to half a dozen years ago, the lad had not one place where he might
play, safe from the policeman. Not a single playground was there, even
on that East-side where half a million tenants were pent up in the big
barracks, out of sight and reach of a green spot. Not a school was there
with a playground belonging to it. Yes! there was one; over behind the
public school in First Street was a little patch in the middle of the
block that had once been a graveyard, but had become a mere litter of
tin cans and ash-heaps. It took three years and, I think, as many
legislative bills to obtain this sorry boon for the living; but, when it
was at last made into a playground, the “gang” in that block went out of
business. What became of it? Where did it go? To school, probably. That
school became the most popular one on the East-side, and the most
orderly.
For all that, however, this playground long remained the only one. It
took years to make us see what a clear-headed man across the sea had
made out many years before; namely, that crime in our large cities is,
to an unsuspected extent, a question of athletics merely—of giving the
boys a chance to play when that is what they need. Boys are like steam
boilers with steam always up: the steam has to have a safe outlet, or it
will find an unsafe one. Boilers have safety-valves with which it is
best not to meddle. The boy’s safety-valve is his play. Let the landlord
hang up his sign in the yard that he will have no ball playing there,
and let the policeman refuse the lad the chance to play in the street,
which is a bad place to play at best—let these two sit on the boy’s
safety-valve, and you need not marvel at the explosion you will hear.
You can read of it in the papers every day: such and such a “gang”
waylaid the policeman on their beat last night and beat him with his own
club. It is nothing to marvel at, no special depravity; it was just the
boiler that went bang.
That was the way we safeguarded that prop under the boy, who is father
to the man, and we reaped as our reward crooked citizenship. New York is
but the type of the rest of our cities in this as in so much else. We
are at last taking the kindergarten seriously; here and there
“play-schools” are being opened in the long summer vacations. In New
York, we have built half a dozen play-piers out into the river, where
the little ones dance to the music of brass bands in the evening. I told
you how we put brass bands up on the schoolhouse roofs and invited the
neighborhood in. Boston has “play-rooms” for indoor fun in crowded
neighborhoods. We shall yet have “play-houses” for the children’s use as
well as for the grown folk; but it is still a running fight. Twice in
the past year have I been appealed to to help save the kindergarten from
ignorant town boards, who could not see what good there was in it that
the people should be taxed for its support. The dawn of common sense has
set in, but it will be sometime yet to the broad daylight.
There are other props which we have hardly recognized as such. There is
the respect for law that means respect for the majesty of the
commonwealth, of the state. What have we made of that? Of the compulsory
education law, until within the last half dozen years, we made a
laughing stock. Of the factory law, said a legislative committee that
looked us over, we made a mess of perjury and child labor. The excise
law became a vehicle of blackmail and corruption. This is how we tended
that prop, forgetting that to bring contempt upon the law is the
shortest cut to civic cynicism, which is a death-blow to the republic:
it lives but in the people’s hopes and high ideals.
The very enforcement of law has sometimes seemed a travesty: the boy who
steals fifty cents is sent to the house of correction; the man who
steals a railroad goes free. So the lad, robbed of every chance and with
the fact dinned into his ears unceasingly by those who would make
capital of his plight, takes to the street and throws stones and mud at
the order of society that gave him no show; at the church, with its
pride and pomp; at the citizen in a good coat and a silk hat; at the
policeman, when his back is turned and he is far enough away; at
anything that stands for the order of society in which he was allowed no
place.
Need we wonder at it? Need we cavil at this lad who clutches at the very
last straw in vain—the father’s help and counsel that means so much to
the growing boy? Too often relations between father and son are
reversed, and the father must depend on the boy for communication with
the strange world around him. He is and remains a stranger, never even
learning the language; the boy is born to it and to the new ways that
prove a stumbling-block to his father. He, the father, is an Italian, a
Greek, a refugee Jew—he is “Dutch.” That sums it all up. He is “Dutch”
and he is “slow,” and, in the inevitable conflict between the old and
the new, the boy escapes to the street and to the gang.
Come now with me to the reformatory and look at their records.
Three-fourths of the young men who land there are “without moral sense”
yet “of average mental capacity,” which is to say that they had the
common sense to benefit by their opportunities had we put any in their
way; but we did not. See how all but eight or nine in a hundred had bad
homes, or homes which, at all events, had no influence for good upon
their lives. But in this it is emphatically true that that which is not
for is against. Unless the home is a saving influence in the lad’s life,
the door has been opened for all that is bad and corrupting. More than
ninety per cent. were adrift at the age when character is formed. And
only one in a hundred escaped bad company![3] The street has no other
kind of company and the street is the alternative of the home.
Footnote 3:
See Year Book of Elmira Reformatory.
There is your heredity made to order for you—to _your_ order—the
heredity of the slum; for the heredity, under which we groan, ever ready
to give up, to lay the blame on the Almighty for our shortsightedness,
our selfishness and love of ease,—this heredity is, in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred, just the sum of the bad environment which it was in
our power to mend if we had but minded it while it was time. The
hundredth case we can leave to the Lord, who punishes the sins of the
fathers upon their children only in them that _hate_ Him. To those who
would do His bidding, His work in the world, He is ever ready to show a
way out. The way is to keep His commandments, the old, and the new that
sums up all the rest. Loving our brother, we shall not have the heart to
leave him in the slough; we shall be wanting to fight all the things
that drag him down, and so we shall be mending not only his chances in
the to-day, but we shall be cutting off the heritage of sin and sorrow
and failure that would blight the to-morrow. We shall have lifted the
curse that was laid upon man for forgetting his brother—for whoso
forgets his brother hateth Him, that is what it means—and shall have
helped the kingdom to come upon earth, even as it is in heaven above. By
helping men to live the life of men, we shall bring them nearer to Him
whose children we are. That is our heredity, the only real one: that we
are children of God! With that backing, who can falter? What is there
that you and I cannot do? And how dare we refuse to do it?
“Weakness is what ails the young criminal, not wickedness,” say the
prison superintendent, the prison chaplain, every one who knows. Lack of
character, that is. How could he grow a character in such a setting as
his? And for this setting we, not he, are responsible. He could not help
himself. Think what it was we wasted! Only the other day the head-worker
of one of the social settlements in New York told me of a little Jewish
boy in her care, a little chap of eight, whose home is in a tenement
where the father works early and late to make ends meet, his darling
ambition that his boy shall some day be a rabbi; but the little fellow
threw consternation into that household by declaring that he would not
be a rabbi when he grew up, and why? “Because,” he told my friend, “I do
not believe I could ever think of words beautiful enough to speak to God
in.” Out of a slum tenement! How you would cherish it forever if your
little one were to lift his soul and yours up to God with such a speech!
Diamonds in the dust, truly.
I remember the “Kid” they brought to police headquarters handcuffed to
two policemen whom he had tried to kill when they came upon him robbing
a store. If ever there was a tough, he was one. And yet when they
brought him out from the detective office, where he had had his pedigree
taken and been photographed and hung in the Rogues’ Gallery as the first
stop on his way to the jail and to the gallows, there was something
underneath the hard crust that spoke to me of the image of God in which
he was made. Overlaid by the slum, yes! hopelessly, you might have said;
but there is no such thing as hopelessness where the spark of His life
is. It may be quickened at any moment. It needs only the right thing to
strike fire, and that thing is always the same. Love of God? He did not
know what it was. He would have spurned you away had you come to him
with it on your lips. But when, five minutes later, a cry of horror went
up on Broadway where a little toddling baby had strayed out upon the
railroad track with a runaway car not ten feet from the child, who
crowed with delight at the sound of the bell which the gripman banged,
sick with dread, for he was powerless to stay the car—when we stood
frozen to stone with the despairing shriek of that mother whom men were
holding back while they turned their heads away, with her cries ringing
the doom of the child in our ears—when there seemed no help on earth,
then it was the “Kid” who tore himself from the grasp of the policemen
and sprang upon the car-track, saving the child at the risk of his own
life a thousand times over! Thief, tough, indexed and hung in the
Rogues’ Gallery; started fair for the jail and the gallows, he did not
hesitate. The peril of the innocent child struck the spark, and the
image came out which the slum had tried to smother. Plenty there are
who, had they seen him, would not have thought it was there; for there
are other things beside the slum that bury it deep, too deep for the
spark to struggle through: too good a time, over-indulgence,
selfishness, for instance. It is not the first time that men have sought
the Lord in the high places in vain. The wise men found Him cradled in
the stable with the dumb beasts, and they worshiped Him there.
There was Fighting Mary. She earned her name; that tells the story. A
pupil on occasion in the Industrial School of the Children’s Aid Society
on Seventh Avenue, she had acquired such a reputation as a battler with
the gangs of the neighborhood, that it seemed like putting a premium on
bad conduct, I suppose, to bid her to the Thanksgiving dinner; but
better counsel prevailed, and she was allowed to come. And when she saw
the little mince pie at her plate—a whole pie, the first and only one in
her desolate life, though nothing was farther from her mind than
thoughts of desolation, with several unsettled scores on hand—her whole
childish soul went out to it. She caressed it tenderly, felt of it,
sniffed its sweet fragrance, and, when every sense was satisfied except
the one that the children all about her were gorging, she crammed it, as
carefully as she might, all warm and pulpy as it was, into her dress
pocket. The boys saw it and, encouraged by the presence of strangers,
jeered a little; not very loudly, for they knew the penalty well; but
she heard it and, with one of the looks before which the “gang” had
quailed before, she said just this: “For mother.”
That was all; but it brought the tears of penitence, of sorrow and of
gladness to the eyes of the good women who thought once of shutting her
out as quite beyond hope. Before that day’s sun set, they did what they
could to undo the wrong by adopting a resolution that has since stood
upon the records of all the twenty schools and more of the Children’s
Aid Society: that occasions of mince pie shall carry double rations
always, one for Mary and one for mother!
These are the children whose backs we have been loading with the
heredity of the slum, of ignorance, of homelessness. There came to me
the other day a letter asking me to be present at the fiftieth annual
meeting of that Children’s Aid Society, which has in all these years
been trying to break the bonds of the slum by taking the children from
it and planting them out on the Western fields where they may grow in
the sunlight. And grow they did; at the meeting to which I was invited,
three governors were to be present, two elected by the people in their
states and one territorial governor appointed by the president; and all
three of them were once bare-legged little raggamuffins taken from the
slum of New York!
No hope? No, there will be none for _us_, unless our eyes are opened
speedily; for it does not end here. We can choose whether we will make
of the lad in the slum a governor or a thief; and we shall have to foot
the bill here, if we choose the bad end. But there is another reckoning
coming for smothering God’s image in a human soul. Somebody has got to
foot that bill, too, and it will not be the boy. He was the victim.
The boy sees the choice we are making. He sees us building jails when we
should have built schools, though the schools are many times cheaper any
way one looks at it. If he has heard that I am my brother’s keeper, he
must conclude upon the evidence that it means jail-keeper; and, in
disgust and derision at our lack of sense, he throws stones and mud. And
who shall blame him? Not I. I joined him long ago, only I throw ink; but
the idea is the same. The boy has been foully dealt with.
And foolishly! Where it would have been—is—so easy to _form_ character,
we have been laboring with such infinite toil to _reform_ it. It would
have formed itself had we left the boy the home, for that is where
character grows. The loss of it thrust a hundred problems upon us of
finding props to take its place. All the labor of forty years has been
directed to that end.
The fresh air holidays are one, and how strong a one, how sadly needed,
he may know who hears the child cry out upon his first sight of God’s
open fields, “How blue the sky is, and how much there is of it!” Not
much in his slum alley! “The fresh air holiday,” said a woman doctor who
has labored all her life among the poor in my city, “is a strong plaster
for our social ills.” And so it is. Some day, I hope to see the touch
from my old home, the neighborly Danish touch, added to it for the good
of us all. There they exchange; the boys from the city go out to the
country to be made over, and the lads from the farms are taken to town
by their teachers to see its wonders and to come nearer to the history
of their country that is written there. So they feel more like what they
are in fact, neighbors who can pull together all the better because they
are no longer strangers. They have been introduced to one another. That
idea is worth considering. In our great country, we need to pull
together in the days that are coming even more than in the past. There
is enough to pull us apart.
The boys’ club is another prop. It is the key to the boy that heads off
the “gang” and the reformatory that lurks behind it. In the beginning,
it grew out of a missionary’s great heart, and wherever there is heart
in it one boys’ club is worth a thousand policemen’s clubs in the fight
with the slum. The boys were breaking the windows of the mission house
in Tompkins’ Square and the police could not drive them off. The
missionary’s wife knew a plan, however: she invited them in to have
coffee and cakes. That was the gospel in practical form for Tompkins’
Square, and the first boys’ club that grew out of that meeting has
to-day an army of members which no building is big enough to house; and
Tompkins’ Square, that was once given over to rioting, to “bread or
blood” processions, has become orderly and peaceful. The last of the
anarchists over there has taken to keeping a beer saloon and
accumulating property. We have grafted the boys’ club upon the public
school and we never did anything better.
The kindergarten is such a prop, and the cooking class is another—never
a stronger in the fight with intemperance, that thrives upon bad cooking
at home as upon nothing else. The whole reformed school is building new
underpinnings for the lad who has so long been left to himself. We have
replaced the three R’s with the three H’s—the head, the heart, and the
hand. We are at last teaching the children to think. We are nearly where
we can vote six millions of dollars for public schools as readily as for
a battleship. When we get to where we can do it without a tremor, we
shall be fairly on the home stretch. As yet we shudder at the great
sums; but they are the opportunities of our greatness, over which we
must learn to rejoice more than over fine ships, mighty railroads, vast
wheat-fields, territorial expansion and a full treasury; because, if
they are not heeded, these other things are but so many temptations and
traps for our stumbling feet.
The social settlement is of all the substitute props the strongest. It
takes all the rest into its plan to help; and it goes to the home, which
is the kernel of all, and tries to help there with neighborly touch.
That is the cure. Greed and selfishness killed the home; human sympathy
only can bring it back. “My brother” is the word that has healing for
all our social ills. The settlement has been compared to a bridge upon
which men go over, not down, from the mansion to the tenement; for a
bridge must be level to be good. There was a time when men went down to
that work, or shot down their coal and their groceries, as if through a
coal chute, in contemptuous settlement of brotherhood arrears. That did
not work. The crop we raised from that was hatred and helplessness. But
the personal touch can redeem even free soup; and if there is anything
more hopeless than that I do not know it. I am told that here in
Philadelphia, where it unaccountably survives, it is coupled, after all,
with kindly inquiry and personal interest, serves as a means of opening
the door merely. It is a bad key; but, if that is the use it is put to,
as I am told by a venerable Quaker who confronted me sternly with the
question, “Jacob, why did thee say in thy book that in Philadelphia
common sense appears to be drowned in soup?”—if that is the way of it, I
am willing to condone even free soup, otherwise outlawed as hopeless. It
was never the way in my city.
So, whichever way we turn, we come back to the commandment: “My
children, love one another.” Doing that, we can leave the results with
Him who said it. But we can make them out even now. We can see how
things are beginning to tend back towards the home where love grows
naturally in the family. The neighborhood idea, that is the heart of the
settlement movement, rouses civic pride, rouses ideals that were dead,
restores to the neighborhood individuality and to the family dignity.
The mothers’ club, what does it mean, what does it discuss, but
home-making? The home library brings the visitor to the home, picks it
out and gives it separate existence, and ties the children to it with a
new loyalty. The boys’ club belongs there in its ultimate development
and will yet go there for its meetings, and the girls’ club too. That
must be the ultimate aim of the settlement, which is now preparing the
ground for it. Everywhere, consciously or unconsciously, the movement is
in the air, and growing, to rescue the home from neglect, to put a stop
to child labor and to home-work that would exclude the family life; the
movement to send mother and children back to the home where they are
safe.
You, in Philadelphia, have your Octavia Hill Association, that has shown
us how to redeem a whole street. I have told you of our efforts in our
worse slum. It is so everywhere. I _am_ my brother’s keeper, and I am
ashamed at last not to own it. That is the key-note of the whole modern
reform movement, the new charity, the new school, the social settlement
and all; and thank God for it!
How long we were finding out that we were neighbors! A year or two ago,
I went to a suburb of New York to speak of these things, even as I am
now speaking to you. And when that evening I sat at the family board
with my host, who was a clergyman, a secretary in a foreign mission
board, he said, looking around upon his little ones, that, if I could
find him a poor widow in the city with five children of their ages, whom
they could go along with and help as they grew, I would be doing a good
thing for them and a better thing for his children. And I promised, for
that was ideal charity, neighbor with neighbor.
But it was not easy. Weeks passed before I found a family in an
East-side tenement that just filled the requirements. It was Christmas
Eve, and, while I stayed to look them over, I came to love them, the
good children and the brave little woman fighting her fight all unaided.
She told me that she was a scrub-woman in a public building; but it was
not until I had gone half way over to the office, to tell my friend on
the telephone that I had found what he sought, that I thought of asking
Where she scrubbed. I went back to ask her.
And where was it, do you think? In the mission building, on his floor!
Between them was just the thickness of the oaken door, all the time she
had been needing him as he did her, and neither knew where to find the
other. They were neighbors in very truth, and they did not know it.
It may be that your neighbor lives as near to you, in want of much that
you can give, your love and friendship first and last. Go and seek him.
And when you have found him, bind up his wounds, help him and care for
him; and, when you must depart on the morrow, leave of your substance
that he may be cared for until you come that way again. That was
neighborliness as the Good Samaritan saw it.
“Go,” said the Saviour, “go, and do thou likewise.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s note:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in
the public domain.