There is a literary power which might be called Russian--a style of bald
narration which carries absolute conviction of human character, in
simple words packed with atmosphere. Only the best writers have it; this
book is full of it. I read the manuscript more than a year ago, and I
remember it chiefly as a series of vivid pictures--a sort of epic of our
City of Dreadful Day. Here we see and smell and hear the East Side; its
crowded, gasping filth, the sour stench of its grinding poverty, the
cries and groans and lamentations in many alien tongues of the hopeful
peoples whose hope is broken in the Promised Land. Pale, undersized,
violent children at play in the iron street; the brown, steamy warmth of
Jewish coffee-houses on Grand Street; sick tenement rooms quivering and
breathless in summer heat--starkly hungry with the December wind cutting
through broken windows; poets, musicians, men and women with the blood
of heroes and martyrs, babies who might grow up to be the world's
great--stunted, weakened, murdered by the unfair struggle for bread.
What human stories are in this book! What tremendous dramas of the soul!
It is as if we were under water, looking at the hidden hull of this
civilization. Evil growths cling to it--houses of prostitution,
sweat-shops which employ the poor in their bitter need at less than
living wages, stores that sell them rotten food and shabby clothing at
exorbitant prices, horrible rents, and all the tragi-comic
manifestations of Organised Charity.
Every person of intelligence and humanity who has seen the workings of
Organised Charity, knows what a deadening and life-sapping thing it is,
how unnecessarily cruel, how uncomprehending. Yet it must not be
criticised, investigated or attacked. Like patriotism, charity is
respectable, an institution of the rich and great--like the high tariff,
the open shop, Wall street, and Trinity Church. White slavery recruits
itself from charity, industry grows bloated with it, landlords live off
it; and it supports an army of officers, investigators, clerks and
collectors, whom it systematically debauches. Its giving is made the
excuse for lowering the recipients' standard of living, of depriving
them of privacy and independence, or subjecting them to the cruelest
mental and physical torture, of making them liars, cringers, thieves.
The law, the police, the church are the accomplices of charity. And how
could it be otherwise, considering those who give, how they give, and
the terrible doctrine of "the deserving poor"? There is nothing of
Christ the compassionate in the immense business of Organised Charity;
its object is to get efficient results--and that means, in practise, to
just keep alive vast numbers of servile, broken-spirited people.
I know of publishers who refused this book, not because it was untrue,
or badly written; but because they themselves "believed in Organised
Charity." One of them wrote that "there must be a bright side." I have
never heard the "bright side." To those of us who know, even the Charity
organisation reports--when they do not refuse to publish them--are
unspeakably terrible. To them, Poverty is a crime, to be punished; to
us, Organised Charity is a worse one.