WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME.
One day a group of unusually intelligent wives of working men were driving
through Central Park in a Park carriage. All were mothers, some of grown
children, yet it was the first time that twelve of the twenty (all but two
born in New York) had seen Central Park. Coming back on the east drive, the
closed houses on Fifth Avenue attracted their attention. Various
suggestions were made as to what use these houses could be put in the
summer, when one woman, slight, delicate and extremely nervous, said: "I
don't want anything in those houses but the room, just the room. I've never
had all the room I want. I would have if I lived in them." After a moment
she continued: "The reason we don't love each other as we should is because
we don't have room; we crowd each other. All the time I lived in my
father's home I was crowded. How we used to fight! Fight in the night, as
well as the day, just because we did not have room. The beds were so
crowded that one of the young ones had to sleep across the foot. The big
ones would keep their feet up while they were awake, but when they went to
sleep they would stretch out and kick the one across the foot. When I was
so little that I slept that way, I used to lie awake in terror expecting
the kick, and how I scratched when it came! I know we would have loved each
other much more if we could have had room to grow up in, as the children in
those houses do. And my mother! She didn't have a room to herself when she
had the sickness that killed her."
[Illustration: YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the little miseries of childhood
due to lack of room in the home. "My mother used to drive us out of the
house to get a chance to sweep it," said another mother of children. "I
remember lots of times standing down at the hall door, shivering, waiting
for her to get through. I would go into the neighbors' rooms, but often
they had got rid of their own children for the reason my mother had of
hers."
"I tell you what used to make me mad; it was to have to wait for the others
to get through eating," said another. "When I hire a place I always look
first to see if the kitchen is big enough to pull the table from the wall
and sit about it. I don't think I ever had any hot dinner when I was
little, and it used to make me mad. When I had three children I moved just
to get a large kitchen; it ain't near so nice a place, but the kitchen is
big." There was not a woman there who did not have a grievance against her
childhood because there was not room. One of them with crimson cheeks told
how she remembered the sense of comfort that came to her after the death of
an older sister because she had a bed to herself; she said it was a long
time before she knew the cause, for she missed her sister's companionship,
but she was more comfortable; she enjoyed having the five nails at the foot
of the bed for her own clothes. The woman who spoke first interrupted: "I
never in my life had even a hook in the wall that was my own until I was
married. We were so near of a size we could wear each other's things, and
we did. The one who was quickest got the best of that size. You never knew
whose clothes you'd have to put on in the morning. I'll never have but this
child. She likes me. She hates being pushed and crowded. She has a bed and
bureau of her own. Never, never until my husband can pay more rent will we
have another child." She paid the penalty of death for this determination.
As one thinks of the number of human beings with all their belongings
crowded into the floor space of a tenement-house home, the marvel at the
endurance grows greater. Think of its limitations of conveniences!
To those who know the limitations of a tenement-house home, the criticisms
and suggestions that the superficially informed reformers make on and for
the hygienic management of these homes are at once the source of amusement
and indignation. When stress is laid on airing a bed every morning, and one
in imagination sees the only windows in another room with a breakfast table
between them, a room already overcrowded with things, the only room for the
mother and baby during the process, one wonders what the speaker would do
under the same circumstances. Then when the horrors of dust are revealed
and the necessity of keeping the floors clean by frequent washing is made
to be imperative, one sees the bed that just fits between the walls at the
head and foot, with half of its own space free in front of it, and again
comes the question, what would the expert do living under like
circumstances? What is needed everywhere is scientific knowledge in
conjunction with intimate knowledge of the evils inseparable from the small
dark rooms of even the best tenements, and then we will have suggestions
that the woman can use--can apply to her own family conditions--who must do
the work for a family within this space.
In the best of the tenements it will be found that where the tenants can
afford a parlor, access to it is across the kitchen, where all the work of
the family must be done. It will be seen at once the disadvantage at which
the house-mother is when friends who are not intimate call. Nothing stands
between her and the outer world but the door into a public hallway. The
bedrooms admit of a bed, and sometimes, but only in the exceptional
bedroom, a bureau. This is usually found in the parlor, if there is one,
and in it all the clothes that can be folded, all the little accessories
belonging to the family; to this, however, all must have access. If there
is a closet for clothes, or if the family can own and house a wardrobe, it
is usually in this room, and the common convenience of the family. The
bedrooms, dark, offer no space for a washstand. The kitchen is the common
wash-room. The kitchens of the tenement houses built in these later years
are a marvel of inconvenience. The dish closet is a few shelves up near the
ceiling, the lower one of which can be reached by a woman five feet four
standing on the soles of her feet; a chair is necessary to reach the other
shelves. Beneath this space is the pot closet, or it may be the stationary
tubs, the top of which provides table space for cooking conveniences.
[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S HOUR AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
There comes to mind now one of the best plans for a tenement having four
families on each floor on the East Side. The stairways are lighted by a
window on each landing opening on an air shaft, and on each floor is a
lavatory with a large window. Each suite consists of four rooms. The parlor
has two windows on the street; a kitchen window opening into the parlor,
never raised if the family have social standards; and a window on a large
air shaft, or space between the two houses, on which the bedroom windows,
which are large, open. The rent for these four rooms is seventeen dollars
per month, and they are on the fifth floor. The kitchens in this house have
been described. The family have to sit at three sides of the table; there
is no room to pull it from the wall; even then one side is uncomfortably
near the stove. The only space except the parlor for a refrigerator is in
the bedroom. As there are three young wage-earners supporting the home, who
are social, who are encouraged by the widowed mother to have their friends
in their own home, this is not to be tolerated. The refrigerator is in the
bedroom. It was in that room when it was occupied for four years by a girl
dying of tuberculosis. Is it any wonder that the fight against this disease
is again being waged in that family? Yet it is above the average of its
class in intelligence, as the apartments are above the average in the
region.
The very elementary necessity of space and place for privacy in taking a
bath is exceptional. For space, place and light are necessary. A very
bright woman, perfectly familiar with the limitations of the tenement-house
homes, once said to the writer: "The truth is they cannot be clean if they
are decent." A cruel truth which was brought forcibly to the remembrance of
the writer one winter afternoon in an East Side home, where a mother was
trying to bring up a family to the best of her ability. When the caller
went into the living-room of the family a tub stood at the side of the
stove, in which was the youngest daughter, a girl about eight; a brother of
ten and his boy friend of twelve or fourteen years were playing checkers on
the other side of the room. The mother was ironing. There was no
consciousness of embarrassment shown by the children. The mother was
ashamed, not at the exposure, but at being found out in permitting such an
exposure. She was a member of a club where the training of children was a
constant theme. The necessity of physical cleanliness, its relation to
health, she had grasped, and her children profited by it. The relation
between privacy and morals she had not grasped. It was as though a veil
had fallen from her eyes as she looked at her daughter of eight standing
naked before the two boys. Whether such a thing ever occurred again the
caller does not know; that the mother never forgave the caller for finding
her out she does know. The family had three bedrooms, but none would permit
the placing of a washstand in them. One was the passageway from front to
rear, for the family occupied a floor, but could afford only one fire.
Privacy is almost impossible in the tenement-house home. One bedroom is
usually the passageway to the next, if there are two, or both bedrooms are
passageways from front to rear of the home, and must be used by all the
family. Privacy is impossible in these rooms, and there are thousands of
just such apartments. Children must grow up in them subject to the
limitations, restrictions and exposures their walls compel. This division
of space must fix standards of reserve, of privacy, of social life. No
amount of love, not even of intelligence, can save the children from the
evils such division of space imposes on family life. It deadens the
sensibilities. The insidious effects of this is not always realized, even
by the intelligent parents who accept them as inevitable.
One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the inconsistencies of the
standards of those who go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the
betterment of the conditions of the working people. We have secured a law
compelling separate closets for men and women in stores and factories, a
righteous measure in the interest of morality. But the closets in the
tenements must be used by men, women and children of several families. A
neighborly courtesy is the loaning of the key, to save a neighbor a journey
upstairs. Children run in from the street, several at a time, for it is the
only place provided. This publicity and freedom is the crying evil of the
tenements, the one from which tragedies come. The marvel is that so few
follow; that in spite, seemingly in defiance, of it all, characters develop
that are beautiful, harmonious, true.
Can one condemn the girl facing the worst that can befall her who under
pressure that her appeal justifies, yes, makes necessary, confides that her
relations with the man who is the father of the coming child began when
each were little things six or eight years old? A relation that grew out of
lack of privacy, the intimacy forced by tenement-house conditions. Both
families have gone far beyond their social position at the time these two
were children, but the blasting of innocency has left its burning scar on
the girl, and she must bear it alone.
Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that gives the love-making in
the tenement region a character peculiarly its own. When interest between
the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so frankly and publicly. There are
times when restraint would seem to improve manners; but among the working
young men and women one is constantly reminded of Adam and Eve in the
garden of Eden. How frankly and unconsciously they must have shown their
interest in each other, and how unconsciously they must have revealed their
interest in each other to all the other breathing creatures. Perhaps
nothing about the love-making is more interesting than that numbers add to
the enjoyment of both lovers. Nothing adds more to the happiness of a
wage-earning girl than to have her "chum" deeply interested in and deeply
interesting to a young man at the same time she is. It seems to be conceded
that two couples can have so much more pleasure than one. The terms applied
by these young people to each other will reveal their social level in the
wage-earning world. If the term "steady" is used where the world of wealth
and leisure would use _fiance_, the under wage-earning world is reached. If
"friend" is used, the social ladder covered by that word, used in that
sense, has many rounds. Knowing many working girls who would use the term
"friend" when referring to the man they had accepted as a future husband,
or who would in time hold that relation, the writer was constantly
impressed by the unconscious protection the girls threw about each other.
One would rarely hear of plans made that did not include two beside the
couple engaged, or willing to be. Sometimes two girls were to complete the
party. It is evident that the more means the merrier time. In every group
of girls there will be two or three who cause anxiety; two or three whose
influence, unchecked, may lead to trouble. It is not easy to restrain the
young people, for so often the offenses are so naturally the result of
environment that to speak directly of them would be most unwise. The
chances are that reference to them would put the speaker in the position of
possessing knowledge of an undesirable kind; it would seem to suggest evil.
Often it would be a moral shock to many working girls to have their actions
criticised from the impression their freedom makes before the cause is
understood.
[Illustration: MUTUAL INTERESTS.]
A young girl joined a club for young people. From the first she caused
anxiety. Her face was innocent and attractive, but her actions with young
men were just the reverse. At last it became necessary to speak to her. It
was evident that she attributed the criticism to what she termed
"fussiness." Not the least modification in her manner followed. At last,
after many interviews, she was told that she would never be spoken to
again. If she offended in the club-room once more, she would be given her
hat. That would mean that she was not to again enter those rooms. She
confided to her intimate friend that no one had ever told her that what she
did was wrong. After this interview, a modification of her manner was
noticed, not because she was convinced she was wrong, but because she
thought it wise to heed. A group of young people were returning from a
picnic. Just after the homeward journey had begun, it was seen that this
young girl was sitting in the lap of a young man whom she had always known;
as children they lived for years in the same tenement. Beside him sat the
young girl whom he had invited to the club picnic. The club girl sat so
unconscious of any infringement of manners, public or private, that a young
man who had grown up under the same conditions was asked what he thought of
the act. He started at once to tell the girl to stand up, but was
restrained. Evidently he was shocked, and the act was wrong from his
standpoint, the only standpoint fair to the girl. A seat was made for the
girl elsewhere, who, for the first time, showed distress, or rather
anxiety, because of her own acts. Nothing was said to her.
Occasion was made to speak to the young man who had kept his seat and let
the girl sit in his lap. He was a working man, and his hands showed it. All
his life of twenty-two years he had lived under tenement-house conditions.
"Frank, would you marry a girl who sat in a man's lap in a railroad train?"
he was asked.
"No," he responded indignantly.
"Do you suppose you are the only man in the world who has that feeling?
What right have you to let any girl cheapen herself so that the man who saw
her with you, doing what you permitted, if you did not suggest and
encourage, would not marry her?"
The man's face grew white. He had a sister of whom he was very fond and
very proud.
"What would you do to the man who permitted your sister, when she was
tired, to do what you permitted a girl to do to-night--a girl who has no
brother to watch over her?"
The young man was six feet tall. He rose to his feet, and, raising his
hands toward the starlit sky, he said:
"As true as there is a God above me, I will never while I live let any girl
do what I am not willing my own sister should do anywhere."
After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said:
"I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold you responsible. You are
stronger mentally, morally and physically, and are wholly to blame."
Whether he spoke to the girl or not, no one knows, but never again was it
necessary to even mentally criticise that young girl's manners with young
men. Not only did her manners change, but the expression of her face. One
grew to love and trust her, and ask her help for other girls.
The chivalry of the working boys and young men is constantly seen,
unconsciously revealed. Sometimes it is dangerous the degree in which it
shows itself among the finest of the boys. A sick girl, unable to go out,
will command attentions so special and direct that the fear of her
misunderstanding, and suffering because she has not understood, will make
those interested who know the danger unhappy; sympathy from any cause will
make a great-hearted working boy place himself in a position where he may
be easily misunderstood.
It is astonishing how long the spirit of childhood will live in working
boys and girls, even under conditions that seem never to justify happiness
and spontaneity!
One Sunday a group of working men and girls went nutting, being duly and
properly chaperoned. Four of the young men climbed a big walnut tree. The
girls, with some of the young men, were gathered at the foot, waiting for
the shower of nuts. The chaperon sat on a stone fence a little way off. The
wind began to blow, swaying the top branches. One of the young men having a
good voice laid himself along a limb high from the ground, singing
"Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top." The others took it up and the girls
joined in. Over and over it was sung. Then the girls and boys on the ground
joined hands outside the span of the tree and sang "Ring around a rosy."
Every singing game of childhood was enthusiastically played. Every one of
these young people were poor as the world counts wealth--every one over
eighteen--all had worked from the first moment they could earn wages. Each
one had suffered the wearing anxiety of no wages when the family needed
what they could earn, and yet they sang--they felt like children. No amount
of money at the time could have bought them this happiness.
The sun poured down a glory of yellow light on the trees that seemed to
have caught its color dashed with red flames. Across the field came one of
the girls slowly--a girl who never had manifested any enthusiasm, except
for dancing; who never gave expression to any emotion of feeling. It was
thought impossible to move her. As she came nearer, it was seen that she
was deeply stirred; her face was expressive. Putting her head against the
arm of the chaperon, she whispered, rather than spoke: "I did not know
trees were any color but green before." The tears were chasing each other
down her cheeks, while her mouth was wreathed with smiles. The girl was
over twenty. Had she been born in a family that would use the privileges of
the various Fresh-Air organizations, she would have known more of the
country. It was this year that she first saw the stars over the trees, and
the moon at the full in the sky when it had a horizon. Obedience to her was
not easy, but to her brother she gave it willingly; he had been her nurse
in babyhood, her friend and companion in childhood, and was now her
protector. In every plan of these young people he considered his sister
first. If she had an escort, he invited some other girl to go with him; if
not, he took his sister. The girl never manifested any interest in young
men beyond their ability to dance well. She would find a dozen reasons for
not dancing if she found herself on the floor with an awkward dancer.
This group of twenty-two young men and women, all from homes that would
bar the door to charity, even when suffering, were fairly representative of
the social standard of the better part of the wage-earning world of New
York. Among them was the independent girl, the one who had no desire to be
sought in marriage; she saw the worries of her sisters married to men
having small and uncertain wages; saw the wearing side of motherhood rather
than its joys. She skillfully kept her young men friends as friends,
changing from one to the other as soon as she saw the line of friendship
being crossed. The girl who never won attention till she wooed it was among
them; the girl who was treated discourteously or neglected was one of them.
The girl who was sought for exhibition because she dressed well, yet who
never roused any deeper feeling, was there, for some of the men were very
observant, and had standards of style for the girls they escorted.
[Illustration: THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.]
There was the young man who willfully played with a girl's feelings; the
young man who openly exhibited the love he had awakened, but to which he
did not respond; the girl whose adoration received indifferent treatment,
yet who was never entirely cast aside by the man too selfish to marry. In
that company there was one couple who were sentimental in their actions;
they would sit and hold hands, if permitted, rather than dance. As soon as
it was discovered that their actions were influencing others, they were
given the choice to restrain the expression of their affection in public
completely or resign. The lesson was effectual. When it was seen that one
of the young men was very deeply interested in one of the young women, that
she was only semi-conscious of his interest, yet enjoyed it, while not at
all interested in him, just a few words, pointing out how unkind it was to
permit his interest to develop and how unfair to let him spend money for
her when she never meant to hold any relation but that of friend, changed
her attitude toward him. She made the young man understand her position.
More than that, she gave her lesson to the other girls, and escorts were
changed frequently; groups arranged to go to the theater instead of
couples. As one girl put it, "We don't want any nonsense." Yet several
marriages have occurred among these members, the new homes making centers
of social interest for the others. The babies are objects of deepest
interest to all, and it is a lesson to see the ease and freedom with which
even the young men will hold them. Much is said of the "little mothers,"
but the "little fathers" are as unselfish and devoted a part of the family
life in the tenements as the little mothers. When a great, strong young man
picks up a baby with the ease of a woman, is interested in its ills of the
moment, one is grateful for the hours that, as a child, he spent as nurse;
sees the beauty of strength and tenderness, and the humanizing effect of
the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by
the environment of a tenement-house region.
The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be
attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was
possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad
began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who
chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening
in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people
entered the car laughing, pushing, slapping one another. The young men and
women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer
looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at
the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in
perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is
this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things,
that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning young
people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement.
These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word
means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew
parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but
principally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work
anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the
deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many
Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their
daughters. That parents would dare to assume such authority in so personal
a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation.
One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of
these girls marry against her will.
No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of
these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a
privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be
at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This
freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls
in New York. Were it not for their common sense and the knowledge of life
thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the
country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness
of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality
between the sexes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes
from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors
asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy.
This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.
At the lower rounds of the social ladder in the wage-earning world the
mother and baby are inseparable, if the mother does not drink. Night and
day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ignorance, but cared for.
Often everything else is neglected. When the baby sleeps, the mother is too
tired to work, too indifferent. When awake, the baby insists on being held.
One is frequently reminded of the story of the woman whose moan when her
baby died was: "What excuse can I give John now?" Yet the day that baby is
able to walk alone on the street the mother loosens her hold. The baby
finds its freedom limited only by its ability to remain upright, and to
return to its home for meals and at night. "Throw me the key and a piece of
bread," is often the extent of its demands from the sidewalk. True, the
mother knows every woman in the block will be, in an emergency, a mother.
The child learns to care for itself; it makes less and less demands on the
mother, who may even now have another baby compelling all her thought and
time. Above this scale, where home-making assumes importance, the child
remains longer under the mother's care; is watched when on the street by
glances from the window; is sent to school, and some oversight maintained
over its school life; but the wage-earning period means emancipation from
oversight often even at this level. Hundreds of girls start out and find
work for the first time without any evident responsibility on the part of
even good mothers. No amount of familiarity with this exercise of freedom
deadens the horror of it to the outsider. Women, mothers of attractive
daughters, will not know the street on which the daughters work. After one
of the most disastrous fires in New York, in which many working girls
perished, four mothers notified the police the next day that their
daughters had disappeared. It was the failure to trace the girls and the
advertising of their disappearance that led, through companions who had
escaped from the building, to the awful conclusion that these four had
perished in the flames.
Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to go to the place where the
daughter finds employment; but here, as in everything else in life, that
which is deemed the more important receives attention. Perhaps it is the
habit of trust, or indifference, that governs mothers' activities.
A girl will make intimate friendships unhindered, unguided by mothers who
act up to the measure of their comprehension of the duties of a mother.
Girls are admitted to the homes who are unknown outside of the workshop;
they work with the daughter; no other background is known. The mother knows
that other mothers are accepting her daughters on the same basis of
knowledge. For their young men friends there may be, but as frequently
there will not be, any greater sense of responsibility than for the girl
friends. In homes where the income would seem to demand a sense of social
responsibility it is found wanting, and young people come and go
unhindered. If there are two or more young wage-earners in the family,
their conversation may bring knowledge of what they are doing, where they
are going. But they also make compacts at concealments of disobedience
where there are laws to be obeyed.
[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND.]
The world has been shocked by the tragedies of death and disgrace that came
to the homes of two young working girls within the past year. In each case
the father and mother had gone to bed with the daughters out in the night,
where they did not know; one a girl of eighteen, the other less. The
"cadet" system would never exist were the parents of every girl alert to
train and guard her the more closely because she was a working girl.
Until by some direct process the control of daughters and of sons is made
desirable, and then natural in the wage-earners' homes, the problem of
family life in the tenements will remain unsolved. It is a question
sometimes whether, and sometimes it is very evident, that by the giving up
of wages to the parents the freedom of the workers, even though but
children, from obedience and parental oversight is purchased.
Those who know working girls know how high is the average of morality.
Years will go by in intimate relations with the same group of girls and no
tragedy will mar it; no echo of tragedy among their friends. The hardness
with which even the suggestion of looseness is treated in any group of
working girls is simply an expression of self-preservation. A group of
sixty girls, earning the lowest wages and living under the worst
conditions, were watched five years and one girl fell. As one goes over her
history from birth, any other result would seem a miracle. A girl arrested
gave the first name and address of one of the girls in this factory. The
case was reported in the papers. By an unfortunate circumstance, the
working girl living at that number was away from the factory two days at
this time. When she learned of the connection that had been made because of
the chance use of her Christian name and her address, she told a lie as to
where she was at the time of that arrest. The other girls struck until she
was discharged. The girl was innocent of everything but the lie;
investigation proved this. The girls would not recede from their position;
work had to be found for the girl elsewhere. She was publicly marked. They
could not convince everybody of her innocence; lots of people believed the
story, and they would not work with her; go back and forth with her.
A room was hired as a lunch-room for these girls. They brought their own
lunches and paid a small amount of dues, which were used to pay for tea
served daily. The projectors of this little enterprise were girls of wealth
and social position; three were at the lunch-room every day. By
representing themselves as friends of the projectors to the caretaker, two
representatives of a "yellow journal" gained access to the room. One, a
woman, engaged the caretaker in conversation for some time in the hall,
getting all the information she could give her. The Sunday edition of that
paper contained an illustration of the room filled with wretched-looking
girls, while young women holding up trailing skirts were passing cups. The
text was as far from the truth as the picture. The working girls absolutely
refused to go to the lunch-room again. At last they agreed that if the
paper would publish a true account--that they provided their own lunches
and paid dues, and waited on themselves--they would go back. The paper
refused. Two of those girls would never enter the rooms again.
The working girl has suffered quite as much at the hands of yellow
journalism as the woman of wealth and social position. Not one of these
girls went to school until she was fourteen; nor during any year since she
began working had she earned on an average more than $3.50 per week. Yet
they had social standards to maintain, and compelled recognition of them by
those who opened opportunities to them.
The inspiring fact remains that the standard of home life in ethics, as in
necessities, is raising. Without doubt much of this is due to the
improvement in the class of readers used in our public schools. They are
not perfect in the matter of selection, but they carry messages to the
hearts, as well as the heads, of the children, few of whom would pass an
examination on their contents. Even the primary grades introduce the
children to the best thoughts of all time, and the crumbs, at least, are
carried to the homes.
The girls who belong to the working-girls' club carry with them everywhere
the influence that is molding their characters to a brighter type of
American womanhood. The Settlements soon become centers of education
through the social activities they make possible to the people. They
surpass the clubs in this, that boys and girls, young men and women, each
have in them the center that makes possible social occasions that are
within their means and under rightful guides; together men and women are
trained socially. The Settlements have been in existence long enough to
have the children that were the first friends of the Residents now the
fathers and mothers of children. The years of contact show results in the
homes established, in the kind of care and the ambitions held for the
children still babies. Wages have not greatly changed from those earned by
the fathers of these new home-makers; but money represents different
values. The kindergarten is the first thing demanded for their children,
and the seeds sown in the minds of these young mothers bear fruit one
hundred-fold because it is prepared.
The kindergarten mother clubs have also borne fruit in the homes where even
the youngest child has gone beyond the kindergarten's age. These mothers
learn for the first time the need of sympathy; of living with the children
through every period of growth; of sharing and of making together a home.
The result is, the homes gain in moral fiber and moral purpose. The schools
and the homes are brought into close relation through these beginnings, and
the child finds its interests a unit, and home the place where its whole
good is of vital importance. The mother establishes the home often on the
basis of contrast. "It shall not be what mine was; their lives shall not be
what mine was when I was a child."
The churches, many of them, provide for the social life of their people;
these social activities must be of a character that wins those who have the
least to contend with in themselves, who find a pleasure and inspiration in
religious life, which often is far more a matter of temperament than of
spiritual development.
One sees the highest expression of spiritual development in lives apart
from the Church as well as in the Church. This it is that develops a
feeling of reverence for any movement having for its object the bettering
of the social life of the people. One learns that every vulgarity that
becomes obnoxious; every freedom that is brought within the bounds of
restraint by new standards of education and refinement; every influence set
in motion because of the spiritual perception of the answer to the
question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" means spiritual life growing toward
that of the Master of time, whose laws are but two for the guiding of men,
"Love the Lord thy God," "Thy neighbor as thyself;" and these make neither
cross nor steeple necessary, for they may be obeyed in the heart and guide
the life wherever it is lived.
[Illustration: LIBRARY DAY AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]