveniences for the men and their families.  Thus tests are being made to discover whether it is possible to encourage among certain classes of foreign laborers, whose habits of life have not, to put it mildly, been of the tidiest, some appreciation of the standard of civilization represented by clean, pretty cottages, pleasant meeting houses, and shower baths.

I have not told about the billiard tables, bowling alleys, and game rooms of the clubs, nor about the model rooms fitted up to show housewives how they may make their homes attractive at but slight expense, nor about the annual medical examination of the children, nor about the company dentists who charge their patients only for the cost of gold actually used, nor about the fine company store at Edgewater Mine, nor about the excellent meats supplied by the company butchers, nor about the low prices of supplies, nor about the effort to discourage employees from buying cheap furniture at high prices on the installment plan, nor, above all, about the clean, decent, happy look of the families we chanced to see.

Even had I the space in which to tell of these things, it is perhaps wiser that I refrain from doing so.  For I am aware that in speaking anything but ill of a great corporation I have scandalously outraged precedent.  Nor does it argue well for my powers of observation, or those of my companion.  I feel confident that where our limited visions perceived only prosperity and contentment, certain of my brother writers, and his brother illustrators would, in our places, have rent the thin, vaporish veil of apparent corporate kindliness, and found such foul shame, such hideous malignity, such grasping, grubby greed, such despicable soul-destroying despotism, as to shock the simple nature of a chief of the old-time Russian Secret Police.