the tenantry. In the first we find an old Irish woman who lives here
with her two boys. She keeps house for them in two little rooms.
Everything is poverty-stricken and dirty. The poor old woman is a wreck
in body and in mind. She has buried seven daughters. She says, "I've
buried a good flock. Too much trouble broke my very life out of me." We
go in at another door. Here is an English woman; she has two children
and keeps a boarder. She scrubs now in a bank building, and washes at
other places. She sewed for a long time. At first she was paid fourteen
cents a pair for finishing pants, then thirteen cents, then twelve
cents, and finally ten cents, and then, as it was impossible to get
bread for her children on what she could earn, she went to scrubbing.
Being a very rugged woman physically, she is able to do this. If she
had been frail and delicate, with a young babe, she would have been
compelled to keep on finishing pants at ten cents a pair.
[Illustration: AN ANCIENT TENEMENT.]
It is hot and dirty here everywhere. How could it be otherwise? Every
one of these housekeepers must have a fire in her room every time she
wants hot water for washing or any other purpose. Take the day of my
visit,--one of the hottest in June; it is ninety degrees in the shade,
but with the fire in the rickety stove in the room in which this mother
and her little girl are working, it cannot be less than a hundred and
thirty. But the fire cannot go out, or the washing will stop, and there
will be no food to-morrow. For these two miserable sweat-boxes--the
paper half torn off, bed-bug dens that nothing could thoroughly cleanse
except a fire that would exterminate the very walls--she pays two
dollars and a half per week. As a striking illustration of the good
results of agitation on these subjects, I called at this house during
the past week, when one of the tenants told me that my repeated visits
to the place, and the fact that I had had a photographer there making
views of it, had awakened so much comment in the section that the
landlord had got frightened and had had the corridors washed, and had
put new paper on some of the rooms.
Off Norman Street in the West End is a court which I have visited
during the past week in company with two other gentlemen. The houses on
this court are occupied by Italian fruit-venders for the most part.
The court itself is littered up with refuse and decayed fruit in a most
filthy and unhealthy manner. In one of these large tenement houses
there is no family which occupies more than one room. Let us
investigate a few of them. Here is a room fifteen feet long. At its
narrow end it is only five feet six inches wide, and at the other end
not quite seven feet wide. In this narrow lane five people live. Huge
strings of bananas in every stage of ripening hang over the piles of
filthy bedding. It is in the second story, and the corridor in front,
which is forty-three inches wide--unusually spacious, as you will see
later--is half taken up with boxes of decaying fruit, buckets of slops,
and piles of refuse. The walls are as black and rusty as the stove.
Here is another family residence in this building. The size is ten and
one-half by ten and one-fourth feet. Four people live here. The entire
furnishings are not worth five dollars. The cupboard is a lemon-box
with a partition in it, set on the floor. The bread, kneaded and ready
to bake, is laid out on an old, dirty, colored handkerchief on the pile
of bedding; there are no chairs, table, or other furniture of any kind.
Another room which also answers for home for four people, is sixteen
feet long and six feet five inches wide. The walls here, as in many
other rooms, have large sections of the plastering torn off, and are
blackened with many years of smoke and dirt.
[Illustration: ITALIAN FRUIT-VENDERS AT HOME.]
The next family we visit has three people. The room is seven by nine
feet. The bed covers all except thirty-one inches on one end, and
twenty-four inches on one side. There are boxes of fruit under the bed,
some of it decaying; what is too rotten to sell must serve for home
consumption. And so we go on, room after room, and floor after floor.
Now, section fourteen of the law in regard to tenement houses says:
"The tenant of any lodging-house or tenement house shall thoroughly
cleanse all the rooms, floors, windows, and doors of the house, or part
of the house, of which he is the tenant, to the satisfaction of the
Board of Health; and the owner or lessee shall well and sufficiently,
to the satisfaction of said board, whitewash and otherwise cleanse the
walls and ceilings thereof, once at least in _every year_, in the
months of April or May, and have the privies, drains, and cesspools
kept in good order, and the passages and stairs kept clean and in good
condition."
Now, I have no desire or intention to do any injustice to the members
of the Board of Health. They may be over-worked, and have an
insufficient force to pay proper attention to their duties; but I state
only the simple fact--and I am sure it is a fact that the people
generally ought to know--when I say that there is a shameful and
dangerous lack of such attention in many of these tenement houses. In
regard to the houses I have just described the law is a dead letter.
The passages and stairs are filthy beyond description. Some of these
corridors are only twenty, twenty-three, and twenty-nine inches wide,
and yet, dark and narrow as they are, they are largely filled up with
piles of refuse and garbage. In one of these buildings the water-closet
on the landing has had the door taken down and put away, so that it
stands open day and night.
[Illustration: COCKROACHES BY FLASH-LIGHT.]
[Illustration: BANANA SELLER.]
On some of the walls of these living rooms the cockroaches and bed-bugs
swarm in abundance, literally by hundreds, at ten o'clock in the
morning. The walls and ceilings have not only _not_ been cleansed or
whitened this year, but it must have been many years since there has
been an attempt made to clean them. In one of these bedrooms I counted
twenty-five boxes of lemons, besides great bunches of half-ripened
bananas. Live chickens were kept under the bed in one of these rooms.
The fruit which is ripened in these places is sold daily in every
section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings,
far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves
and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help
but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these
filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place,
for their sign is put up over the doors of these rooms, telling how
many are allowed to sleep in each room; but they might as well have
kept the sign in the office for all the good it has done, for in nearly
every room the inmates admitted to the Italian interpreter who
accompanied me, that from two to three times as many persons occupied
the room as the sign permits. One of these buildings, four stories
high, is so old and rickety that it cannot stand alone, and has
careened over against the building next to it. Everything is of wood,
and if it was once on fire, with its narrow, obstructed halls and
stairways, the swarm of tenants would burn like rats in a trap.
This is by no means an isolated case. When Rev. Mr. Barnett, of
Whitechapel, London, was here a few days ago, one of the inspectors of
the Board of Health took him to visit some of the tenement houses of
South Boston and the North End. A _Boston Herald_ reporter went with
them, and I quote from his report of the trip: "The party first visited
the tenement houses of South Boston, occupied for the most part by the
fishermen and their families, and the poorer classes of the Irish
population. The first one visited was the house known as the Slate
block on First Street. Here was seen one of the best examples of the
worst class of dwellings, and one in which legislation had accomplished
but little. Here was a building where the law had not been complied
with regarding whitewashing, and the walls were dirty and stained with
smoke. Hardly a house was seen, in the whole course of the journey,
where this simple law in the interest of health and sanitary condition
of living had been observed. In many cases, it appeared as though it
had not only been neglected this spring, but for many springs in the
past. In driving from this section of the city to the North End, Mr.
Barnett made the somewhat startling remark, 'We have nothing nearly so
bad as this in Whitechapel.'"
[Illustration: UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS.]
Doesn't it seem a little strange to an outsider that the Board of
Health keep on hand, as it were, block after block of tenement houses,
where both landlords and tenants deliberately set the law at defiance,
which they can show off at call? There could not be a greater folly
than to put this question aside as a matter only interesting to those
poor people themselves. The slavery of Uncle Tom and his woolly-headed
children cursed the plantation house, in the end, as much as it did the
cabin. We must look after these people and help them for the sake of
others, if not on their own account. Dr. John S. Billings, in an
address before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in
February of this year, says: "When diphtheria prevails in a tenement
house, many school children are endangered, and the most perfect
plumbing in a house affords little protection against the entrance of
this disease, if it is prevailing in the vicinity. Typhus and smallpox
do not confine their ravages to the vicious and foul, after they have
acquired malignancy amongst them. Mingled with those who might not be
worth saving, is a much larger number of honest, industrious, and
fairly intelligent and energetic poor people who live by days' wages,
and are struggling against their surroundings to improve their
condition, and especially to give their children a fairer chance in the
race for life than they themselves have had. These last are the people
whom it is worth while to help for their own sake. You will observe,"
says this cool-headed doctor, "that I am considering this matter
entirely from the money point of view, without reference to religion or
morals or altruism. The question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is far
more important, I admit; but I confine myself to a lower plane--to the
bread-and-butter aspects of municipal life. Great numbers of the
incompetent, vicious, idle, deformed, or starved-brain class have been
poured into this country by immigration during the last fifty years,
and have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums,
alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results
of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited
result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but
hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are
from two to three times as great as those of the better class of
population; one-fourth of their sickness is treated by charities, and
one-third of those who die among them are buried at public expense. The
districts in which they live require a larger proportion of the work of
city officials, inspections, removal of nuisances, police, the courts,
etc.; and, on the other hand, they contribute but little to municipal
or other taxation. All this is well known; but we have not yet arrived
at the stage of applying efficient and systematic prevention, which is
perfectly possible, and are still pottering with the so-called remedies
which are of little use. In these districts the deaths usually
outnumber the births, so that if it were not for a continued stream of
new recruits this population would diminish. How can accessions be
prevented? One way is to get rid of and prevent additions to the kind
of dwellings these people seek. Do you say that they must live
somewhere, and that there must be such places for such people? I do not
think so. It is not necessary that any city should allow the existence
of any such houses within its limits; and if their destruction forces
some persons into the almshouses, and drives others away, it will be
the cheapest and best in the end."
There are scores, and I think I should be safe to say hundreds, of
tenement houses within the city limits of Boston which are unfit to be
inhabited, and where the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of
health required by the statutes, and yet the tenants are paying a
sufficiently large rent to pay good interest on a clean, healthful
tenement. Our modern science and our Christian civilization are alike
challenged by this condition of things.
Yet, as you think of the horror of these Boston "cabins" and their
miserable tenants, you will say, "They are at least free, they cannot
be bought and sold like Uncle Tom." Alas! they are not free. True, no
one can take them to an auction-block, but their bondage is none the
less real. Into that fearfully neglected Italian tenement house which I
have tried to describe in this discourse, the sweater had come, and
women were making a fine class of knee pants for twenty cents a dozen
pairs, which means forty cents a day in wages. These people find it
impossible to save. The lower strata of wages in Boston, and in all our
large cities, has reached the point where the people who depend on them
labor simply to exist. One day's sickness in father or mother or child
leaves a gap it takes weeks or months to bridge over again.
[Illustration: TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING.]
Sometimes a Southern Uncle Tom or Aunt Chloe had their son or daughter
sold out of their arms, leaving them with broken hearts. But the white
slaves of the tenement house sound every deep of human agony. Think
what it is to try to raise boys honest, when their playmates are
thieves from the cradle! Think of the agony of a mother fighting the
wolf of starvation day and night and finding, as, one Boston mother did
only a few weeks ago, that the wolf of lust had devoured her one ewe
lamb before she was yet thirteen years of age! Brothers, it is not yet
time for the "abolitionist" to put aside his tocsin or his sword while
so many of our brothers and sisters are living and sighing in their
despair:--
"Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
Forgetting that the world is fair;
Where no babe we cherish lest its soul perish,
Where our mirth is crime, our love a snare."
VIII.
SOCIAL MICROBES IN BOSTON TENEMENT HOUSES, AND HOW TO DESTROY THEM.
"Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be."
--ALFRED TENNYSON: _In Memoriam._
The greatest claim Job ever makes for himself is that in the days of
his prosperity, when everybody knew him and was obsequious to him as a
rich man, he was not only kind to the poor, but exhibited for them a
genuine sympathy which was illustrated in his carefully searching out
the causes of their troubles.
There is a good deal that passes for kindness and sympathy, in these
days, that is nothing more than lazy good-nature. Ignorant or
indifferent charity is often as mischievous in its results as the
wicked greed of the skinflint and the miser. Sympathy, to be worth any
thing, must be incarnated, as in Job's case, so that it becomes feet to
the lame and eyes to the blind. Frances Power Cobbe declares that the
most Christ-like thing she ever heard from human lips, was from the
"Good Earl" of Shaftesbury:--
"The friend of all the friendless 'neath the sun;
Whose hand had wiped away a thousand tears;
Whose eloquent lips and clear, strong brain have done
God's holy service through his fourscore years."
When he was speaking to her one day, in his study, of the wrongs of
young girls, which he had just been investigating, the tears came to
his eyes and his voice trembled. After a pause, he added, "When I feel
how old I am, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong, but I
feel I cannot bear to go and leave the world with all the misery in
it."
People who have no genuine sympathy for their fellows, oftentimes grow
harder-hearted at a revelation of the miseries of the oppressed, which
stirs nobler souls to their profoundest depths and awakens them to all
manner of helpful benevolence. There is an old legend of St. Hilary
Loricatus, who scourged himself so perpetually that his skin became
like the hide of a rhinoceros. So, acquaintance with the sorrows and
woes of the poor and unfortunate, acquired out of a morbid curiosity,
or a hunger for that kind of emotion experienced by the reader of
sensational novels, will result only in marring and hardening us.
Very different is the result of such knowledge when obtained through an
earnest sympathy and a holy ambition to assuage the sorrows of the
distressed. Shelley never wrote anything more beautiful, perhaps, than
this:--
"In sacred Athens, near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood;
Serve not the unknown God in vain,
But pay that broken shrine again,
Love for hate, and tears for blood."
I put this emphasis on the need of searching out the wrongs of the
poor, because I am satisfied that one of the greatest factors in the
present tenement-house situation is the ignorance and indifference of
the people as to the condition of things in the slum tenement house. I
am sure that nothing but good can come from an honest attempt to "let
in the light of day upon the landlordism of the slums, as you have let
it in upon Mormonism, and other hateful things that prefer darkness
rather than light."
We need to bear in mind constantly, in considering this question, that
society is a whole, and that an evil in one class of our citizenship
cannot help but have its vicious influence, in a greater or less
degree, upon every other portion of society. We must also remember that
the bad tenement house is the birthplace and cradle, and to a large
extent the schoolroom, of multitudes of boys and girls who are to exert
their influence on every phase of our city life in the near future.
Modern scientists have pursued the study of disease microbes with such
diligence, that they claim to be able to recognize beyond mistake the
germs of certain diseases. They find them in the atmosphere almost
everywhere, and they prove that these microbes are real germs of
disease, by their experiments with the lower animals.
The soil under our feet is full of these micro-organisms. The smallest
quantity of earth put in water reveals, through the microscope, besides
the organic and mineral matter, a mass of beings more or less complex,
moving more or less rapidly. A German author, Mr. Reimers, has
calculated that every cubic centimetre of earth may contain several
million germs.
[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF A NORTH END TENEMENT HOUSE.]
Among these microbes some have not been studied, and the part they play
in the economy of life is not known to us, while certain others have
functions which have been well determined. Carbuncle, for instance, is
one of the most terrible maladies which can attack cattle, and
sometimes even men. Now-a-days, thanks to the labors of the scientists,
this malady had become quite rare, and tends more and more to
disappear. For a long time it has been known that carbuncle has been
due to a particular microbe, but it was not known how it was
propagated. M. Pasteur has demonstrated that this propagation was due,
in part at least, to the longevity of the germs.
Thus it is, if you bury the dead body of an animal which has died of
carbuncle, in a ditch five or six feet deep, and cover it with earth,
the carbuncle bacteria will be found in the neighboring soil several
years after the interment. We can understand, then, that cattle put to
graze on this land, or fed by provender from it, may contract the
disease. So when the cause of this malady was unknown, it is not to be
wondered at that superstitious country people called these places
"cursed fields."
There are social microbes no less potent and mischievous than those
with which Pasteur deals. Some of those who are infected with the
contagion are put away in pest-houses or in prisons; many more walk the
streets, and spread their dangerous infection through the social,
business, and home life of the people. My claim is that the bad
tenement house in Boston, as everywhere else where people are herded
together in crowded filthy quarters, where sanitary laws are neglected
or defied either by landlords or tenants, or both, furnishes a
breeding-place for the microbes of nearly every sin and vice that
infest our modern society. The editor of the Portland _Oregonian_,
commenting on General Booth's scheme for the rescue of the London poor,
says: "Its most hopeful features are those which propose to provide the
lowly with means to help themselves, in the building and maintenance of
homes. Thousands of women belonging to the 'submerged tenth' need
almost as much instruction in the simple acts of housewifely thrift and
neatness, as the squaws belonging to the North American Indian tribes.
[Illustration: WIDOW AND TWO CHILDREN IN UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT.]
"Homes, in the civilized sense of the term, they have never had to
keep, and their squalid abiding-places, overrun with wretched and
quarrelsome half-clad children, and bare of the commonest comforts of
life, have offered very unattractive fields for womanly originality and
painstaking endeavor. A cheerful, quiet home, wherein the laborer is
always sure of warmth and light and wholesome food, has in it a saving
grace which all the creeds in Christendom cannot compass without its
auxiliary aid."
The power of the liquor traffic, and all the other kindred vices that
cluster about it, is constantly re-enforced by the social conditions of
the neglected tenement house. Temptation enters as largely into
drunkenness as into any other vice; and in the foul and fetid courts of
the North End, the West End, South Boston, and the Cove, temptation to
vice of every kind is ever present. The words of George R. Simms, in
his earnest study of life in the homes of the London poor, apply with
equal force to such sections in Boston: "The complete lack of home
comforts, the necessity of dulling every finer sense in order to endure
the surrounding horrors, the absence of anything to enter into
competition with the light and glitter of the gin palace, and the
cheapness of the drink in comparison with food, all these contribute
to make the poor easy victims to intemperance. Among the poor,
the constant war with fate, the harassing conditions of daily life,
and the apparent hopelessness of trying to improve their condition,
do undoubtedly tend to make them 'drown their sorrows' and rush
for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the publican
dispenses at so much a glass. Ask any of the temperance workers
in the viler districts, and they will tell you how they have
watched hundreds of decent folk come into a bad neighborhood,
and gradually sink under the degrading influences of their
surroundings. There are a few men who have worked to keep their
brethen from the clutches of the drink fiend who would not gladly hail
the advent of air, light, and cleanliness, and the enforcement of
sanitary laws, as the best weapons with which to do doughty deeds in
their combats with intemperance among the poor."
One of the hardest things to deal with, in an attempt to arouse good
people who are well-to-do and steadily prosperous to a serious study of
the troubles of the poor, is to shake them out of the erroneous
conviction that it is always the fault of the poor that they are in
financial straits and compelled to resort to such places of dwelling.
Put yourself in your brother's place, and listen to this true story of
New England life enacted during the past year.