SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS.
In a preceding chapter an attempt was made to show how hopeless the task of
home-making was for women who had neither knowledge nor ideals to guide
them. When it is remembered that the environment of these homes was in
itself degrading, to maintain even the semblance of a home was a remarkable
achievement.
These women knew but three educating influences--home, school and Church.
Four, perhaps, if one chooses to count the streets, where most of their
time was spent, as one. The value of the first they revealed in the homes
they made. The school at the time it was a factor in their development was
a place that had no connection with anything else in their lives. What they
learned there was but to the exceptional few without any practical value.
They learned to read to get promoted, or because they could not help it.
The arithmetic which they found valuable they learned in doing errands and
spending their own pennies. They learned to form letters with their pens;
but as they had no use for the knowledge, they soon forgot it. Their
conception of education and that of their world left them perfectly at ease
in their accomplishment. The Church had to do with their souls; and to the
majority the care of their souls was a delegated responsibility, and gave
them little concern, if any. Personal effort in that direction was a matter
of old age.
The Church was, by its own traditions and sentiment, a spiritual light and
guide; the end and aim of its service to develop spiritual life by teaching
and prayer. The social life of the people, or, for that matter, the civic
conditions that to the last degree regulated and controlled their
pleasures, were not the concern of the Church. The parish house did not
exist. The institutional church had not been conceived even in thought.
Yet at this period, 1880 and 1881, there was a growing consciousness that
something was wrong in the social order; that neither churches, schools nor
homes were meeting the necessities of the working people or their children.
The Church found itself losing ground; the people could not be held in
allegiance to it. This was so true of the Protestant churches downtown that
already the wisdom of moving uptown was being questioned. Some had even
then left their old buildings to be used as mission churches; others sold
their downtown buildings, moving uptown, giving up any attempt at holding
the masses, who manifested no interest in the Church or its work. The
missions then established were and are maintained with more or less wisdom
and success. That mistakes should be made was natural. There was no
precedent as to how one class in this democratic community should work for
another. It took years for the churches to learn that the secret of success
was in working _with_, and not _for_, the people.
The overcrowding went on. Neighborhoods changed so rapidly that it was
impossible to adopt any system to meet the necessities of the social
conditions. These conditions were created by race standards of living,
pleasure and religion. No man or organization was prepared to grapple with
them intelligently, for they viewed them as observers.
The Church had still the first interpretation of feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison. Secular work was
not yet a part of the redemptive work of the Church. Poverty and ignorance
reigned where prosperity and intelligence had been. The mission church
became a distributing station. It was but natural that the men and women
who followed Christ in their lives should feed and clothe the hungry and
the naked. It was quite as natural that people whose struggle for life was
constant, a struggle in which they were rarely successful, even when they
accepted their own standards of success, should develop shrewdness in
securing all possible aid at the least possible effort. The more they
received without effort, the easier life was made for them. This was one
method of adjustment. Where there were several children in a family they
were often sent to as many Sunday-schools. The churches, all unconsciously,
for a long period carried on the work of the missions on a commercial
basis, competing energetically to secure attendants at mission services and
Sunday-schools. The workers found their success measured by the numbers
that appeared in their reports. It was the American standard of success. It
became profitable to go to Sunday-school. The approach of the holidays
found them crowded. The mission churches boomed. They provided an outlet
for the energies of devoted, consecrated men and women, determined to make
the world better because they were in it. The missions were an outlet for
the generous; for the men and the women who considered themselves stewards
of the properties in their possession. The blunders made are a tribute to
the faith which established and maintained churches. The very blunders of
those years were the seeds of wisdom these latter days are beginning to
garner in the fruits of cooperation and federation. The forces are
beginning to marshal under one banner and emblem, with one aim born of the
nineteenth century conception, that Christ taught civic duty to His
followers when He declared, "Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's." That the Church is the guardian of the people's rights, as well
as their example, is a long-delayed conception. It has taken thirty years
to bring the evolution in Church work from competition to cooperation in
the work of personal and civic regeneration.
Many of the difficulties hardest to overcome have grown out of the mistakes
of those years, when the rapid influx of foreigners changed the character
of the people of the tenement regions, and the Church failed to change its
methods. They came, many of them, paupers, a charge at once upon the
charitable and the humane. Neither their ignorance nor poverty was a bar to
their citizenship; their presence on the municipal stage in the character
of voters, sovereigns, increased the civic problems of New York, and
naturally these the Church problems.
Unfortunately the charitable work of the churches was too often left to the
management of sentimental people, who failed to see what has been forced
upon workers of the present day: that hunger is sometimes a moral educator;
that the salvation of a family may sometimes be best secured by letting
them suffer, the innocent with the guilty, because in the suffering is an
educating power impossible to secure in any other way.
One evening to a working-girls' club a teacher in a mission school not far
away brought a girl of sixteen, introducing her as one of her girls who had
been in her class two years. Privately she told one of the directors of the
club of the poverty of the girl's family. The father was a man of
seventy-five, who could do only the lightest work, and found getting the
work he could do very difficult. This girl was the eldest of seven
children, all attending the mission. "It is a mystery what would become of
the family, were it not for what the mission does for them," was the
comment of the teacher. A close inspection of the girl did not reveal
distressing poverty, and the directors of the club were puzzled. The girl
was employed in a store at a very small salary. She was anxious to go to
the country. Of course, she must be sent away without any cost to herself.
She doubted if the family could spare her wages, even if she could go free.
She explained that she and her brothers and sisters had gone in "Tribune
Fresh-Air Parties," but she was now too old. "The trouble with our family
is," she commented, "that we are all too old." It seemed a hopeless
doctrine to become fixed in the mind of a girl of sixteen, so the club
directors secured a vacation for her through the Working-Girls' Vacation
Society, deciding that, if it were necessary, they would pay the mother her
wages for the time the girl was away. No question arose as to her wages. At
the expiration of her two weeks' vacation, when she should have been
penniless, she appeared at the club in a new hat and gloves. When the girl
joined the club her Sunday-school teacher paid one month's dues. She had
been present at several business meetings; she had seen the other girls
paying their dues, she had heard the treasurer's report, but she never
attempted to assume her financial obligations. She was spoken to finally in
regard to her dues, and responded calmly by saying she could not pay her
dues; she had no money. Various suggestions were made as to the possibility
of her paying part. At last, to relieve the club treasury, one of the
directors said: "I will pay what you owe and one month in advance. You may
pay me as you can." The girl never came to the club again. No effort was
made to trace her, as she contributed nothing to the life of the club, and
many girls kept their dues paid who dressed far more plainly; these very
girls she had on more than one occasion treated discourteously.
Two years afterward one of the club officers was calling on a friend. "I am
so glad you came in," she exclaimed. "One of your club girls is in trouble
and is coming here with Miss ----, a mission worker in Dr. ----'s church,
this morning. Now you can help solve her problem." To have a member of a
working-girls' club go to an outsider for help is to have one of your own
family appeal to strangers in time of need. The club worker kept still. She
was covered with shame. She had failed to establish relations with one it
was her sole purpose to help. Who the girl was she did not know, as her
friend had forgotten the girl's name. The girl came. It was our old friend
of sixteen. She was, as may be imagined, not pleased to see the director of
the club. The history of that family is fairly indicative of how missions
were conducted at that time. How many of them are conducted at the present
with the same results? Originally this family was found by the workers of a
mission established by a wealthy church, and apparently in need. Rent was
paid; food and clothes provided; doctors sent when necessary. The return
for this, as tacitly agreed, was the presence of the children, as rapidly
as they were old enough, in the Sunday-school, and the father and mother at
the Sunday evening service, the only service this mission maintained.
The timidity of the first contact disappeared early. The wants soon outgrew
the needs of the family. The mission people failed to respond to the wants,
and watched more closely what it cost the church to meet the needs after
the first years of acquaintance. This was not to be borne. The family went
in a body to another mission of the same church ten blocks away. They made
not the slightest effort to deceive, for they did not change their address.
Here were nine persons to add to the roll of the mission, and they were
added. The family was enthusiastically welcomed. No impudent or intrusive
questions were asked. Shoes, coats, rent money in whole or part was
generously given. At the end of two years discoveries were made that led
the mission workers to question what was done with the supplies provided.
The family would not stand this. They went bodily to a church less than a
mile away, still living at the old address. The family was again taken up
without question. That the father could not work was accepted and
generosity was increased. The other missions contrasted unfavorably in
generous impulses; the girl urged her former classmates to join the last
mission. The church meanwhile was walking by faith in its treatment of the
poor; aiming to live up to the conception of its days; strengthening the
influence of its prayers with gifts of potatoes; certainly a great advance
on prayers and no potatoes.
At about this time a young girl was met in a Sunday-school class very
attractive, always well and prettily dressed. She had been in the
Sunday-school all her life, and had joined the church with her mother, a
gentle, quiet woman, who leaned on her daughter for guidance. The daughter
was a tower of strength. By accident it was learned that the girl was a
wage-earner, working with her mother in a large suit house in New York;
that they kept house, doing the housework, even the washing and ironing,
before and after their day's work. Added to this they made all their own
clothes, which must have involved a vast amount of labor, as they both
dressed well.
The position of this mother and daughter is fairly typical of a large army
of women workers, and explains, in part, at least, why two women of so much
character should have accepted charity for so many years and why they could
not change their economic relation. The work they did was to a degree a
trade. Each was a special "hand" on a certain part of women's suits. They
were paid by the piece. When they had work, they made good wages; but the
seasons were short. The beginning of every season found them in debt. By
the time the debt was paid work had grown slack or stopped. It was simply
impossible to get beyond this, try as they would. When the girl broke down,
she explained it by saying, "I worked all night to finish my dress. If I
could buy the material in the slack season I could make our things then. We
never have the money, and they have to be made just when work is hardest at
the store." She was but nineteen. The girl was pretty, ambitious, entirely
above the men of her own station in refinement, and yet quite as far
beneath the brothers of the girls she met in her Sunday-school class. She
lived in mental terror lest they should attempt to call on her. It was
pitiful to see the struggle she made to conceal the fact that she was poor.
The other girls knew she worked, knew the church helped the family, but
were very tactful in assisting her in keeping her secret.
When the mother came to the notice of the officers of the church she was a
widow with three young children, one a baby. She could support her family
if the rent was paid. The church officers were glad to do this. They did
not support a mission and had very little outlet for the church's
generosity, except the mission societies--Home and Foreign--to which they
were devoted as a church.
For thirteen years the church had been faithful to its promise and paid the
rent. Nobody questioned the mother as to how her children were getting on,
or what was being done to make them self-supporting. The younger were two
boys. When they were large enough to play on the street, the mother put
them in an institution and paid a small sum for them. The girl went to work
with the mother as soon as she could. The elder boy came home at fourteen
and became a wage-earner. He was troublesome, most difficult to manage, was
out of work more time than he was employed, and yet he would not when
unemployed even keep the fire, that the house might be comfortable when his
mother and sister came home. They always left the house in order when they
went to work, but found it littered when they returned. The boy had no
sense of moral responsibility for his own support. His temper was wholly
untrained. At the time the family history was connected, the youngest boy
was to come home, and naturally his return was dreaded. The mother and
daughter met the problem unaided as to advice or suggestion. Apparently the
church would continue to pay the rent without question, though there were
three, and would soon be four, wage-earners in the family.
When these facts were discovered, the church committee was asked to advance
money enough to pay for the girl's lessons at a school where dress-cutting
was taught, and to notify the widow that her rent would no longer be paid.
The girl accepted the offer at once. She proved a great success, and to-day
is earning a salary as a designer equal to that of many college professors.
She educated her younger brother in a profession, and has entirely
forgotten the days when the church helped her. Her social affiliations are
in another part of the city, and she bows, or forgets to bow, when she
meets those who may remember it, as they would, to her credit. Had the
church retained its claim on her through its financial aid, she would not
be where she is to-day. Her development came when the church made another
future possible to her by refusing to pauperize the family.
We all know the families who have more turkeys at Christmas than members.
We still have churches and sewing schools in the same neighborhood, giving
their Christmas entertainments at different hours and at different dates,
to suit the convenience of those who attend both and profit thereby. We
even have different entertainments given for different branches of work in
the same church at different hours. We succeeded in impressing one boy with
the idea that what he received at the various organizations maintained for
his profit was "Christmas loot," and that he was clever at getting more
than his share. We have become accustomed to conducting an exchange after
our Christmas entertainments, because in giving we have, unfortunately,
duplicated the gifts received elsewhere. Mollie finds herself with two
dolls and no bed, and Katie has two beds and no doll, and Alice has two
sets of dishes and no table. Like fate has attended the gifts to the boys.
We, as a result, enact the role of patient, sweet generosity and
redistribute gifts.
We know that comparisons are made as to which church, sewing school or club
is the one to give the major portion of the coming year's attendance. But
all this will disappear as rapidly as sectarianism and competition between
churches and in philanthropic effort disappear. Competition created it;
cooperation will dispel it, because all will come to a higher conception of
the relations of efforts toward improvement. Then the "profit" of church
and Sunday-school attendance will not be measured by the "things"
distributed.
Nothing marks the growth of public intelligence more than the federations,
and the systems that have grown out of the knowledge of the injury done the
poor by misplaced generosity. Sometimes the children of the poor seem
uncanny in the knowledge they possess of how to use the public and private
charities.
A girl of seventeen gave astonishing evidence of this in a family crisis.
She was a member of a working-girls' club; quiet, studious, reserved. She
was always one of the poorest dressed girls in the club. Her devotion to
those classes which she joined and attended regularly attracted the
attention and admiration of the club directors. Discovering that her dress
was in part responsible for the treatment accorded her by two or three
members, it was decided to make it possible for her to make a better
appearance. She had shown qualities which, if allowed free play, would make
her an influential member of the club.
It was discovered that she attended a near-by mission of a Congregational
church. Consultation with the mission workers brought the unwelcome
knowledge that the mother was immoral, hopelessly immoral, but that her
children loved her dearly and that she was devoted to them. The paying of
rent seemed to support a shelter that ought not to exist, but no one had
the courage to attempt to separate the mother and children. Even this girl
of seventeen had no idea of her mother's wrong-doing. It was a case that
needed the wisdom of Solomon to solve. Just before Christmas the mother
fell ill. The passion of grief that convulsed that group of children was
convincing testimony of the mother's tenderness and devotion. Her eyes
followed them constantly. When able to speak, she would whisper: "What will
become of them? There is no one to care for them." She was removed to a
hospital, with the knowledge that the rent had been paid for a month and
that the children would be looked after. She died two days later. When the
house was visited that morning, the elder girl was out "getting things,"
the children said. When she came in, she was told that provision had been
made to send them all together to a home, where they would not be separated
for a month. The girl sprang to her feet, grabbed the fifteen-months-old
baby from the floor, and swept the others in a circle about her. She
panted, rather than said: "You shall not take the baby away! I will not let
them go! Nobody shall take them. They are mine. I can take care of them.
You just pay the rent. I can do everything else. See?" She put the baby
down, and thrusting her hands into her pockets, brought out tickets to the
Diet Kitchen, the Charities Department for coal and groceries. She had
been to two missionaries connected with different churches she knew, and
secured orders on a near-by grocery for dry groceries. There was not a
public or private charity that gave out-door assistance that that girl of
seventeen did not know just what must be done to get their help. The amount
of knowledge of this kind that she possessed was astounding.
Besides, there was not an institution in the city where children were taken
for longer or shorter periods of time that she did not know. In many of
them she had been herself. In others she had visited the other children of
the family when they were inmates. She found out the defects of each
one--the kind of matron, of food, of punishments that governed in each, and
made out a case against each one. White, with blazing eyes, she looked
capable of doing just what she said she would do, take care of the family
of five little children. They were grouped about her, clinging to her, all
crying in the face of the awful calamity that was about to befall
them--separation. It was agreed that they should stay where they were for
the balance of the month. The question of the future beyond that would be
discussed later. The girl quieted down.
The mother had been insured in one of the insurance companies on the weekly
payment plan. The girl had secured an undertaker who would go to the
hospital and take the mother's body to his establishment for the funeral to
be held the next morning.
"We will have our own minister," she said, with dignity, "not the mission."
Her visitors were again astounded. The mission had looked after the family
for years. The girl had for several years been connected with the
Sunday-school. The address of the minister was secured. The girl explained:
"My mother was confirmed in that church, in her own country, her own home.
She had a letter to the church when she came to this country with my father
after they were married. At first my father earned good money, but he got
sick and they did not get along, and my mother stopped going there, except
to communion; and for three years now she ain't had the clothes to go even
then. She had us confirmed there as soon as we were old enough, and we went
there to communion when we had the clothes. The minister is going to come
to the funeral, and I am going to send word to some of mother's friends
from the old country who go there to church. I could not have them come
here; mother would feel awful." Glancing about the barren, dirty rooms with
a look of scorn, she continued: "We could not let our church friends know
how poor we are. Mother tried hard enough. She was away from home days at a
time looking for work. She took boarders. She did everything she could. You
know I've worked when I could get it." Her voice broke for the first time.
"She took boarders and gave them the beds; we all slept on the floor. She
married the last boarder, the baby's father. She told me to stay here until
he came home, this month--he's a sailor--and to do just what he says. He
was always kind to me and gave me things. You've paid the rent, and you
need not do anything more. I'll stay right here and keep the children till
the baby's father comes home; you need not trouble any more."
She was quiet a moment, but evidently felt the doubt and the decision in
her visitors' minds. Rising, she said fiercely: "I'll not; I'll never let
these children be taken from me!"
The problem was too much for her visitors. They decided to leave the
question of the immediate future to the family's own minister, who
certainly had not carried these lambs in his arms, nor watched very closely
over their erring mother.
The family was separated. Nothing else was possible. The baby's father
repudiated any responsibility for any of the children, and disappeared. The
girl drooped for a time after the separation; but she finally secured a
good home, making a capable, devoted servant until she married. She owes
allegiance only to her own church, saying: "The minister talked so
beautifully at mother's funeral." Her whole conception of the mission
church is that it is an institution for helping the poor.
She never doubted her mother, whose picture, enlarged from a small
photograph, is the chief ornament in her parlor, her most cherished
possession, outside of her husband and children.
In spite of the outburst of passionate devotion at the time of her mother's
funeral, this woman, now with a comfortable home of her own, knows nothing
of the children for whose protection she attained, for a time at least,
sublime heroism. In a few months her indifference was as astonishing as her
devotion had been. Her own life and its concerns filled her mental horizon
to their entire exclusion. For her own home and children she has the
passionate love that she gave to her mother and the crowd of half-brothers
and sisters. She is ambitious for her children, and has two in the High
School. This woman is a fair illustration of the evolution that is making
this nation great.
The churches, when first the social disintegration began, had neither the
intelligence born of experience nor the money to place the mission work in
charge of people of high intellectual and social development. There were no
training schools for Christian workers, and to that degree the Church was
hampered in inaugurating its work among the poor. The selection was too
often a question of pleasing some wealthy member of the church, by giving
positions to proteges who had absolutely no qualification for the work but
their necessities. This basis of selection--not yet wholly eliminated--put
the work of the missions under the control of men and women who lacked
social training. Neither by nature nor grace were they fitted for the work
they attempted to do.
Their attitude of mind was too often that of patron, which, as any one of
experience knows, is one of the most demoralizing influences active among
the poor.
There comes to mind now a downtown church, the mission of one of the
leading uptown churches. It was Thanksgiving evening. For weeks placards
had been on the front of the building announcing an entertainment for that
evening, to which all the people were invited. On the platform were a
number of young men and women, sons and daughters of the uptown church
members, the entertainers for the evening.
The church was packed with the people of the region, self-respecting poor.
The mission, fortunately for them, was limited in money, so its
possibility for pauperizing was limited to just that degree. The mission
pastor, before the entertainment began, opened with a prayer, in which he
thanked God for the warm-hearted, generous people who were giving
themselves and their money for the uplifting of the poor and degraded. God
was asked to implant a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of those
assembled to enjoy this pure entertainment provided for their benefit. When
he opened his eyes he continued his theme in two variations for twenty
minutes longer, in what he called an address. It was this attitude of mind
on the part of many of the workers that drove out of the church the mass of
the poor; that began the breach that has widened, until in September, 1901,
we stand appalled as we realize all that has entered into the making of
that awful national tragedy.
The standards of cleanliness and beauty maintained in the mission churches
have been far from what they should be. As the visitor enters to-day one of
the first buildings erected on the East Side as a mission church, he is
repelled by the general air of neglect; the dirt on walls and ceiling, made
still more repellent by water stains from leaks; the ugliness of the whole
interior, as well as the entire lack of adaptation to the work of to-day,
which one of the most devoted of pastors, a friend to every man, woman and
child in the region, is establishing. There is not one thing in that
building that is not ugly and cheap. The very platform on which the pastor
preaches lacks furniture, that would impart an air of cheer or
impressiveness. Instead of the building being an unconscious influence in
the neighborhood for beauty, tidiness, cleanliness, it is a part of the
general result of the greed and poverty which has made one of the most
sordid, character-destroying neighborhoods in New York.
One Sunday afternoon, as the writer was passing this building, the children
began pouring out of it. The Sunday-school had just closed. They yelled,
fought, ran. Suddenly they discovered a half-drunken wretch of a woman
reeling down the street. The elder boys pulled her clothes, dragged off her
hat, tormented her, yelling and laughing at the foul language they called
forth. It was appalling, yet not surprising. The building remains as first
erected. No attempt has been made to adapt it to the needs of the region.
It was built for church and Sunday-school services, and the work which the
devoted, consecrated pastor has put into it to meet the needs of the time
is done under conditions that make the highest success impossible. There is
not a room in the neighborhood for boys' clubs, for reading-room, for
pleasure, where boy nature can have the fullest expression under wise
direction. For adults the saloon and the streets are the only resources
outside of their overcrowded homes. The pastor knows that to succeed in
changing the character of that neighborhood it is necessary to hold the
people through seven days of the week. He knows that this can be done if he
can provide for the people pleasures, opportunities that express their
social development. He knows that people express themselves in their
pleasures, and that, whether they will or not, that expression is
controlled by environment. If the trustees will not, cannot be made to see
this, let the pastor of the mission be what he will, his work will be
limited by the men who, in the very nature of their relations to the
mission, cannot see the truth.
The pastor of the mission had a long vacation given him. The man sent to
take his place wore soiled linen, would sit for an hour at a time tipped on
the back legs of his chair. He would refer to the people in their presence
as "they" and "these people." One of the young men who belonged to a club
where some attention had been paid to manners and dress said one night:
"Say, wouldn't you think that feller would wear clean collars, and stand
up when talking to a lady? I don't care if he is a minister, he ain't
much."
The people who were responsible for putting that man in that position were
generous, held the best social positions, filled responsible positions in
the commercial world. Not one of them would have chosen that man to
represent them in the business world, because of his carelessness in dress
and lack of manners. But they did not hesitate to send him to represent the
Lord Jesus Christ to the poor; not a demoralized and degraded people, but a
self-respecting body of Americans, born and trained, so far as they had
been trained, to believe in the equality of man under the flag and before
God. Is it any wonder that the more intelligent of the people resented the
placing of this man over them, and remained away from the church of which
he had charge? His person, his mind or his manners were not contradictory.
One evening, going through the audience room of this building on an errand
to the rear room, the visitor heard one of the women missionaries say to a
little girl who had evidently been troublesome and inattentive: "If you
don't sit still, Mollie, I'll come there and shake you until you'll be glad
to sit still." The woman was training a group of little girls to take part
in a Christmas entertainment. They were each to recite a verse and turn a
gold paper-covered letter as they recited, so that when the last one had
spoken her verse the sentence "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth
and good-will to men" would be revealed. The woman, in temper, language,
conception of her duty to these children, differed in nowise from their
ignorant, tired, worried mothers at home, who probably made no claim as a
teacher of morals and religion. What ideals of womanhood did this woman
represent?
A minister came to attend the funeral of a little baby in a surplice so
soiled and rumpled that a friend of the mother, who was a good laundress,
said afterward: "I wish he'd given me that yesterday morning. I would have
washed and ironed it." "He wouldn't have worn it if it had been a rich
man's child," was the little mother's response. "Well, he acted like his
surplice, rumpled," said the first speaker. And the writer was struck with
the perfect characterization of the man's manner.
Fortunately, there are men who see the divine in every human being; who
know that sorrow, grief, shame and suffering bear as cruelly, as bitterly
on the poor as the rich, and in their ministration know no difference
between them.
The writer was present at a funeral in an East Side home in a tenement
having sixteen families. A wife and mother had died. The family occupied
the floor through. Nothing was known to the writer of the creed of the
family, though she had known them for years. The minister came in a
spotless surplice, most carefully put on. His manner of greeting the family
and friends was so expressive of fraternal sympathy that one felt it a
privilege to witness it. He stood in that East Side home the herald of
hope. Since the blow had fallen he had visited it every day. On the day of
the funeral he had so filled the hearts in that home with the spirit of
resignation that the lesson that it taught left an impress on all who were
present. Not once in the earnest address did he use the word "death." It
was "release," and he made all feel that gratitude for relief from cruel
suffering was the occasion for the assembling of the friends together. He
gave out the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee." There was no musical
instrument in the home. All present were wage-earners. The writer trembled
for the result. The minister's beautiful tenor voice started the hymn,
assisted at once by boys' voices in the different rooms. He had brought the
choir of his church to assist, and stationed them through the rooms by
direction before they came to the house. The people all sang. When the
services were over, this minister remained with the family, a courtesy
which to the poor is so unusual that the memory of it is still one of the
events of life on the East Side.
[Illustration: A SPIRITUAL BULWARK.]
This represents this clergyman's attitude toward his people; and all who
are their friends are his people. Is it any wonder that they never go
beyond his care? He has baptized the children of three generations. Easter
service is the home-coming of these families. They come from as far as they
have money to pay their fare. The gray stone church is pretty. It has
stained-glass windows, a baptistry, and maintains a surpliced choir. It is
delightful to see the positive influence of these accessories on the
people. Other churches to which they have access lack them, and the
contrast deepens the love for the old church. It needs renovating, a parish
house, a corps of modern workers. But these can well be dispensed with
while that towering gray head leads the people. For the noble, unselfish
life of the man stands before them always, the embodiment of eternal love
and sympathy, interpreting both under conditions that would at times seem
to justify doubt.
There is another phase of the Church's attitude toward its work in the
poorer districts that lies at the root of the rejection of the Church by
the majority of the thinking, self-respecting poor, and that is the
assembling of the poor together as an exhibit of its work; the making of
reports of which the poor are the statistics. The defence that this is
necessary to stimulate the interest of the rich, and by that means secure
the money for the continuing of the work in the poorer sections of the
city, is but the evidence of the lack of spiritual life in the Church; the
absence of the very foundation of Christianity and brotherly love.
The consciousness that watching the hungry eating Christmas and
Thanksgiving dinners is hardly what Christ meant when he gave forth the
decree, "Feed my lambs," is becoming a conviction; but it is due to the
positive teaching of workers outside of the Church, who felt the
irreparable loss of self-respect that must follow from such an exhibition.
To gather the beneficiaries of their generosity together and take stock, as
it were, of the investments, the dividends of which are to be realized
wholly in the future life, has antagonized the self-respecting poor. They
refuse to assemble as objects of interest, even in a church.
So dense is the spiritual perception of even some very good people, so
materialistic is the plane on which work for the poor is conducted in some
churches, that the results have been cruel--unconscious on the part of the
offenders--but nevertheless cruel.
A group of very young girls worked in a factory on the borders of a section
in which lived people of wealth and intelligence. The factory made no
provision for a lunch room. When the weather permitted, the girls ate their
lunches on the curbs and on the stoops of houses in the immediate
neighborhood. This was demoralizing to the girls and distressing to several
women in the neighborhood. Not far away was a large house hired and
controlled by a church long noted for its broadness and its generosity. The
basement of the house was not used, except twice a week in the evening by a
working-girls' club. The use of this basement from half-past eleven till
one was asked for and granted.
The plan was to have a woman arrange the tables, make tea, and wash the
dishes used by the girls each day. The girls were to pay five cents a week
for the use of the room and the tea. They were to bring their own lunches.
The plan met with their warmest approval, and the lunch room was opened,
with three young girls from a society in the church to help. The girls
poured their own tea. For three days everything promised well. The girls
accepted the one condition imposed, that they would go quietly to and from
the factory at the noon hour, to avoid comments from the residents about.
The fourth day some of the righteous, energetic souls belonging to the
church thought they would see the result of their generous gift of the use
of the room for which they had no other use.
Nine of them, personally conducted by one of the assistant ministers,
crowded the two doorways to see these girls eat the lunch they brought from
their own homes and drink the tea for which they were paying all they had
been asked to pay. One small girl, with her hair still hanging in braids
down her back, tried in every way to break off pieces of her luncheon
without uncovering it. Finding she could not, she gave up, and tied the
string about the paper again, sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. It
was this child's first week out of school. Her father was now in the
hospital for the third month. There were five children, of which this girl
was the eldest. All the money saved by this skillful mechanic and his
thrifty wife was gone, and this girl had to go to work. One can imagine
faintly her feelings as she looked at the crowded doorways and knew that
the whispered comments included her. The less refined, though more
independent, girls sat with flaming cheeks, and holding papers over their
lunches, ate them and drank the tea.
The first week represented the life of that lunch club. The girls went back
to the curb and the sidewalk and stoops as lunch rooms. Here, at least, no
personally conducted parties came to view them. If any one looked at them
and they objected, they were on terms of equality, and at once notified the
offenders of their offence. To the credit of the people who used that
street, few stopped to look at the girls.
It would have surprised those very good people to have known the opinion
those crude, uneducated girls had of them. A day or two later, standing
with a group of girls who had not been present, with a half dozen of the
men who worked in the factory, as spectators, the leader of the girls
described the scene, caricaturing the "church gang," as she called them,
and some of the girls who had been distressed by their presence. The group
shrieked with laughter; yet there was an unpleasant note in it. "---- them!
That's what they always do. Stay away from them after this," was the
comment and advice of one of the men. "You bet!" responded the girl actor,
as she curveted down toward the factory in response to the whistle calling
them back to their work.
If the years as they passed did not clearly reveal that the Church that
holds the poor is one over which men of the highest intellectual and social
training are placed in charge, the mistakes of the present would be
extenuated. Such churches do exist. Men of strong, vivid spiritual
perception have erected and maintained bulwarks of righteousness in
neighborhoods where the environment, the civic order is degrading. They
have done this by conducting all the departments of their work with the
view of developing the gifts of the people to whom they are ministering.
The choir is the boys and girls trained by the best teachers they can
secure. The Sunday-school teachers are the working boys, girls, men and
women who are instructed by the pastor for their Sunday-school work. The
officers of the church are the men of the neighborhood. The people are
married and buried from the church; the children are baptized in it. The
preaching is teaching that salvation is of time, as well as of eternity.
The sins of the people are made visible. The pulpit holds the mirror up to
nature. It is a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading them
into the promised land, made so by their own civic honesty, their own
personal character.
These men do not have to make reports; to bow before a board of trustees.
They do not have to suppress or expand to meet the ideas of theorists. A
few men give them the financial support they need, and let them, like men,
stand before God and their own souls responsible for what they do for the
people whom, when Christ was on earth, He chose for His friends--the poor.
[Illustration: WHERE THE PEOPLE SHARE.]