In this brief sketch of suggested remedial measures, I have confined
myself entirely to those measures which have been successfully tried
elsewhere. I have simply tried to correlate the constructive work in
child saving which has thus far been accomplished into something like a
definite and comprehensive policy. Discussion by earnest men and women
who have given the matters dealt with careful and patient study will,
doubtless, show the need of many changes, both in the direction of
modification and of extension. The important thing at the present time
is to secure an intelligent discussion of the whole problem of the duty
of society to the child, and I venture to hope that the foregoing may
help in that direction. While I have insisted mainly upon the
legislative aspect of the problem, I am not insensible of the importance
of individual responsibility and effort. Much of the child labor of
to-day, for example, is due to the carelessness and indifference of
purchasers’ forever demanding “cheap” goods; and a recognition on their
part of all the monstrous wrong and tragedy hidden in that word “cheap”
would do much to diminish the evil.
We need in our modern life something of that spirit which prompted David
to pour out upon the ground the precious cooling draught his brave
followers, at the risk of their lives, brought him from the well by
Bethlehem’s gate. The water had been obtained at too great a cost, the
risking of human lives, and David could not drink it.[185] We need that
spirit to be applied to our social relations. Those things which are
cheap only by reason of the sacrifice, or risk of sacrifice, of human
life and happiness are too costly for human use. While it is to a large
extent true that there is no problem which depends more completely upon
collective action, through the channels of government, it is also true
that there is abundant room for well-directed private effort. The
coöperation of all the constructive forces in society, private and
public, is necessary if the children are to be saved from the evils by
which they are surrounded, and the future well-being of the race made
possible and certain. Here is the real reconstruction of society—the
building of healthy bodies and brains to insure a citizenship free from
physical and moral decay, worthy of liberty and aspiring to brotherhood.
-----
Footnote H:
_Charities._
Footnote I:
See Appendices A and B.
Footnote J:
Appendix A.
V
BLOSSOMS AND BABIES
There is an affinity between children and flowers. To me the sight of a
blossom often suggests a baby, and the sight of a baby often suggests a
favorite flower.
Many a mother singing lullabies to the baby at her breast calls it her
“blossom.”
And children, healthy children, are fond of flowers.
I once saw a boy of ten who didn’t know what a flower was. He knew what
each card in a pack was, and he wasn’t afraid of a policeman. But he was
afraid of a grassy and daisy-spangled field. London had destroyed for
him all sense of kinship with Nature.
But most children, even city children, love flowers. The country child
loves familiarly as it loves its own mother, but the city child loves
and worships. Yesterday I saw a group of little girls with their noses
pressed flat against a florist’s window. “My, ain’t they sweet!” they
cried in chorus.
_If only the flowers could know!_
Some sympathetic and leisured ladies have formed themselves into a guild
to give such children as I saw at the florist’s window growing flowers
to tend and love. I do not know the ladies. We live in the same city,
but in a different world.
And yet we have some things in common, these good ladies and I. Perhaps
many things, but chief of all a love for children and flowers. In our
different worlds, so little alike, this love flourishes with equal
freedom. My wife loves blossoms and babies, too, but she is not a member
of the guild. Its meetings are not held in our world.
The guild got together 10,000 little children from the tenements of this
great city of New York. To each child a potted plant was given, in the
hope that its presence would brighten the home, and its care “refine”
and “spiritualize” the child.
Good, generous ladies of the guild!
And from each child was exacted the promise that upon a given date at
the end of a full year, the plant should be brought back and placed upon
exhibition. Ribbons were promised as prizes to those children whose
plants should be in the most flourishing condition.
The year passed. The day of the exhibition arrived. Richly gowned women,
calling themselves “patronesses,” were there. They went in luxuriously
equipped automobiles to smile and be condescending toward children who
went in rags and were hungry.
But not all the children to whom the year before they had given flowers
were there. Some of them had drooped during the summer and died like
flowers in parched ground.
And many of the plants were withered and dead, too.
What an exhibition, to be sure! Geraniums without fragrance. Geraniums
which a year ago bore deep, rich, green leaves and bright scarlet
blossoms, were now straggling and wretched, with pale-green—almost
white—stems, with poor, sickly-looking little leaves and with no
flowers. And many a pot containing only a withered and rotted stick,
with maybe a little note, “Please, ma’am, it died because our rooms is
dark.”
Some of the richly gowned women wept as they looked at the long rows of
pitiful flowers, and at the long rows of withered and dead flowers.
Wept? I wonder why.
I wonder if they wept because they began to appreciate faintly how
poverty withers and oppresses all life; or only because the sight of so
many dead flowers, and flowers worse than dead, overwhelmed them? Or had
they heard the flowers tell their sad little histories?
For every one of the flowers had a story to tell to understanding
hearts.
Yes, madam, that tall, withered geranium stick, which made you weep as
you remembered how beautiful its scarlet blossoms had looked the year
before, when you gave it to little crippled Polly with the flaxen hair,
could unfold a story, if you could but understand it. But it is a story
of the tenement, not of your world. And you cannot understand.
But little Polly (who doesn’t understand either) can tell you enough to
give you cause for tears. Real tears. Human tears.
I could tell you, for I know the tenement. It is in my world. But let
Polly tell.
* * * * *
“When youse gived us th’ prutty flow’r, leddy, I put ’er in our winder
so’s all th’ kids ’ud see from th’ street. An’ mamma wus so proud! An’
me little baby bruver jes’ went wild, leddy. An’ when mamma wus washin’,
he’d stay so good and call out, so pert-like, ‘Putty! putty!’ An’ mamma
said ‘twus a blessin’, ’cause she wus able to do th’ washin’ when baby
wus playin’.
“But when winter comed, leddy, yer flow’r an’ th’ leaves wus all dead
like, an’ comed off. An’ me mamma said ’twus th’ cold. An’ when I put
’er by th’ airshaft she said ’twus too dark. An’ so yer flow’r jes’ died
like, an’ mamma wus so cut up washin’ days, for me bruver wus teethin’
an’ there warn’t no flow’r.
“But mamma said yer flow’r ’ud come up in th’ summer. So I jes’ kep’
waterin’, an’ when th’ fine days comed I put ’er in our winder again.
An’ it growed a bit, leddy, an’ mamma an’ me wus so glad! But ’twus
allus growin’ a bit an’ then dyin’ like, ’cause, mamma said, we didn’t
git no sun in our rooms. An’ I used to cry in th’ nights ’bout that
flow’r, leddy!
“An’ when summer comed an’ folks wus sleepin’ ’pon their fire-’scapes, I
put yer flow’r outside an’ watered ’er ev’ry day. But when me little
bruver wus sick, an’ th’ doctor said he mus’ go to th’ country
somewheres, yer flow’r jes’ died an’ dried up like a stick, leddy. Me
little bruver died, too, an’ th’ doctor said he’d ’a’ lived if he’d gone
into th’ country.
“I’m sorry, leddy, fur yer flow’r. P’raps ’twus ’cause it never went to
no country place. I tried me best, leddy, but—”
* * * * *
No, don’t reproach yourself, madam. You didn’t know. How could you know,
living in another world? It was really good of you to think of the
tenement children, and to give them your flowers.
Poor little children of the tenements! It was good of you to think of
them. Their homes are squalid, and flowers do make the home brighter.
And their little lives do need the refining and spiritualizing influence
of flowers.
_But neither the babies nor the blossoms can flourish there. They pine
and droop and die together. True, some of them live—babies and
blossoms—but how?_
You are a woman and you love children and flowers. Tell me, did not the
pale, sickly children and the pale, sickly plants impress you as even
more saddening than the dead plants—the constant reminders of dead
children?
Their slow, prolonged dying is more terrible than death to me. And I
love them both, children and flowers.
I honor your tears. They proclaim you to be possessed of a human heart.
But you are a misfit in your sphere. Your place is in our world.
You mean well, but your guild is only a toy. The problem is not to be
solved so easily. If you would help solve it, you must give something
more than plants. You must give yourself.