to the host and said unto him ‘take care of him and whatsoever thou
spendest more, when I come again I will repay thee.’”
Showing mercy! That is the badge of the neighborly spirit. “Go thou and
do likewise.” That the world is coming back to Him by the door which the
Saviour Himself pointed out, and which we shut, perhaps that is a rebuke
to us for our luke-warmness, for our little faith and understanding. Let
us learn the lesson, then, in humility and repentance, but let us never
again be found saying “can’t” in His fight.
I spoke of the _de_-moralization of the public school. Observe that I
did not say demoralization; I think we are working out of that. What I
was thinking of was that, in our sectarian zeal to see that no heresy
got in, we have, perhaps, come perilously near shutting the door against
both reverence and truth, and so helped on worse mischief. It is a
matter that has caused me a good deal of uneasiness. I am troubled about
it, and yet I do not know how to help it. Is it a sign that the school,
too, is coming around to the neighborhood goal? that we have all,
unknowingly, been helping to haul it around that way—this, I mean, that
the ideal is growing which would have the school be the neighborhood
_soul_, no longer the barren mind, merely? I like to think that it is,
and that this was the thought which moved the Methodist ministers to
promise me last summer to join heartily in the effort to get the public
schools in my city opened for Sunday concerts. The “Lord’s Day” stood in
the way no longer—rather, it was what decided them. It had too long been
the devil’s day among those East-side multitudes.
I marked out for myself a straight talk, when you asked me to come to
you,—and no preaching. The Lord knew what He was about when He made me a
reporter, a gatherer of facts, and not a preacher: He makes no mistakes.
But brethren! If it had been different—if I had been worthy——Oh! when I
look upon you young men preparing to take up His work in the world—what
can you not do if you but believe that your cause is His! What is there
you cannot do? In my day, I have seen the merest handful of men and
women, fewer in number than you can count upon the fingers of your two
hands, but standing firmly for the right, pull my city upward, upward
towards the light,—even in the worst of its bad days, and in spite of
them. I tell you now that if all of you here, going out to your work as
you believe with the apostolic charge upon you, were to go determined to
follow in the apostles’ steps, looking neither to the right nor to the
left—to the living that is to keep you, nor to what expediency
whispers—never losing hope, never hanging your heads, not being afraid
of being called optimists—Christ was the great optimist of all ages; He
never lost hope even of us—what could you not do? I learned something
when I was last in Denmark, where they make butter for a living and
where they have two kinds of Christians, the happy Christians, as they
are called, and the “hell preachers”; I learned there that, if you want
good butter, you must buy it of the happy Christians; they make the
best. So it is in all things in the world; the happy Christians made it
go round. I tell you, brethren, that if all of you here now, or the half
of you, or the fourth of you, were to go out to your work in that
spirit, in the spirit of a dear old Lutheran woman I once knew who said
on her deathbed, “I know but Him and Him crucified; if there is anything
else I should know I am afraid I don’t,”—if you were to go forth to your
work in that spirit, letting all else go, Christian unity would come on
the wave of an irresistible flood; so does the world hunger for the
message you carry.
Suppose you do not live to see it come? We have so little time that we
are always in a hurry, but _He_ has all the time there is. Why should I
let the fact discourage me that wrongs are not all righted at once? It
is nineteen hundred years since Christ came to a sin-ridden world to
free it from bondage, and it is sin-ridden yet. Why should I think that
I should be able to do better in my little time? I have a friend who,
for many years, was connected with the naval observatory in Washington.
A couple of years ago, when he was retired, I said to him that I always
looked upon an astronomer with a kind of awe,—he seemed to me to be so
near to the Almighty, at his elbow seeing Him work, as it were; and my
friend smiled.
“I have not looked through a telescope at a star in a dozen years,” he
said. “All the years I have been in the service I have been carrying on
certain calculations that were begun before I was a man and that will go
on years after I am dead. When they are finished at last, we shall know
something worth knowing. Meanwhile, I and the rest of us have been but
links in the long chain upon whose trusty work depends the final value
of it all. That I have tried to do my part faithfully must be my
reward.”
What greater reward could any man ask than this—to be a link, however
humble, in the chain which links our world of men with God’s kingdom on
high and helps prepare this earth for His coming in His own good time?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
OUR FIGHT FOR THE HOME
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
OUR FIGHT FOR THE HOME
WHEN I was preparing these lectures, it happened that I went out of town
and, returning, crossed the river to New York in the morning before
sunrise. I stood at the bow of the ferry-boat and looked at the city,
lying wrapped in gloom, indistinguishable except for a light in some big
building, itself unseen, piercing it here and there. But, over and
beyond the gloom, the ruddy glow of the morning that was breaking grew
steadily as I looked. I knew that soon it would be bright daylight. As I
stood and watched it and as one after another the outlines of the old
landmarks came out and took shape, I thought that so, at last, the dawn
is breaking upon us in this fight for the home upon which all hinges. It
is no longer an uphill fight _all_ the time.
The other day, I spoke of discouragements that beset the way. They are
there in plenty, but there has come into the fight a new note, that was
missing before. We know now what the fight means. From other quarters,
too, help is coming. Let me sound this note of hope right here; there is
enough of the gloom. The critics of my books complain that I am
unsystematic, that I “put things in” as I think of them. Perhaps so. I
find it somehow easier to put them in when I think of them than when I
don’t think of them. Even while I am about to show you how deep we fell,
let me remember the forces that are coming to help us out. I think that
not only have we turned upon our track and seen the necessity of making
the most of this city civilization with its unsolved problems, which is
the order of the day; but I believe that we have reached the divide, the
point where the population shall be turned back to the soil which it has
been deserting.
Many things seem to me to tend that way. The isolation of the farm is
disappearing. The telephone; the free rural delivery of mails, which
brings good roads, daily newspapers and the bicycle; the concentration
of rural schools; a better grasp of the obstacles in the way of keeping
the boy on the farm—these at one end. At the other, the harnessing of
new forces capable of transmitting power away from the centres of steam
energy, and the scattering of the congested populations to the suburbs;
means of transportation that we knew not of a dozen years ago. It seems
as if the very century, the stamp of which is combination,
concentration, so far as we are yet able to make it out, might have in
store for us as its big surprise the reversal of the process that
characterized its predecessor and bred our perplexities: the drift of
the population everywhere to the cities. So that when it seemed in
extremest peril, the rescue of the home may be made easier than we
thought. I would that in this I might be a true prophet! We can face the
other problems of our day with confidence, if the _home_ be safe; for
_there_ we have backing.
And now let me take you to my own city, to the metropolis, as typical of
most of the large cities of our country. We struggle with the same evils
in Boston, in Chicago, in New York, in Buffalo, in St. Louis, in
Washington. It was only the other day that I looked upon some alleys in
the national capital, under the very shadow of the big gray dome, in
which the crowding was as vile and as wicked as it ever was in the
one-room houses of Glasgow. Though you boast of less crowding upon the
land here in Philadelphia, yet we have the testimony of your
public-spirited men and women that the sanitary condition of your alleys
is far from good. That means darkness and dirt. In other words, you are
no stranger to the pigsty of which I spoke as being the enemy of the
home and of American citizenship. How came it about? What brought us to
the brink, where, looking over, we see “all the conditions” under which
the people live “making for unrighteousness”?
I said it before; but let the public records speak. In 1865, the Council
of Hygiene, pointing to the tenement slum, said, “Its evils and the
perils that surround it are the necessary result of a forgetfulness of
the poor.” “Evils,” was putting it mildly. They came in the last
analysis to murder, child murder. The undertaker and the slum landlord
divided the profits between them. “Not intemperance, ignorance or
destitution alone causes the increase of crime,” was the report of a
committee come down from Albany in the fifties to see what was the
matter with New York; “together they, with municipal and popular
neglect, find their soil in the tenements and thrive and develop
virulence.” The remedy, as the committee saw it, was to “_furnish every
man with a clean and comfortable home_.”
Tell me, what think you of “homes” where men and women “crowded beneath
moldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy
cellars”? I quote that from a report of the Association for the
Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, one of the most conservative
and one of the wisest of our public charities, which, with unerring
instinct, saw that the way to improve the condition, the morals, of the
people was to give them decent homes. What do you think of cellar
“homes” in which the children had to stay in bed till the tide fell; of
homes where children died, “smothered by the foul air of an
un-ventilated room,” a windowless room[2] which the light of day never
entered! That was the burden of a death certificate registered in the
Health Department in those old, indifferent days. What think you of a
city one-quarter of whose children never grew up to lisp the sacred name
of mother, one-third of whose babies never reached their third year, and
one-half never manhood or womanhood! That was the record; and, when
decency came, the death rate came down with it. Child murder ceased to
be the fashion. In thirty-five years, the mortality in my city, while
the population grew and grew, was reduced one-half. I mean, of course,
the percentage of deaths upon the population. In the last dozen years,
reform has saved enough lives in New York City alone annually to people
a city of no mean proportions.
Footnote 2:
Since these lectures were delivered the struggle to preserve the
tenement-house law has developed the fact that after thirty-seven
years there are still over 300,000 windowless, dark rooms in the
tenements of the Greater New York!
I must refer those who wish to get at the statistical facts to the
reports of the successive Tenement House Commissions, or to my own
record of the “Battle with the Slum,” in which I have tried to gather
them all. Only let me mention here that the death rate of New York came
down from 26.32 per 1,000 inhabitants, in 1887, to 19.53 in 1897. It had
been known to run as high as 45 in 1,000 in bad seasons of the bad past;
and in individual instances much higher than that.
What think you of “homes,” a hundred under one roof—a hundred families,
mind you, not a hundred tenants—under the roof of a barrack stamped
officially by the Health Board as a “den of death”? I will tell you what
that Senate Investigation Committee of 1857 thought of them: “The
conclusion forced itself upon the reflections of all that certain
conditions and associations of life and habitation are the prolific
parents of corresponding habits and morals.” Aye, they were. In that
Sixth Ward slum grew up the Five Points. Out of it came the pigsty
voters that voted Tweed and his thieves into possession of the city
government, and the treasure, for which we had paid such a price, out of
the pockets of the taxpayers, while the thieves mocked us and demanded
what we were going to do about it. We had made money our idol, and it
put its foot upon our necks and trod hard.
For that was it. The only question that had been asked till then was:
What would they bring, those tenements? The tenant must “pay the rent or
get out.” Indifference—popular neglect—that was the time for pulling it
mildly; for men of standing, of influence in the community, drew the pay
that was the price of selling the brother into slavery. Listen to this
from the report of the Council of Hygiene: “Some of them,” meaning the
owners of slum tenements, “are persons of the highest character, but
they fail to appreciate the responsibility that rests upon them.” They
did. They failed so signally that, when called to account by the health
inspectors in the years that followed, they “urged the filthy habits of
their tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property.” You
will hear that plea, if you listen long enough and closely enough, even
in our day. And whenever you hear it, stop right there and think who is
to blame for the cultivation of those habits. The health inspector of
whom I spoke had no doubts upon the subject. The owners, he said, are
_entirely_ to blame. A pigsty, in time, will make a pig even of man who
is made in the image of God. You can degrade him to that level if you
try hard enough and are willing to pay the price.
They failed to appreciate their responsibility, those men of the highest
character. They did not fail to collect the rents that sometimes went as
high as forty per cent. upon the value of their property. No, but let us
give them their due-an agent collected the rents, they did not. _They_
traveled abroad; perhaps they never saw the dens upon the proceeds of
which they lived at their ease. Do you see what I am driving at? Do you
see how it all, here as everywhere, is just a question of gold that will
buy _ease_ for ourselves! For gold we sold the black man into slavery,
and for gold we let his white brother perish in his slum. We were in a
hurry to get rich and we forgot all else besides; forgot the brotherhood
in our worship of the golden calf. Men have done it in all times, and
the slum is as old as is organized society. “The destruction of the poor
is their poverty.” Whatever else was the matter with those houses, they
paid.
I will tell you one thing that was the matter with that slum where the
home had ceased to be sacred, where the family ideal was tortured to
death and character smothered, where children were damned rather than
born into the world until the very shock of the discovery that one in
five was killed by the worst of the dens came almost as a relief. When
the Church finally roused itself to the doing of its duty it put a
long-belated finger upon the sore spot of it all:
“In this ward,” said the Federation of Churches after a house-to-house
canvass, “the churches, clubs, schools, educational and helpful agencies
of every kind make a front of 756 running feet on the street, while the
saloons, put side by side, stretch themselves over nearly a mile; so
that ideals of citizenship are minting themselves upon the minds of the
people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.”
The devil had it in that ward, seven to one. Out of such an environment
comes the Lost Tenth, the helpless and the hopeless, that levy tribute
on our strength and our life. Comptroller Coler showed that eleven and
one-half per cent. of all the money raised by taxation in New York went
to support poverty and, largely, pauperism, with the burden all the time
increasing. The poverty maps at our Tenement House Exhibition showed few
enough tenements that were free from the taint of alms-seeking, but some
from which, in five years, seventy-five different families had asked
public relief. That is one thing that is the matter with the slum—it
makes its own heredity. The sum of the bad environment of to-day and of
yesterday becomes the heredity of to-morrow, becomes the citizenship of
to-morrow. The lowered vitality, the poor workmanship, the inefficiency,
the loss of hope—they all enter in and make an endless chain upon which
the curse of the slum is handed down through the generations. Our task
is to break that chain, unless we want it to break us. We accepted the
legacy in the charter of a people’s rights: life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness; and we must find the way to secure them, or accept
the alternative. Freedom means justice to the people or it means
nothing; and justice, like true charity, must begin at home—with the
home.
We have made that out in our day; and we say rightly that the housing
question holds the key to most of the civic problems that beset us. It
does; but at bottom it is because it is a much bigger question than of
citizenship, even. It is a moral question—not a question of “morals,”
merely, which is akin to manners, though on that score we have made
headway since “men of the highest character” have abandoned the owning
of slum tenements for profit—but the moral question whether I shall love
my neighbor or kill him; whether I shall stand idly by and see my
brother’s soul stunted, smothered in the slum of my making, of my tacit
consent at any rate, or put in all upon rescuing him. Brethren, we shall
never rescue our city, you will never rescue yours, until we understand
that that is what it all harks back to, that all these things mean one
and the same thing: _that I am my brother’s keeper for good or for
evil_. No man liveth unto himself alone. A moral, a profoundly religious
question bound up inseparably with our faith, if by it we mean something
which is alive; and it is only the living faith _here_ that has claim
upon life in the hereafter. No man who, unmoved, sees his brother perish
on earth, need expect a welcoming hand to be reached out to him from the
skies, if I read my Bible aright.
It is hard to understand the attitude of the church, through all those
weary years, towards the people it was meant to shepherd, except upon
the assumption, which was a fact, that it, too, had been seized and
carried away by the prevailing craze, taking the thing for the soul of
the thing. Handsome church edifices went up, with brown stone and marble
and carvings without stint, further and further from the people’s homes;
though not always as the record shows. In the rear of Trinity Church and
“overlooked by the stained-glass windows of that beautiful edifice,” the
legislative committee, of which I spoke, pointed, with a scorn it hardly
made an attempt to conceal, to a tenement containing fourteen families
in which “filth and want of ventilation were enough to infect the very
walls with disease.” As a matter of fact, two epidemics of yellow fever
and of cholera had started in that row. But whether the churches were
near or far, the people kept aloof from them. _That_ is not hard to
understand, when I recall the dive in William Street, with two stories
of vileness underground, that was known in the Health Department to
belong to a New Jersey church corporation! The profits were the devil’s
wages and they went to pay for what some Christians called God’s work! I
suppose they persuaded themselves—men can persuade themselves to almost
anything if they want to—that that was the reason they were not willing
to give them up, and they fought stubbornly the efforts of the
authorities to break up the dive where unspeakable debauchery held high
carnival most of the day and all of the night. It is not hard to
understand, when there comes to mind the congregation of Christians that
moved up-town from Mulberry Street and sold their old house of worship
to speculating builders, who converted it into a rear tenement, put a
brick building in front and into these barracks piled a hundred
families, a total of three hundred and sixty persons. What kind of home
altars were there, think you? That was at the Five Points where the
dives were particularly vile, but I will warrant that there was nothing
in the saloon in the front basement one-half as bad as in the flats in
the rear, where men and women had once sat and worshiped their God, to
whose service they had dedicated that house.
In 1868, the death rate in the “Old Church Tenements,” as they were
called until for very shame we destroyed them, was _seventy-five per
thousand_, counting only those who died in the houses, not those whose
end came in the hospitals to which those tenements were “among the
largest contributors.”
Hard to understand that men fell away from the church? They must have
thought that the Lord had forgotten them; but it was only the men who
professed His name that had forgotten. _He_ remembered. The day will
come, I hope,—I think it is on the way now,—when we shall be permitted
to forget the greatest wrong of all; that it was a church corporation,
the strongest and wealthiest, and alas! our own, that, for its temporal
advantage and to save a paltry few hundred dollars, took up the cudgel
for the enemy we were battling with and all but succeeded in upsetting
the whole structure of tenement-house law we had built up with such
weary toil in our effort to help the man to a level where he might own
himself a man. You know the story of that and how bitterly it has
rankled these many years. The church corporation was a tenement-house
owner, one of the largest, if not, indeed the largest in the city, and
its buildings were old and bad. It suited its purposes to let them be
bad, because they were down-town where the land was rapidly getting
valuable for warehouse purposes, and the tenements were all to be torn
down by and by. And so it was that it achieved the reputation of being
the worst of landlords, hardly a name to attract the people to its pews.
We had got to the point in our fight where we had made good the claim of
the tenant to at least a full supply of water in his house, though light
and air were yet denied him by the builder, when that church corporation
chose to contest the law ordering it to supply water in its houses, and
won, for the time being, on the plea that the law was arbitrary and
autocratic. They are all autocratic, the laws that are made for the
protection of the poor man; they have to be while the purpose to hinder
rather than help lives in his brother. We trembled on the edge of a
general collapse of all our remedial laws, until the court of last
resort decided that any such claim was contrary to public policy and
therefore inadmissible.
It was not long after that, that a distinguished body of churchmen in my
city invited me to speak to them of slum evils. And I showed them
pictures of the little children from the gutter, until at last some
unthinking brother made the comment: “Oh, well, they wouldn’t wash, if
you gave them the chance.” Perhaps you can imagine the result. I would
not have missed that opportunity for a good deal.