denomination uniting in a systematic canvass of the city to get at the
facts of the people's life of which they had ceased to be a part,
pleading for parks, playgrounds, kindergartens, libraries, clubs, and
better homes. There is a new and hearty sound to the word "brother" that
is full of hope. The cry has been answered. The gap in the social body,
between rich and poor, is no longer widening. We are certainly coming
closer together. Ten years ago, when the King's Daughters lighted a
Christmas tree in Gotham Court, the children ran screaming from Santa
Claus as from a "bogey man." Last Christmas the boys in the Hebrew
Institute's schools nearly broke the bank laying in supplies to do him
honor. I do not mean that the Jews are deserting to join the Christian
church. They are doing that which is better,--they are embracing its
spirit; and they and we are the better for it. God knows we waited long
enough; and how close we were to each other all the while without
knowing it! Last Christmas a clergyman, who lives out of town and has a
houseful of children, asked me if I could not find for them a poor
family in the city with children of about the same ages, whom they might
visit and befriend. He worked every day in the office of a foreign
mission in Fifth Avenue, and knew little of the life that moved about
him in the city. I picked out a Hungarian widow in an East Side
tenement, whose brave struggle to keep her little flock together had
enlisted my sympathy and strong admiration. She was a cleaner in an
office building; not until all the arrangements had been made did it
occur to me to ask where. Then it turned out that she was scrubbing
floors in the missionary society's house, right at my friend's door.
They had passed each other every day, each in need of the other, and
each as far from the other as if oceans separated them instead of a
doorstep four inches wide.
* * * * *
Looking back over the years that lie behind with their work, and forward
to those that are coming, I see only cause for hope. As I write these
last lines in a far distant land, in the city of my birth, the children
are playing under my window, and calling to one another with glad cries
in my sweet mother tongue, even as we did in the long ago. Life and the
world are before them, bright with the promise of morning. So to me
seem the skies at home. Not lightly do I say it, for I have known the
toil of rough-hewing it on the pioneer line that turns men's hair gray;
but I have seen also the reward of the toil. New York is the youngest of
the world's great cities, barely yet out of its knickerbockers. It may
be that the dawning century will see it as the greatest of them all. The
task that is set it, the problem it has to solve and which it may not
shirk, is the problem of civilization, of human progress, of a people's
fitness for self-government that is on trial among us. We shall solve it
by the world-old formula of human sympathy, of humane touch. Somewhere
in these pages I have told of the woman in Chicago who accounted herself
the happiest woman alive because she had at last obtained a playground
for her poor neighbors' children. "I have lived here for years," she
said to me, "and struggled with principalities and powers, and have made
up my mind that the most and the best I can do is to live right here
with my people and smile with them,--keep smiling; weep when I must, but
smile as long as I possibly can." And the tears shone in her gentle old
eyes as she said it. When we have learned to smile and weep with the
poor, we shall have mastered our problem. Then the slum will have lost
its grip and the boss his job.
Until then, while they are in possession, our business is to hold taut
and take in slack right along; never letting go for a moment.
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.