Unemployment, sickness, the least stoppage of the scant income, means
distress. It is estimated that in our country not less than 4,000,000
persons are dependents or paupers, and not less than 10,000,000 are in
poverty. This means that they cannot earn enough regularly to maintain
the standard of life that means the highest efficiency, and that at some
time they are liable to need aid. Mr. Riis has shown that about one
third of the people of New York City were dependent upon charity at
some time during the eight years previous to 1890. The report of the
United Hebrew Charities for 1901 shows similar conditions existing among
the Jewish population of New York. Pauperism is a peril, and poverty is
a source of apathy and despair. The unskilled immigrant tends to
increase the poverty by creating a surplus of cheap labor, and also
falls under the blight of the evil he increases.
[Sidenote: Pauperism and Immigration]
Treating of this subject, the Charities Association of Boston reports
that it is hopeless to attempt to relieve pauperism so long as its ranks
are increased by the great hosts coming into the country, with only a
few dollars to depend upon, and no certain work. The statistics of the
public almshouses show that the proportion of foreign-born is greatly in
excess of the native-born. The pathetic feature of this condition is
that what is wanted is not charity but employment at living wages.
Greatly is it to the credit of the immigrants from southeastern Europe
that they are eager for work and reluctant to accept charity. The danger
is that, if allowed to come and then left without opportunity to work,
they will of necessity fall into the careless, shiftless, vicious class,
already so large and dangerous.
[Sidenote: Peril of the "Great White Plague"]
The immigrants in the city tenements are especially exposed to
consumption, that "Great White Plague" which yearly kills its tens of
thousands. In New York City alone ten thousand die annually of
tuberculosis; and this is the result largely of tenement conditions.
Statisticians estimate that the annual money loss in the United States
from tuberculosis, counting the cost of nursing, food, medicines, and
attendance, as well as the loss of productive labor, is $330,000,000.
Mr. Hunter instances a case where an entire family was wiped out by this
disease within two years and a half. In spite of his efforts to get the
father, who was the first one infected with the disease, to go to a
hospital, he refused, saying that as he had to die, he was going to die
with his family. The Health Board said it had no authority forcibly to
compel the man to go to a hospital; and the result was that the whole
family died with him. This plague "is the result of our weakness, our
ignorance, our selfishness, and our vices; there is no need of its
existence, and it is the duty of the state to stamp it out." That is Mr.
Hunter's conclusion, with which we heartily agree.
_V. The Cry of the Children_
[Sidenote: Peril of Child Neglect]
Another peril of the city, and of the entire country as well, that comes
through the foreigners is child neglect and labor; which means
illiteracy, stunted body and mind, and often wreckage of life. Every
foreign neighborhood is full of children, and sad enough is the average
child of poverty. What makes the tenement district of the great city so
terrible to you as you go into it is the sight of the throngs of
children, who know little of home as you know it, have irregular and
scanty meals, and surroundings of intemperance, dirt, foul atmosphere
and speech, disease and vice. No wonder the police in these districts
say that their worst trouble arises from the boys and the gangs of young
"toughs." There is every reason for this unwholesome product. Mr. Hunter
says there are not less than half a million children in Greater New York
whose only playground is the street. Result, the street gang; and this
gang is the really vital influence in the life of most boys in the large
cities. It is this life, which develops, as Mr. Riis says, "dislike of
regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, gambling
propensities, absence of energy, and carelessness of the happiness of
others." The great homeless, yardless tenement, where the children of
the immigrants are condemned to live, is the nursery of sickness and
crime. The child is left for good influence to the school, the
settlement, or the mission. For the enormous amount of juvenile crime in
the city, which it requires a special court to deal with, the conditions
are more responsible than the children, or even than the parents, who
are unable to maintain home life, and who, through the pinch of poverty
or the impulse of avarice, give over the education of the children to
school or street. Here is a picture of the life on its darker side:
[Sidenote: Street Life of Children]
"Crowded in the tenements where the bedrooms are small and often dark,
where the living room is also a kitchen, a laundry, and often a
garment-making shop, are the growing children whose bodies cry out for
exercise and play. They are often an irritant to the busy mother, and
likely as not the object of her carping and scolding. The teeming
tenements open their doors, and out into the dark passageways and
courts, through foul alleys and over broken sidewalks, flow ever renewed
streams of playing children. Under the feet of passing horses, under the
wheels of passing street-cars, jostled about by the pedestrian, driven
on by the policeman, they annoy everyone. They crowd about the music or
drunken brawls in the saloons, they play hide-and-seek about the garbage
boxes, they shoot 'craps' in the alleys, they seek always and everywhere
activity, movement, life."[77]
[Sidenote: Imprisoned Childhood]
But worse than this picture is that of childhood in the sweat-shop, the
factory, the mine, and other places of employment. Mr. Hunter has
written a chapter on "The Child"[78] that should be studied by every
lover of humanity. Its facts ring out a clarion call for reform. This
touches our subject most closely because, as he says, "These evils of
child life are doubly dangerous and serious because the mass of people
in poverty in our cities are immigrants. The children of immigrants are
a remarkable race of little ones."
[Sidenote: Happy Childhood]
Indeed they are, and they give you the bright side of the picture, in
spite of all the evil conditions in which they live. The present writer
stood recently opposite the entrance to a public school in the congested
East Side, where not one of all the thousand or more of scholars was of
native stock. As the crowds of little girls poured out at noontime their
faces made a fascinating study. The conspicuous thing about them was the
smile and fun and brightness. The dress was of every description, and
one of the merriest-faced of all had on one shoe and one rubber in place
of the second shoe; but from the faces you would never suspect into what
kind of places these children were about to go for all they know of
home. The hope lies in the children, and the schools are their great
blessing and outlet, even if as Mrs. Betts says, many of them of certain
classes do not think so. Mr. Hunter says:
[Sidenote: What Kind of Americans?]
"They are to become Americans, and through them, more than through any
other agency, their own parents are being led into a knowledge of
American ways and customs. All the statistics available prove that vice
and crime are far more common among the children of immigrants than
among the children of native parentage, and this is due no less to the
yardless tenement and street playground than to widespread poverty. In a
mass of cases the father and mother both work in that feverish, restless
way of the new arrival, ambitious to get ahead. To overcome poverty they
must neglect their children. Turned out of the small tenement into the
street, the child learns the street. Nothing escapes his sharp eyes, and
almost in the briefest conceivable time, he is an American ready to make
his way by every known means, good and bad. To the child everything
American is good and right. There comes a time when the parents cannot
guide him or instruct him; he knows more than they; he looks upon their
advice as of no value. If ever there was a self-made man, that man is
the son of the immigrant. But the street and the street gang have a
great responsibility; they are making the children of a hundred various
languages from every part of the world into American citizens."
[Sidenote: A Plain Duty]
How long will American Christianity allow this process of degeneracy to
go on, before realizing the peril of it, and providing the counteracting
agencies of good? That is the question the young people ought to
consider and help answer.
[Sidenote: Child Labor]
But far worse than all else, "the nation is engaged in a traffic for the
labor of children." In this country over 1,700,000 children under
fifteen are compelled to work in the factories, mines, workshops, and
fields. These figures may mean little, for as Margaret McMillan has
said, "You cannot put tired eyes, pallid cheeks, and languid little
limbs into statistics." But we believe that if our Christian people
could be brought for one moment to realize what the inhumanity of this
child labor is, there would be such an avalanche of public opinion as
would put a stop to it. This evil is a new one in America, begotten of
greed for money. This greed is shared jointly by the capitalist employer
and the parents, but the greater responsibility rests upon the former,
who creates the possibility and fosters the evil.
[Sidenote: Alien Victims]
The immigrants furnish the parents willing to sell their children into
child slavery in the factory, or the worse mill or mine--prisons all,
and for the innocent. Into these prisons gather "tens of thousands of
children, strong and happy, or weak, underfed, and miserable. Stop their
play once for all, and put them out to labor for so many cents a day or
night, and pace them with a tireless, lifeless piece of mechanism, for
ten or twelve hours at a stretch, and you will have a present-day
picture of child labor." But there is yet one thing which must be added
to the picture. Give the child-slave worker a tenement for a home in the
filthy streets of an ordinary factory city, with open spaces covered
with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters
running sewers, and the air foul with odors and black with factory
smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but
hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe "back of the
yards" in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the
picture would be even darker than the one given.
[Sidenote: The Shame of the Century]
Think of it, young people of Christian America! In the twentieth
century, in the country we like to think the most enlightened in the
world, after all our boasted advancements in civilization, child
slavery--more pitiful in some respects than African slavery ever
was--has its grip on the nation's childhood.
[Sidenote: An Appalling Record]
The record is amazing to one who has never thought about this subject.
Easily a hundred thousand children at work in New York, in all sorts of
employments unsuitable and injurious. Try to realize these totals, taken
from Mr. Hunter, of children under fifteen, compelled to work in
employments generally recognized as injurious: Over 7,000 in this
country in laundries; nearly 2,000 in bakeshops; 367 in saloons as
bartenders and other ways; over 138,000 at work as waiters and servants
in hotels and restaurants, with long hours and conditions morally bad;
42,000 employed as messengers, with work hours often unlimited and
temptations leading to immorality and vice; 20,000 in stores; 2,500 on
the railroads; over 24,000 in mines and quarries; over 5,000 in glass
factories; about 10,000 in sawmills and the wood-working industries;
over 7,500 in iron and steel mills; over 11,000 in cigar and tobacco
factories; and over 80,000 in the silk and cotton and other textile
mills.
[Sidenote: Soul Murder for Money]
Now, all of these industries are physically injurious to childhood. But
more than this, schooling has been made impossible, and immorality,
disease, and death reap a rich harvest from this seed-sowing. And why
are these helpless children thus engaged and enslaved, stunted,
crippled, and corrupted, deprived of education and a fair chance in
life? Simply because their labor is cheap. Mr. Hunter speaks none too
strongly when he calls this "murder, cannibalism, destruction of soul
and body." And it is the children of the immigrants who are thus
sacrificed to Mammon, the pitiless god of greed. Shall our Christian
young people have no voice in righting this wrong? Within a generation
they can put an end to it, if they will. Here is home missionary work at
hand, calling for highest endeavors.
QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER VI
AIM: TO SEE CLEARLY THE DANGERS ARISING FROM CONGESTION OF
FOREIGNERS IN OUR CITIES, AND THE BEST WAYS OF GUARDING AGAINST
THEM
I. _Foreigners in Cities._
1. What are the chief causes of the following: (1) the rapid growth
of great cities; (2) the existence of slums; (3) the settling of
immigrants in colonies?
2. Is your knowledge of the lives of the poor sufficient to move
you to work for their redemption? Are any of those persons, about
whom we have studied, your neighbors?
3. Is the prevailing tone of New York and other cities American or
Foreign? Give illustrations.
4. What is the prevailing tone in city government? Is there any
connection between the answers of these last two questions?
II. _Tenement-House Evils._
5. Where do most of the foreigners settle first in the United
States? Of what races is the mass chiefly composed?
6. Describe the conditions under which they live. Do they find them
so or make them so?
7. What remedies can be applied to tenement-house conditions? What
do the workers among them think of the needs and prospects?
8. What can be done toward improvement by the family? the school?
the city government?
III. _Prevalent Abuses._
9. Do the slum conditions tend to contaminate new arrivals? Do they
actually deteriorate?
10. What is the worst industrial feature of the tenement-house
districts? Describe its workings. Tell of some typical sweat-shop
workers.
11. What political evils flourish in the congested districts?
12. What moral and social evils flourish in the congested
districts?
IV. _Effects upon the Poor and the Children._
13. What relation does immigration hold to pauperism and poverty?
To conditions of health?
14. Name some of the principal authorities for the preceding
answers? How would you answer those who disputed their statements?
15. Can you give any facts as to child labor? What do you think of
the policy of employing children?
16. * Does this chapter convince you that Christians have a duty in
these matters, and if so, what is it?
REFERENCES FOR ADVANCED STUDY.--CHAPTER VI
I. _New York Slums and Foreign Quarters._
Study especially the Ghetto, Little Italy, Little Hungary, et al. and
find out whether similar conditions exist in cities of your section.
For New York, consult
University Settlement Studies, Vol. I, Nos. 3 and 4.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, X, XII.
For Chicago, consult
Hull House Papers.
For Boston, consult
Wood: Americans in Process, III, IV.
II. _Measures for Relief of Slum Population._
Riis: The Battle With the Slum, V-XV.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, VI, VII, XXIV.
III. _Connection between a Dense Foreign Population and Corruption in
Politics._
Wood: Americans in Process, VI.
IV. _Checks Put upon Industrial Oppression and Poverty._
Riis: The Peril and the Preservation of the Home.
V. _Problems of Poverty and Childhood as Affected by Immigration._
Hunter: Poverty, I, V, VI.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, XV, XVII, XXI.
_"To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely," said
Burke. If there is to be patriotism, it must be a matter of pride to
say, "Americanus sum"--I am an American._--Professor Mayo-Smith.
VII
IMMIGRATION AND THE NATIONAL CHARACTER
If that man who careth not for his own household is worse than an
infidel, the nation which permits its institutions to be endangered by
any cause that can fairly be removed, is guilty, not less in Christian
than in natural law. Charity begins at home; and while the people of the
United States have gladly offered an asylum to millions upon millions of
the distressed and unfortunate of other lands and climes, they have no
right to carry their hospitality one step beyond the line where American
institutions, the American rate of wages, the American standard of
living are brought into serious peril. _Our highest duty to charity and
to humanity is to make this great experiment here, of free laws and
educated labor, the most triumphant success that can possibly be
attained._ In this way we shall do far more for Europe than by allowing
its slums and its vast stagnant reservoirs of degraded peasantry to be
drained off upon our soil.--_General Francis A. Walker._
If the hope which this country holds out to the human race of permanent
and stable government is to be impaired by the enormous and unregulated
inroad of poverty and ignorance, which changed conditions of
transportation have brought upon us, then for the sake of Europe, as
well as for the sake of America, the coming of these people should be
checked and regulated until we can handle the problems that are already
facing us.--_Phillips Brooks._
There are certain fundamentals in every system, to destroy which
destroys the system itself. Our institutions have grown up with us and
are adapted to our national character and needs. To change them at the
demand of agitators knowing nothing of that character and those needs
would be absurd and destructive.--_Professor Mayo-Smith._
VII
IMMIGRATION AND THE NATIONAL CHARACTER
_I. Two Points of View_
[Sidenote: The Larger Race Problem]
Immigration is a radically different problem from that of slavery, but
not less vital to the Republic. It is a marvelous opportunity for a
Christian nation, awake; but an unarmed invasion signifying destruction
to the ideals and institutions of a free and nominally Christian nation,
asleep. "The wise man's eyes are in his head," says Solomon, "but the
fool walketh in darkness." In other words, the difference between the
wise and otherwise is one of sight. While Americans are walking in the
darkness of indifferentism and of an optimism born not of faith but
ignorance, immigration is steadily changing the character of our
civilization. We are face to face with the larger race problem--that of
assimilating sixty nationalities and races. The problem will never be
solved by minimizing or deriding or misunderstanding it.
[Sidenote: The Two Sides]
All through this study we have sought to remember that there are two
sides to every question, and two to every phase of this great
immigration question. Especially is this true when we come to estimating
effects upon character, for here we are in the domain of inference and
of reasoning from necessarily limited knowledge. Here, too, temperament
and bias play their part. One person learns that of every five persons
you meet in New York four are of foreign birth or parentage, notes the
change in personality, customs, and manners, and wonders how long our
free institutions can stand this test of unrestricted immigration.
Another answers that the foreigners are not so bad as they are often
painted, and that the immorality in the most foreign parts of New York
is less than in other parts.
[Sidenote: Different Opinions]
A third says it is not fair to count the children of foreign-born
parents as foreign; that they are in fact much stronger Americans in
general than the native children of native parentage; and instances the
flag-drills in the schools, in which the foreign children take the
keenest delight, as they do in the study of American history. But a
fourth says, with Professor Boyesen, that it takes generations of
intelligent, self-restrained, and self-respecting persons to make a man
fit to govern himself, and that if the ordinary tests of intelligence
and morality amount to anything, it certainly would take three or four
generations to educate these newcomers up to the level of American
citizenship.
[Sidenote: Conflicting Views]
One observer of present conditions says there is a lowered moral and
political tone by reason of immigration; and another agrees with a
leader in settlement work who recently said to the writer that he sees
no reason to restrict immigration, that wages will take care of
themselves and the foreigner steadily improve, and that there is in the
younger foreign element a needed dynamic, a consciousness of
Americanism, an interest in everything American in refreshing contrast
to the _laissez-faire_ type of native young person now so common. His
conclusion, from contact with both types, is that the intenseness and
enthusiasm of the foreign element will make the native element bestir
itself or go under.
[Sidenote: Mean between Extremes]
So opinions run, pro and con. There must be a mean between the two
extremes--the one, that God is in a peculiar sense responsible for the
future of the United States, and cannot afford to let our experiment of
self-government fail, however foolish and reckless the people may be;
and the other, that unless Congress speedily passes restrictive laws the
destiny of our country will be imperiled beyond remedy. We find such a
mean in that Americanization which includes evangelization as an
essential part of the assimilating process.
[Sidenote: Foreigners Everywhere]
As to the ubiquity of the foreigner all will agree. "Any foreigners in
your neighborhood?" asked the writer of a friend in a remote country
hamlet. "O, yes," was the reply, "we have a colony of Italians." Of all
such questions asked during months past not one has been answered in the
negative. Go where you will, from Atlantic to Pacific Coast, the
immigrant is there. In nineteen of the northern states of our Republic
the number of the foreign-born and their immediate descendants exceeds
the number of the native-born. In the largest cities the number is two
thirds, and even three quarters. There are more Cohens than Smiths in
the New York directory. Two thirds of the laborers in our factories are
foreign-born or of foreign parentage. New England is no longer Puritan
but foreign. So is it in the Middle and the Central West, and not only
in city and town but hamlet and valley. The farms sanctified by many a
Puritan prayer are occupied to-day by French-Canadian and Italian
aliens. Foreigners are running our factories, working our mines,
building our railways, boring our tunnels, doing the hard manual labor
in all the great constructive enterprises of the nation. They are also
entering all the avenues of trade, and few other than foreign names can
be seen on the business signs in our cities large or small.
[Sidenote: Foreignism Preserved]