laborer stood before the Revolution, where the English laborer stood
before the passing of the first Reform Bill and the repeal of the Corn
Laws, shows a lack of historical perspective. The assumption that all
strikes represent an agonized protest against tyranny, an agonized
appeal from injustice, is a perversion of truth. The assumption that
child-labor in the United States is the blot upon civilization that it
was in England seventy years ago, denies the duty of comparison. If the
people who write verses about 'Labor Crucified' would make a table of
the wages paid to skilled and unskilled workmen, from the Chicago
carpenter to the Philadelphia street-cleaner, they might sing in a more
cheerful strain. If the people who to-day echo the bitterest lines of
Mrs. Browning's 'Cry of the Children' would ascertain and bear in mind
the proportion of little boys and girls who are going to school in the
United States, how many years they average, and how much the country
pays for their education, they might spare us some violent invectives.
Even Mr. Robert Hunter permits himself the use of the word 'cannibalism'
when speaking of child-workers, and this in the face of legislation
which every year extends its area, and grows more stringently
protective.
There is a great deal of loose writing on this important theme, and it
stands in the way of amendment. It is assumed that parents are seldom or
never to blame for sending their children to work. The mill-owner
snatches them from their mothers' arms. It is assumed that the child who
works would--if there were no employment for him--be at school, or at
play, happy, healthy, and well-nourished. No one even alludes to the
cruel poverty of the South, which, for generations before the cotton
mills were built, stunted the growth and sapped the strength of Southern
children. They lived, we are told, a 'wholesome rural life,' and the
greed of the capitalist is alone responsible for the blighting of their
pastoral paradise.
There is no need to write like this. The question at issue is a grave
and simple one. It makes its appeal to the conscience and the sense of
the nation, and every year sees some measure of reform. If a baby girl
in an American city, a child of three or five, is forced to toil all
day, winding artificial daisy stems at a penny a hundred, let the name
of her employer and the place of her employment be made public. The
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children can deal peremptorily
with such a case. It is not even the privilege of parents to work a
little child so relentlessly. If the pathetic story is not supported by
facts, or is not in accord with facts, it is neither wise nor well to
publish it. Why should a sober periodical, like the _Child-Labor
Bulletin_, devoted to a good cause, print a poem called 'A Song of the
Factory,' in which happy children are portrayed as sporting in beautiful
meadows,
Idling among the feathery blooms,
until a sort of ogre comes along, builds a factory, drives the poor
innocents into it, and compels them to
Crouch all day by the spindles, wizened, and wan, and old,
earning 'his bread.' Apparently--and this is the gist of the
matter--they have no need to earn bread for themselves. The accompanying
illustrations show us on one page a prettily dressed little girl sitting
daisy-crowned in the fields, and, on the other page, a ragged and
tattered little girl with a shawl over her head going to the work which
has but too plainly impoverished her. Hansel and Gretel are not more
distinctly within the boundaries of fairyland than are these entrapped
children. The witch is not more distinctly a child-eating hobgoblin than
is the capitalist of such fervid song.
The sickly and unreasoning tone which pervades the literature of poverty
is demoralizing. There is nothing helpful in the assumption that effort
is vain, resistance hopeless, and the world monstrously cruel. The
dominating element of such prose and verse is a bleak despair, unmanly,
unwomanly, inhuman. Out of the abundance of material before me, I quote
a single poem, published in the New York _Call_, reprinted in the
_Survey_, and christened mockingly,--
THE STRAIGHT ROAD
They got y', kid, they got y', just like I said they would;
You tried to walk the narrow path,
You tried, and got an awful laugh;
And laughs are all y' did get, kid, they got y' good!
They never saw the little kid,--the kid I used to know,
The little bare-legged girl back home,
The little girl that played alone,
They don't know half the things I know, kid; ain't it so?
They got y', kid, they got y',--you know they got y' right;
They waited till they saw y' limp,
Then introduced y' to the pimp,
Ah, you were down then, kid, and couldn't fight.
I guess you know what some don't know, and others know damn well,
That sweatshops don't grow angel's wings,
That working girls is easy things,
And poverty's the straightest road to hell.
And this is what our Lady Poverty, bride of Saint Francis, friend of all
holiness, counsel of all perfection, has come to mean in these years of
grace! She who was once the surest guide to Heaven now leads her chosen
ones to Hell. She who was once beloved by the devout and honored by the
just, is now a scandal and a shame, the friend of harlotry, the
instigator of crime. Even a true poet like Francis Thompson laments that
the poverty exalted by Christ should have been cast down from her high
caste.
All men did admire
Her modest looks, her ragged, sweet attire
In which the ribboned shoe could not compete
With her clear simple feet.
But Satan, envying Thee thy one ewe-lamb,
With Wealth, World's Beauty and Felicity
Was not content, till last unthought-of she
Was his to damn.
Thine ingrate, ignorant lamb
He won from Thee; kissed, spurned, and made of her
This thing which qualms the air,
Vile, terrible, old,
Whereat the red blood of the Day runs cold.
These are the words of one to whom the London gutters were for years a
home, and whose strengthless manhood lay inert under a burden of pain he
had no courage to lift. Yet never was sufferer more shone upon by
kindness than was Francis Thompson; never was man better fitted to
testify to the goodness of a bad world. And he did bear such brave
testimony again and yet again, so that the bulk of his verse is alien to
pessimism,--'every stanza an act of faith, and a declaration of good
will.'
The demoralizing quality of such stuff as 'The Straight Road,' which is
forced upon us with increasing pertinacity, is its denial of kindness,
its evading of obligation. Temptation is not only the occasion, but the
justifier of sin,--a point of view which plays havoc with our common
standard of morality. When a vicious young millionaire like Harry Thaw
runs amuck through his crude and evil environment, we sigh and say, 'His
money ruined him.' When a poor young woman abandons her weary
frugalities for the questionable pleasures of prostitution, we sigh and
say, 'Her poverty drove her to it.' Where then does goodness dwell? What
part does honor play? The Sieur de Joinville, in his memoirs of Saint
Louis, tells us that a certain man, sore beset by the pressure of
temptation, sought counsel from the Bishop of Paris, 'whose Christian
name was William.' And this wise William of Paris said to him: 'The
castle of Montl'héry stands in the safe heart of France, and no invading
hosts assail it. But the castle of La Rochelle in Poitou stands on the
line of battle. Day and night it must be guarded from assault, and it
has suffered grievously. Which gentleman, think you, the King holds high
in favor, the governor of Montl'héry, or the governor of La Rochelle?
The post of danger is the post of glory, and he who is sorely wounded in
the combat is honored by God and man.'
III
There are those whose ardor for humanity finds a congenial vent in the
denouncement of all they see about them,--all the institutions of their
country, all the laborious processes of civilization. Sociologists of
this type speak and write of an ordinary American city in terms which
Dante might have envied. Nobody, it would seem, is ever cured in its
hospitals; they only lie on 'cots of pain.' Nobody is ever reformed in
its reformatories. Nobody is reared to decency in its asylums. Nobody
is--apparently--educated in its schools. Its industries are ravenous
beasts, sucking the blood of workers; its poor are 'shackled slaves';
its humble homes are 'dens.' I have heard a philanthropic lecturer talk
to the poor upon the housing of the poor. She threw on a screen enlarged
photographs of narrow streets and tenement rooms which looked to me
unspeakably dreary, but which the working-women around me gazed at in
mild perplexity, seeing nothing amiss, and wondering that their
residences should be held up to this unseemly scorn. They did not do as
did the angry Italians of a New Jersey town,--smash the invidious
pictures which shamed their homes; they sat in stolid silence and
discomfiture, dimly conscious of an unresented insult.
It is hard to grasp a point of view immeasurably remote from our own;
but what can we understand of other lives unless we do this difficult
thing? Old women in the out-wards of an almshouse (of all earthly abodes
the saddest) have boasted to me that their floors were scrubbed every
other day, and their sheets changed once a week; and this braggart humor
stunned my senses until I called to mind the floor and the bed of one of
them (an extraordinarily dirty old woman) whom I had known in other
years. Last winter the workers in a settlement house were called upon at
midnight to succor a woman who had been kicked and beaten into
unconsciousness by a drunken husband. The poor creature was all one
bleeding bruise. When she was revived, her dim eyes traveled over the
horrified faces about her. 'It's pretty bad,' she gasped, 'it's mighty
bad'; and then, with another look at the group of protecting, pitying
spinsters, 'but it must be something fierce to be an old maid.'
The city is a good friend to the poor. It gives them day nurseries for
their babies, kindergartens for their little children, schools for their
boys and girls, playgrounds, swimming-pools, recreation piers,
reading-rooms, libraries, churches, clubs, hospitals, cheap amusements,
open-air concerts, employment agencies, the companionship of their kind,
and the chance of a friend at need. In return, the poor love the city,
and cling to it with reasonable but somewhat stifling affection. They
know that the hardest thing in life is to be isolated,--'unrelated,' to
use Carlyle's apt word; and they escape this fate by eschewing the
much-lauded fields and farms. They know also that in the country they
must stand or fall by their own unaided efforts, they must learn the
hard lesson of self-reliance. Many of them propose to live, as did the
astute author of _Piers Plowman_, 'in the town, and on the town as
well.' Moreover, pleasure means as much to them as it does to the rest
of us. We hardly needed Mr. Chesterton to tell us that a visit to a
corner saloon may be just as exciting an event to a tenement-house
dweller, as a dinner at a gold-and-marble hotel is to the average
middle-class citizen; and that the tenement-house dweller may be just as
moderate in his potations:--
Merrily taking twopenny rum, and cheese with a pocket knife.
Poverty, we are assured, is an 'error,' like ill-health and crime. It is
an anachronism in civilization, a stain upon a wisely governed land. But
into our country which, after a human fashion, is both wise and foolish,
pours the poverty of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with
but a few dollars between them and want; with scant equipment, physical
or mental, for the struggle of life; with an inheritance of feebleness
from ill-nourished generations before them,--this is the problem which
the United States faces courageously, and solves as best she can. What
she cannot do is miraculously to convert poverty into plenty,--certainly
not before the next year doubles, and the third year trebles the
miracle-seeking multitude. She cannot properly house or profitably
employ a million of immigrants before the next million is clamoring at
her doors. Nor is she even given a fair chance to accomplish her giant
task. The demagogues who are employed in the congenial sport of railroad
baiting, and who are enjoying beyond measure the fun of chivying
business interests into dusty corners, are the ones to lift up their
voices in shrill appeal for the army of the unemployed. They refuse to
connect one phenomenon with the other. The notion that crippling
industries will benefit the industrious is not so new as it seems. Æsop
must have had a clear insight into its workings when he wrote the fable
of the goose that laid the golden egg.
The City of New York expends, according to a recent report of the
Hospital Investigating Committee, more than a million of dollars a year
for the care of sick, defective, and otherwise helpless aliens. It
expended in 1913 nearly four hundred thousand dollars for the care of
aliens who had been in this country less than five years. This is the
record of our greatest city, the one in which the astute immigrant takes
up his abode. The education she gives her little foreign-born children
comprises for the most part manual and vocational training, clinics for
the defective, schools for the incorrigible, free or cost-price lunches,
doctoring, dentistry, the care of trained nurses, and a score of similar
attentions unknown to an earlier generation, undreamed of in the
countries whence these children come. In return for such fostering care,
New York is held up to execration because she has the money to pay the
taxes which are expended in this fashion, because she lays the golden
egg which benefits the poor of twenty nations. Her unemployed
(reinforced hugely from less favored communities) riot in her streets
and churches, and agitators curse her for a thing of evil, a city of
palaces and slums, corroded with the
Shame of lives that lie
Couched in ease, while down the streets
Pain and want go by.
The only people who take short views of life are the poor, the poor
whose daily wage is spent on their daily needs. Clerks and bookkeepers
and small tradesmen (toilers upon whose struggle for decency and
independence nobody ever wastes a word of sympathy) may fret over the
uncertainty of their future, the narrow margin which lies between them
and want. But the workman and his family have a courage of their own,
the courage of the soldier who does not spend the night before battle
calculating his chances of a gun-shot wound, or of a legless future. It
is exasperating to hear a teamster's wife cheerfully announce the coming
of her tenth baby; but the calmness with which she faces the situation
has in it something human and elemental. It is exasperating to see the
teamster risk illness and loss of work (he might at least pull off his
wet clothes when he gets home); but he tells you he has not gone to his
grave with a cold _yet_, and this careless confidence saves him as much
as it costs. I read recently an economist's sorrowful complaint that
families, in need of the necessities of life, go to moving-picture
shows; that women, with their husbands' scanty earnings in their hands,
take their children to these blithesome entertainments instead of buying
the Sunday dinner. It sounds like the citizens who buy motor cars
instead of paying off the mortgages on their homes, and it is an error
of judgment which the working man is little likely to condone; but that
the pleasure-seeking impulse--which social workers assign exclusively to
the spirit of youth--should mutiny in a matron's bones suggests
survivals of cheerfulness, high lights amid the gloom.
The deprecation of earthly anxiety taught by the Gospels, the precedence
given to the poor by the New Testament, the value placed upon voluntary
poverty by the Christian Church,--these things have for nineteen hundred
years helped in the moulding of men. There still remain some leaven of
courage, some savor of philosophy, some echoes of ancient wisdom (heard
oftenest from uneducated men), some laughter loud and careless as the
laughter of the Middle Ages, some slow sense of justice, not easy to
pervert. These qualities are perhaps as helpful as the 'divine
discontent' fostered by enthusiasts for sorrow, the cowardice bred by
insistence upon trouble and anxiety, the rancor engendered by invectives
against earth and heaven. No lot is bettered by having its hardships
emphasized. No man is helped by the drowning of his courage, the
destruction of his good-will, the paralyzing grip of
Envy with squinting eyes,
Sick of a strange disease, his neighbor's health.
Entertaining the Candidate
By Katharine Baker
Bag in hand, brother stops in for fifteen minutes, from campaigning, to
get some clean shirts. He says the candidate will be in town day after
to-morrow. Do we want him to come here, or shall he go to a hotel?
We want him, of course. But we deprecate the brevity of this notice.
Also the cook and chambermaid are new, and remarkably inexpert. Brother,
however, declines to feel any concern. His confidence in our power to
cope with emergencies is flattering if exasperating.
There is nothing in the markets at this time of year. Guests have a
malignant facility in choosing such times. We scour the country for
forty miles in search of green vegetables. We confide in the fishmonger,
who grieves sympathetically over the 'phone, because all crabs are now
cold-storage, and he'd be deceiving us if he said otherwise.
Still we are determined to have luncheon prepared in the house. Last
time the august judge dined with us we summoned a caterer from a hundred
miles away, and though the caterer's food was good, it was late. We
love promptness, and we are going to have it. Ladies knew all about
efficiency long before Mr. Frederick Taylor. Only they couldn't teach it
to servants, and he would find he couldn't either. But every mistress of
a house knows how to make short cuts, and is expert at 'record
production' in emergencies.
The casual brother says there will be one or two dozen people at
luncheon. He will telephone us fifteen minutes before they arrive. Yes,
really, that's the best he can do.
So we prepare for one or two dozen people, and they must sit down to
luncheon because men hate a buffet meal. We struggle with the problem,
how many chickens are required for twelve or twenty-four people? The
answer, however, is really obvious. Enough for twenty-four will be
enough for twelve.
Day after to-morrow arrives. The gardener comes in to lay hearth-fires
and carry tables. We get out china and silver. We make salad and rolls,
fruit-cup and cake. We guide the cook's faltering steps over the
critical moments of soup and chicken. We do the oysters in our own
particular way, which we fancy inimitable. We arrange bushels of flowers
in bowls, vases, and baskets, and set them on mantels, tables,
book-cases, everywhere that a flower can find a footing. The chauffeur
comes in proudly with the flower-holder from the limousine, and we fill
it in honor of the distinguished guest.
Then we go outside to see that the approach to the house is
satisfactory. The bland old gardener points to the ivy-covered wall, and
says with innocent joy, '---- it, ain't that ivory the prettiest thing
you ever saw in your life?' And we can't deny that the lawn looks well,
with ivy, and cosmos, and innumerable chrysanthemums.
The cook and chambermaid will have to help wait on the table. The
chambermaid, who is what the butler contemptuously calls 'an educated
nigger,' and so knows nothing useful, announces that she has no white
uniform. All she has is a cold in her head. We give her a blouse and
skirt, wondering why Providence doesn't eliminate the unfit.
We run upstairs to put on our costliest shoes and stockings, and our
most perishable gown. The leisurely brother gets us on the wire to say
that there will be twenty guests in ten minutes.
Descending, we reset the tables to seat twenty guests, light the
wood-fires, toss together twenty mint-juleps, and a few over for luck,
repeat our clear instructions to the goggling chambermaid, desperately
implore the butler to see that she keeps on the job, drop a last touch
of flavoring in the soup, and are sitting by the fire with an air of
childish gayety and carelessness when the train of motor-cars draws up
to the door.
Here is the judge, courteous and authoritative. Here is his assiduous
suite. The room fills with faces well known in every country that an
illustrated newspaper can penetrate. From the Golden Gate and the Rio
Grande, from New York and Alabama, these men have come together, intent
on wresting to themselves the control of the Western Hemisphere. Now
they are a sort of highly respectable guerillas. To-morrow, very likely,
they will be awe-inspiring magnates.
Theoretically we are impressed. Actually they have mannerisms, and some
of them wear spectacles. We reflect that the triumvirs very likely had
mannerisms, too, and Antony himself might have been glad to own
spectacles. We try to feel reverence for the high calling of these men.
We hope they'll like our luncheon.
The butler brings in the juleps and we maintain a detached look, as
though those juleps were just a happy thought of the butler himself, and
we were as much surprised as anybody. The judge won't have one, but most
everybody else will. The newspaper men look love and gratitude at the
butler.
That earnest youth is the judge's secretary. The huge, iron-gray man
expects to be a governor after November fifth, if dreams come true. The
amiable old gentleman who never leaves the judge's side, has come two
thousand miles out of pure political enthusiasm, to protect the
candidate from assassins. He can do it, too, we conclude, when we look
past his smiling mouth into his steely eyes.
Here is the campaign manager, business man and man-of-the-world.
This pretty little newspaper-woman from Utah implores us to get an
utterance on suffrage from the judge. Just a word. It will save him
thousands of votes. Well, she's a dear little thing, but we can't take
advantage of our guest.
Luncheon is announced. Brother, slightly apologetic, murmurs that there
are twenty-three. Entirely unforeseen. He babbles incoherently.
But it's all right. We women won't come to the table. Voting and eating
and things like that are better left to the men anyway. Why should women
want to do either, when they have fathers and brothers to do it for
them? We can sit in the gallery and watch. It's very nice for us. And
exclusive. Nothing promiscuous. Yes, go on. We'll wait.
Whoever is listening to our conversation professes heartbreak at our
decision, and edges toward the rapidly filling dining-room.
We sit down to play lady of leisure, in various affected attitudes. We
are not going near the kitchen again. The luncheon is simple. Everything
is perfectly arranged. The servants can do it all. It's mere machine
work.
From afar we observe the soup vanishing. Then one by one we
stammer,--'The mayonnaise--'--'I wonder if the rolls are hot--'--'Cook's
coffee is impossible,'--fade silently up the front stair, and scurry
down the kitchen-way.
We cover the perishable gown with a huge white apron, we send up a
fervent prayer for the costly shoes, and go where we are needed most.
We save the day for good coffee. With the precision of a juggler we
rescue plates from the chambermaid, who is overcome by this introduction
to the great world and dawdles contemplatively through the pantry door.
Charmed with our proficiency, she stands by our side, and watches us
clear a shelf of china in the twinkling of an eye. If she could find a
stool, she would sit at our feet, making motion studies. But she
couldn't find it if it were already there. She couldn't find anything.
We order her back to the dining-room, where she takes up a strategic
position by the window, from which she can idly survey the mob outside,
and the hungry men within.
The last coffee-cup has passed through the doorway. Cigars and matches
are circulating in the butler's capable hands. No more need for us.
We shed the enveloping aprons, disappear from the kitchen, and
materialize again, elegantly useless, in the drawing-room. Nobody can
say that luncheon wasn't hot and promptly served.
Chairs begin to clatter. They are rising from the table. A brass band
outside bursts into being.
Brother had foretold that band to us, and we had expressed vivid
doubts. He said it would cost eighty dollars. Now eighty dollars in
itself is a respectable sum, a sum capable even of exerting some mild
fascination, but eighty dollars viewed in relation to a band becomes
merely ludicrous.
We said an eighty-dollar band was a thing innately impossible, like
free-trade, or a dachshund. Brother attested that the next best grade of
band would demand eight hundred. We justly caviled at eight hundred. We
inquired, Why any band? Brother claimed that it would make a cheerful
noise, and we yielded.