A LITTLE FATHER.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 worryand 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 standardsthat 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 ofwomen. 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 thehome 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 readreadily. 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.
A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.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 comprehensionof 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 corruptgovernment 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.
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 ofthe 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 momentto 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 hisbidding. 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 commonbonds 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.
TAKING THEIR TURN IN THE YARD AT THE SETTLEMENT.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 wasa 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 pledgedthemselves 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 attentionand 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 stronglesson 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, andhe 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 responsibilityfor 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 responsiblethan 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 supportthan 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 friendsto 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 thecharacter 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 unfitfor 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 toschool 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 thecity 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 evilsof 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 declineof 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, blackenedbecause 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.