Part 2

You do not need the city tenement as a monument of civic folly in wrecking the home. There are other ways of doing it, and none surer or quicker than by forcing the children to labor when they should be at play. The city crowds have no monopoly of the slum, though they have the lion’s share of it. It thrives wherever ignorance and helpless poverty are, and child labor is the shortest road to both.

The city tenements are the crowded highway. Listen to this description of them in my own city:

“The tenement districts of New York are places in which thousands of people are living in the smallest space in which it is possible for human beings to exist—crowded together in dark, ill-ventilated rooms, in many of which the sunlight never enters, and in most of which fresh air is unknown. They are centres of disease, poverty, vice and crime, where it is a marvel—not that children grow up to be thieves, drunkards and prostitutes, but that so many should ever grow up to be decent and self-respecting. All the conditions which surround childhood, youth and womanhood in New York’s crowded tenement quarters make for unrighteousness. They also make for disease. There is hardly a tenement house in which there has not been at least one case of pulmonary tuberculosis within the last five years, and in some houses there have been as great a number as twenty-two different cases of this terrible disease. From the tenements there comes a stream of sick, helpless people to our hospitals and dispensaries—from them also comes a host of paupers and charity seekers. The most terrible of all the features of tenement-house life in New York, however, is the indiscriminate herding of all kinds of people in close contact; the fact that, mingled with the drunken, the dissolute, the improvident, the diseased, dwell the great mass of the respectable workingmen of the city with their families.”

I am not quoting newspaper condemnation. The newspapers have not always been found on that side of the line. I am not quoting from my own writings, these many years, on this subject. The paragraph is from the official report of the Tenement House Commission of 1900, of which I was not a member; nor is it alone in its condemnation. “They,” said the Tenement House Committee of 1894, speaking of the tenements, “interfere with the separateness and sacredness of the home, and ... conduce to the corruption of the young.” There you have it in a nutshell. They destroy the home and corrupt youth! But think of it! “All the conditions make for unrighteousness”—in a city of soon four million souls, half of whom come under that ban! And all the cities in the land copying after and tending the same way,—with yours, thank God! bringing up the rear. Keep Philadelphia there, brethren, as you value your civic life. With the tenement added to the rest you will never work out from under it. Keep it out, under whatever name it comes, whether as a French flat, an apartment house, or what not. It all means the destruction of the home ideal. Flats are but showy tenements. There is not one of them with a chimney big enough to let in Santa Claus, and you might as well give up at once as to have him excluded. There are few enough of them that, were the watchful eye of the sanitary policeman taken off them for six months, would not turn out as bad as the worst. And he has got one eye on the district leader now. Keep out the tenement; it is the enemy of the commonwealth. And ever hold in high honor the men who fight that fight for you, whether they be Jewish rabbis, Christian ministers, or lay brethren laboring for the good of their kind. They fight for your very life.

I shall have much to say about these tenements hereafter. I will try to show in pictures that will help you to the understanding of it, how they injure the social fabric. Here I wish to remind you that that injury is yours as well as ours. An injury to one _is_ the concern of all in a democracy like ours. You cannot have citizenship tainted at one end of the line and expect to keep it untainted at the other end. It works mischief both ways. Ignorance hurts the state in the man who groans under it, and in the man who enslaved his mind, who permitted and was responsible for the outrage. It is of no use to shut our eyes to it. The slum is a cancer that has long roots reaching the avenue as well as the alley. The consciousness, however vague, of having betrayed his brother, breeds hardness of heart in the betrayer, for which alms-giving does not atone.

“Forgiveness to the injured doth belong, He never forgives who did the wrong.”

Watch and you will find that, when the slum vote is most in evidence, careless wealth goes shooting on election day and lets the Republic go to the dogs. Well may the president make the slum an issue in his message! He is right, for citizenship is murdered there. And well may the Church put the redemption of the slum increasingly into its preaching and into its practice! It is angling for living men, not for dead ones. I spoke of pigsties. Tell me, what sense is there in a man’s sitting comfortably in his pew of a Sunday, inviting his soul with a view of the beautiful mansion he has engaged on high, and letting his brother below wallow in his slough the while? Do you think that bargain will stand? I do not. I think he runs a very excellent chance, when his race is over, of having to take _his_ turn in the sty. We are brothers whether we own it or not, and you and I together have to carry the load which is of our making. Try you ever so hard, you cannot lay down your end, and neither can I, mine.

Is it not the old, old story of human selfishness that tries ever to get the easy end at the expense of the toiling brother? The woman who shuts her eyes to the fact that “women’s wages have no lowest limit, since the paths of shame are always open to them,”[1] and joins in the rush at the bargain counter, the pennies she saves literally, _literally_ the life-drops of her sister, body and soul! the selfish man who says: “What is it to me?” the labor leader who, for personal gain, sacrifices his cause, which is the cause of human progress, “the effort of men, being men, to live like men”—these are they who are selling the American home in our cities into slavery. If anything could make me believe in purgatory, it is the existence of their kind. We all need making over, but they seem to need purging by fire to turn the demon of selfishness out of them, that the spirit of brotherhood may enter. I do not know—I am not a prophet—but I think I can make out that we are on the eve of great social changes, for which our democracy was meant to prepare us, but for which it finds us even now unfit. And all because of that one thing, the great obstacle!

Footnote 1:

Report of Working Women’s Society in New York City.

The blindness of them, not to see it! Whichever way we turn, where the selfishness crops out that is where the mistake is made that forfeits public sympathy, while it holds up the cause of human progress. Capital earns its fair reward. Promptly it seeks to crush out its neighbor—calls it protecting its own interests, as though we were so many beasts of prey whose appetites were the one thing we had in common; proclaims from the house-tops the age-old doctrine of privilege—God-given privilege!—from which the world has been trying for centuries to get away; calls the President of the United States, when he tries to make peace, a tinkering politician; and sits in the high seat of the constitution, as if it were made for the protection of property only and had nothing whatever to do with the people! I yield to no man in my respect for the constitution of our land. It is so great and so real that I object to having it worked up into either a sceptre to coerce men, or a fetish to cajole them, as much as I object to having the Bible used that way. I take the constitution to be a human document, the record of action taken by wise and patriotic men to meet emergencies that arose in their day. Unless we are to assume that wisdom died with them; that human experience was completed and bound in volumes to file away on dusty shelves, with nothing more ever to happen that requires judgment or action; or unless we are to confess ourselves unable to take such action when the time comes, we shall be wise to drop the fetish business and to deal with the constitution as men capable of defending their lives and their liberties, including the right to work, and the right not to be frozen to death at the dictation of a half dozen coal kings, upon any plane upon which those liberties may be attacked. This intense regard for the constitution, that is wont to develop in men and newspapers in exact ratio as their love of the brother dies, always suggests to me the fatal ritualism that is akin to the letter that killeth. Something has to make up for that which has been lost; but nothing ever can.

The wrongs of wealth! We all know them. “It is the denial of them,” said Theodore Roosevelt to me the other day, “that has confronted the world with the challenge that ‘property is theft.’” And he was right. But capital has no monopoly of wrong. Labor organizes its multitudes and instantly raises a club to keep out the man who does not think as the next man does, with violence if he will not go willingly. The shallow self-seeking of its advocates, the ignorant blundering of their followers, is often enough to make one sick at heart. We have to look beyond them to the real claims of the cause of labor to having served the world by making homes out of hovels, by making free men out of slaves, by giving back to man his self-respect. We have to take the long-range view to forget the immediate injury and put things right. Organized labor, with all its mistakes, has put us heavily into its debt, for it is true that “only a self-respecting people can remain a free people.” Wrongs there are on both sides. If capital sought but its just reward, it would find it compatible with giving labor its fair share. If labor thought of the rights of the employer with its own; if the fight were ever for the good of the race as it was meant to be; if the union label always guaranteed honest work, a living wage, no sweat-shop or child labor, a clean shop and a fair observance of the factory laws, its cause would be irresistible.

That is it. You know it and I know it. The right, when it appears stripped of all self-seeking, _is_ irresistible. Hence our fight is never hopeless or vain.

The employer who says that he will not treat with his men, that they must obey or get out, forfeits public sympathy and loses his case in our day. The self-seeking union that betrays its cause has no standing in the court of public opinion. It means that appeal can be made to the good in men, can be made with more success than ever. I am warned to beware of a false optimism that digs pitfalls for our feet by making us think there is nothing more to mend. I know that danger; but that the warning should be uttered is in itself the greatest endorsement of my faith in the better day that is dawning. There was little enough to tie that faith to in the days when I wrote “How the Other Half Lives”; but there is enough now for us all to see, and I, in turn, warn him who will not see it, against the pessimism that is both false and disabling. No, thank God, you can at last make your appeal to the consciences of men, and that is why I make it here. I want the church to back it. It is from that quarter that I expect the strong blows to be struck for the home, the blows that will tell. “All the conditions which surround childhood, youth and womanhood” in the crowded tenements of New York City, of the metropolis, “make for unrighteousness.” Is not the call to the Church of God?

Yes! and it has heard the call and is heeding it. I have before me the record of the social activities of one church, St. George’s, of which my friend, Dr. Rainsford, whom you know, is the rector. The year books of Grace Church, of St. Bartholomew’s, of Calvary, of scores of churches in New York, would have like stories to tell. This grocery department, this sewing school, this employment society, these helping hands, kindergartens, cooking schools and mothers’ clubs—they all mean one thing, the determination to reclaim the home that is in peril; they mean that the men and women struggling there shall have backing; that they shall not be permitted “to be content” as they are, for when a man lies down under the slum he is lost. It means that war is declared against the slum, and is to be fought to the bitter end. The Church is coming to the rescue, and I am glad to bear witness that mine is in the van in generous rivalry with its neighbors.

Shall I tell you how I came to be an Episcopalian? I had long been tempted by my friendship for the rector whose church I attended in my own town, though I was not a member of his flock. I had been a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Congregationalist in my day; I would be a Roman Catholic rather than be nothing at all, though that would go hard with me. Denominational fetters ever sat lightly upon me, perhaps too lightly. So that I marched under the flag, I cared less what regimental badge I wore. But one day, I read in my newspaper a growl from the East-side about Bishop Potter’s Mission, the Pro-cathedral in Stanton Street. “Their services,” wrote the man who did me this favor, “are of the kindergarten class: clubs, gymnastics, mothers’ meetings, girls’ dress-making classes—and they call _that_ religion!” Ah! I thought, is that what they are doing over there? and I waited for the answer that was not long in coming.

“Yes,” wrote the priest in charge, “we call it that; and, furthermore, it is our belief that a love of God that does not forthwith seek to run itself into some kindly deed to man is not worth having.” That was their creed—I called it ever after “the Bishop’s creed,”—and I told Bishop Potter then and there that if that was the creed of his church I would join, and I did.

I shall have occasion to show you how the church missed its great opportunity once; how it slept through its chance in the days that are gone, and in its sleep did grievous wrong to the people’s homes, which it ought to have defended. Those are of the sins of the past, and they have to be atoned for; but, please God, we shall not sin thus again. The home that is in peril shall appeal, does appeal to-day to the Christian conscience—appeals from the rule of gold to the golden rule, from the rule of might to that of right; and no longer does it appeal in vain. There was a time, even in my memory, when it was said with more show of reason than I care to think of, that the greatest church corporation in the land was the worst tenement-house landlord in New York City. But to-day our appeal is to the churches. They aroused our consciences to action twenty years ago; they and the Christian men and women who sit in them head every movement in our great city towards the redemption of the home; they led in the fights for reform, for decent living conditions for the people, that wrested victory from the slum twice in the last half dozen years. You all remember those fights and the share that this same Pro-cathedral with the Bishop’s creed bore in the last one.

There was never such an arraignment of a city government as that made by the Bishop of New York in his letter to the mayor, calling upon him, “in the name of these little ones, these weak and defenseless ones, Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races and tongues, but from homes in which God is feared and His law revered,” to save the people from a “living hell” of vice and corruption; and never was there such a response of an aroused city as to that summons. The heart of the people is all right; it is on the side of the Lord and His hosts, all doubting Thomases to the contrary notwithstanding. Let us be glad!

I remember a cry for help that came from over on that East-side, of which we hear so much. It was a good many years ago when I was a reporter in Mulberry Street, and it came from a church in a letter to the Police Board asking for protection against the boys who played in the street in front of it and disturbed the Sunday worship. The captain of the precinct retorted that they had no other place in which to play and no other time for it, and that the minister of that church had better be about getting them a playground. That was in the days of little sense, and the result was that other cry that went up and made itself heard at a great meeting of all the churches: “How shall we lay hold of this great multitude that has forsaken our altars?” They have learned since to lay hold of it with gymnastics, kindergartens and boys’ clubs, and the little handful of discouraged communicants has grown into hundreds that throng about the altar rail of St. George’s and the other churches every Sunday. We have come into the days of good sense. I shall not be charged with false optimism in this; for I remember the day when the families on the register of St. George’s could be counted in one short breath, whereas now the communicants number more than eight thousand, the vast majority of them from the East-side tenements—with the mayor of the city teaching the Bible class in the Sunday-school and the president of the Citizens’ Union and the greatest financier of any day among the strong backers of the rector and his work. I am but stating the facts in which I rejoice. My eyes are not shut to the troubles that are ahead in the changing populations over there; but I am not afraid of losing the Lord’s fight, and neither are those in charge of St. George’s. I speak of it as typical of all the rest of the parishes in New York who are enlisted in that war. It is the men who are not afraid who win battles. But first you must plan them.

Right here, I want to point out to you young men, who are going to take a hand in it, one of the weak spots, if not _the_ weak spot, in your campaign for the home—that home which all the influences of the modern day combine to put in peril. I mean the disappearance of the family altar. Hand to hand with the crowding of the home to the wall, has gone the crowding out of the things that make it the representative of heaven on earth; until now one seldom hears of the old family worship, so seldom that it almost gives one a start to be asked to join in family prayer. And I am not referring to the homes of working men especially, but to those of the rich and prosperous as well. The causes of it? They are many and complex in the setting forth of them, I suspect: the hurry of our modern life, the new freedom that makes little minds think themselves bigger than their maker, the _de_-moralization of the public school, the pressure of business,—it is hard to get the family together—which is merely setting up the fact of the scattering of the home in the defense of it. The causes are many, but the result is one: the wreck of the home. I said it before, of child labor, that it was dearly paid for. So also the business prosperity which makes us forget God is bought at a price no man can afford to pay. It is my cherished privilege sometimes to break bread with a pious Jewish friend, and when I see the family gathered about his board giving thanks, a blush comes to my cheek, a blush for my own people. Whence the abiding strength of that marvelous people through all the centuries of persecution in the name of the Prince of Peace, but from the fact that they still hold to the God of their fathers in their homes? I have been told of the experience of a friend in a town not far from mine, who asked his pastor on the occasion of a friendly evening visit to his house, to remain and pray with the family. The good man’s face lighted up with pleased surprise, as he said: “I have been in this parish more than a year and this is the first time I have been asked to pray with any of my people in their homes.” Is it any occasion for wonder that they have been vainly trying for more than a dozen years in that place to build a new and very much needed church? They have never been able to raise the money, though their own houses are particularly nice; there is not a poor man in the parish in the sense of his wanting any of the necessities of life. But why should they build a house for the Lord when they have put Him out of their own homes? What sense would there be in that?

I say to you young men preparing for the priesthood, if you want strong churches and strong men and women in them, go worship with your parishioners in their homes. Take my word for it that you will be surprised at the result. We have filled the hungry mouths in our land of plenty, but there are more starving hearts than you know of all about you. Build up the family altar, and the home will come back of itself. Do not bother yourselves about “God in the Constitution,” if you have Him installed in the people’s homes. If God is feared in the home, _there_ is written the Constitution which will never need amendment. The greatest peril that besets the American home to-day is its godlessness. Put back the family altar and let there be written over it the old stout challenge to the devil and his hordes: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord;” and even the slum tenement shall seek to attack it in vain.

In the town of which I spoke, there have in the last half dozen years grown up two clubs, one for the men, the other for the women, and I am told that practically they all belong. The result has been the disappearance of pretty nearly all of the pleasant neighborhood life of that day when a man gave his arm to his wife after supper and they went together for a social call upon some neighbor, for a chat, a little music, going home in good season for bed, telling one another that they had had a good time. There are no good times in that town any more—not of that kind at all events. The men spend the evenings bowling at the club; the women meet in committees to plan public improvements. The old time supper has become a later dinner and it is the rarest of all things to find a neighbor “dropping in” unannounced—so rare that one feels that it somehow is not good form any longer. The family firesides are cold. And the young—I am told that there is a disproportionate number of them growing up idle and useless, if not worse. They have lost their hold, though they do not know it. I am no enemy of clubs, although I know little of them; but, as a substitute for the altar, I will fight them until I die. And I am a great backer of woman’s influence in public affairs—it has been good always and everywhere in my sight; but I say to you now that I would rather see, we could better afford, that every club and organization in the land should cease to exist, and every ten-pin alley stand silent and deserted, than that the old home life which centred about the family hearth should go from among us. With it goes that which nothing, no commercial gain, no advance in science, or government or human knowledge, can replace.

“But they are gone,” I hear some one say, “the old patriarchal days, and you can’t call them back.” I wish there was no such word in the language as “can’t.” It has made more mischief than all the rest of them together. But in the last sifting the world is run by the men who _can_, while those who can’t stand and look on. Who says you cannot do the thing that is right? That is what we are here for. Our business is to make out the right and then go ahead and do it. The Lord has all the time and all the resources that there are, and, if we do our best, we can leave Him to attend to the rest. Can’t! If the Church says to-day that it cannot restore the old faith, that it cannot rekindle the altar fires that have grown cold, it had better go out of the business; it has become an unfaithful steward.