Part 3

But as a matter of fact, it not only can, but nothing is easier. We are fighting wind-mills of the devil’s making. He put them there to frighten us off. In so far as we have lost our grip, it is because we Christians have been untrue to our mission, have failed to discern it. I see in all the social unrest and longings of the day the yearning heart of the world, which doctrine and ceremony and printed prayers have left and ever will leave cold. It is the praying _life_ it cries out for. The very infidel owns the perfect man in our Christ; and he turns upon our faith in anger because he feels that he has been cheated of the love that must be _lived_ by His followers to be felt. Only so can the world be made to see God in man. It was never more impatient for the sight than it is to-day.

When the century drew to a close, in common with many others, I looked for a great revival that should sweep over men and set their minds toward the things on high; and, when it did not come, when the new century came in without it, I was disappointed. Until one day there came a letter to me from a friend whom I had known in all the years to be ever busy among His poor, toiling early and late in the Master’s steps; a letter that expressed the same thought, the same disappointment. “When will it ever come,” she wrote. And all at once it flashed through my mind that it had come, so silently, so gently,—even as He Himself came into the world, unheralded except by the angels’ song to the shepherds in the field—that we knew it not until it had passed and become history. What else is the mighty philanthropic movement of the last twenty years that has swayed the minds and hearts of men; that has given us the social settlement; that goes into the byways and the hedges searching for the lost neighbor and compels him to come in? What else is that but a revival of our faith on the lines Christ Himself laid down: binding up the wounds, caring for the sick and the stricken, helping him over the hard places, even paying his rent if he is helpless and poor?

“And on the morrow when he departed he took out twopence and gave them to the host and said unto him ‘take care of him and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again I will repay thee.’”

Showing mercy! That is the badge of the neighborly spirit. “Go thou and do likewise.” That the world is coming back to Him by the door which the Saviour Himself pointed out, and which we shut, perhaps that is a rebuke to us for our luke-warmness, for our little faith and understanding. Let us learn the lesson, then, in humility and repentance, but let us never again be found saying “can’t” in His fight.

I spoke of the _de_-moralization of the public school. Observe that I did not say demoralization; I think we are working out of that. What I was thinking of was that, in our sectarian zeal to see that no heresy got in, we have, perhaps, come perilously near shutting the door against both reverence and truth, and so helped on worse mischief. It is a matter that has caused me a good deal of uneasiness. I am troubled about it, and yet I do not know how to help it. Is it a sign that the school, too, is coming around to the neighborhood goal? that we have all, unknowingly, been helping to haul it around that way—this, I mean, that the ideal is growing which would have the school be the neighborhood _soul_, no longer the barren mind, merely? I like to think that it is, and that this was the thought which moved the Methodist ministers to promise me last summer to join heartily in the effort to get the public schools in my city opened for Sunday concerts. The “Lord’s Day” stood in the way no longer—rather, it was what decided them. It had too long been the devil’s day among those East-side multitudes.

I marked out for myself a straight talk, when you asked me to come to you,—and no preaching. The Lord knew what He was about when He made me a reporter, a gatherer of facts, and not a preacher: He makes no mistakes. But brethren! If it had been different—if I had been worthy——Oh! when I look upon you young men preparing to take up His work in the world—what can you not do if you but believe that your cause is His! What is there you cannot do? In my day, I have seen the merest handful of men and women, fewer in number than you can count upon the fingers of your two hands, but standing firmly for the right, pull my city upward, upward towards the light,—even in the worst of its bad days, and in spite of them. I tell you now that if all of you here, going out to your work as you believe with the apostolic charge upon you, were to go determined to follow in the apostles’ steps, looking neither to the right nor to the left—to the living that is to keep you, nor to what expediency whispers—never losing hope, never hanging your heads, not being afraid of being called optimists—Christ was the great optimist of all ages; He never lost hope even of us—what could you not do? I learned something when I was last in Denmark, where they make butter for a living and where they have two kinds of Christians, the happy Christians, as they are called, and the “hell preachers”; I learned there that, if you want good butter, you must buy it of the happy Christians; they make the best. So it is in all things in the world; the happy Christians made it go round. I tell you, brethren, that if all of you here now, or the half of you, or the fourth of you, were to go out to your work in that spirit, in the spirit of a dear old Lutheran woman I once knew who said on her deathbed, “I know but Him and Him crucified; if there is anything else I should know I am afraid I don’t,”—if you were to go forth to your work in that spirit, letting all else go, Christian unity would come on the wave of an irresistible flood; so does the world hunger for the message you carry.

Suppose you do not live to see it come? We have so little time that we are always in a hurry, but _He_ has all the time there is. Why should I let the fact discourage me that wrongs are not all righted at once? It is nineteen hundred years since Christ came to a sin-ridden world to free it from bondage, and it is sin-ridden yet. Why should I think that I should be able to do better in my little time? I have a friend who, for many years, was connected with the naval observatory in Washington. A couple of years ago, when he was retired, I said to him that I always looked upon an astronomer with a kind of awe,—he seemed to me to be so near to the Almighty, at his elbow seeing Him work, as it were; and my friend smiled.

“I have not looked through a telescope at a star in a dozen years,” he said. “All the years I have been in the service I have been carrying on certain calculations that were begun before I was a man and that will go on years after I am dead. When they are finished at last, we shall know something worth knowing. Meanwhile, I and the rest of us have been but links in the long chain upon whose trusty work depends the final value of it all. That I have tried to do my part faithfully must be my reward.”

What greater reward could any man ask than this—to be a link, however humble, in the chain which links our world of men with God’s kingdom on high and helps prepare this earth for His coming in His own good time?

II

OUR FIGHT FOR THE HOME

II

OUR FIGHT FOR THE HOME

WHEN I was preparing these lectures, it happened that I went out of town and, returning, crossed the river to New York in the morning before sunrise. I stood at the bow of the ferry-boat and looked at the city, lying wrapped in gloom, indistinguishable except for a light in some big building, itself unseen, piercing it here and there. But, over and beyond the gloom, the ruddy glow of the morning that was breaking grew steadily as I looked. I knew that soon it would be bright daylight. As I stood and watched it and as one after another the outlines of the old landmarks came out and took shape, I thought that so, at last, the dawn is breaking upon us in this fight for the home upon which all hinges. It is no longer an uphill fight _all_ the time.

The other day, I spoke of discouragements that beset the way. They are there in plenty, but there has come into the fight a new note, that was missing before. We know now what the fight means. From other quarters, too, help is coming. Let me sound this note of hope right here; there is enough of the gloom. The critics of my books complain that I am unsystematic, that I “put things in” as I think of them. Perhaps so. I find it somehow easier to put them in when I think of them than when I don’t think of them. Even while I am about to show you how deep we fell, let me remember the forces that are coming to help us out. I think that not only have we turned upon our track and seen the necessity of making the most of this city civilization with its unsolved problems, which is the order of the day; but I believe that we have reached the divide, the point where the population shall be turned back to the soil which it has been deserting.

Many things seem to me to tend that way. The isolation of the farm is disappearing. The telephone; the free rural delivery of mails, which brings good roads, daily newspapers and the bicycle; the concentration of rural schools; a better grasp of the obstacles in the way of keeping the boy on the farm—these at one end. At the other, the harnessing of new forces capable of transmitting power away from the centres of steam energy, and the scattering of the congested populations to the suburbs; means of transportation that we knew not of a dozen years ago. It seems as if the very century, the stamp of which is combination, concentration, so far as we are yet able to make it out, might have in store for us as its big surprise the reversal of the process that characterized its predecessor and bred our perplexities: the drift of the population everywhere to the cities. So that when it seemed in extremest peril, the rescue of the home may be made easier than we thought. I would that in this I might be a true prophet! We can face the other problems of our day with confidence, if the _home_ be safe; for _there_ we have backing.

And now let me take you to my own city, to the metropolis, as typical of most of the large cities of our country. We struggle with the same evils in Boston, in Chicago, in New York, in Buffalo, in St. Louis, in Washington. It was only the other day that I looked upon some alleys in the national capital, under the very shadow of the big gray dome, in which the crowding was as vile and as wicked as it ever was in the one-room houses of Glasgow. Though you boast of less crowding upon the land here in Philadelphia, yet we have the testimony of your public-spirited men and women that the sanitary condition of your alleys is far from good. That means darkness and dirt. In other words, you are no stranger to the pigsty of which I spoke as being the enemy of the home and of American citizenship. How came it about? What brought us to the brink, where, looking over, we see “all the conditions” under which the people live “making for unrighteousness”?

I said it before; but let the public records speak. In 1865, the Council of Hygiene, pointing to the tenement slum, said, “Its evils and the perils that surround it are the necessary result of a forgetfulness of the poor.” “Evils,” was putting it mildly. They came in the last analysis to murder, child murder. The undertaker and the slum landlord divided the profits between them. “Not intemperance, ignorance or destitution alone causes the increase of crime,” was the report of a committee come down from Albany in the fifties to see what was the matter with New York; “together they, with municipal and popular neglect, find their soil in the tenements and thrive and develop virulence.” The remedy, as the committee saw it, was to “_furnish every man with a clean and comfortable home_.”

Tell me, what think you of “homes” where men and women “crowded beneath moldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars”? I quote that from a report of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, one of the most conservative and one of the wisest of our public charities, which, with unerring instinct, saw that the way to improve the condition, the morals, of the people was to give them decent homes. What do you think of cellar “homes” in which the children had to stay in bed till the tide fell; of homes where children died, “smothered by the foul air of an un-ventilated room,” a windowless room[2] which the light of day never entered! That was the burden of a death certificate registered in the Health Department in those old, indifferent days. What think you of a city one-quarter of whose children never grew up to lisp the sacred name of mother, one-third of whose babies never reached their third year, and one-half never manhood or womanhood! That was the record; and, when decency came, the death rate came down with it. Child murder ceased to be the fashion. In thirty-five years, the mortality in my city, while the population grew and grew, was reduced one-half. I mean, of course, the percentage of deaths upon the population. In the last dozen years, reform has saved enough lives in New York City alone annually to people a city of no mean proportions.

Footnote 2:

Since these lectures were delivered the struggle to preserve the tenement-house law has developed the fact that after thirty-seven years there are still over 300,000 windowless, dark rooms in the tenements of the Greater New York!

I must refer those who wish to get at the statistical facts to the reports of the successive Tenement House Commissions, or to my own record of the “Battle with the Slum,” in which I have tried to gather them all. Only let me mention here that the death rate of New York came down from 26.32 per 1,000 inhabitants, in 1887, to 19.53 in 1897. It had been known to run as high as 45 in 1,000 in bad seasons of the bad past; and in individual instances much higher than that.

What think you of “homes,” a hundred under one roof—a hundred families, mind you, not a hundred tenants—under the roof of a barrack stamped officially by the Health Board as a “den of death”? I will tell you what that Senate Investigation Committee of 1857 thought of them: “The conclusion forced itself upon the reflections of all that certain conditions and associations of life and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals.” Aye, they were. In that Sixth Ward slum grew up the Five Points. Out of it came the pigsty voters that voted Tweed and his thieves into possession of the city government, and the treasure, for which we had paid such a price, out of the pockets of the taxpayers, while the thieves mocked us and demanded what we were going to do about it. We had made money our idol, and it put its foot upon our necks and trod hard.

For that was it. The only question that had been asked till then was: What would they bring, those tenements? The tenant must “pay the rent or get out.” Indifference—popular neglect—that was the time for pulling it mildly; for men of standing, of influence in the community, drew the pay that was the price of selling the brother into slavery. Listen to this from the report of the Council of Hygiene: “Some of them,” meaning the owners of slum tenements, “are persons of the highest character, but they fail to appreciate the responsibility that rests upon them.” They did. They failed so signally that, when called to account by the health inspectors in the years that followed, they “urged the filthy habits of their tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property.” You will hear that plea, if you listen long enough and closely enough, even in our day. And whenever you hear it, stop right there and think who is to blame for the cultivation of those habits. The health inspector of whom I spoke had no doubts upon the subject. The owners, he said, are _entirely_ to blame. A pigsty, in time, will make a pig even of man who is made in the image of God. You can degrade him to that level if you try hard enough and are willing to pay the price.

They failed to appreciate their responsibility, those men of the highest character. They did not fail to collect the rents that sometimes went as high as forty per cent. upon the value of their property. No, but let us give them their due-an agent collected the rents, they did not. _They_ traveled abroad; perhaps they never saw the dens upon the proceeds of which they lived at their ease. Do you see what I am driving at? Do you see how it all, here as everywhere, is just a question of gold that will buy _ease_ for ourselves! For gold we sold the black man into slavery, and for gold we let his white brother perish in his slum. We were in a hurry to get rich and we forgot all else besides; forgot the brotherhood in our worship of the golden calf. Men have done it in all times, and the slum is as old as is organized society. “The destruction of the poor is their poverty.” Whatever else was the matter with those houses, they paid.

I will tell you one thing that was the matter with that slum where the home had ceased to be sacred, where the family ideal was tortured to death and character smothered, where children were damned rather than born into the world until the very shock of the discovery that one in five was killed by the worst of the dens came almost as a relief. When the Church finally roused itself to the doing of its duty it put a long-belated finger upon the sore spot of it all:

“In this ward,” said the Federation of Churches after a house-to-house canvass, “the churches, clubs, schools, educational and helpful agencies of every kind make a front of 756 running feet on the street, while the saloons, put side by side, stretch themselves over nearly a mile; so that ideals of citizenship are minting themselves upon the minds of the people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.” The devil had it in that ward, seven to one. Out of such an environment comes the Lost Tenth, the helpless and the hopeless, that levy tribute on our strength and our life. Comptroller Coler showed that eleven and one-half per cent. of all the money raised by taxation in New York went to support poverty and, largely, pauperism, with the burden all the time increasing. The poverty maps at our Tenement House Exhibition showed few enough tenements that were free from the taint of alms-seeking, but some from which, in five years, seventy-five different families had asked public relief. That is one thing that is the matter with the slum—it makes its own heredity. The sum of the bad environment of to-day and of yesterday becomes the heredity of to-morrow, becomes the citizenship of to-morrow. The lowered vitality, the poor workmanship, the inefficiency, the loss of hope—they all enter in and make an endless chain upon which the curse of the slum is handed down through the generations. Our task is to break that chain, unless we want it to break us. We accepted the legacy in the charter of a people’s rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and we must find the way to secure them, or accept the alternative. Freedom means justice to the people or it means nothing; and justice, like true charity, must begin at home—with the home.

We have made that out in our day; and we say rightly that the housing question holds the key to most of the civic problems that beset us. It does; but at bottom it is because it is a much bigger question than of citizenship, even. It is a moral question—not a question of “morals,” merely, which is akin to manners, though on that score we have made headway since “men of the highest character” have abandoned the owning of slum tenements for profit—but the moral question whether I shall love my neighbor or kill him; whether I shall stand idly by and see my brother’s soul stunted, smothered in the slum of my making, of my tacit consent at any rate, or put in all upon rescuing him. Brethren, we shall never rescue our city, you will never rescue yours, until we understand that that is what it all harks back to, that all these things mean one and the same thing: _that I am my brother’s keeper for good or for evil_. No man liveth unto himself alone. A moral, a profoundly religious question bound up inseparably with our faith, if by it we mean something which is alive; and it is only the living faith _here_ that has claim upon life in the hereafter. No man who, unmoved, sees his brother perish on earth, need expect a welcoming hand to be reached out to him from the skies, if I read my Bible aright.

It is hard to understand the attitude of the church, through all those weary years, towards the people it was meant to shepherd, except upon the assumption, which was a fact, that it, too, had been seized and carried away by the prevailing craze, taking the thing for the soul of the thing. Handsome church edifices went up, with brown stone and marble and carvings without stint, further and further from the people’s homes; though not always as the record shows. In the rear of Trinity Church and “overlooked by the stained-glass windows of that beautiful edifice,” the legislative committee, of which I spoke, pointed, with a scorn it hardly made an attempt to conceal, to a tenement containing fourteen families in which “filth and want of ventilation were enough to infect the very walls with disease.” As a matter of fact, two epidemics of yellow fever and of cholera had started in that row. But whether the churches were near or far, the people kept aloof from them. _That_ is not hard to understand, when I recall the dive in William Street, with two stories of vileness underground, that was known in the Health Department to belong to a New Jersey church corporation! The profits were the devil’s wages and they went to pay for what some Christians called God’s work! I suppose they persuaded themselves—men can persuade themselves to almost anything if they want to—that that was the reason they were not willing to give them up, and they fought stubbornly the efforts of the authorities to break up the dive where unspeakable debauchery held high carnival most of the day and all of the night. It is not hard to understand, when there comes to mind the congregation of Christians that moved up-town from Mulberry Street and sold their old house of worship to speculating builders, who converted it into a rear tenement, put a brick building in front and into these barracks piled a hundred families, a total of three hundred and sixty persons. What kind of home altars were there, think you? That was at the Five Points where the dives were particularly vile, but I will warrant that there was nothing in the saloon in the front basement one-half as bad as in the flats in the rear, where men and women had once sat and worshiped their God, to whose service they had dedicated that house.

In 1868, the death rate in the “Old Church Tenements,” as they were called until for very shame we destroyed them, was _seventy-five per thousand_, counting only those who died in the houses, not those whose end came in the hospitals to which those tenements were “among the largest contributors.”