THE GENESIS OF THE GANG
Jacob Beresheim was fifteen when he was charged with murder. It is now
more than six years ago, but the touch of his hand is cold upon mine,
with mortal fear, as I write. Every few minutes, during our long talk on
the night of his arrest and confession, he would spring to his feet,
and, clutching my arm as a drowning man catches at a rope, demand with
shaking voice, "Will they give me the chair?" The assurance that boys
were not executed quieted him only for the moment. Then the dread and
the horror were upon him again.
Of his crime the less said the better. It was the climax of a career of
depravity that differed from other such chiefly in the opportunities
afforded by an environment which led up to and helped shape it. My
business is with that environment. The man is dead, the boy in jail. But
unless I am to be my brother's jail keeper merely, the iron bars do not
square the account of Jacob with society. Society exists for the purpose
of securing justice to its members, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding. When it fails in this, the item is carried on the
ledger with interest and compound interest toward a day of reckoning
that comes surely with the paymaster. We have heard the chink of his
coin on the counter, these days, in the unblushing revelations before
legislative investigating committees of degraded citizenship, of the
murder of the civic conscience, and in the applause that hailed them
from the unthinking crowd. And we have begun to understand that these
are the interest on Jacob's account, older, much older, than himself. He
is just an item carried on the ledger. But with that knowledge the
account is at last in the way of getting squared. Let us see how it
stands.
We shall take Jacob as a type of the street boy on the East Side, where
he belonged. What does not apply to him in the review applies to his
class. But there was very little of it indeed that he missed or that
missed him.
He was born in a tenement in that section where the Gilder Tenement
House Commission found 324,000 persons living out of sight and reach of
a green spot of any kind, and where sometimes the buildings--front,
middle, and rear--took up ninety-three per cent of all the space in the
block. Such a home as he had was there, and of the things that belonged
to it he was the heir. The sunlight was not among them. It "never
entered" there. Darkness and discouragement did, and dirt. Later on,
when he took to the dirt as his natural weapon in his battles with
society, it was said of him that it was the only friend that stuck to
him, and it was true. Very early the tenement gave him up to the street.
The thing he took with him as the one legacy of home was the instinct
for the crowd, which meant that the tenement had wrought its worst
mischief upon him; it had smothered that in him around which character
is built. The more readily did he fall in with the street and its ways.
Character implies depth, a soil, and growth. The street is all surface.
Nothing grows there; it hides only a sewer.
[Illustration: Jacob Beresheim.]
It taught him gambling as its first lesson, and stealing as the next.
The two are never far apart. From shooting craps behind the "cop's" back
to filching from the grocer's stock or plundering a defenceless pedler
is only a step. There is in both the spice of law-breaking that appeals
to the shallow ambition of the street as heroic. At the very time when
the adventurous spirit is growing in the boy, and his games are all of
daring, of chasing and being chased, the policeman looms up to take a
hand, and is hailed with joyful awe. Occasionally the raids have a comic
tinge. A German grocer wandered into police headquarters with an appeal
for protection against the boys.
"Vat means dot 'cheese it'?" he asked, rubbing his bald head in helpless
bewilderment. "Efery dime dey says 'cheese it,' somedings vas gone."
To the lawlessness of the street the home opposes no obstacle, as we
have seen. Within the memory of most of us the school did not. It might
have more to offer even now. But we have gone such a long way since the
day I am thinking of that I am not going to find fault. I used to think
that some of them needed to be made over, until they were fit to turn
out whole, sound boys, instead of queer manikins stuffed with
information for which they have no use, and which is none of their
business anyhow. It seemed to me, sometimes, when watching the process
of cramming the school course with the sum of human knowledge and
conceit, as if it all meant that we distrusted Nature's way of growing a
man from a boy, and had set out to show her a shorter cut. A common
result was the kind of mental befogment that had Abraham Lincoln
murdered by Ballington Booth, and a superficiality, a hopeless slurring
of tasks, that hitched perfectly with the spirit of the street, and left
nothing to be explained in the verdict of the reformatory, "No moral
sense." There was no moral sense to be got out of the thing, for there
was little sense of any kind in it. The boy was not given a chance to be
honest with himself by thinking a thing through; he came naturally to
accept as his mental horizon the headlines in his penny paper and the
literature of the Dare-Devil-Dan-the-Death-Dealing-Monster-of-Dakota
order, which comprise the ordinary æsthetic equipment of the slum. The
mystery of his further development into the tough need not perplex
anybody.
But Jacob Beresheim had not even the benefit of such schooling as there
was to be had. He did not go to school, and nobody cared. There was
indeed a law directing that every child should go, and a corps of truant
officers to catch him if he did not; but the law had been a dead letter
for a quarter of a century. There was no census to tell which children
ought to be in school, and no place but a jail to put those in who
shirked. Jacob was allowed to drift. From the time he was twelve till he
was fifteen, he told me, he might have gone to school three weeks,--no
more.
Church and Sunday-school missed him. I was going to say that they passed
by on the other side, remembering the migration of the churches up-town
as the wealthy moved out of and the poor into the region south of
Fourteenth Street. But that would hardly be fair. They moved after their
congregations; but they left nothing behind. In the twenty years that
followed the war, while enough to people a large city moved in
down-town, the number of churches there was reduced from 141 to 127.
Fourteen Protestant churches moved out. Only two Roman Catholic churches
and a synagogue moved in. I am not aware that there has been any large
increase of churches in the district since, but we have seen that the
crowding has not slackened pace. Jacob had no trouble in escaping the
Sunday-school, as he had escaped the public school. His tribe will have
none until the responsibility incurred in the severance of Church and
State sits less lightly on a Christian community, and the Church, from a
mob, shall have become an army, with von Moltke's plan of campaign,
"March apart, fight together." The Christian Church is not alone in its
failure. The Jew's boy is breaking away from safe moorings rather faster
than his brother of the new dispensation. The Church looks on, but it
has no cause for congratulation. He is getting nothing in place of that
which he lost, and the result is bad. There is no occasion for profound
theories about it. The facts are plain enough. The new freedom has
something to do with it; but neglect to look after the young has quite
as much. Apart from its religious aspect, seen from the angle of the
community's interest wholly, the matter is of the gravest import.
What the boy's play has to do with building character in him Froebel has
told us. Through it, he showed us, the child "first perceives moral
relations," and he made that the basis of the kindergarten and all
common-sense education. That prop was knocked out. New York never had a
children's playground till within the last three years. Truly it seemed,
as Abram S. Hewitt said, as if in the early plan of our city the
children had not been thought of at all. Such moral relations as Jacob
was able to make out ran parallel with the gutter always, and counter to
law and order as represented by the policeman and the landlord. The
landlord had his windows to mind, and the policeman his lamps and the
city ordinances which prohibit even kite-flying below Fourteenth Street
where the crowds are. The ball had no chance at all. We have seen in New
York a boy shot down by a policeman for the heinous offence of playing
football in the street on Thanksgiving Day. But a boy who cannot kick a
ball around has no chance of growing up a decent and orderly citizen. He
must have his childhood, so that he may be fitted to give to the
community his manhood. The average boy is just like a little
steam-engine with steam always up. The play is his safety-valve. With
the landlord in the yard and the policeman on the street sitting on his
safety-valve and holding it down, he is bound to explode. When he does,
when he throws mud and stones, and shows us the side of him which the
gutter developed, we are shocked, and marvel much what our boys are
coming to, as if we had any right to expect better treatment of them. I
doubt if Jacob, in the whole course of his wizened little life, had ever
a hand in an honest game that was not haunted by the spectre of the
avenging policeman. That he was not "doing anything" was no defence. The
mere claim was proof that he was up to mischief of some sort. Besides,
the policeman was usually right. Play in such a setting becomes a direct
incentive to mischief in a healthy boy. Jacob was a healthy enough
little animal.
Such fun as he had he got out of law-breaking in a small way. In this he
was merely following the ruling fashion. Laws were apparently made for
no other purpose that he could see. Such a view as he enjoyed of their
makers and executors at election seasons inspired him with seasonable
enthusiasm, but hardly with awe. A slogan, now, like that raised by
Tammany's late candidate for district attorney,[31]--"To hell with
reform!"--was something he could grasp. Of what reform meant he had only
the vaguest notion, but this thing had the right ring to it. Roosevelt
preaching enforcement of law was from the first a "lobster" to him, not
to be taken seriously. It is not among the least of the merits of the
man that, by his sturdy personality, as well as by his unyielding
persistence, he won the boy over to the passive admission that there
might be something in it. It had not been his experience.
[Footnote 31: In the first Greater New York election.]
There was the law which sternly commanded him to go to school, and which
he laughed at every day. Then there was the law to prevent child labor.
It cost twenty-five cents for a false age certificate to break that, and
Jacob, if he thought of it at all, probably thought of perjury as rather
an expensive thing. A quarter was a good deal to pay for the right to
lock a child up in a factory, when he ought to have been at play. The
excise law was everybody's game. The sign that hung in every saloon,
saying that nothing was sold there to minors, never yet barred out his
"growler" when he had the price. There was another such sign in the
tobacco shop, forbidding the sale of cigarettes to boys of his age.
Jacob thought that when he had the money he smoked as many as fifteen
packs a day, and he laughed when he told me. He laughed, too, when he
remembered how the boys of the East Side took to carrying balls of cord
in their pockets, on the wave of the Lexow reform, on purpose to
measure the distance from the school door to the nearest saloon. They
had been told that it should be two hundred feet, according to law.
There were schools that had as many as a dozen within the tabooed
limits. It was in the papers how, when the highest courts said that the
law was good, the saloon keepers attacked _the schools_ as a nuisance
and detrimental to property. In a general way Jacob sided with the
saloon keeper; not because he had any opinion about it, but because it
seemed natural. Such opinions as he ordinarily had he got from that
quarter.
When, later on, he came to be tried, his counsel said to me, "He is an
amazing liar." No, hardly amazing. It would have been amazing if he had
been anything else. Lying and mockery were all around him, and he
adjusted himself to the things that were. He lied in self-defence.
[Illustration: Heading off the Gang. Vacation Playground near Old Frog
Hollow.]
Jacob's story ends here, as far as he is personally concerned. The story
of the gang begins. So trained for the responsibility of citizenship,
robbed of home and of childhood, with every prop knocked from under him,
all the elements that make for strength and character trodden out in the
making of the boy, all the high ambition of youth caricatured by the
slum and become base passions,--so equipped he comes to the business of
life. As a "kid" he hunted with the pack in the street. As a young man
he trains with the gang, because it furnishes the means of gratifying
his inordinate vanity; that is the slum's counterfeit of self-esteem.
Upon the Jacobs of other days there was a last hold,--the father's
authority. Changed conditions have loosened that also. There is a time
in every young man's life when he knows more than his father. It is like
the measles or the mumps, and he gets over it, with a little judicious
firmness in the hand that guides. It is the misfortune of the slum boy
of to-day that it is really so, and that he knows it. His father is an
Italian or a Jew, and cannot even speak the language to which the boy
is born. He has to depend on him in much, in the new order of things.
The old man is "slow," he is "Dutch." He may be an Irishman with some
advantages; he is still a "foreigner." He loses his grip on the boy.
Ethical standards of which he has no conception clash. Watch the meeting
of two currents in river or bay, and see the line of drift that tells of
the struggle. So in the city's life strive the currents of the old and
the new, and in the churning the boy goes adrift. The last hold upon him
is gone. That is why the gang appears in the second generation, the
first born upon the soil,--a fighting gang if the Irishman is there with
his ready fist, a thievish gang if it is the East Side Jew,--and
disappears in the third. The second boy's father is not "slow." He has
had experience. He was clubbed into decency in his own day, and the
night stick wore off the glamour of the thing. His grip on the boy is
good, and it holds.
It depends now upon chance what is to become of the lad. But the slum
has stacked the cards against him. There arises in the lawless crowd a
leader, who rules with his stronger fists of his readier wit. Around him
the gang crystallizes, and what he is it becomes. He may be a thief,
like David Meyer, a report of whose doings I have before me. He was just
a bully, and, being the biggest in his gang, made the others steal for
him and surrender the "swag," or take a licking. But that was unusual.
Ordinarily the risk and the "swag" are distributed on more democratic
principles. Or he may be of the temper of Mike of Poverty Gap, who was
hanged for murder at nineteen. While he sat in his cell at police
headquarters, he told with grim humor of the raids of his gang on
Saturday nights when they stocked up at "the club." They used to "hook"
a butcher's cart or other light wagon, wherever found, and drive like
mad up and down the avenue, stopping at saloon or grocery to throw in
what they wanted. His job was to sit at the tail of the cart with a
six-shooter and pop at any chance pursuer. He chuckled at the
recollection of how men fell over one another to get out of his way. "It
was great to see them run," he said. Mike was a tough, but with a better
chance he might have been a hero. The thought came to him, too, when it
was all over and the end in sight. He put it all in one sober,
retrospective sigh, that had in it no craven shirking of the
responsibility which was properly his: "I never had no bringing up."
There was a meeting some time after his death to boom a scheme for
"getting the boys off the street," and I happened to speak of Mike's
case. In the audience was a gentleman of means and position, and his
daughter, who manifested great interest and joined heartily in the
proposed movement. A week later, I was thunderstruck at reading of the
arrest of my sympathetic friend's son for train-wrecking up the state.
The fellow was of the same age as Mike. It appeared that he was supposed
to be attending school, but had been reading dime novels instead, until
he arrived at the point where he "had to kill some one before the end of
the month." To that end he organized a gang of admiring but less
resourceful comrades. After all, the planes of fellowship of Poverty Gap
and Madison Avenue lie nearer than we often suppose. I set the incident
down in justice to the memory of my friend Mike. If this one went astray
with so much to pull him the right way and but the single strand broken,
what then of the other?
Mike's was the day of Irish heroics. Since their scene was shifted from
the East Side, there has come over there an epidemic of child crime of
meaner sort, but following the same principle of gang organization. It
is difficult to ascertain the exact extent of it, because of the
well-meant but, I am inclined to think, mistaken effort on the part o£
the children's societies to suppress the record of it for the sake of
the boy. Enough testimony comes from the police and the courts, however,
to make it clear that thieving is largely on the increase among the
East Side boys. And it is amazing at what an early age it begins. When,
in the fight for a truant school, I had occasion to gather statistics
upon this subject, to meet the sneer of the educational authorities that
the "crimes" of street boys compassed at worst the theft of a top or a
marble, I found among 278 prisoners, of whom I had kept the run for ten
months, two boys, of four and eight years respectively, arrested for
breaking into a grocery, not to get candy or prunes, but to rob the
till. The little one was useful to "crawl through a small hole." There
were "burglars" of six and seven years; and five in a bunch, the whole
gang apparently, at the age of eight. "Wild" boys began to appear in
court at that age. At eleven, I had seven thieves, two of whom had a
record on the police blotter, and an "habitual liar"; at twelve, I had
four burglars, three ordinary thieves, two arrested for drunkenness,
three for assault, and three incendiaries; at thirteen, five burglars,
one with a "record," as many thieves, one "drunk," five charged with
assault and one with forgery; at fourteen, eleven thieves and
housebreakers, six highway robbers,--the gang on its unlucky day,
perhaps,--and ten arrested for fighting, not counting one who had
assaulted a policeman, in a state of drunken frenzy. One of the gangs
made a specialty of stealing baby carriages, when they were left
unattended in front of stores. They "drapped the kids in the hallway"
and "sneaked" the carriages. And so on. The recital was not a pleasant
one, but it was effective. We got our truant school, and one way that
led to the jail was blocked.
[Illustration: Craps.]
It may be that the leader is neither thief nor thug, but ambitious. In
that case the gang is headed for politics by the shortest route.
Likewise, sometimes, when he is both. In either case it carries the
situation by assault. When the gang wants a thing, the easiest way seems
to it always to take it. There was an explosion in a Fifth Street
tenement, one winter's night, that threw twenty families into a wild
panic, and injured two of the tenants badly. There was much mystery
about it, until it came out that the housekeeper had had a "run in" with
the gang in the block. It wanted club room in the house, and she would
not let it in. Beaten, it avenged itself in characteristic fashion by
leaving a package of gunpowder on the stairs, where she would be sure to
find it when she went the rounds with her candle to close up. That was a
gang of the kind I have reference to, headed straight for Albany. And
what is more, it will get there, unless things change greatly. The
gunpowder was just a "bluff" to frighten the housekeeper, an instalment
of the kind of politics it meant to play when it got its chance.
There was "nothing against" this gang except a probable row with the
saloon keeper, since it applied elsewhere for house room. Not every gang
has a police record of theft and "slugging" beyond the early encounters
of the street. "Our honorable leader" is not always the captain of a
band of cutthroats. He is the honorary president of the "social club"
that bears his name, and he counts for something in the ward. But the
ethical standards do not differ. "Do others, or they will do you,"
felicitously adapted from Holy Writ for the use of the slum, and the
classic war-cry, "To the victor the spoils," made over locally to read,
"I am not in politics for my health," still interpret the creed of the
political as of the "slugging" gang. They draw their inspiration from
the same source. Of what gang politics mean every large city in our
country has had its experience. New York is no exception. History on the
subject is being made yet, in sight of us all.
[Illustration: Children's Playground. Good Citizenship at the Bottom of
this Barrel.]
Our business with the gang, however, is in the making of it. Take now
the showing of the reformatory,[32] to which I have before made
reference, and see what light it throws upon the matter: 77.80 per cent
of prisoners with no moral sense, or next to none, yet more than that
proportion possessed of "good natural mental capacity," which is to say
that they had the means of absorbing it from their environment, if there
had been any to absorb. Bad homes sent half (47.79) of all prisoners
there; bad company 97.60 per cent. The reformatory repeats the prison
chaplain's verdict, "weakness, not wickedness," in its own way:
"Malevolence does not characterize the criminal, but aversion to
continuous labor." If "the street" had been written across it in
capital letters, it could not have been made plainer. Less than 15 per
cent of the prisoners came from good homes, and one in sixty-six (1.51)
had kept good company; evidently he was not of the mentally capable.
They will tell you at the prison that, under its discipline, eighty odd
per cent are set upon their feet and make a fresh start. With due
allowance for a friendly critic, there is still room for the
three-fourths labelled normal, of "natural mental capacity." They came
to their own with half a chance, even the chance of a prison. The
Children's Aid Society will give you still better news of the boys
rescued from the slum before it had branded them for its own. Scarce
five per cent are lost, though they leave such a black mark that they
make trouble for all the good boys that are sent out from New York.
Better than these was the kindergarten record in San Francisco. New York
has no monopoly of the slum. Of nine thousand children from the
slummiest quarters of that city who had gone through the Golden Gate
Association's kindergartens, just one was found to have got into jail.
The merchants who looked coldly on the experiment before, brought their
gold to pay for keeping it up. They were hard-headed men of business,
and the demonstration that schools were better than jails any day
appealed to them as eminently sane and practical.
[Footnote 32: "Year-Book of Elmira State Reformatory," 1901. The
statistics deal with 10,538 prisoners received there in twenty-seven
years. The social stratum whence they came is sufficiently indicated
by the statement that 15.96 per cent were illiterates, and 47.59
percent were able to read and write with difficulty; 32.39 per cent
had an ordinary common school education; 4.06 per cent came out of
high schools or colleges.]
And well it might. The gang is a distemper of the slum that writes upon
the generation it plagues the receipt for its own corrective. It is not
the night stick, though in the acute stage that is not to be dispensed
with. Neither is it the jail. To put the gang behind iron bars affords
passing relief, but it is like treating a symptom without getting at the
root of the disease. Prophylactic treatment is clearly indicated. The
boy who flings mud and stones is entering his protest in his own way
against the purblind policy that gave him jails for schools and the
gutter for a playground; that gave him dummies for laws and the tenement
for a home. He is demanding his rights, of which he has been
cheated,--the right to his childhood, the right to know the true dignity
of labor that makes a self-respecting manhood. The gang, rightly
understood, is our ally, not our enemy. Like any ailment of the body, it
is a friend come to tell us of something that has gone amiss. The thing
for us to do is to find out what it is, and set it right.
That is the story of the gang. That we have read and grasped its lesson
at last, many things bear witness. Here is the League for Political
Education providing a playground for the children up on the West Side,
near the model tenements which I described. Just so! With a decent home
and a chance for the boy to grow into a healthy man, his political
education can proceed without much further hindrance. Now let the League
for Political Education trade off the policeman's club for a boys' club,
and it may consider its course fairly organized.
I spoke of the instinct for the crowd in the man as evidence that the
slum had got its grip on him. And it is true of the boy. The experience
that the helpless poor will not leave their slum when a chance of better
things is offered is wearily familiar to most of us. One has to have
resources to face the loneliness of the woods and the fields. We have
seen what resources the slum has at its command. In the boy it laid hold
of the instinct for organization, the desire to fall in and march in
line that belongs to all boys, and is not here, as abroad, cloyed with
military service in the young years,--and anyhow is stronger in the
American boy than in his European brother,--and perverted it to its own
use. That is the simple secret of the success of the club, the brigade,
in winning back the boy. It is fighting the street with its own weapon.
The gang is the club run wild.
How readily it owns the kinship was never better shown than by the
experience of the college settlement girls, when they first went to make
friends in the East Side tenements. I have told it before, but it will
bear telling again, for it holds the key to the whole business. They
gathered in the drift, all the little embryo gangs that were tuning up
in the district, and made them into clubs,--Young Heroes, Knights of the
Round Table, and such like; all except one, the oldest, that had begun
to make a name for itself with the police. That one held aloof,
observing coldly what went on, to make sure it was "straight." They let
it be, keeping the while an anxious eye upon it; until one day there
came a delegation with this olive branch: "If you will let us in, we
will change and have your kind of a gang." Needless to say it was let
in. And within a year, when, through a false rumor that the concern was
moving away, there was a run on the settlement's penny provident bank,
the converted gang proved itself its stanchest friend by doing actually
what John Halifax did in Miss Mulock's story: it brought all the pennies
it could raise in the neighborhood by hook or by crook and deposited
them as fast as the regular patrons--the gang had not yet risen to the
dignity of a bank account--drew them out, until the run ceased. This
same gang which, the year before, was training for trouble with the
police!
The cry, "Get the boys off the street," that has been raised in our
cities, as the real gravity of the situation has been made clear, has
led to the adoption of curfew ordinances in many places. Any attempt to
fit such a scheme to metropolitan life would result only in adding one
more dead-letter law, more dangerous than all the rest, to those we
have. New York is New York, and one look at the crowds in the streets
and the tenements will convince anybody. Besides, the curfew rings at
nine o'clock. The dangerous hours, when the gang is made, are from seven
to nine, between supper and bedtime. This is the gap the club fills out.
The boys take to the street because the home has nothing to keep them
there. To lock them up in the house would only make them hate it more.
The club follows the line of least resistance. It has only to keep also
on the line of common sense. It must be a real club, not a reformatory.
Its proper function is to head off the jail. The gang must not run it.
But rather that than have it help train up a band of wretched young
cads. The signs are not hard to make out. When a boy has had his head
swelled by his importance as a member of the Junior Street-cleaning
Band to the point of reproving his mother for throwing a banana peel in
the street, the thing to be done is to take him out and spank him, if it
_is_ reverting to "the savagery" of the street. Better a savage than a
cad. The boys have the making of both in them. Their vanity furnishes
abundant material for the cad, but only when unduly pampered. Left to
itself, the gang can be trusted not to develop that kink.
It comes down in the end to the personal influence that is always most
potent in dealing with these problems. We had a gang start up once when
my boys were of that age, out in the village on Long Island where we
lived. It had its headquarters in our barn, where it planned divers
raids that aimed at killing the cat and other like outrages; the central
fact being that the boys had an air rifle, with which it was necessary
to murder something. My wife discovered the conspiracy, and, with
woman's wit, defeated it by joining the gang. She "gave in wood" to the
election bonfires, and pulled the safety valve upon all the other plots
by entering into the true spirit of them,--which was adventure rather
than mischief,--and so keeping them within safe lines. She was elected
an honorary member, and became the counsellor of the gang in all its
little scrapes. I can yet see her dear brow wrinkled in the study of
some knotty gang problem, which we discussed when the boys had been
long asleep. They did not dream of it, and the village never knew what
small tragedies it escaped, nor who it was that so skilfully averted
them.
It is always the women who do those things. They are the law and the
gospel to the boy, both in one. It is the mother heart, I suppose, and
there is nothing better in all the world. I am reminded of the
conversion of "the Kid" by one who was in a very real sense the mother
of a social settlement up-town, in the latitude of Battle Row. The Kid
was driftwood. He had been cast off by a drunken father and mother, and
was living on what he could scrape out of ash barrels, and an occasional
dime for kindling-wood which he sold from a wheelbarrow, when the gang
found and adopted him. My friend adopted the gang in her turn, and
civilized it by slow stages. Easter Sunday came, when she was to redeem
her promise to take the boys to witness the services in a neighboring
church, where the liturgy was especially impressive. It found the larger
part of the gang at her door,--a minority, it was announced, were out
stealing potatoes, hence were excusable,--in a state of high
indignation.
"The Kid's been cussin' awful," explained the leader. The Kid showed in
the turbulent distance, red-eyed and raging.
"But why?" asked my friend, in amazement.
"'Cause he can't go to church!"
It appeared that the gang had shut him out, with a sense of what was due
to the occasion, because of his rags. Restored to grace, and choking
down reminiscent sobs, the Kid sat through the Easter service,
surrounded by the twenty-seven "proper" members of the gang.
Civilization had achieved a victory, and no doubt my friend remembered
it in her prayers with thanksgiving. The manner was of less account.
Battle Row has its own ways, even in its acceptance of means of grace.
[Illustration: "The gang fell in with joyous shouts."]
I walked home from the office in the early gloaming. The street wore its
normal aspect of mingled dulness and the kind of expectancy that is
always waiting to turn any excitement, from a fallen horse to a fire, to
instant account. The early June heat had driven the multitudes from the
tenements into the street for a breath of air. The boys of the block
were holding a meeting at the hydrant. In some way they had turned the
water on, and were splashing in it with bare feet, revelling in the
sense that they were doing something that "went against" their enemy,
the policeman. Upon the quiet of the evening broke a bugle note and the
tramp of many feet keeping time. A military band came around the corner,
stepping briskly to the tune of "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Their
white duck trousers glimmered in the twilight, as the hundred legs
moved as one. Stoops and hydrant were deserted with a rush. The gang
fell in with joyous shouts. The young fellow linked arms with his
sweetheart and fell in too. The tired mother hurried with the baby
carriage to catch up. The butcher came, hot and wiping his hands on his
apron, to the door to see them pass.
"Yes," said my companion, guessing my thoughts,--we had been speaking of
the boys,--"but look at the other side. There is the military spirit. Do
you not fear danger from it in this country?"
No, my anxious friend, I do not. Let them march; and if with a gun,
better still. Often enough it is the choice of the gun on the shoulder,
or, by and by, the stripes on the back in the lockstep gang.