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Title: The leaven in a great city

Author: Lillian William Betts

Release date: December 3, 2011 [eBook #38205]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Josephine Paolucci,


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[Illustration: NO LONGER PROFITABLE.]


THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

by

LILLIAN W. BETTS

Illustrated







[Illustration]

New York
Dodd, Mead & Company
1903

Copyright, 1902,
By Dodd, Mead and Company.

First Edition published September, 1902.




CONTENTS


   CHAPTER                                                PAGE

         I. AT THE BOTTOM,                                   1

        II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS,              37

       III. THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF,                       75

        IV. SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS,                    102

         V. WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS,                          135

        VI. A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT,                           162

       VII. WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME,                      196

      VIII. FINANCIAL RELATIONS IN FAMILIES,               225

        IX. HOME STANDARDS,                                263

         X. WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?                 290




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

                                                          PAGE

   No Longer Profitable--_Frontispiece_

   The Site of the Old Runway                               12

   Your Choice                                              24

   Saturday Morning on the East Side                        38

   The Past, Present, and Middle Period                     44

   A Social Centre that Becomes Political                   56

   A Doorway on the East Side                               60

   Early Morning among the Push-Carts                       64

   Meeting the Needs of the Neighbourhood                   70

   A Remnant of the Past                                    76

   A Type of the Present                                    88

   A Corner in a Workingman's Home                          94

   A Spiritual Bulwark                                     128

   Where the People Share                                  134

   A Corner in an Old Section                              152

   Opposite a Corner in an Old Section                     154

   The Woman's Home Improvement Club at the Settlement     168

   The Kindergarten of the College Settlement              178

   Making a Selection                                      184

   At the Settlement--A Stormy Day                         188

   Yard Day at the Settlement                              196

   The Children's Hour at the College Settlement           200

   Mutual Interests                                        206

   The Forest of the Tenements                             212

   The Children's Playground                               218

   Library Day at the College Settlement                   224

   A Street on the East Side                               236

   A Cooking Class of Mothers and Children                 244

   A Meeting of Neighbours                                 250

   The Reading-Room at the Settlement                      254

   After School at the College Settlement                  258

   The Morning Airing of an East Side Heiress              264

   A Bit of Old Greenwich                                  274

   A Little Father                                         280

   A Corner in Old Greenwich                               286

   Taking their Turn in the Yard at the Settlement         294




CHAPTER I.

AT THE BOTTOM.


One of the first, and, up to the present time, one of the most interesting
experiments made in New York for the better housing of the poor, was made
in the early eighties by a score or less of philanthropic capitalists.
These gentlemen organized a stock company to hold and manage tenement-house
property, limiting their dividends to three per cent. on the capital; the
surplus dividends, if any, over this amount, to be used in improving the
property, and securing such conditions and opportunities for the tenants as
would stimulate pride and independence. The formation of this company
followed one of the periodic agitations of the tenement-house problems
customary in New York.

In 1878 a conference was called by the State Charities' Aid Association to
consider the condition of the tenement houses in this city. Mr. Alfred T.
White, of Brooklyn, had at this time proved that model tenements, conducted
on strictly business principles, paid as investments, and stated at this
conference that his model houses made a return of seven one-half per cent.
As a result of this conference a committee was appointed who reported that
they did not find it desirable to recommend the building of model tenements
in New York at this time. Mr. White for many years stood alone as the man
of wealth with the courage of his convictions, that there were wage-earners
compelled to live under tenement-house conditions who would pay for and
respect the best housing that capital would offer them, within their
rent-paying capacity.

The tenement-house agitation continued.

In 1879 Mayor Cooper had appointed a committee known as the "Mayor's
Committee," to devise means to effect tenement-house reforms. This
committee reported, and among other suggestions recommended, that companies
be organized to build modern tenements. Some members of this committee,
with others, formed the stock company alluded to with a capital of
$300,000. With a wisdom peculiarly their own, they did not wait until model
buildings could be erected according to plans not yet drawn on sites not
yet selected, but they leased on a long lease property that had been
unproductive for a long time, and occupied by a people at the lowest level
of the home-making people of the city. Below them are the people who do not
even pretend to make a home. This property was located in the old Fourth
Ward. It was the reputation of this ward, and the record of the particular
property, which doubtless led these capitalists to secure it. It was
conceded that the poverty and degradation of the Fourth Ward was at least
as great as in any other section of the city. The property leased had
attracted public attention and been the subject of special investigation
and reports in every agitation of the tenement-house problem since 1856.

The Fourth Ward criminal and health records figure for an even longer
period in every effort at bettering municipal conditions by the example it
presented of civic indifference, neglect and maladministration. The houses
faced on two alleys, known in their best days as "Single" and "Double"
alley, respectively. As this distinction indicates, on Single Alley one row
of houses faced the walls of the adjoining property, while two rows of
houses faced each other across Double Alley. Later known as Swipe's Alley,
Guzzle Row, Hell's Kitchen, Murderers' Row, showing the gradual descent
from respectability. There is a tradition that Single Alley once had
gardens that extended to Roosevelt Street; that the houses had been
occupied by one family; but this cannot be verified. In their most
degenerate days these houses had an air of exclusiveness, due doubtless to
their fronting on courts and the tall iron fences, with gates, that
separated the houses from the street. The neighborhood at one time was
aristocratic; Franklin Square, but a short distance from the property, was
a social center of national greatness. As business went northward, the
merchants, bankers, tradespeople, followed, for the tie between home and
business was still very close; the midday dinner made distance between the
two impossible. The old homes were left for subdivision among the skilled
workmen and clerks.

The tide of immigration set in, and the strangers settled near the docks
and wharfs--the source of their wages; in time they crowded into the old
residences, beginning the housing problem of New York. These old homes were
soon overcrowded. They could not be made sanitary. The demand for room was
so great that the large closets--the necessity of the old-time
housekeepers--were counted bedrooms, and are to-day in houses of this type
in tenement-house regions throughout the city.

The property secured by the new company at the time it was leased was a
part of a large estate, the owner of which during his lifetime had
personally cared for it. He was both strict and just, and these two
attributes preserved these houses for years after the property in the
neighborhood had begun to yield to the character of later residents. This
owner kept the alleys and the houses in repair. The semi-privacy the iron
gate gave the tenants was for years the reason that the better-paid
mechanics remained in the courts or alleys. When the owner died, the
property was put in control of an agent, with the usual result--rapid
degeneracy. It was now conducted to secure the largest returns at the least
outlay. The evils of the absentee landlord are not confined to Ireland.
Absenteeism on the part of owners of tenement-house property is one of the
causes of the social and civic problems that retard the growth of the
highest civilization in New York. Under the management of an agent, the
character of the tenants in the courts changed rapidly, and the people who
took possession added to the disreputable character of the Fourth Ward. For
years before this the largest per cent. of the immigrants settling in New
York settled in this section. They came with distorted notions as to their
place in the new land. Liberty meant to the majority the right to follow
their own will. When hunger and loneliness and nakedness forced them to
reconsider their first conception of what America was, resentment,
recklessness, or adaptability developed. The difference was a matter of
temperament quite as much as of race.

In 1880 the heads of the families living in the courts were day
laborers--men who worked along the docks, coal shovelers, hucksters, women
who did a day's work, sold newspapers at the ferries, or worked in the
factories. Every child in the alley was ready to do anything that would
earn money from the time he could walk. The people knew every benefit the
city dispensed to the poor: free coal; homes available and how to get in
them; free burial; every organization that dispersed charity, and how to
get it. Even the children were clever in their extremities, and knew how to
get assistance when the Island claimed their parents. From infancy the
children looked forward to wage-earning as a time of happiness. School was
a prison-house to be avoided, except when its warmth and shelter were
preferable to the street, or the home, when intemperance and temper made
life unendurable in it; then they attended school willingly. The truant
officers in this region were not feared. They were the fags of the "boss,"
not the officers of a city department. None of the fads of to-day, which so
disturb the conservative people who see ruin of mental ability in modern
educational systems, were then thought of. The kindergarten, nature study,
manual training, were on the educational horizon of New York, in a cloud
scarcely so large as a man's hand. The trustee system was in perfect
working order. The teachers were what God made them, unhampered by the
pressure of superintendent and supervisors to maintain standards.

It was as true in that day as in 1892, when a man, wholly familiar with all
the systems of education in the country, to the question, "Why is there
such uniformity in the defects of the schools in the tenement-house
regions?" replied, "They represent the demands of the people in the
district who elect the men who control them. You will find that the public
schools always represent the public sentiment and demands of the people
interested in them."

This was profoundly true of the schools in this region at this time. To-day
there is scarcely any change in the buildings except that of added age. At
least two of them are a disgrace to the city. But there is a great change
in the system. To-day the civilizing force in this community is the public
schools; the remnant does not attract the philanthropist. To the men and
women of our public schools who, preserving the highest ideals, work with
enthusiasm amid the most discouraging surroundings, the city owes a debt
that money cannot repay.

The liquor saloons numbered then about as they do now, occupying every
available space. More elaborate now, perhaps, for they represent political
headquarters, if not proprietorship, of men identified with the worst forms
of political corruption; then, as now, openly used in the interest of these
men. There is this great change, that children dare not now, as they did
then, enter and leave these places fearlessly at any hour carrying pails,
pitchers or bottles. It was then a neighborly kindness to let children thus
serve a neighbor; it was a source of revenue to the children.

The gangs were many and notorious in the ward. Frequent were the clashes
and loyal the spirit with which assailed and assailants maintained silence
if there was danger of arrest because of these conflicts. "To squeal" was
to earn the contempt of the community. The number of crimes, the full
measure of degradation, reached in this ward will never be known. The dense
population of this ward is so hidden by business and traffic that in 1901
the statement was made by some people interested in civic affairs that the
region was given over to office buildings. The district of which the Fourth
Ward is a part cast 10,000 votes in the mayoralty campaign of that year.
Votes that represent a civilization as peculiarly its own as though oceans
separated it from the people a mile and a half away.

Target companies were the social clubs of that day, the forerunners of the
political organizations of to-day. The climax of their existence were the
annual excursions to some near-by grove for shooting matches. These matches
were the great social occasions of the many "sets." The question of who was
the reigning belle of the locality was settled beyond dispute by selection
of one to present the wreath for the target, or a big bunch of flowers, to
the captain of the target company on the day of the annual parade. These
were always of artificial flowers, and were made gorgeous and splendid by
floating strips and fringes of tinsel paper. The greatest feuds in the Ward
have grown out of the selection of the fair lady to present these trophies.
Her selection changed the political history of her friends often, and her
knights' fists fought her cause, and crowned her, their wounds testifying
to their devotion. The political "boss" of that period presented the
organizations that acknowledged his leadership with silver mugs, castors or
pitchers--prizes for the shooters--but he presented money to keep the
balance of his popularity. The gifts were carried conspicuously over the
route of the procession, which always stopped in front of the house of the
lady, who was to express her favor in the gifts of floral trophies--usually
paid for by the company, sometimes by her knight, or knights combined for
her honor. This house was for the time being the center of interest for the
crowd, as she was of envy or pride to the community. The day of the target
parade was one that called for great sacrifice, that it might be attended
by the requisite formalities and new clothes. Money must be raised to
provide barouches for the great political lights of the ward who gave this
particular company their favor; to pay the attendant colored men who
carried the target and the water and tin cups; for the band with the drum
major. All cost money, and money was scarce; but the prominence and
pleasure paid; and the Fourth Ward had many of these organizations, which
made life exciting, and at times dangerous, when their several groups met,
each struggling for supremacy, each with a leader who must be defended.

Fresh-air organizations, seaside resorts, were as unknown as trolleys;
hundreds in the Fourth Ward lived and died without ever having seen Central
Park or the ocean. The relief from the sufferings of summer was sitting and
sleeping on the near-by piers. Man's humanity to man at this period of New
York's social history was expressed in hospitals, infirmaries, homes of
many kinds, distribution of food, clothes and medicine. The more
applications secured for these sources of relief, the more tickets given
out in a year at any point for outside relief, the more easy the conscience
of the men who sent the money that maintained them, who measured the value
of their charities by the figures representing human beings that appeared
in the reports. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were then, as now,
"round-ups" for the wretched, the needy and the lazy. The pleasure of the
givers was greatly added to by watching the hungry eating.

What caused the misery and wretchedness was no secret; but with few
exceptions the men of money and brains were not ready to remove the
prevailing and rooted cause. The exceptions were the men who, impressed by
the example of Mr. Alfred T. White, leased the tenements known as Single
and Double alley, or Gotham Court, the worst piece of property in what was
acknowledged to be the worst ward in the city.

It had grown more and more difficult to collect rents, and the destruction
of the property by the tenants made any effort at repair futile. Lead pipe,
brass faucets, were wrenched off and sold as rapidly as they were put in;
banisters, stair-rails, blinds, even wooden floors had been used as
firewood. The very bricks on the chimneys were used as missiles of offense
and defense. The Double Alley boasted of a haunted house, which at times
created the greatest excitement in the neighborhood because of mysterious
noises and lights seen and heard at night. Again and again the house had
been raided by the police and stolen goods recovered after the ghostly
exhibits. The police showed to the brave of the neighborhood that sulphur
and brimstone were the ghostly lights, and clever arrangements of ropes and
pulleys and pans the source of the cries and groans that had frozen them
with fear. It was useless. The next appearance of the lights and the sound
of awful groans filled the neighborhood with terror.

For obvious reasons the only source of water supply was a hydrant in the
center of each alley. The only drainage was the sink sunk in front of it.
When it is remembered that between five and six hundred people lived in
these houses, the opportunities for cleanliness will be appreciated. All
the water used was carried up and down stairs. That pans and pails of water
were emptied from the windows without careful note of the passer-by beneath
is not surprising. This naturally was not conducive to peace; but peace was
not the aim of the people of the court; in fact, its disturbance varied the
monotony of life in the alleys.

[Illustration: THE SITE OF THE OLD RUNWAY.]

Single Alley had a narrow opening from its rear, or western, end to
Roosevelt Street. This was paved with brick sunken and broken. It was a
dormitory for the drunken and homeless, a depository for all kinds of
refuse. This alley was a runway. The entrance on the two streets offered
every opportunity of escape to the fleeing fugitive from justice or
vengeance. The code of honor of the alley was to speed the hunted and
obstruct the hunter. The policeman entering the alley in pursuit of a
transgressor knew his fate; he was a target for water, wood, coal, bricks
and unlimited language; unexpected obstructions would be found in the
alley, and the attentions he received when he tripped or fell were intended
to increase the distance between the representative of law and order and
the fleeing offender. He or she might or might not be a friend. The alley's
activity in behalf of the fugitive was based on a new interpretation of the
promised return of bread cast on the waters.

No matter how bitter the feuds that divided the tenants in the alley, the
appearance of a rent collector in the later days healed the breach, bridged
the widest chasm. He was a common foe and to be downed by common consent.
If abuse and defiance did not drive him beyond the gates, bricks dropped
from the roofs, after a vigorous campaign of water and cooking utensils,
conducted by the feminine contingent from the windows, usually
accomplished his complete rout, not only for that time, but for the future.
As the years passed on, it became almost impossible to get any agent to
make the second attempt to collect rent from the tenants of the alleys.

The home life of the people in the alley was interesting. Every inch of
space was occupied. The families ranged from a childless old couple, past
seventy, who had lived twenty-eight years in the Single Alley, to the boy
and girl who had just started housekeeping on nothing at all. The women in
the alleys had married, it was found, at about eighteen. They knew
absolutely nothing of housekeeping. Many of them acknowledged that they had
never made a fire before they married. The most elementary knowledge of
cooking, sewing or the use of money was lacking. Of the two hundred and one
mothers in the alley, one could cut and make the garments for herself and
children; four could make bread--one did; one made soup sometimes, but
could not remember the last time. Meals consisted of bread and coffee, or
tea, with beer provided for "him" for breakfast and supper. Dinner was a
"bit" of meat or fish, thought of and cooked between eleven and twelve; the
cooking was frying. Potatoes were substituted for bread at this meal;
rarely any other vegetable except Sunday. On that day, if there was money
enough in the morning, dinner was of corned beef and cabbage, or bacon and
cabbage. One family standing at the head of this community socially had
meat three times each day. This family had in it five wage-earners. They
paid four dollars a month rent for two rooms. The children had all been
born and had grown to manhood and womanhood in the alley. As the writer was
able to win the confidence of these people, it was evident that each mother
was conscious that something was wrong that life yielded no better return.
What was wrong? Where the remedy was to be found did not seem to interest
them. The days drifted. Children ran half naked or in rags, while mothers
sat in neighbors' rooms, stood in doorways, in the halls, or lounged in the
alleys. There were homes in which neither needles, thread nor scissors
could be found. The mother did not know how to use them. A pot and a frying
pan were the only cooking utensils the most lavish closet revealed. Washing
and scrubbing are laborious at any time, but when carrying water from ten
to fifty feet on the level, then up one to four flights of stairs and down
again is added to the labor, it is not astonishing that dishes, clothes and
bodies were at all times freighted with disease and death. A knowledge of
the relation between dirt and disease, cleanliness and health was not the
general knowledge it is to-day. Their relation to moral elevation or
degradation is barely understood to-day.

The average weekly wages of the men living in the alleys at this period was
between eight and nine dollars per week, and sometimes kept at the latter
figure for weeks. It will be seen at once that the poverty, misery,
degradation and dirt that kept life at the level it was in the alleys was
due to some other cause than wages, for rent was only four dollars a month,
when paid, and it was paid less than eight months of the year. Beer flowed
in the alley; tin cans, pitchers, pails, went back and forth at all times
of the day and night. It was the first errand on which the baby feet were
sent. Every woman in the alley acknowledged that she had seen her husband
drunk before she married him. She knew better how to manage him when he was
drunk than when he was sober. A blow given in drink was not recorded
against a husband either by the wife or her neighbors. A blow given when
the man was sober was remembered and aroused pity and sympathy. Over
seventy per cent. of the women drank to the point of unconsciousness. All
used liquor. Of child training there was none. The act that was laughed at
this hour brought a blow the next. Attending school was for the child to
decide. If he wanted to go, he went. Usually lack of clothing shut out
about half the children of school age in the alley.

Mother love was largely a matter of animal instinct. While the baby
depended on her for nourishment, she could be found with it in her arms at
all times; it was, so far as life had a concentrated thought, her constant
care. The moment the baby found its feet and used them, the child was cut
loose and began his individual life. His standards, language, habits, were
what his environment made them. His care, so far as the mother was
concerned, was conducted on the lines of the least resistance. If the child
was struck by an outsider, it raised the tiger in the mother; if ill, a
burden to carry for which there was neither money nor knowledge; the mother
had no strength and could not meet cares that demanded continuous thought;
her mind was not trained to it. Health and disease were largely a matter of
luck. Death brought pangs, but life was too much of a struggle for it to be
a crushing blow, even when it was one's child. Children came and went too
fast in the alleys for their coming or going to fill or empty even a
mother's life.

Not one woman in the alley could remember ever having an entire new outfit
in her life, nor had any of her children; her first baby had worn garments
that had been made for some more fortunate baby.

Such was the dead level of existence lived in the alleys. Without the
stimulus of drink it would be lethargy, and was when there was no money to
treat or be treated. Pleasure? It was unknown outside of the beer can. If
that did not give pleasure, why life was a hand-to-hand, hopeless struggle
with homelessness, hunger and nakedness. In the alleys a fight became a
pleasure and death a social opportunity. Even love seemed denied the people
of the alleys. Marriage often was a part of the habitual drifting when not
a matter of compulsion. Homes were established with no bond but that of
law, and sometimes not that. That they even were what they were was a
tribute to the fundamental morality that is the salvation of the civilized
world.

These were the people who had made the alleys between 1855 and 1880, when
the owners of the estate gladly leased the property on a long lease. As has
been stated, spasmodic attempts had been made to reclaim the property, to
make it productive, but always by men acting for the owners; they never
came in personal contact with the tenants. It is doubtful if they even had
any conception of the effect of their delegated responsibility on the
people, or had any knowledge of the change that resulted when the property
ceased to have the personal supervision of the owner.

The lessees put two ladies in control of the property. One or the other was
to be found there each day.

The tenants were notified that rent must be paid weekly; that the rooms
would be white-washed and painted; that the agents would be at liberty to
visit the rooms daily; that no child would be permitted to carry liquor on
the premises; every bundle or basket carried by a child would be examined,
and any liquor found would be emptied into the sink in the yard. Water
would be put in the halls on each floor; destruction of property would mean
eviction. All who were unwilling to accept these conditions were asked to
move at once. The rent remained the same, four dollars per month for two
rooms. Families desiring four rooms could have them for eight dollars per
month, the company cutting a door through the party walls, giving direct
ventilation through the floor, with windows opening on both alleys. The
absolute impossibility of getting two equally good rooms in the
neighborhood for the same rent kept the majority of the families. A few
tacitly accepted the change, largely because acquiescence was their habit
of mind, while some expected to set at naught any rules or regulations
that they found obnoxious. No tenant moved voluntarily.

The new ownership took possession with the same human beings who had
occupied the houses for years. The first step was to insist on cleanliness.
The alleys were swept and washed every morning, as were the halls and
stairways. Garbage cans were provided and their use insisted on. Every can
or bundle carried by a child was examined, and all liquors found in them
were emptied into the sink in the yard. Quarrels and fights grew less
frequent, especially among the women. The children attended school, for
their appearance during school hours led to investigations that the
majority of the tenants preferred to avoid. The aim was to establish such
relations between the representatives of the company and the tenants as
would give opportunities to reduce the ignorance and indifference that were
quite as responsible, if not more responsible, for the misery in the homes
than lack of money. The tenants held aloof. They were tenants because they
could not get as much comfort for the money elsewhere; but there could be
no friendship where the payment of rent was insisted upon, where
drunkenness involved the risk of, and abuse of property positive, eviction.

Several young couples were tenants. The aim and hope of the agents were to
gain the confidence of these young mothers. The first child of one died
late that summer. Potter's Field was the place of burial. The young father
could have worked six days in the week, but that would have been slavery
intolerable. He refused it, and followed his lifelong habit of drifting,
which was also that of the young mother. She had never resented her
husband's days of idleness until this baby died and there was not one cent
to provide for the care and disposition of the little body. This was the
opportunity of the two women who were waiting to prove that they were not
oppressors. A little coffin, a white slip and socks, some flowers--at that
time an unheard-of tribute to death--a carriage and a grave in the cemetery
approved by the mother's church was provided. The battle was won. Every
man, woman and child in the alley surrendered to this evidence of
comradeship. That this act gave birth to hopes that must be stifled was
natural. Rules must be enforced and comradeship expressed at the times of
emergency. The first and hardest battle was won. Confidences were gained
that led to marriages and baptisms that had been neglected or forgotten.
The office, simply but tastefully furnished, became a school-room, where
the mothers and the children learned to sew. Goods were bought in
quantities and sold at cost to the learners. A sewing machine and a
teacher appeared and were welcomed. Practical talks, or, more properly,
conversations, were held; but no one took note of them as special efforts
in philanthropy, they were so naturally a part of each day's experience.
The daily visits to each tenant resulted in establishing relations that
justified reproof, suggestion, commendation. The standards of pleasure,
pain, suffering, accomplishment were elementary in the alleys. An hour's
work with the needle left the worker exhausted, and diversion then meant
moral safety. The homes were barren, and the acme of hope was wages to pay
rent, buy food and clothes; the last rarely realized. The months, and even
years, passed without the people passing beyond the confines of the ward.
The generations lived this life, and it was a fixed habit. The world had
nothing to offer to the habitual residents of the ward that the ward did
not provide; it has but little to-day to offer them.

In spite of the emptiness of life and barrenness of these homes, they were
on the whole better than the homes of the preceding generation.

When the wives laid the cause of their burdens on their husbands' shoulders
because they drank, the question, "Did you know he drank when you married
him?" would be answered easily, with no thought of self-condemnation,
"Yes," in frank confession.

"Do you drink?"

"I drink beer, mostly. Sure, ye get discouraged just working and washing,
and never a cent; not a decent rag to go on the street, and no place to go
when you get there but a neighbor's house. What is there but a glass of
beer? You don't mean to get drunk; yer that before ye know."

This total lack of personal relation to life was me mental attitude of
almost every woman. If she was a widow, she worked to make a home for her
children, who, again and again, so often that it ceased to attract
attention, heard how much harder life was because they were in it. This
seemed the accepted attitude, and accounted for the expression on the faces
of these children--a puzzled, hardened expression that blotted out all
suggestion of childhood. That time was an element in the problem of life
was not accepted. That the garment made at home would last longer and cost
less was conceded; but what was the use of making things when they could be
bought so cheaply. The total absence of reasoning powers was shown here. To
make soup would mean staying at home, thinking and planning for hours in
advance of a meal. The soup would cost no more than steak and provide two
meals, but it would mean loneliness, when the time, through ignorance,
could not be turned to interesting uses.

There were women in these alleys, mothers of grown children, who could not
tell a bias from a straight edge; who could not put a gingham apron
together having straight and bias selvages. Beyond sewing on occasional
buttons, there was no use in their minds for needles. They had worked in
tin factories. They had worked at all kinds of employment that called into
play the minimum amount of brains and the maximum of muscles. Not one woman
was found who before her marriage had worked in any line of employment that
had the slightest connection with the arts of home-making. The wages they
earned was that of unskilled labor, in lines of employment known to be
intermittent. Wages, large or small, went into the common family fund. The
future was not a matter of care. When all in the family worked, life was
lived merrily; when hard luck came, life was lived stoically. This spirit
went into the home of the wage-earners when they married. There was far
less physical suffering than the privations of their lives made natural.
Often these limitations were self-imposed; there was money enough to give
life color and purpose, if only there had been knowledge to guide in the
adjustment between necessities and income; a conception of time as an
element in the financial problem.

[Illustration: YOUR CHOICE.]

The closer one entered into the individual life, the more clearly was it
revealed that the problems of poverty grew out of the inability to see the
relations of things, to comprehend life in its entirety. Even after two
years of close relation with these people in the alleys, it was with the
utmost caution and tact that the subject of free coal could be broached. It
was then distributed by the city--an intimate source of political
corruption. A large quantity of coal was purchased and put in the cellar.
It was offered to the tenants at the same price the grocer sold it by the
pail, with the difference that it was delivered in the rooms. First, pride,
a desire to appear somewhat above the neighbors, moved to independence on
the coal question. In two years' time free coal was in the category of
disgraces in the alley, and marked a rising moral tide.

A young woman and her husband were special objects of attention to the
agents. They were young, good-looking, bright, and, when sober, ambitious
as their conception of life made possible. Both drank, the woman more than
the man, and she sank lower when drunk. For years she had spent more time
on the Island than off it. What could be done? The whitewashing and
painting of the two hopelessly barren rooms seemed to bring the woman to a
pause. It was not possible to get beer through a neighbor's child now, and
until she was drunk this woman would not go into a saloon. The clean alley,
washed every morning, by some process of reasoning seemed to demand
corresponding effort indoors, and the barren rooms were never dirty when
the woman was sober. Even this gave employment to hands that had never used
a needle, therefore less time was spent lounging in the doorway or other
rooms. The washing of clothes, though ragged and few, took time and
centered the interest, if but for a short time. The look of utter weariness
and indifference in the face of the woman was slowly disappearing. There
was really a purpose in life; the four walls and little else that was home
required thought and effort. Life had an object at last. But the devil of
drink was not so easily conquered; she was gone one morning from home. The
neighbors explained to the agents her absence, being familiar with the
habits of the type. In court she listened again indifferently to "Ten
dollars or ten days." This time a woman came forward, paid the ten dollars,
and Agnes was free. Surprised, dumb-stricken, wondering why, Agnes followed
the friend home. New clothes, simple, suitable, were waiting for her. Then
the fight began. At times it was hourly. Work was provided that the clumsy,
untrained hands could do. The proceeds were to pay for a new carpet, that
had to be unrolled many times to hold Agnes from the street. At last it was
down, and the two friends added a rocker and a picture. Tom was a new man,
and every penny of his wages came home. All this time the prosperity of the
couple was viewed by most of the people as due to passing "good luck." That
there was a moral battle being fought did not seem to enter their
consciousness. Four years later, on the stairway, the writer saw Agnes with
her beautiful baby boy, her first-born, on her arm. The comprehension of
what the sight must have been on the Mount of Transfiguration has always
been clearer when the expression on the face of Agnes, as she met the woman
who had fought for her salvation for time and eternity, is recalled. Two
years had passed since Agnes had tasted liquor in any form. Her passionate
devotion to her baby, her new knowledge of the arts of home-making, kept
her so busy that Agnes was rarely a visitor to her neighbors, except in the
case of sickness. Tom's love of liquor seemed limited; largely a matter of
companionship or discouragement. When his home became a center of interest
to Agnes, his buoyant nature responded to the new environment. When liquor
disappeared from the home, it ceased to be a constant temptation. Outside
of his home Tom found for a time that his new departure attracted to him
unpleasant attention, guying, teasing, coaxing, which he met with jokes.
Force as an inducement to make him drink was met by blows; and Tom struck
heavily. The new impulse for a better life brought heavy social penalties
on Tom and Agnes. It meant nothing in common with those about them. When a
man and woman will neither treat nor be treated at that social level social
ostracism follows. Their home was the refuge of the children driven by
frenzied, drunken parents from their own homes. What they had they shared
with the children when the parents were on the Island. When sickness came
to homes in the alleys, Tom and Agnes could be relied upon to share and
help in carrying the added burdens. Tom's muscles and the knowledge of
their power saved many a wife from blows that, without Tom, would have
fallen freely. Back of their every effort stood the two wise women who were
redeeming this corner of the great city. The day came when Tom and Agnes
realized the boy must grow up in a different neighborhood, and Tom and
Agnes moved.

The making of a laundry compelled the removal of a childless couple who had
occupied their rooms over thirty years. It was impossible to make them
accept the fact that the children could play in the alley under the new
_régime_. For years the old woman and her stick were familiar to the sight
and the feelings of the children of the alley. "I'm in Dixie's Land. Dixie
ain't home!" had been shouted under their windows, at their room door,
which was very near the alley door, to bring them out in torrents of rage.
As age made the old couple less fleet and more quarrelsome, the daring of
the children grew, and any time of the day or night the conflict between
the old couple and the children, in which parents figured, was a
possibility. Peace became impossible. The decision was final; the old
couple must go; their rooms were necessary to the new improvements. It was
pathetic to discover that no amount of persuasion would make the old couple
live north of Roosevelt Street; it meant a lowering in their social world.
"I've always lived respectable, and I always will. I would not live in that
block," announced the old woman, with conscious pride. Even the alley, it
was found, had standards of residence, a line that must not be crossed, to
maintain respectability.

By this time the mental attitude of every woman in the alleys had changed
toward her home. Positive determination to overcome inertia, or ambition to
excel, it was impossible to create. Innate predilections were the chief
factor in individual development among the women. What a woman liked to do
she attempted to learn how to do, or what she found she could do most
easily. Some would learn to cook who absolutely refused to sew; some would
sew who refused to cook; some would take care of the babies while the
mothers were learning who would neither cook nor sew, feeling they could do
both well enough; these it was impossible to make home-makers. The shackles
of the past could never be thrown off wholly by the home-makers in the
alleys. The children responded; could be won by personal affection, by
prizes, by the mother's insistence. For it was soon learned that nimble
fingers in the home lightened the mother's work; but the mothers were the
unwilling victims of their own past.

The use of money was the most difficult lesson of all to teach. If there
was money, the food was bought lavishly; pennies were given freely to the
children. If there was no money, the barrenness was accepted even
cheerfully. Wages were given at the maximum weekly amount remembered. No
deductions were made for idle days. It requires a knowledge of advanced
arithmetic to adjust intelligently forty weeks of wages to fifty-two weeks
of expenses. It requires more than an elementary knowledge of arithmetic to
adjust five days' wages to the seven days' expenses, fixed and emergency,
of a growing family. When a week comes that brings six or seven days'
wages, is it a marvel that in view of the many weeks of imposed
restrictions this week of wealth should be welcomed as a period of freedom
from care? That the money should be lavishly used? It takes the ability to
think, to connect cause and effect, imagination, to see possible results,
memory of experiences to hold men and women constantly in check, and this
means mental training. Not a woman in the alley had attended school
regularly during even the short period of her school life; each one had
gone to work the moment she could earn money. Neither she nor any one about
her questioned the value of the work she found to do beyond the money it
gave at once. Nobody ever thought of the present as in relation to the
future. Now that she was a mother, she met life the same way. Her children
must earn money. To make sacrifices that their wage-earning capacity in the
future might be greater would, if suggested to her, have been merely an
evidence of how little the rich know of life. What was the estimate of life
these mothers in the alley made? The differences between them were
external, not mental. One answers for nearly all. To get as much comfort
out of to-day as possible and to-morrow work hard, and be careful. To the
majority that to be used to-morrow never came. When plenty came, it was
always to-day--a glad, free day that might never come again.

At the end of four years but four of the tenants of the alleys who were
tenants when the lease was executed had been evicted. The death rate had
lowered from 85 to 22 per cent. The tenants rarely appeared in the police
courts. Wife-beating created excitement and indignation. But in spite of
the awakening, a moral, mental, physical inertia, stagnation, held more
than the majority of the tenants in control. There was spasmodic response;
but the painful truth had to be accepted that there must be redemptive
power within to respond to redemptive conditions without before the home
could be vitalized with the spirit of hope and energy. Fifty years and more
of neglect and indifference cannot be overcome in five years of moral
activity exerted to overcome the evils man neglected to prevent.

The alleys are gone; some tenants drifted to other scenes, more settled in
the tall, dark tenements that have sprung up through the whole district,
the worst type erected in New York. The rear buildings abound even back of
the tall factories, reached by dark, noisome alleys. No amount of care or
repair could save the old houses. They have gone the way of all material
things. Their history is a part of the social and political history of New
York.

How slowly moral sentiment grows in a large city is shown by the years that
elapsed before active measures were taken to redeem what was known as a
plague spot, a menace to the body politic, a constant source of moral
degeneracy.

The Citizens' Association, organized in 1864, through its Council of
Hygiene and Public Health, districted the city for special investigation by
sanitary experts. One of these gives a large part of his report to Gotham
Court, and presents sectional drawings to show the impossibility of
securing proper sanitary conditions for the people living in the notorious
houses. It seems incredible that these conditions once known should not
have aroused public interest to the point of action. Nothing was done. The
physical and moral degeneracy continued until 1880, when a few private
individuals made the experiment of redemption. Even this came when the
houses had gone beyond the point of reclaiming. On the site of the old
buildings rises a new business building.

Not far away two of the most brutal and atrocious murders of recent years
in New York have occurred. In July, 1901, three blocks from the old
buildings, in broad daylight, a man known to be the collecting agent for
property in the neighborhood was robbed by three members of a well-known
gang. The children are thin, precocious. Their language, even in their
play, is vulgar, coarse, profane. Babies have at their command strange
oaths, probably never heard elsewhere. The streets are neglected, the
sidewalks uneven and broken. For almost half a century this region has had
a reputation peculiar to itself. Efforts have been made to reach the
people, but they have not been persistent. Even the church efforts are
perfunctory, as though faith as to the redemptive power in this people did
not exist.

This fact remains: within the boundaries of this region lives a community
that is shaping the political control of New York City and State, and will
for years to come. It has its traditions of loyalty; it has fixed standards
of its own peculiar privileges; its standards of rights. The very police of
the region expect certain things to occur; misdemeanors of a certain
character that would bring punishment anywhere else are passed by here;
they are part of the civilization of the region. Snuggled down under the
shadow of the bridge and the elevated road, a center of business interests
which the moral standards of the residents do not affect, because their
activities, other than of the muscles, are not exercised until carts,
drays, drivers, clerks, proprietors have gone northward or across the
river. The community lives within itself, has created its own standards,
and is New York in its own estimation.

Writing of the people in this section in 1865, a sanitary expert quotes
with an apology a medical term common in the hospitals and dispensaries as
a disease of the people in this section, "tenement-house rot." The term
has, perhaps, in the interests of civilization, died out; but no one can
walk through these streets, observing the faces of the people, and not
realize that the old, unsanitary, germ-laden tenements of this section have
produced a physical condition peculiar to this region, as it has a moral
degeneracy that is peculiarly its own. The section, as a whole, has not
attracted the philanthropist. He is wise in his day and generation and puts
forth his efforts where the tide of humanity is rising, and not falling,
even though it means three or four generations before the tide is out.

New York has a gospel all its own. Work where the crowds are greatest, that
the printed reports may count people in great numbers, for ye gain dollars
thereby. New York counts the remnant only at the polls, and ignores the
penalty her indifference imposes on her own advancement.

The opening years of the century hold promise that there is at least a
partial realization of the solidarity of the interest of the people. That
conditions make for degradation in the homes means degradation of citizens;
and this means burdens laid, not on the sections where the homes and the
citizens are found, but on the whole city. What altruism has not
accomplished, selfishness may. It may be that where all else has failed,
intelligent politics may redeem, and the section again may be the center of
the moral as well as commercial activity.




CHAPTER II.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS.


The centralization of the interests of the tenement-house population is not
understood by those who broaden their mental, if not their active, interest
by reading and travel; who in the varied interest of a broader life are
forced to see the multiplicity of factors that enter into the settlement of
every problem. This is what we mean by knowing the relation of things;
marking the distinction between those who see only and those who
comprehend. The man who is a machine set in the place where he bears his
relation to the whole by an authority which he dares not question loses all
opportunity to comprehend his relation to that whole. He is interested in
immediate results as related to himself only. This is the relation which
the mass of the tenement-house workers and voters bear to life.

The people of whole sections live entirely within certain geographical
lines, every interest centered within these limits.

The race sections are logical, based on the law of natural selection; of
family interest. The first generation of immigrants naturally hold the
second generation of home-makers near them, and these together hold the
relatives and friends who follow. Three generations are not infrequently
found in the same house, each maintaining its own home. The new arrivals
keep alive the foreign home traditions, the foreign home habits of living.
Poverty and greed make the people crowd together. The last arrivals are
taught what their predecessors have learned of American life and law. The
race section perpetuates itself; it retains all that it can of the old
life, and interprets the new according to the lessons learned from
environment, and power as it is exercised on the people. Each race section
has its own thoroughfare. The people on the street use their own language,
and trade in shops of their own countrymen. In some sections newspapers are
published in the language of the section, giving prominence to the local
news. Were it not for the public schools, one wonders what would be the
result of this race centralization.

[Illustration: SATURDAY MORNING ON THE EAST SIDE.]

The writer once met a man who had voted for twenty-three years in one ward.
For sixteen of these years he had cast his vote from one house in Orchard
Street. He had never been farther north than Houston Street, farther south
than Hester and had never crossed the Bowery. He had positive convictions
on every subject relating to the ward; he knew the life history of every
political leader in that portion of the city; could rehearse the disasters
that had followed every man who failed to fall in line at the polls; knew
what saloon-keepers were forced to obey the law, and who "didn't care a
cent" for the law; knew why this man could put his goods on the walk and
why the other man could not. He protected his own two daughters from the
evils of his home environment as he saw them; was strict to rigorousness
about their home-coming; watched the kind of people who moved into the
house in which he lived, and doubtless kept it above the average of the
neighborhood by his watchfulness. But he did not know who was President of
the United States, and did not consider it the business of the poor man. He
refused a "job" under the city, because he didn't want to be "beholden." It
was all right for the man who needed a job to take it. The only grievance
the man had was that the Hebrews were crowding into the neighborhood. This
was an invasion of his personal rights; they had their own place on the
south side of Grand Street, as the Italians had west of the Bowery, and
coming into that region north of Grand Street was an intrusion on the
personal rights of himself and his countrymen. The first thing which would
happen, if they--his own people--did not look sharp, would be the Hebrews
would have a say in politics. The man's mental attitude is typical of the
race settlement, the race political rights theory in many sections of New
York; the difference is only in the race dominant.

This man was a porter, who for seventeen years was employed in an East Side
department store, working in a sub-cellar nine hours a day for nine dollars
a week. He could not read, though he came to this country when five years
of age. He became a wage-earner at eleven. His daughters became
wage-earners at fourteen, having attended public schools until that age.
The pride with which this man referred to his daughters' education made one
comprehend the gradual absorption by the foreign peoples who come to us of
American ideas. Those girls knew they were not educated; they had been
forced to contrast their mental equipment with that of the "club ladies,"
as they called the residents at the College Settlement, where the club of
which they were members met. They, too, had been satisfied until brought
into relationship with those who represented another world. The revelation,
because of contact with the minds of these college-trained women, showed
them, so far as they could comprehend it, their own lack of mental
training, the first step in their true education.

Women are by nature more conservative than men; they cling longer to early
traditions and habits; find it more difficult to adopt new habits of
thought. The more closely they are surrounded by people of their own way of
life, their own habits of thinking, the more strongly intrenched are they
in the customs and habits of their native country, the less are the homes
they regulate modified by the new environment. The result is that whole
sections of New York to-day are as foreign as the villages from which the
people in them came. There are women in New York whose children and
grandchildren were born in the city who cannot speak English, nor
understand it beyond the merest assent or dissent. Their lives in old age
are pitiable.

A sweet, motherly German once said to the writer, and but a short time ago:
"I am so lonely. I cannot speak English. I never learn it. I sit in my
daughter's house, where German is not used. The children all want to be
Americans; they will not talk German. When I sit at the table, I never
speak. They all talk, but I do not understand. Sometimes I ask, and the
children say they have not time to tell me. They buy only the English
papers, and so I cannot read. I wish I had learned English when I first
came. I was young then, but I had eight children after I came here, and I
did everything for them. I could not take the time, I thought. I see now
the children could have taught me. Now they have not the time." This woman
was a German in her sympathies, her interests, her standards. Positive race
antagonism existed between her and her family. She measured everything by
German life and rule, and lived a critic among a people her own only in
blood. In answer to the question, she explained that her husband learned
English for his "work." The family attended the mission church when they
attended church. She attended the German services, but the rest of the
family, even her husband, the English services. Her constant plaint was: "I
am so lonely. Some day I never speak all day. At the table they speak
English."

Hundreds of women like this one sit in homes in New York in which they have
no part, barred out by the fact that they speak a foreign tongue. One of
the mistakes made in even our church work has been the maintaining of
distinctive church services in a foreign tongue. In so far as the churches
have done this, they have been an obstruction to good citizenship for time,
whatever they may have accomplished for eternity, for the people they call
their own.

One of the most earnest of missionary workers in New York, an American
citizen born in Italy, protested vigorously to the writer on the policy of
maintaining church services in New York in a foreign tongue. "You cannot
make a united people using many languages. I would preach that to the
people all the time. I use English words in my sermons to my own people,
and I tell them to learn English; it is better for them in business. The
women ought to learn, for they lose their children. They go away from them
because they do not speak the English. In New York they are the victims of
oppression, my people, because they cannot speak English. They have to bow
the head to the yoke because they are foreigners in a strange land in which
they vote. It is a great wrong to them and to the country. It makes the
'boss.'"

The first interest of the mother in the tenement, as of the mother
everywhere, is the support of her children; to get for them all that she
can. She would prefer that her husband should be honest, which may mean
that the only dishonesty of which she has any comprehension is stealing
money or other tangible property. In politics the tenement-house women have
only a secondary interest. They accept without question the statements of
their male relatives as to issues and men. Even this degree of interest
represents only the most intelligent of the tenement-house women. The
charge that a man used his political position and affiliations to further
his own advancement, that he purchased the votes and enthusiasms of less
clever voters, would mean to the women educated in their conception of
right and wrong under the systems of machine politics that the man was
intelligent and trying to do the best he could for his family and his
friends. To say that he refused to rally voters to support the party that
gave him a position because he was convinced that the party was dishonest
in the use it made of the victory it gained at the polls, would arouse the
deepest contempt for the man. He would be considered not only untrue to his
family, but to his friends. Had he remained in close relation to the
politicians who gave him his chance, he would not only provide for his
family, but his friends would have the benefit of his influence; he could
give them a chance in time.

[Illustration: THE PAST, PRESENT AND MIDDLE PERIOD.]

The man of brains they see drop his tools, take off his overalls and stand
in high hat, and eventually frock-coat, the center of a crowd of men who
smile at his nod, though they worked shoulder to shoulder but a short time
ago--in a trench, perhaps; yes, even came over in the same ship with him.
The women do not understand the process of evolution, but they see the
results. They soon know that from street sweeper to car conductor, the man
who has become a politician under a strong partisan government regulates,
and often decides, the wage-earning opportunities of the greater portion of
the men in the tenement-house sections. They learn, these women, that it is
not a question of how faithful the worker is in the discharge of his duty
that insures him work, but that it is some mysterious influence they call
"politics," that means work and wages or no work and no wages, and
suffering. This conception of the relation of the petty politician to the
voters' chance to earn even a meager and uncertain living under the sway of
his influence rarely excites more than passing indignation from the women
who suffer most because of the system. When the women of the politician's
family grow arrogant and snobbish, then the floods of eloquence break loose
for a time, and the listener may learn many things of which he would
otherwise be ignorant. The increased power of the petty henchman rarely
enables him to change the way of living of his family. Sometimes he does
not when he can, for he knows that he increases his power as he lives on
the level of the average voter in his district. The less conscience he
has, the more patient he is in waiting for the day when his district is
only one factor in his political strength.

Even the little children reveal deference to the family of the man who is
known to have "pull." There came to an East Side library one afternoon a
little girl better dressed than any child who had yet appeared there. She
was impudent, noisy, aggressive. In the game-room she cheated in the games,
and finally broke up several games of checkers and dominoes by pushing over
the boards. No child resented this. The little girl when spoken to seemed
astonished by the reprimand. As she was leaving, the writer said to her: "I
am sorry, little girl, but I shall have to tell you that you must not come
here again unless you mean to obey; you must not talk in the reading-room,
and in the games you must play fair. I hope I shall not have to tell you
not to come here again." The child stared in astonishment. She went out on
the street. In a few minutes several little girls who had frequented the
rooms for months came running back in great excitement, one saying
breathlessly: "Why, that little girl's father is a school trustee; she does
just as she likes in school." "Yes," added another, "and now she says she
won't come here any more. She's awful mad." From her point of view this was
a calamity. "Well, I hope she will not come if she cannot behave," was the
comment made. The children stood aghast. The trustee system had been
abolished in New York at least two years when this incident occurred. Later
the writer found that the father was in the council of Tammany Hall.

A boy of the same neighborhood rang the bell, interfered with children
leaving the house, and broke the windows. The time for kindly persuasion
ended. When the members of a woman's club in that section using that house
were consulted, it was made perfectly clear to the writer that worse
troubles would follow if the boy were arrested, for he would not be
detained and he would be more ugly than ever. His father was a ward leader
who had formerly been a street sweeper, then foreman of the gang, etc.,
going through the gradations that mark the making of the minor "boss." This
boy bullied little children, stole their toys, would break up their games.
Yet to have him join in their play was evidently an honor which they bore
much to retain. He was only fourteen, yet he was found to be the leader of
a gang of boys in the most disgusting immoralities. Even this did not rouse
the mothers of the neighborhood to fight for their children's protection.
The boy was spreading immorality of a disgusting nature through a whole
neighborhood. The evil he wrought was told in tears in private, but denied
in public through fear of the father's power in preventing the accusers'
husbands and sons from getting work--one result of the Tammany system that
enslaves homes and blasts the innocence of little children in New York.

A clever, hard-working Irish woman was once telling the writer the story of
her life and that of her children. At the time she was deeply interested in
the future of four nephews, who were the motherless sons of her brother.
Out of her experience with sons-in-law she enunciated her conclusions: "I
tell me brother, don't let them b'ys learn politics; it's a mighty poor
thrade. Sure, when Tammany's in they're all right; but when Tammany's out,
where are they? Sure, it's a mighty poor thrade, as I learnt to me sorrer.
Betther have them blacksmiths, sez I, like their grandfather at home. I do
hope he be's listening to me, for they're foine b'ys." It will be easier
for the four "b'ys" to learn politics than any other "thrade," for it is an
open union making one demand, obedience to the "boss."

To this woman Tammany was an employer good to the poor man--a doctrine that
is taught to the smallest boy. He breathes it in the air; he nurses it in
the milk that nourishes him. As he gets older he adds a new article to his
faith. The Tammany system is the protector of his liberties. It does not
restrict him in his right of private judgment. As one studies the race
sections, the discovery is made that hundreds of votes are cast for Tammany
candidates in the belief that obnoxious restrictions on the sale of liquor
on Sundays will be removed, or that the laws will not be enforced. The hope
of raising the moral tone of the voters is futile while any portion of them
justify the casting of a ballot for the sole reason that it will make it
possible for the voter to break the law with impunity. The most
demoralizing legislation is that which makes a man a sneak as well as a
law-breaker. May the day be hastened when no man who stands in moral
rectitude in the presence of man and God will be forced to maintain what he
believes his rights in defiance of the law. We are a cosmopolitan country,
owing power and greatness to the sons and daughters of many lands. The
Puritan conception of government is out of place to-day. The larger
conception of man not controlled by the law, but the master in himself of
the restraints it would place upon him, is the American conception of
manhood, and toward this the best legislative action must trend. Thinking
men and women who have studied the social conditions of New York know that
no more calamitous influence is set in motion in New York than a sense of
injustice that protects and justifies to the people the breaking of a law.
When this goes farther, and any considerable number of the citizens combine
for the purpose of overcoming it by defying or by ignoring it, the
foundations of the government are threatened. It is time for fanaticism to
feel the pressure of broad-minded balanced public opinion. A law
administered at the demand and according to the conscience of people
unaffected by its administration, used by them against an equally
intelligent class who feel that personal liberty has been curtailed at the
expense of their right of judgment, is class legislation. No greater evil
influence has been active in New York than the creating of a sentiment that
endorsed the breaking of the liquor laws. It has been a prolific source of
blackmail; it has enabled politicians, who live at the public expense, to
pose to men whose personal right of judgment had been curtailed as the
apostles of freedom. The short-sighted friends of temperance have by their
misdirected activities created political capital for the men who in
official life have made New York's problems.

Legislation enacted without the will of the people governed is provocative
of two things: contempt and defiance of the law; unrest that makes for
antagonism to government. The lower in the scale of reason the voter is,
the less able he is to get any point of view but his own. His comprehension
of the rights of others depends on the comprehension of his rights
expressed in the law designed for his regeneration. He certainly never goes
higher in the scale of reason while he defies the law in satisfying his
sense of justice and freedom; he cannot rise in the scale of living while
he stoops to acts he would avoid if his sense of justice were not outraged.
He justifies his act because of his sense of oppression. He cannot respond
to any effort looking to the general good of the city while he smarts under
a sense of liberties curtailed by the very people who ask for his help.

When President Roosevelt was Police Commissioner he enforced the law
governing the sale of liquor on Sunday. The city was torn asunder for
weeks. The discussion filled the columns of the daily press. The fact,
after weeks of discussion with one group of tenement-house women--all the
wives of skilled workers--was finally made clear that the law was at fault,
if fault there was, not the Commissioner. The law, if bad, must be
repealed; but as long as it was the law it must be enforced. During this
discussion much light was obtained. One woman told how cleverly the law
was evaded by the liquor dealer two doors from her house. He hired the back
room on the top floor of the house next door, keeping the liquor in a
closet. The men in the secret entered the house two doors distant, went up
to the roof and down the scuttle to the room where the liquor was to be
had. Some of the group listened to her description with flashing eyes. When
she finished she was given to understand that she had played the part of
traitor. It was all right for her to do it. She was safe. Her husband was
in a good, independent position; it made no difference to him how much
trouble came because of her "telling tales." To others it was a disgrace
that men who had only a few cents to spend for a little pleasure with their
friends should have to sneak like thieves, as one of the women expressed
it. All condemned having the liquor in their own homes in quantities, as
they condemned the illegal selling. "When a man sneaks in like that he
stays longer and spends more than when he can walk in openly and walk out
again as he does other days. When he has it in the house he never stops
treating and drinking until it's gone." The "free lunch" was deplored; but
every one of the forty-five women decided that it was the only meal fit to
eat that hundreds of laboring men ever had; that men were forced to eat at
lunch counters in barrooms and buy liquor who would never go there if
their mothers and wives knew how to cook. They claimed that the women would
cook for their families if they knew how. They did not know how. They were
forced to go to work in factories as soon as they left school, and never
had a chance to learn anything about housekeeping; their mothers never knew
how to keep house. Could a stronger argument for domestic science teaching
in our public schools be advanced?

When the High License bill was before the Legislature at Albany several
years ago, the writer was asked to speak at a mothers' meeting in one of
the poorest sections of what was then the city of Brooklyn. On her way to
the mission she counted nineteen liquor saloons on three blocks; in every
case they were on the lower floor of a tenement house. The hall was over a
pork and provision store; a loft without any attempt at more than broom
cleanliness, walls bare, grimy, and seeming to ooze grease. The atmosphere
of smoked meat was sickening. Nothing in the way of a shelter could have
been more barren and repellent, yet it was a mission maintained by a
church.

About one hundred women--the wives of day laborers and longshoremen--were
present. Some were bareheaded: several with babies in their arms. The
subject chosen was the High License bill. It was a discussion. At least ten
of the women spoke. The scene will never be forgotten. One woman, about
thirty, after listening intently, rose with a baby on her arm, and turning
passionately to those in the hall, said: "Why don't yer talk honest? Every
one of us drink. Some of us, not many, drink because we love it. Most of us
drink because we're discouraged and don't know what else to do. We're
fools; it don't help us; it makes it worse. Some of us would never touch it
if it were not brought to us. We know that anything that would take away
the drink from our doors would save us. Drive them out!" She turned to the
platform appealingly. "Drive them out, so that we, yes, and the men, would
have to walk four or five blocks to them, and we'll be different. It is
easy sending the children now. Make it harder! Make it harder!"

"Shall we close them?"

"You couldn't do it," she said. "You couldn't do that. Make it cost more to
start them, and there won't be so many. They'll be farther apart, and they
won't try so hard to make us drink. Many a woman has learned to drink
because she had to pass the holes to get to her home. Tell the truth like
me, or say whether I'm telling the truth!" was her appeal to the audience.

The flood-gates were opened. Every woman agreed with the first speaker that
the saloon could never be abolished; it could be regulated. Beer, they
thought, to most women was a greater temptation than strong liquors. The
number of saloons near their homes they thought the heaviest burden the
poor man's family had to bear. They understood perfectly that the brewers
paid for the licenses, and that the saloons were the meeting places where
votes were controlled. They thought the saloons ought to be open at least
Sunday afternoon, but they would have them close earlier Saturday night.
They thought that any law that made a man a sneak to get a drink was an
evil. They saw that such a law enabled the politician to say which man
could sell liquor and which could not. One of them, who could neither read
nor write, had discovered that the saloons selling a certain brewer's beer
had more freedom than any of the saloons selling other beers; they thought
the saloon-keepers paid either in money or drinks for the votes of the men
who frequented their places in the interest of the politicians who owned
the saloons or protected them. There was not the slightest evidence that
one woman there saw any dishonesty in the system. There were no principles
in politics, only men. Things remained with them the same no matter who was
elected. It was a district which was under the control of one party, having
an unquestioned majority, which steadily increased through the efforts of a
shrewd leader who had no visible means of support.

The section in which this group of women lived was a long, narrow strip
bordering on the East River. The residences of a population each occupying
its own house at this time held the reeking tenements in check on the east.
Within ten years this has been wholly changed. The handsome old residences
have become tenement houses, overcrowded, uncared for, occupied by people
now at the level of former despised neighbors. The better class of the
laborers' families have left the houses bordering on the river, and these
have been given over to the poorest and most hopeless of the day laborers.
There is a thoroughfare which has stores brilliantly lighted for five
blocks. Every want of the people can be supplied in them. The people, old
and young, settle placidly in the region. It is their world. The language
of the little children on the streets, from early morning until late at
night, is appalling. A kindergarten was started, but the people who started
it did not have money enough to secure the right kind of a room, nor to
make the room attractive, nor to keep it so clean that that would in itself
make it more attractive than the homes of the children. It was finally
given up, because even the small amount expended was not forthcoming at the
end of the third year. It could have had four times the number of children
the room would accommodate at one time, but no one cared enough to support
it.

[Illustration: A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL.]

The half-grown boys are coarse-looking, use profane and coarse language
unknowingly in their ordinary conversation on the street. Their attitude
toward girls is brutal. The girls of this section are free in their
manners, slangy and coarse in their conversation. They earn the lowest
wages paid to women in the factories and lofts that abound in the region.
The schoolhouses are old and dark; the streets are neglected and dirty. The
smoky, grimy mission-room disappeared long ago. Not one influence is at
work to raise the general moral tone of this community, the voting power of
which outnumbers four to one regions where every influence in and out of
the homes tends to develop moral standards and political intelligence in
the same political unit.

The region is a social plague spot, neglected and allowed to spread. It
does not present as a special feature to arouse activity the evils of the
"Red Light" district, but only the blasting influence of a region sunk in
the apathy of deadened moral natures, killed by the hopelessness of
changing the environment of their homes until it represents all they ask of
life. The poverty of the people makes well-nourished bodies impossible, and
lack of physical power makes moral resistance impossible.

Recently in one of the most crowded of the tenement-house sections of New
York, where the grip of poverty holds degradation, where the people live as
remote from American civilization as when in their own land, the writer
viewed the parade in the evening of the voters of the district, who had
been the guests of the district leader, a State Senator, at an outing.
These outings are the annual "round-ups" of the voters. The expenses of
these outings run into the five figures, it is said, in this district.
Boats and a grove are hired. Chowder, coffee, sandwiches and beer are
provided free. Games of chance, to which, it is whispered, the district
leaders are not disinterested observers, and athletics are the features of
the outings. The return at night is an occasion for fireworks and a parade.
Caps and canes are provided for the voters often; sometimes only a ribbon
badge. The expenses are met by the sale of tickets, which sometimes sell
as high as five dollars. These tickets the liquor dealers, in fact, the
tradesmen of all kinds in the district, men holding office under the city
government who are affiliated with the leader and the men who hope to
secure rights or privileges, legal or illegal, through the leader's
influence, know it is wise to purchase. To the mass of the men of the
district it means perhaps the one day of freedom in the year, when they
have the pleasure of enjoying drinks and food wholly at the cost of
another.

In this particular parade were five thousand men, not one thousand of whom
bore the slightest outward evidence of American citizenship, but the right
to vote, as their presence in the column indicated. It scarcely seemed
possible that the scene was in America. Swarthy women and children crowded
gayly decorated fire-escapes, crowded the windows, and made movement
impossible on the streets. Arches of lights, lanterns swinging from
fire-escapes and on ropes from sidewalks to roofs, were in the colors of
the land from which these people came. The flags and bunting displayed
presented colors of a foreign land, with here and there the flag of the
country whose political destiny their votes controlled to a large degree.
The next day the white caps worn by the men in this parade appeared on the
heads of schoolboys and working boys by the hundred, the wearers proud to
wear the colors of the man who, so far as their knowledge or experience, or
that of their parents, went, was the greatest man, the man of the widest
range of authority, in the United States. What do they care who is at the
head of the city government? The men do not need to ask who is the district
leader; he finds them through his unpaid workers and the coalition is
accomplished. Soon the immigrant, turned citizen, understands the
principle. He gets work and votes for the leader. It is simple and direct.
When the extent of one's knowledge enables him to handle a broom or to sell
peanuts or bananas in the new country, and that under the supervision of a
blue-coated tyrant who levies on the voter's cart, if not his pocket, when
and where he pleases, moral arguments in a foreign tongue are not
convincing to that voter. He would rather not submit to the supervision and
its attendant tax; he would rather not have his work intermittent; but he
learns that protest increases his evils, and he submits. The blue-coated
tyrant is a friend of the "boss" who helped get his license, and it must be
right. Whatever comes to him, he must not antagonize the "boss." That is
the first lesson he learns in American citizenship, at the point where it
is most effective, his wage-earning privileges.

[Illustration: A DOORWAY ON THE EAST SIDE.]

There are leaders so strong and tactful that year after year their reign is
unquestioned. Only the police and the ambulance surgeons know when there is
an attempted revolution--when the leader's right is questioned by another
would-be leader. There is only one issue--the man; nobody cares for the
principle--if there be a difference of principle--involved.

In one of the old sections of the city in which is a ward that for forty
years has excelled in crime; a section which at the present time presents
the meanest and lowest of the tenements in New York; in which there is less
effort to counteract the evils of the environment of the homes or change
the environment due to the control of the "boss" than in any other section,
a political feud culminated in the fall of 1901, defeating the man who had
been the leader for years. It was stated that the man who won had expended
$35,000; the man who lost, $12,000 in the struggle. This is a section where
poverty is the universal inheritance of the people who make this section
home.

For weeks the section was in a condition of constant warfare. The smallest
boys were organized as gangs and shouted the name of the leader they had
chosen their hero. Boys of five wore the buttons of their heroes. From
fire-escapes, on wagons hung bits of white cloth declaring the names of
the contestants. One of these, to avoid unpleasant embarrassment, had gone
to California after the Lexow investigation. A favorite legend displayed by
his enemy's friends was, "Paddy is the man who to Californy ran." This was
displayed on one fire-escape on which opened the windows of two families,
each espousing the cause of the contending leaders. The week before the
balloting for leader the legend was kept in place by the constant vigilance
for twenty-four hours of the day by the family whose sentiments it
expressed. "Paddy" was defeated. The next morning the two neighbors, who
had been enemies for weeks, leaned, each from her own window, chatting
amicably, while the son of one was arranging the legend on the fire-escape
to include both families. On either side was gracefully arranged an
American flag, while the harp of Erin hung just in the middle of the
fire-escape. Peace reigned in Warsaw. "Paddy's" friends, like the fairies
of childhood, disappeared in the night. The whole district, as one man,
accepted the change of rulers, and the new leader's banners were thrown to
the breeze everywhere. Nothing succeeds like success in the tenement-house
regions. For a couple of weeks peace seemed to reign in the district. The
followers of the old leader found themselves displaced; new followers
controlled the favors in the district. There began a new distribution of
patronage. Then the old leader's displaced friends, with a few loyal souls,
rallied about him. He had made money enough through his political
affiliations to be defiant, and announced that the political corruption of
the party to which he had belonged compelled him to rally to the support of
the movement to overthrow it. Some of his followers were loyal to bravery,
and declared, too, against the political system. Two of them, because of
these declarations, were discharged forty-eight hours later from places in
a city department where they drew salaries of $1200 per year. Their places
were given to two of the new leader's followers. Two weeks later all had
returned to the old allegiance, and the papers announced that the head of
the Tammany system had decided that the patronage of the district would be
evenly divided between the two factions.

Independence of action is costly under such a system; costly in loss of
wages to the voter; of food, raiment, shelter to his family.

A voter who refuses to surrender the ease of his home or the pleasure of
his club for the good of the district in which his home is located is not
in a position to criticise his poor neighbor who will not jeopardize the
position secured by his vote that supports his family to maintain the
theory of American citizenship. Why should he make sacrifices to free the
city from disgrace when his independent neighbor refuses to sacrifice his
ease to protect his family from the inevitable evils of a corrupt city
government?

It was the conferring the rights of citizenship on immigrants almost as
soon as they landed that fastened on New York an evil that has grown until
the city has been held in the shackles of a spoils system that overshadows
its commercial supremacy and makes it the argument against democratic
government. The heaviest disgrace for this condition rests not on the men
who profit by the system but on the good men who permit it to develop. It
was the logical result of their indifference to the city's good and their
responsibility for that good. This inactivity on the part of the mass of
responsible citizens made the control of the city offices for personal ends
easy to the men who, because of lack of training and moral turpitude, could
not conceive of a service for other than personal ends. Shrewdness made
them see that the immigrant was the ladder on which they could climb to
political power and stability. They met the immigrant as friend and
neighbor; they secured him work; they schooled him to citizenship, and
began at once to train him in that deadliest of all influences in a
democracy, class in politics. So long as this system of education prevails,
the appearance of a candidate for local office who does not bear the
"hall-mark" of the neighborhood will be resented.

[Illustration: EARLY MORNING AMONG THE PUSHCARTS.]

As time went on and the immigrants came from many countries, a new evil
sprang up--the race section; the section where, maintaining all the
characteristics of the country from which the people came, the men exercise
the rights of citizenship at the behest of a political trainer who is able
to promise favors for obedience, and work vengeance for disobedience.
Behind him is a power which he must obey until the day comes when by his
own shrewdness he is able to cross swords with those above him in the
political system, becoming himself a dictator. In the process of his
evolution from ward heeler to district leader he has trained those who
follow him so well that he duplicates himself scores of times, increasing
his power every time he makes a follower, either by fear or favor,
perpetuating the system that makes the city, as has been aptly said, a
"gold mine" which it costs the operators nothing to work.

The man at the bottom knows the duplicate of the leader nearest his own
level; this man is his friend, his countryman often. The links in the
chain are unbroken, and the man who dares to disobey the orders issued from
the top feels not only the displeasure of the henchman, but the combined
strength of the chain, or as much of it as is necessary to compel him to
obey or to crush him. The poor man whose tool to earn a living is a shovel,
a pick or a broom is not in a position to defend his rights; he has no
public sentiment in the only world he knows to support him in any attempt
he may make to attain his rights when defrauded by the political system he,
in utter ignorance, has helped to establish. When he is thrown out of work
given to secure his vote, he has no redress. The man at the bottom must
make the rule of his life "Small favors thankfully received." His hope for
work in the future depends on keeping in friendly touch with the system;
this is the first principle of American citizenship grasped by the
naturalized citizen.

Just before our last national election a number of men employed in skilled
labor in one of our city departments were laid off. To some of those men
this loss of work meant suffering for their families; to others it meant
debt and dependence. It was startling the spirit in which this loss of work
and wages were accepted by these men. The district leader, elected by the
people to make the laws at Albany, in order "to hold his district in line"
for this election, had to provide forty-eight voters with places. He
demanded from the department forty-eight places; the work was in his
district. No one questioned his right to make this demand; these places
represented his political capital. In no way could his demands be met
except by the discharge of forty-eight men then at work who lived outside
the district. It was done. The men laid off, almost to a man, accepted it
as the fortune of the political protégé. Scarcely a word of resentment was
expressed. There were removals into this special district before the next
municipal election, and new enrollments under the leader's banner,
irrespective of the political bias of the voters. Some of the men were
sullen and felt the loss of manhood; some said, "I'll vote as I like, but I
must have work;" others believed that only under this leader's banner could
a poor man hope to get his rights--the privilege to earn his living; or, in
their language, "He is hustling for his friends."

Not only does the skilled and unskilled manual laborer find that the
approval of his district leaders is necessary to secure work under the
city, but that the affiliations and power of the district leader and his
political followers can secure him work under corporations holding public
franchises. He knows that the district leader secures privileges,
licenses, votes for franchises, directly or indirectly, with the distinct
understanding that his recommendations insure places to the men who carry
them. Under corrupt city government the man in business who does not cater
to the political powers finds his privileges curtailed; that he is made the
target for petty annoyances. Especially is this true in the downtown
districts, where in the transaction of business the rights of citizens to
the streets are ignored. Until one has lived close to it, it is almost
impossible to believe the power over the working masses the smallest cog in
the political machine exercises. It is this that makes imperative the
control of the city by men of high moral standing. No amount of unselfish
philanthropy can save a city governed by the corrupt.

There are sections in the city of New York where from the time the boy is
old enough to recognize the power of a policeman he guides his life to
curry favor with this visible expression of power. He knows almost as soon
as he can talk the man who rules in the world in which he lives. He sees
his playmate defy the policeman because his father is a man of power, or
the friend of the man who rules the district. "Pull" is the law, all the
law he recognizes. He hears discussed from his earliest years the
dependence of his class on the political powers who govern, not for the
good of the city, but that they may have their rights; their rights, as
interpreted, being the securing of a place for a longer or shorter period
at the nod of a "boss." Their district is all the city thousands of the
inhabitants of these sections know. How can it be otherwise? They are never
called for any purpose to any other part of the city, unless it be the
cemetery. Family, friends, business all center within a score of blocks. If
a distance must be traversed, it is through thoroughfares that but
duplicate regions they know, all a part of the kingdom of the "boss."

When the observer sees five thousand men walking behind a banner conferred
on the leader of the district because every man in it who votes votes at
his dictation, there comes to him a faint apprehension of what political
power in the tenement-house district is. This district leader interprets
all these men know of this country or its institutions. They know that he
secures work for them; that he befriends them in time of trouble. He
interprets Christ's doctrine to them: "I was hungry and ye gave me meat;
thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and
ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came
unto me." This is what the district leader does, if not in person, by
proxy. Is it any wonder he can control votes? Is it any wonder that the
poor, ignorant, unequipped voter should curry favor, bow to him,
acknowledge his supremacy even to the law? For this the voter can break the
law, and the leader secure remission of the penalty. The leader's nod has
been known to guide the judge on the bench. The leader can make the
innocent suffer because his power is greater than the law to which the
innocent appeal. This is the moral doctrine with which we inoculate our
newly made citizens, and under which the children of our overcrowded
tenement houses grow up. As the boys approach manhood they know no greater
privilege than to serve the man who has the power to give them place, and
he begins to cultivate their acquaintance early.

It takes brains, moral standards, a knowledge of life and experience to put
the district leaders and their cohorts in the place they belong. Talking
against them accomplishes nothing while the majority he represents keeps
him in power, yes, makes him possible. He makes morality an evil,
dishonesty justice to the people who know him as the representative of
republican principles. They are the people. They have left one land because
it deprived them of rights. Rights as they know them are personal, and the
district leader secures them.

[Illustration: MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.]

The opposition to the reform movement by the people governed by the
district leader comes from the conviction, dimly conceived or implanted,
that the election of the men who represent it would mean that everywhere
merit and not "pull" would keep the voter at work; that business would have
to be conducted according to law; that crime would be punished; that no man
would hold the keys of the prison for their benefit, but for the protection
of the community.

One of the greatest moral lessons administered to the people of New York in
a language that all understood, and one which all classes in the community
needed, was given by the late Colonel George E. Waring. When he organized
the Department of Street Cleaning on the merit system; when he proved to
every man in the department that if he did his work no man could displace
him; that he could defend himself, a man before men, if charges were
brought against him, Colonel Waring changed the moral character of New
York. Every man in that department had his friends to whom he carried the
message; stood a free man employed by the city; a man who dared to vote as
he would though in public service; would not be deprived of the right to
earn his daily bread because of the use he made of his rights as an
American citizen. This moral lesson went into every home. The woman whose
husband handled a broom, drove a cart, held her head up, for the magic D.
S. C. had changed a "job" that enslaved her husband to an employment that
honored him.

The enforcement of the law in the gathering of the garbage; the cleanliness
of the streets in the tenement-house districts equal to those of the
avenues, for the first time in generations brought the great truth to the
consciousness of the people in the tenement-house regions that all men were
equal. That the clean streets led to clean halls and cleaner homes was
natural; and the further evolution meant clean characters, because of moral
freedom to express opinion in a ballot cast at no man's command.

And then came the summers when, for the sake of the children, extra
exertions were made to keep the streets clean. Slowly the truth dawned on
the dullest mother that the babies were not dying in such numbers; were not
so ill, because the streets were clean, the garbage collected and the
streets washed and cool. Twenty years of Colonel Waring, and the moral tone
of the most ignorant would be changed. For the right to earn his living
honestly, honorably, to cast his ballot as an American citizen, would be
guaranteed to every voter employed in a city department employing the
greatest number of voters with the least manual ability, the least
education.

A city is just as honest as the greatest number of citizens casting a
ballot with the least knowledge of its value and effect; it comes no higher
in the scale of integrity than that. Every man who stands behind a broom
because he earns what is paid him, and knows that he stays there just as
long as he continues to earn his wages, represents a wealth of manhood in a
democracy, a part of the nation's capital as a world power.

When Colonel Waring discharged the first man convicted of accepting a bribe
for collecting the refuse of the city contrary to the law of the
department, he gave a practical demonstration of the truth of the
Declaration of Independence that all men are born free and equal. He showed
by that act that the poor man who could not pay a bribe was protected by
the law; that wealth purchased no privileges at the expense of the city.
Just where the spoils system had worked its deepest degradation it received
its most effective lesson. The greatest benefit that Colonel Waring, that
man of law and order, conferred upon New York, was not its clean streets,
but the moral lesson that a city department can be administered to secure
the best interests of the people on the principles that control the best
business houses of the city.

To the shame of the city be it said that it had so long been accustomed to
the spoils system that it could not accept the theory of Colonel Waring. It
was impossible for even the philanthropic workers to believe that a man
would not be placed, if they used their personal "pull" with the head of
the department. The politicians learned quickly that the system in that
department ignored "pull." When they did accept it, they determined to
overthrow the man who robbed the spoils system of its largest perquisite
where it was most effective in numbers. The combination of the political
machines accomplished the city's disgrace in 1897. It was redeemed in 1901
by a people who had suffered cruelly; who saw in the four years of misrule
that they had made their own chains of bondage.




CHAPTER III.

THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF.


The importance of environment is at last admitted as a factor in
character-building. That light and air are indispensable to cleanliness,
and physical cleanliness to health, and health to morals, is the gospel
that the evils of the tenements have forced the philanthropists to declare
until the thinking public is convinced of its truth.

There are tenement houses that have reputations as positive as individuals.
Thoughtful, intelligent wives of working-men would not, could not be
persuaded to move into them because of their reputations. Often the evils
of these tenements are justly attributed to the housekeepers. Housekeepers
of tenements are women who pay the whole or a part of their rent by
overseeing the house; attending to the cleaning, collecting the rents,
letting the rooms, adjusting differences between tenants--"a go-between"
between the agent or the owner and the tenants. The owner or agent
employing these women upholds their decisions when differences between the
tenants and housekeepers arise. This clothes them with great authority,
and often enables them to do great injustice. They are feared usually.
Families will endure restrictions of liberties, every deprivation of their
rights, because protest would mean eviction or discomforts that would
compel them to move.

Under some agents and owners these housekeepers have absolute control of
the property. They frequently make and enforce rules that utterly ignore
the rights of tenants. This rule is often as absolute as though they were
the owners of the house. Strange as it may seem, this class of housekeepers
usually make the property under their control pay; they usually keep up the
character of the houses under their control because they have standards and
compel those about them to live up to them.

[Illustration: A REMNANT OF THE PAST.]

On an East Side street a few blocks from the East River are four 27-foot
front houses of the English-basement type. The plan of these houses
indicates that they were designed as residences for people of ample means.
The halls are broad, the stairways wide, ascending in recesses on the first
floor that leaves the entrance halls clear from front to rear doorways. The
yards of these four houses, wide and deep, are paved with broad flagging
stones, such as are used on the sidewalks. The fences are kept in good
order and well painted. Not a child living in these four houses dares to
play in those yards. The housekeeper--one woman has charge of the four
houses--would order them out. If the children did not leave at once,
complaint would be made to the mothers; and if they did not uphold the
housekeeper and insist that the children play in the street, the mothers
who failed would have to move. Every mother-tenant knows this well. A
mother of three children who had lived in these houses all her married
life, when asked why the children could not play in the yard, where she
could watch them, replied: "Why, if the children played in the yard they
would make a lot of work for the housekeeper. She would not stand it." This
mother's tone indicated that she thought the housekeeper was right. The
youngest of the three children in another family living in these houses was
ill all winter. When convalescent, the doctor ordered him to be kept out of
doors as much as possible. The mother had all the work to do for five in
family, and had to devise some means of keeping the child out that would
not interfere with her work. She arranged the fire-escape outside of the
window, putting pillows and toys out there. The little fellow climbed over
the rail and struck a stone beneath, breaking his arms.

"Why did you not put him in the yard, where you could watch him, and where
he could run about?"

"Oh! the housekeeper would be so angry; I wouldn't dare."

"Must you keep the children out of the yard?"

"Yes; they would make an awful lot of work for the housekeeper."

Investigation proved that the owner of this property supported the
housekeeper in depriving even the babies of the use of these yards. A
mother could not roll a baby carriage around the yards, because her older
children, if she had any, would be sure to go into the yards to see her.
The rents for four rooms, two absolutely dark, ventilated through the dark
and unventilated halls by a window eighteen inches square, were $22, $20
and $18 per month, respectively, for each floor. The streets in front are
overcrowded, dirty; when the trucks were in the streets, two were always
standing in front of these houses. Push-carts now replace the trucks.

The people stay in these houses year after year. A bill never appears on
them. The arbitrary restriction as to the use of the yard is not counted
against the property, because it is so clean, kept in such good repair, and
the character of the people scrutinized before they are accepted as
tenants. It is generally understood that the renting of furnished rooms is
not approved. The housekeeper finds a tenant who rents rooms objectionable.
In a neighborhood where every house shows year after year a loss of
character, people poorer and more ignorant becoming tenants, these four
houses retain the appearance of comfort and respectability. Among the
tenants there is but little intimacy; they appear to have little in common.
The women are never heard in the halls, nor do they loiter about the
doorways. The men are all skilled workmen, earning good wages--clerks on
small salaries, or in city departments, all natives of New York. The wives
were all wage-earners before they were married. They dress well; most of
them are fairly good housekeepers. All buy their children's clothes ready
made; two make their own dresses. For their children they are ambitious,
and expect to keep them in school until they are sixteen. This the children
defeat. The boys get places during the summer vacations in their fourteenth
year, refusing to go back to school. The girls are contented until
fourteen, and then they grow restless, becoming wage-earners; all that they
earn is spent for their clothes. The wages of the father may no more than
meet the expenses of the family, but this is not considered. Clothes are
the essentials. A man having a salary of $1,400, living in one of these
houses, had to go in debt the first week of a serious illness of his wife.
He did not have a dollar in advance to meet emergencies. He was a proud,
indulgent, tender husband and father.

This type of house and this class of tenants are disappearing from the East
Side. The remnant of this class who remain are held by political
affiliations or family ties. The men enjoy the sense of power that comes
from this connection, and realize fully that to leave the district would
mean a loss of social prestige, or, if minor politicians, a loosening of
their hold on the people to whom they represent political power. Many of
this class remain in the section because they hold positions in the city
departments in return for active service in the interest of the political
machines.

Not far away from these tenements is another in which are sixteen families.
The rents in this house range from $5 to $9.50 per month for two to three
rooms. The house is dirty, neglected; violations of the sanitary laws are
evident from the front door to the roof, on which tenants occupying the
front rooms must dry their clothes. The water is in the dark halls; in
winter, for days at a time, the pipes, both water and drain, are frozen and
burst; yet the tenants stay year after year. One woman, the mother of four
children, was born, married, her four children were born, and her husband,
mother and father died in this house. She has never moved, except across
the hall, up and downstairs, as she has been able to pay more or has been
forced to reduce her rent. The women in this house know almost nothing of
housekeeping. The men are employed only about half the time. The number of
children in the house averages three to each family. It is a New England
hamlet under one roof in this particular. If there is sickness in any
family, it is the concern of every tenant; if a man is out of work, it is a
community misfortune, and to be shared. A new hat for man or woman is the
cause of rejoicing, for it is the badge of respectability for any in the
house who may need it in an emergency. The whole household, for such it
seems to be, are poor, very poor; thriftless, unambitious; the men somewhat
given to drink to excess; yet the spirit of neighborliness shames
criticism. A woman in this house ill four months was nursed by her
neighbors night and day. Her house and children were cared for, food
provided when necessary. Comment on their loyalty and devotion was met with
the response: "God knows how soon she may be doing it for one of us." Yet
when that woman, whom most of them had known all her life, gave evidence of
pregnancy a few months after her husband's death, not a woman crossed her
doorsill until the birth of twin babies within the period of time redeemed
her character. Whether from remorse or love, ample return for this cruelty
has been made many times.

In the two-room apartments in this house there is one closet, with shelves
about six inches wide. This is in the one room that serves as living-room,
kitchen, dining-room--a room less than eight feet wide. The bedroom is
perfectly dark, ventilated by a square window into perfectly dark,
unventilated halls. A full-sized bed leaves the width of the door between
it and the wall. The three-room apartments have outside windows--five to
the three rooms. There is a closet in the kitchen and one in the large
room. People talk of poverty, but few people know what it is. A woman who
had moved into the three-room apartment had hung all the clothing for five
in family in the one bedroom on four nails. In reply to a protest, she said
patiently and quietly: "There are no hooks in the closet in the front room,
and I hadn't a penny to buy any." Ten cents provided that closet with
hooks. A comment was made on the keeping of the washtub under the kitchen
table. "Why do you not have the tub carried to the cellar?" An expression
of self-pity passed over the woman's face as she explained that the tub
would have to be carried down three flights of stairs, out on the street,
around the corner, down the cellar stairs, and then to her coal cellar at
the extreme end of the cellar.

The house stands on a corner, the entrance from the street at the extreme
end of the west wall. The cellar door was formerly close to the entrance
door, but the landlord built in the back end of the cellar an oven when a
baker hired the store on the first floor. A cellar door was then opened at
the farthest part of the front, or south wall, one hundred and twenty-five
feet from the entrance door of the house. Is it surprising that coal is
bought by the pail by all the tenants? That tubs are kept anywhere in their
rooms where there is space?

Shiftlessness, thriftless uncleanliness marks even the sidewalk about this
house. The dirt inside or out troubles nobody. Children will spill half the
contents of the garbage pail they are carrying to the cans in the tiny
yard, in halls and on the stairway. It is kicked out of the way without
comment. Dogs or cats, and ofttimes both, are members of the families who
live under this roof. The unsanitary conditions of the closets in the yard
arouse pity for the tenants on the first floor; but no tenant thinks of
complaining to either the housekeeper or the authorities. It would be
useless, and would get them into trouble. The present owner is willing to
kalsomine the bedrooms and halls each spring, but the tenants object
because it makes a lot of work.

In August, two years ago, the writer was going up the first flight of
stairs in this house, when a baby voice was heard pleading: "Pease tum
fas'er; oh, pease tum fas'er; I 'ant to do p'ay; I 'ant to doe on steet;
pease tum fas'er." On the third floor a tiny boy stood in front of the sink
talking to the faucet, from which a tiny stream was flowing into a little
tin pail. An infant's voice from one of the rooms told the story. The
mother needed water and could not leave the baby. Perhaps this was the tiny
nurse of mother and baby, big enough to call a neighbor to do what he could
not do.

When it is remembered that this stream of water from the faucet represented
the water supply for four families, the difficulties of cleanliness under
those conditions may be slightly appreciated. In spite of the dirt, the
darkness, the unsanitary conditions of this house, the thriftlessness and
ignorance of the tenants, there is a spirit of neighborliness in it that
puts the critical to blush. Without a doubt the housekeeper, who is a
shrewd woman, fosters this spirit of neighborliness. She smiles as she
says: "They gets so used to each other they hates to be separated." Neither
house nor tenants seem to go below the level established twelve years ago.

There is a housekeeper who does mission work of which the world takes no
note. She is the woman who in the true sense is an altruist. By her force
of character, her hatred of inefficiency, her love of order, she compels
the women who become tenants who do not know how to keep house to learn
how.

The writer knows intimately such a housekeeper. She had charge of a
four-story tenement on the lower East Side. The house was of the type known
as "double decker." There were four apartments on each floor; the front
consisting of a kitchen, living-room and two bedrooms; the back, of one
room and two bedrooms. Small windows near the ceiling in kitchen and
bedrooms opened on a narrow space between this and the next house, which
was an old-fashioned residence. A similar opening in that house enabled the
neighbors to look into each other's rooms. Water and refuse were thrown
into this space between the two houses, and sometimes into the rooms of
neighbors unintentionally. There was war, bitter war, because of this; for
the large tenement was occupied by a part of the remnant having social
standards left on the lower East Side.

There was water in all the kitchens of the large tenement. The halls were
absolutely dark, but were free from the nuisances of hallways having sinks.
Stairs and halls were covered with light oilcloth, the stairs having brass
treads on the edge. Everything was kept as clean as soap, water and
muscular strength could keep it.

The first visit was made to this house long before Colonel Waring had shown
what clean streets would do in the tenement-house districts. On the street
curb in front of the door stood three ash barrels filled within three
inches of the top, carefully covered with newspapers tucked in around the
edge of the contents. This indicates the standards of this housekeeper. She
hated dirt and disorder. She could not be happy where it was. She forced by
tact, coercion, persuasion, any and every means, her way to the heart and
home of every ignorant housekeeper who came under that roof. She taught
cooking by sending cake, bread, soup she had made to the tenants, and
arousing the desire in them to learn how to make that particular dish. She
instituted an exchange of skill among the tenants. The woman who could make
a dress and not a hat exchanged skill with the one who had been a milliner.
The woman who made bread and failed with cake exchanged skill with the
cakemaker. They even took turns in going to the theatre, the neighbor
staying home and taking care of the children.

The property was more valuable every year; no bill appeared at the door. It
stood apart from its neighbors for years. This housekeeper was compelled to
give up her responsibility and left the house, as she wisely said: "No one
would manage it in my way. I could not get on in peace." Six months after
every tenant had moved but the liquor dealer; and even his bar-room had
sunk to a lower level. A building in which many homes might be maintained
is now merely a place of shelter. People move in and out; no relations are
established; there is nothing to hold the tenant here above any other
house. The owner has sold the property, hating its present character.

Again, tenants will be the victims of vindictive housekeepers, who for any
and no reason will begin a system of petty persecutions to compel a tenant
to move. Then there is the gossiping housekeeper, who keeps the tenants at
war. It is no secret that the method of rent collecting of some
housekeepers holds tenants year after year. They will take the rent in the
smallest sums, daily or weekly. By the end of the month they will usually
have the full amount collected. The houses where this system prevails are
the most objectionable. The tenants for this leniency endure positive
evils. The important thing is a place of shelter for the family. Work is
uncertain, or long periods of idleness has made the payment of rent
impossible for a period. The housekeeper understands and becomes
responsible for keeping the tenant until the rent is paid. In return the
tenants endure neglect of duty on the part of the housekeeper. Silence is
their expression of gratitude. No repairs are made, for none are demanded.
The house sinks lower and lower; anybody can move in on the payment of part
of a month's rent. The vacant rooms are dirty--give visible evidence of the
presence of vermin; but the family evicted with only half a month's rent in
hand cannot afford to be critical. This is the house that makes the slum.

Two housekeepers of tenements were discussing owners and tenants before the
writer. One was rigid, keeping the house astonishingly clean, with rooms
rarely vacant; the other, always in trouble with the tenants, always having
some one to evict, threw the blame for her troubles on the tenants. The
first one listened, finally saying slowly: "No, you are the one. You get
cross and abuse the children. You make pets of some children and some
mothers, and the others see it and get mad. Then there is a fight. To keep
a house you must treat everybody the same. You must make good rules; you
must do your part and make every tenant do her part. I've had two of the
tenants you put out of your house five years. They are good tenants; watch
yourself."

[Illustration: A TYPE OF THE PRESENT.]

There are landlords who care for nothing but the income from their
property. Any kind of tenant who will pay rent is acceptable. Any
housekeeper who collects the specified amount may hold control without
question. The housekeeper may have standards, but these are swept aside by
the exactions of the landlord. The rents in such houses are usually high,
because there is such a percentage of loss in rents. This house also
contributes to the creation of the slum.

The careless and apparently malicious destruction of property by tenants is
not appreciated by those who touch this question of tenement houses
superficially. No means has yet been found to make the tenement-house
population understand that the abuse of property is a factor in their rent
problem. Within a year the writer was walking with a group of women, two of
whom were housekeepers in tenement houses. This question of tenants was
being discussed freely by the women who were tenants as well as the
housekeepers. It was interesting to find that all agreed that one family
could change the character of a tenement house for the worst, but one
family could not improve its character. The reason was that the family
above the tenement came only to reduce their rent during a hard time, while
the family with evil tendencies stayed until they were put out, to go into
a cheaper tenement and lower that. They agreed that where housekeeper and
tenant got on well together both hated a change. The two things that
dragged down the character of a tenement was beer-drinking and destructive
children--children allowed to "run wild." These women insisted that there
never would be quarrels in tenement houses were it not for these two
causes. A woman who drank beer would invite her new neighbors to drink.
They would treat in return, and the house would show it at once. The women
who drink beer in this fashion grow careless of their persons and their
homes; they get rid of their children, who soon learn to enjoy the freedom
from control. The children destroy the property first in play, through
carelessness, and later grow malicious.

If a housekeeper is sharp and shrewd, these women tenants claimed that she
could at any time get rid of an objectionable tenant; but the housekeepers
held that if the owner did not care for anything but rents, the
housekeeper was often compelled to let in and keep in objectionable
tenants. They admitted, one and all, that houses fairly indicated the
character of the people who would live in them, and that rents regulated
the class of tenants to a very great degree. They admitted that at times
one could find tenants who had lived for many years in one house where
conditions had changed for the worst. But it was unusual. People now
selected houses where those of their own faith, and, if foreign, those of
their own nationality, at least predominated. That this tendency was seen
more and more every year. This group of women were among the remnant of
Christians left on the lower East Side. All had been born there of Irish
parentage. They lived in the houses bordering on the edge of the East
River--old houses on the plan of the first tenements erected in New York,
or in houses designed for one family and now holding four to eight. Two of
them lived in houses built in a row erected eighty-three years ago. They
were two-story, dormer windows and basement frame houses, built without an
area, the door to the basements opening like a cellar door on the street.
These basements were occupied by a family each. Fourteen of these houses
are still standing. The people in this section live a life entirely their
own. They have been crowded out, the more prosperous, by the Hebrews,
while the remnant find themselves hemmed in by them.

These people live in the confines of a Roman Catholic parish that twenty
years ago contained nearly eleven thousand souls of that faith. Three years
ago the priest in charge estimated his parish at less than four thousand,
and that four thousand remained because they were too poor to get away, he
declared.

The Hebrews, as tenants will, on the same block show many social grades,
many degrees of poverty and prosperity, many stages of development in
American civilization. There is a sense of feeling of brotherhood that
other people lack. The houses will range from the most uncleanly, ill-kept,
to the new tenement with ornate entrance and modern improvements. The most
modern will, on entering, be found with walls marked and broken when the
wood-work is new. No one seems troubled by this destruction. The
housekeeper does not struggle, for it is expected and charged for in the
rent. Plumbing is of the simplest, for it is expected to present the
largest percentage of loss in the administration of the property. One of
the most elaborate of the new tenements erected on the lower East Side was
visited three months after it was occupied. Every hallway from top to
bottom of the house had broken plaster and was marked by pencil and crayon.
The plumber was then a daily visitor. This house a year afterward bore on
the interior evidences that years of hard usage might have brought. The
housekeeper collected rents and attended to the garbage. She was utterly
indifferent to the appearance of the house, which, intended for prosperous
families, was a nest of sweat-shops, where even children of six and seven
were employed. The rents had been collected; that was the owner's only
requirement.

The West Side is congested, because manufacture and storehouses are
displacing the houses. Rents are high, and the houses for the most part old
residences occupied by several families. The people, generally, are
Americans. They are deeply attached to this old section, because it is
their birthplace; and for many of them an even deeper attachment prevails,
for this section was the birthplace of parents. The houses often are found
to have lifelong friends, often relatives, as tenants. The tenants keep the
halls and stairways clean in turn, and the houses generally are well kept
up. Here one tenant is allowed a rebate on rent for renting rooms,
collecting the rent, caring for the sidewalk and stoop, the garbage and
ash-cans. The majority of the people in this section are Protestants. The
Protestant churches are well maintained. The Trinity Corporation supports
kindergartens, cooking and sewing schools. The Judson Memorial is a very
attractive gymnasium, that brings children from as far west as the North
River. The Methodist Church holds many who in no other section could find
the same equality and freedom. The vocabulary of the people through this
section shows the effect of the newer activities in the modern churches;
the effect of the enlarging interests of the children in art and nature
through the public school education.

While the people are living on small incomes, often on uncertain incomes,
life is lived at a much higher level than on the East Side. Children are
not so precocious in evil knowledge. This difference is due largely to the
fact that the houses contain three and four families at the most; that the
apartment houses in the section are beyond the reach of any but the skilled
working man. He holds his own at high rental in the house that shelters but
three other families like his own. His neighbors are people of like
ambitions as his own, and demand what he demands.

[Illustration: A CORNER IN A WORKINGMAN'S HOME.]

The housekeepers in this section differ essentially in their relation to
the tenants from those of the more heterogeneous population of the East
Side of the city. One resemblance is recognized--the effect of the
character of the housekeeper. Here, as on the East Side, to a very large
degree, the comfort, health, peace and good-will of the tenants in every
house depends on the character and the spirit of the woman who controls the
property for the landlord.

The law of natural selection holds good. The housekeeper holds the tenants
who are satisfied with the conditions she creates. They, especially the
children, develop in habits of cleanliness, in care of property, in respect
for the rights of others, as the rules of the house enforced by the
housekeeper compel. It is in her power to get rid of those who do not
accept her dictates, let them be what they may--just or unjust. The
housekeeper will make her presence felt. If she violates the law in the
disposal of garbage outside of the house, tenants will violate the law she
makes for them in the care and disposal of garbage inside the house. If she
is compelled to obey the law, she will compel tenants to obey the law. It
is this that makes the morale of the Department of Street Cleaning so
important. If the part of the house which in renting tenants agree to keep
clean is not kept clean, the observer will discover that the housekeeper
does not keep her part of the agreement in keeping the entrance clean.

A large factor in the tenement house for character building or destroying
is the housekeeper who has charge of it. Where she is well paid she makes
the property valuable. She cares for it, for the character of the tenants.
Tenants remain in the house because of the advantages her offices control
for the poor man and his wife anxious to provide for their children's best
welfare. Property under this type of woman resists decay. She holds it in
spite of the decay about it. The characterless, slovenly, indifferent
housekeeper is a factor in destroying property, because of the destructive
character of the tenants who will tolerate her and her methods.

The house that is the property of the man with "a pull" is an obstruction
to civilization almost impossible to overcome. By connivance the law is
inoperative. If pushed, such an owner can easily rid himself of the tenants
who attempt, or have attempted for them, efforts to compel the owners to
repair the property. A mill owner on the water front on the lower East Side
owned three three-story and basement houses adjoining the mill property.
They had been built for one family each. The basements were altered into
stores, and the floors above altered at the least cost to accommodate one
or two families. This meant two inside bedrooms absolutely without
ventilation. The tenants of this property and all in the neighborhood were
tormented by the smoke and gas from the chimney of the mill. When the wind
blew directly toward the houses, windows were kept closed for hours in the
warmest weather. All the tenants dried their clothes on pulley lines.
Frequently the soot made the clothes unwearable, and they had to be washed
the second time. Ten years of effort have failed to compel the building of
the chimney of that mill to the legal height.

The houses the mill owner owned were in a disgraceful condition. The
closets in the yards had no flow of water. The engineer of the mill was
required to carry a hose from the mill over the fences to the closets to
flush them. Sometimes he forgot to turn the water off, and the yards were
flooded and made disgusting. Sometimes he forgot for days at a time to
flush the closets, when the conditions were even worse. Only people who
were helpless or hopeless would endure such conditions. One of the workers
of the College Settlement discovered the conditions in these houses. She
took immediate steps to compel the necessary improvements. The owner
discovered that the wife and children of one of the tenants went to clubs
at the Settlement, and he ordered that family to move. Before the mother
moved her education had begun, and she imparted to her neighbors the
information that the conditions were unlawful and could be changed if they
would fight for it. The man exacted his rent on the first of the month; he
was hard and unyielding; the tenants continued the warfare until he had
evicted every one who spoke English and filled his houses with foreigners.
One of the stores is used for storing and sorting rags and paper; next door
is a meat shop. The fight was given up. The owner had "a pull," and the law
is defied to this day on that property.

All the land on the river front in this neighborhood for blocks is made
land, filled in by the city refuse, on which houses were built years ago.
This kind of property extends back from the North River for three, and at
one point four, blocks. In some of the houses near the river the high tides
of spring and fall rise in the cellars. The College Settlement workers who
visited families in one of these houses had been distressed by the amount
of illness in it. Malaria had attacked every family. Spring and fall wages
were lost at times by as many as three wage-earners in one family for two
and three days each week. In addition to loss of wages, there was the
expense of medicine and doctors. At last came the urgent request that a
worker should call on a girl of sixteen who was dying of consumption on the
first floor. This consisted of four rooms, two being inside bedrooms, each
of which would hold a three-quarter bed and a chair between the bed and the
wall. One was absolutely unventilated, except through the doors. It was, in
fact, a passageway between the front and rear rooms. This plan is the usual
plan in houses altered from residences for one family to a tenement house.

The door of the other bedroom, which opened into the large room, was closed
at night because the large room was used as a bedroom by the male members
of the family and one lodger. The girl of sixteen had slept with two others
in that room for eight years. The floors of the four rooms were covered
with carpets. The odor was sickening. The visitor asked the tenant who
brought her to the sick girl what caused the odor perceptible in the hall,
with front and rear windows always open, unbearable in the rooms where
doors and windows were closed.

"Oh, that! The water has been in the cellar now for two or three weeks. The
tides are high now." A visit to the cellar showed the water at the height
of the second step of the cellar stairs; also a sewer pipe that had burst.
Visits were made to the proper city department once a week for eleven
weeks. The clerk, on the last visit, evidently intending to be facetious,
said: "Say, what's the matter with those people taking baths in that
cellar? They ain't got no bathtubs."

The owner of the property had "pull" enough to escape even an investigation
by the department. It was years before the cellar of that house was
concreted and the necessary connections of pipes and sewers made. It was
done when the property had changed hands and a man comparatively poor and
wholly free from political affiliations became the owner.

The people of this whole region are the victims of political corruption.
Some of them have more fear of offending a political light, let his glimmer
be ever so small, than of offending against even God's law. They could be
turned out of house and home, deprived of the means of earning a living, by
men who openly defy the law, and who become heroes to the growing boys and
girls for no reason but because of their power to use and defy the law.

The moral natures of the men and the women who grow up under this influence
are dwarfed and warped until it is impossible for them to have distinct
conceptions of right and wrong. The education they receive does not reveal
the relations of ethics to life; the struggle for existence dulls the mind;
while the depleted physical conditions caused by bad air, mal-nutrition and
ignorance of real values reduce moral resistance almost to zero. Enforce
the tenement-house laws, and the moral strength of the people of New York
will rise to higher levels of moral resistance. Not poverty, but the burden
imposed by political corruption, is the blight of home life in the
tenement-house sections of New York.




CHAPTER IV.

SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS.


In a preceding chapter an attempt was made to show how hopeless the task of
home-making was for women who had neither knowledge nor ideals to guide
them. When it is remembered that the environment of these homes was in
itself degrading, to maintain even the semblance of a home was a remarkable
achievement.

These women knew but three educating influences--home, school and Church.
Four, perhaps, if one chooses to count the streets, where most of their
time was spent, as one. The value of the first they revealed in the homes
they made. The school at the time it was a factor in their development was
a place that had no connection with anything else in their lives. What they
learned there was but to the exceptional few without any practical value.
They learned to read to get promoted, or because they could not help it.
The arithmetic which they found valuable they learned in doing errands and
spending their own pennies. They learned to form letters with their pens;
but as they had no use for the knowledge, they soon forgot it. Their
conception of education and that of their world left them perfectly at ease
in their accomplishment. The Church had to do with their souls; and to the
majority the care of their souls was a delegated responsibility, and gave
them little concern, if any. Personal effort in that direction was a matter
of old age.

The Church was, by its own traditions and sentiment, a spiritual light and
guide; the end and aim of its service to develop spiritual life by teaching
and prayer. The social life of the people, or, for that matter, the civic
conditions that to the last degree regulated and controlled their
pleasures, were not the concern of the Church. The parish house did not
exist. The institutional church had not been conceived even in thought.

Yet at this period, 1880 and 1881, there was a growing consciousness that
something was wrong in the social order; that neither churches, schools nor
homes were meeting the necessities of the working people or their children.
The Church found itself losing ground; the people could not be held in
allegiance to it. This was so true of the Protestant churches downtown that
already the wisdom of moving uptown was being questioned. Some had even
then left their old buildings to be used as mission churches; others sold
their downtown buildings, moving uptown, giving up any attempt at holding
the masses, who manifested no interest in the Church or its work. The
missions then established were and are maintained with more or less wisdom
and success. That mistakes should be made was natural. There was no
precedent as to how one class in this democratic community should work for
another. It took years for the churches to learn that the secret of success
was in working _with_, and not _for_, the people.

The overcrowding went on. Neighborhoods changed so rapidly that it was
impossible to adopt any system to meet the necessities of the social
conditions. These conditions were created by race standards of living,
pleasure and religion. No man or organization was prepared to grapple with
them intelligently, for they viewed them as observers.

The Church had still the first interpretation of feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison. Secular work was
not yet a part of the redemptive work of the Church. Poverty and ignorance
reigned where prosperity and intelligence had been. The mission church
became a distributing station. It was but natural that the men and women
who followed Christ in their lives should feed and clothe the hungry and
the naked. It was quite as natural that people whose struggle for life was
constant, a struggle in which they were rarely successful, even when they
accepted their own standards of success, should develop shrewdness in
securing all possible aid at the least possible effort. The more they
received without effort, the easier life was made for them. This was one
method of adjustment. Where there were several children in a family they
were often sent to as many Sunday-schools. The churches, all unconsciously,
for a long period carried on the work of the missions on a commercial
basis, competing energetically to secure attendants at mission services and
Sunday-schools. The workers found their success measured by the numbers
that appeared in their reports. It was the American standard of success. It
became profitable to go to Sunday-school. The approach of the holidays
found them crowded. The mission churches boomed. They provided an outlet
for the energies of devoted, consecrated men and women, determined to make
the world better because they were in it. The missions were an outlet for
the generous; for the men and the women who considered themselves stewards
of the properties in their possession. The blunders made are a tribute to
the faith which established and maintained churches. The very blunders of
those years were the seeds of wisdom these latter days are beginning to
garner in the fruits of coöperation and federation. The forces are
beginning to marshal under one banner and emblem, with one aim born of the
nineteenth century conception, that Christ taught civic duty to His
followers when He declared, "Render unto Cæsar the things that are
Cæsar's." That the Church is the guardian of the people's rights, as well
as their example, is a long-delayed conception. It has taken thirty years
to bring the evolution in Church work from competition to coöperation in
the work of personal and civic regeneration.

Many of the difficulties hardest to overcome have grown out of the mistakes
of those years, when the rapid influx of foreigners changed the character
of the people of the tenement regions, and the Church failed to change its
methods. They came, many of them, paupers, a charge at once upon the
charitable and the humane. Neither their ignorance nor poverty was a bar to
their citizenship; their presence on the municipal stage in the character
of voters, sovereigns, increased the civic problems of New York, and
naturally these the Church problems.

Unfortunately the charitable work of the churches was too often left to the
management of sentimental people, who failed to see what has been forced
upon workers of the present day: that hunger is sometimes a moral educator;
that the salvation of a family may sometimes be best secured by letting
them suffer, the innocent with the guilty, because in the suffering is an
educating power impossible to secure in any other way.

One evening to a working-girls' club a teacher in a mission school not far
away brought a girl of sixteen, introducing her as one of her girls who had
been in her class two years. Privately she told one of the directors of the
club of the poverty of the girl's family. The father was a man of
seventy-five, who could do only the lightest work, and found getting the
work he could do very difficult. This girl was the eldest of seven
children, all attending the mission. "It is a mystery what would become of
the family, were it not for what the mission does for them," was the
comment of the teacher. A close inspection of the girl did not reveal
distressing poverty, and the directors of the club were puzzled. The girl
was employed in a store at a very small salary. She was anxious to go to
the country. Of course, she must be sent away without any cost to herself.
She doubted if the family could spare her wages, even if she could go free.
She explained that she and her brothers and sisters had gone in "Tribune
Fresh-Air Parties," but she was now too old. "The trouble with our family
is," she commented, "that we are all too old." It seemed a hopeless
doctrine to become fixed in the mind of a girl of sixteen, so the club
directors secured a vacation for her through the Working-Girls' Vacation
Society, deciding that, if it were necessary, they would pay the mother her
wages for the time the girl was away. No question arose as to her wages. At
the expiration of her two weeks' vacation, when she should have been
penniless, she appeared at the club in a new hat and gloves. When the girl
joined the club her Sunday-school teacher paid one month's dues. She had
been present at several business meetings; she had seen the other girls
paying their dues, she had heard the treasurer's report, but she never
attempted to assume her financial obligations. She was spoken to finally in
regard to her dues, and responded calmly by saying she could not pay her
dues; she had no money. Various suggestions were made as to the possibility
of her paying part. At last, to relieve the club treasury, one of the
directors said: "I will pay what you owe and one month in advance. You may
pay me as you can." The girl never came to the club again. No effort was
made to trace her, as she contributed nothing to the life of the club, and
many girls kept their dues paid who dressed far more plainly; these very
girls she had on more than one occasion treated discourteously.

Two years afterward one of the club officers was calling on a friend. "I am
so glad you came in," she exclaimed. "One of your club girls is in trouble
and is coming here with Miss ----, a mission worker in Dr. ----'s church,
this morning. Now you can help solve her problem." To have a member of a
working-girls' club go to an outsider for help is to have one of your own
family appeal to strangers in time of need. The club worker kept still. She
was covered with shame. She had failed to establish relations with one it
was her sole purpose to help. Who the girl was she did not know, as her
friend had forgotten the girl's name. The girl came. It was our old friend
of sixteen. She was, as may be imagined, not pleased to see the director of
the club. The history of that family is fairly indicative of how missions
were conducted at that time. How many of them are conducted at the present
with the same results? Originally this family was found by the workers of a
mission established by a wealthy church, and apparently in need. Rent was
paid; food and clothes provided; doctors sent when necessary. The return
for this, as tacitly agreed, was the presence of the children, as rapidly
as they were old enough, in the Sunday-school, and the father and mother at
the Sunday evening service, the only service this mission maintained.

The timidity of the first contact disappeared early. The wants soon outgrew
the needs of the family. The mission people failed to respond to the wants,
and watched more closely what it cost the church to meet the needs after
the first years of acquaintance. This was not to be borne. The family went
in a body to another mission of the same church ten blocks away. They made
not the slightest effort to deceive, for they did not change their address.
Here were nine persons to add to the roll of the mission, and they were
added. The family was enthusiastically welcomed. No impudent or intrusive
questions were asked. Shoes, coats, rent money in whole or part was
generously given. At the end of two years discoveries were made that led
the mission workers to question what was done with the supplies provided.
The family would not stand this. They went bodily to a church less than a
mile away, still living at the old address. The family was again taken up
without question. That the father could not work was accepted and
generosity was increased. The other missions contrasted unfavorably in
generous impulses; the girl urged her former classmates to join the last
mission. The church meanwhile was walking by faith in its treatment of the
poor; aiming to live up to the conception of its days; strengthening the
influence of its prayers with gifts of potatoes; certainly a great advance
on prayers and no potatoes.

At about this time a young girl was met in a Sunday-school class very
attractive, always well and prettily dressed. She had been in the
Sunday-school all her life, and had joined the church with her mother, a
gentle, quiet woman, who leaned on her daughter for guidance. The daughter
was a tower of strength. By accident it was learned that the girl was a
wage-earner, working with her mother in a large suit house in New York;
that they kept house, doing the housework, even the washing and ironing,
before and after their day's work. Added to this they made all their own
clothes, which must have involved a vast amount of labor, as they both
dressed well.

The position of this mother and daughter is fairly typical of a large army
of women workers, and explains, in part, at least, why two women of so much
character should have accepted charity for so many years and why they could
not change their economic relation. The work they did was to a degree a
trade. Each was a special "hand" on a certain part of women's suits. They
were paid by the piece. When they had work, they made good wages; but the
seasons were short. The beginning of every season found them in debt. By
the time the debt was paid work had grown slack or stopped. It was simply
impossible to get beyond this, try as they would. When the girl broke down,
she explained it by saying, "I worked all night to finish my dress. If I
could buy the material in the slack season I could make our things then. We
never have the money, and they have to be made just when work is hardest at
the store." She was but nineteen. The girl was pretty, ambitious, entirely
above the men of her own station in refinement, and yet quite as far
beneath the brothers of the girls she met in her Sunday-school class. She
lived in mental terror lest they should attempt to call on her. It was
pitiful to see the struggle she made to conceal the fact that she was poor.
The other girls knew she worked, knew the church helped the family, but
were very tactful in assisting her in keeping her secret.

When the mother came to the notice of the officers of the church she was a
widow with three young children, one a baby. She could support her family
if the rent was paid. The church officers were glad to do this. They did
not support a mission and had very little outlet for the church's
generosity, except the mission societies--Home and Foreign--to which they
were devoted as a church.

For thirteen years the church had been faithful to its promise and paid the
rent. Nobody questioned the mother as to how her children were getting on,
or what was being done to make them self-supporting. The younger were two
boys. When they were large enough to play on the street, the mother put
them in an institution and paid a small sum for them. The girl went to work
with the mother as soon as she could. The elder boy came home at fourteen
and became a wage-earner. He was troublesome, most difficult to manage, was
out of work more time than he was employed, and yet he would not when
unemployed even keep the fire, that the house might be comfortable when his
mother and sister came home. They always left the house in order when they
went to work, but found it littered when they returned. The boy had no
sense of moral responsibility for his own support. His temper was wholly
untrained. At the time the family history was connected, the youngest boy
was to come home, and naturally his return was dreaded. The mother and
daughter met the problem unaided as to advice or suggestion. Apparently the
church would continue to pay the rent without question, though there were
three, and would soon be four, wage-earners in the family.

When these facts were discovered, the church committee was asked to advance
money enough to pay for the girl's lessons at a school where dress-cutting
was taught, and to notify the widow that her rent would no longer be paid.

The girl accepted the offer at once. She proved a great success, and to-day
is earning a salary as a designer equal to that of many college professors.
She educated her younger brother in a profession, and has entirely
forgotten the days when the church helped her. Her social affiliations are
in another part of the city, and she bows, or forgets to bow, when she
meets those who may remember it, as they would, to her credit. Had the
church retained its claim on her through its financial aid, she would not
be where she is to-day. Her development came when the church made another
future possible to her by refusing to pauperize the family.

We all know the families who have more turkeys at Christmas than members.
We still have churches and sewing schools in the same neighborhood, giving
their Christmas entertainments at different hours and at different dates,
to suit the convenience of those who attend both and profit thereby. We
even have different entertainments given for different branches of work in
the same church at different hours. We succeeded in impressing one boy with
the idea that what he received at the various organizations maintained for
his profit was "Christmas loot," and that he was clever at getting more
than his share. We have become accustomed to conducting an exchange after
our Christmas entertainments, because in giving we have, unfortunately,
duplicated the gifts received elsewhere. Mollie finds herself with two
dolls and no bed, and Katie has two beds and no doll, and Alice has two
sets of dishes and no table. Like fate has attended the gifts to the boys.
We, as a result, enact the rôle of patient, sweet generosity and
redistribute gifts.

We know that comparisons are made as to which church, sewing school or club
is the one to give the major portion of the coming year's attendance. But
all this will disappear as rapidly as sectarianism and competition between
churches and in philanthropic effort disappear. Competition created it;
coöperation will dispel it, because all will come to a higher conception of
the relations of efforts toward improvement. Then the "profit" of church
and Sunday-school attendance will not be measured by the "things"
distributed.

Nothing marks the growth of public intelligence more than the federations,
and the systems that have grown out of the knowledge of the injury done the
poor by misplaced generosity. Sometimes the children of the poor seem
uncanny in the knowledge they possess of how to use the public and private
charities.

A girl of seventeen gave astonishing evidence of this in a family crisis.
She was a member of a working-girls' club; quiet, studious, reserved. She
was always one of the poorest dressed girls in the club. Her devotion to
those classes which she joined and attended regularly attracted the
attention and admiration of the club directors. Discovering that her dress
was in part responsible for the treatment accorded her by two or three
members, it was decided to make it possible for her to make a better
appearance. She had shown qualities which, if allowed free play, would make
her an influential member of the club.

It was discovered that she attended a near-by mission of a Congregational
church. Consultation with the mission workers brought the unwelcome
knowledge that the mother was immoral, hopelessly immoral, but that her
children loved her dearly and that she was devoted to them. The paying of
rent seemed to support a shelter that ought not to exist, but no one had
the courage to attempt to separate the mother and children. Even this girl
of seventeen had no idea of her mother's wrong-doing. It was a case that
needed the wisdom of Solomon to solve. Just before Christmas the mother
fell ill. The passion of grief that convulsed that group of children was
convincing testimony of the mother's tenderness and devotion. Her eyes
followed them constantly. When able to speak, she would whisper: "What will
become of them? There is no one to care for them." She was removed to a
hospital, with the knowledge that the rent had been paid for a month and
that the children would be looked after. She died two days later. When the
house was visited that morning, the elder girl was out "getting things,"
the children said. When she came in, she was told that provision had been
made to send them all together to a home, where they would not be separated
for a month. The girl sprang to her feet, grabbed the fifteen-months-old
baby from the floor, and swept the others in a circle about her. She
panted, rather than said: "You shall not take the baby away! I will not let
them go! Nobody shall take them. They are mine. I can take care of them.
You just pay the rent. I can do everything else. See?" She put the baby
down, and thrusting her hands into her pockets, brought out tickets to the
Diet Kitchen, the Charities Department for coal and groceries. She had
been to two missionaries connected with different churches she knew, and
secured orders on a near-by grocery for dry groceries. There was not a
public or private charity that gave out-door assistance that that girl of
seventeen did not know just what must be done to get their help. The amount
of knowledge of this kind that she possessed was astounding.

Besides, there was not an institution in the city where children were taken
for longer or shorter periods of time that she did not know. In many of
them she had been herself. In others she had visited the other children of
the family when they were inmates. She found out the defects of each
one--the kind of matron, of food, of punishments that governed in each, and
made out a case against each one. White, with blazing eyes, she looked
capable of doing just what she said she would do, take care of the family
of five little children. They were grouped about her, clinging to her, all
crying in the face of the awful calamity that was about to befall
them--separation. It was agreed that they should stay where they were for
the balance of the month. The question of the future beyond that would be
discussed later. The girl quieted down.

The mother had been insured in one of the insurance companies on the weekly
payment plan. The girl had secured an undertaker who would go to the
hospital and take the mother's body to his establishment for the funeral to
be held the next morning.

"We will have our own minister," she said, with dignity, "not the mission."
Her visitors were again astounded. The mission had looked after the family
for years. The girl had for several years been connected with the
Sunday-school. The address of the minister was secured. The girl explained:
"My mother was confirmed in that church, in her own country, her own home.
She had a letter to the church when she came to this country with my father
after they were married. At first my father earned good money, but he got
sick and they did not get along, and my mother stopped going there, except
to communion; and for three years now she ain't had the clothes to go even
then. She had us confirmed there as soon as we were old enough, and we went
there to communion when we had the clothes. The minister is going to come
to the funeral, and I am going to send word to some of mother's friends
from the old country who go there to church. I could not have them come
here; mother would feel awful." Glancing about the barren, dirty rooms with
a look of scorn, she continued: "We could not let our church friends know
how poor we are. Mother tried hard enough. She was away from home days at a
time looking for work. She took boarders. She did everything she could. You
know I've worked when I could get it." Her voice broke for the first time.
"She took boarders and gave them the beds; we all slept on the floor. She
married the last boarder, the baby's father. She told me to stay here until
he came home, this month--he's a sailor--and to do just what he says. He
was always kind to me and gave me things. You've paid the rent, and you
need not do anything more. I'll stay right here and keep the children till
the baby's father comes home; you need not trouble any more."

She was quiet a moment, but evidently felt the doubt and the decision in
her visitors' minds. Rising, she said fiercely: "I'll not; I'll never let
these children be taken from me!"

The problem was too much for her visitors. They decided to leave the
question of the immediate future to the family's own minister, who
certainly had not carried these lambs in his arms, nor watched very closely
over their erring mother.

The family was separated. Nothing else was possible. The baby's father
repudiated any responsibility for any of the children, and disappeared. The
girl drooped for a time after the separation; but she finally secured a
good home, making a capable, devoted servant until she married. She owes
allegiance only to her own church, saying: "The minister talked so
beautifully at mother's funeral." Her whole conception of the mission
church is that it is an institution for helping the poor.

She never doubted her mother, whose picture, enlarged from a small
photograph, is the chief ornament in her parlor, her most cherished
possession, outside of her husband and children.

In spite of the outburst of passionate devotion at the time of her mother's
funeral, this woman, now with a comfortable home of her own, knows nothing
of the children for whose protection she attained, for a time at least,
sublime heroism. In a few months her indifference was as astonishing as her
devotion had been. Her own life and its concerns filled her mental horizon
to their entire exclusion. For her own home and children she has the
passionate love that she gave to her mother and the crowd of half-brothers
and sisters. She is ambitious for her children, and has two in the High
School. This woman is a fair illustration of the evolution that is making
this nation great.

The churches, when first the social disintegration began, had neither the
intelligence born of experience nor the money to place the mission work in
charge of people of high intellectual and social development. There were no
training schools for Christian workers, and to that degree the Church was
hampered in inaugurating its work among the poor. The selection was too
often a question of pleasing some wealthy member of the church, by giving
positions to protégés who had absolutely no qualification for the work but
their necessities. This basis of selection--not yet wholly eliminated--put
the work of the missions under the control of men and women who lacked
social training. Neither by nature nor grace were they fitted for the work
they attempted to do.

Their attitude of mind was too often that of patron, which, as any one of
experience knows, is one of the most demoralizing influences active among
the poor.

There comes to mind now a downtown church, the mission of one of the
leading uptown churches. It was Thanksgiving evening. For weeks placards
had been on the front of the building announcing an entertainment for that
evening, to which all the people were invited. On the platform were a
number of young men and women, sons and daughters of the uptown church
members, the entertainers for the evening.

The church was packed with the people of the region, self-respecting poor.
The mission, fortunately for them, was limited in money, so its
possibility for pauperizing was limited to just that degree. The mission
pastor, before the entertainment began, opened with a prayer, in which he
thanked God for the warm-hearted, generous people who were giving
themselves and their money for the uplifting of the poor and degraded. God
was asked to implant a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of those
assembled to enjoy this pure entertainment provided for their benefit. When
he opened his eyes he continued his theme in two variations for twenty
minutes longer, in what he called an address. It was this attitude of mind
on the part of many of the workers that drove out of the church the mass of
the poor; that began the breach that has widened, until in September, 1901,
we stand appalled as we realize all that has entered into the making of
that awful national tragedy.

The standards of cleanliness and beauty maintained in the mission churches
have been far from what they should be. As the visitor enters to-day one of
the first buildings erected on the East Side as a mission church, he is
repelled by the general air of neglect; the dirt on walls and ceiling, made
still more repellent by water stains from leaks; the ugliness of the whole
interior, as well as the entire lack of adaptation to the work of to-day,
which one of the most devoted of pastors, a friend to every man, woman and
child in the region, is establishing. There is not one thing in that
building that is not ugly and cheap. The very platform on which the pastor
preaches lacks furniture, that would impart an air of cheer or
impressiveness. Instead of the building being an unconscious influence in
the neighborhood for beauty, tidiness, cleanliness, it is a part of the
general result of the greed and poverty which has made one of the most
sordid, character-destroying neighborhoods in New York.

One Sunday afternoon, as the writer was passing this building, the children
began pouring out of it. The Sunday-school had just closed. They yelled,
fought, ran. Suddenly they discovered a half-drunken wretch of a woman
reeling down the street. The elder boys pulled her clothes, dragged off her
hat, tormented her, yelling and laughing at the foul language they called
forth. It was appalling, yet not surprising. The building remains as first
erected. No attempt has been made to adapt it to the needs of the region.
It was built for church and Sunday-school services, and the work which the
devoted, consecrated pastor has put into it to meet the needs of the time
is done under conditions that make the highest success impossible. There is
not a room in the neighborhood for boys' clubs, for reading-room, for
pleasure, where boy nature can have the fullest expression under wise
direction. For adults the saloon and the streets are the only resources
outside of their overcrowded homes. The pastor knows that to succeed in
changing the character of that neighborhood it is necessary to hold the
people through seven days of the week. He knows that this can be done if he
can provide for the people pleasures, opportunities that express their
social development. He knows that people express themselves in their
pleasures, and that, whether they will or not, that expression is
controlled by environment. If the trustees will not, cannot be made to see
this, let the pastor of the mission be what he will, his work will be
limited by the men who, in the very nature of their relations to the
mission, cannot see the truth.

The pastor of the mission had a long vacation given him. The man sent to
take his place wore soiled linen, would sit for an hour at a time tipped on
the back legs of his chair. He would refer to the people in their presence
as "they" and "these people." One of the young men who belonged to a club
where some attention had been paid to manners and dress said one night:
"Say, wouldn't you think that feller would wear clean collars, and stand
up when talking to a lady? I don't care if he is a minister, he ain't
much."

The people who were responsible for putting that man in that position were
generous, held the best social positions, filled responsible positions in
the commercial world. Not one of them would have chosen that man to
represent them in the business world, because of his carelessness in dress
and lack of manners. But they did not hesitate to send him to represent the
Lord Jesus Christ to the poor; not a demoralized and degraded people, but a
self-respecting body of Americans, born and trained, so far as they had
been trained, to believe in the equality of man under the flag and before
God. Is it any wonder that the more intelligent of the people resented the
placing of this man over them, and remained away from the church of which
he had charge? His person, his mind or his manners were not contradictory.

One evening, going through the audience room of this building on an errand
to the rear room, the visitor heard one of the women missionaries say to a
little girl who had evidently been troublesome and inattentive: "If you
don't sit still, Mollie, I'll come there and shake you until you'll be glad
to sit still." The woman was training a group of little girls to take part
in a Christmas entertainment. They were each to recite a verse and turn a
gold paper-covered letter as they recited, so that when the last one had
spoken her verse the sentence "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth
and good-will to men" would be revealed. The woman, in temper, language,
conception of her duty to these children, differed in nowise from their
ignorant, tired, worried mothers at home, who probably made no claim as a
teacher of morals and religion. What ideals of womanhood did this woman
represent?

A minister came to attend the funeral of a little baby in a surplice so
soiled and rumpled that a friend of the mother, who was a good laundress,
said afterward: "I wish he'd given me that yesterday morning. I would have
washed and ironed it." "He wouldn't have worn it if it had been a rich
man's child," was the little mother's response. "Well, he acted like his
surplice, rumpled," said the first speaker. And the writer was struck with
the perfect characterization of the man's manner.

Fortunately, there are men who see the divine in every human being; who
know that sorrow, grief, shame and suffering bear as cruelly, as bitterly
on the poor as the rich, and in their ministration know no difference
between them.

The writer was present at a funeral in an East Side home in a tenement
having sixteen families. A wife and mother had died. The family occupied
the floor through. Nothing was known to the writer of the creed of the
family, though she had known them for years. The minister came in a
spotless surplice, most carefully put on. His manner of greeting the family
and friends was so expressive of fraternal sympathy that one felt it a
privilege to witness it. He stood in that East Side home the herald of
hope. Since the blow had fallen he had visited it every day. On the day of
the funeral he had so filled the hearts in that home with the spirit of
resignation that the lesson that it taught left an impress on all who were
present. Not once in the earnest address did he use the word "death." It
was "release," and he made all feel that gratitude for relief from cruel
suffering was the occasion for the assembling of the friends together. He
gave out the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee." There was no musical
instrument in the home. All present were wage-earners. The writer trembled
for the result. The minister's beautiful tenor voice started the hymn,
assisted at once by boys' voices in the different rooms. He had brought the
choir of his church to assist, and stationed them through the rooms by
direction before they came to the house. The people all sang. When the
services were over, this minister remained with the family, a courtesy
which to the poor is so unusual that the memory of it is still one of the
events of life on the East Side.

[Illustration: A SPIRITUAL BULWARK.]

This represents this clergyman's attitude toward his people; and all who
are their friends are his people. Is it any wonder that they never go
beyond his care? He has baptized the children of three generations. Easter
service is the home-coming of these families. They come from as far as they
have money to pay their fare. The gray stone church is pretty. It has
stained-glass windows, a baptistry, and maintains a surpliced choir. It is
delightful to see the positive influence of these accessories on the
people. Other churches to which they have access lack them, and the
contrast deepens the love for the old church. It needs renovating, a parish
house, a corps of modern workers. But these can well be dispensed with
while that towering gray head leads the people. For the noble, unselfish
life of the man stands before them always, the embodiment of eternal love
and sympathy, interpreting both under conditions that would at times seem
to justify doubt.

There is another phase of the Church's attitude toward its work in the
poorer districts that lies at the root of the rejection of the Church by
the majority of the thinking, self-respecting poor, and that is the
assembling of the poor together as an exhibit of its work; the making of
reports of which the poor are the statistics. The defence that this is
necessary to stimulate the interest of the rich, and by that means secure
the money for the continuing of the work in the poorer sections of the
city, is but the evidence of the lack of spiritual life in the Church; the
absence of the very foundation of Christianity and brotherly love.

The consciousness that watching the hungry eating Christmas and
Thanksgiving dinners is hardly what Christ meant when he gave forth the
decree, "Feed my lambs," is becoming a conviction; but it is due to the
positive teaching of workers outside of the Church, who felt the
irreparable loss of self-respect that must follow from such an exhibition.
To gather the beneficiaries of their generosity together and take stock, as
it were, of the investments, the dividends of which are to be realized
wholly in the future life, has antagonized the self-respecting poor. They
refuse to assemble as objects of interest, even in a church.

So dense is the spiritual perception of even some very good people, so
materialistic is the plane on which work for the poor is conducted in some
churches, that the results have been cruel--unconscious on the part of the
offenders--but nevertheless cruel.

A group of very young girls worked in a factory on the borders of a section
in which lived people of wealth and intelligence. The factory made no
provision for a lunch room. When the weather permitted, the girls ate their
lunches on the curbs and on the stoops of houses in the immediate
neighborhood. This was demoralizing to the girls and distressing to several
women in the neighborhood. Not far away was a large house hired and
controlled by a church long noted for its broadness and its generosity. The
basement of the house was not used, except twice a week in the evening by a
working-girls' club. The use of this basement from half-past eleven till
one was asked for and granted.

The plan was to have a woman arrange the tables, make tea, and wash the
dishes used by the girls each day. The girls were to pay five cents a week
for the use of the room and the tea. They were to bring their own lunches.
The plan met with their warmest approval, and the lunch room was opened,
with three young girls from a society in the church to help. The girls
poured their own tea. For three days everything promised well. The girls
accepted the one condition imposed, that they would go quietly to and from
the factory at the noon hour, to avoid comments from the residents about.
The fourth day some of the righteous, energetic souls belonging to the
church thought they would see the result of their generous gift of the use
of the room for which they had no other use.

Nine of them, personally conducted by one of the assistant ministers,
crowded the two doorways to see these girls eat the lunch they brought from
their own homes and drink the tea for which they were paying all they had
been asked to pay. One small girl, with her hair still hanging in braids
down her back, tried in every way to break off pieces of her luncheon
without uncovering it. Finding she could not, she gave up, and tied the
string about the paper again, sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. It
was this child's first week out of school. Her father was now in the
hospital for the third month. There were five children, of which this girl
was the eldest. All the money saved by this skillful mechanic and his
thrifty wife was gone, and this girl had to go to work. One can imagine
faintly her feelings as she looked at the crowded doorways and knew that
the whispered comments included her. The less refined, though more
independent, girls sat with flaming cheeks, and holding papers over their
lunches, ate them and drank the tea.

The first week represented the life of that lunch club. The girls went back
to the curb and the sidewalk and stoops as lunch rooms. Here, at least, no
personally conducted parties came to view them. If any one looked at them
and they objected, they were on terms of equality, and at once notified the
offenders of their offence. To the credit of the people who used that
street, few stopped to look at the girls.

It would have surprised those very good people to have known the opinion
those crude, uneducated girls had of them. A day or two later, standing
with a group of girls who had not been present, with a half dozen of the
men who worked in the factory, as spectators, the leader of the girls
described the scene, caricaturing the "church gang," as she called them,
and some of the girls who had been distressed by their presence. The group
shrieked with laughter; yet there was an unpleasant note in it. "---- them!
That's what they always do. Stay away from them after this," was the
comment and advice of one of the men. "You bet!" responded the girl actor,
as she curveted down toward the factory in response to the whistle calling
them back to their work.

If the years as they passed did not clearly reveal that the Church that
holds the poor is one over which men of the highest intellectual and social
training are placed in charge, the mistakes of the present would be
extenuated. Such churches do exist. Men of strong, vivid spiritual
perception have erected and maintained bulwarks of righteousness in
neighborhoods where the environment, the civic order is degrading. They
have done this by conducting all the departments of their work with the
view of developing the gifts of the people to whom they are ministering.
The choir is the boys and girls trained by the best teachers they can
secure. The Sunday-school teachers are the working boys, girls, men and
women who are instructed by the pastor for their Sunday-school work. The
officers of the church are the men of the neighborhood. The people are
married and buried from the church; the children are baptized in it. The
preaching is teaching that salvation is of time, as well as of eternity.
The sins of the people are made visible. The pulpit holds the mirror up to
nature. It is a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading them
into the promised land, made so by their own civic honesty, their own
personal character.

These men do not have to make reports; to bow before a board of trustees.
They do not have to suppress or expand to meet the ideas of theorists. A
few men give them the financial support they need, and let them, like men,
stand before God and their own souls responsible for what they do for the
people whom, when Christ was on earth, He chose for His friends--the poor.

[Illustration: WHERE THE PEOPLE SHARE.]




CHAPTER V.

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS.


Twenty-five or thirty years ago in New York the question of the wisdom, if
not the necessity, of moving the downtown churches uptown began to agitate
the pastors and church leaders. The congregations, or part of the
congregations, who had contributed most liberally to the support of the
Church were beginning to move uptown, crowded out by business and the
incoming foreign element which settles near the shipping and factory
districts. The new-comers did not support the churches, especially the
Protestant, not even by attendance. It was natural that the churches should
follow their congregations. Some sold their buildings to the sects that
came with the foreigners; some made a brave effort to maintain a church for
the people; some became missions, distributing stations to the poor people
who had settled in the now overcrowded houses that formerly were the homes
of one family. The change in the downtown communities was so rapid that no
one could understand how to deal with the new element. The Church had to
spend years in learning how to adapt its methods to the needs of the new
peoples who settled by hundreds where scores had been. Not only was this
feature bewildering in itself, but the people spoke an unknown tongue, were
foreign in thought and sentiment; were social, rather than religious.

The saloon far outstripped the Church in the ease with which it adapted
itself to the new element. The Church encountered not merely the new people
degraded, but an environment that in itself was a tremendous obstacle to
decent living. The Church shortly discovered an entirely unlooked-for evil,
insidious, demoralizing--the political corruption of voters. The Church to
the smallest degree only in recent times has come into the larger
conception of its function as a teacher of good citizenship, a link between
the voter and the ballot-box, preaching the duty of the exercise of the
franchise governed by conscience. It took the moral degradation of the city
to rouse the churches to activity as redemptive civic powers.

The corrupting influence of corrupt politicians was evidenced in the
conditions that developed in sections of the city left to their control. As
the years went on and the men of conscience and intelligence became more
absorbed in business and profession, more given to money-making, because of
increasing social demands, the city became, in the minds not only of these
politicians, but of the voters they trained, a mine to be worked for
personal gain. Ignorance contributed to the rapid degeneracy of the people
in the old home sections of New York.

The saloon became very early in the development of the tenement-house
sections the only social center. The result was an increasing of the drink
habit and the establishment of political headquarters in saloons. Often the
politician in embryo was the saloon-keeper, often the bartender. The social
side of life thirty years ago was not a subject for church consideration
and study.

The Church ministering to a people having standards of social life
established by the churches, the outgrowth of its teachings and creeds, can
ignore questions that the Church ministering, or trying to minister, to a
people poverty-stricken, overworked, living lives barren of any pleasures
but those of the senses, in an environment that of itself would be a
deteriorating influence, must meet and answer.

The Church downtown discovered it must work seven days in the week; that
its office, its function was secular, as well as religious; that its Sunday
work was but one-seventh of its work, and that the six-sevenths must
minister to that one. The Church must go out into the highways and hedges,
to use a misplaced metaphor for a city street, and win the people. This
evolution of conception marks a spiritual Renaissance.

Industrial training was introduced by the churches, the natural result of
discovering the ignorance of the women of household arts. Far more valuable
than the skill imparted to the children gathered in these classes was the
contact with the earnest, refined women and young girls who were the
teachers in the now established mission churches. The revelation was
mutual. If the tenement-house child gained new ideas of cleanliness, of
order, of neatness, of dexterity, of manners, the uptown teacher also
gained knowledge of which she stood quite as much in need. When a panting,
shining-faced child came to sewing school half to three-quarters of an hour
late because she scrubbed the halls and stairs of a three-story tenement
house to help her mother, the housekeeper, who paid the whole or part of
the rent for the family by this service, the uptown woman of leisure gained
a new view of life and its responsibilities. When the mission worker who
was giving time and strength and knowledge as the expression of her faith
and conscience, found children scarcely more than babies working far beyond
their strength in the service of their families, the uptown worker gained a
new conception of sacrifice, of poverty, and, what was far more important,
a new conception of the causes of ignorance. The uptown woman of leisure
saw that often children were sacrificed to greed; forced to become
wage-earners by parents anxious to increase their bank accounts.

As time went on, they saw that, whether poverty or greed was responsible
for the sacrifice of the children, the protection of the children was the
safeguard of the State, of the nation. There came from this, by the process
of evolution, the factory laws for the protection of women and children;
the compulsory school law. In these latter days this last has been made
ridiculous by the failure of the municipality to provide school
accommodations for the children of school age, especially the children
under fourteen living in the overcrowded sections.

The church workers in the tenement-house sections were able to find means
to meet some of the evils of oppression, of poverty, of ignorance. They had
concrete facts to present to a semi-indifferent public; but when the social
side of the people in the tenements became a problem, especially the social
life of the young people, the remedies did not present themselves. The
legislation proposed and executed was restrictive, not recreative. It was
not the function of the State or the Church to provide social
opportunities for uneducated, overworked young people.

The older girls in the Sunday-school classes presented not only all the
problems of the little children, but the larger one of social opportunity.
The homes were too small, too overcrowded to give social opportunity to the
family. Besides, there was that saddest of all features too often found in
the home of the working girls--the absence of all sense of personal
responsibility on the part of parents for the social life of the children,
girls and boys. The children in all but the exceptional home were free to
choose friends, free to go and come as suited them. Home was a place in
which to eat and to sleep; a place of shelter; a place often entered only
when there was no place to go out of working hours.

The problem of providing social opportunity faced the downtown churches. In
the very nature of things the social opportunities the Church could offer
must be limited; must be of the nature that appealed to the more quiet, the
phlegmatic, the element that presented the least factors in the social
problem. The parish house, the church house did not exist. All the
amusements offered the people must be in a building consecrated to
religious life and service. It was a serious question how far the Church
was justified in introducing the purely social.

It was natural that the young women brought into touch with the young
working girls in the Sunday-school should apprehend the restrictions that
life in a tenement imposed on a working girl. Everything in this life
tended to make her gregarious. She was born into a house probably
overcrowded before she came into it; she slept, ate, lived with crowds. The
street, her only playground, was teeming with children like herself. When
she worked, she rubbed elbows with the workers on each side of her. She
went and came from her work one of a group. The working girl lived free,
and pleasure she would have.

The girl of wealth and leisure working in the mission Sunday-school, by her
own youth and natural inclinations, could appreciate this side of the
working-girl's nature, and with the same clearness of vision see the
limitations imposed on the Church in trying to meet the social needs of the
people for whom it primarily existed.

Visiting the homes of their girl pupils, the Sunday-school teachers
discovered the limitations of the homes. Between the homes as they existed
and the churches as they must exist, the social center for the working girl
must be created that would meet her social needs. The streets were the
working-girl's reception-room, drawing-room, living-room, where she
received her most intimate friends; where mutual entertainment was provided
in ways that made no drafts on purse or inventiveness. Halls were open for
dancing, where her presence was so desirable that she was admitted free or
at half the price demanded of her brother. Excursion grounds with dancing
platforms were then popular within the city limits. The immorality of the
present temptations that make perilous the way of the working girl in 1901
were almost wholly unknown twenty years ago.

The work the earnest-hearted women interested in the working-girl's life
faced was how to enlarge her social opportunities in connection with
educational opportunities that would meet her peculiar need, and which she
would accept. New methods of intercourse, new places of meeting must be
found.

Every organization that has developed in these latter days for bettering
the condition of the people has its root in the doctrines of the churches;
workers and money come from the people who receive their impulse from the
teachings of Christ. These organizations are as truly as the churches the
expression of brotherly love; the positive declaration of the
consciousness that no man liveth to himself.

To Miss Grace H. Dodge the women of this country owe a great debt. She,
from the standpoint of a Church worker, devoted and faithful, saw that
outside of the Church, but governed by all that the Church believed and
taught, the natural outcome of both, a social center for working girls must
be created. This center must be independent of any other organization. It
must be at once a natural expression of the working-girls' standards. It
must be flexible, as well as progressive, during every period of evolution
in each group; it must keep in touch with the least progressive mentally,
the most progressive socially.

A place must be created where recreation was possible; where classes to
meet the educational wants of every member could be established. Above all,
a place must be made where wealth and poverty, education and ignorance,
could meet on the common level of mutual helpfulness.

A conference with a group of working girls but strengthened Miss Dodge's
conviction that this social center would not only give to the working girls
the social opportunity that New York lacked, but it would give to the woman
of wealth and leisure the opportunity to meet the people whom she must know
if she would use her time, her money, her education wisely in the interest
of social development.

With Miss Dodge as president, the first working-girls' club was organized.
It marked a new epoch. It made the opportunity that had never existed--the
working of rich and poor to secure the same end. This country reaps the
benefit of this first step in altruism based on the highest Christian and
democratic doctrines.

The working-girls' club has from that time been a positive factor in the
social development of working women, not only of New York, but the whole
country. It has enabled the students of economics and sociology to get at
facts that have revolutionized theories. The working-girls' club taught the
working girls themselves the causes of their economic disadvantages.

Hardly was the first club formed when the practical results inseparable
from this new combination of interests and sympathies met the approval of
all interested in the problem of the working-girl's life. Everywhere clubs
began to form. The idea has been adapted and adopted by the churches.
Working-girls' clubs of all degrees of development, under many kinds of
constitutions, managed and mismanaged, are to be found north, east, south
and west.

The question of support was one of primary importance. Miss Dodge had
studied this side of the question thoroughly, and from the first it was
decided that dues must be paid by the members. As new clubs were formed,
this question of dues was met differently. Usually the wages of the
majority of each group of girls forming a club decided the amount of dues,
and naturally the dues varied in the clubs. In some clubs the dues were
five cents per month; in others, five cents per week; in some the dues were
twenty-five cents per month. Even this amount could not meet the expenses
of a club conducted to elevate the standards of the members by the
environment, as well as the social and educational opportunities provided.
The financial managements of the clubs differ greatly, and always have.
Strenuous effort has always been made in some clubs to make them
self-supporting; they seem almost to live for that purpose. Entertainments,
sub-letting of rooms, fairs, every means is resorted to accomplish this
end. Naturally the members of such clubs develop a good deal of business
ability; sometimes at the expense of qualities that in a woman count for
more in life.

The highest form of club life developed among working girls represents, to
the working girl, her college. She realizes, as does the rich girl or boy
who enters college, that what she pays does not, cannot, pay for what she
receives. This conception of the financial side of the working-girls' club
management controls in the clubs, with few exceptions, to-day.

The club must give every educational and social opportunity that will meet
the needs of the members. As the college meets the demands of its students
in the electives it offers, so must the working-girls' club. As the college
student must meet the financial obligations he assumes when he enters
college, so must the member of the working-girls' club keep her financial
engagement. As the college makes it possible for the worthy student to
complete his course of study after financial disaster makes it impossible
for him to meet his financial obligations, so must the working girl who has
contributed to the life of the club, or who has shown her desire to profit
by what it offers, be kept in good and regular standing when financial
disaster makes personal independence impossible. In short, the
working-girls' clubs that are conducted on the broader lines, and with the
most comprehensive knowledge of our social conditions, are in management
and purpose a college for working girls. The idea of self-support may have
been strained for a time, but it was an error in the right direction, and
led to the truer conception which regulates the management of the best
clubs to-day.

It was curious, is curious, the attitude of mind with which some girls
approach the club idea. There comes to mind now the effort to form a second
club in the rooms of a club of several years' standing. The need of the
second club had grown out of the refusal of the girls who earned from five
to nine dollars a week in various employments to associate with a number of
girls working in a tobacco factory, and earning on an average three dollars
and a half per week. The last-named were rough in speech and manner, and
far from stylish in dress--the standard of the elder club. The introduction
of the girls from the tobacco factory to the club was the result of the
sentiment of one of the members of the club, a bright, wealthy, healthy
girl, a great favorite with the other club girls. She had wanted for two
years to work with girls less prosperous than the girls in the club of
which she was a member.

A large tobacco factory not far from where the club met attracted her
attention, and she invited the girls working there to join the club.
Twenty-two came to the club-room. Mentally they were in a state of nature.
This group of girls represented just what intermittent school attendance,
uninterrupted freedom of the streets, from the time they could walk alone
to the present time, might be expected to produce. They were strangers even
to the degree of social opportunities the members of the club represented.

Their standards of manners and morals were what the neighborhood in which
they grew up made them. Their homes were in one of the worse sections of
the city, in which an institution wholly charitable pretending to do
educational work had been, not what was intended, an elevating influence,
but the reverse for the children of this section. When these girls went to
school they alternated between this and the public school, so that it was
impossible to compel their attendance at the public school through officers
of the law. The neighborhood in which most of these girls had been born and
grew up was a section as remote from the life of the city of which it was a
part as though it were in another country. Through it ran a thoroughfare in
which were stores that could supply every want. It was another political
unit where one man ruled, whose approval meant work in the city department,
in the street railroads, on the docks; even in the factories, of which
there were many in the section. The streets were in a shocking condition,
unpaved and dirty, and no one objected because no one cared.

The tenement houses were formerly the residences of the prosperous. These
houses were badly kept, old and unsanitary. Liquor saloons were on two, and
sometimes three, corners of the streets through the whole section.
Beer-sodden women were so common a sight that the women who did not bear
evidence of over-indulgence were remarkable. These girls had never known
personal ownership, even in a bureau drawer; not so much as the right to
one peg on which to hang their clothes to the exclusion of others. It is
doubtful if they ever owned a change of under-clothing that another child
of the family could not claim.

Naturally, the girls took possession of the club-rooms. Quite as naturally
the older members resented it. It was seen at once that an attempt to have
the new girls elected as club members would be equivalent to ejection. They
were tolerated, but not tolerable to the older members. At the end of four
weeks the two sets of girls lined up on opposite sides of the room, utterly
refusing to intermingle. This passive attitude changed to the aggressive,
which approached open hostilities so closely as to make the danger line.
When this point was reached it was decided to form the new girls into a
club by themselves. The rooms were not used every evening by the club for
which they were hired. Sub-letting would give more money for educational
purposes.

As this attempt at club-making is one of the worst, and for that reason one
of the failures, it would be well to describe it:

The directors hired rooms each fall, in September or October, until the
first of May following. As one recalls this club, it presents one of the
best evidences of the barrenness of the working-girl's life in New York.
Every fall for years a few notes written to the leading girls, and a group
of twenty or twenty-five working girls, would gather and start anew on this
club life. This method of conducting a club made it seem useless to spend
money in making the rooms attractive. They were usually on the second floor
of a house occupied by two or more families; the halls dark and bare; the
rooms rarely clean as to walls and ceiling, barren of ornament. The floors
were bare, and not infrequently stood sadly in need of scrubbing. They were
lighted by smoking kerosene lamps, which but added to their
unattractiveness. Frequently the caretaker started the fires a few minutes
before the time for the girls to appear. Yet the girls came and remained
winter after winter.

The new girls accepted the same conditions, and assembled one stormy night
to form their own club, with several additions to their number of their
own selection, among the rest their forewoman. The leaders of the club
realized that she might be an element of strength; she might be the source
of infinite trouble. She had been young many years before, a fact of which
she was wholly unconscious. She was dressed in what at the time was called
laquer--a warm shade of tan--silk, trimmed with bead trimming; a lace
collar, and a most remarkable hat completed the kind of a costume that
always is discouraging to a true club worker.

Naturally the forewoman was the spokeswoman for the girls. It was useless
to attempt to draw out a personal opinion from the girls, all of whom
worked under her. Knowing the wages of the girls, it had been decided that
five cents per month should be the dues, leaving the girls a margin from
which they might pay for classes. The indignation of the forewoman at the
suggestion of five cents a month dues would have been amusing if it had not
revealed her utter blindness to the poverty of the girls. Being determined
that no girl there should be kept out of her club by poverty, the
suggestion was made to the forewoman that as her wages equalled the wages
of any three of the girls, and as she chose to join a club where the others
received such small wages, she might pay the same dues, and each month
make a donation to the club to meet its current expenses. She could see the
dues alone would not do that.

The forewoman, after a few minutes, consented to accept the condition. The
worried look left the faces of the young girls, and they beamed on the
gracious lady who consented to waive her own dignity in their behalf.
Perhaps it is well to state here that the forewoman never made any
donation, and that she would have been dropped from the club for
non-payment of dues but for the knowledge that such a step would mean that
she would make the girls leave the club. She was by them considered a good
forewoman, kind, and ready to help a girl if a girl tried to earn more
money. She had to be consulted in everything attempted for the girls.
Fortunately she was so afraid of revealing her ignorance, which was dense
outside of her work, that she always supported the workers directing the
club affairs.

This woman was taken ill. The director of the club found that she boarded
with a family consisting of a father, mother and three children, living in
three rooms. She was found lying on a mattress on the floor, destitute of
sheets or pillow-cases. She did not own a nightdress. The tan silk dress
with the bead trimming hung on a nail over her head, surmounted by the
gorgeous hat. She was very ill and penniless; yet the poor about her were
devoted to her and considered her most remarkable.

[Illustration: A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]

Several years ago both of the clubs referred to consolidated with another
club whose directors kept the club-rooms open throughout the entire year.
After the consolidation a house of three stories in a good neighborhood was
rented, and devoted entirely to the use of the club. Only those who have
watched the development of these girls could appreciate what the club has
done for them. Cooking and sewing classes, lectures on city government,
talks on books, on art and nature; the weekly contact with women of culture
and refinement, who carry the conviction that club work is a pleasure, that
service for others is a delight, has borne fruit, and the girls in turn
give their service to those whom they may help--oftenest the members of
their own club.

The evolution of character through the contact with others is, after all,
the highest attainment of the working-girls' club movement. It brought the
working girl into entirely new relations. Constantly she was forced to see
the folly of placing emphasis on the wrong thing.

A nice-looking girl, very well dressed, joined a working-girls' club. Her
face indicated character and intelligence. She was elected to office, but
never re-elected, for she was ignorant--too ignorant to perform the
smallest duties in club life. She came every week on the social evening,
always the best-dressed girl in the club. As she grew more familiar she
grew snobbish. She lived in a very poor neighborhood, where her clothes
must have been even more out of place than in the club-room. She held a
position which required special manual skill, and in her own field was an
expert. Unfortunately, she obtained an influence over certain girls and
headed a clique. Every week she became a greater problem. One night a
rather rough, but frank and intelligent, girl was introduced as a candidate
for membership by a member who worked in the same shop. The girl who was
the club problem had been away two weeks working overtime, and did not come
to the club until after the new girl had been elected a member. The
amazement of both as they faced each other as members of the same club
aroused questions as to their social and family background. All that
appeared was that they were neighbors.

[Illustration: OPPOSITE A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]

The first reception to mothers was given by the club about this time. When
the night of the reception came, the "problem" came in a new dress having a
jetted front. Her appearance amazed the members, and made it clear that the
"problem" must be solved or eliminated. The new member appeared with two
mothers, both plainly dressed, one not warmly enough. This one was timid,
reluctant to enter the room, and but for the urging of the new member and
her mother she would have gone home. She refused to remove the shabby shawl
she wore, and adjusted again and again the straw hat, on which a narrow
black ribbon was pinned. The "problem" stood in front of the mantel,
surrounded by an admiring crowd. The two mothers and the new member walked
into the room. It was a dramatic moment. The new member, with an expression
of deep scorn, said: "You forgot to ask your mother; we brought her." The
"problem" grew white and then crimson. The girls fell back and gazed
spellbound at the shabby, uncomfortable, timid mother. The scales fell from
their eyes. The "problem," so far as influence in the club was concerned,
ceased to be a problem. A girl who would sacrifice her mother's comfort,
who used her simply to keep house for her, could not hold any position in a
working-girls' club.

The story crept out. The "problem" felt the loss of prestige. Clothes had
satisfied her ambition; she had through them enjoyed a sense of power. The
experience of that evening doubtless opened her eyes to things in life to
which she had been blind. Again and again she was seen during that evening
reception to look at her mother searchingly. She seemed to see her in a new
light, and by its reflection, herself. The mother was afraid of her and
showed it. The daughter, it was evident, discovered that fear for the first
time and sought to overcome it. It was determined to hold fast to the
"problem" and help her solve herself. Great progress was made. Her dress no
longer astonished; her mother came to the club receptions comfortably and
suitably dressed. Out of consideration for her mother, she remained in the
wretched tenement, because the mother and the house had grown old together;
but the rooms were now furnished. The new member had supplanted the
"problem" as an influence in the club. The "problem" became engaged, and
the club lost her. The man was a store-keeper in a town not far from New
York. The girl married and forgot to take her mother to her new home. The
mother remained a club legacy for two years, when she died. The daughter
sent the money to bury her, but did not come to the funeral. Her husband is
successful, and she is a social power in the Church to-day; a devoted
mother and wife, strange as it may seem.

The centering of experience, the revelations of character inevitable in a
working-girls' club, are the largest factors in educating the members. As
the years go on, emphasis is laid on the right things. Harmony results,
because a sense of proportion is gained. Girls who have had the benefit of
a public school education that enables them to fill positions that prove
they have had such opportunities, often in the beginning of their club life
will manifest a feeling of superiority over the girl who works with her
hands. But eventually some experience will reveal to them the pettiness of
their estimate, and a readjustment of values is made.

A girl, long a member of a club, had won the love and admiration of all
connected with it. She earned wages far above the average of working girls,
a fact well understood in the club. She was always an officer, and a
dependable power in the management of the club. The girls were to give a
play. No amount of urging won this girl's consent to take part in the play.
A girl who had taken a part dropped out, and some one must take her place
at once. Now the girls refused to take "no" for an answer, and the favorite
went down in the basement with the others who were in the play. Each had
her book to read her part, as a help to the girl pressed into the service.
When it came her turn to read there was absolute silence. The girl sat
white and trembling, trying to speak. At last jerkingly the words came: "I
cannot read. I never learned beyond the small words. I had to take care of
the children when mother went to work, while my father was sick. I went to
work as soon as I could and helped keep them in school. They all read and
write. I cannot. Now you know why I did not say 'yes.'"

There was silence for the space of several minutes. No one could speak.
Then the baby of the club, the one everybody petted, whose very naughtiness
was attractive, ran around the table, threw her arms around the speaker's
neck, saying: "You're worth all the rest of us put together. We'll never
give the old play. We all hate it." This followed by a half dozen kisses
placed wherever she could touch the crimson, tear-stained face of the girl
through her hands.

Education had been put in its right place in the field of accomplishment.
When the entertainment was given, the girl who could not read was made
manager, because no one could do so well.

For more than twenty years the working-girls' club has been a power in
thousands of lives. The process of character building through accretion and
elimination has been going on. Through its influence the club method has
been applied under every guise, but perhaps it is just to say that it has
been at its best where its formation and management has been purely
democratic and absolutely non-sectarian. In the nature of things, in
affiliation with any organization, it must take its place as the fraction
of a unit, and be in its management considered always as only a part of a
whole to whose success it owes an allegiance.

Now the working-girls' clubs have their State organizations, even their
national organization. The Pan-American Exposition brought working girls to
the number of five hundred together in a convention to consider the
questions vital to club life and management. Can any one doubt the effect
of this journey into the world, the first that hundreds of these girls had
ever made? Of the readjustment of ideas, the revelation of beauty, the new
birth of values, because of the vision of a larger world lying beyond
factory, workshop, office, school-room? For it has come to this: that the
professional as well as the manual worker finds inspiration in the
working-girls' club.

As the years went on, a new problem grew out of the working-girls' club
movement. The members married, but they were not willing to lose the social
affiliations of girlhood; they were unwilling often, reluctant always, to
sever club relationship. On the other hand, the members felt that a married
woman should remain home in the evening with her husband. Often the
married member would come carrying her baby, for the club represented the
mother's social relations. The next step was natural, the forming of a club
of the married members to meet in the afternoon. The first working-girls'
club, of which Miss Dodge is still president, formed, as the Domestic
Circle, a club of married members.

The A. O. V. Matrons at the Cottage Settlement are the married members of
the A. O. V. Club, formed when the matrons were little girls. Other
working-girls' clubs have contributed to the membership of other married
women's clubs.

Naturally, the subjects discussed in these clubs are those bearing on
housekeeping and the training of children. The training received in the
clubs enables the married members to conduct their business with dignity
and dispatch. They are trained to club life, and have learned how to avoid
unnecessary friction.

Some clubs plan a winter's work ahead. These programmes show a broadening
of interest and sympathy, not only in the technical affairs, the home and
the care of children, but the larger affairs outside of the home that makes
its environment. It must be that the girls who have been club members make
more companionable wives than the women who have not had their
opportunities. The children are always present at the meetings of the
mothers. Various devices and methods are employed to entertain and interest
them. What the mothers' club means to the little ones was unconsciously
revealed very recently in the statement of a young mother: "---- is always
home from school five minutes earlier club day. She runs home to get
ready."

The working-girls' club has in the process of its evolution become a family
institution.




CHAPTER VI.

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT.


The Residents of the College Settlement learned in the first year of their
work in Rivington Street to sympathize deeply with the married women, the
mothers in the region.

Mothers, after nights spent in overcrowded, unventilated bedrooms caring
for nursing babies, began getting breakfast at five o'clock in the morning.
Husband and children of every age must be wakened for work or for school,
often irritable because of the unhygienic conditions under which they had
slept. Friction and quarreling is to be expected when there is one
wash-basin for the use of the whole family; one sink for the morning bath
of the family when there is running water in the rooms. Breakfast of bread
and strong coffee, perhaps with the family waiting turns because only three
sides of the table are available, as there is not room to pull the table
out from the wall to make the four sides useful. Floor space costs in the
tenements.

Friction, adjustment and hurry do not tend to develop a serene spirit in
the house-mother whose office is purely executive. How much less in the
house-mother whose hands must do all the work of the home? When the working
and school-going members of the family are cared for and have gone their
several ways, there is left to the house-mother almost always a baby and
another child too young to go to school, to care for and amuse. In addition
there is the round of work--washing, ironing, mending, making, cooking--all
to be done under limitations of space and conveniences; often with the
handicap of ignorance. Whatever the advantage of self-made money-makers,
the self-made housekeeper, taught only by experience, not only pays dearly
for her education, but is more than apt to be satisfied with her
self-taught accomplishments, thus increasing her disadvantages in the use
of time and money.

Even with a small family the house-mother with the usual round of work
would not have many moments of leisure. When it is a large family, with all
the disadvantages of the tenement-house home, the days are not long enough
for the work to be done. It crowds the hours, and accumulates until often
discouragement and nervous exhaustion follow. If the mother have a
conscience, she wars with herself, battling against conditions that she
feels but cannot understand nor overcome.

Three hundred and sixty-five days in the year the Residents found these
mothers who needed the change of pleasure that made no demands on purses.
Even good wages did not permit these families money to buy pleasure and
recreation. Mothers, good mothers, grew old before their time. They often
grew careless of their personal appearance, and by this risked their
influence in their homes, separation from their children, alert and often
overconscious on the subject of dress.

Then there were semi-apathetic mothers because of discouragement; the
mothers who drifted, never having an aim in life or an ideal; then the
mothers who long ago ceased to make any struggle against environment, every
year becoming more inert; the mothers, now grand-mothers, who were
remembered only in time of need by their children. The Residents saw the
need of the mothers of all types. How could the apathetic be awakened, the
discouraged stimulated, the overworked rested and cheered? Hundreds,
thousands of mothers were losing the best things of life because for them
the activities that increase interest and sympathies could not be brought
into their lives. Their environment made social opportunities in their own
homes impossible. Husband and children, through contact with life in shop,
factory, store, street and school, enlarged their interest every day; while
the wife and mother came to a mental standstill, often losing interest in
everything outside of her home; often failing through lack of knowledge and
discouragement in making that a place of rest and refreshing.

The Settlement was the bright spot in the lives of hundreds of young people
and children. The mothers who could be stimulated must be reached and held
in a center where pleasure would be the controlling element and education
an incident. There were mothers who had lost all desire for social life. It
was found difficult to arouse in them even a momentary interest in the
thought of seeing new things, new people. The grind of life had blunted all
social instincts. There were women who on the social side of their natures
were dead; could not be roused by any thought outside of the routine of
their lives. Interest enough to do for their families what required the
least effort of mind and body was all that was left. The hope in these
homes was the children. To them the Settlement must give inspiration and
ideals; the home would never give either.

In the second year of the College Settlement's activity a persistent effort
was made to reach the mothers, especially the mothers of the more alert and
active boys and girls affiliated with the Settlement, in clubs and classes.
These mothers came, but never the same group twice. The smallest obstacle
would prevent the very women who most needed social opportunity from
accepting it. When they needed help, they came to the Settlement; they were
most cordial hostesses when the Residents called; delighted in the
opportunities the Settlement made for their children; but the habit of
staying indoors, out of touch with any life but that of the tenement-house
halls, was a fixed habit most difficult to dislodge.

Some of the workers who were interested in this question were led to
conclude that it was only the exceptional woman in the tenements who
retained the capacity to plan her work to secure a specified hour or two of
freedom in a whole week. The life imposed on the tenement-house mother does
not make time an element in adjustment of her day, still less of her week.
The breakfast over, the day unfolds itself, and the mother is free to meet
it. Only in the exceptional home is life considered in its relation to the
time of day. One thing was clear: that in the homes of the better paid
wage-earners the mothers did not get their share of life's brightness. A
College Settlement worker, enthusiastically supported by the Head Resident,
determined to secure it for some of them. Failures would not discourage the
worker, for every effort would be considered an experiment until success
was attained. The club idea had proved successful for the children and
young people; it had for mothers of larger opportunities elsewhere in the
social world; it might for these mothers. At least, it could be tried.

Twenty-two calls were made on the mothers of children and young people then
coming to the Settlement, asking them to the Settlement for a certain
afternoon in the following week. All accepted the invitation; ten came. The
women who responded were told of the plan to start a club to meet once a
week. There would be music, a short talk and refreshments. The plan seemed
to please all who were present, and it was agreed to meet the following
week.

At once a problem was faced. Some of the mothers came without hats, wearing
not overclean aprons, and apparently looking upon the movement as some new
phase of almsgiving. Others were alert, well-dressed, comprehended that
they must contribute their share in money and interest or the effort would
die out. The children of these two types of mothers could not be
distinguished by outward signs. American public school life and the very
atmosphere of the street life had already begun its leveling-up process in
dress and independence. How could these two types be brought into a common
social relation, when they held nothing in common but the experience of
living under the roof with many?

It was decided to let the law of natural selection operate freely. The club
was an experiment, and it must not start with preconceived plans; its life
must be one of evolution. The next week only the alert women appeared.

The club was formed, a president elected, and dues placed at ten cents per
week. This the projectors tried to reduce, but the members insisted that
they could and would pay it. That it would cost almost that to pay for the
cake and coffee, and they could help somebody if there was any money over.
The club was limited to ten members, and filled at the second meeting. It
enlarged to fifteen the next year. In its fifth year it numbered
forty-five.

The subject of the first formal talk, informally conducted, as its subject
demanded, was: "How long after the hair is out of curling-papers is it
becoming?" This, of course, gave the opportunity of laying stress on a
wife's personal appearance; the necessity of being as attractive as
possible to one's own husband and children. That was, is, the keynote of
the club, its creed, its religion to-day, when mothers and married
daughters are members. The time of meeting was two o'clock, that the
mothers might be at home in time to get supper for their husbands and
children. Babies came with their mothers, and children in school came to
the Settlement instead of going home after school. Many of the little girls
belonged to a sewing club that met the same afternoon at the Settlement.
The club, named in the first month of its existence "The Woman's Home
Improvement Club," celebrated its eleventh anniversary at the College
Settlement, October, 1901.

[Illustration: THE WOMAN'S HOME IMPROVEMENT CLUB AT THE SETTLEMENT.]

As the first anniversary approached, the members suggested an evening
meeting, that their husbands might come. The proposition received the most
enthusiastic support from the Settlement Residents. Husbands, all the
children who worked, and a friend of each member--if married, her
husband--were included in the invitation. Dancing and music occupied the
evening. What a revelation! Fathers dancing with their own daughters for
the first time; mothers with their sons; daughters and sons spellbound at
the sight of their mothers and fathers dancing together! It was evident
that the club was a feature of the family life. The husbands and grown
children knew what had been talked about, what had been done at the
meetings. One husband, watching his wife dancing with their son, said: "I
don't know how you've done it, but this club has made my wife young again;
she's as young as when we were married." This wife and mother of nine
children at the club one afternoon wished there were a hundred such clubs.
"'Tis a mistake to just stay shut up." She waited a minute, and then said:
"I had not bought a hat for eighteen years until I joined this club; I did
not need it; I never went anywhere; the children did all the errands."

This was the very type of mother the projectors of the club hoped to reach.
The first evening reception proved such a success that it was decided to
hold one evening reception each month for the family and friends of the
members. Thanksgiving and Christmas receptions belonged to the children.
Apples, nuts, gingerbread, cake and peanut brittle, with coffee, are the
refreshments for Thanksgiving evening; new milk for the children. The games
are Blind Man's Buff, Going to Jerusalem, with the Virginia Reel as an
alternate, because the little children can dance it. "America" and "Home,
Sweet Home," sung in chorus, close the evening. More than one family is now
represented by three generations on these evenings. At the first evening
reception a father and son of twenty years stood side by side. When the
father began singing, the son stopped and looked at him in amazement. This
changed to one of enjoyment, as he said between the verses: "Dad, I didn't
know you could sing." "I haven't in twenty years, I guess," was the reply.
Both father and son had good voices. The son had made the discovery that he
had a voice, at the Settlement, in his club. He edged closer to his father;
there was a new bond of sympathy. The boy's Christmas present from his
father, mother, brother and sisters was a mandolin, the first time a
combination present had been given. It was quite natural that the next year
a table for the new parlor should be the gift of the children to the
parents.

An incident occurring in the third year after the club was organized is,
perhaps, as perfect an illustration of the lack of social opportunity in a
tenement-house home as can be given.

One of the most faithful and interested of the members was a woman about
fifty-seven when she joined the club. She was slow to respond to the club
idea; to the right of personal judgment outside her own affairs. Her
responses to a question that involved an expression of opinion was usually:
"It don't make no difference to me." After a time she grasped the idea that
she was one of many, but had equal rights with all the members in deciding
questions relating to the club, and she began assuming responsibilities;
expressing her views. In the third year she came to the president, and
with every evidence of wishing to disclose a secret, said: "Next week
Thursday is my birthday. I never had a birthday party in my life. I've
always wanted one, but never had the room, and I never had the dishes. Do
you believe I could have a birthday party here next week?"

"Yes, I'm sure you could."

"I can't do much; and I only have two friends besides the club that I want
to have. I want to pay for all the coffee and cake, that I may feel that
it's my party. Just my two daughters, and my two friends, and my
grandchildren--four, that's all. I've been saving the money for a year."

One night early in the next week the bell rang. A working man stood at the
door. He handed a five-dollar bill to one of the Residents, saying: "My
wife, she's goin' to have a party here Thursday. I want you to give her a
good time. She's been a good wife to me. Don't tell her; just spend it for
her;" and the man disappeared in the darkness.

It was decided to order a birthday cake and light sixty candles.

The day came. Every member brought a remembrance. Radiantly, tearfully
happy stood the hostess. She loved music, and a sweet, gracious woman whose
music wins the most cultured sang song after song. Time for refreshments
came. In the front parlor a club of little girls were sewing. It seemed a
pity that they should not see the cake and the candles lighted. They were
told that the doors would open, a lady was having her first birthday party,
and it would be kind to wish her many returns of the day.

The cake was brought in with the sixty candles burning, and placed before
the hostess, a gift from her husband. "I didn't know," the wife kept
whispering under her breath as she stood beside it at the table. The doors
rolled slowly backward, and twenty children breathed "Ah!" Then in a piping
chorus, "Wish you many returns of the day." A moment the woman stood still.
Then turning a shining face on all about, she moved toward the children,
the tears falling fast. Raising her hands and face heavenward, she said
solemnly: "O God, what have I done that you should be so good to me?" The
volume of her life was opened.

A cake with a few shining candles, a few friends with their little
offerings, and the wishes of a few children, and to one woman God had
reached out of His high heaven and selected her as the special object of
His care and love.

Not all of the five dollars had been used. The hostess was asked what she
wanted done with it. She was radiant. "I'll give a party to those children
what said that sweet thing to me." Suggestions of other uses were cast
aside. The children must have a party--ice cream and cake. When she found
out that cake and ice cream would cost more than the money in hand, she
announced: "I will wait to give it. In a month I save money to put to it."
She made all her own arrangements, and proved a hostess of resource and
tact.

She received her guests most cordially. Perhaps the most wildly exciting
hours of her life were when, after much coaxing, she joined in the games of
Drop the Handkerchief, Blind Man's Buff and Going to Jerusalem, the last
game sending her crimson and panting into a chair in the corner, with the
children crowding about her shrieking with laughter.

Time for refreshments found her anxious and watchful. The members of the
club had fallen into the spirit of the day, and nobody was grown up.

An incident occurred during the serving of refreshments which showed the
educational value of a story written for pleasure, not education; at the
same time a very deep compliment to the book. "The Birds' Christmas Carol"
was a favorite book in the club. It had been read twenty-seven times in
one tenement house by eleven members of one family, and four times by one
member, who said she would own a copy whenever she could spare the money.
She wanted to read it when she felt cross. As there were not chairs enough
for all at the party, some of the children sat on the floor. The little
daughter of the mother who wanted to own "The Birds' Christmas Carol" sat
on the floor in front of her mother. She did something while eating her ice
cream of which her mother disapproved. With a quick glance at one of the
workers who stood near her, the mother said: "If I had been as wise as Mrs.
Ruggles, she would not have done that." Mrs. Ruggles was a thoroughly
appreciated character. Her struggles to equip her children were perfectly
understood, as were her ambitions for them. The hostess of the day was as
disappointed as the youngest child when the lighting of the gas told that
the day was done. She was the last to leave, saying: "I never was so happy
in my life. It has been beautiful. All my life I wanted a birthday party.
Now I have two;" and she turned a radiant face to say "Good-night" as she
went down the stoop into the gathering darkness.

The weeks went by. The club had tickets to go to Glen Island, through the
generosity of Mr. Starin. In August another member had a birthday, and
confided the secret to the giver of the birthday party, saying, "I wanted
to give a birthday party as you did. I never had one in my life; but I
could not get money enough. I tried hard since yours." In September the
elder member confided this conversation to the president of the club,
saying, "Now we will give her a surprise. She shall have the party. I have
talked with every member. But we will not each buy her a present; we put
our money together and buy her a dress." The president doubted the wisdom
of this, and suggested a dozen other gifts. "No, we give a dress. She does
not have as nice a dress as other members. It is not right that one member
of a club should not dress as good as every other member. Why not she take
that dress? She know we love her, and we give her this because we want her
to look as good as anybody; she is so pretty."

The dress was bought and given by the oldest member of the club, who in her
speech announced her views on dress, and the need of one member looking as
well-dressed as any other member; that if one could not have things, then
the others must share with her; that was being a true member. The dress was
received in the spirit in which it was given. When it was found that it
could not be made by the receiver in time for the next reception because
she had so much work, it was cut and made by five members of the club. The
wisdom of putting money together to buy one present was learned, and from
that time on the custom has been to make joint gifts when gifts are given.
This is done in families, greatly reducing the valueless things that were
formerly bought when only a little money, a few cents perhaps, could be
spent by each one.

About the time this club was established the kindergarten had been added to
the vocabulary of philanthropists. The kindergarten existed as part of the
secular work of many of the churches, and individuals here and there
supported kindergartens. It was generally conceded that the mothers of the
children did not appreciate the work the kindergarten was doing for their
children; that too often they felt that permitting them to go was
conferring a favor on the kindergartners or those who had asked for their
children's attendance. The Residents and workers at the Settlement did not
believe that this was a healthy attitude of mind. They believed it was
responsible for the irregular attendance of many of the children, as well
as the lack of punctuality. There was no kindergarten in connection with
the Settlement, nor room for one, but one was greatly needed. Much as it
was needed, it must not come until the mothers wanted it and were willing
to work for it.

Miss Brooks was then at the head of the Kindergarten Training School in
connection with the Teachers' College. She was consulted. The result was
that the members of the Woman's Home Improvement Club became on several
afternoons members of a kindergarten. They used the materials, took part in
the games directed by Miss Brooks and the members of her training class.
The names of the material used, the things made, the stories, the games,
the songs, became a part of the vocabulary of the mothers. Some of the
material was bought and taken home to entertain the children. The natural
result followed. "If only we could have a kindergarten for our children!"

[Illustration: THE KINDERGARTEN OF THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]

It was suggested that if seventy children could be found near enough to the
DeWitt Memorial, where a room for the kindergarten was available, that
perhaps the kindergarten would be established there. Over one hundred calls
were made by the nine members of this club, which resulted in securing the
promised attendance of seventy children. The Lowell Kindergarten was then
opened at the DeWitt Memorial by the New York Kindergarten Association as a
result of this effort. The difficulties the mothers put in the way of good
work in the kindergarten was explained to the members of the club, who
agreed to call on mothers whose children did not come to the kindergarten
in time, or were irregular in attendance. It was most interesting to watch
the growth of public sentiment in favor of regular and punctual attendance,
not only at the kindergarten, but at school. If the kindergarten child
reported Johnny Jones, who was a neighbor's child, as absent, the elder
brother or visitor after school was sent to find out if Johnny Jones were
ill. It became a badge of good motherhood to have the child in the
kindergarten on time. Before this, through talks by doctors and nurses, the
relation between health and cleanliness had been discovered. Cleanliness
was imposed on their own children, and exacted from other mothers of
kindergarten children.

The influx of Hebrews, toward whom the members of this club had a deep race
prejudice, drove them out of this neighborhood. Before seven years had
passed but four of the members were residents of this district. But a
change of residence did not change their belief in the value of the
kindergarten. Wherever they have gone they have sought it for their young
children, who have found always intelligent and sympathetic listeners in
their mothers to all the events and incidents in their kindergarten world.
One mother learned accompaniments to songs, and the children sing
kindergarten songs at the club entertainments, even those in the grammar
grade join.

As time went on, the conviction grew stronger that the real pressure of
poverty or lack of money, among the self-respecting independent poor came
not on the physical nature but the mental and emotional. The pressure was
incessant. There never was a time when there was money to buy pleasure.
Months, years went by without life offering the opportunity for enlarging
the mental horizon of thousands of capable, receptive, devoted mothers. To
the children the Church entertainments were opportunities; clubs and sewing
schools were doing their share, but the mothers were only onlookers. There
was no active part for them except in the world of work. The churches
provided religious opportunity and social opportunity, regulated by the
Church environment. Hundreds were not attracted, and often one sympathized
with their rejection of this kind of social opportunity, tinged too
frequently with patronage, and of necessity, narrow in its scope.

Early in the history of this club the love of music was so evident that it
was decided that the members should hear "The Messiah." That would be the
Christmas treat that year. The cost of the tickets was far beyond the means
of the members, but friends made the purchase of the tickets for every
member possible.

Two days before the giving of the Oratorio, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith came
to the Settlement and gave a recital. Handel's picture was displayed, the
story of his life told. The themes of the Oratorio were explained, and then
sung by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. A new world was opened. The night for the
Oratorio came. The journey so far uptown was into a land wholly unknown.
Carnegie Hall was a revelation of another world. Its size and beauty, the
audience, all a revelation. From the opening bar to the close of the
Oratorio the club members listened entranced. It was the enlarging of the
world revealed by Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith. As the chorus "Unto us a child
is born, Unto us a son is given," closed, every one of the mothers sat with
shining face but moist eyes. A new message had come. One little mother,
whose battle so bravely fought won reverence for her, leaned down and
whispered: "I'm so glad I have sons; I'm so glad. I think I know now what
it means." The echo came back for weeks, yes, for years. One member, in
trying to tell her husband, said: "I saw while I was talking how
impossible it was to make him understand, so I said: 'John, you'll never
know till you get to Heaven what I heard and saw to-night.'"

The result justified the effort. It was seen that it was wise to have the
best of everything for the members of the club in the way of entertainment.
Musicians have given most generously of their time and talent. Speakers who
are sought for in the highest intellectual world have been secured for the
evening receptions, when the husbands and working children and friends were
present. The result has been to develop just at the level where it was most
needed standards that protect the home from enjoyments tinged with
vulgarity, and even crudeness is now detected and accepted grudgingly or
with apology.

The hard times of 1893-94 gave a new opportunity to test the value of such
a club. The stories of suffering, of helplessness, made it seem wise to
control money to be expended through the club members. They were brought
into contact with families who never before were reduced to the point of
asking charity. About four hundred dollars was expended under the direction
of the members of this club. Work tickets were bought and given to men and
women whose life history they knew, men and women they had known for years.
When cases of strangers were brought to their notice, they investigated
and advised as to the best way to give help. To prevent eviction, payment
of rent was the first effort of the club members.

The education they received was invaluable. For the first time it was
possible for them to help others in a large way; they saw that the number
they could help depended on the wisdom shown in expending the money on
which they could call. Their indignation knew no bounds when they found
they had been deceived, as they were in half a dozen cases of families
brought to their attention. One case caused a complete revolution in their
theory that if people suffered it was because the world was hard with them,
had not given them a chance. One woman, a widow, was brought to the
attention of the club early in the winter. She had one child, and they had
not had a fire in weeks; had no outside garments to go on the street,
because they had pawned them for food. They had eaten nothing but bread and
coffee for seven weeks. Now they were to be evicted from the one room they
had occupied, because no rent had been paid for two months. The club had
decided that paying back rents only benefited landlords; that, having so
little money and so many demands, rent in advance was all they could pay.
They voted to move the woman, then to find work for her. It was decided
that she must learn to operate a sewing machine. The Charities'
Organization Society made that possible. After two weeks' trial, it was
found that the woman could not learn. Then the society gave her a chance to
learn laundry work, and for two weeks more money to support the woman and
child--cared for by one of the members in turn while the mother was away
from home--was given. Again the report came that the woman would not learn.
Then the members decided to teach her. This individual teaching, with what
the society had done, seemed to make an impression. It was decided that the
woman could iron.

[Illustration: MAKING A SELECTION.]

When this stage was reached the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of the
members passed on her way from work a laundry. At the door a sign hung,
"Hands Wanted." The little girl went in and asked about wages. The man at
the desk laughed at her. "It made me mad. I just looked at him," drawing
herself up as she told the story. "I said: 'I do not want the work for
myself, but for a woman _our_ club is trying to help; she's poor, and a
widow.' Then the man looked at me, and told me to tell the woman to come. I
told him we'd all been teaching her." The use of the plural possessive
thrilled the heart of the workers; the club was a family possession. The
woman was told to go to work the next morning. As the little girl was
returning from work the next night, she stopped at the laundry to ask about
the woman; to walk home with her, if she were going home. She was told the
woman had not appeared. Before going to her own home, the child went to see
why the woman had not gone to work. The woman had overslept. For three
weeks that little girl got up earlier and went after that woman, delivering
her at the laundry as though she were a package. It was decided that the
sacrifice was too much; if the woman was not willing to keep the work by
her own effort, she was not worth helping. An alarm clock was bought and
given her, and she was taught how to wind it. She lost the place before the
end of the first week because she could not get there on time.

The club found out that there were people it was impossible to help, do
what the world would.

This little girl during this period of struggle with this woman was met one
Sunday afternoon. She carried a doll to which she was devoted, and for
which she made a cloak that Sunday morning. "Isn't she pretty?" she said,
holding up the doll. "I often wish I could see her when I'm working." What
a combination of child and woman! As the years have passed, this little
girl has paid the penalty of shop life. She has grown hard, aggressive,
self-assertive, untruthful. If only her environment could have been
different, she would have made a magnificent woman. The world of struggle
has been too much for her; it has strangled the spirit of helpfulness.

The lessons of that winter have been well learned. Every mother in the club
wants a trade for her child; something learned that has in it wage-earning
promise because the worker has special knowledge.

The time came when it was possible to turn the attention of these mothers
to the administration of those city departments that make the environment
of their homes. The streets naturally claimed first attention. They learned
to take the numbers of the street sweepers who failed to do their work; to
take the numbers of the carts improperly and carelessly filled, and report
them at the club meeting. Leaking roofs, broken stairways, unlighted halls,
contagious diseases were reported, and conditions in the stores and
factories where their daughters worked.

The criminality of concealing dangers that threatened many to protect one
was comprehended. The club motto became "A helping hand to all."

The club members felt that it was possible for them to give special help
to little children. In a thousand ways the women in the house of many
families find the opportunity to help children; often through the children
they helped the mothers. Sometimes through personal influence they secured
the regular attendance of children at school; sometimes it meant calling in
the aid of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to secure
the rights of children, to protect them from evils in their own homes.

One day a wealthy woman who had lost a little girl told the president of
this club this incident, which, she said, changed the course of her life.
For months she had shut out the world. God and man were cruel. Nothing
interested her; life was empty. She sat by the window in her home one
November afternoon. It was drizzling and blowing. A little girl without hat
or coat stood shivering and crying against the church railing opposite. As
she watched the child her mind reverted to the clothes she handled so
constantly, because they had been worn by her child. She sent for the
little stranger, and when she went on the street again she was warm, tidy
and comfortable. Then came the thought, "God never meant a woman should be
a mother just to one little girl. She must be a mother to every child who
needs her." From that day this woman has given her life and service to
children. The story was told to the club.

One of the members, after the meeting had adjourned and while the
refreshments were being served, was overheard saying: "Why, certainly it
would change everything if every woman would live in that way. Think how
many times you could save children, how many times you could help them, if
you were their mother just for the time they needed you--often only a few
minutes."

Months after a member reported: "Well, I don't know what you'll all think
when I tell you what I did last week. I've been bothered because such a
nice-looking little girl came every morning about school time and went
upstairs in the house opposite. She carried a lunch-box and books. I would
see her with a baby at the window, and see her in the morning run on
errands. At three o'clock she went away in the direction from which she
came. That child is playing 'hookey.' That woman is to blame, I said to
myself. One morning last week I saw the child go to the corner grocery. I
went after her.

[Illustration: AT THE SETTLEMENT--A STORMY DAY.]

"'Where you live, little girl?' I asked. She grew red and hung her head,
and tried to get out of the store. I stand in front of her. 'No, you must
not be afraid of me. I have little girls. I love all little girls. Where is
your mother? Child, you deceive her. She thinks you are in school, and you
play "hookey."' The child ran out of the store, crying. I went right
upstairs after her. I knock. The woman would not open the door. I knock
louder, then she come. When she see me, she tried to close the door. I put
my foot in the door and keep it open. I say, 'You are doing wrong. I belong
to a club where every member is to be a mother to every child what needs
her. If that little girl come here one more day, I follow her home and tell
her mother. It be bad for you if any child come here so young as that
child. It is against the law for such little children to work. That little
girl is playing "hookey," and you make her. You do that any more, and I
make a complaint against you to the Children's Society. Good-morning;' and
I took out my foot, bowed and went downstairs. When I got home, that little
girl is running down the street where she comes every morning. I never see
her now, and that woman do her own errands and mind her own baby."

The members applauded. A child out of school is a child to be looked after.
It has been concluded by the members of this club that they can do their
best missionary work in the houses where they live, by keeping their rooms
and their children in the best possible condition; that every home, every
child so cared for, is the best possible sermon preached, the purpose of
which is to make life better.

The League for Political Education, the Woman's Auxiliary of the Civil
Service Reform Association, the City History Club have sent speakers to the
club, some conducting courses of lectures. Even the Assembly District work
undertaken by the League for Political Education was attempted by the club,
but did not succeed. It could hardly be expected that it would.

During all those years the members had been trained to self-government. All
questions are decided by the majority. There came a time when the majority
voted to leave the College Settlement. It was deplored by the projectors,
but accepted. After a few weeks a small house was taken a couple of blocks
from the East River. The house had a large yard, and by expending a small
amount of money was made very attractive. The attempt was made to have the
members of the club do neighborhood work. A very short trial proved this
was impracticable. Two things were revealed: That the mother of a
working-man's family has neither strength nor time to give away; that the
very conditions of tenement-house neighborhoods require trained, impersonal
workers. The women who gave time to the club work in the neighborhood
neglected their homes and families. The few members who tried to do
neighborhood work in the house used every advantage the club-house offered,
which they controlled, to curry favor, to revenge slights, real or fancied,
to themselves or their children. The best mothers made no attempt to do any
neighborhood work. The house became a social center, an educational center.
But it was not a success until paid workers were put in charge of different
departments, with a very few volunteer workers; and the most faithful of
these were women of wealth.

It was hoped that uptown organizations would establish branches of their
work in this house. Some did attempt it, but it failed for the reason that
so many efforts to better the conditions of the tenement-house dwellers
fail. Women lacking the right qualities volunteered, or the work was
important when other things did not interfere. Clubs were established to
which the organizers came when it was convenient. Again and again children
connected with clubs waited until darkness came, but no "dear lady" whom
they trusted appeared. In another case, numbers were the standard of
success, and scores were crowded in where units should have been. All this
forced the employment of paid workers, and centered the responsibility on
one until the burden was too great to be borne.

Added to this, the principle of self-government had given a one-sided
development to some of the members, and friction would develop when large
questions were to be decided, an aggressive minority combating a
conservative and less demonstrative majority.

The reform campaign of 1897 began. The picture of the candidate of the
Citizens' Union hung in the window. The Citizens' Union used the house and
yard for its lectures. When the campaign was ended, the friction developed
to the unbearable point, and it seemed, in view of the dissension, best to
disband the club. The club voted to keep together and return to the College
Settlement, if the privilege could be secured. This was generously given,
and the club unanimously voted to return, pledging the members to give all
the aid possible to the Settlement work. Since 1898 the club has again been
a part of the work at the Settlement.

For six years this club has had a country club-house--a large house, easy
of access, in New Jersey, admirably adapted to the purposes of the club.
The house is surrounded by lawns and an apple orchard. Two kitchens make it
possible for two families to occupy the house at the same time. The rent
is paid and the house cleaned each spring. All other expenses, including
car fares, are paid by the members of the club using the house. The plan is
for each member to use half the house for two weeks. By a system of
evolution and working of the law of natural selection, four families use
the house at the same time. Mrs. A. invites Mrs. B. for the two weeks that
she is entitled to half of the house; and Mrs. B., arranging her two weeks
to follow Mrs. A., reciprocates by asking Mrs. A. to remain for her two
weeks. Co-operative housekeeping has developed, as has the sharing in the
care of the children. The barn, equipped for the children, has been an
endless delight. Two members have in the past been debarred the use of the
house. One because of the character of the men invited by the husband; one
because of the language used to her children. Both were asked to resign
from the club, or to make it inconvenient to use the club-house. One
resigned. The average number of people using this club-house has been
between four and five hundred each season. Sick children of neighbors have
been taken up by the members and cared for during their whole vacation. On
Sundays, friends, relatives and city neighbors are guests.

There has never been any supervision over the house, except that of the
members. Each member leaves the part of the house she has used clean for
the one coming after her. For several years the club paid part of two
months' rent, raised through entertainments. One year the members made a
donation of thirty dollars. Broken dishes are replaced, and the cost of
repairing furniture broken is paid by the member using the furniture at the
time. The large parlor is a club-room, and used by every member who goes up
for a day. A closet is provided with dishes to be used when picnics are
given by the members. The theory is that the grounds--four acres--can be
used by the members at any time, but the families in the house must not be
interfered with in any way.

The story of this club has been told at this length because it has proved
what can be done in broadening the life of women of natural intelligence
living under tenement-house conditions; how the family can have a common
interest, to which each contributes, a center that can create social
opportunity for the friends of every member and the members of every
family.

This club has been able to do much to lighten the burdens in the time of
financial crisis for people who could only have been helped through such a
medium. It was the help of a friend always. For years it has been able to
distribute Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners; but it grows more cautious
every year, for it has made discoveries of the abuses of the Christmas
dinner-giving. Through the children it has been possible to reach other
children who needed Christmas cheer, but who would not take it from ever so
kind-hearted a public.

The long years of working together has cemented friendships that are the
inheritances of the children, and sons and daughters have intermarried.
Baby after baby finds its godmother in the club.

There have been mortifying failures, but there have been positive successes
in the eleven years. The club has proved conclusively that the
working-men's wives can be determining factors in arousing and demanding
better environment for their homes; that the wife and mother who keeps in
touch with life commands greater influence in and outside her home, where
all that she learns is used to make that home better; that she keeps her
place in her family best when she makes herself the companion of her
husband and children; when she, as far as she may, is herself the source of
their social life, and contributes to their mental interests by sharing
with them all the educational opportunity that life gives her.




CHAPTER VII.

WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME.


One day a group of unusually intelligent wives of working men were driving
through Central Park in a Park carriage. All were mothers, some of grown
children, yet it was the first time that twelve of the twenty (all but two
born in New York) had seen Central Park. Coming back on the east drive, the
closed houses on Fifth Avenue attracted their attention. Various
suggestions were made as to what use these houses could be put in the
summer, when one woman, slight, delicate and extremely nervous, said: "I
don't want anything in those houses but the room, just the room. I've never
had all the room I want. I would have if I lived in them." After a moment
she continued: "The reason we don't love each other as we should is because
we don't have room; we crowd each other. All the time I lived in my
father's home I was crowded. How we used to fight! Fight in the night, as
well as the day, just because we did not have room. The beds were so
crowded that one of the young ones had to sleep across the foot. The big
ones would keep their feet up while they were awake, but when they went to
sleep they would stretch out and kick the one across the foot. When I was
so little that I slept that way, I used to lie awake in terror expecting
the kick, and how I scratched when it came! I know we would have loved each
other much more if we could have had room to grow up in, as the children in
those houses do. And my mother! She didn't have a room to herself when she
had the sickness that killed her."

[Illustration: YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT.]

It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the little miseries of childhood
due to lack of room in the home. "My mother used to drive us out of the
house to get a chance to sweep it," said another mother of children. "I
remember lots of times standing down at the hall door, shivering, waiting
for her to get through. I would go into the neighbors' rooms, but often
they had got rid of their own children for the reason my mother had of
hers."

"I tell you what used to make me mad; it was to have to wait for the others
to get through eating," said another. "When I hire a place I always look
first to see if the kitchen is big enough to pull the table from the wall
and sit about it. I don't think I ever had any hot dinner when I was
little, and it used to make me mad. When I had three children I moved just
to get a large kitchen; it ain't near so nice a place, but the kitchen is
big." There was not a woman there who did not have a grievance against her
childhood because there was not room. One of them with crimson cheeks told
how she remembered the sense of comfort that came to her after the death of
an older sister because she had a bed to herself; she said it was a long
time before she knew the cause, for she missed her sister's companionship,
but she was more comfortable; she enjoyed having the five nails at the foot
of the bed for her own clothes. The woman who spoke first interrupted: "I
never in my life had even a hook in the wall that was my own until I was
married. We were so near of a size we could wear each other's things, and
we did. The one who was quickest got the best of that size. You never knew
whose clothes you'd have to put on in the morning. I'll never have but this
child. She likes me. She hates being pushed and crowded. She has a bed and
bureau of her own. Never, never until my husband can pay more rent will we
have another child." She paid the penalty of death for this determination.

As one thinks of the number of human beings with all their belongings
crowded into the floor space of a tenement-house home, the marvel at the
endurance grows greater. Think of its limitations of conveniences!

To those who know the limitations of a tenement-house home, the criticisms
and suggestions that the superficially informed reformers make on and for
the hygienic management of these homes are at once the source of amusement
and indignation. When stress is laid on airing a bed every morning, and one
in imagination sees the only windows in another room with a breakfast table
between them, a room already overcrowded with things, the only room for the
mother and baby during the process, one wonders what the speaker would do
under the same circumstances. Then when the horrors of dust are revealed
and the necessity of keeping the floors clean by frequent washing is made
to be imperative, one sees the bed that just fits between the walls at the
head and foot, with half of its own space free in front of it, and again
comes the question, what would the expert do living under like
circumstances? What is needed everywhere is scientific knowledge in
conjunction with intimate knowledge of the evils inseparable from the small
dark rooms of even the best tenements, and then we will have suggestions
that the woman can use--can apply to her own family conditions--who must do
the work for a family within this space.

In the best of the tenements it will be found that where the tenants can
afford a parlor, access to it is across the kitchen, where all the work of
the family must be done. It will be seen at once the disadvantage at which
the house-mother is when friends who are not intimate call. Nothing stands
between her and the outer world but the door into a public hallway. The
bedrooms admit of a bed, and sometimes, but only in the exceptional
bedroom, a bureau. This is usually found in the parlor, if there is one,
and in it all the clothes that can be folded, all the little accessories
belonging to the family; to this, however, all must have access. If there
is a closet for clothes, or if the family can own and house a wardrobe, it
is usually in this room, and the common convenience of the family. The
bedrooms, dark, offer no space for a washstand. The kitchen is the common
wash-room. The kitchens of the tenement houses built in these later years
are a marvel of inconvenience. The dish closet is a few shelves up near the
ceiling, the lower one of which can be reached by a woman five feet four
standing on the soles of her feet; a chair is necessary to reach the other
shelves. Beneath this space is the pot closet, or it may be the stationary
tubs, the top of which provides table space for cooking conveniences.

[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S HOUR AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]

There comes to mind now one of the best plans for a tenement having four
families on each floor on the East Side. The stairways are lighted by a
window on each landing opening on an air shaft, and on each floor is a
lavatory with a large window. Each suite consists of four rooms. The parlor
has two windows on the street; a kitchen window opening into the parlor,
never raised if the family have social standards; and a window on a large
air shaft, or space between the two houses, on which the bedroom windows,
which are large, open. The rent for these four rooms is seventeen dollars
per month, and they are on the fifth floor. The kitchens in this house have
been described. The family have to sit at three sides of the table; there
is no room to pull it from the wall; even then one side is uncomfortably
near the stove. The only space except the parlor for a refrigerator is in
the bedroom. As there are three young wage-earners supporting the home, who
are social, who are encouraged by the widowed mother to have their friends
in their own home, this is not to be tolerated. The refrigerator is in the
bedroom. It was in that room when it was occupied for four years by a girl
dying of tuberculosis. Is it any wonder that the fight against this disease
is again being waged in that family? Yet it is above the average of its
class in intelligence, as the apartments are above the average in the
region.

The very elementary necessity of space and place for privacy in taking a
bath is exceptional. For space, place and light are necessary. A very
bright woman, perfectly familiar with the limitations of the tenement-house
homes, once said to the writer: "The truth is they cannot be clean if they
are decent." A cruel truth which was brought forcibly to the remembrance of
the writer one winter afternoon in an East Side home, where a mother was
trying to bring up a family to the best of her ability. When the caller
went into the living-room of the family a tub stood at the side of the
stove, in which was the youngest daughter, a girl about eight; a brother of
ten and his boy friend of twelve or fourteen years were playing checkers on
the other side of the room. The mother was ironing. There was no
consciousness of embarrassment shown by the children. The mother was
ashamed, not at the exposure, but at being found out in permitting such an
exposure. She was a member of a club where the training of children was a
constant theme. The necessity of physical cleanliness, its relation to
health, she had grasped, and her children profited by it. The relation
between privacy and morals she had not grasped. It was as though a veil
had fallen from her eyes as she looked at her daughter of eight standing
naked before the two boys. Whether such a thing ever occurred again the
caller does not know; that the mother never forgave the caller for finding
her out she does know. The family had three bedrooms, but none would permit
the placing of a washstand in them. One was the passageway from front to
rear, for the family occupied a floor, but could afford only one fire.

Privacy is almost impossible in the tenement-house home. One bedroom is
usually the passageway to the next, if there are two, or both bedrooms are
passageways from front to rear of the home, and must be used by all the
family. Privacy is impossible in these rooms, and there are thousands of
just such apartments. Children must grow up in them subject to the
limitations, restrictions and exposures their walls compel. This division
of space must fix standards of reserve, of privacy, of social life. No
amount of love, not even of intelligence, can save the children from the
evils such division of space imposes on family life. It deadens the
sensibilities. The insidious effects of this is not always realized, even
by the intelligent parents who accept them as inevitable.

One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the inconsistencies of the
standards of those who go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the
betterment of the conditions of the working people. We have secured a law
compelling separate closets for men and women in stores and factories, a
righteous measure in the interest of morality. But the closets in the
tenements must be used by men, women and children of several families. A
neighborly courtesy is the loaning of the key, to save a neighbor a journey
upstairs. Children run in from the street, several at a time, for it is the
only place provided. This publicity and freedom is the crying evil of the
tenements, the one from which tragedies come. The marvel is that so few
follow; that in spite, seemingly in defiance, of it all, characters develop
that are beautiful, harmonious, true.

Can one condemn the girl facing the worst that can befall her who under
pressure that her appeal justifies, yes, makes necessary, confides that her
relations with the man who is the father of the coming child began when
each were little things six or eight years old? A relation that grew out of
lack of privacy, the intimacy forced by tenement-house conditions. Both
families have gone far beyond their social position at the time these two
were children, but the blasting of innocency has left its burning scar on
the girl, and she must bear it alone.

Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that gives the love-making in
the tenement region a character peculiarly its own. When interest between
the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so frankly and publicly. There are
times when restraint would seem to improve manners; but among the working
young men and women one is constantly reminded of Adam and Eve in the
garden of Eden. How frankly and unconsciously they must have shown their
interest in each other, and how unconsciously they must have revealed their
interest in each other to all the other breathing creatures. Perhaps
nothing about the love-making is more interesting than that numbers add to
the enjoyment of both lovers. Nothing adds more to the happiness of a
wage-earning girl than to have her "chum" deeply interested in and deeply
interesting to a young man at the same time she is. It seems to be conceded
that two couples can have so much more pleasure than one. The terms applied
by these young people to each other will reveal their social level in the
wage-earning world. If the term "steady" is used where the world of wealth
and leisure would use _fiancé_, the under wage-earning world is reached. If
"friend" is used, the social ladder covered by that word, used in that
sense, has many rounds. Knowing many working girls who would use the term
"friend" when referring to the man they had accepted as a future husband,
or who would in time hold that relation, the writer was constantly
impressed by the unconscious protection the girls threw about each other.
One would rarely hear of plans made that did not include two beside the
couple engaged, or willing to be. Sometimes two girls were to complete the
party. It is evident that the more means the merrier time. In every group
of girls there will be two or three who cause anxiety; two or three whose
influence, unchecked, may lead to trouble. It is not easy to restrain the
young people, for so often the offenses are so naturally the result of
environment that to speak directly of them would be most unwise. The
chances are that reference to them would put the speaker in the position of
possessing knowledge of an undesirable kind; it would seem to suggest evil.
Often it would be a moral shock to many working girls to have their actions
criticised from the impression their freedom makes before the cause is
understood.

[Illustration: MUTUAL INTERESTS.]

A young girl joined a club for young people. From the first she caused
anxiety. Her face was innocent and attractive, but her actions with young
men were just the reverse. At last it became necessary to speak to her. It
was evident that she attributed the criticism to what she termed
"fussiness." Not the least modification in her manner followed. At last,
after many interviews, she was told that she would never be spoken to
again. If she offended in the club-room once more, she would be given her
hat. That would mean that she was not to again enter those rooms. She
confided to her intimate friend that no one had ever told her that what she
did was wrong. After this interview, a modification of her manner was
noticed, not because she was convinced she was wrong, but because she
thought it wise to heed. A group of young people were returning from a
picnic. Just after the homeward journey had begun, it was seen that this
young girl was sitting in the lap of a young man whom she had always known;
as children they lived for years in the same tenement. Beside him sat the
young girl whom he had invited to the club picnic. The club girl sat so
unconscious of any infringement of manners, public or private, that a young
man who had grown up under the same conditions was asked what he thought of
the act. He started at once to tell the girl to stand up, but was
restrained. Evidently he was shocked, and the act was wrong from his
standpoint, the only standpoint fair to the girl. A seat was made for the
girl elsewhere, who, for the first time, showed distress, or rather
anxiety, because of her own acts. Nothing was said to her.

Occasion was made to speak to the young man who had kept his seat and let
the girl sit in his lap. He was a working man, and his hands showed it. All
his life of twenty-two years he had lived under tenement-house conditions.

"Frank, would you marry a girl who sat in a man's lap in a railroad train?"
he was asked.

"No," he responded indignantly.

"Do you suppose you are the only man in the world who has that feeling?
What right have you to let any girl cheapen herself so that the man who saw
her with you, doing what you permitted, if you did not suggest and
encourage, would not marry her?"

The man's face grew white. He had a sister of whom he was very fond and
very proud.

"What would you do to the man who permitted your sister, when she was
tired, to do what you permitted a girl to do to-night--a girl who has no
brother to watch over her?"

The young man was six feet tall. He rose to his feet, and, raising his
hands toward the starlit sky, he said:

"As true as there is a God above me, I will never while I live let any girl
do what I am not willing my own sister should do anywhere."

After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said:

"I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold you responsible. You are
stronger mentally, morally and physically, and are wholly to blame."
Whether he spoke to the girl or not, no one knows, but never again was it
necessary to even mentally criticise that young girl's manners with young
men. Not only did her manners change, but the expression of her face. One
grew to love and trust her, and ask her help for other girls.

The chivalry of the working boys and young men is constantly seen,
unconsciously revealed. Sometimes it is dangerous the degree in which it
shows itself among the finest of the boys. A sick girl, unable to go out,
will command attentions so special and direct that the fear of her
misunderstanding, and suffering because she has not understood, will make
those interested who know the danger unhappy; sympathy from any cause will
make a great-hearted working boy place himself in a position where he may
be easily misunderstood.

It is astonishing how long the spirit of childhood will live in working
boys and girls, even under conditions that seem never to justify happiness
and spontaneity!

One Sunday a group of working men and girls went nutting, being duly and
properly chaperoned. Four of the young men climbed a big walnut tree. The
girls, with some of the young men, were gathered at the foot, waiting for
the shower of nuts. The chaperon sat on a stone fence a little way off. The
wind began to blow, swaying the top branches. One of the young men having a
good voice laid himself along a limb high from the ground, singing
"Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top." The others took it up and the girls
joined in. Over and over it was sung. Then the girls and boys on the ground
joined hands outside the span of the tree and sang "Ring around a rosy."
Every singing game of childhood was enthusiastically played. Every one of
these young people were poor as the world counts wealth--every one over
eighteen--all had worked from the first moment they could earn wages. Each
one had suffered the wearing anxiety of no wages when the family needed
what they could earn, and yet they sang--they felt like children. No amount
of money at the time could have bought them this happiness.

The sun poured down a glory of yellow light on the trees that seemed to
have caught its color dashed with red flames. Across the field came one of
the girls slowly--a girl who never had manifested any enthusiasm, except
for dancing; who never gave expression to any emotion of feeling. It was
thought impossible to move her. As she came nearer, it was seen that she
was deeply stirred; her face was expressive. Putting her head against the
arm of the chaperon, she whispered, rather than spoke: "I did not know
trees were any color but green before." The tears were chasing each other
down her cheeks, while her mouth was wreathed with smiles. The girl was
over twenty. Had she been born in a family that would use the privileges of
the various Fresh-Air organizations, she would have known more of the
country. It was this year that she first saw the stars over the trees, and
the moon at the full in the sky when it had a horizon. Obedience to her was
not easy, but to her brother she gave it willingly; he had been her nurse
in babyhood, her friend and companion in childhood, and was now her
protector. In every plan of these young people he considered his sister
first. If she had an escort, he invited some other girl to go with him; if
not, he took his sister. The girl never manifested any interest in young
men beyond their ability to dance well. She would find a dozen reasons for
not dancing if she found herself on the floor with an awkward dancer.

This group of twenty-two young men and women, all from homes that would
bar the door to charity, even when suffering, were fairly representative of
the social standard of the better part of the wage-earning world of New
York. Among them was the independent girl, the one who had no desire to be
sought in marriage; she saw the worries of her sisters married to men
having small and uncertain wages; saw the wearing side of motherhood rather
than its joys. She skillfully kept her young men friends as friends,
changing from one to the other as soon as she saw the line of friendship
being crossed. The girl who never won attention till she wooed it was among
them; the girl who was treated discourteously or neglected was one of them.
The girl who was sought for exhibition because she dressed well, yet who
never roused any deeper feeling, was there, for some of the men were very
observant, and had standards of style for the girls they escorted.

[Illustration: THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.]

There was the young man who willfully played with a girl's feelings; the
young man who openly exhibited the love he had awakened, but to which he
did not respond; the girl whose adoration received indifferent treatment,
yet who was never entirely cast aside by the man too selfish to marry. In
that company there was one couple who were sentimental in their actions;
they would sit and hold hands, if permitted, rather than dance. As soon as
it was discovered that their actions were influencing others, they were
given the choice to restrain the expression of their affection in public
completely or resign. The lesson was effectual. When it was seen that one
of the young men was very deeply interested in one of the young women, that
she was only semi-conscious of his interest, yet enjoyed it, while not at
all interested in him, just a few words, pointing out how unkind it was to
permit his interest to develop and how unfair to let him spend money for
her when she never meant to hold any relation but that of friend, changed
her attitude toward him. She made the young man understand her position.
More than that, she gave her lesson to the other girls, and escorts were
changed frequently; groups arranged to go to the theater instead of
couples. As one girl put it, "We don't want any nonsense." Yet several
marriages have occurred among these members, the new homes making centers
of social interest for the others. The babies are objects of deepest
interest to all, and it is a lesson to see the ease and freedom with which
even the young men will hold them. Much is said of the "little mothers,"
but the "little fathers" are as unselfish and devoted a part of the family
life in the tenements as the little mothers. When a great, strong young man
picks up a baby with the ease of a woman, is interested in its ills of the
moment, one is grateful for the hours that, as a child, he spent as nurse;
sees the beauty of strength and tenderness, and the humanizing effect of
the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by
the environment of a tenement-house region.

The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be
attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was
possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad
began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who
chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening
in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people
entered the car laughing, pushing, slapping one another. The young men and
women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer
looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at
the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in
perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is
this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things,
that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning young
people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement.

These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word
means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew
parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but
principally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work
anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the
deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many
Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their
daughters. That parents would dare to assume such authority in so personal
a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation.
One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of
these girls marry against her will.

No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of
these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a
privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be
at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This
freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls
in New York. Were it not for their common sense and the knowledge of life
thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the
country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness
of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality
between the sexes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes
from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors
asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy.
This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.

At the lower rounds of the social ladder in the wage-earning world the
mother and baby are inseparable, if the mother does not drink. Night and
day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ignorance, but cared for.
Often everything else is neglected. When the baby sleeps, the mother is too
tired to work, too indifferent. When awake, the baby insists on being held.
One is frequently reminded of the story of the woman whose moan when her
baby died was: "What excuse can I give John now?" Yet the day that baby is
able to walk alone on the street the mother loosens her hold. The baby
finds its freedom limited only by its ability to remain upright, and to
return to its home for meals and at night. "Throw me the key and a piece of
bread," is often the extent of its demands from the sidewalk. True, the
mother knows every woman in the block will be, in an emergency, a mother.
The child learns to care for itself; it makes less and less demands on the
mother, who may even now have another baby compelling all her thought and
time. Above this scale, where home-making assumes importance, the child
remains longer under the mother's care; is watched when on the street by
glances from the window; is sent to school, and some oversight maintained
over its school life; but the wage-earning period means emancipation from
oversight often even at this level. Hundreds of girls start out and find
work for the first time without any evident responsibility on the part of
even good mothers. No amount of familiarity with this exercise of freedom
deadens the horror of it to the outsider. Women, mothers of attractive
daughters, will not know the street on which the daughters work. After one
of the most disastrous fires in New York, in which many working girls
perished, four mothers notified the police the next day that their
daughters had disappeared. It was the failure to trace the girls and the
advertising of their disappearance that led, through companions who had
escaped from the building, to the awful conclusion that these four had
perished in the flames.

Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to go to the place where the
daughter finds employment; but here, as in everything else in life, that
which is deemed the more important receives attention. Perhaps it is the
habit of trust, or indifference, that governs mothers' activities.

A girl will make intimate friendships unhindered, unguided by mothers who
act up to the measure of their comprehension of the duties of a mother.
Girls are admitted to the homes who are unknown outside of the workshop;
they work with the daughter; no other background is known. The mother knows
that other mothers are accepting her daughters on the same basis of
knowledge. For their young men friends there may be, but as frequently
there will not be, any greater sense of responsibility than for the girl
friends. In homes where the income would seem to demand a sense of social
responsibility it is found wanting, and young people come and go
unhindered. If there are two or more young wage-earners in the family,
their conversation may bring knowledge of what they are doing, where they
are going. But they also make compacts at concealments of disobedience
where there are laws to be obeyed.

[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND.]

The world has been shocked by the tragedies of death and disgrace that came
to the homes of two young working girls within the past year. In each case
the father and mother had gone to bed with the daughters out in the night,
where they did not know; one a girl of eighteen, the other less. The
"cadet" system would never exist were the parents of every girl alert to
train and guard her the more closely because she was a working girl.

Until by some direct process the control of daughters and of sons is made
desirable, and then natural in the wage-earners' homes, the problem of
family life in the tenements will remain unsolved. It is a question
sometimes whether, and sometimes it is very evident, that by the giving up
of wages to the parents the freedom of the workers, even though but
children, from obedience and parental oversight is purchased.

Those who know working girls know how high is the average of morality.
Years will go by in intimate relations with the same group of girls and no
tragedy will mar it; no echo of tragedy among their friends. The hardness
with which even the suggestion of looseness is treated in any group of
working girls is simply an expression of self-preservation. A group of
sixty girls, earning the lowest wages and living under the worst
conditions, were watched five years and one girl fell. As one goes over her
history from birth, any other result would seem a miracle. A girl arrested
gave the first name and address of one of the girls in this factory. The
case was reported in the papers. By an unfortunate circumstance, the
working girl living at that number was away from the factory two days at
this time. When she learned of the connection that had been made because of
the chance use of her Christian name and her address, she told a lie as to
where she was at the time of that arrest. The other girls struck until she
was discharged. The girl was innocent of everything but the lie;
investigation proved this. The girls would not recede from their position;
work had to be found for the girl elsewhere. She was publicly marked. They
could not convince everybody of her innocence; lots of people believed the
story, and they would not work with her; go back and forth with her.

A room was hired as a lunch-room for these girls. They brought their own
lunches and paid a small amount of dues, which were used to pay for tea
served daily. The projectors of this little enterprise were girls of wealth
and social position; three were at the lunch-room every day. By
representing themselves as friends of the projectors to the caretaker, two
representatives of a "yellow journal" gained access to the room. One, a
woman, engaged the caretaker in conversation for some time in the hall,
getting all the information she could give her. The Sunday edition of that
paper contained an illustration of the room filled with wretched-looking
girls, while young women holding up trailing skirts were passing cups. The
text was as far from the truth as the picture. The working girls absolutely
refused to go to the lunch-room again. At last they agreed that if the
paper would publish a true account--that they provided their own lunches
and paid dues, and waited on themselves--they would go back. The paper
refused. Two of those girls would never enter the rooms again.

The working girl has suffered quite as much at the hands of yellow
journalism as the woman of wealth and social position. Not one of these
girls went to school until she was fourteen; nor during any year since she
began working had she earned on an average more than $3.50 per week. Yet
they had social standards to maintain, and compelled recognition of them by
those who opened opportunities to them.

The inspiring fact remains that the standard of home life in ethics, as in
necessities, is raising. Without doubt much of this is due to the
improvement in the class of readers used in our public schools. They are
not perfect in the matter of selection, but they carry messages to the
hearts, as well as the heads, of the children, few of whom would pass an
examination on their contents. Even the primary grades introduce the
children to the best thoughts of all time, and the crumbs, at least, are
carried to the homes.

The girls who belong to the working-girls' club carry with them everywhere
the influence that is molding their characters to a brighter type of
American womanhood. The Settlements soon become centers of education
through the social activities they make possible to the people. They
surpass the clubs in this, that boys and girls, young men and women, each
have in them the center that makes possible social occasions that are
within their means and under rightful guides; together men and women are
trained socially. The Settlements have been in existence long enough to
have the children that were the first friends of the Residents now the
fathers and mothers of children. The years of contact show results in the
homes established, in the kind of care and the ambitions held for the
children still babies. Wages have not greatly changed from those earned by
the fathers of these new home-makers; but money represents different
values. The kindergarten is the first thing demanded for their children,
and the seeds sown in the minds of these young mothers bear fruit one
hundred-fold because it is prepared.

The kindergarten mother clubs have also borne fruit in the homes where even
the youngest child has gone beyond the kindergarten's age. These mothers
learn for the first time the need of sympathy; of living with the children
through every period of growth; of sharing and of making together a home.
The result is, the homes gain in moral fiber and moral purpose. The schools
and the homes are brought into close relation through these beginnings, and
the child finds its interests a unit, and home the place where its whole
good is of vital importance. The mother establishes the home often on the
basis of contrast. "It shall not be what mine was; their lives shall not be
what mine was when I was a child."

The churches, many of them, provide for the social life of their people;
these social activities must be of a character that wins those who have the
least to contend with in themselves, who find a pleasure and inspiration in
religious life, which often is far more a matter of temperament than of
spiritual development.

One sees the highest expression of spiritual development in lives apart
from the Church as well as in the Church. This it is that develops a
feeling of reverence for any movement having for its object the bettering
of the social life of the people. One learns that every vulgarity that
becomes obnoxious; every freedom that is brought within the bounds of
restraint by new standards of education and refinement; every influence set
in motion because of the spiritual perception of the answer to the
question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" means spiritual life growing toward
that of the Master of time, whose laws are but two for the guiding of men,
"Love the Lord thy God," "Thy neighbor as thyself;" and these make neither
cross nor steeple necessary, for they may be obeyed in the heart and guide
the life wherever it is lived.

[Illustration: LIBRARY DAY AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]




CHAPTER VIII.

FINANCIAL RELATIONS IN FAMILIES.


The women of education who attempted to make the conditions of
working-men's families better, found their own education advanced, their
values of essentials greatly modified in some respects, greatly enlarged in
others. This was due to the bravery, the unselfishness, the contradictions
of character forced on their attention through the natural, familiar
intercourse made possible through neighborhood and club relations.

Probably the most astonishing experience in working-girls' club life is the
revelation of the entire lack of self-consciousness on the part of working
girls as to anything remarkable in their giving up wages not only week
after week, but year after year, for the benefit of their families. The
closer one gets to the poorest paid of the working girls, the more common
is this unconscious unselfishness. In fact, the girl at this level who
would attempt to hold or even to introduce a business relation in her
family relation, would find herself an object of contempt, even when the
personal habits of those who controlled the use of the money she earned
were of such a character as to certainly mean waste of the money, perhaps
worse.

However one's judgment may at times condemn this unselfishness and
recognize in it a positive evil, one's heart is thrilled by the spirit of
loyalty and devotion of which it is the evidence. Three sisters belonged to
a working-girls' club. They were all employed in one establishment and
earned good wages, yet they never had clothes that made them even
comfortable. It was a mystery. They did not belong to the race which too
frequently make thrift a vice, but were descendants of one the world counts
thriftless. The months passed on. One of the sisters became indispensable
to the club. She had the rarest tact, while straightforward and frank. When
the second winter came, the pressure of life on these girls was very
evident. How to relieve it, how even to approach the subject without
appearing intrusive and meddlesome, was the wearing problem of the club
directors. After the holidays the influence of one of the directors was
asked by one of the sisters in behalf of a brother. Then the cause of the
pressure was unconsciously revealed. There were five brothers and a father
in the family.

The story unfolded. For years these three girls had supported the family;
the six men had always been the victims of cruel "bosses." Worthy,
industrious, anxious to work, looking for work all the time, they never
succeeded in finding work under conditions that made it possible for them
to continue. The years of self-sacrifice had not shaken the faith of these
sisters in the smallest degree. "What would happen if your foreman would
become arbitrary and cross?" was asked. The reply revealed the whole
conception of woman's relation to life as they held it. "It's different
with women; they have to bear things."

Another year passed without any change, except that the sisters grew old
faster than they should. A quiet, determined effort was made to influence
these girls to pay board to their mother instead of giving all their wages.
They listened to the argument that as long as they continued their present
system the brothers would not work steadily. The sisters listened, but the
system did not change. Every penny was handed to the mother for
disbursement.

One morning in the early spring, three years after these girls had joined
the club, word came that the sister who had grown dear to the club
directors, to every member of the club, was dead. She had dropped to the
floor at her bench the day before, and died in the night. "Greater love
hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." The
sacrifice was complete. Standing in the room of death with the six
able-bodied men for whom this girl had given up her life, the sacrifice
seemed barren, for its fruits had been garnered in her own character and
had gone out of this life.

A year later the mother sent for one of the directors of the club to have
her plead with the sisters remaining that they would give her their wages
as formerly. "They only pay board now; they refuse to do anything for the
poor boys. 'Twas a bad day when ---- died. Shure, she gave me every cent.
Not one did she keep back. Ever since she died, the girls just pay board,
not a cent more. See how comfortable they are. They bought waterproofs,
both of them, last week, and Jim has no overcoat. ---- would have bought
him an overcoat."

"Yes, doubtless she would. I remember the winter before she died she wore a
spring jacket all winter, and that her shoes had been broken for weeks
before she died." "Shure, I know." Tears fell from the woman's eyes, and
her face bore every evidence of sorrow. "The boys could not get work that
winter. God knows they tried. They had to have clothes, and ---- was a good
daughter. 'Twas a bad day for me when she died." The mother had not the
slightest conception of the sacrifice her daughter had made--a sacrifice
that had cost her her life. Her thought was for her sons; their comforts
were to be secured through the daughters, who were a secondary
consideration.

When her visitor protested against the sisters working to support the
brothers in idleness, the mother was indignant. When she tried to show the
woman that if the boys were forced by hunger and cold to go to work it
would be their moral salvation, the mother insisted that they did try to
get work, but that it was their "fate" to have unreasonable "bosses," who
made it impossible for them to work under them.

"Do you think the girls always work under conditions that are easy?"

"No; but it is easier for a woman to stand a hard 'boss,'" was the mother's
answer, without any expression of sympathy. Again she urged that the
visitor use her influence with the two sisters for them to go back to their
old method of giving the mother their wages. When the visitor refused, the
amazement of the woman at her refusal was pathetic. When the visitor
confessed that she was largely responsible for the change in the girls' use
of their wages, the mother's indignation rose to the point of abuse. That
her boys were robbed was the idea fastened in her mind. That the club was
the enemy of that home was the mother's conviction.

The mental attitude of this mother is by no means unusual. It is a common
thing to find mothers who insist on controlling the wages of daughters who
make no exactions in regard to the wages of sons. The effect is to lessen
the self-respect of the girls and the sense of personal responsibility of
the boys. In the family referred to the experiment of paying board to the
mother was watched carefully. It was a success. The effect on the girls was
positive. They developed a sense of personal responsibility; they grew more
dignified and more reliable; above all, they developed self-respect. The
fight was a hard one, but the moral victory was won. The brothers either
found work under men who were fair, or they learned to endure control and
discipline under a "boss," which was probably what they needed. The girls
grew to have a care for their father's and mother's appearance and bought
them clothes. Never as long as the mother lived did her feeling of her
resentment against working-girls' clubs die out.

After her death, the father and brothers agreed to pay one of the sisters
so much each week if she would stay home and keep the house. The sister did
it, though it meant hours of loneliness, and, from her point of view,
dependence. She had taken courses in cooking and sewing in the club; she
had listened to talks on sanitation and hygiene; she had learned the value
of money through the management of her own wages. She created for that
family a far better home than it had ever known under the shiftless,
thriftless management of an undisciplined mother.

The daughter was able to pay more rent from the money given to support the
house, and the pride and self-respect of the family were greatly increased
by the possession of a parlor, which was furnished on the installment plan
out of the weekly sum paid to the sister. The home became a social center
for the friends. The boys bring even their girl friends to their home,
because it possesses more attractions than any other place to which they
have access. A banjo lies on top of a piano--hired--and two of the boys
take music lessons. In a family of seven wage-earners, even though the
wages of each may be small, the combined income is large in proportion to
the standards of outlay, and secures more than comfort, if rightly managed.

In this family a home maintained at a social level is of greater importance
than clothes, and all work to keep it. Sacrifices are made to buy things
for the home by every member of the family. The sisters are to these
brothers the finest type of women, and no girl whom they meet quite comes
to their level. The sisters will never marry. The home, the father and
brothers fill their cup of interest. There is still a latent suspicion that
men are non-dependable, and they must be in a position to meet emergencies;
the unjust "boss" may appear at any time, and they may be needed. Their
brothers are a trust and must be guarded.

A visit was made to a home in which a girl of sixteen was dying of
tuberculosis. The plaint of the mother, even in the presence of the girl,
was, "She was such a good child. She always brought home her envelope
unopened." To the visitor this was at the time incomprehensible, as the
advantages of the envelope to her were two-fold, that it could be opened as
well as closed. The child had worked nearly three years, had been paid her
wages in a sealed envelope, which she always gave to her mother as she
received it. This is the measure of goodness for husband and child in
thousands of working-men's homes. This mother was unconsciously brutal.
Whether from lack of sensitiveness, or because of a life spent in fighting
just homelessness and hunger, to the very last hour of her child's life her
moan was, "What will I do without her wages?"

Not once did that little girl hear her mother give expression to any sense
of personal loss for her companionship. The child herself became weighed
down with the sense of responsibility, and resented the lack of strength
because it added to her mother's burdens. This was her regret, the only
thing she mentioned: "I wish I could have helped mother till the others
grew up. I've cost such a lot being sick so long and not earning anything."
That was her estimate of life at sixteen.

A son went wrong in that family, and as the time approached for his return
home, the mother moved, lest he should be annoyed by questions and comments
on his absence by neighbors. No power could be brought to bear on that
mother to make her move that the daughter might sleep in a room having an
outside window. One influence came within the range of her experience, the
other was beyond her comprehension, and her daughter died in an absolutely
dark, unventilated bedroom, in which she had slept eight years.

She was a dainty girl, in spite of the bad taste with which she dressed,
this second victim. She floated, rather than walked, and her cheeks were
like carnations. The girls in the club all liked her, and their young men
friends at the receptions showed at once how attractive they found this
girl. She was reticent as to her affairs, except in the question of work.
When out of work, she did not hesitate to speak of it and ask to be
remembered if any of the club members knew where she could get work. At
last she came quietly one morning to the director and said the doctor told
her she must stop working for three months. The expression in her eyes
filled the listener with fear. In a voice that trembled, she said: "I am
the only one working. Mother has a baby and cannot work, and--and"--her
voice lowered and her eyes fell--"my father will not be home for three
months from last Monday. He got into trouble. He would not if he had been
sober," she added, in proud defence. Two months later the end was near, and
the girl knew it. All that could be done under the conditions had been
done. It was little, for an unreasonable, drunken mother had to be reckoned
with all the time. She would stand railing against the girl for not going
to work when the girl could not walk across the floor for lack of strength.
The girl was under eighteen, and her mother was the controlling power in
her life.

One of the young men who had been frequently a guest at the club receptions
worked in an office near the girl's home. He passed one day as she sat by
the window, and she saw him. "If he knew where I lived, he'd come in and
see me," she said with a smile, full of friendship as the young man turned
down the street. "I'll run after him. I know he would like to see you. He
asked about you at the club last night." She clutched convulsively at her
visitor's hand, saying: "Oh, don't! I wouldn't for the world have him see
this place." She closed her eyes, after a searching glance about the room.
Of course, the mother broke out in wailing about how hard she tried to do
for the children and how ungrateful they were--ashamed of their home.

The girl gathered her strength and sat up, her eyes blazing with
indignation. "Mamma, I'm dying. I'll not be here another week. There are
three more girls; I don't want them to live through what I have." Slowly,
solemnly, she continued: "You have not been good. Papa earned good wages,
enough to keep us all comfortable; you know what you did with the money. He
stopped giving it to you, and you got what you wanted on credit. You kept
that up. You know what happened to him. I went to work. You know what you
did with my money. I could not keep it from you even when I knew the little
ones were hungry, for you beat me and took it, unless I had spent it for
groceries and meat and coal before I came home pay-day. I heard what the
doctor said, that I was dying because I have not had food and have to sleep
in that hole, or holes like it." She pointed to the horrible bedroom. "I am
dying. You are planning with the insurance money to have a big funeral.
Have your own friends, but not one of the girls from the club or their
friends, even when I am dead. I don't want them to come here. Promise me,"
she panted to her visitor, "that you will not let them come." The promise
was given.

The mother was shrieking, whether from grief, or rage, or remorse the
visitor could not determine. That night death came.

The girl was buried from the church she attended. When the club members
were requested not to go to the house, there was scarcely concealed
indignation. "Did she ever ask you to call on her when she was well?" There
was no assent. "Have you any right to intrude there when she is silent? The
church is open to all." No comment was made. At the church early in the
morning the young men and women friends met. The mother could not even that
morning hold herself in control. The girl's secret was out, and a great
sympathy was added to the love her friends bore her. Her memory was an
incense because of what her life must have been. Her unconscious
unselfishness, her devotion to her little brothers and sisters, was
revealed to them when they saw her mother. Good fathers and mothers found
new expressions of affection for awhile at least, while the sharpness of
contrast stood out between the dead girl's parents and their own, her life
and theirs.

[Illustration: A STREET ON THE EAST SIDE.]

The girl who presents the most difficult problem in club life is the one
whose social impulses are dominant. Noise, activity, excitement, seem
inseparable from her presence. This type of girl arouses enthusiastic
friends. She leads because she is daring; because she does not in any
experience question results. One such girl had been studied for months.
There was a superficial response to the efforts to win her regard, but the
response was too transparent not to be understood. The girl would speak to
any man who looked at her. One day she was playing "tag" with the other
girls in front of the factory where she worked. A rag-picker pushing a cart
made some remark as he passed. The girl, Molly, gave a spring and alighted
on the man's shoulders like a cat. She clung there. He began to run, but he
could not throw her off. She twined her fingers in his hair, made him turn
back and carry her to the place where her shrieking, laughing companions
stood. She sprang off. Still holding the man, she made him get down on his
knees on the curb to the girls and apologize. Like a bird she flew to the
place where he had dropped his push-cart, and, pumping the handle up and
down to make the bells jingle, she brought it back to the man, still
exhausted by his unwonted exertions, and with a mocking bow placed the
handle of the cart in his hand. Then she stood up straight and ordered him
to move on, adding: "If you ever show your nose around here again, you'll
get more than you got this time." The man ran as if for his life.

Molly then turned and saw the friend whom she had promised she would be
more quiet on the street. Her face crimsoned as she came toward her. "I
could not help it. You don't know what he said. He won't never speak to
another girl minding her own business as he spoke to us. I won't tell you
what he said; it was too bad." The girl was about seventeen years old. She
had cut off her hair, and it was bleached. She wore the gayest hats, which
only served to emphasize the poverty and shabbiness of the rest of her
clothes. One day she passed her friend's house without a jacket. She ran,
holding her hands under her arms. Her jacket had been bought with money
earned by working overtime, a result secured by the most persistent effort
and argument.

Now the jacket was gone, and the slack season coming. As five o'clock
approached, the girl's self-appointed guardian took her station at the
window to watch for the girl on her way home. She came skipping along,
slapping her arms to keep warm. She entered the house reluctantly in
response to the call, "Where is your jacket, Molly?"

"I ain't cold. I ain't a bit cold."

"Where is your jacket?"

"Really and truly, I ain't cold. I'm thin, but I don't feel the cold as
much as other girls. I ain't a mite cold."

It was impossible for the girl to stand still. She was shivering with cold,
and her teeth, which were beautiful, were chattering. After a time the
explanation was given.

There were five in family. The girl's mother, a stepfather about fifteen
years younger than the mother, a brother one year younger than the girl,
and a feeble-minded sister of fourteen. The girl was the only regular
wage-earner in the family. The brother was a worthless fellow, who bore
every evidence of degeneracy and rarely worked. The stepfather drank, and
worked only occasionally. Molly earned six dollars a week, except in the
slack seasons, two a year, when she earned about three dollars a week for
four weeks each time. She began working when she was fourteen, and had
never kept back one penny of her wages. Her mother had bought her new hats,
but in all her life no other new garment except the jacket had ever been
bought for her. She never asked any questions about the money, but she
supposed the rent was paid. When she reached home the night before
everything was on the sidewalk, and her feeble-minded sister was watching
them. The jacket was the only thing owned on which money could be raised;
it was pawned. "Molly, may I call on your mother?" A reluctant consent was
given.

The home now was in a rear basement, the ceiling just above the level of
the yard. The mother and husband occupied the bedroom; Molly and her sister
slept on a narrow lounge covered with Brussels carpet, every spring broken.
It was a series of humps. It was impossible to sit on it. In reply to a
question, the mother acknowledged that no provision was made to make it
more comfortable. The brother slept on the floor. The rooms were dirty and
overcrowded. Food was of necessity poor, and because of the mother's
indifference and ignorance, was poorer than it need have been.

This was what Molly received for six dollars a week. The moment the mother
knew who the visitor was, she began abusing the girl. One special cause of
offense was the keeping back of overtime money to buy a new jacket. She
evidently imagined that she did not get all the girl's money every week.
When it was pointed out to her that the new jacket had paid half a month's
rent, she refused to be mollified, because the money paid for it would have
paid the rent for a month and a half. Of course, this extra money would
have gone like the regular wages if it had been given to the woman.

The walls were covered with pretty advertising cards and pictures cut from
papers. Not a vulgar nor ugly picture was on the walls. "Who put up those
pictures?" "Molly. Shure, that's all she's good for when she's home,
a-cutting and putting up these things." This was one more charge against
the girl. Evidently the girl gave her wages, and gave them willingly; but
that ended her interest in her home and measured the mother's in her.

It was decided to move the family into one of the model tenements and
furnish a room for the girl and her sister, paying the difference in rent
for one year, to see what the result would be in health and morals in that
family. When the proposition was made one evening to Molly, her face
lighted and she emitted a sigh of perfect consent. But the light died out,
and an expression of almost self-pity supplanted it.

"No, I must not let you do it. It would be lovely to have a room for Katie
and me alone. I must not let you do it." She was silent for some minutes;
then, with eyes cast down, she said in a quiet voice that indicated that
persuasion was useless: "I know them houses. They're awful nice. I'd like
to live in them. They're awful particular. They won't let no noisy people
in. They make them move right out." Then slowly, with burning cheeks, she
said in barely distinct tones: "Mamma is noisy sometimes, and when she's
noisy she gets into fights with people. There ain't no use of moving in
there; they'd not let us stay. Then, Billy"--the stepfather--"and I fight.
I never speaks to him, excepts when he speaks ugly to Katie or mamma. He's
drunk a lot now, most all the time, and then he's ugly to them. He ain't to
me, 'cos he knows I'd break his head; but he is to them, and then I has to
shut him up. I ain't spoke to him since he struck mamma, just after they
was married."

"But your wages give him a home and food."

"Yes, I know it, but I can't help that, 'cos he's married to mamma and must
be where she is." There was silence again, and then the girl continued:
"Mamma didn't do it so much till she married him; she's worse now. I wish
I was dead;" and the head of many shades was buried with the limp,
"frowzled" feathers in the sofa cushion. "No, I can earn enough to keep
them where they are. I must not move; but it would be lovely," she added
with a sob.

A couple of weeks later she came in the evening. It was raining hard. After
a moment's silence, she announced, with shining face: "We have the
loveliest baby at our house, born last night week. I wanted to tell you
before, but I had to do the work night and morning. He's lovely." She
fussed at her pocket and brought out a pair of baby shoes of worsted. "I
got them with some money I earned overtime. You say I ought to get what I
want with that money." The eyes of the hostess followed the lines of
Molly's dress to her feet. Her swollen, purple foot was seen through the
broken upper of her shoe. Molly was looking with pride and love at the tiny
shoes on her knee. "I named the baby Willie, and I'm his godmother," she
added with pride, without the slightest conception of the relation between
"Billy" and "Willie."

"Billy? Oh, he's drunk; been drunk a week. I ain't let him in yet; I'm
goin' to wait until the baby's bigger and mamma's up. She'll let him in,"
she added, with disgust.

Matters grew worse with the advent of the new baby, for Molly had to fight
with her mother to get it cared for. At last it died, to Molly's pathetic
grief. The mother had consented to Katie's removal to an institution, where
she could receive care and training. Molly was persuaded she owed a duty to
herself. No impression was made until her mother had been arrested twice.
Then Molly consented to leave home. It was deemed best that she should
contribute part of the rent to insure her mother a home and to maintain a
natural human tie. Molly did this _for three years_. Then she married a man
controlling a good business. Molly is a quiet, devoted wife. She married a
man old enough to be her father. When the wisdom of this was questioned,
she said, with emphasis and a nod of her curly head: "No young man for me,
thank you. Look at Billy!"

It was Friday morning--a warm, sultry morning in August. The bell rang. A
mother in black and a young daughter of eighteen were in the
reception-room. The daughter had evidently been crying. "I've come to tell
yer that Annie can't go to the country to-morrow. She's sick'm. She's cried
all night. Her brother was discharged'm. He do be havin' a bad man for a
'boss.' He's discharged'm, and Annie can't go to the country with the girls
to-morrow. I can't spare her wages. It's all I got. Shure, if I could get
work in washin', or anything to do, I'd do it, but I can't'm. I'll look all
the week; and the boy'll get somethin', perhaps. She can't go this week;
will yer let her go next? Shure, the rent is due, and her wages is all I
got for three of us. Yer can go to work to-day, even if it be a bit late,
and yer can go next week to the country."

[Illustration: A COOKING CLASS OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.]

"Oh, mamma! the girls talk nothing but country. I can't go to-day," was the
sobbing response.

The girl did not go that summer. There was no room for her until September.
By that time the work at the factory had increased and not one girl could
be spared. Patiently Annie commented: "It wouldn't be any good if they
could spare me. My brother is out of work yet. He's awfully unlucky."

The quiet heroism of thousands of working girls can be appreciated only by
those who become familiar with their lives in the natural intercourse of
club life. There is, of course, the other type of girl--the girl who
insists on spending the major portion, if not all, of her wages for
clothes; who assumes no responsibility for the family, and who has conceded
to her the right to spend her money for clothes. She would make life most
uncomfortable if she were compelled to share what she earned, even when the
family live under conditions that make the home merely a place of
shelter--conditions that make even decency impossible. The fathers and
mothers seemingly have no rights that this type of girl feels she is bound
to respect. When such girls marry, the mothers will do the washing for
their daughters, hold the menial relation, and neither mother nor daughter
questions the justice of the relation. Sometimes the daughter will pay the
mother for doing the washing, "to," as she expresses it, "help her mother
out." Such families usually cannot be helped through any influence but the
evolution that comes through environment and neighborhood development.
There is a superficial difference in the social development of such parents
and children. The parents concede the higher position to their children,
and the children take it as a matter of right.

The wages of skilled workmen enable them to keep their children in school
until they are sixteen or seventeen years old, if the children will stay.
These fathers can support their families, but not dress them as they
desire. The girls go to work for the sole purpose of dressing better than
their fathers could dress them. This indulgence creates false standards,
and is a serious blot on the American working-man's life. It prevents
marriage. Both young men and young women understand that the wages of one
cannot buy luxuries for two that the wages used for one bought. The army of
clerks on small salaries increase yearly. This class, through association,
develop tastes and standards of living that make impossible the
establishment of homes on their incomes and at the same time the continued
indulgence of developed tastes. No type of family develops less that adds
to the wealth and attainment of the country than this type. The children
are selfish; they marry; they discover that the wages that bought clothes
to suit the extravagance of one is wholly inadequate to support a family.
Discouragement, friction, ennui follow, and life becomes a grind, without
hope, without inspiration. The second family slips backward, and it is but
two generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves, with this difference,
that the arms covered by the shirt sleeves of the third generation lack the
muscles of the first, as the spirit lacks its moral fiber. It is this type
of family that keeps alive the most vexing of social problems. The skilled
working-man's family, the family of the small salaried men, present the
most difficult problems not only in the use of money, but the use of time.
Their daughters are often far more helpless than the daughters of men of
wealth. During their school days, except in the exceptional home, they are
not trained to do housework; do not learn to sew. As soon as school days
end, office or store work begins, and then there is no time to learn the
household arts. If in these homes the money-saving value of time were
taught, independence and freedom impossible in wage-earning would be
secured; the standards of life would be the essentials, not the
non-essentials, that so often rob life of what is best and most valuable.

Hundreds of girls become wage-earners because they dislike housework.
Anything else is preferable. Dean Gill, of Barnard College, New York, in an
address recently delivered, said there were three types of college girl:
The girl who never could learn any of the arts of home-making. She advised
that that girl be allowed to choose a career, and that men make no attempt
to interfere with it. The girl who had in her the latent qualities that, if
developed, would make her a home-maker. Such a girl it might be wise to
keep home for one year between Sophomore and Junior year. And the third
girl had the home-making gifts so well developed naturally that no amount
of college training would modify them. This classification holds good of
the daughters of men earning small salaries, wages, and no wages.

As the Domestic Science department is developed in our public schools, the
homes of working men of the better class will benefit by it. This distaste
of housework will disappear, because it will have gained a place equal in
value to geography and mental arithmetic, and these will have value because
a knowledge of them adds to the home-maker's ability.

There are homes of thrift and order where all must be wage-earners; homes
where the claims of parents on the wages of children are conceded. There is
a bank account, but on this the children have no claim, no matter how much
of their wages may have gone into it, or how much educational opportunity
they may have lost because its demands have been paramount. When the
children marry they establish homes without any or very little help from
their parents. They do not expect it. Home, food, clothes have been given
them; all claims have been met. They are as free as their parents when they
began. Usually there is a gift of a piece of furniture or table linen; but
money to start a new bank account is not expected. Without doubt, much of
the inability to use money to prepare for future emergencies is due to the
fact that financially the new home-makers from these homes are infants in
practical experience. The marvel is that they keep homes as well as they
do, and meet the future as well as they do without planning to meet it.

The second generation of this type of thrifty families rarely carry the
habits of thrift of their parents into their home-making. The new financial
freedom is a novelty, and presents in itself enjoyment that the new
home-makers use. Here and there is a recovery from the danger of
extravagance by a young couple, but the recovery is rarely so complete as
to repeat the restrictions that the thrift of the parents compelled in
their homes. The new generation demand better clothes and better furniture.
Food and rent are regulated to meet these demands.

One stands appalled sometimes at the degree of vitality, the hope and the
cheerfulness that prevail in the homes protected only by the muscles of one
man; what they can buy representing all that the home may have. There is no
spirit of recklessness; there is no failure to comprehend the slight
protection a husband and father can give, though he be skillful; but there
is a sublime confidence in the future. Though familiar with suffering, if
not personally, then sympathetically, with full knowledge of what sickness
and death bring to other unprotected homes, such men and women, and there
are thousands, live from youth to and through age cheerfully, happily,
without any financial safeguard except against Potter's Field. This weekly
insurance is kept up; the family live cheerfully, gayly, sometimes to the
end.

[Illustration: A MEETING OF NEIGHBORS.]

One result of doling out small sums to young wage-earners, whether thrift
or necessity is responsible, is disastrous, especially disastrous for young
girls. It has seemed to the writer that if mothers and fathers could be
brought to a realizing sense of its dangers, they would endure hunger
rather than have their daughters exposed to it. After all, it could be
averted by making a division of the money spent for dress. Girls are often
dressed out of all proportion to the sums they earn, if a fair division of
their wages were made, if the dignity of the daughters was protected by any
degree of independence financially. Of course this disproportionate use of
money is due to false standards that will only be regulated when the people
on salaries learn to universally live true to the law of proportion in
their expenditures.

It seems to be a fixed idea that a girl is dependent on invitations from
young men for her social pleasures. If she is not invited, it is not only
her misfortune, but her fault; she should be more attractive. On the other
hand, the young man is scarcely any better off than the young girl
financially, yet he expects, and his world expects, that he shall bear, not
only his own social expenses, but those of at least one girl. His impulse
is to be chivalrous, for chivalry is not regulated by income nor deadened
by pennilessness.

It is oppressive at times to see how the lack of money prevents the natural
association of young men and women; how often the young men are forced to
give up the society of girls for this reason. Girls often unconsciously
force invitations. As one goes down the scale, the girls invite themselves,
where the young men have to bear the expenses. So small a matter as carfare
will make a girl thrust herself on a young man's care. The girl will not
resent indifference, even discourtesy and neglect, if only her aim is
accomplished. The young men suffer the reflex of this attitude of mind, and
their estimate of women is regulated by these misconceptions, and even
their manner as husbands is regulated by this conception of the relations
of the sexes, and wife and daughters suffer in consequence.

The higher up one goes in the social scale, the less evident is this
aggressiveness on the part of girls, and the more natural relation of man
as the suitor is apparent. As girls are brought more familiarly under the
guidance of women willing to discuss the financial relations that should be
maintained between the unmarried of both sexes, the more careful girls
become in permitting the expending of money by men for their social
pleasures; especially so where the limitation of a man's resources is
understood, or even suspected.

How to make mothers put their daughters in an independent position where
their pleasures are concerned is a very important and at the same time a
very difficult question. When it is a question, as it often is, of the very
necessities of life for a family and the allowing of money for the pleasure
of a fun-loving daughter, necessities bear down the scale, even of justice,
and dignity ceases to have value. For it must be remembered that the girl's
wages, used for her exclusively, would often allow the exercise of
independence in her social affiliations. This it is that makes Settlements
so important in our social life. Here boys and girls do meet on a platform
of independence, chaperoned naturally by those who know intimately the home
surroundings, the social standards, the limitations of life in the regions,
and all that creates environment, that most positive factor in the making
of character. The social attitude of the young people who grow up in
affiliation with the Settlements is found to differ greatly from that of
young people untrammeled by oversight or influence that develops dignity.

The influence of working-girls' clubs is positive in its effect on the
majority of the members. The girls are taught in the clubs directly and
indirectly. It is not only in the teaching of the home arts, but through
lectures, talks, books and contact with women of education. The members
often astonish those who know them best by their responses to their
opportunities. This mental development makes them critical. The men they
meet rarely have had their opportunities, and they suffer by comparison.
The young women often find they have larger interests and sympathies; far
clearer ideas of the responsibilities of life; are better equipped than the
men they meet. Every girls' club shows members who thus develop. Often they
will not marry. They are the support of one or both parents, now too old to
work; they help married sisters and brothers; they are the prop and stay of
all the halt and lame of their families; wiser and better guides for
growing nephews and nieces than their own mothers and fathers. Frequently
they are the most important helpers in club life, exerting a positive,
upbuilding influence. Yet one always grows sad when thinking of them. Not
thriftlessness, but unselfishness, may leave them penniless in old age.
There is no place for them. Rarely is there a corner to which they are
welcome in the tenement house; often even where there is love and gratitude
there may not be space. Floor space often regulates the expression of love,
where the heart may have unlimited space.

[Illustration: THE READING ROOM AT THE SETTLEMENT.]

The saddest figure in tenement-house life is the unmarried woman who can no
longer work and is dependent. In her effort to serve her people she may
have played the critic, and that is remembered when her service is
forgotten. It is this type of girl who by instinct refuses to accept
attentions that mean the spending of money by men who cannot afford it.
Their wages would, if used for themselves, have given social opportunities
that did not involve obligations, but family demands seemed to make such
use impossible. Sometimes the fun-loving sister will secure both shares.
One is taken to a home of her own; the other left to carry the family
burden, and no one questions why. If it is unanswered, it is attributed to
the lack of attraction in the unmarried sister.

There are homes in the tenements where the wages of the earners make a
family income, in which all share equally, independent of the amount
contributed. There is a bank account. It may be in the joint name of father
and mother, but it is far more commonly the unquestioned property of the
mother. The children look upon this as the protection of the parents from
dependence in old age, should it not be called upon by illness or
misfortune. Such families represent the highest moral development in
tenement-house life. The children have been trained to appreciate
educational opportunities, and school is through childhood an important
factor in life. When the wage-earning period comes, night-school advantages
are appreciated and used. When the work is chosen, some thought is given to
the promise of future wage-earning powers by the acquiring of skill in that
employment. The maximum wages possible at the present time is not the
controlling element in the decision. The future is not sacrificed to the
present. Such a home is kept, no matter how small, in a condition that
makes social life in it possible.

Hallways, street corners, store steps are not the only places for the
development of the social instincts of the members of such families. After
marriage the family is united, and home, though it be in the top of a
tenement, is the Mecca for children and grandchildren.

At the other end of the social scale in this world of workers is the
happy-go-lucky family. Here the system of financial management has its
faults, but much is found that is better than wisdom in money matters.
Spending extravagantly when there is money, going without cheerfully when
there is none. Why, the going without is scarcely treated even with the
respect of making it a subject of conversation. The habit of sharing when
any member has anything to share becomes a fixed habit, and "mine" and
"thine" are not in the family vocabulary. The result is a close and
inter-dependent family relation, of which the mother is the center. Often
you will find that this mother has never had any clothes that would do to
wear on the street, except to early Mass, if she is a Romanist, or that she
rarely goes to church, if a Protestant, because her clothes are not what
she calls "fit." Her life is the gospel of unselfishness, and she reaps the
reward of love. One may fret at the waste, resent the short-sightedness,
which means ignorance and shiftlessness; but there is so much pleasure in
these families, so much that means happiness in them, that one even learns
to forget the frets. They never grow beyond childhood in worldly wisdom,
and childhood is always attractive. It is so rich in promise. Happiness is
the cement of human life. Poverty does not change its power of holding the
members together through weal or woe. There is a common inheritance of
memories that never lose their power of cohesion where love and friendship
reign in families.

The people who do not know the lives of the working people can have no idea
of the extent to which the working men trust their wives. The majority of
working-men's wives are financially in a far more independent position than
the wives even of capitalists, where the wives are without an independent
income. Not only is the money given to the wives, but their use of the
money is unquestioned. There is a constant revelation of the unselfishness
of these men. Children will be overdressed, while the father will not even
be comfortable; but there is no complaint, for the pride of the father is
gratified. He, with the mother, has one standard--clothes. There are men
who say frankly that they would waste the money if it were in their care;
that their wives secure far better results than they could; that the
practice of having only carfare, at the most lunch money, reduces greatly
the much abused social habit of "treating." The married man who can
"treat," it is generally conceded, is not fair to his family; he keeps his
wages at their expense.

Sometimes the observer marvels at the infinite patience of many men. Their
wives drift. Neither money nor time is used for their families. A week's
loss of work, and there is debt; a day's sickness, and to its suffering is
added the knowledge that there is no money in reserve to meet this
emergency, even though the wages insure it. While knowing well the cause,
one resents the unjust conditions that control many marriages among the
young people of the wage-earning class. The young women rarely have the
knowledge that will enable them to do their share in establishing the home.
The young man contracting a marriage without the prospect of supporting a
home is condemned and his bride pitied; but there is little criticism if
she spends years--years that mean discomfort and waste--in learning to do
her part, if she ever learns.

[Illustration: AFTER SCHOOL AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]

The mental attitude of the wage-earners toward their income is confusing
and yet interesting. In reply to any question of wages, the maximum sum is
always given. The question of idle time does not enter into computations of
the year's possible income and necessary outlays. This holds good before as
well as after marriage. Work may last for only forty weeks of the year, but
the other twelve, even among intelligent wage-earners, sometimes are not
counted in their relation to income. This perhaps explains much that is
counted as thriftlessness. It is, in fact, a failure to apply arithmetic to
daily life.

After all is said, no one who is familiar with the income of the
wage-earning class can fail to see that the results obtained prove
conclusively that the use of money in the well-regulated home is a fine
art; that many working-men's wives could give post-graduate courses in the
use of money to women who consider they have the right to teach them. Even
waste and misuse are regulated by education and experience where there is
even a modicum of intelligence. The second conclusion is that thrift under
certain conditions is a vice that causes distinct deterioration of
character. It should be combated as vigorously as thriftlessness. It can
only be done by raising the standards of living; by creating other
standards of value than money.

But everywhere among the wage-earning people the independence of the wife
in money matters is apparent.

There are men who are niggardly and who hand out small sums daily, and
never recognize that the wife has a right to anything beyond food and
shelter, who grudgingly buy clothes when they must. These men are despised,
spoken of with contempt as not being good fathers or husbands, and their
wives are openly pitied. But the mass of working men place their wives in a
perfectly independent position by making them the absolute disbursers of
their incomes. The small shopkeepers, to all intents and purposes, treat
their wives as partners. The wives work with them, sharing their knowledge,
their responsibilities, and appear as joint owner in the bank account. The
wife usually is the safe until the money goes to the bank account.

When a wife is a good financial manager, she is the head of the house,
whose reign is never questioned. "Her children rise up and call her
blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her," though the Book of
Proverbs may be unknown. This financial independence of the wives of
working men develops the spirit of independence and aggressiveness that so
often disturbs and upsets the plans of the woman who would do them good,
and is the cause of the charge of ingratitude that is often made against
the women of the tenement-house regions. It is scarcely natural to develop
gratitude for efforts made in the wrong direction. Poverty has its degrees,
as has wealth. There are families living in tenements whose conditions
represent wealth when contrasted with that of their neighbors. One fact
remains. Both women do not need the same opportunities, the same help. The
student of the management of wages in a tenement-house home rapidly
acquires a spirit of humility. While everywhere there is waste, there are
times when money seems to buy double the amount that the student thought
possible. With the wage-earners' families, as with all others, the income
buys that which is most desired by those spending it. Choice is the master
of decision, even in necessities. What is needed in the wage-earner's
family is that education, that opportunity for development that will make a
choice of the highest things, those that will mean a body and mind so
nourished and cared for that moral resistance is the available capital of
every member of the family in time of need.




CHAPTER IX.

HOME STANDARDS.


The world knows two aspects of involuntary poverty: The one inseparable
from degradation; the other picturesque, appealing to the emotions, and
giving a field for the play of sympathetic activity that frequently
neglects to note the results it attains.

There are few who discern that poverty is a comparative term, and these do
not use the word in its financial sense wholly.

Those who know intimately the struggling, up-growing poor know that the
rich can never give the exquisite expression to love that life at this
level makes possible. Who would dream when looking at the Hercules, with
clothes and hands soiled by his daily labor, that he is the tender nurse of
wife and baby; that he is hurrying to a house cared for with joy. He will
wash dishes, cook, scrub the floor, walk the baby to sleep, and coddle and
pet a wife who from sheer loneliness and worry over work undone may be the
harder to please and quiet. All this, and perhaps, almost certainly, not
once will any terms of endearment be heard, and, strange as it may seem, no
kiss given. How one rebels and rejoices that love can be thus expressed!

When sickness enters the home of the poor man, money is not present to
relieve the able from personal service, often made more difficult through
ignorance. Pride shuts the door to charity and the burden is carried in
love. Those who know life at this level can never, never lose faith in the
Eternal love, for they see always, however disguised, the divine spark in
every human being. The silence of love thus expressed, the revelation of it
where least expected, makes the one who witnesses it conscious of what
power lies outside and beyond and above his own life, not witnessed to the
ear. Every day at this level of life in our great city it is proved to the
privileged that tenderness is the winning element in strength; that love
daily, hourly here proves its power of self-abnegation. Here, too, it fills
its function of inspiration. Days, weeks, months, years go by and the
burden of moral weakness is borne with the cloak of faith wrapped about its
fears. When so expressed, its loyal unconsciousness adds to its beauty and
makes it an inspiration to all who come into its presence as friends; the
lips voice its faith, the eyes alone reveal its fears even to friends.

[Illustration: THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS.]

The more intimately one comes into the home circle of the independent
wage-earners the more clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand
revealed. Life must be lived so simply, the interests of life are so
evident, that the value of words decreases; action expresses the heart
perfectly. The very services the children render each other train them for
the family life they will establish. The baby tended by an older brother
and sister learns to depend on them for care, and that dependence in turn
draws out a love and responsibility that could not have birth under any
other conditions. The child who finds that in pain, weariness, suffering, a
father and mother alone share its care; the elder children who see how
naturally sacrifices are made for them, how little the father and mother
value themselves, their ease, even their comfort, learn to value the love
in the home and depend on it, give love to it, that money to buy service
would bar out. The child who sees parents make sacrifices to enlarge his
opportunities for education, seeing him as a positive factor in his own
manhood, sees more than parental love in such sacrifices and stands in more
than the relation of child to parents.

At the level where charity and dependence are large factors in the home
life, the relation of parents to children is changed by their presence.
Art has given Charity the figure of a noble, benign woman, in the ample
folds of whose garments children are protected. Too often in life she wears
a short skirt, to make speed possible, suggesting in movements and voice
the need of nervines, when she does not seem to have taken the bandage from
the eyes of Justice for her own use, while neglecting to borrow her scales.
Where Charity is the welcome guest, instinct is greater than intelligence
in the parental relation. The home tie is slight; children become shrewdly
self-dependent, physical hardships are more easily borne, and life is often
a mere matter of shelter and food; the animal alone is kept alive. This
represents a social level as remote from that of the independent
wage-earner as is represented between the home's standards and requirements
of a family living on fifteen hundred dollars a year and that of a family
living on fifteen thousand dollars a year.

We use the word poor so carelessly that there is confusion where absolute
misapprehension has not developed as to the character of the largest, most
receptive, most responsive and most responsible class of citizens of New
York. Politically they have been neglected, until the Citizens' Union gave
them a formative part in political decisions. Here and there a score or
more independent working men would be found in political organizations,
because of an active political conscience, always hoping for better days,
when the city would be given its imperative rights without regard to the
State or national political complications. It was a hopeless fight, and has
sent into the erratic political parties the majority of the independent
working men now in them. The schemes of the politicians disgusted them, and
new principals seemed to be the only hope for the clean-minded mind who did
its own thinking.

The great mass of these independent, self-respecting, intelligent
working-men voters were hunted for at election, but were not counted worthy
to take a place in the councils of the politically active because they were
feared. The Citizens' Union recognized their value and power, and they have
come into their own as citizens. No greater service have the Settlements
done the city than discovering this unused element in political power and
centering it where it is recognized as the saving power in municipal
government. These men stand at the head of the homes that reveal
love--tender, protecting inspiring love--serving in unspoken unselfishness
to the largest degree.

Thousands of mothers can testify to the cheerful sharing by fathers in the
household burdens after a day of hard work; of cheerful going without
necessities on the part of a father to give more than necessities to the
children. Thousands of husbands and fathers will note the unselfishness and
wisdom of a mother in caring for and enlarging the opportunities for the
children, who are the common objects of love and ambition, and the
confidence and love of the husband grows with the years. To the observer
there is at the same time no more inspiring and depressing revelation than
the parental love which asks nothing for itself, but all that life can give
for the children, the visible expression of their mutual love. Often there
is no thought given to a future of possible dependence. Wages do not make
possible the care of the children at the standards of the parents, the
buying of an environment that the experience of intelligent parents demands
for them, and a bank account. The last is desirable, the first demand
imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be thrown out when the life
currents are running toward the rocks of want and dependence. Nothing is
kept back for personal use by these fathers and mothers. Sometimes this
very unselfishness, when unregulated by wisdom, leaves them lonely and
forsaken in old age. Those to whom they have given their lives have by the
gift been placed in social positions that seemingly bar out the parents who
made achievement possible. Even in the loneliness of old age the parents
rejoice at the success and forget and forgive the separation. The end for
which they worked has been attained, their children are successful, and
they still count themselves nothing compared with their children.

It is the independent wage-earners who make the largest contributions to
our wealth, commercial greatness, national prestige; yet the world,
counting wealth by dollars, classifies these as poor. They are as far
removed from the incapable, the degraded, the vicious, the dependent, the
ignorant--who provide the themes for books--as far removed from the
worthless, the deficient, the mentally, morally weak, so familiar to the
people of wealth who give money or time, or both, to lessen their miseries,
as they are in standard and ambition from the people counted wealthy. The
cost of floor space on which to make a home may make them neighbors of the
people who are the problems of a great city; they may live in regions that
are the laboratory of the student of social and political conditions, but
they live behind closed doors, bring up their children, so far as they can,
uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and overcome their environment to a
surprising degree. There is no word to distinguish them from those who make
capital of their poverty, and the world loses much because of the lack of a
term that would express the class who are the hope of this nation, whose
children are the promise of its established greatness.

The very limitations that small incomes impose on husbands and wives,
strangers to social ambitions, bring into the relation an independence and
_camaraderie_ that possibilities of wealth would bar out. When a father and
mother have one object in life, their children, they have no personal
ambitions; their minds run in the same groove; they live of necessity a
unit. When the aim is to give their children a better education than they
had; to place them on a firmer foundation in the wage-earning world than
the one on which the father and mother started; to save the children from
the contaminating world as they had to meet it, there of necessity is a
welded interest that bars out a world of distractions. The world in which
such fathers and mothers live may seem narrow, but the smallness of the
world makes the companionship the closer. As one gets into the inner circle
of these homes, the small part that wealth plays in happiness is realized,
and the comprehension of what constitutes essentials is gained. The man who
knows the measure of his wage-earning power does not waste his nerve and
vitality to earn more; the family grow to have fixed habits of expenditure,
and content is attained that the social strugglers never know. The victim
of nervous prostration is not found in the working-man's world; the fixed
rate of wages relieves the nerves, but exercises the muscles and the
balance of health is kept. The exceptions to this happy attainment are
those whose mental or moral natures have not been adjusted to the happy,
even life of the skilled, sober, industrious, thrifty working-man's family
in New York.

The world of wealth would find itself rejected if it brought with it into
the wage-earning world its moral standards, the rules of conduct are so
simple in this world, the standards so elemental. An aldermanic candidate
who in his own world is not counted ignorant, during the campaign of 1901
conceived the idea, which he had never held before, though this was the
fourth time he had appealed to the suffrages of the people, that the women
were a factor in political success. He decided to call on the wives,
mothers and sisters of the voters in his district. It would be interesting
to know his conclusions after his experience. He must have gained wisdom by
his experiment, and heard some unwelcome truths. He announced to one of his
hostesses that he thought if he called and showed himself they might see in
him something that would persuade them that their husbands, fathers,
brothers, or sons ought to vote for him. It would have been interesting to
have seen his face when more than one hostess assured him that, having seen
him, she felt bound to urge her husband to vote for the other candidate. Or
when he was told by others that he must understand how certain he was of
defeat, or he would not appeal to women. Still more interesting it would
have been to see him when an outraged wife let down the flood-gates of her
wrath because she blamed him for the periodic lapses from industry and
sobriety of which her husband was guilty. The better class of voters of
this candidate's party resented angrily the man calling on their wives. The
root cause of the indignation of the men and women it was found was that
this man dared to call when the husbands were not at home. In the world of
work there is no place for social life in the day-time, and it argues ill
for those who indulge in it. The Metropolitan Opera House in the evening
would so shock the working man and his wife that they would never recover
respect for those who frequent it. A high-necked lace dress with a low
lining, worn in the evening by one from the other world to an East Side
party, brought out this comment: "Oh! yes, she's all right. They all do it,
the women; but isn't it awful?"

The moral standards for men and women in the world of work are the same.
The immoral man is despised and avoided by the women. A woman who should
maintain the smallest degree of friendship or acquaintance with a man known
to be immoral would be avoided by her neighbors; she would be made to
realize at once the cause of her offending.

A silly, pretty little woman, whose husband at times was cruel and brutal,
ran away from him with another man. No one in the neighborhood could
remember when such a thing had happened before, and the neighborhood
resented it as a disgrace. The husband's brutality was well known; he was
despised and ignored by the better element of men in the neighborhood. Had
the wife gone alone, she would have had the support of a respectable
minority, but now the husband was the object of deep sympathy. When the
wife was found, and declared she would gladly starve with the partner of
her disgrace--and there was a fair prospect at the time that she
would--"than have the best in the land with my husband; he has kicked me
out for the last time," she was cast out of the books of remembrance in
that neighborhood. "She married him for better or worse," was the measure
of a wife's duty among these wives and mothers.

The admiration of the explorer into this world of work and homes grows with
the years for the people who make it, as indignation grows at the
misunderstanding of its limitations, its possibilities, its beauty and
greatness. For Matthew Arnold gave the true definition of greatness when he
said it was the obstacles overcome, not his attainments, that made a man
great. The explorer makes many discoveries--some that stimulate and
surprise, some that puzzle and depress. The silence of love in this world
is a revelation. Whether the terms of endearment are not in the language of
this world, or whether the want of leisure and privacy stifle them, it is
difficult to decide. Perhaps it is that the language of love is learned in
a mother's arms; that when her service to her child must be physical, when
it is but one of a thousand things demanding her care and thought--when her
muscles must serve unceasingly--she has no time to express the love that
strengthens them by words. It may be that the language of love does not
grow within crowded walls, and that it is forced to express itself in
service.

[Illustration: A BIT OF OLD GREENWICH.]

A man ranking high in the intellectual world once took for his theme, when
preaching to a company of wage-earners and their wives, "Home Life." It was
a rare inspiration that moved him to point out how much was lost to the
home where the verbal expression of love was never heard. He said no higher
inspiration to work his best could be given a man than his wife's good-bye
kiss in the morning; nor a charm that would drive away care, worry and
exhaustion more perfect than her welcoming kiss when he returned from his
work at the close of the day. He pictured the feelings of the man who found
his wife silent and unresponsive when he entered the house; who answered
his query as to what was the matter with "Nothing." In his audience was a
wife whose faithfulness and intelligence had made her husband far more than
he could ever have been without her, a fact of which he was fully
conscious; he was not allowed to forget it. This wife was deeply impressed
by what she heard. She was ignorant because of lack of opportunity,
untruthful because she was ignorant; she could not see the relations of
things. Vindictive, because in her moral code you must resent any wrong,
real or fancied, by an action that goes far deeper than that of the
offender in its effect. Anything else would be an evidence of weakness. She
expressed her contempt for one who would forgive an injury, and prided
herself that she never did. She had enthusiasm, could inspire others, and
proved herself as capable in leading them to do wrong as to do right. She
was the power in her home, and established its standard of right and wrong
that gave motive to the lives of her children. This night the speaker
lifted the veil. There was something that belonged in the home that she
alone could put there, and she had not. She resolved that she would part
from and meet her husband with a kiss. It is best to let her tell her own
story:

"I just made up my mind I'd do it." No girl of eighteen giving a confidence
of a love affair could have shown more embarrassment than this mother of
wage-earning children. "I did not know how I would do it, or what ----
would say, but I just made up my mind I would kiss him when he came home. I
thought about it all the next day. Late in the afternoon I made up my mind.
Of course, I could not kiss him before the children. When it was most time
for ---- to come home, I sent them each on an errand that would keep them
away until long after ---- got home. I had the table all set and the supper
cooking. At last I heard him come up the stairs. My land! How I trembled! I
stood so that when the door opened he would not see me, and then I just
kissed him before I had a chance to think. He staggered back, he was so
surprised." She waited while an expression that should have been habitual
changed her shrewd, hard face into a loving woman's. "But I never saw him
look so happy," she continued. "I made up my mind I would kiss him every
day when he came home. I could not kiss him in the morning, for the
children were all there," she added decidedly; "but I can always send the
little ones on errands at night."

Perhaps it was three weeks later that she told of the climax. "I had a
toothache all day; I was tired and cross, for I had been washing. I stood
by the fire, making the hash. Kittie was setting the table, when ----
opened the door. I did not look up. He stood in the door a minute; then he
asked, 'What's the matter, Jennie?' 'Nothing.' I knew I said it cross. I
looked up then. ---- looked so disappointed that I thought he'd cry. I just
forgot the children, and right before them I kissed ---- twice. I wish you
could have seen his face. I burst out laughing when I looked at the two
children. They stood staring at us with their mouths wide open. Do you know
what I did? I kissed each of them. I don't believe I've kissed either since
they were babies. I think they told the big ones in the front room when
they came from work." This experiment in love-making did not continue. ----
came home drunk one night, and for punishment the experiment was dropped
and never resumed. While it lasted, it had a most harmonizing effect on
the whole family, and one wondered if it had been begun earlier, when the
habit could have been easily fixed, what would have been the result.

The mother, from a worldly point of view, has been most successful. The
children are in positions where skill is required, and wages seem to depend
on health only. Yet they are not popular; are selfish and unsympathetic.
They point to their own success as the reason why every family should
succeed. The family has moved into new environment, establishing relations
that have placed it several rounds higher than the level at which the
home-making began; but it has no fixed place in the social world. The
combined income of the five wages equals at times two thousand dollars a
year.

Not every wife in this world of silent love is encouraged as this wife was.
Another, a gentle, quiet woman, without children, thought she would try.
"He sit so still when he came home. I bought a flower and put it on the
table. I have what he like best for supper, and I wait. I listen over the
banister. When he come near our flight, I slip back and wait in the room,
leaving the door open so he can see. When he close the door I go up to him,
put mine arms around his neck and kiss him. He take my arms, shove me back
and say: 'What the matter mit you? You crazy?'" The woman was crying. The
three friends sat silent a moment, and then one said: "You haf no
children," and the wife nodded. That was her explanation, and theirs.

Perhaps no greater charm prevails in this world of wage-earners than the
attitude toward motherhood. There will be found here and there the young
woman who rebels against it, who may risk life rather than assume the care
of a baby. When one goes back of this rebellion there is always found the
influence of some older woman who has other ambitions, clothes, pleasure;
who influences, or tries to influence, the young married women she meets; a
woman who will even talk freely to girls against motherhood. There is in
this world of workers the strong active public sentiment against childless
women that more than counteracts this influence, and babies are welcomed
when there is nothing but love to greet them, not much more to feed them or
clothe them; but they are welcomed. The training of the children--natural,
not acquired--to be fathers and mothers has doubtless a far-reaching effect
in keeping this natural attitude of mind toward parenthood.

We get up a lot of wasted sentiment about the little mothers and fathers,
not seeing that the offices are fitting them to meet a future when all
that they learn in the care of baby brothers and sisters will make their
lives easier as fathers and mothers. Often the only opportunity they have
for expressing affection is the little baby given to their care.

How well one must know this part of the wage-earning world before it is
possible to appreciate the fact that the boy is being trained by "his baby"
for that future when he will share with the mother of his child its care.
It is a constant revelation to find how intelligent the young men at this
level are about children, and how frankly and unconsciously they will
express it and condemn the ignorant or careless treatment of a child. The
relation of the wage-earning children to the little children is paternal
often. The little ones know that the elder ones work and care for them, and
they render an obedience that is often amusing. With sisters this takes
another form. If the elder girl has ideas and tastes, especially if she has
skill, she will often entirely decide how the younger children shall dress;
often the younger children would not be at all satisfied with clothes the
elder girls did not select and design. Here again will be found a
half-maternal attitude that secures obedience and regulates privileges;
that sometimes ignores the rightful authority in the home. The young girl
who has an elder sister working and secures work with her is considered
very fortunate. Two sisters are known, now past middle life. One is quite a
handsome woman, the other plain. The handsome sister is the younger; she
never, when she was a wage-earner, went through the streets alone. The
elder sister, when they did not work together, escorted the younger one
back and forth to her work. Now, the mother of three children, nothing
could persuade her to go on the streets alone beyond the corner store. Her
husband, in a city department on a small salary, always attends her in
shopping expeditions, and all social engagements are made with respect to
his hours of freedom. She receives a wealth of love, and tenderness, and
protection. Selfish? Yes, till one wonders at the blindness of those who do
her homage.

[Illustration: A LITTLE FATHER.]

Once a very sensible wife and mother, whose intelligence and devotion are
raising the family many degrees above that of the generation preceding her
and her husband, said: "I shall watch my children. My mother let one of my
sisters exact far more than her share of wages. She coaxed or cried, or
both, until she got what she wanted. The rest of us gave in, because we
would not worry mother; you see that, now we are all married, she expects
us to save her from worry and work; we have to; she cannot get along." In
a moment she continued: "Haven't you seen it, that in every large family
there is one who gets more and gives less than the others?" A statement
profoundly true, but not confined to any one social level.

Among the discoveries the explorer into this world makes is that life is
full of compensations. One learns to overlook bad housekeeping, when it is
discovered that a cross, impatient word is never spoken by the
house-mother; that the children are the companions of the mother; that no
one else is so attractive; that she is never too busy to listen to anything
that interests them. One learns to forgive the needlessly shabby dressing
of children, when it is discovered that they are well nourished and cared
for, and that the husband and father never fails to declare that his wife
is the best cook in the city and always has his meals on time. Usually this
mother is fat, full of fun, and laughs as though tears were not in the
world.

Order, cleanliness and economy do not appeal as cardinal virtues when it is
found that there is no room for the children in the house, no money to buy
them the smallest pleasure where these over-estimated virtues predominate.
It is found usually that the worry of maintaining standards that ignore
the rights of the family, and to which they have been sacrificed, have
seared the mother's head and heart, and she no longer responds to the
maternal emotions; she becomes the victim of her own habits and cannot
reform. Perhaps it is this type of woman who creates the most barren home;
the one that is quite as prolific a source of supply to the saloons and the
streets as that of the degenerate housekeeper out of whose life spiritual
impulse has departed, and into which ideals and ambitions were never born.

It is difficult at times to decide whether to laugh at or resent the
criticisms one often hears of the extravagances of the poor. When one
becomes familiar with the demands for rent, coal, shoes, for clothes that
must be worn to work and school; for the things the cost of which cannot be
put below a certain sum--food always can be regulated--and compares these
fixed charges with the income available, the management of money in the
independent working man's family amounts to genius, and it must take
generations of economists to produce it.

Unfortunately, in New York emphasis is laid on clothes. Extravagance in
dress is the habit of the city. The people seen in the streets, in the
stores, in public conveyances, show a singular uniformity in clothes; this
is as true of men as of women. The differences are in manners and English.
The spirit of the land is as yet materialistic, and the democratic spirit
shows itself in the outward forms. The tailor-made gown was not looked upon
as a regenerator of æsthetic standards, but it has proved that. Its
simplicity and durability has released money that formerly was used in
useless trimming. The ready-trimmed hat is also a lever in throwing the
scale in the right direction.

The attention to school decoration of recent years has given new standards
for the home. The wage-earning world grows more harmonious in its demands
on wages; the home now makes its demands for decoration that the workers
obey. Signs outside of tenement houses renting suites of four rooms for
twenty and twenty-five dollars per month announce: "Burlaped halls; parlors
in white and blue;" or, "Tiled halls, open gas grates, fancy chandeliers."
The men who hire these apartments earn from fifteen to twenty-five dollars
a week or more. Thousands of American working men pay these rentals to save
their children from the environment inseparable from the surroundings that
must be endured if a fair proportion of their wages were used for rent. One
grows to reverence the courage that enables a husband and wife, with only
one pair of hands earning the home needs, to assume such rents. No higher
evidence of the manhood and righteous ambition of the American citizen
could be given than this: that he places his all to secure for his children
a home that is reasonably protected; that offers opportunities for
cleanliness and privacy. Renting a room to a lodger will sometimes make
less demands on a father's wages for rent; sometimes the rent is assumed in
the hope of securing lodgers, and then the struggle is pathetic, but borne
because the children must not grow up in a less desirable neighborhood. If
one were asked for the standard by which to measure the civilization of
each family in the wage-earning world, the reply would have to be, "Rent."
It at once makes the most and the least return; it is the tyrant which
makes or mars the home life. When a family of eight, having a combined
income of thirty-six dollars a week, are content to live in three rooms,
one knows about what to expect in social standards, and how many
generations it will take to raise the home level. When a family of
six--five wage-earners--who began life at almost the homeless level,
gradually come into a combined income of two thousand dollars a year, it is
not to be expected that its standards of needs will be those of a college
graduate on the same income. Often no member of the family can read
readily. School life was, especially for the elder children, an
intermittent one, and truth did not regulate the beginning of wage-earning
of any of the children. The younger children probably warred against school
long before fourteen years of life gave them freedom. There is natural
intelligence, a certain manner acquired through observation, but no
standard of intellectual life. Their very intelligence makes such families
conscious of their shortcomings, and it is this consciousness that leads to
the aggressiveness of manner that is so offensive, so often mistakenly
called the American manner. It is the manner that is due to awakened
consciousness which in the next generation will know when to wear evening
dress, if not how.

The use of money in such families is for show. It would be counted
extravagant to buy a book, or a ticket to an oratorio or a concert to hear
the best music. It would in such a family be counted useless to train the
younger children to wage-earning by education. The heads of the family will
be hospitable where it counts as showing how much more they have than the
others in their world. They receive from their world what snobbishness
receives everywhere. Snobbishness, on the whole, is not common even where
the income would remove the family from a tenement-house environment. The
uncertainty of work, and the absolute dependence of the worker on wages,
make snobbishness dangerous; that often proves a boomerang their
observation shows.

[Illustration: A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.]

The spirit of helpfulness may not find so free a field of operations when
wages are two dollars and a half and over a day, but it is in readiness.
Sickness in a neighbor's family will show that it has not been lost because
of prosperity, but it is less lavish; there is dawning consciousness that
self-preservation is the first law of nature; that home has the first right
to strength and thought; that only the surplus is available for the world
of friends. The same thriftlessness which makes a family accept charity
without question is the cause of their generosity. As the sense of
responsibility develops, the observer discovers a reserve in the giving of
either their money or their strength to those about them; kindness abounds,
but generosity is regulated as one goes up the scale in the world of
wage-earners. Not only that, but in the direst need the needy, as one goes
up the scale, regulate the degree of freedom given the closest friends. It
often borders on the tragic, the suffering borne in silence, and revealed
often when the time for help is passed.

This division of the people into rich and poor without gradations and
without a comprehension of the standards and needs that make new worlds up
and down the scale, has had a serious effect on the home life, the church
life of the people, the political life of the people. The churches have
driven out the very people in the tenement-house regions who needed them
and whom they needed.

Corrupt administration has imposed burdens on the homes which for a time
the voters in turn felt powerless to lift. The independent wage-earner
found his hope of political recognition in allegiance to the political
machines. The leaders, his inferiors often mentally, and still more surely
morally, were at least approachable and familiar, and the man who made his
own life found too often that only in the political circle of interest was
he the equal of those who led. Here there was no manner that expressed
condescension or superiority. His own language was spoken; he was at home.
That these men allowed themselves to be used was the natural result of the
habit of indifference to the real issues in a municipal campaign so common
in New York. When the burdens of a corrupt administration pressed on the
homes; when the leaders for righteous government acknowledged by appealing
to the makers of this country, the plain people, that they were an integral
part of the city's government, they responded, and by their response
overthrew the corrupt government that the indifference of all classes had
helped to make powerful.

The century opens well. Capitalist and wage-earner sit at the same board,
having equal voice in the plans for redeeming the city from partisan
machine control.

As one thinks of the change, one sees that the evils that disgraced New
York were due to the indifference of the millionaires and the honest
working men. It is the response of the political conscience of both to the
need of the city that has been its redemption; its only sure protection is
the activity of that conscience three hundred and sixty-five days of each
year in all the years to come.




CHAPTER X.

WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?


It took years for the evils of political machines to make life unbearable
in New York. Not until the tremendous evils it imposed on child-life were
given emphasis did the public sentiment of the city find intelligent
expression--voice the moral conscience of the whole people. That dishonest
administration of the city government imposed burdens on the home of the
poor man no intelligent person disputed; but few knew how heavy the burdens
or how far-reaching the effects on character. The people who suffered most
were, in the very nature of things, the ones who could not see these
influences, or estimate truly the degrading effect on character. The people
who resented the conditions that made life harder in the tenements; who
resented the environment which made the bringing up of children in
innocence, integrity, and decency often impossible, were those who were in
the minority. Hopelessness of overcoming the evils made some voters the
forgers of their own chains.

Newspapers gave columns to the exposure of the evils of the political
methods which made individuals rich at the cost of the homes of the city,
especially the homes of the poor. But the phase of this influence that was
most degrading could only be learned by living in the regions, one of the
people, suffering with them the burdens dishonesty imposed.

When college-trained men and women established their homes in the regions
of the tenements, making friends with the people, associating freely with
them, especially with the young people and the children, they discovered
that the worst evil with which the people were contending was the constant
lowering of the moral standards due to the influence of the political
organization that seemed to regulate even the right of the people to earn a
living. It was but a step from fear to favor; but a little time before the
man out-weighed the principle; Justice became the hand-maid of "pull," and
the people living wholly under the environment corrupt political power
created, knew no government but that of the "leader" and the man who
represented him. To trade votes was no disgrace, for it meant a share in
the perquisites that political power held. These men and women of trained
intelligence saw that the corrupting of the moral standards of the people
was a far greater evil--an evil that was of far greater moment to the
whole people than the maladministrations that affected their physical
being, though it led to death.

It was the revelations the Settlement workers were able to make to a
half-informed community of wealth and trained intelligence that led to the
redeeming of the city. It made the active combination of wealth and poverty
that brought into the political arena the dormant consciences that created
in 1901 the Apotheosis, New York redeemed, that is the justification of
democracy to the world.

The iniquity, ignorance and indifference that create and maintain a system
of municipal administration based on the theory that politics is a
profession, and each promoter the architect of his own fortune, to be built
at the expense of the citizens, is the reflection of the character of the
citizens. The system is never the product of one man's brains, nor does its
growth ever begin at the top. It begins always in the smallest political
unit, where the man who wishes the office in the gift of that unit stands
closest to the people. The bargaining for votes begins there. The number of
exchanges of votes for favors and places successfully accomplished makes
the "boss," the man who represents law and order; who is judge, and jury,
and keeper of the jail to those who do his bidding. As the political units
develop their bosses--"leaders," in voters' parlance--the system grows
until the chain is complete, and each political henchman, in the order of
his importance, takes his share of the people's money. The perquisites
reach millions before the thousands are distributed that enables the leader
to pose as the all-pervading friend to the district in time of need.

The political units where this system of government in the interest of the
"boss" have their strongest hold are the best evidences of the moral
degeneracy that follows. Here the liquor saloons flourish, the headquarters
of the "leader" and his cohorts, used in the order of rank in the system,
from the gayly lighted, silver-bedecked, mirror-lined bar-room to the
smoky, dirty, vilely kept den where those gather who have no use in life
but to vote according to orders and work for the political leader's
entrenchment. These saloons represent the primary school and the university
of the voters of the district. They represent all the educational and
recreative opportunity of most of the adults. They establish the habits of
thinking for the majority of the people, for they are the lyceum where all
questions are discussed that interest the people. The most interesting is
how to get wages, as it is the most important. The common struggle creates
common bonds of sympathy. All principles go down before the concrete,
understandable fact that if the "boss" is beaten, work will cease for
neighbor, friend, and friend's friend. Each man learns through every course
in this training school of citizens that the paramount duty of each voter
is to keep the "boss" in power. It means wages, or the hope of wages, under
the least strenuous of employers, the city. Men work hard for the system,
not because the moral nature of many of them is not in revolt against the
system, but because the keeping of a home for wife and children is at
stake. Often the voter's necessities, his ignorance often, his rebellion
against wealth often, his unrest, undermine his moral nature, blind his
intelligence, and he forges the chains that bind him in slavery to a system
that will cast him aside, and refuse him a reason when there is no use for
him. The voter may work during an election campaign half knowing that to
secure another worker in the interests of the political system the place he
holds has been promised to another after election. This fear and this hope
enters the homes; women and children are educated under the moral
degradation that enslaves husbands, sons, brothers, friends, lovers. The
standards of morals are established even in childhood by the working of the
systems of political machines. There is one measure of morals, _success_.
What succeeds is right.

[Illustration: TAKING THEIR TURN IN THE YARD AT THE SETTLEMENT.]

A small house was hired, through the generosity of several women, for the
purpose of providing a place for recreation and social opportunity for a
number of Christians--that is, people not Hebrews--left in a thickly
settled Hebrew district. These Christians, a mere remnant, resented the
opportunities offered the Hebrews, and while they might have availed
themselves of them, they would not, so strong was the race prejudice.
Shortly after the house was opened a delegation of boys appeared asking for
the use of the large room for a boys' club. The privilege was given on the
conditions that one of the workers interested in the house should have the
privilege of visiting the room freely when the club was in session; that
the club should pay twenty cents per month for the use of the room; that it
should be limited to twenty members for three months. Before the first
month had passed, it was decided that unless the club would accept a
director, it was a waste of the space and light to let these boys use the
room. They called themselves a debating and literary club. They knew
nothing of literature naturally and less of debating. They were told that
they must accept a director, a man who would instruct them in parliamentary
law, guide them in debate and suggest subjects for study, or they must
give up the room. They were very angry, but finally decided to accept the
director. Their constitution provided for an election every month, a
provision which kept them in a turmoil all the time. When the majority were
convinced of this, and voted that officers should be elected every three
months, the dissenting minority withdrew to form a new club, to meet
somewhere else. Two weeks later, on club night, the bell rang. The leader
of the minority, who had been elected president of the new club, asked if
they might come back. They did not like the place where they met. After a
conference with the original club, it was decided that, if they chose to
come back as members of the club and pay their dues--three cents per
week--they might come back. The conditions were accepted, and the seceding
minority were to be reinstated as members of the original club on the next
meeting night. As the petitioner was leaving, he turned innocently to the
director and said: "Say, we've elected a couple of new fellows. They can
come in, can't they?" The club consented conditionally on the "new fellows"
being peaceable. The next meeting night came. The bell rang. In order to do
full honor to the returning prodigals, the president went to the door.
There was a rush and a scramble; the eight boys who withdrew, followed by
twenty-two others, crowded into the room and demanded an election at once.
They declared they were in the majority now, and had a right to the
presidency for one of their own number. It was impossible to eject them,
had it been wise. The question was postponed for one week and an arbitrator
selected.

When the next meeting night came, some of the new recruits had dropped out
and their places had been taken by older boys. The original members, who
had maintained the club, were told to sit together and keep absolutely
quiet. The constitution declared that no boy was a member of the club who
did not pay an initiation fee of five cents; this included the first
month's dues. The first strange boy was asked: "Have you paid your
initiation fee?" The leader, a boy not fourteen, sprang forward and pressed
a five-cent piece in the boy's hand, saying: "Pay it now. Joe's the
treasurer." The cue had been given him, and he proceeded to give out
nickels to the new boys, urging them to "pay Joe quick." During this scene
another of the receding minority took his position in front of the door to
prevent any boy leaving the room with the money. The performance was
stopped; the opulent small boy, who it was evident was buying votes for the
presidency, was told to gather up his nickels. The recruits were told,
after an explanation, why they must leave, and to their credit be it
recorded some of them resented the position in which they had been placed
and promised the misleading leader an unhappy next day before they left. It
was then decided that the twelve members who had constituted the majority
should ballot individually for the eight who had seceded, as though they
had never belonged to the club. It is unnecessary to say that the boy who
made the trouble was rejected. Not one of those boys was fifteen years old,
yet they had learned and understood the method of the political
organizations of the region. Their elders, those they loved, used these
methods, and succeeded by them in getting place and power. The man who
succeeded in sharp practice in politics was the "boss." The man who was
beaten was not smart. The measure of morals was success, not methods used
to attain that success.

A woman's club, organized several years before, used this house. The
husbands of several of them organized a men's club, and met in the house
one evening in the week. Several of those men were affiliated with the
political organizations of the district; some held positions under the city
government through these affiliations.

When the Citizens' Union campaign began in 1897, the women who established
the house offered it and the yard for one evening a week to the Citizens'
Union Campaign Committee. Illustrated lectures were given to the people of
the neighborhood, the friends of the clubs using the house, and the parents
of children in the children's clubs. This declared the sentiments of the
women who established the house, which were emphasized when a picture of
the Citizens' Union candidate for Mayor was put in the window. It became
evident at once that there was trouble in the women's club; some of the
members of the men's club never entered the house after the picture was
placed. The Citizens' Union was defeated. At once the friction in the
women's club developed, till it seemed wise to disband it. It was announced
that the house had been given up, and that all the work done there must be
placed elsewhere. The younger clubs were housed in the Clark Memorial. The
women's club, in spite of the friction, voted to keep together, and, with
the City History Club, asked to be received at the College Settlement,
which generously, and at great inconvenience, arranged to receive them. The
members of the women's club, numbering forty-five, voted unanimously to
become identified with the College Settlement work, and pledged themselves
to that work. The one woman who had resisted this decision in secret stood
with the rest pledged to the Settlement. At once she incited trouble at the
Settlement. She was voted out of the club. When the decision was announced,
she, with the treasurer of the club and three others, walked out of the
house, the treasurer taking the club treasurer's book and the money, over
seventeen dollars. Sunday's papers announced the incorporation of a club
under the old name. The incorporators were the five women who had left the
club at the Settlement. The business of incorporating was attended to by a
political leader in the State Assembly. One of these women had held a
position in a city department, secured for her by a leader of one of the
political parties; one was the wife of a man holding a city position
through active affiliation with the other political party; another was the
wife of a man who was striving for prominence in political affairs in the
district, irrespective of party; the other was shrewd, ambitious,
vindictive. The club before this break had done charitable work; had helped
families who needed help, through the generosity of friends of wealth. It
had a limited membership, and election was the assurance of certain
qualities in the woman who was received as a member. All this had commanded
attention and could furnish political capital. To hold this for one or the
other of the political parties was the intention of the women who
incorporated under the club name and persuaded six of the club members to
join them.

The treasurer was so evidently the cat's-paw of those who were managing the
affair that, while steps were being taken to punish her for taking the
money, the club at the Settlement voted not to prosecute her, because it
would be a stigma on her as long as she lived, because she would have to
stand with women arrested for drunkenness and disorderly characters in the
dock. The original club remained at the Settlement. The minority who
withdrew, a total of eleven, began active and aggressive work. They hired
the use of a working-girls' club-room. They began to work according to the
most approved methods of political leaders. They attended the outings of a
political association; tried to do what they called charitable work, but
which this very group proved they could not do justly while in the little
house.

The Fusion campaign of 1901 brought unexpected complications to the club
woman. The Tammany influence was stronger than the Republican, and the
women who had led in the incorporating of the club withdrew. Unfortunately,
the opportunity to give this whole group a strong lesson in morals was
lost, and they have been accepted where, had the genesis of their club been
understood, it is but reasonable to suppose they would have had no moral
support, and for that reason would have gained a moral lesson.

The training most needed by the people of narrow experience and limited
intelligence is that of clear distinctions between right and wrong by those
they class above themselves. That shrewdness is not a moral virtue; that
revenge is mean and not the function of mortals, is the one lesson
intelligence and moral standards can teach convincingly.

Recently it was the privilege of the writer to visit a Parents' Society
connected with a school in the outskirts of Brooklyn. The spirit of good
fellowship that existed, not only among the teachers of the school, but
between the teachers and the parents, was a revelation. That there was a
unifying cause was certain. What was it? One of the mothers, during a walk
to the station, revealed it. In response to a comment on the good feeling
so evident, the mother replied: "Yes, I feel it. Mr. ----," naming a member
of the Board of Education, "at prayer meeting the other night spoke of the
school and what a power it was in this part of the city. We owe it all to
him. He's done everything he could do for the school, and he has made all
the ministers and the priests friends of the school." She was quiet a
minute, and then added: "Years ago, when he first began fighting for the
school, people used to call him a 'boss.' I think that kind of a boss would
be good in every school. I tell my husband we ought to be glad that we
bought that lot out here and built when we did, for we helped to make Mr.
---- successful. If leading men to do your will means being a 'boss,' Mr.
---- is one. But the city needs hundreds of such 'bosses.'" The man is a
simple American citizen, bearing a foreign name, who saw clearly there were
more ways of serving and saving his country than by carrying a rifle.

In the last analysis the "boss" as he is in New York to-day is the product
of many roots. The one that goes deepest in the soil, the course of his
deepest hold, can be traced to the doors of our churches. The men who have
failed to see that they owed an allegiance to the city that does not differ
in degree from what they owed the Church; the men who failed to see that
the Church was a positive factor in civic life; that its effectiveness in
the community was dependent on the standards it demanded and helped to
maintain in the city; that on it rested the responsibility for civic
character-building--on these men rest the heaviest responsibility for the
evolution of the political "boss" and the evils of which he is the
personification.

Men and women give money to maintain church services in sections where
political corruption and civic neglect have resulted in creating an
environment that makes decent living impossible; an environment that has so
degenerating an influence that the people become a factor in the problem it
presents, for they have sunk to its level.

In those sections the tools of the "boss," his active political agents, use
the most despicable methods. The tool of the principal is valuable as he is
conscienceless. His crumbs are the minor offices in the gift of the people;
the lesser tools get "jobs," which the very limitations of their minds make
them believe they must use to secure the largest return of money and power
to themselves--a conception largely due to the indifference of the men who
willingly delegate their civic responsibilities. Every man and woman who
pays the slightest attention to the conditions under which the poor are
forced to live, know that these conditions are responsible for the
existence of nine-tenths of the eleemosynary institutions, private and
public. They know that many of these institutions, could they stand before
the community in their true character, would be recognized as disgraceful
blots upon our civilization. They exist because so many good people in the
community have found greater pleasure in establishing and maintaining them
than in working actively to prevent the growth of the conditions that
peoples them.

Again and again one sees the names of men and women working actively on
these boards of management who would not give a moment's thought to a
meeting called in the interests of better civilization in sections of the
city where their own homes are located; who know nothing of the conditions
of the schools, the streets, the tenement houses, the factories, or the
administration of the law in regard to them. There are men who would resent
the charge of ignorance who do not know the names of the officers they
either actively or passively elected to office in the political unit in
which are their homes. They do not attend the primaries, defending their
absence on the ground that they could accomplish nothing by their
presence--a defense that is in itself a self-accusation. If their divine
right of citizenship has been forfeited, it is by their own civic sin of
omission. The longer one studies the evils that have grown up in the
administration of the business of the great municipality of New York, the
clearer one sees that the sins of omission are responsible for their
growth--far more responsible than the sins of commission against which
intelligent voters rail, when they do not use them as salve for their
political consciences. It is a profound truth that in a republic the
character of the people is shown in the character of the men the people
elect to office. This is as true of the ward as of the nation.

The political units of government in New York are, in the main, inhabited
by the rich and poor, the intelligent and the ignorant; those who can
reason from effect to cause, and those who cannot reason at all. Yet in
these sections the worst possible home conditions will exist--unsanitary
schools, dirty streets, badly paved. Saloons will abound and political
corruption will go unheeded. Why? Because no men of intelligence and
responsibility will accept the minor offices that mean the administration
of the affairs of this unit in the interest and for the protection of the
whole people.

When men of position in the professional and business world signify their
willingness to accept the least office in the gift of the people, the daily
papers announce the fact in large headlines, and the men become marked as
capable of great self-sacrifice, they become preëminent for the time. The
men who have controlled the nominations, those who have no other visible
means of support than these minor offices and political patronage, resent
the suggestion of men of professional and financial fortunes accepting
these offices; they consider the appearance of a man holding business or
professional positions of power or influence as a candidate for a minor
office as an invasion, an intrusion of their personal rights; it is an
attempt to defraud them. They do not hesitate to publicly claim the right
to nomination and election as the reward for their activity in politics.
And they do this when they cannot point to one thing done officially to
justify their claims to the suffrages of the people. They dare to do it in
the face of the knowledge, held by the people, that they use their offices
often for personal ends, defrauding the people.

The scores of voters who have places within the patronage of a minor
official see the danger to them of an official who would place merit in
advance of votes. The man of position may be far from wealthy; may consent
to serve the city at a financial loss; but the active voters live so remote
from the voters at the top that the election is almost certain to be
decided on class lines; and the defeat of the non-professional politician
is accepted by every man, woman and child in the poorer portion of the
district as a personal triumph; the evidence that the poor man has friends
to back him in his fight for place and power; that the poor must work
together politically.

Whose fault is it? The good, intelligent, responsible citizens who
delegated the government of their city to the men who use it for their
personal gain. The good men in active politics, who openly concede the
right to the minor offices in the city government to men whom they know are
ignorant, and not infrequently know equally well are dishonest, and who
will sacrifice the interest of the people to strengthen the system that
means personal gains.

The political conditions of the city several years ago gave birth to one of
the periodic moral upheavals that resulted in the election of a strong,
earnest, loyal, church-supporting citizen as Mayor. This Mayor was anxious
to raise the character of the city government. He determined to accomplish
this by the character of his appointments. He had more than a superficial
knowledge of the public schools, which at that time were the theater for
the exercise of political "pulls." It was known for years that the Board of
Education had been used to a greater or less extent to pay political debts,
to create political capital for future use by some of its most active
members. The new Mayor had it in his power to change the character of the
Board, and he carefully considered his appointments.

In one of the sections of the city where, numerically as to families,
wealth and poverty were fairly balanced, a section having in it churches of
every denomination, many of them maintaining missions in the same political
unit--there was at least this expression of neighborly interest--the
schools were among the first built in the city. The last school building
erected at the time of this Mayor's election had been built twenty years
before; one had been built when the foundation for the pillars of the
elevated road had been set in front of the site before it was purchased by
the Board of Education, and was now in the heart of a crowded foreign
settlement, had no out-door playground; the third building in the school
district was so old, so badly planned, that for years effort had been made
to secure a new building, but were defeated by the indifference, and at
times the opposition, of the best citizens of the district, according to
their own estimate.

The new Mayor determined to put the best men in the district on the Board.
Twenty-eight men in that district, men of power, men of standards, some of
them philanthropists actively interested in work for the poor, declined.
The men appointed, the best he could get to serve, were unfit for the
position--mentally unfit, for they were uneducated; or morally unfit,
because any position paid or unpaid under the city government was conceived
by them as just so great an opportunity to create political capital or
realize perquisites put within their control by their appointments. The
Mayor had begun at the top to make his appointments. The declinations of
the honor were because of lack of time, a lack of knowledge. When the
appointments were announced, there was a storm of criticism, and none more
violent than the majority of the men who declined to serve on the Board.

At this time there was a great deal of activity among many leading women in
the State to have a bill passed by the Legislature that would compel the
Mayor of cities of the first class to appoint women in the proportion of
one-third of the whole number appointed to the Boards of Education of those
cities. The greatest activity for this measure was exercised in Brooklyn.
One of the leaders, when asked a question about one of the schools in her
own district, did not know where the school was. She had been a tax-payer
in the district twenty-two years, and was considered a progressive woman.
Her chief reason for working for this bill, for spending money freely in
the interest of its success, was man's indifference to school matters.
Perhaps if the command, "Feed my lambs" had been given to Dorcas instead of
Peter, she might have developed enough sense of responsibility about the
mental food given to know where the school buildings of her own school
district were located.

In this school district, October, 1901, there were 574 children on half-day
classes. There was no manual training, though the pupils in the schools
were, for the most part, the children of day laborers, mechanics, and
clerks on small salaries. There was no free library, nor prospect of any,
because public sentiment did not demand it. There was one small park,
difficult of access. To reach it from the outer sections of the district,
the tracks used by nine lines of trolley cars must be crossed. There were
no public baths, except one in summer, near the mouth of a large sewer. One
of the schools had no out-door playground; two had the closets in the
in-door playgrounds. There was no room where the teachers could retire if
ill, or where they could take their luncheons; no rooms where pupils could
be privately interviewed or taken if ill. Yet it is in this very district,
where the oldest and wealthiest families of the city live; where
nine-tenths of the philanthropic enterprises of the city have been born,
and where the moral upheavals for the regeneration of the city will always
find their quota of leaders, that there is developing some of the worst
evils of a cosmopolitan city. Within its borders is a fair-sized Italian
city, with scores of sweat-shops. Across the thoroughfare is a large Irish
village lying at the foot of the hill, the streets dirty, unpaved, the
houses in an unsanitary condition. Some of them are overrun with rats of
enormous size. The streets at the top of the hill are beginning to yield to
the pressure of the crowds at the foot. Specific houses seem to have in
them the very germs of immorality and degeneracy. Women who have made a
struggle when, by misfortune, forced to move into these houses cease to
struggle, and yield to the influences about them. The tenement-house laws
are violated openly.

There are not less than six missions, with twice that number of churches,
in this one section; but so far as the environment of the poor is
concerned, they might as well not exist. The majority of the tax-payers,
those who command public respect and confidence, will not serve
authoritatively in the political unit in which are their homes, in which
their children must grow up. They will not take offices that would put it
in their power to change the environment of the homes of the poor by
securing the rights, enforcing the laws, that would protect all of the
homes from the evils of vice, ignorance and unsanitary conditions. But
these men when wealthy will support liberally institutions made necessary
by their civic indifference.

No man in a pulpit in the section has ever made a study of it to arouse the
conscience and energies of the members of his church to their political
duties. Unfortunately the women, for the most part, are as ignorant of the
condition, and as indifferent. Because of the unsanitary conditions of the
houses occupied by the poor, the dirty streets, the restrictions of child
life, the lack of opportunity for moral development, the total dearth of
recreative opportunity for the boys and girls, the young men and women who
are wage-earners, the lack of educational facilities for the children who
must be educated, if at all, at the expense of the State, the section is a
prolific source of supply to the institutions the intelligent, sympathetic,
wealthy women of the section are so active in creating and sustaining.

The indifference of the wealthy and responsible to the conditions
prevailing in parts of this section is so well known that officers at the
heads of the city department ignore complaints, or treat them as incidents
to be tolerated as part of the experiences of their official life.

The penalty is being paid in the steady decline of real estate values, the
gradual spread of the undesirable part of the community, the exodus of the
wealthiest to the sections more remote from the tenements.

The environment that has a degenerating influence on the people of limited
means in that section is not due primarily to the political corruption of
those using their positions to secure their own ends, but to the criminal
attitude of the men in the churches and intelligent men not in them, who
refuse to assume the political responsibilities that are their birthrights;
the criminal indifference of those who fail to know the necessities of
which the homes of the poor whom God gave into their charge stand in need.
This section of the city is typical, not peculiar. Every section of New
York gives evidence of the divorce between the churches and the political
control that makes the environment of the home and the churches.

The city is what the good, active people of the city want it to be--no
better, no worse. The condition of the most uncared-for section gives the
church's answer to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The mark of
Cain may not be visible, but every child who goes out of life because its
right to light, air, sunshine has not been protected is a charge against
the Church. Every boy and girl whose life record is shadowed, blackened
because their right to education, to training, to freedom to develop
physically, mentally, morally, spiritually was denied them through
political indifference, are the evidences of the failure of the churches to
live up to the light which Christ left to their keeping. His followers do
not march through the cities of the poor, an army.

When Christ said, "The second is like unto it, love thy neighbor as
thyself," He did not not mean the ethical conception for which the Church
has stood, but the broad, Christ-like conception of brotherhood which would
protect "thy neighbor" from the evils of his own ignorance and weakness;
that would use one's best strength in his interest seven days in the week.





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