I BECOME AN AUTHOR AND RESUME MY INTERRUPTED CAREER AS A LECTURER
For more than a year I had knocked at the doors of the various
magazine editors with my pictures, proposing to tell them how the
other half lived, but no one wanted to know. One of the Harpers,
indeed, took to the idea, but the editor to whom he sent me treated
me very cavalierly. Hearing that I had taken the pictures myself,
he proposed to buy them at regular photographer's rates and "find
a man who could write" to tell the story. We did not part with
mutual expressions of esteem. I gave up writing for a time then, and
tried the church doors. That which was bottled up within me was,
perhaps, getting a trifle too hot for pen and ink. In the church
one might, at all events, tell the truth unhindered. So I thought;
but there were cautious souls there, too, who held the doors against
Mulberry Street and the police reporter. It was fair, of course,
that they should know who I was, but I thought it sufficient
introduction that I was a deacon in my own church out on Long
Island. They did not, it seemed. My stock of patience, never very
large, was showing signs of giving out, and I retorted hotly that
then, if they wanted to know, I was a reporter, and perhaps Mulberry
Street had as much sanctity in it as a church that would not listen
to its wrongs. They only shut the doors a little tighter at that.
It did not mend matters that about that time I tried a little
truth-telling in my own fold and came to grief. It did not prove
to be any more popular on Long Island than in New York. I resigned
the diaconate and was thinking of hiring a hall--a theatre could be
had on Sunday--wherein to preach my lay sermon, when I came across
Dr. Schauffler, the manager of the City Mission Society, and Dr.
Josiah Strong, the author of "Our Country." They happened to be
together, and saw at once the bearing of my pictures. Remembering
my early experience with the magic lantern, I had had slides made
from my negatives, and on February 28, 1888, I told their story in
the Broadway Tabernacle. Thereafter things mended somewhat. Plymouth
Church and Dr. Parkhurst's opened their doors to me and the others
fell slowly into line.
I had my say and felt better. I found a note from Dr. Schauffler
among my papers the other day that was written on the morning after
that first speech. He was pleased with it and with the collection
of $143.50 for the mission cause. I remember it made me smile a
little grimly. The fifty cents would have come handy for lunch that
day. It just happened that I did not have any. It happened quite
often. I was, as I said, ever a bad manager. I mention it here
because of two letters that came while I have been writing this, and
which I may as well answer now. One asks me to lift the mortgage
from the writer's home. I get a good many of that kind. The
writers seem to think I have much money and might want to help them.
I should like nothing better. To go around, if one were rich, and
pay off mortgages on little homes, so that the owners when they had
got the interest together by pinching and scraping should find it
all gone and paid up without knowing how, seems to me must be the
very finest fun in all the world. But I shall never be able to do
it, for I haven't any other money than what I earn with my pen and
by lecturing, and never had. So their appeals only make me poorer
by a two-cent stamp for an answer to tell them that, and make them
no richer. The other letter asks why I and other young men who
have had to battle with the world did not go to the Young Men's
Christian Association, or to the missionaries, for help. I do not
know about the others, but I did not want anybody to help me. There
were plenty that were worse off and needed help more. The only time
I tried was when Pater Breton, the good French priest in Buffalo,
tried to get me across to France to fight for his country, and
happily did not succeed. As to battling with the world, that is
good for a young man, much better than to hang on to somebody for
support A little starvation once in a while even is not out of
the way. We eat too much anyhow, and when you have fought your way
through a tight place, you are the better for it. I am afraid that
is not always the case when you have been shoved through.
And then again, as I have just told, when I did go to the ministers
with a fair proposition, they did not exactly jump at it. No, it
was better the way it was.
The thing I had sought vainly so long came in the end by another
road than I planned. One of the editors of _Scribner's Magazine_
saw my pictures and heard their story in his church, and came to
talk the matter over with me. As a result of that talk I wrote an
article that appeared in the Christmas _Scribner's_, 1889, under the
title "How the Other Half Lives," and made an instant impression.
That was the beginning of better days.
Before I let the old depart I must set down an incident of
my reporter's experience that crowds in with a good hearty laugh,
though it was not the slum that sent me to the Church of the Holy
Communion over on Sixth Avenue. And though the door was shut in my
face, it was not by the rector, or with malice prepense. A despatch
from the Tenderloin police station had it that the wife of the
Rev. Dr. Henry Mottet was locked up there, out of her mind. We had
no means of knowing that Dr. Mottet was at that time a confirmed
bachelor. So I went over to condole with him, and incidentally
to ask what was the matter with his wife, any way. The servant who
came to the door did not know whether the doctor was in; she would
go and see. But even as she said it the wind blew the door shut
behind her. It had a snap-lock.
"Oh!" she said, "I am shut out. If the doctor isn't in the house,
I can't get in."
We rang, but no one came. There was only one way: to try the windows.
The poor girl could not be left in the street. So we went around
the rectory and found one unlatched. She gave me a leg up, and I
raised the sash and crawled in.
Halfway in the room, with one leg over the sill, I became dimly
conscious of a shape there. Tall and expectant, it stood between
the door-curtains.
"Well, sir! and who are you?" it spoke sternly.
I climbed over the sill and put the question myself: "And who are
you, sir?"
"I am Dr. Mottet, and live in this house." He had been in after
all and had come down to hear what the ringing was about. "And now
may I ask, sir--?"
"Certainly, you may. I am a reporter from Police Headquarters, come
up to tell you that your wife is locked up in the Thirtieth Street
police station."
The doctor looked fixedly at me for a full minute. Then he slowly
telescoped his tall frame into an armchair, and sank down, a look
of comic despair settling upon his face.
"O Lord!" he sighed heavily. "A strange man climbs through my
parlor window to tell me, a bachelor, that my wife is locked up in
the police station. What will happen next?"
And then we laughed together and made friends. The woman was just
an ordinary lunatic.
I was late home from the office one evening the week my Christmas
article was printed. My wife was waiting for me at the door, looking
down the street. I saw that she had something on her mind, but the
children were all right, she said; nothing was amiss. Supper over,
she drew a chair to the fire and brought out a letter.
"I read it," she nodded. It was our way. The commonest business
letter is to me a human document when she has read it. Besides, she
knows so much more than I. Her heart can find a way where my head
bucks blindly against stone walls.
The letter was from Jeanette Gilder, of the _Critic_, asking if
I had thought of making my article into a book. If so, she knew a
publisher. My chance had come. I was at last to have my say.
I should have thought I would have shouted and carried on. I
didn't. We sat looking into the fire together, she and I. Neither
of us spoke. Then we went up to the children. They slept sweetly
in their cribs. I saw a tear in her eye as she bent over the baby's
cradle, and caught her to me, questioning.
"Shall we lose you now?" she whispered, and hid her head on my
shoulder. I do not know what jealous thought of authors being wedded
to their work had come into her mind; or, rather, I do. I felt it,
and in my heart, while I held her close, I registered a vow which
I have kept. It was the last tear she shed for me. Our daughter
pouts at her father now and then; says I am "fierce." But She comes
with her sewing to sit where I write, and when she comes the sun
shines.
Necessarily, for a while, my new work held me very close. "How the
Other Half Lives" was written at night while the house slept, for
I had my office work to attend to in the day. Then it was my habit
to light the lamps in all the rooms of the lower story and roam
through them with my pipe, for I do most of my writing on my feet.
I began the book with the new year. In November it was published,
and on the day it came out I joined the staff of the _Evening
Sun_. I merely moved up one flight of stairs. Mulberry Street was
not done with me yet, nor I with it.
I had had a falling out with the manager of the Associated Press
Bureau,--the _Tribune_ had retired from the copartnership some
years before,--and during one brief summer ran an opposition shop
of my own. I sold police news to all the papers, and they fell away
from the Bureau with such hearty unanimity that the manager came
around and offered to farm out the department to me entirely if
I would join forces. But independence was ever sweet to me, and
in this instance it proved profitable even. I made at least three
times as much money as before, but I did it at such cost of energy
and effort that I soon found it could not last, even with the
phenomenal streak of good luck I had struck. It seemed as if I had
only to reach out to turn up news. I hear people saying once in a
while that there is no such thing as luck. They are wrong. There
is; I know it. It runs in streaks, like accidents and fires.
The thing is to get in the way of it and keep there till it comes
along, then hitch on, and away you go. It is the old story of the
early bird. I got up at five o'clock, three hours before any of my
competitors, and sometimes they came down to the office to find my
news hawked about the street in extras of their own papers.
One way or another, a fight there was always on hand. That seemed
foreordained. If it was not "the opposition" it was the police.
When Mulberry Street took a rest the publisher's "reader" began it,
and the proof-reader. This last is an enemy of human kind anyhow.
Not only that he makes you say things you never dreamed of, but
his being so cocksure that he knows better every time, is a direct
challenge to a fight. The "reader" is tarred with the same stick.
He is the one who passes on the manuscript, and he has an ingrown
hatred of opinion. If a man has that, he is his enemy before he
ever sets eye on him. He passed on my manuscript with a blue pencil
that laid waste whole pages, once a whole chapter, with a stroke.
It was like sacking a conquered city. But he did not die in his
sins. I joined battle at the first sight of that blue pencil. The
publishers said their reader was a very capable man. So he was, and
a fine fellow to boot; had forgotten more than I ever knew, except
as to the other half, of which he did not know anything. I suggested
to the firm that if they did not think so, they had better let
him write a book to suit, or else print mine as I wrote it. It was
fair, and they took my view of it. So did he. The blue pencil went
out of commission.
How deadly tired I was in those days I do not think I myself knew
until I went to Boston one evening to help discuss sweating at the
Institute of Technology. I had an hour to spare, and went around
into Beacon Street to call upon a friend. I walked mechanically up
the stoop and rang the bell. My friend was not in, said the servant
who came to the door. Who should she say called? I stood and looked
at her like a fool: I had forgotten my name. I was not asleep;
I was rummaging in an agony of dread and excitement through every
corner and crevice of my brain for my own name, but I did not find
it. As slowly as I could, to gain time, I reached for my card-case
and fumbled for a card, hoping to remember. But no ray came. Until
I actually read my name on my card it was as utterly gone as if
I had never heard it. If the people of Boston got anything out of
my speech that day they did better than I. All the time I spoke
something kept saying over within me: "You are a nice fellow to
make a speech at the Institute of Technology; you don't even know
your own name."
After that I was haunted by a feeling that I would lose myself
altogether, and got into the habit of leaving private directions in
the office where I would probably be found, should question arise.
It arose at last in a Brooklyn church where I was making a speech
with my magic-lantern pictures. While I spoke a feeling kept
growing upon me that I ought to be down in the audience looking at
the pictures. It all seemed a long way off and in no way related to
me. Before I knew it, or any one had time to notice, I had gone
down and taken a front seat. I sat there for as much as five minutes
perhaps, while the man with the lantern fidgeted and the audience
wondered, I suppose, what was coming next. Then it was the pictures
that did not change which fretted me; with a cold chill I knew I
had been lost, and went back and finished the speech. No one was
any the wiser, apparently. But I was glad when, the following week,
I wrote the last page in my book. That night, my wife insists,
I deliberately turned a somersault on the parlor carpet while the
big children cheered and the baby looked on, wide-eyed, from her
high chair.
I preserve among my cherished treasures two letters of that period
from James Russell Lowell. In one of them he gives me permission to
use the verses with which I prefaced the book. They were the text
from which I preached my sermon. He writes that he is "glad they
have so much life left in them after forty years." But those verses
will never die. They tell in a few lines all I tried to tell on
three hundred pages. The other letter was written when he had read
the book. I reproduce it here.
[Illustration: Mr. Lowell's Letter.]
For myself I have never been able to satisfactorily explain the
great run "How the Other Half Lives" had. It is a curiously popular
book even to-day. Perhaps it was that I had had it in me so long
that it burst out at last with a rush that caught on. The title had
a deal to do with it. Mr. Howells asked me once where I got it. I
did not get it. It came of itself. Like Topsy, it growed. It had run
in my mind ever since I thought of the things I tried to describe.
Then there was the piece of real good luck that Booth's "In Darkest
England" was published just then. People naturally asked, "how
about New York?" That winter Ward McAllister wrote his book about
society as he had found it, and the circuit was made. Ministers
preached about the contrast." How the Other Half Lives "ran from
edition to edition. There was speedily a demand for more "copy,"
and I wrote "The Children of the Poor," following the same track.
Critics said there were more "bones" in it, but it was never popular
like the "Other Half."
By "bones" I suppose they meant facts to tie to. They were scarce
enough at that stage of the inquiry. I have in my desk a table
giving the ages at which children get their teeth that bears witness
to that. I had been struggling with the problem of child-labor in
some East Side factories, and was not making any headway. The children
had certificates, one and all, declaring them to be "fourteen," and
therefore fit to be employed. It was perfectly evident that they
were not ten in scores of cases, but the employer shrugged his
shoulders and pointed to the certificate. The father, usually a
tailor, would not listen at all, but went right on ironing. There
was no birth registry to fall back on; that end of it was neglected.
There seemed to be no way of proving the fact, yet the fact was
there and must be proven. My own children were teething at the time,
and it gave me an idea. I got Dr. Tracy to write out that table
for me, showing at what age the dog-teeth should appear, when the
molars, etc. Armed with that I went into the factories and pried
open the little workers' mouths. The girls objected: their teeth
were quite generally bad; but I saw enough to enable me to speak
positively. Even allowing for the backwardness of the slum, it
was clear that a child that had not yet grown its dog-teeth was not
"fourteen," for they should have been cut at twelve at the latest.
Three years later the Reinhardt Committee reported to the Legislature
that the net result of the Factory Law was a mass of perjury and
child-labor, and day began to dawn for the little ones, too.
Rough ways and rough work? Yes, but you must use the tools that
come to hand, and be glad for them, if you want to get things done.
Bludgeons were needed just then, and, after all, you can get a good
deal of fun out of one when it is needed. I know I did. By that
time the whole battle with the slum had evolved itself out of
the effort to clean one pig-sty, and, as for my own share in it,
to settle for one dead dog. It was raging all along the line with
demands for tenement-house reform and the destruction of the old
rookeries; for parks for the people who were penned up in the slum;
for playgrounds for their children; for decent teaching and decent
schools. There were too many dark spots in New York where we had
neither. So dense was the ignorance of the ruling powers of the
needs and real condition of the public schools, which, on parade
days, they spoke of sententiously as the "corner-stone of our
liberties," while the people cheered the sentiment, that it was
related how a Tammany Mayor had appointed to the office of school
trustee in the Third Ward a man who had been dead a whole year,
and how, when the world marvelled, it had been laughed off at the
City Hall with the comment that what did it matter: there were no
schools in the ward; it was the wholesale grocery district. I do
not know how true it was, but there was no reason why it might not
be. It was exactly on a par with the rest of it. I do not mean to
say that there were no good schools in New York. There were some as
good as anywhere; for there were high-souled teachers who redeemed
even the slough we were in from utter despair. But they were there
in spite of it and they were far from being the rule. Let us hope
for the day when that shall have been reversed as a statement of
fact. No one will hail it more gladly than I. There is an easy way
of putting it to the test; we did it once before. Broach a measure
of school reform and see what the question is that will be asked by
the teachers. If it is, "How is it going to benefit the children?"
hoist the flag; the day of deliverance is at hand. In the battle
I refer to that question was not asked once. The teachers stood
shoulder to shoulder for _their_ rights, let the children fare as
they might.
However, that is an old grievance. We had it out over it once,
and I have no mind to rip it up again unless it is needed. My own
father was a teacher; perhaps that is one reason why I revere the
calling so that I would keep its skirts clear of politics at any
hazard. Another is that I most heartily subscribe to the statement
that the public school is the corner-stone of our liberties, and
to the sentiment that would keep the flag flying over it always.
Only I want as much respect for the flag: a clean school under an
unsoiled flag! So we shall pull through; not otherwise. The thing
requires no argument.
[Illustration: The Boys' "Playground" in an Old-time School.]
My own effort in that fight was mainly for decent schoolhouses,
for playgrounds, and for a truant school to keep the boys out of
jail. If I was not competent to argue over the curriculum with a
professor of pedagogy, I could tell, at least, if a schoolroom was
so jammed that to let me pass into the next room the children in
the front seat had to rise and stand; or if there was light enough
for them to see their slates or the blackboard. Nor did it take
the wisdom of a Solomon to decide that a dark basement room, thirty
by fifty feet, full of rats, was not a proper place for a thousand
children to call their only "playground." Play, in the kindergarten
scheme, is the "normal occupation of the child through which he first
begins to perceive moral relations." Nice kind of morals burrowed
there for him! There was, in the whole of Manhattan, but a single
outdoor playground attached to a public school, and that was an old
burial-ground in First Street that had been wrested from the dead
with immense toil. When I had fed fat my grudge upon these things,
I could still go where the public school children came, and learn,
by a little judicious pumping, how my friend, the professor, had
stored their minds. That is, if they did not come to me. Many
hundreds of them did, when under Roosevelt we needed two thousand
new policemen, and it was from some of them we learned that among
the thirteen States which formed the Union were "England, Ireland,
Wales, Belfast, and Cork"; that Abraham Lincoln was "murdered
by Ballington Booth," and that the Fire Department was in charge
of the city government when the Mayor was away. Don't I wish it
were, and that they would turn the hose on a while! What a lot of
trouble it would save us in November.
As for a truant school, the lack of one was the worst outrage of
all, for it compelled the sending of boys, who had done no worse
harm than to play hooky on a sunny spring day, to a jail with iron
bars in the windows. For the boy who did this wicked thing--let me
be plain about it and say that if he had not; if he had patiently
preferred some of the schools I knew to a day of freedom out in
the sunshine, I should have thought him a miserable little lunkhead
quite beyond hope! As for those who locked him up, almost nothing
I can think of would be bad enough for them. The whole effort of
society should be, and is getting to be more and more, thank goodness
and common sense, to keep the boy out of jail. To run to it with
him the moment the sap begins to boil up in him and he does any
one of the thousand things we have all done or wanted to do if we
dared, why, it is sinful folly. I am not saying that there are not
boys who ought to be in jail, though to my mind it is the poorest
use you can put them to; but to put truants there, to learn all
the tricks the jail has to teach, with them in the frame of mind
in which it receives them,--for boys are not fools, whatever those
who are set over them may be, and they know when they are ill-used,--I
know of nothing so wickedly wasteful. That was our way; is still
in fact, to a large extent, though the principle has been disavowed
as both foul and foolish. But in those days the defenders of the
system--Heaven save the mark!--fought for it yet, and it was give
and take right along, every day and all day.
Before this, in time to bear a strong hand in it all, there had come
into the field a new force that was destined to give both energy
and direction to our scattered efforts for reform. Up till then
we had been a band of guerillas, the incentive proceeding usually
from Dr. Felix Adler, Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, or some one of
their stamp; and the rest of us joining in to push _that_ cart up
the hill, then taking time to breathe until another came along that
needed a lift. The social settlements, starting as neighborhood
guilds to reassert the lost brotherhood, became almost from the first
the fulcrum, as it were, whence the lever for reform was applied,
because the whole idea of that reform was to better the lot of those
whom the prosperous up-town knew vaguely only as "the poor." If
parks were wanted, if schools needed bettering, there were at the
College Settlement, the University Settlement, the Nurses' Settlement,
and at a score of other such places, young enthusiasts to collect
the facts and to urge them, with the prestige of their non-political
organization to back them. The Hull House out in Chicago set the
pace, and it was kept up bravely at this end of the line. For one,
I attached myself as a kind of volunteer "auxiliary" to the College
Settlement--that was what the girls there called me--and to any one
that would have me, and so in a few years' time slid easily into
the day when my ruder methods were quite out of date and ready to
be shelved.
How it came about that, almost before I knew it, my tongue was
enlisted in the fight as well as my pen I do not know myself. It
could not be because I had a "silver-tongue," for I read in the
local newspaper one day when I had been lecturing in the western
part of the state that "a voluble German with a voice like a
squeaky cellar-door" had been in town. It seems that I had fallen
into another newspaper row, all unsuspecting, and was in the
opposition editor's camp. But, truly, I lay no claim to eloquence.
So it must have been the facts, again. There is nothing like them.
Whatever it was, it made me smile sometimes in the middle of a
speech to think of the prophecies when I was a schoolboy that "my
tongue would be my undoing" for here it was helping right wrongs
instead. In fact, that was what it had tried to do in the old days
when the teachers were tyrannical. It entered the lists here when
Will Craig, a clerk in the Health Department, with whom I had struck
up a friendship, helped me turn my photographs into magic-lantern
slides by paying the bills, and grew from that, until now my winters
are spent on the lecture platform altogether. I always liked the
work. It tires less than the office routine, and you feel the touch
with your fellows more than when you sit and write your message.
Also, if you wish to learn about a thing, the best way is always
to go and try to teach some one else that thing. I never make a
speech on a subject I am familiar with but that I come away knowing
more about it than I did at the start, though no one else may have
said a word.
Then there is the chairman. You never can tell what sort of
surprise is in store for you. In a Massachusetts town last winter
I was hailed on the stage by one of his tribe, a gaunt, funereal
sort of man, who wanted to know what he should say about me.
"Oh," said I, in a spirit of levity, "say anything you like. Say
I am the most distinguished citizen in the country. They generally
do."
Whereupon my funereal friend marched upon the stage and calmly
announced to the audience that he did not know this man Riis, whom
he was charged with introducing, never heard of him.
"He tells me," he went on with never a wink, "that he is the most
distinguished citizen in the country. You can judge for yourselves
when you have heard him."
I thought at first it was some bad kind of joke; but no! He was
not that kind of man. I do not suppose he had smiled since he was
born. Maybe he was an undertaker. Assuredly, he ought to be. But
he had bowels after all. Instead of going off the stage and leaving
me blue with rage, he stayed to exhort the audience in a fifteen
minutes' speech to vote right, or something of that sort. The single
remark, when at last he turned his back, that it was a relief to
have him "extinguished," made us men and brothers, that audience
and me. I think of him with almost as much pleasure as I do of that
city editor chap out in Illinois who came blowing upon the platform
at the last minute and handed me a typewritten speech with the question
if that would do. I read it over. It began with the statement that
it was the general impression that all newspapermen were liars,
and went on by easy stages to point out that there were exceptions,
myself for instance. The rest was a lot of praise to which I had
no claim. I said so, and that I wished he would leave it out.
"Oh, well," he said, with a happy smile, "don't you see it gives
you your cue. Then you can turn around and say that anyway I am a
liar."
With tongue or pen, the argument shaped itself finally into the
fundamental one for the rescue of the home imperiled by the slum.
There all roads met. Good citizenship hung upon that issue. Say
what you will, a man cannot live like a pig and vote like a man.
The dullest of us saw it. The tenement had given to New York the
name of "the homeless city." But with that gone which made life
worth living, what were liberty worth? With no home to cherish, how
long before love of country would be an empty sound? Life, liberty,
pursuit of happiness? Wind! says the slum, and the slum is right
if we let it be. We cannot get rid of the tenements that shelter
two million souls in New York to-day, but we set about making them
at least as nearly fit to harbor human souls as might be. That
will take a long time yet. But a beginning was made. With reform
looming upon the heels of the Lexow disclosures came the Gilder
Tenement-House Commission in the autumn of 1894.
[ Picture of an entitled "Typical East Side Tenement Block" subtitled
"Five hundred babies in it, not one bathtub"]
Greater work was never done for New York than by that faithful body
of men. The measure of it is not to be found in what was actually
accomplished, though the volume of that was great, but in what it
made possible. Upon the foundations they laid down we may build for
all time and be the better for it. Light and air acquired a legal
claim, and where the sun shines into the slum, the slum is doomed.
The worst tenements were destroyed; parks were opened, schools
built, playgrounds made. The children's rights were won back for
them. The slum denied them even the chance to live, for it was shown
that the worst rear tenements murdered the babies at the rate of
one in five. The Commission made it clear that the legislation that
was needed was "the kind that would root out every old ramshackle
disease-breeding tenement in the city." That was the way to begin
it. As to the rest of them, it laid the foundation deeper yet, for
it made us see that life in them "conduces to the corruption of
the young." That told it all. It meant that a mortgage was put on
the civic life of the morrow, which was not to be borne. We were
forewarned.
The corruption of the young! We move with rapid strides in our time.
That which was a threat, scoffed at by many, has become a present
and dreadful peril in half a dozen brief years. We took a short cut
to make it that when we tried to drain the pool of police blackmail
of which the Lexow disclosures had shown us the hideous depths.
We drained it into the tenements, and for the police infamy got a
real-estate blackmail that is worse. The chairman of the Committee
of Fifteen tells us that of more than a hundred tenements, full of
growing children, which his committee has canvassed, not one had
escaped the contamination that piles up the landlord's profits.
Twelve dollars for an honest flat, thirty for the other kind and
no questions asked! I find in my scrap-book this warning, sounded
by me in the Christmas holidays, 1893, when the country was ringing
with Dr. Parkhurst's name:--
"I would not, whatever else might happen, by any hasty or ill-advised
system of wholesale raids crowd these women into the tenements and
flats of our city. That is what will surely happen, is happening
now. It is a danger infinitely greater than any flowing from their
presence where they are, and as they are. Each centre of moral
contagion by this scattering process becomes ten or twenty, planted
where they will do the most possible harm. Think of the children
brought in daily, hourly contact with this vice! Think of the
thousands of young women looking vainly for work this hard winter!
Be there ever so little money for woman's honest work, there is
always enough to buy her virtue. Have tenement houses moral resources
that can be trusted to keep her safe from this temptation?
"This is a wicked villany that must not be permitted, come whatever
else may. We hear of danger to 'our young men,' from present
conditions. What sort of young men must they be who would risk
the sacrifice of their poorer sisters for their own 'safety'? And
it is being risked wherever houses of this kind are being shut up
and the women turned into the streets, there to shift for themselves.
The jail does not keep them. Christian families will not receive
them. They cannot be killed. No door opens to them: yet they have
to go somewhere. And they go where they think they can hide from
the police and still ply the trade that gives them the only living
society is willing they shall have, though it says it is not."
And they did go there. Dr. Parkhurst was not to blame. He was
fighting Tammany that dealt the cards and took all the tricks, and
for that fight New York owes him a debt it hardly yet knows of.
Besides, though those raids hastened the process, it was already
well underway. The police extortion of itself would have finished
it in time. A blackmailer in the long run always kills the goose
that lays his golden egg. His greed gets the better of his sense.
The interview I quoted was not a plea for legalizing wrong. That
will get us no farther. It was rather a summons to our people to
cease skulking behind lying phrases and look the matter squarely
in the face. With a tenement-house law, passed this winter, which
sends the woman to jail and fines the landlord and his house $1000,
we shall be in the way shortly of doing so. Until we do that justice
first, I do not see how we can. Poverty's back is burdened enough
without our loading upon it the sins we are afraid to face.
Meanwhile we shall be getting up courage to talk plainly about it,
which is half the battle. Think of the shock it would have given
our grandmothers to hear of a meeting of women in a public hall "to
protest against protected vice." On a Sunday, too. Come to think
of it, I do not know but that wholesome, plain speech on this subject
is nearer the whole than half the battle. I rather guess it is.