Part 8

The kindergarten is such a prop, and the cooking class is another—never a stronger in the fight with intemperance, that thrives upon bad cooking at home as upon nothing else. The whole reformed school is building new underpinnings for the lad who has so long been left to himself. We have replaced the three R’s with the three H’s—the head, the heart, and the hand. We are at last teaching the children to think. We are nearly where we can vote six millions of dollars for public schools as readily as for a battleship. When we get to where we can do it without a tremor, we shall be fairly on the home stretch. As yet we shudder at the great sums; but they are the opportunities of our greatness, over which we must learn to rejoice more than over fine ships, mighty railroads, vast wheat-fields, territorial expansion and a full treasury; because, if they are not heeded, these other things are but so many temptations and traps for our stumbling feet.

The social settlement is of all the substitute props the strongest. It takes all the rest into its plan to help; and it goes to the home, which is the kernel of all, and tries to help there with neighborly touch. That is the cure. Greed and selfishness killed the home; human sympathy only can bring it back. “My brother” is the word that has healing for all our social ills. The settlement has been compared to a bridge upon which men go over, not down, from the mansion to the tenement; for a bridge must be level to be good. There was a time when men went down to that work, or shot down their coal and their groceries, as if through a coal chute, in contemptuous settlement of brotherhood arrears. That did not work. The crop we raised from that was hatred and helplessness. But the personal touch can redeem even free soup; and if there is anything more hopeless than that I do not know it. I am told that here in Philadelphia, where it unaccountably survives, it is coupled, after all, with kindly inquiry and personal interest, serves as a means of opening the door merely. It is a bad key; but, if that is the use it is put to, as I am told by a venerable Quaker who confronted me sternly with the question, “Jacob, why did thee say in thy book that in Philadelphia common sense appears to be drowned in soup?”—if that is the way of it, I am willing to condone even free soup, otherwise outlawed as hopeless. It was never the way in my city.

So, whichever way we turn, we come back to the commandment: “My children, love one another.” Doing that, we can leave the results with Him who said it. But we can make them out even now. We can see how things are beginning to tend back towards the home where love grows naturally in the family. The neighborhood idea, that is the heart of the settlement movement, rouses civic pride, rouses ideals that were dead, restores to the neighborhood individuality and to the family dignity. The mothers’ club, what does it mean, what does it discuss, but home-making? The home library brings the visitor to the home, picks it out and gives it separate existence, and ties the children to it with a new loyalty. The boys’ club belongs there in its ultimate development and will yet go there for its meetings, and the girls’ club too. That must be the ultimate aim of the settlement, which is now preparing the ground for it. Everywhere, consciously or unconsciously, the movement is in the air, and growing, to rescue the home from neglect, to put a stop to child labor and to home-work that would exclude the family life; the movement to send mother and children back to the home where they are safe.

You, in Philadelphia, have your Octavia Hill Association, that has shown us how to redeem a whole street. I have told you of our efforts in our worse slum. It is so everywhere. I _am_ my brother’s keeper, and I am ashamed at last not to own it. That is the key-note of the whole modern reform movement, the new charity, the new school, the social settlement and all; and thank God for it!

How long we were finding out that we were neighbors! A year or two ago, I went to a suburb of New York to speak of these things, even as I am now speaking to you. And when that evening I sat at the family board with my host, who was a clergyman, a secretary in a foreign mission board, he said, looking around upon his little ones, that, if I could find him a poor widow in the city with five children of their ages, whom they could go along with and help as they grew, I would be doing a good thing for them and a better thing for his children. And I promised, for that was ideal charity, neighbor with neighbor.

But it was not easy. Weeks passed before I found a family in an East-side tenement that just filled the requirements. It was Christmas Eve, and, while I stayed to look them over, I came to love them, the good children and the brave little woman fighting her fight all unaided. She told me that she was a scrub-woman in a public building; but it was not until I had gone half way over to the office, to tell my friend on the telephone that I had found what he sought, that I thought of asking Where she scrubbed. I went back to ask her.

And where was it, do you think? In the mission building, on his floor! Between them was just the thickness of the oaken door, all the time she had been needing him as he did her, and neither knew where to find the other. They were neighbors in very truth, and they did not know it.

It may be that your neighbor lives as near to you, in want of much that you can give, your love and friendship first and last. Go and seek him. And when you have found him, bind up his wounds, help him and care for him; and, when you must depart on the morrow, leave of your substance that he may be cared for until you come that way again. That was neighborliness as the Good Samaritan saw it.

“Go,” said the Saviour, “go, and do thou likewise.”

Transcriber’s note:

○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.

○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.

○ The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.