HOME STANDARDS.
The world knows two aspects of involuntary poverty: The one inseparable
from degradation; the other picturesque, appealing to the emotions, and
giving a field for the play of sympathetic activity that frequently
neglects to note the results it attains.
There are few who discern that poverty is a comparative term, and these do
not use the word in its financial sense wholly.
Those who know intimately the struggling, up-growing poor know that the
rich can never give the exquisite expression to love that life at this
level makes possible. Who would dream when looking at the Hercules, with
clothes and hands soiled by his daily labor, that he is the tender nurse of
wife and baby; that he is hurrying to a house cared for with joy. He will
wash dishes, cook, scrub the floor, walk the baby to sleep, and coddle and
pet a wife who from sheer loneliness and worry over work undone may be the
harder to please and quiet. All this, and perhaps, almost certainly, not
once will any terms of endearment be heard, and, strange as it may seem, no
kiss given. How one rebels and rejoices that love can be thus expressed!
When sickness enters the home of the poor man, money is not present to
relieve the able from personal service, often made more difficult through
ignorance. Pride shuts the door to charity and the burden is carried in
love. Those who know life at this level can never, never lose faith in the
Eternal love, for they see always, however disguised, the divine spark in
every human being. The silence of love thus expressed, the revelation of it
where least expected, makes the one who witnesses it conscious of what
power lies outside and beyond and above his own life, not witnessed to the
ear. Every day at this level of life in our great city it is proved to the
privileged that tenderness is the winning element in strength; that love
daily, hourly here proves its power of self-abnegation. Here, too, it fills
its function of inspiration. Days, weeks, months, years go by and the
burden of moral weakness is borne with the cloak of faith wrapped about its
fears. When so expressed, its loyal unconsciousness adds to its beauty and
makes it an inspiration to all who come into its presence as friends; the
lips voice its faith, the eyes alone reveal its fears even to friends.
[Illustration: THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS.]
The more intimately one comes into the home circle of the independent
wage-earners the more clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand
revealed. Life must be lived so simply, the interests of life are so
evident, that the value of words decreases; action expresses the heart
perfectly. The very services the children render each other train them for
the family life they will establish. The baby tended by an older brother
and sister learns to depend on them for care, and that dependence in turn
draws out a love and responsibility that could not have birth under any
other conditions. The child who finds that in pain, weariness, suffering, a
father and mother alone share its care; the elder children who see how
naturally sacrifices are made for them, how little the father and mother
value themselves, their ease, even their comfort, learn to value the love
in the home and depend on it, give love to it, that money to buy service
would bar out. The child who sees parents make sacrifices to enlarge his
opportunities for education, seeing him as a positive factor in his own
manhood, sees more than parental love in such sacrifices and stands in more
than the relation of child to parents.
At the level where charity and dependence are large factors in the home
life, the relation of parents to children is changed by their presence.
Art has given Charity the figure of a noble, benign woman, in the ample
folds of whose garments children are protected. Too often in life she wears
a short skirt, to make speed possible, suggesting in movements and voice
the need of nervines, when she does not seem to have taken the bandage from
the eyes of Justice for her own use, while neglecting to borrow her scales.
Where Charity is the welcome guest, instinct is greater than intelligence
in the parental relation. The home tie is slight; children become shrewdly
self-dependent, physical hardships are more easily borne, and life is often
a mere matter of shelter and food; the animal alone is kept alive. This
represents a social level as remote from that of the independent
wage-earner as is represented between the home's standards and requirements
of a family living on fifteen hundred dollars a year and that of a family
living on fifteen thousand dollars a year.
We use the word poor so carelessly that there is confusion where absolute
misapprehension has not developed as to the character of the largest, most
receptive, most responsive and most responsible class of citizens of New
York. Politically they have been neglected, until the Citizens' Union gave
them a formative part in political decisions. Here and there a score or
more independent working men would be found in political organizations,
because of an active political conscience, always hoping for better days,
when the city would be given its imperative rights without regard to the
State or national political complications. It was a hopeless fight, and has
sent into the erratic political parties the majority of the independent
working men now in them. The schemes of the politicians disgusted them, and
new principals seemed to be the only hope for the clean-minded mind who did
its own thinking.
The great mass of these independent, self-respecting, intelligent
working-men voters were hunted for at election, but were not counted worthy
to take a place in the councils of the politically active because they were
feared. The Citizens' Union recognized their value and power, and they have
come into their own as citizens. No greater service have the Settlements
done the city than discovering this unused element in political power and
centering it where it is recognized as the saving power in municipal
government. These men stand at the head of the homes that reveal
love--tender, protecting inspiring love--serving in unspoken unselfishness
to the largest degree.
Thousands of mothers can testify to the cheerful sharing by fathers in the
household burdens after a day of hard work; of cheerful going without
necessities on the part of a father to give more than necessities to the
children. Thousands of husbands and fathers will note the unselfishness and
wisdom of a mother in caring for and enlarging the opportunities for the
children, who are the common objects of love and ambition, and the
confidence and love of the husband grows with the years. To the observer
there is at the same time no more inspiring and depressing revelation than
the parental love which asks nothing for itself, but all that life can give
for the children, the visible expression of their mutual love. Often there
is no thought given to a future of possible dependence. Wages do not make
possible the care of the children at the standards of the parents, the
buying of an environment that the experience of intelligent parents demands
for them, and a bank account. The last is desirable, the first demand
imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be thrown out when the life
currents are running toward the rocks of want and dependence. Nothing is
kept back for personal use by these fathers and mothers. Sometimes this
very unselfishness, when unregulated by wisdom, leaves them lonely and
forsaken in old age. Those to whom they have given their lives have by the
gift been placed in social positions that seemingly bar out the parents who
made achievement possible. Even in the loneliness of old age the parents
rejoice at the success and forget and forgive the separation. The end for
which they worked has been attained, their children are successful, and
they still count themselves nothing compared with their children.
It is the independent wage-earners who make the largest contributions to
our wealth, commercial greatness, national prestige; yet the world,
counting wealth by dollars, classifies these as poor. They are as far
removed from the incapable, the degraded, the vicious, the dependent, the
ignorant--who provide the themes for books--as far removed from the
worthless, the deficient, the mentally, morally weak, so familiar to the
people of wealth who give money or time, or both, to lessen their miseries,
as they are in standard and ambition from the people counted wealthy. The
cost of floor space on which to make a home may make them neighbors of the
people who are the problems of a great city; they may live in regions that
are the laboratory of the student of social and political conditions, but
they live behind closed doors, bring up their children, so far as they can,
uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and overcome their environment to a
surprising degree. There is no word to distinguish them from those who make
capital of their poverty, and the world loses much because of the lack of a
term that would express the class who are the hope of this nation, whose
children are the promise of its established greatness.
The very limitations that small incomes impose on husbands and wives,
strangers to social ambitions, bring into the relation an independence and
_camaraderie_ that possibilities of wealth would bar out. When a father and
mother have one object in life, their children, they have no personal
ambitions; their minds run in the same groove; they live of necessity a
unit. When the aim is to give their children a better education than they
had; to place them on a firmer foundation in the wage-earning world than
the one on which the father and mother started; to save the children from
the contaminating world as they had to meet it, there of necessity is a
welded interest that bars out a world of distractions. The world in which
such fathers and mothers live may seem narrow, but the smallness of the
world makes the companionship the closer. As one gets into the inner circle
of these homes, the small part that wealth plays in happiness is realized,
and the comprehension of what constitutes essentials is gained. The man who
knows the measure of his wage-earning power does not waste his nerve and
vitality to earn more; the family grow to have fixed habits of expenditure,
and content is attained that the social strugglers never know. The victim
of nervous prostration is not found in the working-man's world; the fixed
rate of wages relieves the nerves, but exercises the muscles and the
balance of health is kept. The exceptions to this happy attainment are
those whose mental or moral natures have not been adjusted to the happy,
even life of the skilled, sober, industrious, thrifty working-man's family
in New York.
The world of wealth would find itself rejected if it brought with it into
the wage-earning world its moral standards, the rules of conduct are so
simple in this world, the standards so elemental. An aldermanic candidate
who in his own world is not counted ignorant, during the campaign of 1901
conceived the idea, which he had never held before, though this was the
fourth time he had appealed to the suffrages of the people, that the women
were a factor in political success. He decided to call on the wives,
mothers and sisters of the voters in his district. It would be interesting
to know his conclusions after his experience. He must have gained wisdom by
his experiment, and heard some unwelcome truths. He announced to one of his
hostesses that he thought if he called and showed himself they might see in
him something that would persuade them that their husbands, fathers,
brothers, or sons ought to vote for him. It would have been interesting to
have seen his face when more than one hostess assured him that, having seen
him, she felt bound to urge her husband to vote for the other candidate. Or
when he was told by others that he must understand how certain he was of
defeat, or he would not appeal to women. Still more interesting it would
have been to see him when an outraged wife let down the flood-gates of her
wrath because she blamed him for the periodic lapses from industry and
sobriety of which her husband was guilty. The better class of voters of
this candidate's party resented angrily the man calling on their wives. The
root cause of the indignation of the men and women it was found was that
this man dared to call when the husbands were not at home. In the world of
work there is no place for social life in the day-time, and it argues ill
for those who indulge in it. The Metropolitan Opera House in the evening
would so shock the working man and his wife that they would never recover
respect for those who frequent it. A high-necked lace dress with a low
lining, worn in the evening by one from the other world to an East Side
party, brought out this comment: "Oh! yes, she's all right. They all do it,
the women; but isn't it awful?"
The moral standards for men and women in the world of work are the same.
The immoral man is despised and avoided by the women. A woman who should
maintain the smallest degree of friendship or acquaintance with a man known
to be immoral would be avoided by her neighbors; she would be made to
realize at once the cause of her offending.
A silly, pretty little woman, whose husband at times was cruel and brutal,
ran away from him with another man. No one in the neighborhood could
remember when such a thing had happened before, and the neighborhood
resented it as a disgrace. The husband's brutality was well known; he was
despised and ignored by the better element of men in the neighborhood. Had
the wife gone alone, she would have had the support of a respectable
minority, but now the husband was the object of deep sympathy. When the
wife was found, and declared she would gladly starve with the partner of
her disgrace--and there was a fair prospect at the time that she
would--"than have the best in the land with my husband; he has kicked me
out for the last time," she was cast out of the books of remembrance in
that neighborhood. "She married him for better or worse," was the measure
of a wife's duty among these wives and mothers.
The admiration of the explorer into this world of work and homes grows with
the years for the people who make it, as indignation grows at the
misunderstanding of its limitations, its possibilities, its beauty and
greatness. For Matthew Arnold gave the true definition of greatness when he
said it was the obstacles overcome, not his attainments, that made a man
great. The explorer makes many discoveries--some that stimulate and
surprise, some that puzzle and depress. The silence of love in this world
is a revelation. Whether the terms of endearment are not in the language of
this world, or whether the want of leisure and privacy stifle them, it is
difficult to decide. Perhaps it is that the language of love is learned in
a mother's arms; that when her service to her child must be physical, when
it is but one of a thousand things demanding her care and thought--when her
muscles must serve unceasingly--she has no time to express the love that
strengthens them by words. It may be that the language of love does not
grow within crowded walls, and that it is forced to express itself in
service.
[Illustration: A BIT OF OLD GREENWICH.]
A man ranking high in the intellectual world once took for his theme, when
preaching to a company of wage-earners and their wives, "Home Life." It was
a rare inspiration that moved him to point out how much was lost to the
home where the verbal expression of love was never heard. He said no higher
inspiration to work his best could be given a man than his wife's good-bye
kiss in the morning; nor a charm that would drive away care, worry and
exhaustion more perfect than her welcoming kiss when he returned from his
work at the close of the day. He pictured the feelings of the man who found
his wife silent and unresponsive when he entered the house; who answered
his query as to what was the matter with "Nothing." In his audience was a
wife whose faithfulness and intelligence had made her husband far more than
he could ever have been without her, a fact of which he was fully
conscious; he was not allowed to forget it. This wife was deeply impressed
by what she heard. She was ignorant because of lack of opportunity,
untruthful because she was ignorant; she could not see the relations of
things. Vindictive, because in her moral code you must resent any wrong,
real or fancied, by an action that goes far deeper than that of the
offender in its effect. Anything else would be an evidence of weakness. She
expressed her contempt for one who would forgive an injury, and prided
herself that she never did. She had enthusiasm, could inspire others, and
proved herself as capable in leading them to do wrong as to do right. She
was the power in her home, and established its standard of right and wrong
that gave motive to the lives of her children. This night the speaker
lifted the veil. There was something that belonged in the home that she
alone could put there, and she had not. She resolved that she would part
from and meet her husband with a kiss. It is best to let her tell her own
story:
"I just made up my mind I'd do it." No girl of eighteen giving a confidence
of a love affair could have shown more embarrassment than this mother of
wage-earning children. "I did not know how I would do it, or what ----
would say, but I just made up my mind I would kiss him when he came home. I
thought about it all the next day. Late in the afternoon I made up my mind.
Of course, I could not kiss him before the children. When it was most time
for ---- to come home, I sent them each on an errand that would keep them
away until long after ---- got home. I had the table all set and the supper
cooking. At last I heard him come up the stairs. My land! How I trembled! I
stood so that when the door opened he would not see me, and then I just
kissed him before I had a chance to think. He staggered back, he was so
surprised." She waited while an expression that should have been habitual
changed her shrewd, hard face into a loving woman's. "But I never saw him
look so happy," she continued. "I made up my mind I would kiss him every
day when he came home. I could not kiss him in the morning, for the
children were all there," she added decidedly; "but I can always send the
little ones on errands at night."
Perhaps it was three weeks later that she told of the climax. "I had a
toothache all day; I was tired and cross, for I had been washing. I stood
by the fire, making the hash. Kittie was setting the table, when ----
opened the door. I did not look up. He stood in the door a minute; then he
asked, 'What's the matter, Jennie?' 'Nothing.' I knew I said it cross. I
looked up then. ---- looked so disappointed that I thought he'd cry. I just
forgot the children, and right before them I kissed ---- twice. I wish you
could have seen his face. I burst out laughing when I looked at the two
children. They stood staring at us with their mouths wide open. Do you know
what I did? I kissed each of them. I don't believe I've kissed either since
they were babies. I think they told the big ones in the front room when
they came from work." This experiment in love-making did not continue. ----
came home drunk one night, and for punishment the experiment was dropped
and never resumed. While it lasted, it had a most harmonizing effect on
the whole family, and one wondered if it had been begun earlier, when the
habit could have been easily fixed, what would have been the result.
The mother, from a worldly point of view, has been most successful. The
children are in positions where skill is required, and wages seem to depend
on health only. Yet they are not popular; are selfish and unsympathetic.
They point to their own success as the reason why every family should
succeed. The family has moved into new environment, establishing relations
that have placed it several rounds higher than the level at which the
home-making began; but it has no fixed place in the social world. The
combined income of the five wages equals at times two thousand dollars a
year.
Not every wife in this world of silent love is encouraged as this wife was.
Another, a gentle, quiet woman, without children, thought she would try.
"He sit so still when he came home. I bought a flower and put it on the
table. I have what he like best for supper, and I wait. I listen over the
banister. When he come near our flight, I slip back and wait in the room,
leaving the door open so he can see. When he close the door I go up to him,
put mine arms around his neck and kiss him. He take my arms, shove me back
and say: 'What the matter mit you? You crazy?'" The woman was crying. The
three friends sat silent a moment, and then one said: "You haf no
children," and the wife nodded. That was her explanation, and theirs.
Perhaps no greater charm prevails in this world of wage-earners than the
attitude toward motherhood. There will be found here and there the young
woman who rebels against it, who may risk life rather than assume the care
of a baby. When one goes back of this rebellion there is always found the
influence of some older woman who has other ambitions, clothes, pleasure;
who influences, or tries to influence, the young married women she meets; a
woman who will even talk freely to girls against motherhood. There is in
this world of workers the strong active public sentiment against childless
women that more than counteracts this influence, and babies are welcomed
when there is nothing but love to greet them, not much more to feed them or
clothe them; but they are welcomed. The training of the children--natural,
not acquired--to be fathers and mothers has doubtless a far-reaching effect
in keeping this natural attitude of mind toward parenthood.
We get up a lot of wasted sentiment about the little mothers and fathers,
not seeing that the offices are fitting them to meet a future when all
that they learn in the care of baby brothers and sisters will make their
lives easier as fathers and mothers. Often the only opportunity they have
for expressing affection is the little baby given to their care.
How well one must know this part of the wage-earning world before it is
possible to appreciate the fact that the boy is being trained by "his baby"
for that future when he will share with the mother of his child its care.
It is a constant revelation to find how intelligent the young men at this
level are about children, and how frankly and unconsciously they will
express it and condemn the ignorant or careless treatment of a child. The
relation of the wage-earning children to the little children is paternal
often. The little ones know that the elder ones work and care for them, and
they render an obedience that is often amusing. With sisters this takes
another form. If the elder girl has ideas and tastes, especially if she has
skill, she will often entirely decide how the younger children shall dress;
often the younger children would not be at all satisfied with clothes the
elder girls did not select and design. Here again will be found a
half-maternal attitude that secures obedience and regulates privileges;
that sometimes ignores the rightful authority in the home. The young girl
who has an elder sister working and secures work with her is considered
very fortunate. Two sisters are known, now past middle life. One is quite a
handsome woman, the other plain. The handsome sister is the younger; she
never, when she was a wage-earner, went through the streets alone. The
elder sister, when they did not work together, escorted the younger one
back and forth to her work. Now, the mother of three children, nothing
could persuade her to go on the streets alone beyond the corner store. Her
husband, in a city department on a small salary, always attends her in
shopping expeditions, and all social engagements are made with respect to
his hours of freedom. She receives a wealth of love, and tenderness, and
protection. Selfish? Yes, till one wonders at the blindness of those who do
her homage.
[Illustration: A LITTLE FATHER.]
Once a very sensible wife and mother, whose intelligence and devotion are
raising the family many degrees above that of the generation preceding her
and her husband, said: "I shall watch my children. My mother let one of my
sisters exact far more than her share of wages. She coaxed or cried, or
both, until she got what she wanted. The rest of us gave in, because we
would not worry mother; you see that, now we are all married, she expects
us to save her from worry and work; we have to; she cannot get along." In
a moment she continued: "Haven't you seen it, that in every large family
there is one who gets more and gives less than the others?" A statement
profoundly true, but not confined to any one social level.
Among the discoveries the explorer into this world makes is that life is
full of compensations. One learns to overlook bad housekeeping, when it is
discovered that a cross, impatient word is never spoken by the
house-mother; that the children are the companions of the mother; that no
one else is so attractive; that she is never too busy to listen to anything
that interests them. One learns to forgive the needlessly shabby dressing
of children, when it is discovered that they are well nourished and cared
for, and that the husband and father never fails to declare that his wife
is the best cook in the city and always has his meals on time. Usually this
mother is fat, full of fun, and laughs as though tears were not in the
world.
Order, cleanliness and economy do not appeal as cardinal virtues when it is
found that there is no room for the children in the house, no money to buy
them the smallest pleasure where these over-estimated virtues predominate.
It is found usually that the worry of maintaining standards that ignore
the rights of the family, and to which they have been sacrificed, have
seared the mother's head and heart, and she no longer responds to the
maternal emotions; she becomes the victim of her own habits and cannot
reform. Perhaps it is this type of woman who creates the most barren home;
the one that is quite as prolific a source of supply to the saloons and the
streets as that of the degenerate housekeeper out of whose life spiritual
impulse has departed, and into which ideals and ambitions were never born.
It is difficult at times to decide whether to laugh at or resent the
criticisms one often hears of the extravagances of the poor. When one
becomes familiar with the demands for rent, coal, shoes, for clothes that
must be worn to work and school; for the things the cost of which cannot be
put below a certain sum--food always can be regulated--and compares these
fixed charges with the income available, the management of money in the
independent working man's family amounts to genius, and it must take
generations of economists to produce it.
Unfortunately, in New York emphasis is laid on clothes. Extravagance in
dress is the habit of the city. The people seen in the streets, in the
stores, in public conveyances, show a singular uniformity in clothes; this
is as true of men as of women. The differences are in manners and English.
The spirit of the land is as yet materialistic, and the democratic spirit
shows itself in the outward forms. The tailor-made gown was not looked upon
as a regenerator of aesthetic standards, but it has proved that. Its
simplicity and durability has released money that formerly was used in
useless trimming. The ready-trimmed hat is also a lever in throwing the
scale in the right direction.
The attention to school decoration of recent years has given new standards
for the home. The wage-earning world grows more harmonious in its demands
on wages; the home now makes its demands for decoration that the workers
obey. Signs outside of tenement houses renting suites of four rooms for
twenty and twenty-five dollars per month announce: "Burlaped halls; parlors
in white and blue;" or, "Tiled halls, open gas grates, fancy chandeliers."
The men who hire these apartments earn from fifteen to twenty-five dollars
a week or more. Thousands of American working men pay these rentals to save
their children from the environment inseparable from the surroundings that
must be endured if a fair proportion of their wages were used for rent. One
grows to reverence the courage that enables a husband and wife, with only
one pair of hands earning the home needs, to assume such rents. No higher
evidence of the manhood and righteous ambition of the American citizen
could be given than this: that he places his all to secure for his children
a home that is reasonably protected; that offers opportunities for
cleanliness and privacy. Renting a room to a lodger will sometimes make
less demands on a father's wages for rent; sometimes the rent is assumed in
the hope of securing lodgers, and then the struggle is pathetic, but borne
because the children must not grow up in a less desirable neighborhood. If
one were asked for the standard by which to measure the civilization of
each family in the wage-earning world, the reply would have to be, "Rent."
It at once makes the most and the least return; it is the tyrant which
makes or mars the home life. When a family of eight, having a combined
income of thirty-six dollars a week, are content to live in three rooms,
one knows about what to expect in social standards, and how many
generations it will take to raise the home level. When a family of
six--five wage-earners--who began life at almost the homeless level,
gradually come into a combined income of two thousand dollars a year, it is
not to be expected that its standards of needs will be those of a college
graduate on the same income. Often no member of the family can read
readily. School life was, especially for the elder children, an
intermittent one, and truth did not regulate the beginning of wage-earning
of any of the children. The younger children probably warred against school
long before fourteen years of life gave them freedom. There is natural
intelligence, a certain manner acquired through observation, but no
standard of intellectual life. Their very intelligence makes such families
conscious of their shortcomings, and it is this consciousness that leads to
the aggressiveness of manner that is so offensive, so often mistakenly
called the American manner. It is the manner that is due to awakened
consciousness which in the next generation will know when to wear evening
dress, if not how.
The use of money in such families is for show. It would be counted
extravagant to buy a book, or a ticket to an oratorio or a concert to hear
the best music. It would in such a family be counted useless to train the
younger children to wage-earning by education. The heads of the family will
be hospitable where it counts as showing how much more they have than the
others in their world. They receive from their world what snobbishness
receives everywhere. Snobbishness, on the whole, is not common even where
the income would remove the family from a tenement-house environment. The
uncertainty of work, and the absolute dependence of the worker on wages,
make snobbishness dangerous; that often proves a boomerang their
observation shows.
[Illustration: A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.]
The spirit of helpfulness may not find so free a field of operations when
wages are two dollars and a half and over a day, but it is in readiness.
Sickness in a neighbor's family will show that it has not been lost because
of prosperity, but it is less lavish; there is dawning consciousness that
self-preservation is the first law of nature; that home has the first right
to strength and thought; that only the surplus is available for the world
of friends. The same thriftlessness which makes a family accept charity
without question is the cause of their generosity. As the sense of
responsibility develops, the observer discovers a reserve in the giving of
either their money or their strength to those about them; kindness abounds,
but generosity is regulated as one goes up the scale in the world of
wage-earners. Not only that, but in the direst need the needy, as one goes
up the scale, regulate the degree of freedom given the closest friends. It
often borders on the tragic, the suffering borne in silence, and revealed
often when the time for help is passed.
This division of the people into rich and poor without gradations and
without a comprehension of the standards and needs that make new worlds up
and down the scale, has had a serious effect on the home life, the church
life of the people, the political life of the people. The churches have
driven out the very people in the tenement-house regions who needed them
and whom they needed.
Corrupt administration has imposed burdens on the homes which for a time
the voters in turn felt powerless to lift. The independent wage-earner
found his hope of political recognition in allegiance to the political
machines. The leaders, his inferiors often mentally, and still more surely
morally, were at least approachable and familiar, and the man who made his
own life found too often that only in the political circle of interest was
he the equal of those who led. Here there was no manner that expressed
condescension or superiority. His own language was spoken; he was at home.
That these men allowed themselves to be used was the natural result of the
habit of indifference to the real issues in a municipal campaign so common
in New York. When the burdens of a corrupt administration pressed on the
homes; when the leaders for righteous government acknowledged by appealing
to the makers of this country, the plain people, that they were an integral
part of the city's government, they responded, and by their response
overthrew the corrupt government that the indifference of all classes had
helped to make powerful.
The century opens well. Capitalist and wage-earner sit at the same board,
having equal voice in the plans for redeeming the city from partisan
machine control.
As one thinks of the change, one sees that the evils that disgraced New
York were due to the indifference of the millionaires and the honest
working men. It is the response of the political conscience of both to the
need of the city that has been its redemption; its only sure protection is
the activity of that conscience three hundred and sixty-five days of each
year in all the years to come.