THE MAN WITH THE KNIFE.
A man stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street the
other day, looking gloomily at the carriages that rolled by, carrying
the wealth and fashion of the avenues to and from the big stores down
town. He was poor, and hungry, and ragged. This thought was in his
mind: "They behind their well-fed teams have no thought for the morrow;
they know hunger only by name, and ride down to spend in an hour's
shopping what would keep me and my little ones from want a whole year."
There rose up before him the picture of those little ones crying for
bread around the cold and cheerless hearth--then he sprang into the
throng and slashed about him with a knife, blindly seeking to kill, to
revenge.
The man was arrested, of course, and locked up. To-day he is probably
in a mad-house, forgotten. And the carriages roll by to and from the
big stores with their gay throng of shoppers. The world forgets easily,
too easily, what it does not like to remember.
Nevertheless the man and his knife had a mission. They spoke in their
ignorant, impatient way the warning one of the most conservative,
dispassionate of public bodies had sounded only a little while
before: "Our only fear is that reform may come in a burst of public
indignation destructive to property and to good morals."[24] They
represented, one solution of the problem of ignorant poverty _versus_
ignorant wealth that has come down to us unsolved, the danger-cry
of which we have lately heard in the shout that never should have
been raised on American soil--the shout of "the masses against the
classes"--the solution of violence.
[Footnote 24: Forty-fourth Annual Report of the Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor. 1887.]
There is another solution, that of justice. The choice is between the
two. Which shall it be?
"Well!" say some well-meaning people; "we don't see the need of putting
it in that way. We have been down among the tenements, looked them
over. There are a good many people there; they are not comfortable,
perhaps. What would you have? They are poor. And their houses are not
such hovels as we have seen and read of in the slums of the Old World.
They are decent in comparison. Why, some of them have brown-stone
fronts. You will own at least that they make a decent show."
Yes! that is true. The worst tenements in New York do not, as a rule,
_look bad_. Neither Hell's Kitchen, nor Murderers' Row bears its true
character stamped on the front. They are not quite old enough, perhaps.
The same is true of their tenants. The New York tough may be ready to
kill where his London brother would do little more than scowl; yet,
as a general thing he is less repulsively brutal in looks. Here again
the reason may be the same: the breed is not so old. A few generations
more in the slums, and all that will be changed. To get at the pregnant
facts of tenement-house life one must look beneath the surface. Many
an apple has a fair skin and a rotten core. There is a much better
argument for the tenements in the assurance of the Registrar of Vital
Statistics that the death-rate of these houses has of late been brought
below the general death-rate of the city, and that it is lowest in
the biggest houses. This means two things: one, that the almost
exclusive attention given to the tenements by the sanitary authorities
in twenty years has borne some fruit, and that the newer tenements
are better than the old--there is some hope in that; the other, that
the whole strain of tenement-house dwellers has been bred down to the
conditions under which it exists, that the struggle with corruption
has begotten the power to resist it. This is a familiar law of nature,
necessary to its first and strongest impulse of self-preservation. To
a certain extent, we are all creatures of the conditions that surround
us, physically and morally. But is the knowledge reassuring? In the
light of what we have seen, does not the question arise: what sort of
creature, then, this of the tenement? I tried to draw his likeness from
observation in telling the story of the "tough." Has it nothing to
suggest the man with the knife?
I will go further. I am not willing even to admit it to be an
unqualified advantage that our New York tenements have less of the slum
look than those of older cities. It helps to delay the recognition of
their true character on the part of the well-meaning, but uninstructed,
who are always in the majority.
The "dangerous classes" of New York long ago compelled recognition.
They are dangerous less because of their own crimes than because of
the criminal ignorance of those who are not of their kind. The danger
to society comes not from the poverty of the tenements, but from the
ill-spent wealth that reared them, that it might earn a usurious
interest from a class from which "nothing else was expected." That
was the broad foundation laid down, and the edifice built upon it
corresponds to the groundwork. That this is well understood on the
"unsafe" side of the line that separates the rich from the poor, much
better than by those who have all the advantages of discriminating
education, is good cause for disquietude. In it a keen foresight may
again dimly discern the shadow of the man with the knife.
Two years ago a great meeting was held at Chickering Hall--I have
spoken of it before--a meeting that discussed for days and nights
the question how to banish this spectre; how to lay hold with good
influences of this enormous mass of more than a million people, who
were drifting away faster and faster from the safe moorings of the
old faith. Clergymen and laymen from all the Protestant denominations
took part in the discussion; nor was a good word forgotten for the
brethren of the other great Christian fold who labor among the poor.
Much was said that was good and true, and ways were found of reaching
the spiritual needs of the tenement population that promise success.
But at no time throughout the conference was the real key-note of
the situation so boldly struck as has been done by a few far-seeing
business men, who had listened to the cry of that Christian builder:
"How shall the love of God be understood by those who have been
nurtured in sight only of the greed of man?" Their practical programme
of "Philanthropy and five per cent." has set examples in tenement
building that show, though they are yet few and scattered, what may in
time be accomplished even with such poor, opportunities as New York
offers to-day of undoing the old wrong. This is the gospel of justice,
the solution that must be sought as the one alternative to the man
with the knife.
"Are you not looking too much to the material condition of these
people," said a good minister to me after a lecture in a Harlem
church last winter, "and forgetting the inner man?" I told him, "No!
for you cannot expect to find an inner man to appeal to in the worst
tenement-house surroundings. You must first put the man where he can
respect himself. To reverse the argument of the apple: you cannot
expect to find a sound core in a rotten fruit."