Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 64056-h.htm or 64056-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64056/pg64056-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64056/64056-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/perilpreservatio00riisrich
Transcriber’s Note:
Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
THE PERIL AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE HOME
Being the William L. Bull Lectures for the Year 1903
by
JACOB A. RIIS
Author of “The Making of an American,” “The Battle with the Slum,” etc.
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
Philadelphia
George W. Jacobs & Co.
Publishers
Copyright, 1903, by
George W. Jacobs & Company,
Published May, 1903
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Letter Establishing the Lectureship
For many years, it has been my earnest desire to found a Lectureship on
Christian Sociology, meaning thereby the application of Christian
principles to the social, industrial, and economic problems of the time,
in my alma mater, the Philadelphia Divinity School. My object in
founding this Lectureship is to secure the free, frank, and full
consideration of these subjects with special reference to the Christian
aspects of the questions involved, which have heretofore, in my opinion,
been too much neglected in such discussion. It would seem that the time
is now ripe and the moment an auspicious one for the establishment of
this Lectureship, at least tentatively.
I therefore make the following offer to continue for at least a period
of three years, with the hope that these lectures may excite such an
interest, particularly among the undergraduates of the Divinity School,
that I shall be justified, with the approval of the authorities of the
Divinity School, in placing the Lectureship on a more permanent
foundation.
I herewith pledge myself to contribute the sum of six hundred dollars
annually, for a period of three years, to the payment of a lecturer on
Christian Sociology, whose duty it shall be to deliver a course of not
less than four lectures to the students of the Divinity School, either
at the school or elsewhere, as may be deemed most advisable, on the
application of Christian principles to the social, industrial, and
economic problems and needs of the times; the said lecturer to be
appointed annually by a committee of five members: the Bishop of the
Diocese of Pennsylvania; the Dean of the Divinity School; a member of
the Board of Overseers; and two of the Associate Alumni, one of whom
shall be chosen by the Alumni Association, and the other to be myself.
Furthermore, if it shall be deemed desirable that the lectures shall be
published, I pledge myself to the additional payment of from one to two
hundred dollars for such purpose.
To secure the full, frank, and free consideration of the questions
involved, it is my desire that the opportunity shall be given from time
to time to the representatives of each school of economic thought to
express their views in these lectures.
The only restriction I wish placed on the lecturer is that he shall be a
believer in the moral teachings and principles of the Christian religion
as the true solvent of our social, industrial, and economic problems. Of
course, it is my intention that a new lecturer shall be appointed by the
committee each year, who shall deliver the course of lectures for the
ensuing year.
WILLIAM L. BULL.
All Saints’ Cathedral,
Spokane, Washington,
January 1, 1901.
The Committee:
O. W. WHITAKER, Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania.
WILLIAM M. GROTON, Dean of the Philadelphia Divinity School.
J. DEWOLF PERRY,
LYMAN P. POWELL,
WILLIAM L. BULL.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
I. OUR SINS IN THE PAST 11
II. OUR FIGHT FOR THE HOME 65
III. OUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT 117
IV. OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW 155
------------------------------------------------------------------------
List of Illustrations
LECTURE II
At the Old Five Points 90
The “Old Church Tenements” 92
Gotham Court 94
Midnight in Gotham Court 94
The Alderman’s Tenements 96
Little Susie 98
Tenement Where a Home was Murdered 100
A “Drunken” Flat 102
In a Baxter Street Yard 104
Shanty Dwellings in a Tenement Yard 104
Washing in an Italian Flat; the Tea 106
Kettle Used as a Wash Boiler
Pietro and his Father 108
Sister Irene and her Little Ones 110
The Open Trench in the Potter’s Field 112
“The Way Out”—Bedtime in the Five Points 114
House of Industry Nursery
LECTURE III
A Typical Tenement House Block 126
The Only Bathtub in the Block 128
The Riverside Tenements 130
Lodgers at “Five Cents a Spot” 132
They “Lived Nowhere” 136
Joining “the Club” 138
Hell on Earth 140
The City and Suburban Homes Company’s 142
Model Tenements; The Alfred Corning
Clark Block
The “To-morrow” 144
It is Five Years Since the Bend Became a 146
Park
In the Public School of To-day 150
Saluting the Flag 152
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
OUR SINS IN THE PAST
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
OUR SINS IN THE PAST
AT the very outset of my discussion of the peril and the preservation of
the American home, I am confronted with an apparent contradiction that
would seem to deny my premises, my contention that upon the preservation
of the home depends the vitality of our Republic; that, if the home were
gone, we should be fighting against overwhelming odds in the battle to
maintain it and would as surely lose. But I think you will find that the
contradiction is only apparent. I refer to the fact—let me state it
right here and have the enemy all in front, I like it that way—that,
whereas in my own great city I attribute to our unhappy housing
conditions (those conditions which have given to New York the bad name
of “the homeless city,”) most of the troubles that have made our
municipal government a by-word in the past and raised doubts in the
minds of some as to the fitness of our people, of any people, to govern
themselves rightly; yet in this city of yours to which I have come to
make the arraignment, the one among all our great communities that has
the distinction of having preserved the home ideal most nearly, you are,
as far as any one can make out, no better off than we. It has sometimes
seemed that you were even worse off. You have your fight, as we have
ours. But do not let it discourage you if, for the time being, you are
outnumbered. The point is that there are more to help every time.
Looking back now on the many battles in my city, I can see that every
defeat we suffered was really a victory; it showed us how to do better
next time. So is defeat always gain in the cause of right, if we would
only see it. We grow to the stature of men under it. Is it not, when it
comes to that, just a question whether you believe firmly enough in your
own cause? Faith can move mountains of indifference, even here in
Pennsylvania.
I said it seemed a contradiction, and yet only seemed so. It is because
I am sure your sufferings have been _in spite_ of your homes, not
because of any _lack_ of them. Standing the other day on a mountain-side
in New Hampshire, with a matchless view stretching out before me, I said
to my friend, the good rector and faithful pastor of the parish: “Here
everybody must surely be good. How can they help it?”
He looked at me sadly and said, pointing to the scattered farms lying so
peacefully in the landscape: “If you could go with me into those homes
and see the things I see in too many of them you would quit your
Mulberry Bend and transfer your battle with the slum to our hillsides.”
I think, if you will permit me to say it, that your great and splendid
city has been I am almost tempted to say pauperized in its citizenship
by great wealth and perilous prosperity; by a pampered prosperity that
is not good for anybody in the long run. However, that is politics,
which I shall not discuss. The President of the United States says that
my opinion in that quarter is no good at all, and you are free to adopt
his view. I will endorse his views—most of them—anywhere. I seek in mine
an explanation of the civic apathy that has betrayed your town, as it
has mine, into the grasp of a boss and of boss politics. It may be that
I am mistaken. It may be that I put too much of the blame on the
piggeries. I used to say that a man cannot be expected to live like a
pig and vote like a man, and I had reference to the tenements, some of
which surely deserve to be called by no other name. I was very sure of
my ground until the industrial troubles of the last summer seemed to cut
it partly from under me; for then I had people who were well-to-do,
educated, and who ought to know better, right in my own town, come and
upbraid me for always fighting the battle with the slum. “What is the
use?” they said; “they won’t be content.” Since that time I have thought
that perhaps there may be pigs in parlors, too. No, thank God, they will
_not_ be content. Let me say right here, so that we may understand one
another, that the whole of my manhood’s life has been given and what
remains of it will be given, please God, to fighting the things, _all of
them_, that go to debase and degrade manhood and womanhood; so I
understand a Christian’s duty.
In that I know I have not erred. If I have laid too much stress on the
piggeries, it but proves that the peril of the home is not the only one
that besets our Republic, and that we need be up and doing. But still I
believe that the home is the mainstay; that it rather proves the home to
be beset with perils not in the cities only. All the more am I convinced
that around it only can the fight be waged successfully; and I have full
faith that just because you have preserved the home better than have we,
when the day of waking comes, you will throw off the nightmare that has
plagued your dreams with such a jolt as will warn it off for good and
all and tempt it to return no more. Of that I am sure. God speed you in
the fight!
I shall not in this place have to enter into a protracted argument to
prove that the home is the pivot of all and why it is so. We _know_ that
it is so, that it has been so in all ages; that the home-loving peoples
have been the strong peoples in all time, those that have left a lasting
impression on the world. Stable government is but the protection the law
throws around the home, and the law itself is the outgrowth of the
effort to preserve it. The Romans, whose heirs we are in most matters
pertaining to the larger community life, and whose law our courts are
expounding yet, set their altars and their firesides together,—_pro aris
et pro foces_; and their holiest oaths were by their household gods. I
have always thought that in that lay the secret of their strength, and
that in the separation of the fireside and the altar lies the great
peril of our day. When for the fireside we got a hole in the floor and a
hot air register, we lost not only the lodestone that drew the scattered
members of the family to a common focus, but with it went too often the
old and holy sense of home: “I and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
Rome perished when most of her people became propertyless—homeless.
Whenever I think of it there comes to my mind a significant passage in
the testimony of the secretary of the Prison Association in my city
before a legislative committee appointed to investigate the draft riots
of 1863. The mob, he said, came, as did eighty per cent. of the crime in
the metropolis, from the element in the population “whose homes had
ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent and desirable to afford what
are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family.” The
household god of the slum tenement is too apt to be the boss with his
corruption of the neighbor ideal into utter selfishness. On that road
lies destruction.
In France, many years ago, a voice was raised in warning: “Kill the home
and you destroy family, manhood, patriotism.” The warning was vain, and
the home-loving Germans won easily over the people in whose language
there is not even a word to describe What we express in the word “home.”
How much of the strength of the old New England home went into the
making of our Republic you know as well as I. It is that thought which
makes me pause when I remember that in their day one in twenty-five of
the people lived in cities, whereas now the showing is one in three,
with all of the influences of the city seeming to push against the chief
prop of the State, the home. Is it not the chief prop? Imagine a nation
of homeless men, a nation deserving the epithet, “the homeless people”;
what would it have to preserve, what to fight for? And however given to
peace we all may be, in the last analysis the test of a nation’s fitness
to live is that it will fight for its life. No! wipe out the home and
the whole structure totters and falls. Even if it hang together yet a
while, it is not worth preserving, not worth fighting for.
If we had any doubt about it, we have had some information upon the
subject given us in recent years, in my state and in yours. It was here
in your city that the Children’s Aid Society demonstrated, in a way that
did us all good through and through, that the old plan of bringing up
children in squads, which had been tried until it sickened them and us,
was bad, and that placing them out in families made all the difference
in the world. We knew it before, but we needed to be told it in just
that way. We had the experience over again in New York; they had it in
Boston; they have had it everywhere. But very lately we have had a piece
of testimony to that effect that ought to settle the matter. It was an
old scandal in our city that practically all the babies in the Foundling
Hospital died there; none lived to grow up. I say scandal, not in the
sense that any one was to blame. They tried hard enough. Men are not
monsters to see a defenseless baby die without trying to help it. In the
worst Tammany days, we had herds of Jersey cows on Randall’s Island,
kept expressly for those waifs. Everything was done that pity and
experience could suggest, but nothing availed. The babies died, and
there was no help for it. Until four years ago, when a joint committee
of the State Charities’ Aid Association and the New York Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor, took them off the hands of the city
authorities and put them in homes. The first year after that the
mortality among them fell to a little over _fifty_ per cent., the second
year it was just beyond _thirty_ per cent. and the fourth, which was
last year, it had fallen to _ten and seven-tenths_ per cent., a figure
quite below the mortality among all the children under two years of age
in the whole city. And the experience in Brooklyn was just the same.
What did it mean? It meant this, and nothing less, that these children
had come at last to their rights; that every baby is entitled to one
pair of mother’s arms around its neck; that its God-given right is a
home,—a _home_; and that, when man robs it of that right, it will not
stay. And small blame to it! It shows that even foundling babies have
good sense. They stayed, these, in such numbers—their death rate fell
below the ordinary death rate of all the children of their age—because
they were _picked_ homes they were put into. It meant, friends, that God
puts a little child in a home because He wants it to grow up with that
as its most precious heritage, its spark of heaven that ever beckons it
to its true home beyond. It means that you cannot herd human beings in
battalions and expect them to develop the qualities of individuality, of
character, that make citizenship upon which to build the Republic that
shall be the hope of to-morrow as well as the shelter of to-day. We
tried that with the “communities” that wiped out the family and
substituted the barrack for the home. But happily they wiped out
themselves. No, brethren, upon the home rests our moral character; our
civic and political liberties are grounded there; virtue, manhood,
citizenship grow there. We forget it to our peril. For American
citizenship in the long run, will be, _must be_, what the American home
is.
And this home, how does it look to me? The ideal, always in my mind, is
that of a man with his feet upon the soil and his children growing up
there. So, it seems to me, we should have responsible citizenship by the
surest road. But that ideal is unattainable in our cities. We must find
another there. And I ask, as the minimum standard, less than which I
will not take, isolation enough in the teeming crowds to secure the
privacy without which individuality cannot grow and character is
fearfully handicapped. I ask light and air, at least as plentiful and as
good as they have it in the great cattle barns I have seen in my own old
home, where their cows are their most precious possession, because
through them the people make their living. I ask an environment in which
a man may think himself a respectable citizen, an environment that has
no suggestion of the pigsty. You have no business to try to persuade an
American citizen that that is his place. It is treason against the
republic. I ask, above all, the mother who makes the home; I want the
mother. Without her, home is but an empty name.
What, then, of the barrack that destroys privacy, whose crowds make life
loathsome, whose restricted and narrow quarters compel the use of the
family room only for eating and sleeping; not the latter even when the
summer heats come and the people, to live, must sleep on the roof or out
on the fire-escape? What of those things which send the children to the
street, there to grow such character as they can; that smother in them
even the instinct for the open, for the fields and the woods that is
like the last open window for the soul; rob them of those resources of
mind and heart that make them respond quickly to the robin’s and the
daisy’s appeal and make them at home in God’s nature; that give them the
gutter for a playground, and the saloon, as they grow, for their natural
meeting-place,—their only one, indeed; for it is only just beginning to
dawn upon us that in neglecting that function of the public school, we
have been guilty of a fearful and wicked waste.
What of these; and what of the need—the need of making the rent—that
sends the mother to the factory, leaving perhaps the little ones behind,
locked in as the only alternative of the street? Locked in and left to
the chance, the awful chance, of a fire in that tenement with the
children helpless to get out and no one knowing of their plight. I say
it with a shudder, for I have had to record as a reporter too many—oh!
God! too many by far—of these things which wring the heart of a man.
What of the grinding need that sends the mother to the shop and so
knocks the big and the strong prop from under the home?
Or, perhaps, the children go along. Then there is no home; for I do not
call the cheerless room to which they return for their evening meal,
tired and worn and spiritless, to sleep but not to play—I do not call
that home.
We know the curse of child labor. We know it to our sorrow and loss.
Experience has taught us that it is loss, all loss, ever tending
downward; that, however we figure it, the result is always the same:
where men alone work, they earn the support of the family; where men and
women work, they together earn the support, with nothing to spare; and
where men, women and children work, they do that and no more; so that
nothing is gained and everything is lost. Child-life and citizenship are
lost; for the children of to-day are the men of to-morrow. We know it to
our cost, and you have the lesson before you, though you do not seem to
have learned it. When you do, you will find the cost appalling.
What else was the meaning of the testimony given before the Coal Strike
Commission, that moved its members to tears and anger by turns? And why
in the twelfth census has Pennsylvania fallen from the sixteenth to the
twentieth place on the list of states that send their children to
school? It is true that there has been no absolute retrogression, for
while in 1890 there were over two per cent. of your children between the
ages of ten and fourteen years who could neither read nor write, in 1900
the illiterates numbered barely over one in a hundred. But that one is
one too many, and why is he there? Because, according to the showing of
the factory inspectors—and the factory inspectors are always
optimists—there were thirty-five thousand of your children at work, who
should have been in school, not counting the breaker-boys in your mines.
As to them, the coal operators owned up to thirty thousand being in the
mines who never should have been there.
So we are not alone in our sins against childhood. New York is first
among the great industrial states, Pennsylvania is second, and this is
the showing we make as toward the citizenship of to-morrow: New York
fourteenth, Pennsylvania twentieth. Even South Dakota and Wyoming are
ahead of Pennsylvania, and Utah a long way ahead of New York. Industrial
States! The industrial supremacy that is bought at the expense of
childhood’s rights tends directly to man’s enslavement. It is too dearly
bought. Sins against childhood are sins against the home, are cheating
the world of its to-morrow. And you salve your consciences in vain with
the thought that those illiterate ones are the children of foreigners.
_You_ let them in, to be your Americans of the day that is coming;—you
sent for them, your critics say, to underbid the labor that sought a
higher wage because they wanted American homes,—and it is your business
to see to it that they, or their children, at all events, fit into the
state of which you have made them part. Or woe to that state!
You need not marvel that in the commonwealth that forgets its duty to
the home even to that extent, you have a heavy contract on your hands to
redeem its greatest city. It is the same conscience that is asleep
there. It is all of a piece. Every once in awhile I hear some one growl
against foreign missions because the money and the strength put into
them are needed at home. I did it myself when I did not know better, God
forgive me. I know better now; and I will tell you how I found out. I
became interested in a strong religious awakening in my own old city of
Copenhagen, and I set about investigating it. It was then that I learned
what others have learned before me, and what was the fact there, that
for every dollar you give away to convert the heathen abroad, God gives
you ten dollars’ worth of purpose to deal with your heathen at home. So,
as you set about crushing out selfishness, greed and evil in the state,
you step on the snake’s head at home,—in your own city.
You do not need the city tenement as a monument of civic folly in
wrecking the home. There are other ways of doing it, and none surer or
quicker than by forcing the children to labor when they should be at
play. The city crowds have no monopoly of the slum, though they have the
lion’s share of it. It thrives wherever ignorance and helpless poverty
are, and child labor is the shortest road to both.
The city tenements are the crowded highway. Listen to this description
of them in my own city:
“The tenement districts of New York are places in which thousands of
people are living in the smallest space in which it is possible for
human beings to exist—crowded together in dark, ill-ventilated rooms, in
many of which the sunlight never enters, and in most of which fresh air
is unknown. They are centres of disease, poverty, vice and crime, where
it is a marvel—not that children grow up to be thieves, drunkards and
prostitutes, but that so many should ever grow up to be decent and
self-respecting. All the conditions which surround childhood, youth and
womanhood in New York’s crowded tenement quarters make for
unrighteousness. They also make for disease. There is hardly a tenement
house in which there has not been at least one case of pulmonary
tuberculosis within the last five years, and in some houses there have
been as great a number as twenty-two different cases of this terrible
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. The most terrible of all the features of
tenement-house life in New York, however, is the indiscriminate herding
of all kinds of people in close contact; 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.”
I am not quoting newspaper condemnation. The newspapers have not always
been found on that side of the line. I am not quoting from my own
writings, these many years, on this subject. The paragraph is from the
official report of the Tenement House Commission of 1900, of which I was
not a member; nor is it alone in its condemnation. “They,” said the
Tenement House Committee of 1894, speaking of the tenements, “interfere
with the separateness and sacredness of the home, and ... conduce to the
corruption of the young.” There you have it in a nutshell. They destroy
the home and corrupt youth! But think of it! “All the conditions make
for unrighteousness”—in a city of soon four million souls, half of whom
come under that ban! And all the cities in the land copying after and
tending the same way,—with yours, thank God! bringing up the rear. Keep
Philadelphia there, brethren, as you value your civic life. With the
tenement added to the rest you will never work out from under it. Keep
it out, under whatever name it comes, whether as a French flat, an
apartment house, or what not. It all means the destruction of the home
ideal. Flats are but showy tenements. There is not one of them with a
chimney big enough to let in Santa Claus, and you might as well give up
at once as to have him excluded. There are few enough of them that, were
the watchful eye of the sanitary policeman taken off them for six
months, would not turn out as bad as the worst. And he has got one eye
on the district leader now. Keep out the tenement; it is the enemy of
the commonwealth. And ever hold in high honor the men who fight that
fight for you, whether they be Jewish rabbis, Christian ministers, or
lay brethren laboring for the good of their kind. They fight for your
very life.
I shall have much to say about these tenements hereafter. I will try to
show in pictures that will help you to the understanding of it, how they
injure the social fabric. Here I wish to remind you that that injury is
yours as well as ours. An injury to one _is_ the concern of all in a
democracy like ours. You cannot have citizenship tainted at one end of
the line and expect to keep it untainted at the other end. It works
mischief both ways. Ignorance hurts the state in the man who groans
under it, and in the man who enslaved his mind, who permitted and was
responsible for the outrage. It is of no use to shut our eyes to it. The
slum is a cancer that has long roots reaching the avenue as well as the
alley. The consciousness, however vague, of having betrayed his brother,
breeds hardness of heart in the betrayer, for which alms-giving does not
atone.
“Forgiveness to the injured doth belong,
He never forgives who did the wrong.”
Watch and you will find that, when the slum vote is most in evidence,
careless wealth goes shooting on election day and lets the Republic go
to the dogs. Well may the president make the slum an issue in his
message! He is right, for citizenship is murdered there. And well may
the Church put the redemption of the slum increasingly into its
preaching and into its practice! It is angling for living men, not for
dead ones. I spoke of pigsties. Tell me, what sense is there in a man’s
sitting comfortably in his pew of a Sunday, inviting his soul with a
view of the beautiful mansion he has engaged on high, and letting his
brother below wallow in his slough the while? Do you think that bargain
will stand? I do not. I think he runs a very excellent chance, when his
race is over, of having to take _his_ turn in the sty. We are brothers
whether we own it or not, and you and I together have to carry the load
which is of our making. Try you ever so hard, you cannot lay down your
end, and neither can I, mine.
Is it not the old, old story of human selfishness that tries ever to get
the easy end at the expense of the toiling brother? The woman who shuts
her eyes to the fact that “women’s wages have no lowest limit, since the
paths of shame are always open to them,”[1] and joins in the rush at the
bargain counter, the pennies she saves literally, _literally_ the
life-drops of her sister, body and soul! the selfish man who says: “What
is it to me?” the labor leader who, for personal gain, sacrifices his
cause, which is the cause of human progress, “the effort of men, being
men, to live like men”—these are they who are selling the American home
in our cities into slavery. If anything could make me believe in
purgatory, it is the existence of their kind. We all need making over,
but they seem to need purging by fire to turn the demon of selfishness
out of them, that the spirit of brotherhood may enter. I do not know—I
am not a prophet—but I think I can make out that we are on the eve of
great social changes, for which our democracy was meant to prepare us,
but for which it finds us even now unfit. And all because of that one
thing, the great obstacle!
Footnote 1:
Report of Working Women’s Society in New York City.
The blindness of them, not to see it! Whichever way we turn, where the
selfishness crops out that is where the mistake is made that forfeits
public sympathy, while it holds up the cause of human progress. Capital
earns its fair reward. Promptly it seeks to crush out its neighbor—calls
it protecting its own interests, as though we were so many beasts of
prey whose appetites were the one thing we had in common; proclaims from
the house-tops the age-old doctrine of privilege—God-given
privilege!—from which the world has been trying for centuries to get
away; calls the President of the United States, when he tries to make
peace, a tinkering politician; and sits in the high seat of the
constitution, as if it were made for the protection of property only and
had nothing whatever to do with the people! I yield to no man in my
respect for the constitution of our land. It is so great and so real
that I object to having it worked up into either a sceptre to coerce
men, or a fetish to cajole them, as much as I object to having the Bible
used that way. I take the constitution to be a human document, the
record of action taken by wise and patriotic men to meet emergencies
that arose in their day. Unless we are to assume that wisdom died with
them; that human experience was completed and bound in volumes to file
away on dusty shelves, with nothing more ever to happen that requires
judgment or action; or unless we are to confess ourselves unable to take
such action when the time comes, we shall be wise to drop the fetish
business and to deal with the constitution as men capable of defending
their lives and their liberties, including the right to work, and the
right not to be frozen to death at the dictation of a half dozen coal
kings, upon any plane upon which those liberties may be attacked. This
intense regard for the constitution, that is wont to develop in men and
newspapers in exact ratio as their love of the brother dies, always
suggests to me the fatal ritualism that is akin to the letter that
killeth. Something has to make up for that which has been lost; but
nothing ever can.
The wrongs of wealth! We all know them. “It is the denial of them,” said
Theodore Roosevelt to me the other day, “that has confronted the world
with the challenge that ‘property is theft.’” And he was right. But
capital has no monopoly of wrong. Labor organizes its multitudes and
instantly raises a club to keep out the man who does not think as the
next man does, with violence if he will not go willingly. The shallow
self-seeking of its advocates, the ignorant blundering of their
followers, is often enough to make one sick at heart. We have to look
beyond them to the real claims of the cause of labor to having served
the world by making homes out of hovels, by making free men out of
slaves, by giving back to man his self-respect. We have to take the
long-range view to forget the immediate injury and put things right.
Organized labor, with all its mistakes, has put us heavily into its
debt, for it is true that “only a self-respecting people can remain a
free people.” Wrongs there are on both sides. If capital sought but its
just reward, it would find it compatible with giving labor its fair
share. If labor thought of the rights of the employer with its own; if
the fight were ever for the good of the race as it was meant to be; if
the union label always guaranteed honest work, a living wage, no
sweat-shop or child labor, a clean shop and a fair observance of the
factory laws, its cause would be irresistible.
That is it. You know it and I know it. The right, when it appears
stripped of all self-seeking, _is_ irresistible. Hence our fight is
never hopeless or vain.
The employer who says that he will not treat with his men, that they
must obey or get out, forfeits public sympathy and loses his case in our
day. The self-seeking union that betrays its cause has no standing in
the court of public opinion. It means that appeal can be made to the
good in men, can be made with more success than ever. I am warned to
beware of a false optimism that digs pitfalls for our feet by making us
think there is nothing more to mend. I know that danger; but that the
warning should be uttered is in itself the greatest endorsement of my
faith in the better day that is dawning. There was little enough to tie
that faith to in the days when I wrote “How the Other Half Lives”; but
there is enough now for us all to see, and I, in turn, warn him who will
not see it, against the pessimism that is both false and disabling. No,
thank God, you can at last make your appeal to the consciences of men,
and that is why I make it here. I want the church to back it. It is from
that quarter that I expect the strong blows to be struck for the home,
the blows that will tell. “All the conditions which surround childhood,
youth and womanhood” in the crowded tenements of New York City, of the
metropolis, “make for unrighteousness.” Is not the call to the Church of
God?
Yes! and it has heard the call and is heeding it. I have before me the
record of the social activities of one church, St. George’s, of which my
friend, Dr. Rainsford, whom you know, is the rector. The year books of
Grace Church, of St. Bartholomew’s, of Calvary, of scores of churches in
New York, would have like stories to tell. This grocery department, this
sewing school, this employment society, these helping hands,
kindergartens, cooking schools and mothers’ clubs—they all mean one
thing, the determination to reclaim the home that is in peril; they mean
that the men and women struggling there shall have backing; that they
shall not be permitted “to be content” as they are, for when a man lies
down under the slum he is lost. It means that war is declared against
the slum, and is to be fought to the bitter end. The Church is coming to
the rescue, and I am glad to bear witness that mine is in the van in
generous rivalry with its neighbors.
Shall I tell you how I came to be an Episcopalian? I had long been
tempted by my friendship for the rector whose church I attended in my
own town, though I was not a member of his flock. I had been a Lutheran,
a Methodist, a Congregationalist in my day; I would be a Roman Catholic
rather than be nothing at all, though that would go hard with me.
Denominational fetters ever sat lightly upon me, perhaps too lightly. So
that I marched under the flag, I cared less what regimental badge I
wore. But one day, I read in my newspaper a growl from the East-side
about Bishop Potter’s Mission, the Pro-cathedral in Stanton Street.
“Their services,” wrote the man who did me this favor, “are of the
kindergarten class: clubs, gymnastics, mothers’ meetings, girls’
dress-making classes—and they call _that_ religion!” Ah! I thought, is
that what they are doing over there? and I waited for the answer that
was not long in coming.
“Yes,” wrote the priest in charge, “we call it that; and, furthermore,
it is our belief that a love of God that does not forthwith seek to run
itself into some kindly deed to man is not worth having.” That was their
creed—I called it ever after “the Bishop’s creed,”—and I told Bishop
Potter then and there that if that was the creed of his church I would
join, and I did.
I shall have occasion to show you how the church missed its great
opportunity once; how it slept through its chance in the days that are
gone, and in its sleep did grievous wrong to the people’s homes, which
it ought to have defended. Those are of the sins of the past, and they
have to be atoned for; but, please God, we shall not sin thus again. The
home that is in peril shall appeal, does appeal to-day to the Christian
conscience—appeals from the rule of gold to the golden rule, from the
rule of might to that of right; and no longer does it appeal in vain.
There was a time, even in my memory, when it was said with more show of
reason than I care to think of, that the greatest church corporation in
the land was the worst tenement-house landlord in New York City. But
to-day our appeal is to the churches. They aroused our consciences to
action twenty years ago; they and the Christian men and women who sit in
them head every movement in our great city towards the redemption of the
home; they led in the fights for reform, for decent living conditions
for the people, that wrested victory from the slum twice in the last
half dozen years. You all remember those fights and the share that this
same Pro-cathedral with the Bishop’s creed bore in the last one.
There was never such an arraignment of a city government as that made by
the Bishop of New York in his letter to the mayor, calling upon him, “in
the name of these little ones, these weak and defenseless ones,
Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races and tongues, but from homes in
which God is feared and His law revered,” to save the people from a
“living hell” of vice and corruption; and never was there such a
response of an aroused city as to that summons. The heart of the people
is all right; it is on the side of the Lord and His hosts, all doubting
Thomases to the contrary notwithstanding. Let us be glad!
I remember a cry for help that came from over on that East-side, of
which we hear so much. It was a good many years ago when I was a
reporter in Mulberry Street, and it came from a church in a letter to
the Police Board asking for protection against the boys who played in
the street in front of it and disturbed the Sunday worship. The captain
of the precinct retorted that they had no other place in which to play
and no other time for it, and that the minister of that church had
better be about getting them a playground. That was in the days of
little sense, and the result was that other cry that went up and made
itself heard at a great meeting of all the churches: “How shall we lay
hold of this great multitude that has forsaken our altars?” They have
learned since to lay hold of it with gymnastics, kindergartens and boys’
clubs, and the little handful of discouraged communicants has grown into
hundreds that throng about the altar rail of St. George’s and the other
churches every Sunday. We have come into the days of good sense. I shall
not be charged with false optimism in this; for I remember the day when
the families on the register of St. George’s could be counted in one
short breath, whereas now the communicants number more than eight
thousand, the vast majority of them from the East-side tenements—with
the mayor of the city teaching the Bible class in the Sunday-school and
the president of the Citizens’ Union and the greatest financier of any
day among the strong backers of the rector and his work. I am but
stating the facts in which I rejoice. My eyes are not shut to the
troubles that are ahead in the changing populations over there; but I am
not afraid of losing the Lord’s fight, and neither are those in charge
of St. George’s. I speak of it as typical of all the rest of the
parishes in New York who are enlisted in that war. It is the men who are
not afraid who win battles. But first you must plan them.
Right here, I want to point out to you young men, who are going to take
a hand in it, one of the weak spots, if not _the_ weak spot, in your
campaign for the home—that home which all the influences of the modern
day combine to put in peril. I mean the disappearance of the family
altar. Hand to hand with the crowding of the home to the wall, has gone
the crowding out of the things that make it the representative of heaven
on earth; until now one seldom hears of the old family worship, so
seldom that it almost gives one a start to be asked to join in family
prayer. And I am not referring to the homes of working men especially,
but to those of the rich and prosperous as well. The causes of it? They
are many and complex in the setting forth of them, I suspect: the hurry
of our modern life, the new freedom that makes little minds think
themselves bigger than their maker, the _de_-moralization of the public
school, the pressure of business,—it is hard to get the family
together—which is merely setting up the fact of the scattering of the
home in the defense of it. The causes are many, but the result is one:
the wreck of the home. I said it before, of child labor, that it was
dearly paid for. So also the business prosperity which makes us forget
God is bought at a price no man can afford to pay. It is my cherished
privilege sometimes to break bread with a pious Jewish friend, and when
I see the family gathered about his board giving thanks, a blush comes
to my cheek, a blush for my own people. Whence the abiding strength of
that marvelous people through all the centuries of persecution in the
name of the Prince of Peace, but from the fact that they still hold to
the God of their fathers in their homes? I have been told of the
experience of a friend in a town not far from mine, who asked his pastor
on the occasion of a friendly evening visit to his house, to remain and
pray with the family. The good man’s face lighted up with pleased
surprise, as he said: “I have been in this parish more than a year and
this is the first time I have been asked to pray with any of my people
in their homes.” Is it any occasion for wonder that they have been
vainly trying for more than a dozen years in that place to build a new
and very much needed church? They have never been able to raise the
money, though their own houses are particularly nice; there is not a
poor man in the parish in the sense of his wanting any of the
necessities of life. But why should they build a house for the Lord when
they have put Him out of their own homes? What sense would there be in
that?
I say to you young men preparing for the priesthood, if you want strong
churches and strong men and women in them, go worship with your
parishioners in their homes. Take my word for it that you will be
surprised at the result. We have filled the hungry mouths in our land of
plenty, but there are more starving hearts than you know of all about
you. Build up the family altar, and the home will come back of itself.
Do not bother yourselves about “God in the Constitution,” if you have
Him installed in the people’s homes. If God is feared in the home,
_there_ is written the Constitution which will never need amendment. The
greatest peril that besets the American home to-day is its godlessness.
Put back the family altar and let there be written over it the old stout
challenge to the devil and his hordes: “As for me and my house, we will
serve the Lord;” and even the slum tenement shall seek to attack it in
vain.
In the town of which I spoke, there have in the last half dozen years
grown up two clubs, one for the men, the other for the women, and I am
told that practically they all belong. The result has been the
disappearance of pretty nearly all of the pleasant neighborhood life of
that day when a man gave his arm to his wife after supper and they went
together for a social call upon some neighbor, for a chat, a little
music, going home in good season for bed, telling one another that they
had had a good time. There are no good times in that town any more—not
of that kind at all events. The men spend the evenings bowling at the
club; the women meet in committees to plan public improvements. The old
time supper has become a later dinner and it is the rarest of all things
to find a neighbor “dropping in” unannounced—so rare that one feels that
it somehow is not good form any longer. The family firesides are cold.
And the young—I am told that there is a disproportionate number of them
growing up idle and useless, if not worse. They have lost their hold,
though they do not know it. I am no enemy of clubs, although I know
little of them; but, as a substitute for the altar, I will fight them
until I die. And I am a great backer of woman’s influence in public
affairs—it has been good always and everywhere in my sight; but I say to
you now that I would rather see, we could better afford, that every club
and organization in the land should cease to exist, and every ten-pin
alley stand silent and deserted, than that the old home life which
centred about the family hearth should go from among us. With it goes
that which nothing, no commercial gain, no advance in science, or
government or human knowledge, can replace.
“But they are gone,” I hear some one say, “the old patriarchal days, and
you can’t call them back.” I wish there was no such word in the language
as “can’t.” It has made more mischief than all the rest of them
together. But in the last sifting the world is run by the men who _can_,
while those who can’t stand and look on. Who says you cannot do the
thing that is right? That is what we are here for. Our business is to
make out the right and then go ahead and do it. The Lord has all the
time and all the resources that there are, and, if we do our best, we
can leave Him to attend to the rest. Can’t! If the Church says to-day
that it cannot restore the old faith, that it cannot rekindle the altar
fires that have grown cold, it had better go out of the business; it has
become an unfaithful steward.
But as a matter of fact, it not only can, but nothing is easier. We are
fighting wind-mills of the devil’s making. He put them there to frighten
us off. In so far as we have lost our grip, it is because we Christians
have been untrue to our mission, have failed to discern it. I see in all
the social unrest and longings of the day the yearning heart of the
world, which doctrine and ceremony and printed prayers have left and
ever will leave cold. It is the praying _life_ it cries out for. The
very infidel owns the perfect man in our Christ; and he turns upon our
faith in anger because he feels that he has been cheated of the love
that must be _lived_ by His followers to be felt. Only so can the world
be made to see God in man. It was never more impatient for the sight
than it is to-day.
When the century drew to a close, in common with many others, I looked
for a great revival that should sweep over men and set their minds
toward the things on high; and, when it did not come, when the new
century came in without it, I was disappointed. Until one day there came
a letter to me from a friend whom I had known in all the years to be
ever busy among His poor, toiling early and late in the Master’s steps;
a letter that expressed the same thought, the same disappointment. “When
will it ever come,” she wrote. And all at once it flashed through my
mind that it had come, so silently, so gently,—even as He Himself came
into the world, unheralded except by the angels’ song to the shepherds
in the field—that we knew it not until it had passed and become history.
What else is the mighty philanthropic movement of the last twenty years
that has swayed the minds and hearts of men; that has given us the
social settlement; that goes into the byways and the hedges searching
for the lost neighbor and compels him to come in? What else is that but
a revival of our faith on the lines Christ Himself laid down: binding up
the wounds, caring for the sick and the stricken, helping him over the
hard places, even paying his rent if he is helpless and poor?