After all, I was loath to come away. I should have liked to stay and
live awhile with such as they, if the terms of their life had been
possible, for there were phases of it that were very attractive. That
constant meeting and that neighborly intimacy were superficially at
least of a very pleasant effect, and though the whole place seemed
abandoned to mere trade, it may have been a necessity of the case, for
I am told that many of these Hebrews have another ideal, and think
and vote in the hope that the land of their refuge shall yet some day
keep its word to the world, so that men shall be equally free in it
to the pursuit of happiness. I suppose they are mostly fugitives from
the Russian persecution, and that from the cradle their days must have
been full of fear and care, and from the time they could toil that they
must have toiled at whatever their hands found to do. Yet they had not
the look of a degraded people; they were quiet and orderly, and I saw
none of the drunkenness or the truculence of an Irish or low American
neighborhood among them. There were no policemen in sight, and the
quiet behavior that struck me so much seemed not to have been enforced.
Very likely they may have moods different from that I saw, but I only
tell of what I saw, and I am by no means ready yet to preach poverty
as a saving grace. Though they seemed so patient and even cheerful in
some cases, I do not think it is well for human beings to live whole
families together in one room with a kennel out of it, where modesty
may survive, but decency is impossible. Neither do I think they can
be the better men and women for being insufficiently clothed and fed,
though so many of us appear none the better for being housed in palaces
and clad in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day.
I have tried to report simply and honestly what I saw of the life of
our poorest people that day. One might say it was not so bad as it is
painted, but I think it is quite as bad as it appeared; and I could
not see that in itself or in its conditions it held the promise or the
hope of anything better. If it is tolerable, it must endure; if it is
intolerable, still it must endure. Here and there one will release
himself from it, and doubtless numbers are always doing this, as in the
days of slavery there were always fugitives; but for the great mass the
captivity remains. Upon the present terms of leaving the poor to be
housed by private landlords, whose interest it is to get the greatest
return of money for the money invested, the very poorest must always
be housed as they are now. Nothing but public control in some form or
other can secure them a shelter fit for human beings.