I TRY TO GO TO THE WAR FOR THE THIRD AND LAST TIME
That which I have described as "sitting up with a club" in a city
like New York is bound to win your fight if you sit up long enough,
for it is to be remembered that the politicians who oppose good
government are not primarily concerned about keeping you out of
your rights. They want the things that make for their advantage;
first of all the offices through which they can maintain their
grip. After that they will concede as many of the things you want
as they have to, and if you are not yourself out for the offices,
more than otherwise, though never more than you wring out of them.
They really do not care if you do have clean streets, good schools,
parks, playgrounds, and all the things which make for good citizenship
because they give the best part of the man a chance, though they
grudge them as a sad waste of money that might be turned to use
in "strengthening the organization," which is the sum of all their
self-seeking, being their means of ever getting more and more. Hence
it is that a mere handful of men and women who rarely or never had
other authority than their own unselfish purpose, have in all times,
even the worst, been able to put their stamp upon the community
for good. I am thinking of the Felix Adlers, the Dr. Rainsfords,
the Josephine Shaw Lowells, the Robert Ross McBurneys, the R. Fulton
Cuttings, the Father Doyles, the Jacob H. Schiffs, the Robert W.
de Forests, the Arthur von Briesens, the F. Norton Goddards, the
Richard Watson Gilders, and their kind; and thinking of them brings
to mind an opportunity I had a year or two ago to tell a club of
workmen what I thought of them. It was at the Chicago Commons. I
had looked in on a Sunday evening upon a group of men engaged in
what seemed to me a singularly unprofitable discussion of human
motives. They were of the school which professes to believe that
everything proceeds from the love of self, and they spoke learnedly
of the ego and all that; but as I listened the conviction grew,
along with the feeling of exasperation that sort of nonsense always
arouses in me, that they were just vaporing, and I told them so.
I pointed to these men and women I have spoken of, some of them of
great wealth--the thing against which they seemed to have a special
grudge--and told them how they had given their lives and their means
in the cause of humanity without asking other reward than that of
seeing the world grow better, and the hard lot of some of their
fellow-men eased; wherein they had succeeded because they thought
less of themselves than of their neighbors, and were in the field,
anyway, to be of such use as they could. I told them how distressed
I was that upon their own admission they should have been engaged
in this discussion four years without getting any farther, and I
closed with a remorseful feeling of having said more than I intended
and perhaps having made them feel bad. But not they. They had
listened to me throughout with undisturbed serenity. When I had
done, the chairman said courteously that they were greatly indebted
to me for my frank opinion. Every man was entitled to his own. And
he could quite sympathize with me in my inability to catch their
point of view.
"Because here," he added, "I have been reading for ten years or more
the things Mr. Riis writes in his newspaper and in the magazines,
and by which he makes a living, and for the life of me I never
was able to understand how any one could be found to pay for such
stuff."
So there you have my measure as a reformer. The meeting nodded
gravely. I was apparently the only one there who took it as a joke.
I spoke of the women's share in the progress we made. A good big
one it was. We should have been floundering yet in the educational
mud-puddle we were in, had it not been for the women of New York
who went to Albany and literally held up the Legislature, compelling
it to pass our reform bill. And not once but a dozen times, during
Mayor Strong's administration, when they had wearied of me at the
City Hall--I was not always _persona grata_ there with the reform
administration--did I find it the part of wisdom to send committees
of women instead to plead with the Mayor over his five o'clock
tea. They could worm a playground or a small park out of him when
I should have met with a curt refusal and a virtual invitation to
be gone. In his political doldrums the Mayor did not have a kindly
eye to reformers; but he was not always able to make them out in
petticoats.
[Illustration: The School of the New Day.]
The women prevailed at Albany by the power of fact. They knew,
and the legislators did not. They received them up there with an
indulgent smile, but it became speedily apparent that they came
bristling with information about the schools to which the empty
old Tammany boast that New York "had the best schools in the world"
was not an effective answer. In fact they came nearer being the
worst. I had myself had an experience of that kind, when I pointed
out in print that an East Side school was so overrun with rats
that it was difficult to hear oneself think for their squeaking
in the dark "playground," when the children were upstairs in their
classes. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which comprises
the important officials of the city Government with the Mayor as
presiding officer, took umbrage at the statement, and said in plain
words that I lied and that there were no rats. That was a piece
of unthinking ignorance, for an old schoolhouse without rats in it
would be a rare thing anywhere; but it was impertinence, too, of a
kind of which I had had so much from the City Hall that I decided
the time had come for a demonstration. I got me a rat trap,
and prepared to catch one and have it sent in to the Board, duly
authenticated by affidavit as hailing from Allen Street; but before
I could carry out my purpose the bottom fell out of the Tammany
conspiracy of ignorance and fraud and left us the way clear for
three years, So I saved my rat for another time.
This "fact," which was naturally my own weapon, the contribution
I was able to make from my own profession and training, was in
reality a tremendously effective club before which nothing could or
can stand in the long run. If I can leave that conviction as a legacy
to my brother reporters, I shall feel that I have really performed
a service. I believe they do not half understand it, or they would
waste no printer's ink idly. The school war was an illustration
of it, all through. I was at Police Headquarters, where I saw the
East Side, that had been orderly, becoming thievish and immoral.
Going to the schools, I found them overcrowded, ill ventilated,
dark, without playgrounds, repellent. Following up the boys, who
escaped from them in disgust--if indeed they were not barred out;
the street swarmed with children for whom there was not room--I saw
them herded at the prison to which Protestant truants were sent,
with burglars, vagrants, thieves, and "bad boys" of every kind.
They classified them according to size: four feet, four feet seven,
and over four feet seven! No other way was attempted. At the Catholic
prison they did not even do that. They kept them on a "footing
of social equality" by mixing them all up together; and when in
amazement I asked if that was doing right by the truant who might
be reasonably supposed to be in special danger from such contact,
the answer I got was "would it be fair to the burglar to set him
apart with the stamp on him?" I went back to the office and took
from the Rogues' Gallery a handful of photographs of boy thieves
and murderers and printed them in the _Century Magazine_ with a
statement of the facts, under the heading, "The Making of Thieves
in New York." I quote the concluding sentence of that article
because it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that there
was no getting away from its awful arraignment:--
"While we are asking at this end of the line if it would be quite
fair to the burglar to shut him off from social intercourse with
his betters, the State Reformatory, where the final product of our
schools of crime is garnered, supplies the answer year after year,
unheeded. Of the thousands who land there, barely one per cent kept
good company before coming. All the rest were the victims of evil
association, of corrupt environment. They were not thieves by
heredity; they were made. And the manufacture goes on every day.
The street and the jail are the factories."
Upon the lay mind the argument took hold; that of the official
educator resisted it stubbornly for a season. Two years later, when
one of the School Commissioners spoke indulgently of the burglars
and highway robbers in the two prisons as probably guilty merely of
"the theft of a top, or a marble, or maybe a banana," in extenuation
of the continued policy of his department in sending truants there
in flat defiance of the State law that forbade the mingling of
thieves and truants, the police office had once more to be invoked
with its testimony. I had been keeping records of the child crimes
that came up in the course of my work that year. They began before
the kindergarten age with burglary and till-tapping. "Highwaymen"
at six sounds rather formidable, but there was no other name for
it. Two lads of that age had held up a third and robbed him in
the street; at seven and eight there were seven housebreakers and
two common thieves; at ten I had a burglar, one boy and four girl
thieves, two charged with assault and one with forgery; at eleven
four burglars, two thieves with a record, two charged with assault,
a highway robber, an habitual liar, and a suicide; at twelve five
burglars, three thieves, two "drunks," three incendiaries, three
arrested for assault, and two suicides; at thirteen five burglars,
one with a record, five thieves, five charged with assault, one
"drunk," one forger; at fourteen four burglars, seven thieves, one
drunk enough to fight a policeman, six highway robbers, and ten
charged with assault. And so on. The street had borne its perfect
crop, and they were behind the bars every one, locked in with the
boys who had done nothing worse than play hooky.
It was a knock-out blow. Classification by measurement had ceased
at the first broadside; the last gave us the truant school which
the law demanded. To make the most of it, we shall apparently have
to have a new deal. I tried to persuade the Children's Aid Society
to turn its old machinery to this new work. Perhaps the George
Junior Republic would do better still. When there is room for every
boy on the school bench, and room to toss a ball when he is off
it, there will not be much left of that problem to wrestle with;
but little or much, the peril of the prison is too great to be
endured for a moment.
It must have been about that time that I received a letter from an
old friend who was in high glee over a statement in some magazine
that I had evolved a "scientific theory" as to why boys go to the
bad in cities. It was plain that he was as much surprised as he
was pleased, and so was I when I heard what it was all about. That
which they had pitched upon as science and theory was the baldest
recital of the facts as seen from Mulberry Street. Beyond putting
two and two together, there was very little reasoning about it.
That such conditions as were all about us should result in making
"toughs" of the boys was not strange. Rather, it would have been
strange had anything else come of it. With the home corrupted by
the tenement; the school doors closed against them where the swarms
were densest, and the children thrown upon the street, there to take
their chance; with honest play interdicted, every natural right of
the child turned into a means of oppression, a game of ball become
a crime for which children were thrust into jail, indeed, shot down
like dangerous criminals when running away from the policeman who
pursued them;[Footnote: Such a case occurred on Thanksgiving Day,
1897. A great public clamor arose and the policeman was sent to
Sing Sing.] with dead-letter laws on every hand breeding blackmail
and bringing the police and authority into disrepute; with the
lawlessness of the street added to want of rule at home, where
the immigrant father looked on helpless, himself dependent in the
strange surroundings upon the boy and no longer his master--it
seemed as if we had set out to deliberately make the trouble under
which we groaned. And we were not alone in it. The shoe fits every
large city more or less snugly. I know, for I have had a good deal
to do with fitting it on the last two or three years; and often,
when looking my audience over in lecturing about Tony and his
hardships, I am thinking about Mulberry Street and the old days when
problems, civic or otherwise, were farthest from my mind in digging
out the facts that lay ready to the hand of the police reporter.
[Illustration: The Way to present the Manufacture of "Toughs"]
In him as a reporter there may be no special virtue; but there
is that in his work, in the haste and the directness of it, which
compels him always to take the short cut and keeps it clear of
crankery of every kind. The "isms" have no place in a newspaper
office, certainly not in Mulberry Street. I confess I was rather
glad of it. I had no stomach for abstract discussions of social
wrongs; I wanted to right those of them that I could reach. I wanted
to tear down the Mulberry Bend and let in the light so that we
might the more readily make them out; the others could do the rest
then. I used to say that to a very destructive crank who would have
nothing less, upon any account, than the whole loaf. My "remedies"
were an abomination to him. The landlords should be boiled in
oil to a man; hanging was too good for them. Now he is a Tammany
officeholder in a position where propping up landlord greed is his
daily practice and privilege, and he thrives upon it. But I ought
not to blame him. It is precisely because of his kind that Tammany
is defenceless against real reform. It never can make it out. That
every man has his price is the language of Fourteenth Street. They
have no dictionary there to enable them to understand any other;
and as a short cut out of it they deny that there is any other.
It helped me vastly that my associations in the office were most
congenial. I have not often been in accord with the editorial page
of my own paper, the _Sun_. It seemed as if it were impossible for
anybody to get farther apart in their views of most things on the
earth and off it than were my paper and I. It hated and persecuted
Beecher and Cleveland; they were my heroes. It converted me to Grant
by its opposition to him. The sign "Keep off the grass!" arouses
in its editorial breast no desire to lock up the man who planted
it; it does in mine. Ten years and more I have striven in its
columns to make the tenement out a chief device of the devil, and
it must be that I have brought some over to my belief; but I have
not converted the _Sun_. So that on the principle which I laid down
before that I must be always fighting with my friends, I ought to
have had a mighty good time of it there. And so in fact I did. They
let me have in pretty nearly everything my own way, though it led
us so far apart. As time passed and the duties that came to me took
more and more of my time from my office work, I found that end of
it insensibly lightened to allow me to pursue the things I believed
in, though they did not. No doubt the old friendship that existed
between my immediate chief on the _Evening Sun_, William McCloy, and
myself, bore a hand in this. Yet it could not have gone on without
the assent and virtual sympathy of the Danas, father and son; for
we came now and then to a point where opposite views clashed and
proved irreconcilable. Then I found these men, whom some deemed
cynical, most ready to see the facts as they were, and to see
justice done.
I like to think of my last meeting with Charles A. Dana, the "Old
Chief" as he was always called in the office. In all the years I
was on the _Sun_ I do not think I had spoken with him a half dozen
times. When he wanted anything of me personally, his orders were
very brief and to the point. It was generally something--a report to
be digested or the story of some social experiment--which showed
me that in his heart he was faithful to his early love; he had
been in his youth, as everybody knows, an enthusiastic reformer,
a member of the Brook Farm Community. But if he thought I saw, he
let no sign escape him. He hated shams; perhaps I was on trial all
the time. If so, I believe that he meant to tell me in that last
hand-shake that he had not found me wanting. It was on the stairs
in the _Sun_ office that we met. I was going up; he was coming
down--going home to die. He knew it. In me there was no suspicion
of the truth when I came upon him at the turn of the stairs,
stumbling along in a way very unlike the usual springy step of the
Old Chief. I hardly knew him when he passed, but as he turned and
held out his hand I saw that it was Mr. Dana, looking somehow older
than I had ever seen him, and changed. I took off my hat and we
shook hands.
"Well," he said, "have you reformed everything to suit you,
straightened out every kink in town?"
"Pretty nearly," I said, falling into his tone of banter; "all
except the _Sun_ office. That is left yet, and as bad as ever."
"Ha!" he laughed, "you come on! We are ready for you. Come right
along!" And with another hearty hand-shake he was gone. He never
saw the _Sun_ office again.
It was the only time he had ever held out his hand to me, after
that first meeting of ours when I was a lonely lad, nearly thirty
years before. That time there was a dollar in it and I spurned
it. This time I like to believe his heart was in it. And I took
it gladly and gratefully.
The police helped--sometimes. More frequently we were at odds,
and few enough in the rank and file understood that I was fighting
for them in fighting the department. A friend came into my office,
laughing, one day, and told me that he had just overheard the
doorman at Police Headquarters say, as he saw me pass:--
"Ugh! the hypocrite! See him take off his hat and then lay us out
cold in his paper when he gets the chance."
He referred to my old-country habit of raising the hat in salutation
instead of merely nodding or touching the brim. No doubt he expressed
a feeling that was quite general at the time. But after Mulberry
Street had taken notice of Roosevelt's friendship for me there was
a change, and then it went to the other extreme. It never quite got
over the fact that he did not "ring me in" on President McKinley
and the Government, or at least make me his private secretary and
deputy boss of the Empire State while he was Governor. The Mulberry
Street idea of friendship includes the loaves and fishes first and
last, and "pull" is the Joss it worships. In fact I had several
times to explain that Mr. Roosevelt had not "gone back on me" to
save his political reputation. When at a public meeting he once
spoke of me as his friend, a dozen policemen brought me copies of
the paper containing "the notice," with a frankly expressed wish
to be remembered when I came into my own, About that time, being
in the neighborhood, I strayed into the Bend one day to enjoy the
sunlight there and the children sporting in it. At the curb stood
a big policeman leisurely peeling an orange, to which he had helped
himself from a cringing Italian's cart. I asked him how were things
in the Bend since the park had come. He eyed me very coldly, and
said, "Bad, very bad." At that I expressed my astonishment, saying
that I was a reporter at Police Headquarters and had understood
differently.
"What paper?" he grunted insolently. I told him. He bestowed a look
of mingled pity and contempt upon me.
"Nix! mine friend," he said, spreading his feet farther apart and
tossing the peel at the Italian, who grinned with delight at such
condescension. I regarded him expectantly. He was a very aggravating
chap.
"Did you say you were at Police Headquarters--for the Sun?" he
observed at length.
"Yes!" He shook his head.
"Nixie! not guilty!" he said tauntingly.
"Why, what do you mean?"
"Haven't you heard of Mr. Riis, Jacob Riis?"
I said I had.
"The Governor's friend?"
"Yes; what of it?"
"Well, ain't he at Headquarters for the _Sun_?"
I said that was so.
"Well?"
I took out my card and handed it to him. "I am that man," I said.
For a fraction of a second the policeman's jaw dropped; but he was
a thoroughbred. His heels came together before, as it seemed, he
could have read my name; he straightened up. The half-peeled orange
fell from his hand and rolled into the gutter, covertly speeded by
a dextrous little kick. The unhappy Italian, believing it a mishap,
made haste to select the biggest and juiciest fruit on his stand,
and held it out with a propitiatory bow, but he spurned him haughtily
away.
"These dagoes," he said, elaborately placing my card in the sweat-band
of his hat, "ain't got no manners. It's a hard place for a good
man down here. It's time I was a roundsman. You can do it. You've
got de 'pull.'"
When Roosevelt had gone to Washington to help fit out the navy for
the war with Spain, I spent a part of the winter there with him,
and Mulberry Street took it for granted that I had at last been
"placed" as I should have been long before. There was great amazement
when I came back to take my old place. The truth was that I had
gone partly to observe what went on at the capital for my paper,
and partly to speed on the war, in which I was a hearty believer
from the first. It was to me a means, first and last, of ending the
murder in Cuba. One of the very earliest things I had to do with
as a reporter was the _Virginius_ massacre, and ever since it had
been bloodshed right along. It was time to stop it, and the only
way seemed to wrest the grip of Spain from the throat of the island.
I think I never quite got over the contempt I conceived for Spain
and Spanish ways when I read as a boy, in Hans Christian Andersen's
account of his travels in the country of the Dons, that the
shepherds brought butter from the mountains in sheep's intestines
and measured them off in lengths demanded by the customers by tying
knots upon them. What was to be expected from a country that sold
butter by the yard? As the event showed, it ran its navies after the
same fashion and was justly punished. I made friends that winter
with Dr. Leonard Wood, whom we all came to know and admire afterwards
as General and Governor Wood; and a fine fellow he was. He was
Roosevelt's friend and physician, and we spent many strenuous hours
together, being in that mood.
For the third time in my life, and the last, I wanted to go to the
war, when they went, and oh! so badly. Not to fight,--I had had
all I needed of that at home,--but to tell the truth about what
was going on in Cuba. The _Outlook_ offered me that post, and the
_Sun_ agreed heartily; but once more the door was barred against
me. Two of my children had scarlet fever, my oldest son had gone
to Washington trying to enlist with the Rough Riders, and the one
next in line was engineering to get into the navy on his own hook.
My wife raised no objection to my going, if it was duty; but her
tears fell silently--and I stayed. It was "three times and out."
I shall never go to the war now unless in defence of my own home,
which may God forbid. Within a year I knew that, had I gone then,
I should most likely not have returned. I had received notice that
to my dreams of campaigning in that way there was an end. Thankful
that I had been spared, I yet took leave of them with a sigh; most
illogically, for I hate the sight of human suffering and of brutal
passions aroused. But deep down in my heart there is the horror of
my Viking forefathers of dying in bed, unable to strike back, as
it were. I know it is wicked and foolish, but all my life I have
so wished to get on a horse with a sword, and slam in just once,
like another Sheridan. I, who cannot sit on a horse! Even the
one Roosevelt got me at Montauk that was warranted "not to bite
or scratch" ran away with me. So it is foolishness, plain to see.
Yet, so I might have found out which way I would really have run
when the call came. I do hope the right way, but I never have felt
quite sure.
The casualties of war are not all on the battlefield. The Cuban
campaign wrecked a promising career as a foreign correspondent which
I had been building up for some ten or fifteen years with toilsome
effort. It was for a Danish newspaper I wrote with much approval,
but when the war came, they did not take the same view of things
that I did, and fell to suppressing or mutilating my letters,
whereupon our connection ceased abruptly. My letters were, explained
the editor to me a year or two later when I saw him in Copenhagen,
so--er--r--ultra-patriotic, so--er-r--youthful in their enthusiasm,
that--huh! I interrupted him with the remark that I was glad we
were young enough yet in my country to get up and shout for the
flag in a fight, and left him to think it over. They must have aged
suddenly over there, for they were not that way when I was a boy.
The real fact was that somehow they could not get it into their
heads that a European bully could be whipped in one round by "the
States." They insisted on printing ridiculous despatches about
Spanish victories. I think there was something about codfish, too,
something commercial about corks and codfish--Iceland keeping Spain
on a fish diet in Lent, in return for which she corked the Danish
beer--I have forgotten the particulars. The bottom fact was
a distrust of the United States that was based upon a curiously
stubborn ignorance, entirely without excuse in a people of high
intelligence like the Danes. I tried hard as a correspondent to
draw a reasonable, human picture of American affairs, but it seemed
to make no impression. They would jump at the Munchausen stories
that are always afloat, as if America were some sort of menagerie
and not a Christian country. I think nothing ever aggravated me
as did an instance of that kind the year Ben Butler ran for the
Presidency. I had been trying in my letters to present the political
situation and issues fairly, and was beginning to feel that they
_must_ understand, when I received a copy of my paper from Copenhagen
and read there a "life" of General Butler, which condensed, ran
something like this:--
"Mr. Butler was an ambitious young lawyer, shrewd and full of bold
schemes for enriching himself. When the war with the South broke
out, he raised all the money he could and fitted out a fleet of
privateers. With this he sailed for New Orleans, captured the city,
and, collecting all the silver spoons it contained, freighted his
vessels with them, and returned to the North. Thus he laid the
foundation for his great fortune, but achieved lasting unpopularity
in the South, which will prevent his election to the Presidency."
I am not joking. That was how the story of the silver spoons looked
in Danish a quarter of a century after the war. Really, now, what
would you have done? I laughed and--well! made remarks by turns,
and in the end concluded that there was nothing else that could be
done except buckle to and try again; which I did.
If I could not go to the war, I could at least go electioneering
with Roosevelt when he came back and try to help him out the best
I knew how in matters that touched the poor and their life, once
he sat in Cleveland's chair in Albany. I do not think he felt that
as an added dignity, but I did and I told him so, whereat he used
to laugh a little. But there was nothing to laugh at. They are
men of the same stamp, not saints any more than the rest of us,
but men with minds and honest wills, if they have different ways of
doing things. I wish some Cleveland would come along again soon and
give me another chance to vote the ticket which Tammany obstructs
with its impudent claim that it is the Democratic party. As for
Roosevelt, few were nearer to him, I fancy, than I, even at Albany.
No doubt he made his mistakes like the rest of us, and when he
did there were not wanting critics to make the most of it. I wish
they had been half as ready to lend him a hand. We might have been
farther on the road then. I saw how faithfully he labored. I was
his umpire with the tailors, with the drug clerks, in the enforcement
of the Factory Law against sweaters, and I know that early and
late he had no other thought than how best to serve the people who
trusted him. I want no better Governor than that, and I guess we
shall want him a long time before we get one as good.
I found out upon our electioneering tours that I was not a good
stump-speaker, especially on the wing with five-minute stops of the
train. It used to pull out with me inwardly raging, all the good
things I meant to say unsaid. The politicians knew that trick
better, and I left the field to them speedily. Thereafter I went
along just for company. Only two or three times did I rise to
the occasion. Once when I spoke in the square at Jamestown, N.Y.,
where I had worked as a young lad and trapped muskrats in the creek
for a living. The old days came back to me as I looked upon that
mighty throng, and the cheers that arose from it told me that I had
"caught on." I was wondering whether by any chance the old ship
captain who finished me as a lecturer once was in it, but he was
not; he was dead. Another time was in Flushing, Long Island. There
was not room in the hall, and they sent me out to talk to the crowd
in the street. The sight of it, with the flickering torchlight upon
the sea of upturned faces, took me somehow as nothing ever had,
and the speech I made from the steps, propped up by two policemen,
took the crowd, too; it cheered so that Roosevelt within stopped
and thought some enemy had captured the meeting. When he was gone,
with the spirit still upon me I talked to the meeting in the hall
till it rose and shouted. My political pet enemy from Richmond
Hill was on the platform and came over to embrace me. We have been
friends since. The memory of that evening lingers yet in Flushing,
I am told.
A picture from that day's trip through Long Island will ever abide
on my mind. The train was about to pull out from the station in
Greenport, when the public school children came swarming down to
see "Teddy." He leaned out from the rear platform, grasping as many
of the little hands as he could, while the train hands did their
best to keep the track clear. Way back in the jostling, cheering
crowd I made out the slim figure of a pale, freckled little girl
in a worn garment, struggling eagerly but hopelessly to get near
him. The stronger children pushed her farther back, and her mournful
face was nearly the last of them all when Roosevelt saw her. Going
down the steps even as the train started, he made a quick dash,
clearing a path through the surging tide to the little girl, and
taking her hand, gave it the heartiest shake of all, then sprinted
for the departing car and caught it. The last I saw of Greenport
was the poor little girl holding tight the hand her hero had shaken,
with her face all one sunbeam of joy.
I know just how she felt, for I have had the same experience. One
of the things I remember with a pleasure which the years have no
power to dim is my meeting with Cardinal Gibbons some years ago.
They had asked me to come to Baltimore to speak for the Fresh Air
Fund, and to my great delight I found that the Cardinal was to
preside. I had always admired him at a distance, but during the
fifteen minutes' talk we had before the lecture he won my heart
entirely. He asked me to forgive him if he had to go away before
I finished my speech, for he had had a very exhausting service the
day before, "and I am an old man, on the sunny side of sixty," he
added as if in apology.
"On the shady side, you mean," amended the Presbyterian clergyman
who was on the committee. The Cardinal shook his head, smiling.
"No, doctor! The sunny side--nearer heaven."
The meeting was of a kind to inspire even the dullest speaker.
When I finished my plea for the children and turned around, there
sat the Cardinal yet behind me, though it was an hour past his
bedtime. He came forward and gave me his blessing then and there.
I was never so much touched and moved. Even my mother, stanch old
Lutheran that she is, was satisfied when I told her of it, though,
in the nature of things, the idea of her son consorting in that way
with principalities and powers in the enemy's camp must have been
a shock to her.
Speaking of which, reminds me of the one brief glimpse into the
mysteries of the universe I had while in Galesburg, Ill., the same
year. I had been lecturing at Knox College, of which my friend
John Finley was the President. It rained before the meeting, but
when we came out, the stars shone brightly, and I was fired with
a sudden desire to see them through the observatory telescope. The
professor of astronomy took me into the dark dome and pointed the
glass at Saturn, which I knew as a scintillating point of light,
said to be a big round ball like our earth, and had taken on trust
as a matter of course. But to see it hanging there, white and big
as an apple, suspended within its broad and shining ring, was a
revelation before which I stood awe-stricken and dumb. I gazed and
gazed; between the star and its ring I caught the infinite depth of
black space beyond; I seemed to see almost the whirl, the motion;
to hear the morning stars sing together--and then like a flash it
was gone. Crane my neck on my ladder as I might I could not get
sight of it.
"But where did she go?" I said, half to myself. Far down in the
darkness came the old professor's deep voice:--
"That time you saw the earth move."
And so I did. The clockwork that made the dome keep up with the
motion of the stars--of our world rather--had run down, and when
Saturn passed out of my sight, as I thought, it was the earth
instead which I literally saw move.
And now that I am on my travels let me cross the ocean long enough to
say that my digging among the London slums one summer only served
to convince me that their problem is the same as ours, and is to
be solved along the same lines. They have their ways, and we have
ours, and each has something to learn from the other. We copied our
law that enabled us to tear down slum tenements from the English
statute under which they cleared large areas over yonder long
before we got to work. And yet in their poor streets--in "Christian
Street" of all places--I found families living in apartments entirely
below the sidewalk grade. I found children poisoned by factory
fumes in a charitable fold, and people huddled in sleeping-rooms
as I had never seen it in New York. And when I asked why the police
did not interfere, they looked at me, uncomprehending, and retorted
that they were on their own premises--the factory, too--and where
did the police come in? I told them that in New York they came in
when and where they saw fit, and systematically in the middle of
the night so that they might get at the exact facts. As for our
cave-dwellers, we had got rid of them a long time since by the
simple process of dragging out those who wouldn't go and shutting
the cellar doors against them. It had to be done and it was done,
and it settled the matter.
"I thought yours was a free country," said my policeman conductor.
"So it is," I told him, "freedom to poison yourself and your neighbor
excepted." He shook his head, and we went on.
But these were mere divergences of practice. The principle is
not affected. It was clear enough that in London, as in New York,
it was less a question of transforming human nature in the tenant
than of reforming it in the landlord; At St. Giles I found side by
side with the work-house a church, a big bath and wash-house, and
a school. It was the same at Seven Dials. At every step it recalled
the Five Points. To the one as to the other, steeped in poverty and
crime, had come the road-builder, the missionary, the school-teacher,
and let light in together. And in their track was following, rather
faster there than here as yet, the housing reformer with his atoning
scheme of philanthropy and five per cent. That holds the key. In
the last analysis it is a question of how we rate the brotherhood,
what per cent we will take. My neighbor at table in my London
boarding-house meant that, though he put it in a way all his own.
He was a benevolent enough crank, but no friend of preaching. Being
a crank, he condemned preachers with one fell swoop:--
"The parsons!" he said; "my 'evings, what hare they? In hall me
life hi've known only two that were fit to be in the pulpit."
Returning to my own country, I found the conviction deepening
wherever the slum had got a grip, that it was the problem not only
of government but of humanity. In Chicago they are setting limits
to it with parks and playgrounds and the home restored. In Cincinnati,
in Cleveland, in Boston, they are bestirring themselves. Indeed,
in Boston they have torn down more foul tenements than did we in
the metropolis, and with less surrender to the slum landlord. In New
York a citizens' movement paved the way for the last Tenement-House
Commission, which has just finished its great work, and the movement
is warrant that the fruits of that work will not be lost. Listen
to the arraignment of the tenement by that Commission, appointed
by the State:--
"All the conditions which surround childhood, youth, and womanhood
in New York's crowded tenement quarters make for unrighteousness.
They also make for disease. ... From the tenements there comes a
stream of sick, helpless people to our hospitals and dispensaries...
from them also comes a host of paupers and charity seekers. Most
terrible of all... the fact that, mingled with the drunken, the
dissolute, the improvident, the diseased, dwell the great mass of
the respectable workingmen of the city with their families."
This after all the work of twenty years! Yet the work was not wasted,
for at last we see the truth. Seeing, it is impossible that the
monstrous wrong should go unrighted and government of the people
endure, as endure it will, I know. We have only begun to find out
what it can do for mankind in the day when we shall all think enough
about the common good, the _res publica_, to forget about ourselves.
In that day, too, the boss shall have ceased from troubling. However
gross he wax in our sight, he has no real substance. He is but an
ugly dream of political distemper. Sometimes when I hear him spoken
of with bated breath, I think of the Irish teamster who went to
the priest in a fright; he had seen a ghost on the church wall as
he passed it in the night.
"And what was it like?" asked the priest.
"It was like nothing so much as a big ass," said Patrick, wide-eyed.
"Go home, Pat! and be easy. You've seen your own shadow."
But I am tired now and want to go home to mother and rest awhile.