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The Global Lab

The Global Lab

Inequality, Technology, and the New
Experimental Movement
A DA M F E J E R SKOV
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Adam Fejerskov 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930161
ISBN 978–0–19–887027–2
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Preface
During the 1990s, I lived a carefree life in the small Greenlandic town of
Qeqertarsuaq, just north of the Arctic Circle and bordering the western edges
of the ice sheet. The winter months were long and dark, the sun rarely rising
and the depression of darkness always seemingly ready to creep in. But in
summer, the world turned on its head and the magic of the midnight sun kept
us awake for days before sleep eventually found us. I was seven when my par-
ents brought me and my younger brother from our native Denmark and
Copenhagen to the 800-something small town in the beautiful icy wilderness.
A large plane carried us to Kangerlussuaq, and a propeller further north to
Ilulisat, where we encountered the highlight of the trip: the great round-nosed
Sikorsky helicopter. Far from the military macho tales of Black Hawk Down,
this Sikorsky brought us across a pristine (if deadly, I would learn) blue and
green ocean of icebergs and crystal-clear water. Despite the regular school
fights in Greenlanders-versus-Danes fashion, my years in western Greenland
was a privileged life of dog sledding, eating seal blubber for lunch in the
mountains, and catching ammassat, a small fish that arrives by the millions on
the banks of the black and icy beaches, once a year. But such privilege was not
common in Qeqertarsuaq, a town low on jobs and suffering from hardship.
Greenland was my first memory of meeting poverty and a striking testament
to how the destructive force of colonialism permeates as far North as one can
make it on this planet.
It was the inequality of power inherent in any colonial relationship that
drove Denmark, supported by both Save The Children Denmark and the
Danish Red Cross1, to remove a group of twenty-two Greenlandic children
from their homeland in 1951 and install them in Denmark. In a social experi-
ment meant to lay the ground for a new bilingual school system, the children,
all of them the same age as me when I first arrived in their country, were
taken from their parents and sailed to Denmark where they would be indoc-
trinated to learn the Danish language and culture. Destined to be pioneers of
a new Greenland that distanced itself from its Inuit heritage and embraced
Denmark as its self-image of modernity. As one of the involved politicians
formulated the intentions: ‘we wish to create from the Greenlander a good
Danish citizen’. It didn’t take long for the involved parts to see that the
vi Preface
experiment failed to produce positive results, and the children were either
offered away for adoption or placed in orphanages, none of them returned to
their parents. One of the only remaining children has since told of how meeting
her parents again a few years after her removal was a devastating experience.
She had forgotten the language of her people, her parents not understanding a
word she said to them. Like the other children, she was seen as a traitor of
culture, embracing the ways of the colonial ruler, despite having no say in her
removal.
The story of the Greenlandic children and their removal is close to my
heart, framing and shaping my own understanding of what my privileged
presence in their country meant. But also because of its nature as a historical
testament to how ideals of modernity, progress, and the pursuit of a greater
good, may derail in the sacrifices made to seek such. Experimentation is a
powerful methodology and mindset that has driven discoveries and break-
throughs across sciences and industries over the past millennia. It is a strong
political and moral force that structures and shapes both the present and
future for people around the world. Rarely deterministically and often instead
in ways we may not understand or imagine from the outset. That uncertainty
and unpredictability is also why we must remain focused on explicating and
disentangling the hierarchies of knowing, influence, and power that may arise
as experimentation is manifested in practice. Which is what I attempt to do
here. The inspiration for this book originates from years of research on con-
temporary private foundations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, where I first encountered a strong combination of practices of
experimentation and ideas of technological innovation. It is from observing
those very same narratives and trajectories across other fields and among
actors where I would otherwise not have expected them – and from spending
extensive time at their imagined point of origin, Silicon Valley, and at their
sites of manifestation – that I pursue an aim here of opening up what experi-
mentation looks like today and what are its implications. The book builds on
extensive research that has taken me around the world, where observations
and interviews have provided insights into practices of experimentation by a
diverse cast of actors. A large fieldwork grant from the Carlsberg Foundation,
contributing solely to writing this book, specifically made possible visits to
the US, East Africa, and South Asia.
Throughout the writing of the book, I have insistently been reminded that
none of us can think to stand outside science (and sciences of experimentation
not least) and judge it to be good or evil: we are it and it is us.2 Hence, any
criticism must begin with ourselves. An outsider’s perspective such as that
Preface vii
I have pursued here may be seen as easy and a way of escaping the pointing of
any fingers inwards. The book, much likely due to my own blindness, has
obviously been constructed from and with my Western epistemic privilege.
I have tried not to preserve or convey any sensation of a hierarchy of centre
and periphery in my own interpretation of the both constructed and prac-
tised relationship between what I refer to as the Global North and the Global
South. While serving the purposes of explanation and simplicity, these two
concepts of differing spatial, social, political, and cultural contexts and materi
alities should visibly not be taken as absolutes. In the same way that I only
concern myself with a fraction of what can be said to represent the Global
South (along the way undoubtedly reproducing unfortunate stereotypes of
this part of the world as one of despair and destitution), the approaches and
makings of the book’s movement should not come to be taken as an absolute.
The categories of Global North and Global South, and their use, quickly run
into forms of essentialization that obscures the plurality of these two vast and
elusive concepts. I use them here as tools to explain positionalities within
power relations.3 And just as discourses of Western dominance in themselves
risk a eurocentrism that neglects the agency of the Global South,4 the per-
spectives furthered by me also risk victimizing people who may not want to
be victimized. Experimental situations are not settings where individuals
either have agency or they do not—being the two extremes of these subject
positions—but ones in which we must acknowledge the complexity of the
relations of power we are all part of. That is exactly what merits a study of
contemporary experimental practices and ideas.
What ensues, with all the ignorance and mistakes that come from trespass-
ing disciplines and geographies as I do here, is all my responsibility and fault.
Even so, I am inspired by the excellent works of colleagues who are too many
to cite here, but whose ways of thinking and writing can certainly be found
throughout the book. I am grateful to international colleagues, whether in
academia, journalism, or in the professional fields I explore in the book, who
have aided me, sometimes in my writing and other times by opening crucial
access to places, people, and organizations. I am also grateful to my Copenhagen-
colleagues—in particular Luke Patey—who have been with me throughout
the process of publishing this book, as well as Ole Winckler Andersen, Rens
van Munster, Johannes Lang, Lars Engberg- Pedersen, Tobias Hagmann,
Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen, Marie Kolling, Erik Lundsgaarde, Dane Fetterer,
Hayel Celik-Graversen, Therese Bostrup, Kirstine Lund Christiansen, Karl
Møller, Thomas Glud Skjødt, Maiken Bjerrum, Lars Kristian Mathiesen,
Annette Holm, Augusta Janum, Clara Johansen and many others who have
viii Preface
encouraged me and supported the project. At Oxford University Press I’m

grateful for the support I’ve received from Katie Bishop, Henry Clarke, Adam
Swallow, and not least Erin O’Reilly, for wrestling with the manuscript and
displaying their sense of detail.
Towards the end of writing this book, the world suddenly found itself in
one of the most striking experiments in decades, as we attempted to respond
to the Covid-19 pandemic. A dire reminder of what some people have and
what others do not—what difference it makes where you are born, and to
whom—the pandemic has been a failure of multilateralism and global
cooperation. At the same time, for many, it has been a return to mutualism
and the progressive nature that is afforded by what is close to us, whether in
our neighbourhoods or in our families. For me, it was a reminder of the
source from which everything that truly matters flows, and I’m forever grate-
ful to my family, and in particular to Janni, Bror, and not least Billie who was
born into a world of chaos and everyday experimentation, for their unrelent-
ing support and love.
Notes
1. In 2010, Save the Children and the Red Cross both apologized for their participation
in the experimental programme, and so too did the Danish Government in 2020. See
Rud, S. 2017. Colonialism in Greenland: Tradition, Governance and Legacy. Palgrave
Macmillan.
2. As Louise Amoore skilfully reminds us in Amoore, L. 2020. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms
and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Duke University Press.
3. Fonseca, M. 2019. Global IR and western dominance: moving forward or Eurocentric
entrapment? Millennium 48(1): 45–59.
4. See Alejandro, A. 2018. Western Dominance in International Relations? The Inter
nationalisation of IR in Brazil and India. London: Routledge.
Contents
1. The Global Lab 1

2. Humanitarian Machine Dreams 29
3. Randomistas 57
4. The Gates Effect 87
5. Experimental Bodies 115
6. The Silicon Valley Way 143
7. Experimental Futures 167
References 189
Index 199
1
The Global Lab
‘This year’s prize is about alleviating poverty’ Professor Göran Hansson,

Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explains to the
room of journalists and continues in Swedish: ‘the Academy has decided to
award the prize for 2019 to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael
Kremer’. In honour of Alfred Nobel, the three professors are awarded the
highest honour for economists ‘for their experimental approach to alleviating
global poverty’ that is radically ‘changing how public bodies and private
organisations work’. The Academy explains further that ‘this year’s Laureates
have shown how the problem of global poverty can be tackled by breaking it
down into a number of smaller—but more precise—questions at individual or
group levels. They then answer each of these using a specially designed field
experiment. Over just twenty years, this approach has completely reshaped
research in the field known as development economics’. British news media
The Guardian chipped in with their interpretation of the Academy’s award as
well: ‘The Academy said the winners had shown there was a need to adopt
new approaches in the fight against poverty that were based on field trials
rather than prejudice or the failed methods of the past’.1 The three Nobel-
recipients are the intellectual and institutional spearheads of a group of
economists known in equal part collegially and satirically as the randomistas.
The group is so named for their unrelenting affinity for conducting random
ized controlled trials (RCTs), a pronounced form of scientific experiment,
among poor people in the Global South. In her ceremonial interview, Esther
Duflo, the group’s scientific superstar, laid bare their grand ambitions: ‘Our
goal is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific evi-
dence’, and ‘the three of us stand for hundreds of researchers who are part of a
network, . . . and thousands of staff and of course all of the partners and the
NGOs and governments that we have worked with. So, it really reflects the
fact that it has become a movement, a movement that is much larger than us.’
This book is about a movement that prescribes to logics of experimentation
as it practises the Global South as a laboratory, with profound social and political
ramifications. A movement that is propelled by the present accomplishments
2 The Global Lab
of the randomistas, but whose web extends far beyond, as a whole host of
organizations and companies are experimenting with new drugs, emerging
technologies, biometric humanitarian solutions, and radical pol icies and
methodologies for social change in the Global South. Some of these pursue
promises of great revenue in the global bioeconomy while others are in the
business of doing good, but they are bound together by a strong mindset of
experimentation. Throughout the book, we will meet at least four main pro-
tagonists, together making up the core of the movement: philanthropists,
economists, pharmas, and humanitarians. Private foundations such as the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation experiment with new technologies and rad
ical change as they test innovative toilets or condoms or attempt to alter social
norms in poor communities, basing their actions on what they see as objective
models of change emerging from experiments, reducing the messy real world
to formulae. Pharmaceutical companies have moved their experiments with
new drugs to ‘emerging markets’ that provide abundant human subjects ready
to partake in clinical trials to overcome diseases for which they often cannot
afford treatment, pushing both experimental methodologies and stabilizing
experimental practices as everyday care. The randomista economists likewise
conduct randomized controlled trials and similar methodologies brought in
from the natural sciences to experiment with solutions for social problems,
driven by similar scientific desires of reducing complex realities to a set of
logical causal chains. Finally, humanitarian actors, including private charities
and United Nations (UN) organizations, pursue what they see as radical and
innovative approaches to saving lives in disasters and emergencies through
new technologies, from testing cargo drones and big data, to the registration
and ordering of refugees through biometric data, iris scans, and blockchains-
this is an introduction of emerging technologies that essentially functions as
experimentation.
It was during periods of living on the US West Coast that I was initially
familiarized with this emerging movement of experimentation. From entre-
preneurial engineers in the heart of Silicon Valley and overtly optimist pro-
gramme officers working in Seattle for the Gates Foundation, I heard repeated
dreams of using experimentation to radically change the lives of the world’s
poor. These were complemented by harsh criticism of existing ways of com-
batting poverty that were seemingly based on old-fashioned and ideological
concerns that were the opposite of the clean scientific nature of the new
experimental project. I remember I found the fervour and commitment with
which these people argued both fascinating and worrying. Still, it was not
until I began to meet experimental proponents and subjects, from East Africa
The Global Lab 3
to South Asia that I began to realize both the extent of a movement on the rise
and the deep relationship between experimentation, uncertainty, and inequal
ity. All experiments are caught between, on the one hand, the uncertainty of
knowing the potential consequences or the ignorance that lies in not being
able to imagine these, and, on the other hand, choices about how to proceed
and conduct experiments. Sometimes unwisely acted upon through a veil of
ambiguity, sometimes through a troubling logic of subordination. The book
examines the imagined universal and sometimes unquestioned value of sci-
entific and technological progress to show the inequality inherent in experi
mental practice. It explores the political and social ramifications of scientific
efforts, no matter how value neutral, objective, or apolitical these see them-
selves as being, and in particular the construction of difference and the
inequality of experimentation that is found in the erection of imaginary walls
between us and them, between living and dead laboratories. And between
development and inertia. We will follow a movement that is on the rise across
fields that may seem distant from each other but that are in fact bound
together. Across its diverse endeavours runs a common thread: a belief in the
necessity of conducting scientific and technological experimentation for the
sake of progress. The movement’s actors are inspired not least by core logics
emanating out of Silicon Valley about the need for fast-paced radical change,
societal disruption, and technological innovation as progress.
Today then, practices of experimentation have emerged as a major force in
the pursuit of progress and modernization. This book explores a newfound
interest in the practice of experimentation in the Global South at the intersec-
tions of polity, biology, knowledge, and the circumstances of material, social,
and digital life. It aims to explore the oft-hidden geometry of power relations
between those who aim to help and those who receive, sometimes wilfully
and at other times forcefully.2 We will meet a peculiar mix of protagonists,
from Bill Gates and Silicon Valley idealists who see it as their call to push
exponential technologies to the boundaries of the possible, to economists
whose uncompromising views on science lead them to hold experiments as
the only source of truthful evidence, to organizations who specialize in enrol
ling, organizing, or monitoring vulnerable populations. They may represent
different worlds and industries, but they converge around experimentation in
the Global South conducted in the name of notions of development, science,
and policy.3 We will move across geographies and scales, from Southeast Asia
and Africa to Silicon Valley, in order to explore the interplay between global
forces, ideas, and local circumstance and consequence, addressing questions
of what experimentation looks like today in the Global South, who practises
4 The Global Lab
it, and to what ends? What types of progress are imagined through it, and
who benefits from these futures?
*
One of the earliest and most widely discussed disputes on the nature and
impact of experimentation took place between the seventeenth- century
philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Boyle belonged to a group of
British scientists that would eventually form the Royal Society, the UK’s
national academy of sciences today. A devout advocate and central historical
face of experimentation, Boyle and his fellows saw the matter of fact as the
foundation of knowledge; as absolute, permanent, and as holding what they
called ‘moral certainty’. Facts were like holding up a mirror against nature to
simply see that which is given and beyond dispute. And only obtainable
through experimentation. His own famous experimental programme was
that of the air pump, allowing him to explore the nature of air, the vacuum,
and the relationship between pressure and volume of gas in closed systems.
Thomas Hobbes’ innate scepticism drove him to become a critic of Boyle’s
work and approach, challenging the legitimacy of the experiments and the
view that they created unquestionable matters of fact. But his views were
largely discredited as the experimentalists and their newly founded Royal
Society gained widespread prominence in the European scientific commu-
nity. Reduced to its core, the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle almost four
hundred years ago encapsulates contemporary discussions on the form and
ambitions of experimentation. Their intellectual debate was not only one of
science but one of social order and assent in Restoration England, Boyle’s
experimental practice taking the form of an ideological programme as much
as a scientific one, deeply situated in the social and political context of the
time.4 Should authority emerge from a more democratic public sphere or
through the isolated centralized character that was the monarch, they impli
citly struggled over. The present experimental movement we explore here in
the same way sets forth not just a scientific but a political and moral vision for
development and progress in the Global South and beyond.
What is an experiment—is it a method, a logic, or a course of action? Ex
comes from the latin ‘out of ’ and ‘periculum’ has the meaning ‘a (dangerous)
trial’. Expiri also means to try something, in the same category of experience.
Fifteenth-century British philosopher Francis Bacon was among the earlier
thinkers to ponder over the nature of the experiment, but he didn’t make a
clear distinction between observation as experience and experimentation as a
method,5 which has since become a dominant way to consider experiments.
The Global Lab 5
In the sciences that see themselves as hard, experimentation is about looking

at the evidence, proposing a hypothesis that explains the evidence, creating a
trial that tests the ability of the hypothesis to confirm, predict, or explain the
evidence, and use the results of the trial to refine the hypothesis. This is a
scientific method, as positivists such as Karl Popper would put it, designed to
falsify theories. In the medical realm, where it is perhaps most widely prac-
tised, an experiment is seen as ‘an act whereby the investigator deliberately
changes the internal or external environment in order to observe the effects of
such a change’, as the World Medical Association describes it. For the French
physiologist Claude Bernard, who is credited with initiating modern experi
mental medicine with his 1865 Introduction to Experimental Medicine, the
basis for science and knowledge was the experiment and in particular the
method of comparison accentuating the difference between what one expects
to see and what one then finds through trialling.
Andrew Conway Ivy, known in his time as the ‘conscience of U.S. science’
and appointed representative of the American Medical Association at the 1946
Nuremberg Trials that saw Nazi doctors prosecuted for inhumane experiments
during the war, articulated a similar approach to experimentation and know
ledge production: ‘All science or knowledge has two aspects, the descriptive
and the experimental. Knowledge is obtained by describing and systematizing
things and processes which are observed to occur in Nature and by designing
and executing experiments to reveal the nature of things and processes
observed’.6 In practice, the medical approach came to be to trial both subjects
taking a specific experimental therapeutic and subjects not taking it, to object
ively study the effects of the intervention. The clinical trial was born from
such ideas and would come to be known for its use of methods such as the
selection of control groups, the randomization of subjects, and the blinding of
scientists to make them unaware of which patients received a placebo. But
crucially also its post processing evolved, using mathematical and statistical
methods to control for change. The word clinical, fundamentally meaning a
process conducted as though in a clinic, has developed to informally denote
something performed with excellence and precision.7 In a hierarchy of the
quality of practices, proponents of the clinical trial and the closely related
RCT thus see it forming a golden standard, the scientific method par excellence
taking precedence over everything else; the pinnacle of not just biomedical
but all forms of research design.8
It is perhaps of little surprise then that experimentation has travelled from
clinical medicine to almost all other sciences over the past hundred years and
more, just as we will see its migration across organizations and professional
6 The Global Lab
worlds. Not least facilitated by its focus on, at heart, causation and finding the
relationship between cause and effect. Beyond observation, experiments see
the researcher inducing a change and then observing the outcome and conse-
quences of that change. The burden of proof is on the researcher to show that
she can separate and manage variables in such a manner that the effects of
these are not spoiled by confounding factors. British philosopher and utili-
tarianist John Stuart Mill, who formulated his own ideas on experimentation
around the same time as Claude Bernard, held that to understand either cause
or effects, we must isolate one or the other and change the circumstances to
see the consequences. Mill maintained that we could either observe or experi-
ment our way to such knowledge, and that while both hold value, the problem
with observations is that observing b to follow a does not necessarily mean
that a actually causes b. Correlation does not imply causation, as the first
teaching of 101 statistics classes goes. This problem is also referred to as
internal validity, meaning uncertainty surrounds the isolated case. In theory,
experiments make up for this by allowing scientists in their labs to have some
degree of control over the circumstances. In certain experiments, this is the
oretically sufficient to make claims of causality valid, such as when a clinical
study is meant to tell us something about the effects of a cancer treatment in
blood cells. But in cases where experiments are meant to say something about
or affect people in the real world, so-called external validity becomes a prob-
lem for the experimenters, simply because the laboratory context does not
mirror the real world.
Real-world experimentation was key in facilitating the migration of experi
mental practices to the social sciences. Political scientist Harold Gosnell
famously pioneered field experiments in the 1920s by trialling the determin-
ing factors of voter turnout in Chicago. In the same city and around the same
time, sociologists who were part of what would become known as the Chicago
School conducted experiments on programmes of social work, later helping to
spur the so-called golden age of experimentation in US social policy during
the 1960s. Albion Small, the first Professor of Sociology at the University of
Chicago famously claimed that ‘All life is experimentation. Every spontaneous
or voluntary association is an experiment. . . . Each civilization in the world today,
each mode of living side by side within or between the several civilizations is
an experiment.’9 These words were repeated in the late twentieth-century
work of sociologists such as Ulrick Beck and Bruno Latour, who both held
that the world itself is a laboratory. To Beck, science had long since forfeited
its exclusive right to judge what signifies an experiment, as research left the
The Global Lab 7
laboratory and spilled out into society.10 As it moves out of the laboratory,
modern science transfers both risks and potential gains directly into society.
Experimentation, in this view, not only forms a method but may be under-
stood as a distinguishing feature of modern society, breaking with forms of
knowledge discovery existing prior to the seventeenth century.11 The transfer
of randomized experiments from medicine to the social sciences is not without
its issues though, Latour held. In clinical trialling, the so-called confounding
factors are easier to identify and remove than they are in the social sciences.
While a certain protein or a protein level for a subject can be manipulated and
measured to have been so in a clinical trial, it is difficult to ensure that a vari-
able has been completely ruled out in the social world. The same can be said
for a treatment given in an experiment. While a medical doctor can control
the treatment by changing the dosage or the specific drug, social scientists
have a harder time ensuring a streamlined treatment because of human agency
and understanding.12
In reality then, experiments are not clean, clinical, and ordered scientific
processes, whose results form a mirror against nature to expose given truths.
As we were taught decades ago, science and the scientific process—which to
the outsider appears logical, ordered, and coherent—in fact constitute a con-
stant struggle to produce order from disorder.13 There is no control inherent
in scientific methods, only tools that help to assemble or build a performance
of control. In the laboratory, these efforts to produce order are one thing, but
in the field, in the real world, they are something else entirely. There are scien-
tific words for why field experiments possess an even higher degree of chaos
to be ordered than lab experiments: problems of compliance, deviation from
assignment, self-selection, or interference between units.14 Taken together,
what these record is simply the story of how the real world does not easily
offer itself up for the kind of manipulation that a lab perhaps does. People are
not machines, and even in medicine, there is little stability. Returning to
Andrew Ivy, even after the therapy of a disease is discovered ‘its application to
the patient remains in part experimental. Because of the physiological vari
ations in the response of different patients to the same therapy, the therapy of
disease is, and will always be, an experimental aspect of medicine’.15
Despite the way historical accounts of experimentation often situate the
scientist as a lone explorer of truth and knowledge—an individualized author-
ity and miracle man—we appreciate today the messy and complex interlink-
ages, networks, and knowledges that together often form the hybridity of
experimentation. Such appreciation concerns the construction and execution
8 The Global Lab
of an experiment as much as it does its implications. Experiments are not just

open-ended explorations of scientific issues, but instead they are vested with
strategic interests and purpose.16 This perception feeds a core question asked
here—whom do the experiments benefit? RCTs and other experiments are
deeply political and whenever the experimental movement talks of a ‘golden
standard’, these are attempts to render hierarchic the structures of knowledge,
challenging relativism or pluralism. But experiments and all that they prod
uce, as for all other methodologies, can be as biased as any other form of
knowledge. They, too, work as symbolic assets or instruments of communica-
tion that deliver knowledge, carry value, and produce authority across their
many different forms and shapes.
The different forms of experimentation that this book covers also move
across a spectrum. Some are deliberately done for the purpose of inferring
knowledge; others are simply done on the fly with little systematic or scien-
tific thought given to them. Some are expansive in that their immediate suc-
cess generates larger and larger experimentation, and some are narrow or
isolated. Some of the experiments in the book are social, aiming to study how
local systems, norms, or practices can be most effectively disrupted, often
based on a belief that a community or social group is maintaining a harmful
or undesirable practice. Some are economic or political, pursuing systematic
evidence on how to increase employment or the likelihood that local farmers
will adopt new varieties of genetically modified seeds. Central to many of the
experiments we will encounter is technology, borne out of the idea that expo-
nential or radical technologies can bring social and economic progress swiftly
and effectively. Technologies—whether biomedical, humanitarian, or digital—
that are not dead but very much alive, are sometimes given life by those who
use them in experiments or aim to introduce them, and sometimes assume a
life themselves as shapers of future political goals. All of the book’s experimen-
tal practices then share the common denominator that they are conducted for
something more than just scientific purposes. They are done for commercial
ends, to influence social and economic policy, or perhaps to render more
bureaucratically effective the management of vulnerable populations.
Because of these tangible social and political effects of experimentation, we
must approach it from a perspective broader than that pertaining only to a
scientific method. We can call it a political programme, a higher-order logic,
or just a mindset. The purpose is to say that methods are alive and that beyond
its practicality of scientific technique, experimentation is a structuring way to
perceive the world’s being and our understanding of it. Not does it only shape
The Global Lab 9
and produce science, but also social, economic, and political life. When World
Bank economists run a trial to find the most effective measure for forcing
tenants to pay for water in Nairobi slums, they not only conduct an experiment
in which thousands of vulnerable people have their vital access to water
cut off but may also end up legitimizing such measures going forward.17
Experimentation then forms a vocabulary of action and discourse; a set of
shared values about knowledge, change, and about social and political life.
And specific material practices such as RCTs give way for broader assump-
tions about what knowledge has legitimacy, and how social and political work
ought to be shaped. By approaching experimentation as something much
broader than a scientific method, we can include experimental implementa-
tion that may not be conscious of or explicit about its experimental nature.
Not all social experiments are acknowledged as such,18 just as those involved
may not understand their participation as experimental. But that does not
mean they cannot be fundamentally experimental, perhaps even extending
those risks into society.
We must therefore move our analytical gaze from narrow conceptions of
the experiment as a scientific method to experimentation as a political prac-
tice, fundamentally shaped by uncertainty and ignorance, as a trial or a ven-
ture into the unknown.19 Uncertainty means multiple future possibilities for
outcomes; that not everything can be known. As we move towards a know
ledge society, we don’t deterministically reduce unknowns but instead see
surprises and unexpected events increase.20 More new knowledge also means
more ignorance. In the lab, uncertainty means repeated attempts at constru-
ing the experiment to ensure satisfactory results or negate unforeseen conse-
quences between chemical agents. When involving vulnerable populations in
practices of experimentation, uncertainty is added a further dimension of
the risk of human harm. Many of the experimental practices explored here
may come with good intentions—to understand how to incite economic
growth, increase school attendance, or treat diseases. But the interventions
themselves may be experimental to a degree that shows a devaluation of other
peoples. Through the book, we will see the risk here in retaining the Global
South as a laboratory of inequality where subjects are easily accessible and
legitimated by scientific aims, often because they are caught in poverty or
otherwise disadvantaged. Trials may become the only available medical treat-
ment for disadvantaged groups, and experiments in one country suddenly
structure access to education and health in another very different place. The
tension between abstract notions of progressing science or knowledge, and
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inherited or earned thereafter. The pitiful plight of Balzac’s Eugénie
Grandet and her mother was not an exceptional case, but the rule.
Furthermore, she could not testify in civil suits, or be a witness to any
legal document, or have any part in the family council for the
government of her children. Yet this Frenchwoman, a nullity in the
eyes of the law, is respected by all the world for her marvelous
common sense and managing ability. So marked is this that virtually
all the petty retail business in the country is in her hands, and she
manages her business, her children, and her husband as a matter of
course.
This principle of the subjection of woman to the higher authority
of man, installed by immemorial custom, fast bound in civil law by
Napoleon’s code, has in general also been emphasized by the
church. It has consistently developed the passive virtue of sacrifice
and the cheerful acceptance of things as they are. Therefore,
although conditions have changed, to-day, and there are many noble
Catholic feminists, it has in the past been the exception rather than
the rule; and Frenchwomen of the upper classes have been led by
their convent training to accept without question the position
assigned them by social custom and the Napoleonic code. Two of
these three conditions are aptly summed up by Pierre de Coulevain
when she says, “France is the land of femininity, not of feminism:
femininity is Latin and Catholic; feminism is Anglo-Saxon and
Protestant.”
Against these germs of arrested development have sprung up
other germs which have almost killed the first and have produced the
present epidemic of feminism. World forces which affect even China
are of course felt in France. One of these is economic pressure. By
the introduction of machinery and the constantly increasing cost of
living, women of the lower classes have been forced into industry in
France as everywhere else, until it has been stated that sixty per
cent. of the women of France are now wage-earners. Naturally, then,
industrial conditions have compelled them to demand recognition on
the same basis as men. In the middle classes this same pressure
postpones the age of marriage for the man, thus throwing the burden
of support for a longer time on the girl’s father; at the same time it
makes it increasingly difficult for the father to provide the necessary
dot. It therefore sends girls into professions to ease the family
burden, instead of into the convent. “To ease the family burden,” I
say, for she seldom works, as do so many American young women,
for her own enrichment. Her earnings go to her parents.
Photograph by Photograph by From the portrait by
T. T. Henri Manuel Gandara
MME. MME. CURIE COUNTESS
MARGUÉRITE The joint MATHIEU DE
DURAND discoverer of NOAILLES
Editor and radium, Novelist and poet.
journalist. who succeeded
her husband Photograph by
Photograph by in a chair of Touranchet
Chéri-Rousseau physics and MME. BLANC (TH.
MME. chemistry at BENTZON)
DIEULAFOY the Sorbonne.
Lecturer and Novelist and
archæologist. journalist.
Then, too, the tradition that every girl must marry or retire to a
convent has left too many women unaccounted for in the social
scheme. Four and a half million women in France have no home or
children—unmarried women, widows, divorcées, or mothers whose
children are grown. Olive Schreiner says that the woman movement
is the endeavor on the part of women to find new fields of labor as
the old slip from them—a demand for a continued share in the work
of the world. And these millions of Frenchwomen with no home ties
are clamoring for their share. They claim the privilege of employing
their hitherto ingrowing energy in useful work, and in whatever field
they wish.
To these economic and social stimuli a third factor should be
added—the result of the separation of church and state in 1905; and
with time this change will be increasingly felt. Since the convents
exerted a conservative influence, their dissolution minimizes that
tendency. The convents had been almost exclusively the schools of
the girls of the higher classes; they had been the refuge of unmarried
and unfortunate women; the sisters had had charge of the hospitals,
nursing, and nearly all other charities. But since girls must now follow
the nuns to the border countries for their education, not so many go;
and those who stay at home receive a more modern and less
conservative training. Since the unsought in marriage must leave
France in order to take refuge in a convent, more stay in the world.
And since the hungry and sick were left without caretakers, other
women had to take up the works of charity discontinued by the nuns.
Thus perforce, since the separation, new fields of activity, new
occupations, new responsibilities have been thrust upon the women
of France. The withdrawal of the nuns created a vacuum into which
others have rushed.
They are ready for these fresh fields and pastures new. They see
women of other nations so engaged, and example is contagious. A
gain for feminism in Sweden gives impetus in France; a rebellion
against long-established custom in Constantinople gives courage for
one in Paris. Above all, the several international women’s
conferences that have met in Chicago, Berlin, London, and Paris in
the last fifteen years have been great educators, great awakeners.
Then, too, Parisians never lack for foreign examples, for Paris is
cosmopolitan, and Americans especially she has always with her.
The Frenchwoman, who, when her children are grown, is inclined to
lose all interest in life, and settle down to old age, sees American
grandmothers making a tour of the world, and tries to find the secret
of their eternal youth. Thus it may be that as French diplomats have
won half Africa by the skilful use of American inventions and
institutions, so Frenchwomen may yet win all France by clever
adaptation of the American type of woman.
Englishwomen also furnish examples in their interest in sport.
“Sport” is fashionable. Bicycling was once a fad; tennis, riding, and
swimming are popular. The girls’ schools are now advertising
swimming-pools and tennis-courts. For one woman that you met
skating thirty years ago, you now meet five hundred. We long ago
learned, if we ever had to learn, the moral and intellectual value of
exercise. The French, both men and women, are only now
discovering it. We find, therefore, that the hothouse products are
vanishing, and with them, morbidity, unhealthy thoughts,
overstimulated emotions, sluggish brains. In their stead we find
healthy bodies, healthy minds, initiative, organizing ability,
development of the dormant will power, and last, but not least,
natural and unrestrained meeting with men in all sorts of games.
Certain classes of men have been strong and active supporters
of the feminist cause. Indeed, this is one of the most characteristic
features of the movement in France. It seems sometimes as though
the men were more ardent and intelligent feminists than the women
themselves. The little band of French Protestants is naturally in the
forefront of sympathy for the movement. There are fewer Protestants
in all France than there are Jews in New York City, but they exercise
an influence for progress far out of proportion to their small number.
Almost all literary men, no matter what their creed, and lawyers,
teachers, professional men in general, as well as a few deputies and
senators, are on the side of the feminists. The constant pounding
away on the question by playwrights and poets such as Brieux,
Lavédan, Mirbeau, and Jules Bois, has done much to break down
prejudice and widen the point of view. The Odéon and Comédie
Française have struck sounding blows against the old order of “The
Doll’s House,” and novelists like Victor Margueritte, and Marcel
Prévost have done their part in arousing sympathy for the Noras of
France. Socialists, too, espouse the women’s cause.
III
IN the combination of all these causes, then, economic, industrial,
cosmopolitan, social, religious, and literary, the awakening has come
to the women—and men—of France. The successive steps,
seeming slow as they were laboriously gained, become rapid in
retrospect. In professional studies, since 1868, when the first woman
was admitted to a medical school, one after another all barriers have
come down, till to-day all doors are wide open, and in the University
of Paris alone there are over two thousand women students. After
permission to study and take a degree was obtained, came the more
arduous struggle to be allowed to practise their profession, for
prejudice acted as a complete boycott. The prejudice was of two
sorts. One was that of friends and family, who considered a woman
utterly disgraced if she worked. This attitude is still general, and is
the cause of untold unhappiness and estrangement. The other
prejudice, and a strong one, was from her competitors, the men.
Women medical students could obtain their degree, but had no
opportunity to attend clinics or to be internes in hospitals. Law
students, likewise, could not take the bar examinations or practise. It
is owing to the unflagging efforts of two or three able women that this
competitive struggle is also now a thing of the past. Mlle. Jeanne
Chauvin was the test case in law practice. She won after a long and
bitter struggle only ten years ago. In the profession of university
teaching women have been on a par with men since Mme. Curie,
having twice won the Nobel prize for her benefits to mankind through
her chemical discoveries, was appointed to succeed her deceased
husband in the chair of physics and chemistry in the Sorbonne.
Three years ago she became the test case in yet another contest—a
contest over the right of women to public recognition of their
attainments by admission to the Academy. In this first engagement,
like most pioneers, she lost; but the decision raised such a storm of
protest and discussion that there is scarcely a question of the
ultimate victory in this also. We shall yet see women taking their
honored place among the seats of the famous Forty.
The struggle to change woman’s legal status has been
particularly long and hard, and is still in progress. This cause owes
much to Mlle. Maria Chéliga, a Pole, who has lived most of her life in
Paris, and by her essays, lectures, stories, and plays has awakened
public sympathy; and to Mlle. Jeanne Schmahl, editor of “L’Avant
Courrière,” who succeeded after many years of effort in getting a bill
through the Chamber of Deputies giving to married women the
control of their own earnings. At first it failed in the Senate.
Undaunted, she worked for eleven years more until, in 1907, she
wrested from an unwilling Senate the vote in favor of the bill. For the
last five years, therefore, a married woman has been able to spend
what she earns, and to have her own bank-account. Within the last
four years women at the head of large business houses have been
able to vote for the judges of the tribunals of commerce, and thus
see that their business interests are not unfairly dealt with by this
powerful body. Women teachers have for some time been allowed to
vote for the members of the board of education, though women are
not eligible for office in either of these bodies. A married woman can
now testify, and act as a witness in legal documents. She still has no
voice in the family council, a vital institution in France; and if she
invests her earnings in furniture or other portable property, these
possessions belong to the husband.
Photograph by Henri Photograph Photograph by
Manuel by Ogerau Nadar
JEAN BERTHEROY MME. JUDITH GAUTIER
(MME. LE BARILLIER) SÉVÉRINE Daughter of
Poet and historical A fervent Théophile Gautier.
novelist. and
eloquent Photograph by
Photograph by Henri public Boisonnas and
Manuel speaker, Tapouler
MME. HENRI DE whose MARCELLE
REGNIER conférences TINAYRE
at the
(GÉRARD D’HOUVILLE) Odéon are Author of “La
Poet and novelist. a feature Maison du Péché.”
of Parisian
life.
Another sign of the times is the ever-present discussion over the
education and training of the jeune fille. Thirty years ago there was
not a public school for girls in the country. To-day there are many,
though five for the whole of Paris seems insufficient. The inadequate
curriculum is a constant bone of contention, and has already been
much widened and strengthened in both state and Catholic schools
to meet the demand for vocational training. The jeune fille is gaining
slowly in independence, and we find her in novels, spoken of as
looking forward quite naturally to activities and spheres of usefulness
outside of, as well as within the home. “A whole woman is too much
for a man,” one heroine declares.
Owing to the gap left by the nuns’ departure, we find one
important movement of humanitarian interest in the attempts to
reorganize and strengthen the profession of nursing. It had been left
either to the sisters, who were not always as modern in their
methods as could be desired, or to an outside class of Sairey
Gamps, lower in intelligence and decency than domestic servants.
Now they are trying to interest girls of the better classes in the
profession, founding training-schools and studying American
methods.
The fact that the international professional-women’s club of
London, the Lyceum, has now a branch in Paris, and that there are
many other women’s clubs, is significant. Till recently the club
movement has found no response in France. The woman has been
too much occupied in her own household, too much claimed by an
army of relatives, to be drawn outside by clubs or anything else for
the sake of her own development. Then, again, the Frenchwoman of
leisure and ability has been content with her own lot and oblivious of
her duty to her less fortunate sisters. She has therefore not felt the
need of united effort through club organization for a common
humanitarian cause. And even when she has felt this call of duty, she
has always shown an astonishing lack of appreciation of the value of
system and organization for attaining the desired results. Sixty years
ago the feminist pioneers might have succeeded if their efforts had
not been scattered and individual. Indeed, even now French
feminism gives one an impression of ununified restlessness. That
there is now a “club movement,” therefore, shows that at last there is
in France desire for individual development, a sense of duty to one’s
neighbor, and an appreciation of the value of organization. There are
still countless activities that American women are habitually engaged
in—municipal improvement, efforts to improve labor conditions,
child-labor laws, social settlements, etc.—that have not yet reached
France to a noticeable extent. But now that a beginning has been
made, we shall look for all these and more.
Marked as is this general leavening of the lump, art and literature
show the most complete conquest. The art prizes are all open to
women, and at one time or another most of them have been won by
women. To say nothing of their success in painting, sculpture, and
architecture, women absolutely own the field in illustrating, arts-and-
crafts work and in making innumerable small art objects. They also
nearly monopolize literature: in essays, poetry, novels, journalism,
their name is legion, their influence unbounded.
Journalism in France is an influential literary profession, with
strong leaders that no other country can surpass. Women hold
responsible positions on the staff of most of the leading French
reviews, and contribute an astonishing number of articles, generally
under men’s names. Beginning with Mme. Juliette Adam, the line is
unbroken. She was the last of the old school, the first of the new,
wielding high political influence at first through her salon, then
through the pages of the “Nouvelle Révue,” which she founded in
1879. She also wrote novels, essays, and reminiscences. Mme.
Sévérine, a fervent and eloquent public speaker, with rather a
permanent instinct for revolt, shouts her war-cry in the “Echo de
Paris.” The “Révue des Deux-Mondes” and the “Journal des Débats”
include on their staff, among other women, Mme. Arvède Barine.
Three times has the Academy crowned a work of hers, and she
wears the cross of the Legion of Honor, as did Mme. Thérèse
Bentzon, who died five years ago. Mme. Blanc, as she was better
known, was on the staff of these two periodicals. This estimable
woman also wrote novels and essays, some crowned by the
Academy. She was especially loved in America, to which she made
several visits, because she was the most faithful interpreter to the
French of American literature, social customs, and educational
methods. She was an ardent Roman Catholic. Mlle. Maria Martin
edits the “Journal des Femmes,” and Marguérite Durand, “Les
Nouvelles.” The latter is perhaps the most popular woman in France,
and charmingly and essentially feminine.
Photograph by Photograph by Photograph by
Eug. Pirou Ogerau Henri Manuel
MME. MME. ADAM MME. LUCIE
PEYREBRUNE (JULIETTE DELARUS-
Novelist and LAMBER) MARDRUS
poet. Founder of the Dramatist and
“Nouvelle poet.
Photograph by Révue.”
Chéri-Rousseau One of the most Photograph by
YVONNE influential of Chéri-Rousseau
SARCEY modern MME. LUCIE
Frenchwomen. FÉLIX-FAURE
Writer and GOYAU
feminist. Daughter of Félix
Faure.
Novelists and poets have much in common. They are rather too
apt to be feminists of most advanced type, drowned in a noxious
wave of free-thinking, swinging too far in their revolt, and
disregarding moral laws.
GEORGETTE LEBLANC MAETERLINCK,

ACTRESS, SINGER, AND WRITER; THE WIFE
OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK
This epidemic of free-thinking seems to be most evident in the
upper classes, leaving the women of the bourgeoisie untouched. But
perhaps all this is only the fledgling trying its wings, a phase of
development, an ugly stage of self-consciousness, which the French
temperament, essentially one of harmony, will sooner or later adjust.
In poets this characteristic manifests itself in a tendency to reveal
without restraint the inmost secrets of their woman’s soul. Mme. de
Noailles, though admitted by men critics to be in the first rank, is no
exception. She is also a novelist and is on the staff of the “Révue
des Deux-Mondes.” Gérard d’Houville is another poet as well as
novelist; and Lucie Delarus-Mardrus another, seeking unusual and
exotic effects by travels in Eastern lands. The novelists confine their
plots for the most part to studies of feminists. Thus, Marcelle
Tinayre’s “La Rebelle” is a beautiful young journalist; her heroine in
“Hellé” is a charming example of the noblest type of emancipated
young womanhood; Colette Yver’s “Les Dames du Palais” deals with
women lawyers and the divorce question; her “Princesses de
Science” takes up scientific women. Gabriel Réval’s “Ruban de
Venus” shows us artists; and women interested in sociological
questions are the heroines of Renée and Tony d’Ulmès. But the
inevitable underlying theme of them all is the irresistibility of passion,
“the impossibility of woman’s escaping the brutal laws of her own
temperament,” as one commentator expresses it. Moreover, the
heroines are all selfish in their feminism; they are in search of their
individual happiness.
Of the novelists and essayists, more than a passing word should
be given to Marcelle Tinayre, conceded by men critics to be the most
vigorous and virile of women writers, and even classed by one above
George Sand. Her works have been crowned by the Academy, and
she has won the cross of the Legion of Honor. Daniel Lesueur and
Mme. Peyrebrune are both important, and have been distinguished
with many honors. Mme. Maeterlinck is opera-singer, essayist, and
lecturer, as well as novelist. Jeanne Bertheroy and Judith Gautier,
daughter of Théophile Gautier, are famous, as are also Mme.
Dieulafoy and Mme. Félix-Faure Goyau, daughter of the former
president of the republic. Colette Yver, with her “Princesses de
Science,” was the first to win the prize offered by the woman’s paper,
“La Vie Heureuse.” (This is the prize that was awarded to the
seamstress Marguérite Audoux for “Marie Claire.”) Pierre de
Coulevain, remarkably cosmopolitan, and with a wonderfully wide
point of view, is read more by foreigners than by the French. Mme.
Yvonne Sarcey is exceptional in appealing to a sense of duty as the
controlling force in life.
Much as we should like to linger over this long literary list, we
must pass on to other topics. In the matter of the suffrage, progress
is not so marked. Small suffrage societies here and there have
existed for twenty-five years, but the National French Woman’s
Suffrage Association was formed only three years ago. It has
converted many teachers and employees of the post, telegraph, and
telephone service, but has not made any impression on the women
of the working-classes. In 1911 it had a membership of 3000 out of a
total female population of 20,000,000. So it can be seen that the
suffrage movement in France is still in its swaddling-clothes. The
most encouraging thing for the suffrage supporters is the number of
“hommes-femmes”; that is, influential men who give devoted service
to the suffrage cause. We have already spoken of the broad-minded
men who have done much to educate public opinion to more
enlightened views on women. They generally go further still, and are
suffragists. About three years ago they formed a men’s association,
called “The Voters’ League for Woman Suffrage,” which counts
among its members two senators and nine deputies. This league
holds itself in readiness to push forward whatever legislative
measures it considers worth while. It has been working on a bill for
women’s vote in municipal elections, and it is stated as a possibility
that it may be passed. Socialists also favor the suffrage, both
because from the anti-reactionary nature of their doctrines they
must, to be consistent, and because they want the women’s vote.
But their help is of little practical value, for the labor party and the
unions control the socialist party, and these two powerful
organizations are bitter and formidable enemies of women’s
entrance into the economic and political field. Opposition is strong
from the politicians in power. Having brought about the separation of
church and state seven years ago, they fear that all the old clerical
question, which has been the cause of many years of most bitter
wrangling, would be reopened by the women at the first opportunity,
under the instigation of the priests. It is asserted, moreover, that
there is no decided Catholic opposition, as such, to woman suffrage.
It must have become evident from the foregoing pages, however,
that feminism in France is not a matter of the suffrage. There have
been other conquests to make, in the realm of thought rather than
action; old prejudices, old traditions to be removed, rights of moral
and intellectual equality to be established. Indeed, French feminism
can well be defined as “a state of mind, not yet crystallized into
aggressive agitation for reform.” After all, in the last analysis, we see
that for the realization of the feminist ideals must come, and is
coming, a change in man—in his moral standards, in his attitude
toward women, in his whole Latin conception of the social basis of
society. Olive Schreiner says that the new woman is accompanied
by the new man, or there would be no new woman. We see this
development in France to-day. Says Marcel Prévost: “The new
college youth cares more for sport, is more robust physically and is
more healthy-minded. He is less sentimental, more athletic; he does
not think of woman.” In this one statement lies more hope for the
ultimate complete emancipation of woman than in all her literary and
professional achievements.
The newer type of Frenchwoman, breaking away from tradition,
strong-willed, earnest, Maeterlinck is striving to depict in his later
heroines, like Aglavaine and Ariane. His talented wife thus interprets
them for us:
Apparently vainglorious, almost brazen, free, and unsubjected,

marching in the light of day, without faith or principle, we are in reality the
submissive slaves of to-morrow. Beneath our songs of gladness rises a
sorrowful prayer, which no one hears. No one understands our obscure
duty. Sprung from the present, we are daughters of the future, and it is but
natural that the moment which created us should distinguish us but
imperfectly. To hasten our work, would that men might understand us
better, fear us less. Let them learn that for centuries and throughout the
ages, there has been but one divine woman, lover, mother, sister. If at the
present moment we appear different, rebellious, it is only that we may one
day offer them stronger companions and nearer to perfection. For
centuries men hailed in us a beauty that was all effacement. The women
who charm the most in the past appear like those frescoes that old walls
still offer to our eyes half-discolored, pale, ideal, frozen in contemplative
attitude, with lilies in their hands. An abyss seems to separate these
Griseldas from the Aglavaines and Arianes. And yet these two are loving
handmaids of the future.... It is customary to say that woman, influenced
by man, perfects herself according to his ideal. But to-day, grown clearer-
sighted, she seems to look over the shoulder of her mate, and perceive
what he does not yet descry on the horizon.
THE SCARBOROUGH SPOONS
A STORY FOR ENGLISH AND AMERICANS
(DOINGS ON PERILOUS)
BY LUCY FURMAN
Author of “Mothering on Perilous,” etc.
D URING their talks in the Eastern States one winter, the head
workers of the Settlement School on Perilous met Emily
Scarborough, the distinguished essayist and college professor,
and one of them said to her casually:
“In our work in the mountains we come across numbers of good,
even aristocratic, English names, and are always wishing we might
trace the families back through their century and more in Kentucky,
and their previous residence in Virginia, to their old English homes.
“Your own name, Scarborough, is well known to us.”
A look of instant interest succeeded the polite but weary smile on
Miss Scarborough’s face. This expression of weariness was the one
flaw in the satisfying beauty of the essayist, one of those rare
celebrities the sight of whom is not a shock to admirers. “Tell me
about them,” she said.
“The only thing to tell is that all the males of the family perished in
a feud twenty-five years ago—a feud so fierce that ‘the Scarborough-
Bohun War’ is still referred to with horror. The climax came when
Guilford Scarborough and his five sons were ambushed one day by
twenty of the Bohuns, and with their backs against a rocky cliff
fought until the last fell, a dozen Bohuns paying for victory with their
lives. That cliff to-day is called Scarborough’s Doom. One daughter
of the race survives.”
But Miss Scarborough seemed not to hear the last sentences.
“Guilford Scarborough!” she exclaimed.
“It was the name of the founder of our family, a poor knight who
won renown and an earldom by saving the king’s life at Agincourt.
From that day it has been the favorite name for our sons.
“The present earl, the head of our family in England, bears it; my
great-great-grandfather—a second son of the twelfth earl—who left
England and settled an estate in Virginia the middle of the eighteenth
century, bore it.”
She spoke simply, rapidly,—evidently descent from and kinship
with earls was only one of the many fortuitous circumstances of her
brilliant life.
“This Guilford of Virginia,” she continued, “had two sons who at
the outbreak of the Revolution took opposite sides. Lionel, my great-
grandfather, remained a stanch Tory, Guilford joined the
Continentals, and when last heard of, though a mere boy, was a
captain in Washington’s army. Afterward he disappeared as
completely as if the earth had swallowed him. Surely it cannot be
that—”
“Many Revolutionary officers received land-grants in Kentucky for
their services,” interrupted the school woman, “and those who
entered into the isolation of the mountains were afterward lost to the
world.”
“Then your mountain family may, nay, must be descended from
the lost Guilford,” exclaimed Miss Scarborough. “You will understand
my excitement when I tell you I have always supposed myself the
sole representative of the American line. You say that one woman
there also survives?”
“Yes, Dosia Vance. Her little girl—by the way, she has your name,
Emily—is in our school.”
“Theodosia and Emily,—how the old names come down through
the centuries!” said Miss Scarborough, adding, “You must put me in
communication with this Dosia Vance at once.”
“Oh, she is unable to write,” was the reply.
Miss Scarborough’s face paled. “A Scarborough not write!” she
cried incredulously.
“What possible chance could she have, sixty miles away from a
school or a church? One remarkable thing, however, she
accomplished after her marriage. With the help of an old blue-back
speller and the family Bible, she taught herself and her husband to
read. Writing was less possible. She is a woman of great natural
intelligence, and is ambitious for her children.
“Her two eldest sons are at Berea College; we have Emily, and
shall take the younger ones. Emily shows remarkable home-training;
on the day she came to us she was a perfect lady.”
The result of this casual talk was that Miss Scarborough began
an immediate correspondence with Dosia Vance through little Emily.
Of its progress the school women knew little, for soon after their
return in the spring, vacation began, and all the children, including
Emily, went home to hoe corn.
In June, however, a letter came to the school from the essayist.
She wrote:
I send to-day by express a package which I beg you will have delivered
to Theodosia Vance. As soon as I was satisfied that Theodosia was a
descendant of the lost Guilford, I wrote my kinsman the earl of the
interesting survival. He and I are very good friends, and several times on
my trips abroad I have visited his home, the ancient seat of our family. On
one of these occasions, he had an old leather case brought in, and
showed me the most precious heirloom of the family, six dozen worn
spoons, the property of the original Guilford of Agincourt. Taking out a
dozen, the earl gave them to me. Of course I prize them more than
anything I possess. When he heard of the finding of Theodosia, he sent

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