The town of East Haven is the full equation of the American ideal worked
out to a complete and finished result. Therein is to be found all that
is best of New England intellectuality--well taught, well trained; all
that is best of solidly established New England prosperity; all that is
best of New England progressive radicalism, tempered, toned, and
governed by all that is best of New England conservatism, warmed to life
by all that is best and broadest of New England Christian liberalism. It
is the sum total of nineteenth-century American _cultus_, and in it is
embodied all that for which we of these days of New World life are
striving so hard. Its municipal government is a perfect model of a
municipal government; its officials are elected from the most worthy of
its prosperous middle class by voters every one of whom can not only
read the Constitution, but could, if it were required, analyze its laws
and by-laws. Its taxes are fairly and justly assessed, and are spent
with a well-considered and munificent liberality. Its public works are
the very best that can be compassed, both from an artistic and practical
stand-point. It has a free library, not cumbersomely large, but almost
perfect of its kind; and, finally, it is the boast of the community that
there is not a single poor man living within its municipal limits.
Its leisure class is well read and widely speculative, and its busy
class, instead of being jealous of what the other has attained, receives
gladly all the good that it has to impart.
All this ripeness of prosperity is not a matter of quick growth of a
recent date; neither is its wealth inherited and held by a few lucky
families. It was fairly earned in the heyday of New England commercial
activity that obtained some twenty-five or thirty years ago, at which
time it was the boast of East Haven people that East Haven
sailing-vessels covered the seas from India to India. Now that busy
harvest-time is passed and gone, and East Haven rests with opulent ease,
subsisting upon the well-earned fruits of good work well done.
With all this fulness of completion one might think that East Haven had
attained the perfection of its ideal. But no. Still in one respect it is
like the rest of the world; still, like the rest of the world, it is
attainted by one great nameless sin, of which it, in part and parcel, is
somehow guilty, and from the contamination of which even it, with all
its perfection of law and government, is not free. Its boast that there
are no poor within its limits is true only in a certain particular
sense. There are, indeed, no poor resident, tax-paying, voting citizens,
but during certain seasons of the year there are, or were, plenty of
tramps, and they were not accounted when that boast was made.
East Haven has clad herself in comely enough fashion with all those fine
garments of enlightened self-government, but underneath those garments
are, or were, the same vermin that infested the garments of so many
communities less clean--parasites that suck existence from God's gifts
to decent people. Indeed, that human vermin at one time infested East
Haven even more than the other and neighboring towns; perhaps just
because its clothing of civilization was more soft and warm than theirs;
perhaps (and upon the face this latter is the more likely explanation of
the two) because, in a very exaltation of enlightenment, there were no
laws against vagrancy. Anyhow, however one might account for their
presence, there the tramps were. One saw the shabby, homeless waifs
everywhere--in the highways, in the byways. You saw them slouching past
the shady little common, with its smooth greensward, where well-dressed
young ladies and gentlemen played at lawn-tennis; you saw them standing
knocking at the doors of the fine old houses in Bay Street to beg for
food to eat; you saw them in the early morning on the steps of the old
North Church, combing their shaggy hair and beards with their fingers,
after their night's sleep on the old colonial gravestones under the
rustling elms; everywhere you saw them--heavy, sullen-browed, brutish--a
living reproach to the well-ordered, God-fearing community of something
cruelly wrong, something bitterly unjust, of which they, as well as the
rest of the world, were guilty, and of which God alone knew the remedy.
No town in the State suffered so much from their infestation, and it was
a common saying in the town of Norwark--a prosperous manufacturing
community adjoining East Haven--that Dives lived in East Haven, and that
Lazarus was his most frequent visitor.
The East Haven people always felt the sting of the suggested sneer; but
what could they do? The poor were at their doors; they knew no immediate
remedy for that poverty; and they were too compassionate and too
enlightened to send the tramps away hungry and forlorn.
So Lazarus continued to come, and Dives continued to feed him at the
gate, until, by-and-by, a strange and unexpected remedy for the trouble
was discovered, and East Haven at last overcame its dirty son of Anak.