Part 7

Presently I remembered that I had started to interview him, and asked questions. He did not answer them, but his looks were more eloquent than words; and, at the hard places, another street Arab, a degree less dirty and less spiteful than he, ventured responses that let in the light. Read and write he could not, never went to school. I stared at that; visions of truant officers, of compulsory education laws, rose up before me. I little knew then the true condition of things—it was years after that that our first school census showed us fifty thousand children in the street who should have been on the school-benches, but were shut out for lack of room. What did he know? Nothing. But, said I impatiently, what can he do, what does he do?

“He?” said the other boy with a contempt for my lack of understanding, which he made no effort to conceal, “He throws stones!” And mud. That was all, all we had taught him in his apprenticeship of the street, his preparation for the citizenship that was to come. That was _our_ end of the story.

We have been busy since making inquiries concerning this lad who is our to-morrow. We have been at work among the underpinnings to see how fared the props upon which we build character, citizenship—the same thing in the end. When the test comes, they are convertible terms. And the props were not there—they were gone! What had become of them? I have shown you how beset is the home whence came the boy who throws the mud. There is no stronger prop under the character that forms in the growing boy than his home. The tenement is a destroyer of home and of character, of the individuality that makes character tell. A homeless city—a city without civic pride, without citizen virtue, a despoiler of children, a destroyer of the to-morrow.

Did I tell you of my friend whose house stands in a garden with a sand-heap in which the children dig and romp with their cat and the kittens and the terrier dog? Of how the dog _will_ try to smother a kitten now and then in an opportune sand-hole, with the children ever on the watch to avert the threatened catastrophe? And of how they did avert it, until one unlucky day they found a dead kitten in the sand-heap. Whereupon the little girl rushed into her mother’s presence with it in her apron and cried out indignantly:

“There, mamma, a perfectly good cat spoiled!”

Just so with these children of the tenement. Perfectly good, as good as any on the avenue with the brown stone mansions, they are spoiled in the tenement house slum, and the loss is ours, an irreparable loss. The chief prop under the character of the growing boy is gone. Nothing can replace it; nothing ever does.

The school is another. How about the lad’s school? The census of which I spoke told us that story seven years ago; and we were surprised. It would have been more to the point had there been no cause for surprise. Two chief props of the to-morrow, of the state—the home and the school—and both neglected! Fifty thousand children in the street who should have been in school! Where the prop had not been knocked out, what had our neglect made of it?

I remember my efforts to catechize a sewing class of girls, all out of the public school, on the subject of Napoleon, of whom there was a big picture on a poster just across the street. Not one of them knew who he was. They thought the picture was of some wild west show character, Buffalo Bill perhaps. Yes, there was one who “believed she had heard of the gentleman before.” She said it timidly and was evidently not sure that she might not be doing an injury to some innocent citizen who might rise and object. This was what she had heard “that he had two wives.” Not that he was a great general, not that he was a soldier, a lawgiver, a ruler, a leader of men; but that he had two wives. It was Napoleon scaled down to the level of the slum.

We found out what our neglect had made of the public school when three applicants for appointment as policemen under Theodore Roosevelt wrote in their examination papers that five of the thirteen states that formed the union were, “England, Ireland, Wales, Belfast, and Cork”! Another wrote that Lincoln was murdered by Ballington Booth! We had made our public schools into stuffing machines. Where they should have taught the young to think, they jammed them full of all sorts of things that made manikins of them—not men. And the “truants” we made by slamming the school-doors in their faces, we took and locked up in a jail behind iron bars, with burglars and thieves and bad boys of every kind, and divided them there—not into the good and the bad; not into the sheep and the goats, remembering that in mingling them there was fearful danger, for how should the young burglar, bursting with pride in his exploit, keep from bragging of it to his admiring side-partner?—not that way were they classified, with a sense of the peril of such a contact, but into squads according to height: four feet, four feet seven, and over four feet seven! That was how we ran our school machinery, without sense or soul; and, where there is neither, character does not grow. That prop—the school—was gone, knocked out from under the boy, the to-morrow.

However, we have done our best to put it back since we made out how badly off we were, for we understand at last the peril of that. Our schools are every day getting nearer to the ideal school that turns out men and women who think, to do the work of the world. The reformatory I spoke of is no longer guilty of such outrages upon common sense. It is to-day leading the way in an attempt to restore, as nearly as possible, family life and family training in home groups, instead of the deadening institution life, to the children whose greatest misfortune was that they never knew home in the saving sense while they—and we—could so easily have been saved.

And now here is a prop which, certainly during a most critical period of the boy’s life, should stand ahead even of the school. I mean his play. Froebel, the great kindergartner who gave us the best legacy of the nineteenth century to its successor, said that play is “the normal occupation of the child through which he first perceives moral relations.” Upon this truth and the other, that the child “learns by doing,” he built his whole common sense system, which we now know to be the right beginning of all education, whether of rich or poor. How have we dealt with this strong bulwark? As sacredly should it be guarded as the right of habeas corpus; the one is not of greater moment to the commonwealth than the other. You cannot make a good citizen out of the lad whom you denied a chance to kick a ball across lots when that was his ambition and his right. I have said it before: it takes a whole boy to make a whole man.

How did we guard this bulwark of play? In the chief city of the land, up to half a dozen years ago, the lad had not one place where he might play, safe from the policeman. Not a single playground was there, even on that East-side where half a million tenants were pent up in the big barracks, out of sight and reach of a green spot. Not a school was there with a playground belonging to it. Yes! there was one; over behind the public school in First Street was a little patch in the middle of the block that had once been a graveyard, but had become a mere litter of tin cans and ash-heaps. It took three years and, I think, as many legislative bills to obtain this sorry boon for the living; but, when it was at last made into a playground, the “gang” in that block went out of business. What became of it? Where did it go? To school, probably. That school became the most popular one on the East-side, and the most orderly.

For all that, however, this playground long remained the only one. It took years to make us see what a clear-headed man across the sea had made out many years before; namely, that crime in our large cities is, to an unsuspected extent, a question of athletics merely—of giving the boys a chance to play when that is what they need. Boys are like steam boilers with steam always up: the steam has to have a safe outlet, or it will find an unsafe one. Boilers have safety-valves with which it is best not to meddle. The boy’s safety-valve is his play. Let the landlord hang up his sign in the yard that he will have no ball playing there, and let the policeman refuse the lad the chance to play in the street, which is a bad place to play at best—let these two sit on the boy’s safety-valve, and you need not marvel at the explosion you will hear. You can read of it in the papers every day: such and such a “gang” waylaid the policeman on their beat last night and beat him with his own club. It is nothing to marvel at, no special depravity; it was just the boiler that went bang.

That was the way we safeguarded that prop under the boy, who is father to the man, and we reaped as our reward crooked citizenship. New York is but the type of the rest of our cities in this as in so much else. We are at last taking the kindergarten seriously; here and there “play-schools” are being opened in the long summer vacations. In New York, we have built half a dozen play-piers out into the river, where the little ones dance to the music of brass bands in the evening. I told you how we put brass bands up on the schoolhouse roofs and invited the neighborhood in. Boston has “play-rooms” for indoor fun in crowded neighborhoods. We shall yet have “play-houses” for the children’s use as well as for the grown folk; but it is still a running fight. Twice in the past year have I been appealed to to help save the kindergarten from ignorant town boards, who could not see what good there was in it that the people should be taxed for its support. The dawn of common sense has set in, but it will be sometime yet to the broad daylight.

There are other props which we have hardly recognized as such. There is the respect for law that means respect for the majesty of the commonwealth, of the state. What have we made of that? Of the compulsory education law, until within the last half dozen years, we made a laughing stock. Of the factory law, said a legislative committee that looked us over, we made a mess of perjury and child labor. The excise law became a vehicle of blackmail and corruption. This is how we tended that prop, forgetting that to bring contempt upon the law is the shortest cut to civic cynicism, which is a death-blow to the republic: it lives but in the people’s hopes and high ideals.

The very enforcement of law has sometimes seemed a travesty: the boy who steals fifty cents is sent to the house of correction; the man who steals a railroad goes free. So the lad, robbed of every chance and with the fact dinned into his ears unceasingly by those who would make capital of his plight, takes to the street and throws stones and mud at the order of society that gave him no show; at the church, with its pride and pomp; at the citizen in a good coat and a silk hat; at the policeman, when his back is turned and he is far enough away; at anything that stands for the order of society in which he was allowed no place.

Need we wonder at it? Need we cavil at this lad who clutches at the very last straw in vain—the father’s help and counsel that means so much to the growing boy? Too often relations between father and son are reversed, and the father must depend on the boy for communication with the strange world around him. He is and remains a stranger, never even learning the language; the boy is born to it and to the new ways that prove a stumbling-block to his father. He, the father, is an Italian, a Greek, a refugee Jew—he is “Dutch.” That sums it all up. He is “Dutch” and he is “slow,” and, in the inevitable conflict between the old and the new, the boy escapes to the street and to the gang.

Come now with me to the reformatory and look at their records. Three-fourths of the young men who land there are “without moral sense” yet “of average mental capacity,” which is to say that they had the common sense to benefit by their opportunities had we put any in their way; but we did not. See how all but eight or nine in a hundred had bad homes, or homes which, at all events, had no influence for good upon their lives. But in this it is emphatically true that that which is not for is against. Unless the home is a saving influence in the lad’s life, the door has been opened for all that is bad and corrupting. More than ninety per cent. were adrift at the age when character is formed. And only one in a hundred escaped bad company![3] The street has no other kind of company and the street is the alternative of the home.

Footnote 3:

See Year Book of Elmira Reformatory.

There is your heredity made to order for you—to _your_ order—the heredity of the slum; for the heredity, under which we groan, ever ready to give up, to lay the blame on the Almighty for our shortsightedness, our selfishness and love of ease,—this heredity is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, just the sum of the bad environment which it was in our power to mend if we had but minded it while it was time. The hundredth case we can leave to the Lord, who punishes the sins of the fathers upon their children only in them that _hate_ Him. To those who would do His bidding, His work in the world, He is ever ready to show a way out. The way is to keep His commandments, the old, and the new that sums up all the rest. Loving our brother, we shall not have the heart to leave him in the slough; we shall be wanting to fight all the things that drag him down, and so we shall be mending not only his chances in the to-day, but we shall be cutting off the heritage of sin and sorrow and failure that would blight the to-morrow. We shall have lifted the curse that was laid upon man for forgetting his brother—for whoso forgets his brother hateth Him, that is what it means—and shall have helped the kingdom to come upon earth, even as it is in heaven above. By helping men to live the life of men, we shall bring them nearer to Him whose children we are. That is our heredity, the only real one: that we are children of God! With that backing, who can falter? What is there that you and I cannot do? And how dare we refuse to do it?

“Weakness is what ails the young criminal, not wickedness,” say the prison superintendent, the prison chaplain, every one who knows. Lack of character, that is. How could he grow a character in such a setting as his? And for this setting we, not he, are responsible. He could not help himself. Think what it was we wasted! Only the other day the head-worker of one of the social settlements in New York told me of a little Jewish boy in her care, a little chap of eight, whose home is in a tenement where the father works early and late to make ends meet, his darling ambition that his boy shall some day be a rabbi; but the little fellow threw consternation into that household by declaring that he would not be a rabbi when he grew up, and why? “Because,” he told my friend, “I do not believe I could ever think of words beautiful enough to speak to God in.” Out of a slum tenement! How you would cherish it forever if your little one were to lift his soul and yours up to God with such a speech! Diamonds in the dust, truly.

I remember the “Kid” they brought to police headquarters handcuffed to two policemen whom he had tried to kill when they came upon him robbing a store. If ever there was a tough, he was one. And yet when they brought him out from the detective office, where he had had his pedigree taken and been photographed and hung in the Rogues’ Gallery as the first stop on his way to the jail and to the gallows, there was something underneath the hard crust that spoke to me of the image of God in which he was made. Overlaid by the slum, yes! hopelessly, you might have said; but there is no such thing as hopelessness where the spark of His life is. It may be quickened at any moment. It needs only the right thing to strike fire, and that thing is always the same. Love of God? He did not know what it was. He would have spurned you away had you come to him with it on your lips. But when, five minutes later, a cry of horror went up on Broadway where a little toddling baby had strayed out upon the railroad track with a runaway car not ten feet from the child, who crowed with delight at the sound of the bell which the gripman banged, sick with dread, for he was powerless to stay the car—when we stood frozen to stone with the despairing shriek of that mother whom men were holding back while they turned their heads away, with her cries ringing the doom of the child in our ears—when there seemed no help on earth, then it was the “Kid” who tore himself from the grasp of the policemen and sprang upon the car-track, saving the child at the risk of his own life a thousand times over! Thief, tough, indexed and hung in the Rogues’ Gallery; started fair for the jail and the gallows, he did not hesitate. The peril of the innocent child struck the spark, and the image came out which the slum had tried to smother. Plenty there are who, had they seen him, would not have thought it was there; for there are other things beside the slum that bury it deep, too deep for the spark to struggle through: too good a time, over-indulgence, selfishness, for instance. It is not the first time that men have sought the Lord in the high places in vain. The wise men found Him cradled in the stable with the dumb beasts, and they worshiped Him there.

There was Fighting Mary. She earned her name; that tells the story. A pupil on occasion in the Industrial School of the Children’s Aid Society on Seventh Avenue, she had acquired such a reputation as a battler with the gangs of the neighborhood, that it seemed like putting a premium on bad conduct, I suppose, to bid her to the Thanksgiving dinner; but better counsel prevailed, and she was allowed to come. And when she saw the little mince pie at her plate—a whole pie, the first and only one in her desolate life, though nothing was farther from her mind than thoughts of desolation, with several unsettled scores on hand—her whole childish soul went out to it. She caressed it tenderly, felt of it, sniffed its sweet fragrance, and, when every sense was satisfied except the one that the children all about her were gorging, she crammed it, as carefully as she might, all warm and pulpy as it was, into her dress pocket. The boys saw it and, encouraged by the presence of strangers, jeered a little; not very loudly, for they knew the penalty well; but she heard it and, with one of the looks before which the “gang” had quailed before, she said just this: “For mother.”

That was all; but it brought the tears of penitence, of sorrow and of gladness to the eyes of the good women who thought once of shutting her out as quite beyond hope. Before that day’s sun set, they did what they could to undo the wrong by adopting a resolution that has since stood upon the records of all the twenty schools and more of the Children’s Aid Society: that occasions of mince pie shall carry double rations always, one for Mary and one for mother!

These are the children whose backs we have been loading with the heredity of the slum, of ignorance, of homelessness. There came to me the other day a letter asking me to be present at the fiftieth annual meeting of that Children’s Aid Society, which has in all these years been trying to break the bonds of the slum by taking the children from it and planting them out on the Western fields where they may grow in the sunlight. And grow they did; at the meeting to which I was invited, three governors were to be present, two elected by the people in their states and one territorial governor appointed by the president; and all three of them were once bare-legged little raggamuffins taken from the slum of New York!

No hope? No, there will be none for _us_, unless our eyes are opened speedily; for it does not end here. We can choose whether we will make of the lad in the slum a governor or a thief; and we shall have to foot the bill here, if we choose the bad end. But there is another reckoning coming for smothering God’s image in a human soul. Somebody has got to foot that bill, too, and it will not be the boy. He was the victim.

The boy sees the choice we are making. He sees us building jails when we should have built schools, though the schools are many times cheaper any way one looks at it. If he has heard that I am my brother’s keeper, he must conclude upon the evidence that it means jail-keeper; and, in disgust and derision at our lack of sense, he throws stones and mud. And who shall blame him? Not I. I joined him long ago, only I throw ink; but the idea is the same. The boy has been foully dealt with.

And foolishly! Where it would have been—is—so easy to _form_ character, we have been laboring with such infinite toil to _reform_ it. It would have formed itself had we left the boy the home, for that is where character grows. The loss of it thrust a hundred problems upon us of finding props to take its place. All the labor of forty years has been directed to that end.

The fresh air holidays are one, and how strong a one, how sadly needed, he may know who hears the child cry out upon his first sight of God’s open fields, “How blue the sky is, and how much there is of it!” Not much in his slum alley! “The fresh air holiday,” said a woman doctor who has labored all her life among the poor in my city, “is a strong plaster for our social ills.” And so it is. Some day, I hope to see the touch from my old home, the neighborly Danish touch, added to it for the good of us all. There they exchange; the boys from the city go out to the country to be made over, and the lads from the farms are taken to town by their teachers to see its wonders and to come nearer to the history of their country that is written there. So they feel more like what they are in fact, neighbors who can pull together all the better because they are no longer strangers. They have been introduced to one another. That idea is worth considering. In our great country, we need to pull together in the days that are coming even more than in the past. There is enough to pull us apart.

The boys’ club is another prop. It is the key to the boy that heads off the “gang” and the reformatory that lurks behind it. In the beginning, it grew out of a missionary’s great heart, and wherever there is heart in it one boys’ club is worth a thousand policemen’s clubs in the fight with the slum. The boys were breaking the windows of the mission house in Tompkins’ Square and the police could not drive them off. The missionary’s wife knew a plan, however: she invited them in to have coffee and cakes. That was the gospel in practical form for Tompkins’ Square, and the first boys’ club that grew out of that meeting has to-day an army of members which no building is big enough to house; and Tompkins’ Square, that was once given over to rioting, to “bread or blood” processions, has become orderly and peaceful. The last of the anarchists over there has taken to keeping a beer saloon and accumulating property. We have grafted the boys’ club upon the public school and we never did anything better.