CHAPTER XXIX

SAN ANTONIO--WHOSE VERY NAME IS MUSIC

"_If mankind showed half as much love to each other as when one dies or goes away, what a different world this would be._"--AUERBACH.

I carried away in memory from San Antonio two pictures,--one of a beautiful, quaint old city, rich in historical lore; a city of winter sunshine, palms and flowers which make it truly "a stranger's haven"; a picture of welcome and a spirit of kindness even to the homeless unemployed of which I caught glimpses during my brief sojourn in that city, though covered by thoughtlessness for their care of them.

The other picture is of the fifty destitute, homeless men I came in contact with during the few days I spent in San Antonio. I found all but two anxious and looking for work. These two, like many a rich man's son I know, impressed me that they would die before they would work. They seemed to have lost all self-respect and had no compunction in begging a meal or a bed. One was a drinker and the other had a mad passion for reading anything and everything, yet even from these I frequently heard the expression, "I wish I had a job."

There are, of course, the regulars, chained by habits of vice, on whom the police can put their hands at any time. I know them at a moment's glance. It was not these poor unfortunates I came to San Antonio to study, but the itinerant workers who are lured from their dull towns to new and undeveloped centers of activity, believing work and high wages await them.

It was Saturday morning. While strolling down West Commerce Street, I met a young man in overalls, with jumper tucked under one arm. I greeted him:

"Hello, Jack! Can you tell a fellow where he can find a job?"

He looked at me with a laughing twinkle in his eye and answered, "I have nothing like that up my sleeve. I wish I had, and if I could, I would share it with you, pal. I am dead broke, too, and," he continued, "this is my birthday. I am twenty-one to-day. God, but I feel wretched and dirty! I slept in a freight car last night in the I. & G. N. yards but it was a broken rest. The floor was hard and I was as cold as the devil, and then, too, a fellow can't sleep much when he is fearful that at any moment a railroad or a city bull is going to put his hand upon him."

I then asked if he had yet breakfasted, and he answered, "No. I have not eaten since yesterday morning."

Making a trivial excuse, confessing I possessed a little money, we went to breakfast. As we sat down I picked up the morning paper, and he said at once, "Look at the want ads." The only thing offered that morning was by a man in the Riverside Building who wanted ten grubbers.

"Let's look it up," I said.

"All right," he replied. "I can grub, and I'll do anything."

We left for the place. The man was paying ten dollars an acre to men to grub his land, but the agent believed the work was all done. From the manner of the official in charge we fancied we were not of the right color or kind of men for the work.

As we came out of the Riverside Building the young man said, "I would give a thousand dollars if I had it, for a bath and a shave."

"Why don't you go to the public bath?" I asked.

I wish all San Antonio could have seen the look of anticipated pleasure on that boy's face when he asked eagerly, "Where is it?" and the look of disappointment which replaced it when I said, "They haven't any here. But," I said, "you can get a free shave at the barber's college." He went there at once and got his shave.

When he came out of the barber's college, I said, "Let's go to the Y. M. C. A. They, perhaps, will give us a free bath."

"Where is that?" he asked. "It is a rich man's club, isn't it? I don't believe they want hoboes like us there."

I answered, "No; it is a 'Christian institution,' and they are supposed to stand for just this very thing--to help young men who want to help themselves."

We went to the Y. M. C. A. and when we reached the foot of the stairs I said to my companion, "You go up and ask them."

"No," he said, "I can't do it. Why, it cut me even to ask for a free shave where I knew they wanted me."

I then said, "Let us go up together."

Shyly he followed. I approached the attendant at the desk and asked for a free bath. At first he told me decidedly that their baths were for members only. Then he asked me if I was a member of any organization. I replied I was not, and as I turned to leave he said, "I will make an exception this time, but it is not our custom. Do you want one or two?"

I said, "But one. This young man with me wants it."

The attendant gave him a towel and the young man went to his bath. But we were given to understand, in a decisive manner, that we were not welcome and not wanted. _The bath thus given my companion was the first gratuity ever granted me, in all my wanderings, by the Y. M. C. A._

The first remark the young man made after coming from the bath was, "I feel so good, I think I could go without eating for a week."

Turning to me abruptly he said, "I tell you, Jack, I can't beg or steal, and I'm not going hungry or bedless another day."

I suggested the Associated Charities. "They might possibly help us."

"That would be begging, wouldn't it? Besides, that place is for sick men, isn't it? I am not sick. No! I am going into the navy. Let us go over to the Post Office, to the United States Marine Office, and see what they have to offer."

Although he was a young man, a graduate of the grammar school, a perfect type of physical manhood, straight as a poplar, five feet eleven inches in height and weighing a hundred and eighty pounds, he could not get in, and was referred to Fort Sam Houston for enlistment. As we left he said, "I am going to ask the first soldier I see about going in. He probably will give me twenty-five cents for a meal and tell me to keep out of the goldarn place." He continued, though, in a decided manner, "I am going into the army,--not because I want to, but because there seems to be no other immediate opportunity offered."

And so we parted, he to enter the army, I to be left alone with my thoughts.

Two-thirds of our army to-day is made up of boys who are forced into it. It is the volunteer who makes a good soldier, but these boys are not volunteers--with them it is compulsory. Monday morning I went to the army post to see if the boy had done what he said he was going to do. I found him there a soldier, giving three of the best years of his life for sixteen dollars a month, instead of receiving the privilege of labor by being temporarily cared for in a Municipal Emergency Home until he could help himself.

And, now, I will portray briefly the story of "The young man with the hoe," who made his way into southern Texas. He was penniless, and was arrested on the Frisco line because he was discovered riding a freight train. He told me how he was given thirty days in a Texas convict camp, and how they nearly killed him there for being charged with trespassing on the property of the railroad company. I somehow felt that the convict camp had almost killed the best within him, for he remarked as we were strolling down the street toward our destination, "I have a nice gun on me. I think I will pawn it, because if a fellow has a gun on him and has nothing to eat nor any place to sleep he is liable to do something he will be sorry for." He took his gun into a pawnshop and left it there for thirty-five cents.

These are but two incidents showing how badly this city needs a Municipal Emergency Home. There are two-score others that sadden me as I think of them. What a beautiful thing it would be for San Antonio to be one of the first cities in the South to build a home!

Leaving San Antonio on my way to Dallas, I stopped for a short time in Austin where the Texas Legislature was in session.

During my investigations I have never seen a public notice, in the press or elsewhere, guiding a destitute person to the Associated Charities or publicly offering aid, until I came to Austin. Here I saw just one such notice. It was not at the depot nor at any employment office nor at the emergency hospital, nor at the prison door. It was plastered up in the office of a first-class hotel which at that time was headquarters for the assembled lawmakers of the State of Texas. Well, perhaps, that body of estimable gentlemen did need a little charity.

The spirit of power, energy and enterprise has been breathed into the city of Dallas, with all its youth, strength and progress. There is not an old-fashioned thing about her. She fairly flows with the present. The things most in evidence in this city are new thoughts, new ways, new things. Realizing the spirit of the era, her badge of honor, her insignia should be "Just Now," covering two meanings. _Just_ (in the spirit of justice) "disposed to render to each man his due"; _Now,_ "in the least possible time."

When I told the people of Dallas that their beautiful public library of fifteen thousand volumes could afford to have on file for public use only one daily paper and that I had seen a dozen men and boys waiting their turn to read the "want ads"; that the Salvation Army had turned many back into the street because they had no money; that a private employment office was robbing men and boys; that I had found a sixteen-year-old, starving boy in the city forced to beg or steal, who declared that the Associated Charities of New York had shipped seventeen of them from the Orphan Asylums through to Dallas and turned them adrift in the western country and that the Salvation Army absolutely refused to give them aid; of a mother with five little children, one a babe in arms, who spent thirty-six hours in a vacant, old storeroom which was absolutely barren, while the husband looked for work; of the suffering of the many toilers in Dallas walking the streets all night, seeking shelter under death-dealing conditions, and that none of these seemed to know that there was in existence such a thing as organized charity in Dallas, and that many of them, even had they known it, would have taken the chances of starvation rather than to have asked alms, no matter how kindly disposed Dallas charity organizations might be toward them,--they listened with deep interest.

Houston, San Antonio and Dallas received my counsel, not in the spirit of criticism, but as a message holding a great truth, a message containing facts which must be regarded in acts that will reward themselves twofold in the still newer Houston, San Antonio and Dallas,--cities which every day are stirring into new industrial activity the northern hills of the "Lone Star" State.