The whole spectacle of poverty, indeed, is incredible. As soon as you
cease to have it before your eyes,--even when you have it before your
eyes,--you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many
people deny that it exists, or is much more than a superstition of the
sentimentalist. When I get back into my own comfortable room, among my
papers and books, I remember it as I remember something at the theatre.
It seems to be turned off, as Niagara does, when you come away. The
difficulty here in New York is that the moment you go out again, you
find it turned on, full tide. I used to live in a country supposed to
be peculiarly infested by beggars; but I believe I was not so much
asked for charity in Venice as I am in New York. There are as many
beggars on our streets as in Venice, and as for the organized efforts
to get at one’s compassion, there is no parallel for New York anywhere.
The letters asking aid for air funds, salt and fresh, for homes and
shelters, for reading-rooms and eating-rooms, for hospitals and
refuges, for the lame, halt, and blind, for the old, for the young, for
the anhungered and ashamed, of all imaginable descriptions, storm in
with every mail, so that one hates to open one’s letters nowadays; for
instead of finding a pleasant line from a friend, one finds an appeal,
in print imitating typewriting, from several of the millionaires in the
city for aid of some good object to which they have lent the influence
of their signatures, and inclosing an envelope, directed but not
stamped, for your subscription. You do not escape from the proof of
poverty even by keeping indoors amidst your own luxurious environment;
besides, your digestion becomes impaired, and you have to go out, if
you are to have any appetite for your dinner; and then the trouble
begins on other terms.
One of my minor difficulties, if I may keep on confessing myself to
the reader, is a very small pattern of newsboys, whom I am tempted to
make keep the change when I get a one-cent paper of them and give them
a five-cent piece. I see men, well dressed, well brushed, with the
air of being exemplary citizens, fathers of families, and pillars of
churches, wait patiently or impatiently, while these little fellows
search one pocket and another for the pennies due, or run to some
comrade Chonnie or Chimmie for them; and I cannot help feeling that I
may be doing something very disorganizing or demoralizing in failing
to demand my change. At first I used to pass on without apparently
noticing that I had given too much, but I perceived that then these
small wretches sometimes winked to their friends, in the belief that
they had cheated me; and now I let them offer to get the change before
I let them keep it. I may be undermining society, and teaching them
to trust in a fickle fortune rather than their own enterprise, by
overpaying them; but at least I will not corrupt them by letting them
think they have taken advantage of my ignorance. If the reader will not
whisper it again, I will own that I have sometimes paid as high as ten
cents for a one-cent paper, which I did not want, when it has been
offered me by a very minute newsboy near midnight; and I have done this
in conscious defiance of the well-known fact that it is a ruse of very
minute newsboys to be out late when they ought to be in bed at home, or
at _the_ Home (which seems different), in order to work the sympathies
of unwary philanthropists. The statistics in regard to these miscreants
are as unquestionable as those relating to street beggars who have
amassed fortunes and died amidst rags and riches of dramatic character.
I am sorry that I cannot say where the statistics are to be found.