family which we will call Simmons,--far removed from the real name. The
family consisted of the husband and wife, each about thirty-five years
of age, and four children,--the eldest ten. Mr. Simmons was a
confectioner by trade, but for some years had been travelling for a
wholesale grocer's house in New York. He was a man of good address, and
was fairly successful until, in some of the competitions of trade, the
New York house determined to withdraw from that section, and he was
thrown out of business. After casting about for several weeks in a vain
attempt to get employment, he decided to bring his family with him to
New England. They removed to Worcester, where for months he sought
employment, but was unable to find anything except short jobs for a day
or two at a time. Mrs. Simmons, who was an educated and refilled woman,
and a most worthy lady in every respect, did what she could to assist
her husband; but as a fifth child was born to them in the autumn, she
was so weakened by sickness and the care of her children, that she
could do little besides looking after them. As the months passed, they
were compelled to resort to the pawnshop--the bank of the unfortunate.
First went their silverware, which was mostly wedding presents, an
anguish to part with to people of their history and character. Then
followed their best clothing, and some splendid books out of a
well-selected library--for remember that these were educated,
intelligent people, with all the instincts and tastes of good breeding.
Finally, discouraged with Worcester, they removed, with what they had
left, to Boston. Again for weary days, stretching into weeks, went on
the disheartening search for work. Mr. Simmons says in those days the
very iron entered into his soul. To see his refined, cultivated wife
sick and wasting away, his children improperly clothed and hungry, and
compelled, day by day, to return to the tenement house on the filthy
street whither his condition had forced him, with a feeling of utter
helplessness, he declares that nothing but the religious convictions of
his youth, and the sense of the cowardice of the act, saved him from
the death of the suicide.
[Illustration: THE BANK OF THE UNFORTUNATE.]
During the winter they were compelled to sell their excellent
cooking-range, which they had brought with them from New York, and
procure a cheaper one. All the books that were left followed; then the
bedsteads and other furniture went, until there was only one bedstead
left, and that was rented through the day to a man who worked nights.
Many days they had nothing to eat but bread or crackers--and often that
was of a stale quality and a scant allowance. The eldest, a little boy,
attended the Sunday-school of a Boston church; he has one of the
truest, noblest, and most interesting faces I have ever seen. On
missing him for a couple of Sundays, the superintendent of the school
went in search of him, and for the first time knew of the condition of
the family.
[Illustration: OUT OF WORK.]
The Sunday-school superintendent found his little scholar lying in a
dry-goods box,--for there was no bed in the daytime,--sick from lack of
food and clothing. He made inquiries of the mother, and at last, with
sobs and tears, she told their story. Their necessities were relieved,
and through the sympathetic interest of a number of Christian men the
husband now has steady employment. Now, it is easy to say that he
should have gone to the church, or the charities, with the story of his
condition--and I think that is true; but, on the other hand, you can
see that it was the very worthiness of the family, their very nobility,
that made that course seem more bitter than starvation. Bear in mind
that these people were not dissipated, that they were strictly moral
and religious, and that both father and mother were of prepossessing
appearance. This man did not drink, or smoke, or chew, and was
intensely anxious to take care of his family; he was willing to do the
humblest work, and preferred death to begging or dishonor.
Only a few weeks since, I called, with a brother minister, on a family
of Maine people in a miserable tenement house in the North End. The
husband and father had been sick and out of work for a good while. A
short time before my visit, however, he had shipped on a coaster from
Hyannis to Philadelphia. He had arranged for a little credit for his
family to keep them from starving, until his expected return; but the
winds had been contrary, and he was several days overdue. The wife and
four children were in despair. They had had nothing since the morning
of the day before, and then only bread and water, except a little broth
which a neighbor, not much better off, brought in to one of the
children--a beautiful little girl, sick with what would be "la grippe"
on Beacon Hill, but is only "grip" down in the slums. The mother had a
little babe, and was in such delicate health that it was impossible for
her to go out to wash or scrub. Her two narrow little rooms were
scrupulously neat and clean, as were her children; but the tears ran
down her cheeks as, in answer to our questions, she confessed, as if
she had been admitting a crime, poor soul, that they had had nothing to
eat all day.
I give you these instances to show you how false is the idea that
poverty and enforced residence in a miserable tenement house are a
badge of sin or wrong-doing. But think of the agony of fathers and
mothers, who love their children as well as you love yours, and have
ambitions for them as holy and pure, who are compelled to see their
loved ones deteriorating under their eyes, and through the
contamination of the poisonous moral atmosphere which they breathe,
dropping slowly, but certainly, down to a level with the brutality
which surrounds them.
[Illustration: A CHEAP LODGING-HOUSE.]
Well, you ask, what is the remedy for all this? My main purpose, in
this series of discourses, was to place the facts of the situation
before the people. But I have some plain, practical, common-sense
suggestions to make. In the first place, we want an almost _infinitely_
better system of inspection of tenement houses. Every tenement house in
the city, having as many as eight families in it, ought to be inspected
carefully, at least once a month--and once a week would be better--by
an officer who holds his place under civil-service rules, entirely
independent of politics, and who is held to a strict responsibility for
the performance of his duties.
As to the tenement-house sweat-shop, I am convinced that a very simple
law, which ought to be passed by the next legislature, requiring every
manufacturer, of any kind, to file with the inspector of factories a
list of the names and addresses of the people who work for him, would
work wonders. It may be that there are some firms as low down as the
one whose superintendent remarked the other day, when asked what the
effect would be in their business if it were known that their goods
were manufactured in filthy tenement houses: "It would make no
difference at all; our customers would buy of us just the same, no
matter where our garments were made." This firm, I am sure, would find
itself mistaken, and, with a great many others, would break off its
connection with the sweating-business if the law forced it to make that
relation public.
Yet I am sure that nothing promises so much for reform as a revival of
conscientious landlordism. The landlord is now, too often, as one well
says, "an enormous wealthy estate, with heirs scattered here and there,
who hire an agent, as their Southern brothers hired an overseer,
irresponsible, unsympathetic, caring only to please his patrons, by
showing a large balance of profit. And the poorer the tenement, the
larger the balance. No repairs, no janitor, no supervision to pay for;
accommodations so wretched that only the very wretched, who will expect
to be crowded and miserable, will apply for it. O landlord! or
'estate!' too busy to collect your own rents, be not too indolent to
require of your agent a strict account when he brings you twenty per
cent instead of six! You would quickly bring him to book if he were
suddenly to hand you six instead of twenty, but the time to question
him is when it is twenty."
Mrs. Alice Wellington Rollins says in the _Forum_, speaking of New
York: "Nothing is more astonishing, in investigating the slums, than
the discovery of the enormous prices the poor are paying for the most
wretched accommodations. One man boasts that he draws thirty-three per
cent on his tenement investments." The same writer wisely says,
farther: "The landlord is not to be a philanthropist, willing to
sacrifice himself for the good of others; he is to be an intelligent
capitalist, putting in his money purely as an investment, and
philanthropic only to the degree of being satisfied with six per cent
returns, of hiring a janitor to be on hand day and night, of being his
own agent, or keeping a sharp lookout on the one he may have to employ,
and of urging his wife to collect the rents. But individual landlordism
need not necessarily be confined to individual persons. Individual
corporations can become landlords. Why should not some of the insurance
companies that complain of being unable to find suitable investments
for their immense funds, take hold of the tenement question? A
life-insurance company of Boston, complaining of the low rates of
interest obtainable, announce that they never expect over five per
cent, and find it difficult at times to get four.
"Half of the trouble is caused by the wilful cruelty, but half by the
thoughtlessness, of the landlords. A wise writer has said recently:
'Often you don't need to say to a man, "_Why_ do you do so?" If you can
show him _what_ he is doing, it is often enough to rouse him to
reform.' I have faith enough in human nature to believe that if we
could organize a procession of landlords and compel them to walk
through the tenement districts, they would begin the reform
themselves."
Let me relate to you a very interesting experiment that has indeed long
since passed the era of experiment. In 1879 Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln and a
young lady friend were so wrought upon by the filth and misery which
they saw in certain tenement houses visited by them, in connection with
the Associated Charities, that they determined to do something to
better the condition of these poor people. They hired a large house on
the corner of Chardon and Merrimac Streets. It contained twenty-seven
tenements, and the rent agreed upon with the owner was one thousand
dollars a year, though since the first year they have paid twelve
hundred. The house had the worst possible reputation morally, and had
been under the ban of the police for a long time.
It was, at the time they took it, half empty, because of the degraded
character of the occupants. Its entries and corridors were blackened
with smoke, and dingy and uninviting. The sinks were in dark corners,
and were foul and disease-breeding. The stairways were innocent of
water or broom, and throughout the entire house, from top to bottom,
ceilings, walls, stairways--everything was dirty and neglected. It was
surely not an attractive task to attempt to bring cleanliness and order
out of such chaos, but these resolute young reformers deliberately set
themselves to perform the seemingly impossible. The interior was
painted, improved means of lighting and ventilating the sinks were
ordered, and wood and coal closets arranged for each tenement on its
own landing.
[Illustration: THE "GOOD LUCK" TENEMENT HOUSE.]
Previously the tenants had to keep their fuel in the cellar. The mouldy
wall-paper was removed from the entries, and a fresh surface of
plastering was put on. A few of the worst tenants had to be removed,
but the majority, pleased with the new administration of things, were
willing to accept its rules and remain. Tenants were soon found for
every room; and this house, which had been regarded as very unhealthy,
and had been a regular hive for fevers under the old _regime_ of
carelessness and greed, that did not care how dirty the tenants were so
long as they paid their rent, under the new rule of cleanliness became
so healthy that disease was almost unknown, and was, and is to this
day, known by the tenants and the neighborhood generally as the "Good
Luck House." The ladies collected their own rents, and kept everything
well under their own supervision. A close account was kept of all
receipts and expenditures, and at the end of the first year the balance
of cash in hand was $111.67, or more than eleven per cent on the
investment. The second year it was still more profitable, the net sum
at the end of the year being $157.47. Mrs. Lincoln still carries on the
administration of the "Good Luck House," and no queen was ever treated
with more genuine respect than she is there. She is regarded as a most
practical sort of patron saint to the institution. Yet there is no
element of charity suggested in her dealings with her tenants. It is
simply Christian justice. She seeks with great care to help them retain
their self-respect, and treats them as fully her equal in personal
responsibility. The rent is required to be paid regularly. One rigid
rule enforced upon all tenants is cleanliness. She pays for the weekly
scrubbing of the halls and stairways, but the tenants are required to
sweep them every day, in turn. The sinks and drains are kept clean. All
this has a marvellous effect on the home habits of the inmates; and I
have seen as clean and tidy rooms in the "Good Luck" tenement house as
I have seen anywhere, and that, too, on days when they were caught
unawares, it not being the regular rent day, when they expect the
landlady. All above six per cent has been put in the bank as an
emergency fund, and, from time to time, the tenants have been permitted
to share some unexpected pleasure from this. Once a splendid
entertainment was given the tenants, in a public hall, with
stereopticon views; at another time, it took a more material method of
expression, and a good blanket, a pitcher and basin for each family,
came out of this fund. In every way the tenants are made to know that
their interests are in perfect harmony with those of the landlady. To
encourage them to use more room, where they are able to pay for it, a
discount is made on each additional room taken, and ten cents a week is
deducted for payment in advance. A majority of them avail themselves of
this privilege.
If he who makes a tree to grow where none grew before, is a public
benefactor, surely she who has made it possible for many family-trees
to grow and thrive, yielding their fragrance and their fruit in a pure
home and social life, is a benefactress in the highest sense.
Let us encourage on every side the transformation of filthy, neglected
tenements into "Good Luck" houses.
[Illustration: THE SAND GARDEN.]
A little wise thoughtfulness may vastly improve the childhood of the
slums. Boys' clubs and girls' clubs are steps in the right direction.
They awaken an interest in innocent games, afford a glimpse of
beautiful pictures, and give zest to the intellectual appetite for
fresh, wholesome books. The "sand garden" is also a happy thought.
Think of thousands of children reared in the narrowest, filthiest
quarters, who have never had a chance to make even a mud-pie out in the
pure air of heaven. It may seem a small thing to some, but it is a
tragedy to me. When I remember my own happy childhood over in the
Oregon woods, where I ran as free and untrammelled as a young colt in
the pasture, and made mud-pies beside the brook that had its home in a
great bubbling spring on the hillside, breathing the air fragrant with
the perfume of wild lilies, while robins and bobolinks and meadow larks
sported and sang without fear, on every side--when I contrast a
childhood like that with the child-life in the Boston slums, I am
heart-broken. There is nothing so sad as this "murder of the innocents"
that is going on in all our great cities. Marianne Farningham sings
their dirge:--
"Such sights there are in the great sin-soiled city,
As might compel an angel into pity;
But none more sad in all the world of care,
Than a young child driven to black despair!"
Surely, trumpet blast never called men and women to a holier crusade
than this rescue of the lost childhood of the slums.
IX.
OLD WORLD TIDES IN BOSTON.
"There is a poor blind Samson in this land,
Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies."
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: _The Warning_.
Travellers tell us that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are
still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down
through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the
gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was
above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and
stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the
result of some strange convulsion of the earth, the coast-line has sunk
down and down, until the incoming tide of the salt sea has swept over
it, and schools of porpoises and fishes swim among the branches of old
forest trees that in the former time were accustomed to the chatter of
squirrels and songs of birds.
Any one studying the older and more historic sections of Boston will
see many relics of a past civilization by which he will be impressed in
very much the same way as is the sailor who looks on the remains of an
ancient forest in the ocean's bed. Standing in the North End, in front
of the "Copp's Hill Burying-ground," and looking up at the tower of
Christ Church where the famous signal lanterns were hung, one can
almost hear the old church appropriating the words of the poet:--
"By time's highway--a milestone gray--
I watch the world march by;
An endless stream of moving men
Rolls on beneath mine eye.
Still, still they go; where, none can know;
And when one wave is gone,
Another and another yet
Come ever surging on."
It seems strange indeed to go up and down some of these old historic
streets, and yet never in the course of one's walk hear spoken the
language of the country. In the course of my investigations during the
past few months, I have found it impossible to do anything practical
without an interpreter, sometimes in one language, and again in
another. Often in entering an old rear tenement house, where filth and
misery held riot, I have been astonished at the splendidly carved
ornaments over the doorways, and the still-to-be-traced carving on the
balustrade. Once these old rear tenements were the abodes of Boston's
wealthiest and most cultivated citizens; but the Old World tide has
come in, and house after house, block after block, and street upon
street, have been overwhelmed by the waves of people who speak other
languages, and whose habits of life are more foreign than their speech.
[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH TOWER.]
I have no sympathy with those people who are crying out against all
foreigners, yet it seems to me that no serious student of the signs of
the times can take other than a sober view of the submerging tide of
foreign immigration which has come into this country, of which the
North End of Boston is a suggestive illustration. The consideration
which causes the most sober thought among earnest men to-day, is the
entirely different class of immigration coming to us now from that of
former times. In the earlier days of American history it was the
intelligent, self-reliant part of the European communities who dared
the expense and hardship of the long sea voyage by a sailing-vessel,
and faced the exigencies of the New World. The immigrants of those days
were mostly farmers and skilled mechanics, who brought with them the
habit and prestige of success. But under the new order of things, with
the great steam ferries which make a passage to America only a brief
holiday trip of a week, with reduced rates, and controlled by companies
who scour every European city, by aid of their agents, to gather in
their human cargoes from the poorest and most ignorant of all the labor
classes, it becomes a very different question.
[Illustration: ON THE CUNARDER.]
The motives that impel people to this country now, are very different
from what they used to be. The San Francisco _Alta_ well says: "The
time was when the majority of foreign immigrants came because of an
intelligent devotion to free government. Ninety-nine per cent of them
were free from merely material motives. They were not urged by
starvation, they did not come in the squalid steerage, they did not, on
landing, feel compelled to invent servile occupations, before unknown
in this country, merely to get the crusts and scraps that would keep
them alive. Their motive was intellectual more than material. Their
descendants are found in every State, of good report, foremost among
the fibres that make up American character. Their blood may have been
in the beginning English, Irish, Scotch, French, Italian, Spanish,
German, Scandinavian, or Slav. No matter: they are now Americans,
because the expatriation of their ancestors was real, and not unreal.
Its motive was ethical, and not material. At present ninety-nine per
cent of all immigrants come for material reasons only. Their decision
to migrate to the United States is not for lack of liberty, but for
lack of bread. The purpose is animal entirely. Every old emigrant from
any country in Europe knows this to be so. The Italian who genuinely
expatriated himself, who believed in Joseph Mazzini, and sought liberty
for its own sake, finds no fraternity in the Italian immigration that
has poured upon us since the suppression of the murder guilds of
Sicily, and the decline of the industry of assassination in that
country."
[Illustration: ON THE WAY TO THE RABBI.]
I think it is indeed one of the hopeful features of the situation that
nearly all our adopted citizens, who are themselves thoroughly
Americanized, share strongly in this view. Indeed, many of them seem to
realize the danger more keenly than do the native-born citizens. I was
very much interested, at the New England Chautauqua the other day, to
hear Mr. John M. Langston, the colored orator of Virginia, read a
letter from a leading Hebrew of Washington City, in which he reminded
Mr. Langston that he had often pleaded the cause of the Negro, and
appealed to him in turn to plead the cause of the Hebrew, by arousing
public sentiment against the too rapid influx of Russian Jews.
[Illustration: PASSING THE QUARANTINE DOCTOR.]
The swift incoming of these Old World tides has very close relation to
the wages of laboring people. Large numbers of the alien laborers who
are coming now, are little better than "slaves of contractors,
steamship lines, and the professional European jobbers in pauper labor.
The large proportion of those engaged in our mines and on public works
have been secured through these sources, either in direct defiance of
our laws or by the evasion of the laws. They come in direct competition
with the native-born and the worthy foreign immigrant, who comes here
for the purpose of applying for citizenship and securing a home. They
not only come into competition with every worthy class of laborers, but
they are, for the most part, too ignorant to comprehend American
institutions, and have no broader idea of liberty than to insist that
it includes license. At every point of contact with our labor system,
they debase it."
An illustration of this class of labor may be found in the fact that a
year or two ago forty-seven alien miners employed in phosphate mines
near Waterboro, S.C., were imprisoned because they refused to fulfil
the contract under which they had been employed. Their story was that
they had been met at Castle Garden by labor agents who induced them to
sign a paper which they did not understand, but which proved to be a
contract to work for one and two dollars a week in the phosphate mines,
and board themselves. When they learned, on their first payday, of the
trick which had been played upon them, they revolted. A few days in
jail, however, induced them to return to work on the old terms.