Chapter 7

Sister Irene and Her Little Ones

They are worth it, too. Pietro and his father may be ignorant, may be Italians (see illustration facing page108); but they are here by our permission, dead set on becoming American citizens, and tremendously impressed with the privileges of that citizenship. So anxious are they to become citizens that, if they can get there by a shorter cut than the law allows, you need not wonder at their taking the chance. The slum teaches them nothing that discovers a moral offense in that. But noteven the slum can wipe out in me the memory of little Pietro, who sat writing and writing with his maimed hand, trying to learn the letters of the alphabet and how to put them together in words, so that he might be the link of communication between his people and the old home in Italy. He was a poor little maimed boy with a sober face, and it wrings my heart now, the recollection of the look he gave me when I plumped out: “Pietro, do you ever laugh?”

“I did wonst,” he said.

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

The Open Trench in the Potter’s Field

The children are the ones to look out for while it is yet time: the young and the helpless. I spoke of the foundling babies that come from no one knows where. The city could not keep them, try as it might; but there was one whose great heart found a way. Long years ago she sent them by hundreds to the homes far and near where open hearts were yearning to receive them. It is one of the things that make a man believe in human nature, that make him see God in it in spite of all, the fact that there are so many homes of that kind. Not in a single instance since the joint committee of the two charitable societies in New York, of whose great work I have already spoken, began that work, has a child in their care passed the age of two years without being permanently provided for. And they take no chances, but insist upon the child’s being a whole year in its new home before theypermit its adoption. Sister Irene was the one with the great heart. There she stands among her little ones. (See illustration facing page110.) She was a Roman Catholic, and I was born a Lutheran. We could not very well be farther apart on this earth; but, if the heaven upon which my gaze is fixed has not room for both of us—if I shall not find her there with my sainted mother, why, it is not the place I am looking for, and I do not want to go.

I have preached my sermon to the text of the wrecked home. I know of no more pitiful spot on earth than the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island where, when last I was there, I saw seventeen hundred old women, homeless and hopeless in their great age, waiting for their last ride up the Sound in the “charity boat” to the grave that was waiting for them in the Potter’s Field. I know of nothing more hopeless, to all human sight, unless it be that open trench itself. (See illustration facing page112.) Thank God that there is the Christian’shope. Even the trench, with its darkness and gloom and surrender, cannot keep that which is born in heaven and which, despite the slum and its vauntings, is at home there with God.

I showed you the Five Points in its old iniquity and told you to bear it in mind, that I would come back to it. I showed you the “old church tenements” and told you what they stood for. Yet, in its disgrace, it was that wicked slum, it was the outrage of that bad day, that showed us the way out. Where those tenements stood, to-day the doors of the Five Points Mission swing daily to let in nearly one thousand children who are taught the better way there. (See illustration facing page114.) The Point itself has become Paradise Park, a playground for the children; and across the park another mission, the Five Points House of Industry, has registered the self-sacrificing labors of Christian men and women for fifty years. So that on earth there is hope, too. That is the way out.Wherever the Gospel and the sunlight go hand in hand in the battle with the slum, there it is already won; there is an end of it at once.

“The Way Out”—Bed-time in the Five Points House of Industry NurseryFrom “How the Other Half Lives.”Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

IIIOUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT

III

OUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT

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