REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH
I have sketched in outline the gains achieved in the metropolis since
its conscience awoke. Now, in closing this account, I am reminded of the
story of an old Irishman who died here a couple of years ago. Patrick
Mullen was an honest blacksmith. He made guns for a living. He made them
so well that one with his name on it was worth a good deal more than the
market price of guns. Other makers went to him with offers of money for
the use of his stamp; but they never went twice. When sometimes a gun of
very superior make was brought to him to finish, he would stamp it P.
Mullen, never Patrick Mullen. Only to that which he himself had wrought
did he give his honest name without reserve. When he died, judges and
bishops and other great men crowded to his modest home by the East
River, and wrote letters to the newspapers telling how proud they had
been to call him friend. Yet he was, and remained to the end, plain
Patrick Mullen, blacksmith and gun-maker.
In his life he supplied the answer to the sigh of dreamers in all days:
when will the millennium come? It will come when every man is a Patrick
Mullen at his own trade; not merely a P. Mullen, but a Patrick Mullen.
The millennium of municipal politics, when there shall be no slum to
fight, will come when every citizen does his whole duty as a citizen,
not before. As long as he "despises politics," and deputizes another to
do it for him, whether that other wears the stamp of a Croker or of a
Platt,--it matters little which,--we shall have the slum, and be put
periodically to the trouble and the shame of draining it in the public
sight. A citizen's duty is one thing that cannot be farmed out safely;
and the slum is not limited by the rookeries of Mulberry or Ludlow
streets. It has long roots that feed on the selfishness and dulness of
Fifth Avenue quite as greedily as on the squalor of the Sixth Ward. The
two are not nearly so far apart as they look.
[Illustration: Athletic Meets in Crotona Park.]
I am not saying this because it is anything new, but because we have
had, within the memory of us all, an illustration of its truth in
municipal politics. Waring and Roosevelt were the Patrick Mullens of the
reform administration which Tammany replaced with her insolent platform,
"To hell with reform!" It was not an ideal administration, but it can be
said of it, at least, that it was up to the times it served. It made
compromises with spoils politics, and they were wretched failures. It
took Waring and Roosevelt on the other plan, on which they insisted, of
divorcing politics from the public business, and they let in more light
than even my small parks over on the East Side. For they showed us where
we stood and what was the matter with us. We believed in Waring when he
demonstrated the success of his plan for cleaning the streets; not
before. When Roosevelt announced his programme, of enforcing the excise
law because it _was_ law, a howl arose that would have frightened a less
resolute man from his purpose. But he went right on doing the duty he
was sworn to do. And when, at the end of three months of clamor and
abuse, we saw the spectacle of the saloon keepers formally resolving to
help the police instead of hindering them; of the prison ward in
Bellevue Hospital standing empty for three days at a time, an
astonishing and unprecedented thing, which the warden could only
attribute to the "prompt closing of the saloon at one A.M."; and of the
police force recovering its lost self-respect,--we had found out more
and greater things than whether the excise law was a good or a bad law.
We understood what Roosevelt meant when he insisted upon the "primary
virtues" of honesty and courage in the conduct of public business. For
the want of them in us, half the laws that touched our daily lives had
became dead letters or vehicles of blackmail and oppression. It was
worth something to have that lesson taught us in that way; to find out
that simple, straightforward, honest dealing as between man and man is
after all effective in politics as in gun-making. Perhaps we have not
mastered the lesson yet. But we have not discharged the teacher, either.
Courage, indeed! There were times during that stormy spell when it
seemed as if we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby as a people. All
the outcry against the programme of order did not come from the lawless
and the disorderly, by any means. Ordinarily decent, conservative
citizens joined in counselling moderation and virtual compromise with
the lawbreakers--it was nothing else--to "avoid trouble." The old love
of fair play had been whittled down by the jack-knife of all-pervading
expediency to an anæmic desire to "hold the scales even," which is a
favorite modern device of the devil for paralyzing action in men. You
cannot hold the scales even in a moral issue. It inevitably results in
the triumph of evil, which asks nothing better than the even chance to
which it is not entitled. When the trouble in the Police Board had
reached a point where it seemed impossible not to understand that
Roosevelt and his side were fighting a cold and treacherous conspiracy
against the cause of good government, we had the spectacle of a
Christian Endeavor Society inviting the man who had hatched the plot,
the bitter and relentless enemy whom the mayor had summoned to resign,
and afterward did his best to remove as a fatal obstacle to
reform,--inviting this man to come before it and speak of Christian
citizenship! It was a sight to make the bosses hug themselves with glee.
For Christian citizenship is their nightmare, and nothing is so cheering
to them as evidence that those who profess it have no sense.
Apart from the moral bearings of it, what this question of enforcement
of law means in the life of the poor was illustrated by testimony given
before the Police Board under oath. A captain was on trial for allowing
the policy swindle to go unchecked in his precinct. Policy is a kind of
penny lottery, with alleged daily drawings which never take place. The
whole thing is a pestilent fraud, which is allowed to exist only because
it pays heavy blackmail to the police and the politicians. Expert
witnesses testified that eight policy shops in the Twenty-first Ward,
which they had visited, did a business averaging about thirty-two
dollars a day each. The Twenty-first is a poor Irish tenement ward. The
policy sharks were getting two hundred and fifty dollars or more a day
of the hard-earned wages of those poor people, in sums of from one and
two cents to a quarter, without making any return for it. The thing
would seem incredible were it not too sadly familiar. The saloon keeper
got his share of what was left, and rewarded his customer by posing as
the "friend of the poor man" whenever his business was under scrutiny; I
have yet in my office the record of a single week during the hottest of
the fight between Roosevelt and the saloons, as showing of what kind
that friendship is. It embraces the destruction of eight homes by the
demon of drunkenness; the suicide of four wives, the murder of two
others by drunken husbands, the killing of a policeman in the street,
and the torture of an aged woman by her rascal son, who "used to be a
good boy till he took to liquor, when he became a perfect devil." In
that rôle he finally beat her to death for giving shelter to some
evicted fellow-tenants who else would have had to sleep in the street.
Nice friendly turn, wasn't it?
And yet there was something to be said for the saloon keeper. He gave
the man the refuge from his tenement which he needed. I say needed,
purposely. There has been a good deal of talk in our day about the
saloon as a social necessity. About all there is to that is that the
saloon is there, and the necessity too. Man is a social animal, whether
he lives in a tenement or in a palace. But the palace has resources; the
tenement has not. It is a good place to get away from at all times. The
saloon is cheery and bright, and never far away. The man craving human
companionship finds it there. He finds, too, in the saloon keeper one
who understands his wants much better than the reformer who talks civil
service in the meetings. "Civil service" to him and his kind means yet a
contrivance for keeping them out of a job. The saloon keeper knows the
boss, if he is not himself the boss or his lieutenant, and can steer him
to the man who will spend all day at the City Hall, if need be, to get a
job for a friend, and all night pulling wires to keep him in it, if
trouble is brewing. Mr. Beecher used to say, when pleading for bright
hymn tunes, that he didn't want the devil to have the monopoly of all
the good music in the world. The saloon has had the monopoly up to date
of all the cheer in the tenements. If its owner has made it pan out to
his own advantage and the boss's, we at least have no just cause of
complaint. We let him have the field all to himself.
It is good to know that the day is coming when he will have a rival.
Model saloons may never be more than a dream in New York, but even now
the first of a number of "social halls" is being planned by Miss Lillian
Wald of the Nurses' Settlement and her co-workers that shall give the
East Side the chance to eat and dance and make merry without the stigma
of the bar upon it all. The first of the buildings will be opened within
a year.
As to this boss, of whom we hear so much, what manner of man is he? That
depends on how you look at him. I have one in mind, a district boss,
whom you would accept instantly as a type if I were to mention his name,
which I shall not do for a reason which I fear will shock you: he and I
are friends. In his private capacity I have real regard for him. As a
politician and a boss I have none at all. I am aware that this is taking
low ground in a discussion of this kind, but perhaps the reader will
better understand the relations of his "district" to him, if I let him
into mine. There is no political bond between us, of either district or
party, just the reverse. It is purely personal. He was once a police
justice,--at that time he kept a saloon,--and I have known few with more
common sense, which happens to be the one quality especially needed in
that office. Up to the point where politics came in I could depend upon
him entirely. At that point he let me know bluntly that he was in the
habit of running his district to suit himself. The way he did it brought
him under the just accusation of being guilty of every kind of rascality
known to politics. When next our paths would cross each other, it would
very likely be on some errand of mercy, to which his feet were always
swift. I recall the distress of a dear and gentle lady at whose table I
once took his part. She could not believe that there was any good in
him; what he did must be done for effect. Some time after that she
wrote, asking me to look after an East Side family that was in great
trouble. It was during the severe cold spell of the winter of 1898, and
there was need of haste. I went over at once; but although I had lost no
time, I found my friend the boss ahead of me. It was a real pleasure to
me to be able to report to my correspondent that he had seen to their
comfort, and to add that it was unpolitical charity altogether. The
family was that of a Jewish widow with a lot of little children. He is a
Roman Catholic. There was not even a potential vote in the house, the
children being all girls. They were not in his district, to boot; and as
for effect, he was rather shamefaced at my catching him at it. I do not
believe that a soul has ever heard of the case from him to this day.
My friend is a Tammany boss, and I shall not be accused of partiality
for him on that account. During that same cold spell a politician of the
other camp came into my office and gave me a hundred dollars to spend as
I saw fit among the poor. His district was miles up-town, and he was
most unwilling to disclose his identity, stipulating in the end that no
one but I should know where the money came from. He was not seeking
notoriety. The plight of the suffering had appealed to him, and he
wanted to help where he could, that was all.
Now, I have not the least desire to glorify the boss in this. He is not
glorious to me. He is simply human. Often enough he is a coarse and
brutal fellow, in his morals as in his politics. Again, he may have some
very engaging personal traits that bind his friends to him with the
closest of ties. The poor man sees the friend, the charity, the power
that is able and ready to help him in need; is it any wonder that he
overlooks the source of this power, this plenty,--that he forgets the
robbery in the robber who is "good to the poor"? Anyhow, if anybody got
robbed, it was "the rich." With the present ethical standards of the
slum, it is easy to construct a scheme of social justice out of it that
is very comforting all round, even to the boss himself, though he is in
need of no sympathy or excuse. "Politics," he will tell me in his
philosophic moods, "is a game for profit. The city foots the bills."
Patriotism means to him working for the ticket that shall bring more
profit.
"I regard," he says, lighting his cigar, "a repeater as a shade off a
murderer, but you are obliged to admit that in my trade he is a
necessary evil." I am not obliged to do anything of the kind, but I can
understand his way of looking at it. He simply has no political
conscience. He has gratitude, loyalty to a friend,--that is part of his
stock in trade,--fighting blood, plenty of it, all the good qualities of
the savage; nothing more. And a savage he is, politically, with no soul
above the dross. He would not rob a neighbor for the world; but he will
steal from the city--though he does not call it by that name--without a
tremor, and count it a good mark. When I tell him that, he waves his
hand toward Wall Street as representative of the business community, and
toward the office of his neighbor, the padrone, as representative of
the railroads, and says with a laugh, "Don't they all do it?"
The boss believes in himself. It is one of his strong points. And he has
experience to back him. In the fall of 1894 we shook off boss rule in
New York, and set up housekeeping for ourselves. We kept it up three
years, and then went back to the old style. I should judge that we did
it because we were tired of too much virtue. Perhaps we were not built
to hold such a lot at once. Besides, it is much easier to be ruled than
to rule. That fall, after the election, when I was concerned about what
would become of my small parks, of the Health Department in which I took
such just pride, and of a dozen other things, I received one unvarying
reply to my anxious question, or rather two. If it was the Health
Department, I was told: "Go to Platt. He is the only man who can do it.
He is a sensible man, and will see that it is protected." If small
parks, it was: "Go to Croker. He will not allow the work to be stopped."
A playgrounds bill was to be presented in the legislature, and everybody
advised: "Go to Platt. He won't object, it is popular." And so on. My
advisers were not politicians. They were business men, but recently
honestly interested in reform. I was talking one day, with a gentleman
of very wide reputation as a philanthropist, about the unhappy lot of
the old fire-engine horses,--which, after lives of toil that deserve a
better fate, are sold for a song to drag out a weary existence hauling
some huckster's cart around,--and wishing that they might be pensioned
off to live out their years on a farm, with enough to eat and a chance
to roll in the grass. He was much interested, and promptly gave me this
advice: "I tell you what you do. You go and see Croker. He likes
horses." No wonder the boss believes in himself. He would be less than
human if he did not. And he is very human.
I had voted on the day of the Greater New York election,--the Tammany
election, as we learned to call it afterward,--in my home out in the
Borough of Queens, and went over to the depot to catch the train for the
city. On the platform were half a dozen of my neighbors, all business
men, all "friends of reform." Some of them were just down from
breakfast. One I remember as introducing a resolution, in a meeting we
had held, about the discourtesy of local politicians. He looked
surprised when reminded that it was election day. "Why, is it to-day?"
he said. "They didn't send any carriage," said another regretfully. "I
don't see what's the use," said the third; "the roads are just as bad as
when we began talking about it." (We had been trying to mend them.) The
fourth yawned and said: "I don't care. I have my business to attend to."
And they took the train, which meant that they lost their votes. The
Tammany captain was busy hauling his voters by the cart-load to the
polling place. Over there stood a reform candidate who had been defeated
in the primary, and puffed out his chest. "The politicians are afraid of
me," he said. They slapped him on the back, as they went by, and told
him that he was a devil of a fellow.
So Tammany came back. And four long years we swore at it. But I am
afraid we swore at the wrong fellow. The real Tammany is not the
conscienceless rascal that plunders our treasury and fattens on our
substance. That one is a mere counterfeit. It is the voter who waits for
a carriage to take him to the polls; the man who "doesn't see what's the
use"; the business man who says "business is business," and has no time
to waste on voting; the citizen who "will wait to see how the cat jumps,
because he doesn't want to throw his vote away"; the cowardly American
who "doesn't want to antagonize" anybody; the fool who "washes his hands
of politics." These are the real Tammany, the men after the boss's own
heart. For every one whose vote he buys, there are two of these who give
him theirs for nothing. We shall get rid of him when these withdraw
their support, when they become citizens of the Patrick Mullen stamp, as
faithful at the polling place as he was at the forge; not before.
There is as much work for reform at the top as at the bottom. The man in
the slum votes according to his light, and the boss holds the candle.
But the boss is in no real sense a leader. He follows instead, always as
far behind the moral sentiment of the community as he thinks is safe. He
has heard it said that a community will not be any better than its
citizens, and that it will be just as good as they are, and he applies
the saying to himself. He is no worse a boss than the town deserves. I
can conceive of his taking credit to himself as some kind of a moral
instrument by which the virtue of the community may be graded, though
that is most unlikely. He does not bother himself with the morals of
anything. But right here is his Achilles heel. The man has no
conscience. He cannot tell the signs of it in others. It always comes
upon him unawares. Reform to him simply means the "outs" fighting to get
in. The real thing he will always underestimate. Witness Richard Croker
in the last election offering Bishop Potter, after his crushing letter
to the mayor, to join him in purifying the city, and, when politely
refused, setting up an "inquiry" of his own. The conclusion is
irresistible that he thought the bishop either a fool or a politician
playing for points. Such a man is not the power he seems. He is
formidable only in proportion to the amount of shaking it takes to rouse
the community's conscience.
The boss is like the measles, a distemper of a self-governing people's
infancy. When we shall have come of age politically, he will have no
terrors for us. Meanwhile, being charged with the business of governing,
which we left to him because we were too busy making money, he follows
the track laid out for him, and makes the business pan out all that is
in it. He fights when we want to discharge him. Of course he does; no
man likes to give up a good job. He will fight or bargain, as he sees
his way clear. He will give us small parks, play piers, new schools,
anything we ask, to keep his place, while trying to find out "the price"
of this conscience which he does not understand. Even to the half of his
kingdom he will give, to be "in" on the new deal. He has done it before,
and there is no reason that he can see why it should not be done again.
And he will appeal to the people whom he is plundering to trust him
because they know him.
Odd as it sounds, this is where he has his real hold. I have shown why
this is so. To the poor people of his district the boss is a friend in
need. He is one of them. He does not want to reform them; far from it.
No doubt it is very ungrateful of them, but the poor people have no
desire to be reformed. They do not think they need to be. They consider
their moral standards quite as high as those of the rich, and resent
being told that they are mistaken. The reformer comes to them from
another world to tell them these things, and goes his way. The boss
lives among them. He helped John to a job on the pipes in their hard
winter, and got Mike on the force. They know him as a good neighbor, and
trust him to their harm. He drags their standard ever farther down. The
question for those who are trying to help them is how to make them
transfer their allegiance, and trust their real friends instead.
It ought not be a difficult question to answer. Any teacher could do it.
He knows, if he knows anything, that the way to get and keep the
children's confidence is to trust them, and let them know that they are
trusted. They will almost always come up to the demand thus made upon
them. Preaching to them does little good; preaching at them still less.
Men, whether rich or poor, are much like children. The good in them is
just as good, and the bad, in view of their enlarged opportunities for
mischief, not so much worse, all considered. A vigorous optimism, a
stout belief in one's fellow-man, is better equipment in a campaign for
civic virtue than stacks of tracts and arguments, economic and moral.
There is good bottom, even in the slum, for that kind of an anchor to
get a grip on. Some years ago I went to see a boxing match there had
been much talk about. The hall was jammed with a rough and noisy crowd,
hotly intent upon its favorite. His opponent, who hailed, I think, from
somewhere in Delaware, was greeted with hostile demonstrations as a
"foreigner." But as the battle wore on, and he was seen to be fair and
manly, while the New Yorker struck one foul blow after another, the
attitude of the crowd changed rapidly from enthusiastic approval of the
favorite to scorn and contempt; and in the last round, when he knocked
the Delawarean over with a foul blow, the audience rose in a body and
yelled to have the fight given to the "foreigner," until my blood
tingled with pride. For the decision would leave it practically without
a cent. It had staked all it had on the New Yorker. "He is a good man,"
I heard on all sides, while the once favorite sneaked away without a
friend. "Good" meant fair and manly to that crowd. I thought, as I went
to the office the next morning, that it ought to be easy to appeal to
such a people with measures that were fair and just, if we could only
get on common ground. But the only hint I got from my reform paper was
an editorial denunciation of the brutality of boxing, on the same page
that had an enthusiastic review of the college football season. I do not
suppose it did any harm, for the paper was probably not read by one of
the men it had set out to reform. But suppose it had been, how much
would it have appealed to them? Exactly the qualities of robust
manliness which football is supposed to encourage in college students
had been evoked by the trial of strength and skill which they had
witnessed. As to the brutality, they knew that fifty young men are
maimed or killed at football to one who fares ill in a boxing match.
Would it seem to them common sense, or cant and humbug?
That is what it comes down to in the end: common sense and common
honesty. Common sense to steer us clear of the "sociology" reef that
would make our cause ridiculous, on Fifth Avenue and in East Broadway. I
have no quarrel with the man who would do things by system and in order;
but the man who would reduce men and women and children to mere items in
his infallible system and classify and sub-classify them until they are
as dried up as his theories, that man I will fight till I die. One throb
of a human heart is worth a whole book of his stuff. Common honesty to
keep us afloat at all. If we worship as success mere money-getting,
closing our eyes to the means, let us at least say it like the man who
told me to-day that "after all, one has to admire Bill Devery; he's got
the dough," Devery was Tammany's police chief. The man is entitled to
his opinion, but if it gets hitched to the reform cart by mistake, the
load is going to be spilled. It has been, more than once.
A saving sense of humor might have avoided some of those pitfalls. I am
seriously of the opinion that a professional humorist ought to be
attached to every reform movement, to keep it from making itself
ridiculous by either too great solemnity or too much conceit. As it is,
the enemy sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption of
that plan, I would recommend a decree of banishment against
photographers, press-clippings men, and the rest of the congratulatory
staff. Why should the fact that a citizen has done a citizen's duty
deserve to be celebrated in print and picture, as if something
extraordinary had happened? The smoke of battle had not cleared away
after the victory of reform in the fall of 1894, before the citizens'
committee and all the little sub-committees rushed pell-mell to the
photographer's to get themselves on record as the men who did it. The
spectacle might have inspired in the humorist the advice to get two sets
made, while they were about it, one to serve by and by as an exhibit of
the men who didn't; and, as the event proved, he would have been right.
But it is easy to find fault, and on that tack we get no farther. Those
men did a great work, and they did it well. They built from the bottom
and they built the foundation broad and strong. Good schools, better
homes, and a chance for the boy are good bricks to build with in such a
structure as we are rearing. They last. Just now we are laying another
course; more than one, I hope. But even if it were different, we need
not despair. Let the enemy come back once more, it will not be to stay.
It may be that, like Moses and his followers, we of the present day
shall see the promised land only from afar and with the eye of faith,
because of our sins; that to a younger and sturdier to-morrow it shall
be given to blaze the path of civic righteousness that was our dream. I
like to think that it is so, and that that is the meaning of the coming
of men like Roosevelt and Waring at this time with their simple appeal
to the reason of honest men. Unless I greatly err in reading the signs
of the times, it is indeed so, and the day of the boss and of the slum
is drawing to an end. Our faith has felt the new impulse; rather, I
should say, it has given it. The social movements, and that which we
call politics, are but a reflection of what the people honestly believe,
a chart of their aims and aspirations. Charity in our day no longer
means alms, but justice. The social settlements are substituting vital
touch for the machine charity that reaped a crop of hate and beggary.
Charity organization--"conscience born of love" some one has well called
it--is substituting its methods in high and low places for the senseless
old ways. Its champions are oftener found standing with organized labor
for legislation to correct the people's wrongs, and when the two stand
together nothing can resist them. Through its teaching we are learning
that our responsibility as citizens for a law does not cease with its
enactment, but rather begins there. We are growing, in other words, to
the stature of real citizenship. We are emerging from the kind of
barbarism that dragged children to the jail and thrust them in among
hardened criminals there, and that sat by helpless and saw the
foundlings die in the infant hospital at the rate--really there was no
rate; they practically all died, every one that was not immediately
removed to a home and a mother. For four years now a joint committee of
the State Charities' Aid Association and the Association for Improving
the Condition of the Poor has taken them off the city's hands and
adopted them out, and in every hundred now eighty-nine live and grow up!
After all, not even a Jersey cow can take the place of a mother with a
baby. And we are building a children's court that shall put an end to
the other outrage, for boys taken there are let off on probation, to
give them the chance under a different teaching from the slum's, which
it denied them till now.
[Illustration: Flag-drill in the "King's Garden." The Playground at the
Jacob A. Riis House.]
We have learned that we cannot pass off checks for human sympathy in
settlement of our brotherhood arrears. The Church, which once stood by
indifferent, or uncomprehending, is hastening to enter the life of the
people. I have told of how, in the memory of men yet living, one church,
moving up-town away from the crowd, left its old Mulberry Street home to
be converted into tenements that justly earned the name of "dens of
death" in the Health Department's records, while another became the
foulest lodging house in an unclean city, and of how it was a church
corporation that owned the worst underground dive down-town in those bad
old days, and turned a deaf ear to all remonstrances. The Church was
"angling for souls." But souls in this world live in bodies endowed with
reason. The results of that kind of fishing were empty pews and cold
hearts, and the conscience-stricken cry that went up, "What shall we do
to lay hold of this great multitude that has slipped from us?"
The years have passed and brought the answer. To-day we see churches of
every 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. A dozen 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." Here lately 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.
"The more I know of the Other Half," writes a friend to me, "the more I
feel the great gulf that is fixed between us, and the more profoundly I
grieve that this is the best that Christian civilization has as yet been
able to do toward a true social system." Let my friend take heart. She
herself has been busy in my sight all these years binding up the wounds.
If that be the most a Christian civilization has been able to do for the
neighbor till now, who shall say that it is not also the greatest? "This
do and thou shalt live," said the Lord of him who showed mercy. That was
the mark of the brotherhood. No, the gulf is not widening. It is only
that we have taken soundings and know it, and in the doing of it we have
come to know one another. The rest we may confidently leave with Him who
knows it all.
God knows we waited long enough; and how close we were to one another
all the while without knowing it! Two or three years ago at 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 one another 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 knickerbockers. It may be that
our century will yet 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.
* * * * *
And now, having shown you the dark side of the city, which, after all, I
love, with its great memories, its high courage, and its bright skies,
as I love the little Danish town where my cradle stood, let me, before
I close this account of the struggle with evil, show you also its good
heart by telling you "the unnecessary story of Mrs. Ben Wah and her
parrot." Perchance it may help you to grasp better the meaning of the
Battle with the Slum. It is for such as she and for such as "Jim," whose
story I told before, that we are fighting.