CONCLUSION
"_The greatest city is that which has the greatest men and women.
If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the
world._"--WALT WHITMAN.
As I put aside my pen in this my appeal for the Wandering Citizen,
I see on my study table many letters, filled with questions. The
following are the most frequently asked:
"Is not drink the principal cause of destitution?"
"Is the American police system brutal toward the homeless out-of-work
man?"
"What of the impostor at the Municipal Emergency Home?"
Drink is not the primal cause of poverty. The first and all-important
cause is industrial conditions. But the traffic in alcohol is the most
powerful ally of our plutocratic industrial system--in perpetuating
poverty.
Despondent men drink for relief from self-consciousness, starving men
for stimulation, while circumstances, fate, or the vicissitudes of
life prompt many to resort to drink.
The man who works ten hours a day on a meager midday lunch of bread
and cheese, must drink to beat out the day, and when the day is done,
do you wonder that he seeks a stimulant? The comfortable, well-to-do,
honest middle class drink but little, and if at all, very moderately.
The world's main consumers of alcohol are--the very poor for
forgetfulness, the idle rich for pleasure. Broken hearts are found both
in the palace and hovel.
The saloon, that dissolvent of self-respect, character and chastity,
mocking the intelligence of every community, leaving its trace and
putting a brand of shame upon this our boasted enlightened era, we
may not believe in as an institution. And yet, this same saloon is
a refuge meaning as much to the wandering, homeless wage-earner, as
did, in the old days, the shelter of the good monks to the storm-lost
wanderer of the Alps, and until each city is honorable enough to give
to the homeless poor man something in place of the saloon, it certainly
ought not to be mean enough to take from him that agent of life-saving
sustenance. One of the most brilliant newspaper writers that I met in
my crusade told me that while down-and-out in Portland, Oregon, he
lived for one week on what he snatched from the free lunch counter. In
many places they have forced from the saloon the free lunch, the rest
chairs, the tables and papers. They demand that they close at midnight
or earlier, and all day Sunday. Take notice, where they are doing this,
they are not opening their churches very fast as a substitute, and even
if they did, there is very little to sustain life in a plaster-of-paris
image or a stained-glass window.
The saloon, with its shelter, its warmth, and its free lunch, saving
the life of the half-clad perishing man, holds a very strong argument
for its existence. If the mayor of a city has not the power to create
and provide clean, wholesome, public benefits for the wage-earner in
time of need (who has a civic right), we should certainly _demand_ that
the saloon keeper be _forced_ to serve free lunch, and keep his door
open three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and twenty-four
hours every day, for it is a degree more respectable to sleep in a
saloon than in a jail. The first saloon keeper to throw a man _out_,
should be the first to be thrown _out_ of business. Keep the saloons
until every city is honorable and humane enough in its strife for civic
beauty to create public privileges, adequate Municipal Emergency Homes,
public drinking fountains and comfort stations. Then, with a clear
conscience, we may legislate the enormous profit off of the impure
concoctions, and when this is done, the dragon will have been given at
least one effectual blow.
[Illustration: "_Waiting to Crawl into a Cellar for a Free Bed, Unfed,
Unwashed--Fully Clothed They Spend the Night on Board
Bunks, Crowded in Like Animals_"]
"Is the American police system brutal toward the out-of-work man?"
The declaration of the radical Agnostic street speaker, that there
was only one miracle he believed in, and that was "that St. Patrick
drove all the snakes and toads out of Ireland, and that they came to
America, got into politics and on to the police force," is an unjust
dogma, for in my observation every nationality represented on the
police force is of the same character in administering the official
duty and in taking advantage of the trust put in them where they are
made a political adjunct to a municipality.
The policeman is the same as other men. He is a workingman, and like
all men, he loves, he hates, he has his home, his social and business
interests. He is of the community and should stand for the welfare of
that community, and should never be allowed to divorce himself from the
trust placed upon him by the common rights of all the people.
What greater examples of the virtues of character can we find anywhere
than in the police? Their courage is noticeable. They will not
hesitate to rush into danger, into fire, riot, water, to save lives
and property. And over this character of courage is ever present the
element of kindness toward the little child, the old and infirm, and
often of the proffered dime to the homeless man. And yet he is an
Ishmaelite--"his hand is against every man, and every man's hand is
against him," which is a destructive condition.
The _Police System taken as a whole_ throughout our country is
extremely brutal toward the out-of-work, homeless man. There are
but few exceptions. This is largely because when a man is chosen for
that position, for political reasons, he pledges himself, not so
much to keep the peace and the law of the community, as to enforce
the law of the political machine and vice trust of that city. And if
the helpless, homeless man, defenseless because of poverty, is not
shot or clubbed to death (which makes a perquisite for the coroner),
he is often railroaded, by the testimony of one policeman, into the
county jail where it costs five cents a day to keep him, while the
sheriff and chief of police will receive of the tax-payers' money
thirty cents a day for his care. The capacity of these jails is from
one to two hundred souls. So it can be plainly seen that it is much
to the interests of these officeholders to keep them filled. The
remedy? Simply divorce at once the police departments from politics,
and under civil service examination, put intelligent, qualified men
on the force. This is not only to serve honestly the community but
your fellow citizen, the policeman, as well. It is not serving vicious
private interests, which grant to the police a license to be dishonest,
to shoot down or club to death homeless men on the street--which not
infrequently results in the finding of policemen shot to death in
vicious retaliation, supposedly always by a criminal. Then abuse will
cease. As an example, I know of no better policed city than Boston.
Study these men closely. Their spirit is kindliness. Though they may
be armed as a protection from the drink-crazed, there is no evidence
of gun or club. They are not seen drinking in the saloons. They do
not meet you with rum-befouled breaths as in most cities, but with a
_welcoming_ face and a clear eye. Here the unfortunate is given kindly
consideration. In return, the Boston public seems to co-operate in
helping the police. The secret of this valued quality of the police of
Boston lies in the fact that the police are indirectly appointed by
the Governor of the State,--that is, the Governor appoints the Police
Commissioner, and he in turn chooses his officers, _after they have
passed a satisfactory civil service examination_ at the State House.
Such police officials should not receive the sobriquet of "bull" or
"cop," but that of "officer" and "gentleman."
The American citizen who chances to be a police officer is not brutal
by choice, but by command of the system which forces him to be brutal.
In municipalities where police brutality is their shame, the change
can only come through the elector and the tax-payer. A well regulated
city is one founded on the human rights of all the people, and a well
regulated police is the strong right arm of a good city government.
"What of the impostor at the Municipal Emergency Home?"
Study teaches us that the out-of-work men who are so from choice,
those that are mentally and physically normal, among the migratory
workers, are exceedingly rare. If we hesitate at a Municipal Emergency
Home and let ninety worthy men suffer or perish because ten out of
the hundred are unworthy, why not close our public libraries, our
hospitals, our parks, in fact, every public benevolence, lest some
unworthy ones creep in?
We strive to weed out the impostor in many communities by throwing
all idle men in prison, and when they cannot be used as a graft, and
become an expense, or the awakened humane spirit of the city demands
that they shall no longer commit this outrage, they are often run
out of town. Or, after they have been humiliated by arrest, they are
hauled in the police wagons to the outskirts of the city with a prison
threat not to return, and turned destitute onto the next community.
But this clearance test will not stand the light of constitutional
liberty. Though our missions and churches are filled with many grand
good people, the crucial treatment of the wage-earner is the underlying
reason for the crumbling of our Christian faith. The Carpenter of
Nazareth never questioned the man in need who came to learn of Him. To
heal him, that was the predominant thought of His mind.
Are we, all of us, quite sure that we have not, during some period of
our lives, appeared true and genuine when false? Let us not forget
that the highest conception of a citizen of a Christian city is not
what a man was yesterday, but what he is to-day, and what he is going
to be to-morrow, and what we are going to help him to be.
There is an eternal law that what is good and true for us individually
is good and true for us collectively. Let us be self-reliant. To take
the attitude that history _does_ and _must_ repeat itself is the
attitude of cowards.
"The reason of idleness and crime is the deferring of our hopes; whilst
we are waiting we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating
and with crime." This was Rome under the rule of its monarchical
aristocracy of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Centuries. Under this
aristocracy, greed for position, fame, and avarice for great wealth,
was unparalleled.
To satisfy this greed, they built great monuments. They drew upon the
entire country for labor to achieve their selfish aim and end. They not
only lured the country's populace by pomp and glittering gayety, but
big business controlled the land for speculation and selfish pleasure,
forcing the people into urban centers. Even the smaller cities built
amphitheaters and "civic centers" larger than the population. Then
the gluttons of big business discovered that basilicas, monuments for
supposedly great men, triumphal arches, marvelous fountains and temples
of myth were a poor relief for the oppressed wageearner. When too
late, they reluctantly offered their watered charity in free baths,
free coffee and free soup, but the decadence of the grandeur of the
eternal city had already begun. The working wage slave of the ancient
Romans, so marvelously clever in his many crafts, was looked upon as
being but little better than the animal which hauled the stone. There
was no recognition of equality between the classes, nor consequently
equal sharing of profits of production, or the creation of any public
government institutions as a privilege of labor by the right of
toil, to care for the bodily needs of the normal and healthy man who
might need such an institution. The monarchical aristocracy of the
Roman Empire did not believe in those things. But our political and
industrial interests in this country are awakening to the fact that
the foundation of all business is food, shelter and clothing, and that
the honest demands of the people for the essentials of life shall be
met and honestly distributed. They are recognizing that a reserve of
unemployed labor is necessary to the progress of our industries and the
promotion of our civilization, and the necessity of conserving that
unemployed force.
We recognize that we are builders and that we are going to have a great
name--not of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Century, but of this, the
Twentieth Century, _our century_,--that we have already conquered sea
and sky, and have put the "girdle 'round the earth in forty minutes."
But every marvelous achievement, every boasted cry of liberty to make
us free, will never make us great, until we learn that our ruling power
_must_ be God's law of right and love.