Part 5

Out of such conditions came little Antonia Candia, stripped by an inhuman stepmother and beaten with a red-hot poker until her body was one mass of burns and bruises. That stepmother went to jail a long while since, but we have need still of the services of the Children’s Society that has thrown a strong and watchful arm around more than one hundred thousand little ones in the slum where the home had been wrecked. They are the ones that need our care, if only because (I have said it before and I shall have yet to say it many times) they are our own to-morrow. I remember the case of a bright little lad in an East-side tenement whose home had given him up to the street, as do those homes right along. All day he carried the growler from the shop where his father worked to the saloon on the corner, and when evening came he was missing. It was Saturday and he did not come home that night. They sought him all day Sunday in vain. Monday morning when they opened the shop, they found him in the cellar where he had crept after drinking of the beer, and where the rats had found _him_. Not even his mother could recognize him.

These are the ones to look out for; and the aged and helpless. Nor need we marvel much if those whose lives have been spent in the crowds turn their backs upon the country, upon the woods and the fields, when we offer them a refuge there. The tenement has robbed them of their resources, of the individuality that makes a man good company for himself. It is only a man who can think that is at home in the fields. The slum never thinks; it is all the time trying to forget. There is nothing good to think of, nothing worth remembering.

These are ours to care for. The tramp, the lazy man, is entitled only to be locked up. Only the other day, I was invited to come to Boston and join in a discussion of the tramp problem before a distinguished body there; and I refused. I do not think there is a tramp problem which hard labor behind strong bars cannot solve. It is just a question of human laziness. Save the young, and lock up the old man who will not work. A fellow whom I found sitting in a Baxter Street yard, smoking his pipe contentedly, gave me points on that. (See illustration facing page 104.) He was willing to be photographed for ten cents; but, before I could train my camera on him, his mind had evolved possibilities not to be neglected. He was smoking a clay pipe that had, perhaps, cost a cent, but I suppose it was an effort to hold it between his teeth while I made ready, for he made a demand for twenty-five cents if he was to be photographed in character, pipe and all.

In that yard were habitations built of old boards and discarded roof tin, in which lived men, women and children that had been crowded out of the tenements. (See illustration facing page 104.) The rent collector did not miss them, however. They paid regularly for their piggeries. I feel almost like apologizing to the pig; no pig would have been content to live in such a place without a loud outcry.

Though the flats in the tenements were not much better. How strong do you think the home feeling can be in a place where the family tea kettle does weekly duty on Mondays as a wash-boiler? That was a condition I actually found there. (See illustration facing page 106.) Think of the attraction such a place must have for father and the boys when they come home from work in the evening! We shall cry out against the saloon in vain until we give them something better. And a better substitute for the saloon was never offered than in that old legislative committee’s prescription: “To prevent drunkenness give every man a clean and comfortable home.”

They are worth it, too. Pietro and his father may be ignorant, may be Italians (see illustration facing page 108); but they are here by our permission, dead set on becoming American citizens, and tremendously impressed with the privileges of that citizenship. So anxious are they to become citizens that, if they can get there by a shorter cut than the law allows, you need not wonder at their taking the chance. The slum teaches them nothing that discovers a moral offense in that. But not even the slum can wipe out in me the memory of little Pietro, who sat writing and writing with his maimed hand, trying to learn the letters of the alphabet and how to put them together in words, so that he might be the link of communication between his people and the old home in Italy. He was a poor little maimed boy with a sober face, and it wrings my heart now, the recollection of the look he gave me when I plumped out: “Pietro, do you ever laugh?”

“I did wonst,” he said.

The sweaters’ fruitful soil is here: poverty, over-time and under-pay, all the conditions that go to make child labor and to break up the home. But these also are our own, if they came from a foreign land. The Chinaman we have banished because he would not make his home with us, but remained ever a stranger. That was the reason, and it was a good reason. But what sense is there in refusing one immigrant entry because he will not accept an American home, and giving to the one who will accept it the slum tenement—to his undoing and to ours?

The children are the ones to look out for while it is yet time: the young and the helpless. I spoke of the foundling babies that come from no one knows where. The city could not keep them, try as it might; but there was one whose great heart found a way. Long years ago she sent them by hundreds to the homes far and near where open hearts were yearning to receive them. It is one of the things that make a man believe in human nature, that make him see God in it in spite of all, the fact that there are so many homes of that kind. Not in a single instance since the joint committee of the two charitable societies in New York, of whose great work I have already spoken, began that work, has a child in their care passed the age of two years without being permanently provided for. And they take no chances, but insist upon the child’s being a whole year in its new home before they permit its adoption. Sister Irene was the one with the great heart. There she stands among her little ones. (See illustration facing page 110.) She was a Roman Catholic, and I was born a Lutheran. We could not very well be farther apart on this earth; but, if the heaven upon which my gaze is fixed has not room for both of us—if I shall not find her there with my sainted mother, why, it is not the place I am looking for, and I do not want to go.

I have preached my sermon to the text of the wrecked home. I know of no more pitiful spot on earth than the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island where, when last I was there, I saw seventeen hundred old women, homeless and hopeless in their great age, waiting for their last ride up the Sound in the “charity boat” to the grave that was waiting for them in the Potter’s Field. I know of nothing more hopeless, to all human sight, unless it be that open trench itself. (See illustration facing page 112.) Thank God that there is the Christian’s hope. Even the trench, with its darkness and gloom and surrender, cannot keep that which is born in heaven and which, despite the slum and its vauntings, is at home there with God.

I showed you the Five Points in its old iniquity and told you to bear it in mind, that I would come back to it. I showed you the “old church tenements” and told you what they stood for. Yet, in its disgrace, it was that wicked slum, it was the outrage of that bad day, that showed us the way out. Where those tenements stood, to-day the doors of the Five Points Mission swing daily to let in nearly one thousand children who are taught the better way there. (See illustration facing page 114.) The Point itself has become Paradise Park, a playground for the children; and across the park another mission, the Five Points House of Industry, has registered the self-sacrificing labors of Christian men and women for fifty years. So that on earth there is hope, too. That is the way out. Wherever the Gospel and the sunlight go hand in hand in the battle with the slum, there it is already won; there is an end of it at once.

III

OUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT

III

OUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT

IN our last talk, I brought you to the point, the turning point, where our conscience awoke in the defense of the imperiled home in the metropolis. We had had one or two false starts before we finally got there; as, for instance, when a cholera invasion was threatened just after the war. It was that which brought the Council of Hygiene into existence. There was the human disposition to lie down under the “visitation of God” and groan, which simply means that we are all as lazy as circumstances will let us be. For utter uselessness, commend me to the man who sits and prays to the Lord to avert the mischief and never lends a hand himself. I used to laugh at an old deacon out in my town on Long Island, who had borne a masterful hand in dealing with the law-breakers there in the early days, and who when he got excited over the recollection of the wickedness of the past said, “but then me and the Lord we took hold;” but the good deacon was all right on the record. He did his part, stoutly maintaining that it was the Lord’s work. I would rather have one such around than a thousand of the other kind. The Council of Hygiene told these people bluntly that just then was a time to pray, broom in hand; and the cholera danger was met.

The real awakening came a quarter of a century ago, when the churches came to the rescue in a body. Out of that movement grew the first genuine model tenement building company and the plan of “philanthropy and five per cent.”—that plan which must ever be the way out. In the business of building homes for your brother there must be no taint of the alms-giving that is miscalled charity, more is the pity. It must be an honest business between man and man, if it is to succeed. Out of that movement came our Octavia Hill, Miss Ellen Collins, who planted homes, in the true sense of the word, in the very slum of slums, down in Water Street, where the word home had not been heard for so long that the children had fairly forgotten it—planted them, too, right in the very devil’s preserves, and beat him out of sight—brothel, dance-hall, dive, and all—single-minded and whole-hearted little woman that she is! “An outlay of thought,” she told the Tenement House Committee of 1894, “pays better than an outlay of money.” She gave her thought freely, and her heart into the bargain; and when, the other day, the longing for rest came to her and she thought of letting some one else take her place, there came a deputation from Water Street, from that benighted neighborhood that was, and begged her to stay, which was a whole volume of cheer on our way; for it showed that hearts throbbed there in response and that Water Street had a soul, the slum to the contrary notwithstanding. A deputation that recalled that other one, of which Colonel Kilbourne told at the National Conference of Employer and Employee, held last fall in Minneapolis. The Colonel is the manager of a company “between which and its employees no disagreement of any kind has ever arisen.” It was in the dark days of the panic of 1893 that a deputation of workmen, with serious looks on their faces, filed into Colonel Kilbourne’s office and asked to have a word with him. And this was their errand, as put by the spokesman:

“We know that times are bad. We know that your warehouses are filling up with goods which you cannot sell, and that you cannot get your pay for the goods you have sold. And yet you keep us at work. We do not know what your circumstances are, but you have stood by us and we have come to stand by you. Some of us have been here a few years, some of us many. We have had good pay; we have been able to save up some money, and here it is. It is all yours to do with as you please, if you need it in the business.”

Who, brethren, gave you and me the right to sit in judgment on these, or to despair of them? When you hear men prate wisely about “the poor coming up to their opportunities,” ask Miss Collins what she thinks about it and hear what she will say. The Water Street houses had been a veritable hell before she took hold there. The dark halls were a favorite hiding-place for criminals when chased by the police. It used to be said that if a thief once got into the hallways of these buildings there was no use of further effort to catch him. The buildings were unspeakably filthy. The saloon on the ground floor had finally been closed after one of the bloody fights that were the rule of the neighborhood. Yet practically the same tenants are there to-day and have been these twenty years. It was the landlord who was changed and furnished opportunities for the tenants to come up to. Miss Collins brought back the home, and her houses became good and decent; the whole neighborhood took a turn for the better, tried to come up to the ideal that she set before it. Miss Collins came out of that awakening, and she is a mile-post forever on the road out of the slum.

St. George’s came out of it, with broken towers it is true, but with that which is better than spires pointing skyward: the out-and-out declaration that they might stay broken forever while there were men and women to be saved. “All the money we can gather, for flesh and blood; not a dollar, for brick and mortar!” Out of it came that call for men and women that has stirred our city and the whole country from end to end and has given us in New York forty social settlements where then there was not one.

The movements for better schools, for neighborhood service, for decent tenements, for playgrounds for the children, are ripples of that great awakening. New York became a harder town to die in and a better town to live in. We hear no more of fashionable women giving Christmas parties to their lap dogs; and the day is at hand when no tenement mother shall need to bemoan the birth of a daughter because of the perils and the shame that await her. That was the cry that came to us from that East-side a year ago; and that was why we fought to win; for it was that or perish. Out of that awakening came the new day that reckons with the tenants as “souls,” and which in a score of years has wrought a change with us, in spite of the odds we are battling against, that caused an eastern newspaper to say truly the other day that “New York is teaching her sister cities by her old tenements how not to build, and by her new how to build.” It all began there, the fight for the people’s homes; and now let us look and see how the battle goes to-day.

Here let me show you a tenement house block on the East-side to-day, typical of a hundred such and more. (See illustration facing page 126.) There were two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one persons living in it when a census was made of it two years ago, four hundred and sixty-six of them babies in arms. There were four hundred and forty-one dark rooms with no windows at all and six hundred and thirty-five rooms that opened upon the air-shaft. An army of mendicants was marching forth from that block: in five years six hundred and sixty different families in it had applied for public relief. In that time it had harbored thirty-two reported cases of tuberculosis and probably at least three times as many more in all stages that were not reported. The year before, the Health Department had recorded thirteen cases of diphtheria there. However, the rent roll was all right, it amounted to $113,964 a year.

I tell you these things that you may understand the setting of the home in the greatest of American cities. Two millions of people in New York live in such tenements. Do you see those narrow slits in the roof? They are the air-shafts, two feet four inches wide, sixty or seventy feet deep, through which light and air are supposed, in the landlord’s theory, to come down to the tenants. We have just upset that theory and forbidden those double-deckers with that kind of air-shaft. There are to be courts, hereafter, so that the tenant may have light enough within the house, to make out his neighbor. You will look in vain for a yard for the children to play in, and I was going to say you will look in vain for a bath-tub in that block, but I was wrong there. There is one and I will show it to you. It is remarkable enough to make a note of.

It is upon such tenements as these that the sweat-shop got its grip, that grip which we have been trying with such effort to shake off, for the protection of home and of childhood. Directly across the street from there, I found a sick man using for his pillow a bundle of half-finished trousers that were being made in the flat. The man had scarlet fever. The label on the trousers showed that they came from the shop of a Broadway clothier, upon whose counters, but for our coming, they would have been displayed without warning that the death warrant of the purchaser or of some little child in his family was basted in the lining. We _are_ brothers, whether we own it or not, we of the avenue and they of the alley.

Here hangs the bath-tub I spoke of. (See illustration facing page 128.) The landlord did not provide it; it was brought in by a tenant with ambitions, an immigrant, who thought to find here the equality of man with man, of which he had heard. He found the air-shaft in the slum tenement. Suppose now he grows political ideals to correspond with it; who is to blame?

It was in one of the after swells of the great awakening that a man stood up in a meeting of church people of all denominations, gathered to find an answer to the question how to bring those multitudes back to the old altars, and cried: “How shall these people understand the love of God you speak of, when all about them they see only the greed of man?” He was a builder, a Christian builder, and he forthwith set about erecting in Brooklyn a row of tenements such as a Christian man could build with a clear conscience. The Riverside tenements stand there to-day unrivaled. (See illustration facing page 130.) It is much better to live on the yard there than in front, because you have a garden and you have flowers and even a band-stand where the band plays sometimes at the landlord’s expense. The tenants are happy and contented. So is the landlord. He told me himself that he has had six and six and a half and even as high as seven per cent. on his investment, and he said with scorn that the talk about the tenants “coming up to their opportunities” was the veriest humbug. “They are there now,” he said, “a long way ahead of the landlord.” Seven per cent. is good interest on any investment. It almost looks, does it not, as if it were a question then whether a man will take seven per cent. in providing for his brother and save his soul, or twenty-five per cent. and lose it? It is odd that there should be people willing to make the latter bargain; but, since there are such, you might almost say that our fight with the slum is a kind of missionary effort to compel them to take seven per cent. and save their souls in spite of themselves.

Alfred T. White’s tenants have homes: he has made it possible for them. Humble homes to be sure, but furniture and show do not make the home of which I am thinking, the home that is the prop of the Republic. Look, now, upon this flat in an East-side block and tell me if you think that that is a proper setting for American citizenship. (See illustration facing.) That is one of the piggeries I have spoken of, and there are too many of them. Thirteen persons slept in that room where the law allowed only three. In that neighborhood I counted forty-three families in a tenement where the original builder had made room for seventeen. Do you think that is safe? And what must be the effect upon the growing generation of such an environment as that?

One day I found two boys in a back yard—for a wonder there was a back yard—practicing their writing lesson on the fence, and this is what they wrote: “Keep off the grass.” I was thinking the other day when I read about Pompeii and Martinique that who knows but that some time this boasted civilization of ours may be engulfed in such a catastrophe. Then, perhaps a couple of thousand years hence, when the scientific men of that day are digging down to our buried city, they will come upon one of those signs and fetch it up; and they will put their heads together and consult and expound, and then they will turn to the waiting world and announce that “the men of that day worshipped grass”; and they will not be so far out of the way, either. I have seen, in my day, the grass held to be tremendously sacred, while no one cared about the boy. A little more of that, and the slum will have set a stamp upon those children which it will be hard work to wipe out.

As yet you can do it with soap and water and patience. Take them out into the open, set them among the daisies, and see the change. When they return, it is as if windows had been opened for their souls, through which they could look out and see God. They could not before. That is the offense of the slum which kills the home, that it will not let either the one Who is in it or the one who built it see God. Windows for their souls! No need of wondering at that if you saw the window giving upon the dark air-shaft through which those children looked out all the days of their lives when they were at home! When I stood there with that harassed mother, I asked thoughtlessly if the five children I saw about me were all she had. She reddened a little and there was a sob in her voice as she said: “Yes, all but Mary; she doesn’t like to sleep home.” Mary was seventeen. You would not have wondered that she did not like to “sleep home” if you had been there. What does that tell us of one of the horrid problems with which we have to do in our cities? It all comes to the wreck of the home.