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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Leaven in a Great City, by Lillian
+William Betts
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Leaven in a Great City
+
+
+Author: Lillian William Betts
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2011  [eBook #38205]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Josephine Paolucci, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 38205-h.htm or 38205-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38205/38205-h/38205-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38205/38205-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: NO LONGER PROFITABLE.]
+
+
+THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY
+
+by
+
+LILLIAN W. BETTS
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+New York
+Dodd, Mead & Company
+1903
+
+Copyright, 1902,
+By Dodd, Mead and Company.
+
+First Edition published September, 1902.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   CHAPTER                                                PAGE
+
+         I. AT THE BOTTOM,                                   1
+
+        II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS,              37
+
+       III. THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF,                       75
+
+        IV. SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS,                    102
+
+         V. WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS,                          135
+
+        VI. A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT,                           162
+
+       VII. WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME,                      196
+
+      VIII. FINANCIAL RELATIONS IN FAMILIES,               225
+
+        IX. HOME STANDARDS,                                263
+
+         X. WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?                 290
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+   No Longer Profitable--_Frontispiece_
+
+   The Site of the Old Runway                               12
+
+   Your Choice                                              24
+
+   Saturday Morning on the East Side                        38
+
+   The Past, Present, and Middle Period                     44
+
+   A Social Centre that Becomes Political                   56
+
+   A Doorway on the East Side                               60
+
+   Early Morning among the Push-Carts                       64
+
+   Meeting the Needs of the Neighbourhood                   70
+
+   A Remnant of the Past                                    76
+
+   A Type of the Present                                    88
+
+   A Corner in a Workingman's Home                          94
+
+   A Spiritual Bulwark                                     128
+
+   Where the People Share                                  134
+
+   A Corner in an Old Section                              152
+
+   Opposite a Corner in an Old Section                     154
+
+   The Woman's Home Improvement Club at the Settlement     168
+
+   The Kindergarten of the College Settlement              178
+
+   Making a Selection                                      184
+
+   At the Settlement--A Stormy Day                         188
+
+   Yard Day at the Settlement                              196
+
+   The Children's Hour at the College Settlement           200
+
+   Mutual Interests                                        206
+
+   The Forest of the Tenements                             212
+
+   The Children's Playground                               218
+
+   Library Day at the College Settlement                   224
+
+   A Street on the East Side                               236
+
+   A Cooking Class of Mothers and Children                 244
+
+   A Meeting of Neighbours                                 250
+
+   The Reading-Room at the Settlement                      254
+
+   After School at the College Settlement                  258
+
+   The Morning Airing of an East Side Heiress              264
+
+   A Bit of Old Greenwich                                  274
+
+   A Little Father                                         280
+
+   A Corner in Old Greenwich                               286
+
+   Taking their Turn in the Yard at the Settlement         294
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AT THE BOTTOM.
+
+
+One of the first, and, up to the present time, one of the most interesting
+experiments made in New York for the better housing of the poor, was made
+in the early eighties by a score or less of philanthropic capitalists.
+These gentlemen organized a stock company to hold and manage tenement-house
+property, limiting their dividends to three per cent. on the capital; the
+surplus dividends, if any, over this amount, to be used in improving the
+property, and securing such conditions and opportunities for the tenants as
+would stimulate pride and independence. The formation of this company
+followed one of the periodic agitations of the tenement-house problems
+customary in New York.
+
+In 1878 a conference was called by the State Charities' Aid Association to
+consider the condition of the tenement houses in this city. Mr. Alfred T.
+White, of Brooklyn, had at this time proved that model tenements, conducted
+on strictly business principles, paid as investments, and stated at this
+conference that his model houses made a return of seven one-half per cent.
+As a result of this conference a committee was appointed who reported that
+they did not find it desirable to recommend the building of model tenements
+in New York at this time. Mr. White for many years stood alone as the man
+of wealth with the courage of his convictions, that there were wage-earners
+compelled to live under tenement-house conditions who would pay for and
+respect the best housing that capital would offer them, within their
+rent-paying capacity.
+
+The tenement-house agitation continued.
+
+In 1879 Mayor Cooper had appointed a committee known as the "Mayor's
+Committee," to devise means to effect tenement-house reforms. This
+committee reported, and among other suggestions recommended, that companies
+be organized to build modern tenements. Some members of this committee,
+with others, formed the stock company alluded to with a capital of
+$300,000. With a wisdom peculiarly their own, they did not wait until model
+buildings could be erected according to plans not yet drawn on sites not
+yet selected, but they leased on a long lease property that had been
+unproductive for a long time, and occupied by a people at the lowest level
+of the home-making people of the city. Below them are the people who do not
+even pretend to make a home. This property was located in the old Fourth
+Ward. It was the reputation of this ward, and the record of the particular
+property, which doubtless led these capitalists to secure it. It was
+conceded that the poverty and degradation of the Fourth Ward was at least
+as great as in any other section of the city. The property leased had
+attracted public attention and been the subject of special investigation
+and reports in every agitation of the tenement-house problem since 1856.
+
+The Fourth Ward criminal and health records figure for an even longer
+period in every effort at bettering municipal conditions by the example it
+presented of civic indifference, neglect and maladministration. The houses
+faced on two alleys, known in their best days as "Single" and "Double"
+alley, respectively. As this distinction indicates, on Single Alley one row
+of houses faced the walls of the adjoining property, while two rows of
+houses faced each other across Double Alley. Later known as Swipe's Alley,
+Guzzle Row, Hell's Kitchen, Murderers' Row, showing the gradual descent
+from respectability. There is a tradition that Single Alley once had
+gardens that extended to Roosevelt Street; that the houses had been
+occupied by one family; but this cannot be verified. In their most
+degenerate days these houses had an air of exclusiveness, due doubtless to
+their fronting on courts and the tall iron fences, with gates, that
+separated the houses from the street. The neighborhood at one time was
+aristocratic; Franklin Square, but a short distance from the property, was
+a social center of national greatness. As business went northward, the
+merchants, bankers, tradespeople, followed, for the tie between home and
+business was still very close; the midday dinner made distance between the
+two impossible. The old homes were left for subdivision among the skilled
+workmen and clerks.
+
+The tide of immigration set in, and the strangers settled near the docks
+and wharfs--the source of their wages; in time they crowded into the old
+residences, beginning the housing problem of New York. These old homes were
+soon overcrowded. They could not be made sanitary. The demand for room was
+so great that the large closets--the necessity of the old-time
+housekeepers--were counted bedrooms, and are to-day in houses of this type
+in tenement-house regions throughout the city.
+
+The property secured by the new company at the time it was leased was a
+part of a large estate, the owner of which during his lifetime had
+personally cared for it. He was both strict and just, and these two
+attributes preserved these houses for years after the property in the
+neighborhood had begun to yield to the character of later residents. This
+owner kept the alleys and the houses in repair. The semi-privacy the iron
+gate gave the tenants was for years the reason that the better-paid
+mechanics remained in the courts or alleys. When the owner died, the
+property was put in control of an agent, with the usual result--rapid
+degeneracy. It was now conducted to secure the largest returns at the least
+outlay. The evils of the absentee landlord are not confined to Ireland.
+Absenteeism on the part of owners of tenement-house property is one of the
+causes of the social and civic problems that retard the growth of the
+highest civilization in New York. Under the management of an agent, the
+character of the tenants in the courts changed rapidly, and the people who
+took possession added to the disreputable character of the Fourth Ward. For
+years before this the largest per cent. of the immigrants settling in New
+York settled in this section. They came with distorted notions as to their
+place in the new land. Liberty meant to the majority the right to follow
+their own will. When hunger and loneliness and nakedness forced them to
+reconsider their first conception of what America was, resentment,
+recklessness, or adaptability developed. The difference was a matter of
+temperament quite as much as of race.
+
+In 1880 the heads of the families living in the courts were day
+laborers--men who worked along the docks, coal shovelers, hucksters, women
+who did a day's work, sold newspapers at the ferries, or worked in the
+factories. Every child in the alley was ready to do anything that would
+earn money from the time he could walk. The people knew every benefit the
+city dispensed to the poor: free coal; homes available and how to get in
+them; free burial; every organization that dispersed charity, and how to
+get it. Even the children were clever in their extremities, and knew how to
+get assistance when the Island claimed their parents. From infancy the
+children looked forward to wage-earning as a time of happiness. School was
+a prison-house to be avoided, except when its warmth and shelter were
+preferable to the street, or the home, when intemperance and temper made
+life unendurable in it; then they attended school willingly. The truant
+officers in this region were not feared. They were the fags of the "boss,"
+not the officers of a city department. None of the fads of to-day, which so
+disturb the conservative people who see ruin of mental ability in modern
+educational systems, were then thought of. The kindergarten, nature study,
+manual training, were on the educational horizon of New York, in a cloud
+scarcely so large as a man's hand. The trustee system was in perfect
+working order. The teachers were what God made them, unhampered by the
+pressure of superintendent and supervisors to maintain standards.
+
+It was as true in that day as in 1892, when a man, wholly familiar with all
+the systems of education in the country, to the question, "Why is there
+such uniformity in the defects of the schools in the tenement-house
+regions?" replied, "They represent the demands of the people in the
+district who elect the men who control them. You will find that the public
+schools always represent the public sentiment and demands of the people
+interested in them."
+
+This was profoundly true of the schools in this region at this time. To-day
+there is scarcely any change in the buildings except that of added age. At
+least two of them are a disgrace to the city. But there is a great change
+in the system. To-day the civilizing force in this community is the public
+schools; the remnant does not attract the philanthropist. To the men and
+women of our public schools who, preserving the highest ideals, work with
+enthusiasm amid the most discouraging surroundings, the city owes a debt
+that money cannot repay.
+
+The liquor saloons numbered then about as they do now, occupying every
+available space. More elaborate now, perhaps, for they represent political
+headquarters, if not proprietorship, of men identified with the worst forms
+of political corruption; then, as now, openly used in the interest of these
+men. There is this great change, that children dare not now, as they did
+then, enter and leave these places fearlessly at any hour carrying pails,
+pitchers or bottles. It was then a neighborly kindness to let children thus
+serve a neighbor; it was a source of revenue to the children.
+
+The gangs were many and notorious in the ward. Frequent were the clashes
+and loyal the spirit with which assailed and assailants maintained silence
+if there was danger of arrest because of these conflicts. "To squeal" was
+to earn the contempt of the community. The number of crimes, the full
+measure of degradation, reached in this ward will never be known. The dense
+population of this ward is so hidden by business and traffic that in 1901
+the statement was made by some people interested in civic affairs that the
+region was given over to office buildings. The district of which the Fourth
+Ward is a part cast 10,000 votes in the mayoralty campaign of that year.
+Votes that represent a civilization as peculiarly its own as though oceans
+separated it from the people a mile and a half away.
+
+Target companies were the social clubs of that day, the forerunners of the
+political organizations of to-day. The climax of their existence were the
+annual excursions to some near-by grove for shooting matches. These matches
+were the great social occasions of the many "sets." The question of who was
+the reigning belle of the locality was settled beyond dispute by selection
+of one to present the wreath for the target, or a big bunch of flowers, to
+the captain of the target company on the day of the annual parade. These
+were always of artificial flowers, and were made gorgeous and splendid by
+floating strips and fringes of tinsel paper. The greatest feuds in the Ward
+have grown out of the selection of the fair lady to present these trophies.
+Her selection changed the political history of her friends often, and her
+knights' fists fought her cause, and crowned her, their wounds testifying
+to their devotion. The political "boss" of that period presented the
+organizations that acknowledged his leadership with silver mugs, castors or
+pitchers--prizes for the shooters--but he presented money to keep the
+balance of his popularity. The gifts were carried conspicuously over the
+route of the procession, which always stopped in front of the house of the
+lady, who was to express her favor in the gifts of floral trophies--usually
+paid for by the company, sometimes by her knight, or knights combined for
+her honor. This house was for the time being the center of interest for the
+crowd, as she was of envy or pride to the community. The day of the target
+parade was one that called for great sacrifice, that it might be attended
+by the requisite formalities and new clothes. Money must be raised to
+provide barouches for the great political lights of the ward who gave this
+particular company their favor; to pay the attendant colored men who
+carried the target and the water and tin cups; for the band with the drum
+major. All cost money, and money was scarce; but the prominence and
+pleasure paid; and the Fourth Ward had many of these organizations, which
+made life exciting, and at times dangerous, when their several groups met,
+each struggling for supremacy, each with a leader who must be defended.
+
+Fresh-air organizations, seaside resorts, were as unknown as trolleys;
+hundreds in the Fourth Ward lived and died without ever having seen Central
+Park or the ocean. The relief from the sufferings of summer was sitting and
+sleeping on the near-by piers. Man's humanity to man at this period of New
+York's social history was expressed in hospitals, infirmaries, homes of
+many kinds, distribution of food, clothes and medicine. The more
+applications secured for these sources of relief, the more tickets given
+out in a year at any point for outside relief, the more easy the conscience
+of the men who sent the money that maintained them, who measured the value
+of their charities by the figures representing human beings that appeared
+in the reports. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were then, as now,
+"round-ups" for the wretched, the needy and the lazy. The pleasure of the
+givers was greatly added to by watching the hungry eating.
+
+What caused the misery and wretchedness was no secret; but with few
+exceptions the men of money and brains were not ready to remove the
+prevailing and rooted cause. The exceptions were the men who, impressed by
+the example of Mr. Alfred T. White, leased the tenements known as Single
+and Double alley, or Gotham Court, the worst piece of property in what was
+acknowledged to be the worst ward in the city.
+
+It had grown more and more difficult to collect rents, and the destruction
+of the property by the tenants made any effort at repair futile. Lead pipe,
+brass faucets, were wrenched off and sold as rapidly as they were put in;
+banisters, stair-rails, blinds, even wooden floors had been used as
+firewood. The very bricks on the chimneys were used as missiles of offense
+and defense. The Double Alley boasted of a haunted house, which at times
+created the greatest excitement in the neighborhood because of mysterious
+noises and lights seen and heard at night. Again and again the house had
+been raided by the police and stolen goods recovered after the ghostly
+exhibits. The police showed to the brave of the neighborhood that sulphur
+and brimstone were the ghostly lights, and clever arrangements of ropes and
+pulleys and pans the source of the cries and groans that had frozen them
+with fear. It was useless. The next appearance of the lights and the sound
+of awful groans filled the neighborhood with terror.
+
+For obvious reasons the only source of water supply was a hydrant in the
+center of each alley. The only drainage was the sink sunk in front of it.
+When it is remembered that between five and six hundred people lived in
+these houses, the opportunities for cleanliness will be appreciated. All
+the water used was carried up and down stairs. That pans and pails of water
+were emptied from the windows without careful note of the passer-by beneath
+is not surprising. This naturally was not conducive to peace; but peace was
+not the aim of the people of the court; in fact, its disturbance varied the
+monotony of life in the alleys.
+
+[Illustration: THE SITE OF THE OLD RUNWAY.]
+
+Single Alley had a narrow opening from its rear, or western, end to
+Roosevelt Street. This was paved with brick sunken and broken. It was a
+dormitory for the drunken and homeless, a depository for all kinds of
+refuse. This alley was a runway. The entrance on the two streets offered
+every opportunity of escape to the fleeing fugitive from justice or
+vengeance. The code of honor of the alley was to speed the hunted and
+obstruct the hunter. The policeman entering the alley in pursuit of a
+transgressor knew his fate; he was a target for water, wood, coal, bricks
+and unlimited language; unexpected obstructions would be found in the
+alley, and the attentions he received when he tripped or fell were intended
+to increase the distance between the representative of law and order and
+the fleeing offender. He or she might or might not be a friend. The alley's
+activity in behalf of the fugitive was based on a new interpretation of the
+promised return of bread cast on the waters.
+
+No matter how bitter the feuds that divided the tenants in the alley, the
+appearance of a rent collector in the later days healed the breach, bridged
+the widest chasm. He was a common foe and to be downed by common consent.
+If abuse and defiance did not drive him beyond the gates, bricks dropped
+from the roofs, after a vigorous campaign of water and cooking utensils,
+conducted by the feminine contingent from the windows, usually
+accomplished his complete rout, not only for that time, but for the future.
+As the years passed on, it became almost impossible to get any agent to
+make the second attempt to collect rent from the tenants of the alleys.
+
+The home life of the people in the alley was interesting. Every inch of
+space was occupied. The families ranged from a childless old couple, past
+seventy, who had lived twenty-eight years in the Single Alley, to the boy
+and girl who had just started housekeeping on nothing at all. The women in
+the alleys had married, it was found, at about eighteen. They knew
+absolutely nothing of housekeeping. Many of them acknowledged that they had
+never made a fire before they married. The most elementary knowledge of
+cooking, sewing or the use of money was lacking. Of the two hundred and one
+mothers in the alley, one could cut and make the garments for herself and
+children; four could make bread--one did; one made soup sometimes, but
+could not remember the last time. Meals consisted of bread and coffee, or
+tea, with beer provided for "him" for breakfast and supper. Dinner was a
+"bit" of meat or fish, thought of and cooked between eleven and twelve; the
+cooking was frying. Potatoes were substituted for bread at this meal;
+rarely any other vegetable except Sunday. On that day, if there was money
+enough in the morning, dinner was of corned beef and cabbage, or bacon and
+cabbage. One family standing at the head of this community socially had
+meat three times each day. This family had in it five wage-earners. They
+paid four dollars a month rent for two rooms. The children had all been
+born and had grown to manhood and womanhood in the alley. As the writer was
+able to win the confidence of these people, it was evident that each mother
+was conscious that something was wrong that life yielded no better return.
+What was wrong? Where the remedy was to be found did not seem to interest
+them. The days drifted. Children ran half naked or in rags, while mothers
+sat in neighbors' rooms, stood in doorways, in the halls, or lounged in the
+alleys. There were homes in which neither needles, thread nor scissors
+could be found. The mother did not know how to use them. A pot and a frying
+pan were the only cooking utensils the most lavish closet revealed. Washing
+and scrubbing are laborious at any time, but when carrying water from ten
+to fifty feet on the level, then up one to four flights of stairs and down
+again is added to the labor, it is not astonishing that dishes, clothes and
+bodies were at all times freighted with disease and death. A knowledge of
+the relation between dirt and disease, cleanliness and health was not the
+general knowledge it is to-day. Their relation to moral elevation or
+degradation is barely understood to-day.
+
+The average weekly wages of the men living in the alleys at this period was
+between eight and nine dollars per week, and sometimes kept at the latter
+figure for weeks. It will be seen at once that the poverty, misery,
+degradation and dirt that kept life at the level it was in the alleys was
+due to some other cause than wages, for rent was only four dollars a month,
+when paid, and it was paid less than eight months of the year. Beer flowed
+in the alley; tin cans, pitchers, pails, went back and forth at all times
+of the day and night. It was the first errand on which the baby feet were
+sent. Every woman in the alley acknowledged that she had seen her husband
+drunk before she married him. She knew better how to manage him when he was
+drunk than when he was sober. A blow given in drink was not recorded
+against a husband either by the wife or her neighbors. A blow given when
+the man was sober was remembered and aroused pity and sympathy. Over
+seventy per cent. of the women drank to the point of unconsciousness. All
+used liquor. Of child training there was none. The act that was laughed at
+this hour brought a blow the next. Attending school was for the child to
+decide. If he wanted to go, he went. Usually lack of clothing shut out
+about half the children of school age in the alley.
+
+Mother love was largely a matter of animal instinct. While the baby
+depended on her for nourishment, she could be found with it in her arms at
+all times; it was, so far as life had a concentrated thought, her constant
+care. The moment the baby found its feet and used them, the child was cut
+loose and began his individual life. His standards, language, habits, were
+what his environment made them. His care, so far as the mother was
+concerned, was conducted on the lines of the least resistance. If the child
+was struck by an outsider, it raised the tiger in the mother; if ill, a
+burden to carry for which there was neither money nor knowledge; the mother
+had no strength and could not meet cares that demanded continuous thought;
+her mind was not trained to it. Health and disease were largely a matter of
+luck. Death brought pangs, but life was too much of a struggle for it to be
+a crushing blow, even when it was one's child. Children came and went too
+fast in the alleys for their coming or going to fill or empty even a
+mother's life.
+
+Not one woman in the alley could remember ever having an entire new outfit
+in her life, nor had any of her children; her first baby had worn garments
+that had been made for some more fortunate baby.
+
+Such was the dead level of existence lived in the alleys. Without the
+stimulus of drink it would be lethargy, and was when there was no money to
+treat or be treated. Pleasure? It was unknown outside of the beer can. If
+that did not give pleasure, why life was a hand-to-hand, hopeless struggle
+with homelessness, hunger and nakedness. In the alleys a fight became a
+pleasure and death a social opportunity. Even love seemed denied the people
+of the alleys. Marriage often was a part of the habitual drifting when not
+a matter of compulsion. Homes were established with no bond but that of
+law, and sometimes not that. That they even were what they were was a
+tribute to the fundamental morality that is the salvation of the civilized
+world.
+
+These were the people who had made the alleys between 1855 and 1880, when
+the owners of the estate gladly leased the property on a long lease. As has
+been stated, spasmodic attempts had been made to reclaim the property, to
+make it productive, but always by men acting for the owners; they never
+came in personal contact with the tenants. It is doubtful if they even had
+any conception of the effect of their delegated responsibility on the
+people, or had any knowledge of the change that resulted when the property
+ceased to have the personal supervision of the owner.
+
+The lessees put two ladies in control of the property. One or the other was
+to be found there each day.
+
+The tenants were notified that rent must be paid weekly; that the rooms
+would be white-washed and painted; that the agents would be at liberty to
+visit the rooms daily; that no child would be permitted to carry liquor on
+the premises; every bundle or basket carried by a child would be examined,
+and any liquor found would be emptied into the sink in the yard. Water
+would be put in the halls on each floor; destruction of property would mean
+eviction. All who were unwilling to accept these conditions were asked to
+move at once. The rent remained the same, four dollars per month for two
+rooms. Families desiring four rooms could have them for eight dollars per
+month, the company cutting a door through the party walls, giving direct
+ventilation through the floor, with windows opening on both alleys. The
+absolute impossibility of getting two equally good rooms in the
+neighborhood for the same rent kept the majority of the families. A few
+tacitly accepted the change, largely because acquiescence was their habit
+of mind, while some expected to set at naught any rules or regulations
+that they found obnoxious. No tenant moved voluntarily.
+
+The new ownership took possession with the same human beings who had
+occupied the houses for years. The first step was to insist on cleanliness.
+The alleys were swept and washed every morning, as were the halls and
+stairways. Garbage cans were provided and their use insisted on. Every can
+or bundle carried by a child was examined, and all liquors found in them
+were emptied into the sink in the yard. Quarrels and fights grew less
+frequent, especially among the women. The children attended school, for
+their appearance during school hours led to investigations that the
+majority of the tenants preferred to avoid. The aim was to establish such
+relations between the representatives of the company and the tenants as
+would give opportunities to reduce the ignorance and indifference that were
+quite as responsible, if not more responsible, for the misery in the homes
+than lack of money. The tenants held aloof. They were tenants because they
+could not get as much comfort for the money elsewhere; but there could be
+no friendship where the payment of rent was insisted upon, where
+drunkenness involved the risk of, and abuse of property positive, eviction.
+
+Several young couples were tenants. The aim and hope of the agents were to
+gain the confidence of these young mothers. The first child of one died
+late that summer. Potter's Field was the place of burial. The young father
+could have worked six days in the week, but that would have been slavery
+intolerable. He refused it, and followed his lifelong habit of drifting,
+which was also that of the young mother. She had never resented her
+husband's days of idleness until this baby died and there was not one cent
+to provide for the care and disposition of the little body. This was the
+opportunity of the two women who were waiting to prove that they were not
+oppressors. A little coffin, a white slip and socks, some flowers--at that
+time an unheard-of tribute to death--a carriage and a grave in the cemetery
+approved by the mother's church was provided. The battle was won. Every
+man, woman and child in the alley surrendered to this evidence of
+comradeship. That this act gave birth to hopes that must be stifled was
+natural. Rules must be enforced and comradeship expressed at the times of
+emergency. The first and hardest battle was won. Confidences were gained
+that led to marriages and baptisms that had been neglected or forgotten.
+The office, simply but tastefully furnished, became a school-room, where
+the mothers and the children learned to sew. Goods were bought in
+quantities and sold at cost to the learners. A sewing machine and a
+teacher appeared and were welcomed. Practical talks, or, more properly,
+conversations, were held; but no one took note of them as special efforts
+in philanthropy, they were so naturally a part of each day's experience.
+The daily visits to each tenant resulted in establishing relations that
+justified reproof, suggestion, commendation. The standards of pleasure,
+pain, suffering, accomplishment were elementary in the alleys. An hour's
+work with the needle left the worker exhausted, and diversion then meant
+moral safety. The homes were barren, and the acme of hope was wages to pay
+rent, buy food and clothes; the last rarely realized. The months, and even
+years, passed without the people passing beyond the confines of the ward.
+The generations lived this life, and it was a fixed habit. The world had
+nothing to offer to the habitual residents of the ward that the ward did
+not provide; it has but little to-day to offer them.
+
+In spite of the emptiness of life and barrenness of these homes, they were
+on the whole better than the homes of the preceding generation.
+
+When the wives laid the cause of their burdens on their husbands' shoulders
+because they drank, the question, "Did you know he drank when you married
+him?" would be answered easily, with no thought of self-condemnation,
+"Yes," in frank confession.
+
+"Do you drink?"
+
+"I drink beer, mostly. Sure, ye get discouraged just working and washing,
+and never a cent; not a decent rag to go on the street, and no place to go
+when you get there but a neighbor's house. What is there but a glass of
+beer? You don't mean to get drunk; yer that before ye know."
+
+This total lack of personal relation to life was me mental attitude of
+almost every woman. If she was a widow, she worked to make a home for her
+children, who, again and again, so often that it ceased to attract
+attention, heard how much harder life was because they were in it. This
+seemed the accepted attitude, and accounted for the expression on the faces
+of these children--a puzzled, hardened expression that blotted out all
+suggestion of childhood. That time was an element in the problem of life
+was not accepted. That the garment made at home would last longer and cost
+less was conceded; but what was the use of making things when they could be
+bought so cheaply. The total absence of reasoning powers was shown here. To
+make soup would mean staying at home, thinking and planning for hours in
+advance of a meal. The soup would cost no more than steak and provide two
+meals, but it would mean loneliness, when the time, through ignorance,
+could not be turned to interesting uses.
+
+There were women in these alleys, mothers of grown children, who could not
+tell a bias from a straight edge; who could not put a gingham apron
+together having straight and bias selvages. Beyond sewing on occasional
+buttons, there was no use in their minds for needles. They had worked in
+tin factories. They had worked at all kinds of employment that called into
+play the minimum amount of brains and the maximum of muscles. Not one woman
+was found who before her marriage had worked in any line of employment that
+had the slightest connection with the arts of home-making. The wages they
+earned was that of unskilled labor, in lines of employment known to be
+intermittent. Wages, large or small, went into the common family fund. The
+future was not a matter of care. When all in the family worked, life was
+lived merrily; when hard luck came, life was lived stoically. This spirit
+went into the home of the wage-earners when they married. There was far
+less physical suffering than the privations of their lives made natural.
+Often these limitations were self-imposed; there was money enough to give
+life color and purpose, if only there had been knowledge to guide in the
+adjustment between necessities and income; a conception of time as an
+element in the financial problem.
+
+[Illustration: YOUR CHOICE.]
+
+The closer one entered into the individual life, the more clearly was it
+revealed that the problems of poverty grew out of the inability to see the
+relations of things, to comprehend life in its entirety. Even after two
+years of close relation with these people in the alleys, it was with the
+utmost caution and tact that the subject of free coal could be broached. It
+was then distributed by the city--an intimate source of political
+corruption. A large quantity of coal was purchased and put in the cellar.
+It was offered to the tenants at the same price the grocer sold it by the
+pail, with the difference that it was delivered in the rooms. First, pride,
+a desire to appear somewhat above the neighbors, moved to independence on
+the coal question. In two years' time free coal was in the category of
+disgraces in the alley, and marked a rising moral tide.
+
+A young woman and her husband were special objects of attention to the
+agents. They were young, good-looking, bright, and, when sober, ambitious
+as their conception of life made possible. Both drank, the woman more than
+the man, and she sank lower when drunk. For years she had spent more time
+on the Island than off it. What could be done? The whitewashing and
+painting of the two hopelessly barren rooms seemed to bring the woman to a
+pause. It was not possible to get beer through a neighbor's child now, and
+until she was drunk this woman would not go into a saloon. The clean alley,
+washed every morning, by some process of reasoning seemed to demand
+corresponding effort indoors, and the barren rooms were never dirty when
+the woman was sober. Even this gave employment to hands that had never used
+a needle, therefore less time was spent lounging in the doorway or other
+rooms. The washing of clothes, though ragged and few, took time and
+centered the interest, if but for a short time. The look of utter weariness
+and indifference in the face of the woman was slowly disappearing. There
+was really a purpose in life; the four walls and little else that was home
+required thought and effort. Life had an object at last. But the devil of
+drink was not so easily conquered; she was gone one morning from home. The
+neighbors explained to the agents her absence, being familiar with the
+habits of the type. In court she listened again indifferently to "Ten
+dollars or ten days." This time a woman came forward, paid the ten dollars,
+and Agnes was free. Surprised, dumb-stricken, wondering why, Agnes followed
+the friend home. New clothes, simple, suitable, were waiting for her. Then
+the fight began. At times it was hourly. Work was provided that the clumsy,
+untrained hands could do. The proceeds were to pay for a new carpet, that
+had to be unrolled many times to hold Agnes from the street. At last it was
+down, and the two friends added a rocker and a picture. Tom was a new man,
+and every penny of his wages came home. All this time the prosperity of the
+couple was viewed by most of the people as due to passing "good luck." That
+there was a moral battle being fought did not seem to enter their
+consciousness. Four years later, on the stairway, the writer saw Agnes with
+her beautiful baby boy, her first-born, on her arm. The comprehension of
+what the sight must have been on the Mount of Transfiguration has always
+been clearer when the expression on the face of Agnes, as she met the woman
+who had fought for her salvation for time and eternity, is recalled. Two
+years had passed since Agnes had tasted liquor in any form. Her passionate
+devotion to her baby, her new knowledge of the arts of home-making, kept
+her so busy that Agnes was rarely a visitor to her neighbors, except in the
+case of sickness. Tom's love of liquor seemed limited; largely a matter of
+companionship or discouragement. When his home became a center of interest
+to Agnes, his buoyant nature responded to the new environment. When liquor
+disappeared from the home, it ceased to be a constant temptation. Outside
+of his home Tom found for a time that his new departure attracted to him
+unpleasant attention, guying, teasing, coaxing, which he met with jokes.
+Force as an inducement to make him drink was met by blows; and Tom struck
+heavily. The new impulse for a better life brought heavy social penalties
+on Tom and Agnes. It meant nothing in common with those about them. When a
+man and woman will neither treat nor be treated at that social level social
+ostracism follows. Their home was the refuge of the children driven by
+frenzied, drunken parents from their own homes. What they had they shared
+with the children when the parents were on the Island. When sickness came
+to homes in the alleys, Tom and Agnes could be relied upon to share and
+help in carrying the added burdens. Tom's muscles and the knowledge of
+their power saved many a wife from blows that, without Tom, would have
+fallen freely. Back of their every effort stood the two wise women who were
+redeeming this corner of the great city. The day came when Tom and Agnes
+realized the boy must grow up in a different neighborhood, and Tom and
+Agnes moved.
+
+The making of a laundry compelled the removal of a childless couple who had
+occupied their rooms over thirty years. It was impossible to make them
+accept the fact that the children could play in the alley under the new
+_régime_. For years the old woman and her stick were familiar to the sight
+and the feelings of the children of the alley. "I'm in Dixie's Land. Dixie
+ain't home!" had been shouted under their windows, at their room door,
+which was very near the alley door, to bring them out in torrents of rage.
+As age made the old couple less fleet and more quarrelsome, the daring of
+the children grew, and any time of the day or night the conflict between
+the old couple and the children, in which parents figured, was a
+possibility. Peace became impossible. The decision was final; the old
+couple must go; their rooms were necessary to the new improvements. It was
+pathetic to discover that no amount of persuasion would make the old couple
+live north of Roosevelt Street; it meant a lowering in their social world.
+"I've always lived respectable, and I always will. I would not live in that
+block," announced the old woman, with conscious pride. Even the alley, it
+was found, had standards of residence, a line that must not be crossed, to
+maintain respectability.
+
+By this time the mental attitude of every woman in the alleys had changed
+toward her home. Positive determination to overcome inertia, or ambition to
+excel, it was impossible to create. Innate predilections were the chief
+factor in individual development among the women. What a woman liked to do
+she attempted to learn how to do, or what she found she could do most
+easily. Some would learn to cook who absolutely refused to sew; some would
+sew who refused to cook; some would take care of the babies while the
+mothers were learning who would neither cook nor sew, feeling they could do
+both well enough; these it was impossible to make home-makers. The shackles
+of the past could never be thrown off wholly by the home-makers in the
+alleys. The children responded; could be won by personal affection, by
+prizes, by the mother's insistence. For it was soon learned that nimble
+fingers in the home lightened the mother's work; but the mothers were the
+unwilling victims of their own past.
+
+The use of money was the most difficult lesson of all to teach. If there
+was money, the food was bought lavishly; pennies were given freely to the
+children. If there was no money, the barrenness was accepted even
+cheerfully. Wages were given at the maximum weekly amount remembered. No
+deductions were made for idle days. It requires a knowledge of advanced
+arithmetic to adjust intelligently forty weeks of wages to fifty-two weeks
+of expenses. It requires more than an elementary knowledge of arithmetic to
+adjust five days' wages to the seven days' expenses, fixed and emergency,
+of a growing family. When a week comes that brings six or seven days'
+wages, is it a marvel that in view of the many weeks of imposed
+restrictions this week of wealth should be welcomed as a period of freedom
+from care? That the money should be lavishly used? It takes the ability to
+think, to connect cause and effect, imagination, to see possible results,
+memory of experiences to hold men and women constantly in check, and this
+means mental training. Not a woman in the alley had attended school
+regularly during even the short period of her school life; each one had
+gone to work the moment she could earn money. Neither she nor any one about
+her questioned the value of the work she found to do beyond the money it
+gave at once. Nobody ever thought of the present as in relation to the
+future. Now that she was a mother, she met life the same way. Her children
+must earn money. To make sacrifices that their wage-earning capacity in the
+future might be greater would, if suggested to her, have been merely an
+evidence of how little the rich know of life. What was the estimate of life
+these mothers in the alley made? The differences between them were
+external, not mental. One answers for nearly all. To get as much comfort
+out of to-day as possible and to-morrow work hard, and be careful. To the
+majority that to be used to-morrow never came. When plenty came, it was
+always to-day--a glad, free day that might never come again.
+
+At the end of four years but four of the tenants of the alleys who were
+tenants when the lease was executed had been evicted. The death rate had
+lowered from 85 to 22 per cent. The tenants rarely appeared in the police
+courts. Wife-beating created excitement and indignation. But in spite of
+the awakening, a moral, mental, physical inertia, stagnation, held more
+than the majority of the tenants in control. There was spasmodic response;
+but the painful truth had to be accepted that there must be redemptive
+power within to respond to redemptive conditions without before the home
+could be vitalized with the spirit of hope and energy. Fifty years and more
+of neglect and indifference cannot be overcome in five years of moral
+activity exerted to overcome the evils man neglected to prevent.
+
+The alleys are gone; some tenants drifted to other scenes, more settled in
+the tall, dark tenements that have sprung up through the whole district,
+the worst type erected in New York. The rear buildings abound even back of
+the tall factories, reached by dark, noisome alleys. No amount of care or
+repair could save the old houses. They have gone the way of all material
+things. Their history is a part of the social and political history of New
+York.
+
+How slowly moral sentiment grows in a large city is shown by the years that
+elapsed before active measures were taken to redeem what was known as a
+plague spot, a menace to the body politic, a constant source of moral
+degeneracy.
+
+The Citizens' Association, organized in 1864, through its Council of
+Hygiene and Public Health, districted the city for special investigation by
+sanitary experts. One of these gives a large part of his report to Gotham
+Court, and presents sectional drawings to show the impossibility of
+securing proper sanitary conditions for the people living in the notorious
+houses. It seems incredible that these conditions once known should not
+have aroused public interest to the point of action. Nothing was done. The
+physical and moral degeneracy continued until 1880, when a few private
+individuals made the experiment of redemption. Even this came when the
+houses had gone beyond the point of reclaiming. On the site of the old
+buildings rises a new business building.
+
+Not far away two of the most brutal and atrocious murders of recent years
+in New York have occurred. In July, 1901, three blocks from the old
+buildings, in broad daylight, a man known to be the collecting agent for
+property in the neighborhood was robbed by three members of a well-known
+gang. The children are thin, precocious. Their language, even in their
+play, is vulgar, coarse, profane. Babies have at their command strange
+oaths, probably never heard elsewhere. The streets are neglected, the
+sidewalks uneven and broken. For almost half a century this region has had
+a reputation peculiar to itself. Efforts have been made to reach the
+people, but they have not been persistent. Even the church efforts are
+perfunctory, as though faith as to the redemptive power in this people did
+not exist.
+
+This fact remains: within the boundaries of this region lives a community
+that is shaping the political control of New York City and State, and will
+for years to come. It has its traditions of loyalty; it has fixed standards
+of its own peculiar privileges; its standards of rights. The very police of
+the region expect certain things to occur; misdemeanors of a certain
+character that would bring punishment anywhere else are passed by here;
+they are part of the civilization of the region. Snuggled down under the
+shadow of the bridge and the elevated road, a center of business interests
+which the moral standards of the residents do not affect, because their
+activities, other than of the muscles, are not exercised until carts,
+drays, drivers, clerks, proprietors have gone northward or across the
+river. The community lives within itself, has created its own standards,
+and is New York in its own estimation.
+
+Writing of the people in this section in 1865, a sanitary expert quotes
+with an apology a medical term common in the hospitals and dispensaries as
+a disease of the people in this section, "tenement-house rot." The term
+has, perhaps, in the interests of civilization, died out; but no one can
+walk through these streets, observing the faces of the people, and not
+realize that the old, unsanitary, germ-laden tenements of this section have
+produced a physical condition peculiar to this region, as it has a moral
+degeneracy that is peculiarly its own. The section, as a whole, has not
+attracted the philanthropist. He is wise in his day and generation and puts
+forth his efforts where the tide of humanity is rising, and not falling,
+even though it means three or four generations before the tide is out.
+
+New York has a gospel all its own. Work where the crowds are greatest, that
+the printed reports may count people in great numbers, for ye gain dollars
+thereby. New York counts the remnant only at the polls, and ignores the
+penalty her indifference imposes on her own advancement.
+
+The opening years of the century hold promise that there is at least a
+partial realization of the solidarity of the interest of the people. That
+conditions make for degradation in the homes means degradation of citizens;
+and this means burdens laid, not on the sections where the homes and the
+citizens are found, but on the whole city. What altruism has not
+accomplished, selfishness may. It may be that where all else has failed,
+intelligent politics may redeem, and the section again may be the center of
+the moral as well as commercial activity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS.
+
+
+The centralization of the interests of the tenement-house population is not
+understood by those who broaden their mental, if not their active, interest
+by reading and travel; who in the varied interest of a broader life are
+forced to see the multiplicity of factors that enter into the settlement of
+every problem. This is what we mean by knowing the relation of things;
+marking the distinction between those who see only and those who
+comprehend. The man who is a machine set in the place where he bears his
+relation to the whole by an authority which he dares not question loses all
+opportunity to comprehend his relation to that whole. He is interested in
+immediate results as related to himself only. This is the relation which
+the mass of the tenement-house workers and voters bear to life.
+
+The people of whole sections live entirely within certain geographical
+lines, every interest centered within these limits.
+
+The race sections are logical, based on the law of natural selection; of
+family interest. The first generation of immigrants naturally hold the
+second generation of home-makers near them, and these together hold the
+relatives and friends who follow. Three generations are not infrequently
+found in the same house, each maintaining its own home. The new arrivals
+keep alive the foreign home traditions, the foreign home habits of living.
+Poverty and greed make the people crowd together. The last arrivals are
+taught what their predecessors have learned of American life and law. The
+race section perpetuates itself; it retains all that it can of the old
+life, and interprets the new according to the lessons learned from
+environment, and power as it is exercised on the people. Each race section
+has its own thoroughfare. The people on the street use their own language,
+and trade in shops of their own countrymen. In some sections newspapers are
+published in the language of the section, giving prominence to the local
+news. Were it not for the public schools, one wonders what would be the
+result of this race centralization.
+
+[Illustration: SATURDAY MORNING ON THE EAST SIDE.]
+
+The writer once met a man who had voted for twenty-three years in one ward.
+For sixteen of these years he had cast his vote from one house in Orchard
+Street. He had never been farther north than Houston Street, farther south
+than Hester and had never crossed the Bowery. He had positive convictions
+on every subject relating to the ward; he knew the life history of every
+political leader in that portion of the city; could rehearse the disasters
+that had followed every man who failed to fall in line at the polls; knew
+what saloon-keepers were forced to obey the law, and who "didn't care a
+cent" for the law; knew why this man could put his goods on the walk and
+why the other man could not. He protected his own two daughters from the
+evils of his home environment as he saw them; was strict to rigorousness
+about their home-coming; watched the kind of people who moved into the
+house in which he lived, and doubtless kept it above the average of the
+neighborhood by his watchfulness. But he did not know who was President of
+the United States, and did not consider it the business of the poor man. He
+refused a "job" under the city, because he didn't want to be "beholden." It
+was all right for the man who needed a job to take it. The only grievance
+the man had was that the Hebrews were crowding into the neighborhood. This
+was an invasion of his personal rights; they had their own place on the
+south side of Grand Street, as the Italians had west of the Bowery, and
+coming into that region north of Grand Street was an intrusion on the
+personal rights of himself and his countrymen. The first thing which would
+happen, if they--his own people--did not look sharp, would be the Hebrews
+would have a say in politics. The man's mental attitude is typical of the
+race settlement, the race political rights theory in many sections of New
+York; the difference is only in the race dominant.
+
+This man was a porter, who for seventeen years was employed in an East Side
+department store, working in a sub-cellar nine hours a day for nine dollars
+a week. He could not read, though he came to this country when five years
+of age. He became a wage-earner at eleven. His daughters became
+wage-earners at fourteen, having attended public schools until that age.
+The pride with which this man referred to his daughters' education made one
+comprehend the gradual absorption by the foreign peoples who come to us of
+American ideas. Those girls knew they were not educated; they had been
+forced to contrast their mental equipment with that of the "club ladies,"
+as they called the residents at the College Settlement, where the club of
+which they were members met. They, too, had been satisfied until brought
+into relationship with those who represented another world. The revelation,
+because of contact with the minds of these college-trained women, showed
+them, so far as they could comprehend it, their own lack of mental
+training, the first step in their true education.
+
+Women are by nature more conservative than men; they cling longer to early
+traditions and habits; find it more difficult to adopt new habits of
+thought. The more closely they are surrounded by people of their own way of
+life, their own habits of thinking, the more strongly intrenched are they
+in the customs and habits of their native country, the less are the homes
+they regulate modified by the new environment. The result is that whole
+sections of New York to-day are as foreign as the villages from which the
+people in them came. There are women in New York whose children and
+grandchildren were born in the city who cannot speak English, nor
+understand it beyond the merest assent or dissent. Their lives in old age
+are pitiable.
+
+A sweet, motherly German once said to the writer, and but a short time ago:
+"I am so lonely. I cannot speak English. I never learn it. I sit in my
+daughter's house, where German is not used. The children all want to be
+Americans; they will not talk German. When I sit at the table, I never
+speak. They all talk, but I do not understand. Sometimes I ask, and the
+children say they have not time to tell me. They buy only the English
+papers, and so I cannot read. I wish I had learned English when I first
+came. I was young then, but I had eight children after I came here, and I
+did everything for them. I could not take the time, I thought. I see now
+the children could have taught me. Now they have not the time." This woman
+was a German in her sympathies, her interests, her standards. Positive race
+antagonism existed between her and her family. She measured everything by
+German life and rule, and lived a critic among a people her own only in
+blood. In answer to the question, she explained that her husband learned
+English for his "work." The family attended the mission church when they
+attended church. She attended the German services, but the rest of the
+family, even her husband, the English services. Her constant plaint was: "I
+am so lonely. Some day I never speak all day. At the table they speak
+English."
+
+Hundreds of women like this one sit in homes in New York in which they have
+no part, barred out by the fact that they speak a foreign tongue. One of
+the mistakes made in even our church work has been the maintaining of
+distinctive church services in a foreign tongue. In so far as the churches
+have done this, they have been an obstruction to good citizenship for time,
+whatever they may have accomplished for eternity, for the people they call
+their own.
+
+One of the most earnest of missionary workers in New York, an American
+citizen born in Italy, protested vigorously to the writer on the policy of
+maintaining church services in New York in a foreign tongue. "You cannot
+make a united people using many languages. I would preach that to the
+people all the time. I use English words in my sermons to my own people,
+and I tell them to learn English; it is better for them in business. The
+women ought to learn, for they lose their children. They go away from them
+because they do not speak the English. In New York they are the victims of
+oppression, my people, because they cannot speak English. They have to bow
+the head to the yoke because they are foreigners in a strange land in which
+they vote. It is a great wrong to them and to the country. It makes the
+'boss.'"
+
+The first interest of the mother in the tenement, as of the mother
+everywhere, is the support of her children; to get for them all that she
+can. She would prefer that her husband should be honest, which may mean
+that the only dishonesty of which she has any comprehension is stealing
+money or other tangible property. In politics the tenement-house women have
+only a secondary interest. They accept without question the statements of
+their male relatives as to issues and men. Even this degree of interest
+represents only the most intelligent of the tenement-house women. The
+charge that a man used his political position and affiliations to further
+his own advancement, that he purchased the votes and enthusiasms of less
+clever voters, would mean to the women educated in their conception of
+right and wrong under the systems of machine politics that the man was
+intelligent and trying to do the best he could for his family and his
+friends. To say that he refused to rally voters to support the party that
+gave him a position because he was convinced that the party was dishonest
+in the use it made of the victory it gained at the polls, would arouse the
+deepest contempt for the man. He would be considered not only untrue to his
+family, but to his friends. Had he remained in close relation to the
+politicians who gave him his chance, he would not only provide for his
+family, but his friends would have the benefit of his influence; he could
+give them a chance in time.
+
+[Illustration: THE PAST, PRESENT AND MIDDLE PERIOD.]
+
+The man of brains they see drop his tools, take off his overalls and stand
+in high hat, and eventually frock-coat, the center of a crowd of men who
+smile at his nod, though they worked shoulder to shoulder but a short time
+ago--in a trench, perhaps; yes, even came over in the same ship with him.
+The women do not understand the process of evolution, but they see the
+results. They soon know that from street sweeper to car conductor, the man
+who has become a politician under a strong partisan government regulates,
+and often decides, the wage-earning opportunities of the greater portion of
+the men in the tenement-house sections. They learn, these women, that it is
+not a question of how faithful the worker is in the discharge of his duty
+that insures him work, but that it is some mysterious influence they call
+"politics," that means work and wages or no work and no wages, and
+suffering. This conception of the relation of the petty politician to the
+voters' chance to earn even a meager and uncertain living under the sway of
+his influence rarely excites more than passing indignation from the women
+who suffer most because of the system. When the women of the politician's
+family grow arrogant and snobbish, then the floods of eloquence break loose
+for a time, and the listener may learn many things of which he would
+otherwise be ignorant. The increased power of the petty henchman rarely
+enables him to change the way of living of his family. Sometimes he does
+not when he can, for he knows that he increases his power as he lives on
+the level of the average voter in his district. The less conscience he
+has, the more patient he is in waiting for the day when his district is
+only one factor in his political strength.
+
+Even the little children reveal deference to the family of the man who is
+known to have "pull." There came to an East Side library one afternoon a
+little girl better dressed than any child who had yet appeared there. She
+was impudent, noisy, aggressive. In the game-room she cheated in the games,
+and finally broke up several games of checkers and dominoes by pushing over
+the boards. No child resented this. The little girl when spoken to seemed
+astonished by the reprimand. As she was leaving, the writer said to her: "I
+am sorry, little girl, but I shall have to tell you that you must not come
+here again unless you mean to obey; you must not talk in the reading-room,
+and in the games you must play fair. I hope I shall not have to tell you
+not to come here again." The child stared in astonishment. She went out on
+the street. In a few minutes several little girls who had frequented the
+rooms for months came running back in great excitement, one saying
+breathlessly: "Why, that little girl's father is a school trustee; she does
+just as she likes in school." "Yes," added another, "and now she says she
+won't come here any more. She's awful mad." From her point of view this was
+a calamity. "Well, I hope she will not come if she cannot behave," was the
+comment made. The children stood aghast. The trustee system had been
+abolished in New York at least two years when this incident occurred. Later
+the writer found that the father was in the council of Tammany Hall.
+
+A boy of the same neighborhood rang the bell, interfered with children
+leaving the house, and broke the windows. The time for kindly persuasion
+ended. When the members of a woman's club in that section using that house
+were consulted, it was made perfectly clear to the writer that worse
+troubles would follow if the boy were arrested, for he would not be
+detained and he would be more ugly than ever. His father was a ward leader
+who had formerly been a street sweeper, then foreman of the gang, etc.,
+going through the gradations that mark the making of the minor "boss." This
+boy bullied little children, stole their toys, would break up their games.
+Yet to have him join in their play was evidently an honor which they bore
+much to retain. He was only fourteen, yet he was found to be the leader of
+a gang of boys in the most disgusting immoralities. Even this did not rouse
+the mothers of the neighborhood to fight for their children's protection.
+The boy was spreading immorality of a disgusting nature through a whole
+neighborhood. The evil he wrought was told in tears in private, but denied
+in public through fear of the father's power in preventing the accusers'
+husbands and sons from getting work--one result of the Tammany system that
+enslaves homes and blasts the innocence of little children in New York.
+
+A clever, hard-working Irish woman was once telling the writer the story of
+her life and that of her children. At the time she was deeply interested in
+the future of four nephews, who were the motherless sons of her brother.
+Out of her experience with sons-in-law she enunciated her conclusions: "I
+tell me brother, don't let them b'ys learn politics; it's a mighty poor
+thrade. Sure, when Tammany's in they're all right; but when Tammany's out,
+where are they? Sure, it's a mighty poor thrade, as I learnt to me sorrer.
+Betther have them blacksmiths, sez I, like their grandfather at home. I do
+hope he be's listening to me, for they're foine b'ys." It will be easier
+for the four "b'ys" to learn politics than any other "thrade," for it is an
+open union making one demand, obedience to the "boss."
+
+To this woman Tammany was an employer good to the poor man--a doctrine that
+is taught to the smallest boy. He breathes it in the air; he nurses it in
+the milk that nourishes him. As he gets older he adds a new article to his
+faith. The Tammany system is the protector of his liberties. It does not
+restrict him in his right of private judgment. As one studies the race
+sections, the discovery is made that hundreds of votes are cast for Tammany
+candidates in the belief that obnoxious restrictions on the sale of liquor
+on Sundays will be removed, or that the laws will not be enforced. The hope
+of raising the moral tone of the voters is futile while any portion of them
+justify the casting of a ballot for the sole reason that it will make it
+possible for the voter to break the law with impunity. The most
+demoralizing legislation is that which makes a man a sneak as well as a
+law-breaker. May the day be hastened when no man who stands in moral
+rectitude in the presence of man and God will be forced to maintain what he
+believes his rights in defiance of the law. We are a cosmopolitan country,
+owing power and greatness to the sons and daughters of many lands. The
+Puritan conception of government is out of place to-day. The larger
+conception of man not controlled by the law, but the master in himself of
+the restraints it would place upon him, is the American conception of
+manhood, and toward this the best legislative action must trend. Thinking
+men and women who have studied the social conditions of New York know that
+no more calamitous influence is set in motion in New York than a sense of
+injustice that protects and justifies to the people the breaking of a law.
+When this goes farther, and any considerable number of the citizens combine
+for the purpose of overcoming it by defying or by ignoring it, the
+foundations of the government are threatened. It is time for fanaticism to
+feel the pressure of broad-minded balanced public opinion. A law
+administered at the demand and according to the conscience of people
+unaffected by its administration, used by them against an equally
+intelligent class who feel that personal liberty has been curtailed at the
+expense of their right of judgment, is class legislation. No greater evil
+influence has been active in New York than the creating of a sentiment that
+endorsed the breaking of the liquor laws. It has been a prolific source of
+blackmail; it has enabled politicians, who live at the public expense, to
+pose to men whose personal right of judgment had been curtailed as the
+apostles of freedom. The short-sighted friends of temperance have by their
+misdirected activities created political capital for the men who in
+official life have made New York's problems.
+
+Legislation enacted without the will of the people governed is provocative
+of two things: contempt and defiance of the law; unrest that makes for
+antagonism to government. The lower in the scale of reason the voter is,
+the less able he is to get any point of view but his own. His comprehension
+of the rights of others depends on the comprehension of his rights
+expressed in the law designed for his regeneration. He certainly never goes
+higher in the scale of reason while he defies the law in satisfying his
+sense of justice and freedom; he cannot rise in the scale of living while
+he stoops to acts he would avoid if his sense of justice were not outraged.
+He justifies his act because of his sense of oppression. He cannot respond
+to any effort looking to the general good of the city while he smarts under
+a sense of liberties curtailed by the very people who ask for his help.
+
+When President Roosevelt was Police Commissioner he enforced the law
+governing the sale of liquor on Sunday. The city was torn asunder for
+weeks. The discussion filled the columns of the daily press. The fact,
+after weeks of discussion with one group of tenement-house women--all the
+wives of skilled workers--was finally made clear that the law was at fault,
+if fault there was, not the Commissioner. The law, if bad, must be
+repealed; but as long as it was the law it must be enforced. During this
+discussion much light was obtained. One woman told how cleverly the law
+was evaded by the liquor dealer two doors from her house. He hired the back
+room on the top floor of the house next door, keeping the liquor in a
+closet. The men in the secret entered the house two doors distant, went up
+to the roof and down the scuttle to the room where the liquor was to be
+had. Some of the group listened to her description with flashing eyes. When
+she finished she was given to understand that she had played the part of
+traitor. It was all right for her to do it. She was safe. Her husband was
+in a good, independent position; it made no difference to him how much
+trouble came because of her "telling tales." To others it was a disgrace
+that men who had only a few cents to spend for a little pleasure with their
+friends should have to sneak like thieves, as one of the women expressed
+it. All condemned having the liquor in their own homes in quantities, as
+they condemned the illegal selling. "When a man sneaks in like that he
+stays longer and spends more than when he can walk in openly and walk out
+again as he does other days. When he has it in the house he never stops
+treating and drinking until it's gone." The "free lunch" was deplored; but
+every one of the forty-five women decided that it was the only meal fit to
+eat that hundreds of laboring men ever had; that men were forced to eat at
+lunch counters in barrooms and buy liquor who would never go there if
+their mothers and wives knew how to cook. They claimed that the women would
+cook for their families if they knew how. They did not know how. They were
+forced to go to work in factories as soon as they left school, and never
+had a chance to learn anything about housekeeping; their mothers never knew
+how to keep house. Could a stronger argument for domestic science teaching
+in our public schools be advanced?
+
+When the High License bill was before the Legislature at Albany several
+years ago, the writer was asked to speak at a mothers' meeting in one of
+the poorest sections of what was then the city of Brooklyn. On her way to
+the mission she counted nineteen liquor saloons on three blocks; in every
+case they were on the lower floor of a tenement house. The hall was over a
+pork and provision store; a loft without any attempt at more than broom
+cleanliness, walls bare, grimy, and seeming to ooze grease. The atmosphere
+of smoked meat was sickening. Nothing in the way of a shelter could have
+been more barren and repellent, yet it was a mission maintained by a
+church.
+
+About one hundred women--the wives of day laborers and longshoremen--were
+present. Some were bareheaded: several with babies in their arms. The
+subject chosen was the High License bill. It was a discussion. At least ten
+of the women spoke. The scene will never be forgotten. One woman, about
+thirty, after listening intently, rose with a baby on her arm, and turning
+passionately to those in the hall, said: "Why don't yer talk honest? Every
+one of us drink. Some of us, not many, drink because we love it. Most of us
+drink because we're discouraged and don't know what else to do. We're
+fools; it don't help us; it makes it worse. Some of us would never touch it
+if it were not brought to us. We know that anything that would take away
+the drink from our doors would save us. Drive them out!" She turned to the
+platform appealingly. "Drive them out, so that we, yes, and the men, would
+have to walk four or five blocks to them, and we'll be different. It is
+easy sending the children now. Make it harder! Make it harder!"
+
+"Shall we close them?"
+
+"You couldn't do it," she said. "You couldn't do that. Make it cost more to
+start them, and there won't be so many. They'll be farther apart, and they
+won't try so hard to make us drink. Many a woman has learned to drink
+because she had to pass the holes to get to her home. Tell the truth like
+me, or say whether I'm telling the truth!" was her appeal to the audience.
+
+The flood-gates were opened. Every woman agreed with the first speaker that
+the saloon could never be abolished; it could be regulated. Beer, they
+thought, to most women was a greater temptation than strong liquors. The
+number of saloons near their homes they thought the heaviest burden the
+poor man's family had to bear. They understood perfectly that the brewers
+paid for the licenses, and that the saloons were the meeting places where
+votes were controlled. They thought the saloons ought to be open at least
+Sunday afternoon, but they would have them close earlier Saturday night.
+They thought that any law that made a man a sneak to get a drink was an
+evil. They saw that such a law enabled the politician to say which man
+could sell liquor and which could not. One of them, who could neither read
+nor write, had discovered that the saloons selling a certain brewer's beer
+had more freedom than any of the saloons selling other beers; they thought
+the saloon-keepers paid either in money or drinks for the votes of the men
+who frequented their places in the interest of the politicians who owned
+the saloons or protected them. There was not the slightest evidence that
+one woman there saw any dishonesty in the system. There were no principles
+in politics, only men. Things remained with them the same no matter who was
+elected. It was a district which was under the control of one party, having
+an unquestioned majority, which steadily increased through the efforts of a
+shrewd leader who had no visible means of support.
+
+The section in which this group of women lived was a long, narrow strip
+bordering on the East River. The residences of a population each occupying
+its own house at this time held the reeking tenements in check on the east.
+Within ten years this has been wholly changed. The handsome old residences
+have become tenement houses, overcrowded, uncared for, occupied by people
+now at the level of former despised neighbors. The better class of the
+laborers' families have left the houses bordering on the river, and these
+have been given over to the poorest and most hopeless of the day laborers.
+There is a thoroughfare which has stores brilliantly lighted for five
+blocks. Every want of the people can be supplied in them. The people, old
+and young, settle placidly in the region. It is their world. The language
+of the little children on the streets, from early morning until late at
+night, is appalling. A kindergarten was started, but the people who started
+it did not have money enough to secure the right kind of a room, nor to
+make the room attractive, nor to keep it so clean that that would in itself
+make it more attractive than the homes of the children. It was finally
+given up, because even the small amount expended was not forthcoming at the
+end of the third year. It could have had four times the number of children
+the room would accommodate at one time, but no one cared enough to support
+it.
+
+[Illustration: A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL.]
+
+The half-grown boys are coarse-looking, use profane and coarse language
+unknowingly in their ordinary conversation on the street. Their attitude
+toward girls is brutal. The girls of this section are free in their
+manners, slangy and coarse in their conversation. They earn the lowest
+wages paid to women in the factories and lofts that abound in the region.
+The schoolhouses are old and dark; the streets are neglected and dirty. The
+smoky, grimy mission-room disappeared long ago. Not one influence is at
+work to raise the general moral tone of this community, the voting power of
+which outnumbers four to one regions where every influence in and out of
+the homes tends to develop moral standards and political intelligence in
+the same political unit.
+
+The region is a social plague spot, neglected and allowed to spread. It
+does not present as a special feature to arouse activity the evils of the
+"Red Light" district, but only the blasting influence of a region sunk in
+the apathy of deadened moral natures, killed by the hopelessness of
+changing the environment of their homes until it represents all they ask of
+life. The poverty of the people makes well-nourished bodies impossible, and
+lack of physical power makes moral resistance impossible.
+
+Recently in one of the most crowded of the tenement-house sections of New
+York, where the grip of poverty holds degradation, where the people live as
+remote from American civilization as when in their own land, the writer
+viewed the parade in the evening of the voters of the district, who had
+been the guests of the district leader, a State Senator, at an outing.
+These outings are the annual "round-ups" of the voters. The expenses of
+these outings run into the five figures, it is said, in this district.
+Boats and a grove are hired. Chowder, coffee, sandwiches and beer are
+provided free. Games of chance, to which, it is whispered, the district
+leaders are not disinterested observers, and athletics are the features of
+the outings. The return at night is an occasion for fireworks and a parade.
+Caps and canes are provided for the voters often; sometimes only a ribbon
+badge. The expenses are met by the sale of tickets, which sometimes sell
+as high as five dollars. These tickets the liquor dealers, in fact, the
+tradesmen of all kinds in the district, men holding office under the city
+government who are affiliated with the leader and the men who hope to
+secure rights or privileges, legal or illegal, through the leader's
+influence, know it is wise to purchase. To the mass of the men of the
+district it means perhaps the one day of freedom in the year, when they
+have the pleasure of enjoying drinks and food wholly at the cost of
+another.
+
+In this particular parade were five thousand men, not one thousand of whom
+bore the slightest outward evidence of American citizenship, but the right
+to vote, as their presence in the column indicated. It scarcely seemed
+possible that the scene was in America. Swarthy women and children crowded
+gayly decorated fire-escapes, crowded the windows, and made movement
+impossible on the streets. Arches of lights, lanterns swinging from
+fire-escapes and on ropes from sidewalks to roofs, were in the colors of
+the land from which these people came. The flags and bunting displayed
+presented colors of a foreign land, with here and there the flag of the
+country whose political destiny their votes controlled to a large degree.
+The next day the white caps worn by the men in this parade appeared on the
+heads of schoolboys and working boys by the hundred, the wearers proud to
+wear the colors of the man who, so far as their knowledge or experience, or
+that of their parents, went, was the greatest man, the man of the widest
+range of authority, in the United States. What do they care who is at the
+head of the city government? The men do not need to ask who is the district
+leader; he finds them through his unpaid workers and the coalition is
+accomplished. Soon the immigrant, turned citizen, understands the
+principle. He gets work and votes for the leader. It is simple and direct.
+When the extent of one's knowledge enables him to handle a broom or to sell
+peanuts or bananas in the new country, and that under the supervision of a
+blue-coated tyrant who levies on the voter's cart, if not his pocket, when
+and where he pleases, moral arguments in a foreign tongue are not
+convincing to that voter. He would rather not submit to the supervision and
+its attendant tax; he would rather not have his work intermittent; but he
+learns that protest increases his evils, and he submits. The blue-coated
+tyrant is a friend of the "boss" who helped get his license, and it must be
+right. Whatever comes to him, he must not antagonize the "boss." That is
+the first lesson he learns in American citizenship, at the point where it
+is most effective, his wage-earning privileges.
+
+[Illustration: A DOORWAY ON THE EAST SIDE.]
+
+There are leaders so strong and tactful that year after year their reign is
+unquestioned. Only the police and the ambulance surgeons know when there is
+an attempted revolution--when the leader's right is questioned by another
+would-be leader. There is only one issue--the man; nobody cares for the
+principle--if there be a difference of principle--involved.
+
+In one of the old sections of the city in which is a ward that for forty
+years has excelled in crime; a section which at the present time presents
+the meanest and lowest of the tenements in New York; in which there is less
+effort to counteract the evils of the environment of the homes or change
+the environment due to the control of the "boss" than in any other section,
+a political feud culminated in the fall of 1901, defeating the man who had
+been the leader for years. It was stated that the man who won had expended
+$35,000; the man who lost, $12,000 in the struggle. This is a section where
+poverty is the universal inheritance of the people who make this section
+home.
+
+For weeks the section was in a condition of constant warfare. The smallest
+boys were organized as gangs and shouted the name of the leader they had
+chosen their hero. Boys of five wore the buttons of their heroes. From
+fire-escapes, on wagons hung bits of white cloth declaring the names of
+the contestants. One of these, to avoid unpleasant embarrassment, had gone
+to California after the Lexow investigation. A favorite legend displayed by
+his enemy's friends was, "Paddy is the man who to Californy ran." This was
+displayed on one fire-escape on which opened the windows of two families,
+each espousing the cause of the contending leaders. The week before the
+balloting for leader the legend was kept in place by the constant vigilance
+for twenty-four hours of the day by the family whose sentiments it
+expressed. "Paddy" was defeated. The next morning the two neighbors, who
+had been enemies for weeks, leaned, each from her own window, chatting
+amicably, while the son of one was arranging the legend on the fire-escape
+to include both families. On either side was gracefully arranged an
+American flag, while the harp of Erin hung just in the middle of the
+fire-escape. Peace reigned in Warsaw. "Paddy's" friends, like the fairies
+of childhood, disappeared in the night. The whole district, as one man,
+accepted the change of rulers, and the new leader's banners were thrown to
+the breeze everywhere. Nothing succeeds like success in the tenement-house
+regions. For a couple of weeks peace seemed to reign in the district. The
+followers of the old leader found themselves displaced; new followers
+controlled the favors in the district. There began a new distribution of
+patronage. Then the old leader's displaced friends, with a few loyal souls,
+rallied about him. He had made money enough through his political
+affiliations to be defiant, and announced that the political corruption of
+the party to which he had belonged compelled him to rally to the support of
+the movement to overthrow it. Some of his followers were loyal to bravery,
+and declared, too, against the political system. Two of them, because of
+these declarations, were discharged forty-eight hours later from places in
+a city department where they drew salaries of $1200 per year. Their places
+were given to two of the new leader's followers. Two weeks later all had
+returned to the old allegiance, and the papers announced that the head of
+the Tammany system had decided that the patronage of the district would be
+evenly divided between the two factions.
+
+Independence of action is costly under such a system; costly in loss of
+wages to the voter; of food, raiment, shelter to his family.
+
+A voter who refuses to surrender the ease of his home or the pleasure of
+his club for the good of the district in which his home is located is not
+in a position to criticise his poor neighbor who will not jeopardize the
+position secured by his vote that supports his family to maintain the
+theory of American citizenship. Why should he make sacrifices to free the
+city from disgrace when his independent neighbor refuses to sacrifice his
+ease to protect his family from the inevitable evils of a corrupt city
+government?
+
+It was the conferring the rights of citizenship on immigrants almost as
+soon as they landed that fastened on New York an evil that has grown until
+the city has been held in the shackles of a spoils system that overshadows
+its commercial supremacy and makes it the argument against democratic
+government. The heaviest disgrace for this condition rests not on the men
+who profit by the system but on the good men who permit it to develop. It
+was the logical result of their indifference to the city's good and their
+responsibility for that good. This inactivity on the part of the mass of
+responsible citizens made the control of the city offices for personal ends
+easy to the men who, because of lack of training and moral turpitude, could
+not conceive of a service for other than personal ends. Shrewdness made
+them see that the immigrant was the ladder on which they could climb to
+political power and stability. They met the immigrant as friend and
+neighbor; they secured him work; they schooled him to citizenship, and
+began at once to train him in that deadliest of all influences in a
+democracy, class in politics. So long as this system of education prevails,
+the appearance of a candidate for local office who does not bear the
+"hall-mark" of the neighborhood will be resented.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY MORNING AMONG THE PUSHCARTS.]
+
+As time went on and the immigrants came from many countries, a new evil
+sprang up--the race section; the section where, maintaining all the
+characteristics of the country from which the people came, the men exercise
+the rights of citizenship at the behest of a political trainer who is able
+to promise favors for obedience, and work vengeance for disobedience.
+Behind him is a power which he must obey until the day comes when by his
+own shrewdness he is able to cross swords with those above him in the
+political system, becoming himself a dictator. In the process of his
+evolution from ward heeler to district leader he has trained those who
+follow him so well that he duplicates himself scores of times, increasing
+his power every time he makes a follower, either by fear or favor,
+perpetuating the system that makes the city, as has been aptly said, a
+"gold mine" which it costs the operators nothing to work.
+
+The man at the bottom knows the duplicate of the leader nearest his own
+level; this man is his friend, his countryman often. The links in the
+chain are unbroken, and the man who dares to disobey the orders issued from
+the top feels not only the displeasure of the henchman, but the combined
+strength of the chain, or as much of it as is necessary to compel him to
+obey or to crush him. The poor man whose tool to earn a living is a shovel,
+a pick or a broom is not in a position to defend his rights; he has no
+public sentiment in the only world he knows to support him in any attempt
+he may make to attain his rights when defrauded by the political system he,
+in utter ignorance, has helped to establish. When he is thrown out of work
+given to secure his vote, he has no redress. The man at the bottom must
+make the rule of his life "Small favors thankfully received." His hope for
+work in the future depends on keeping in friendly touch with the system;
+this is the first principle of American citizenship grasped by the
+naturalized citizen.
+
+Just before our last national election a number of men employed in skilled
+labor in one of our city departments were laid off. To some of those men
+this loss of work meant suffering for their families; to others it meant
+debt and dependence. It was startling the spirit in which this loss of work
+and wages were accepted by these men. The district leader, elected by the
+people to make the laws at Albany, in order "to hold his district in line"
+for this election, had to provide forty-eight voters with places. He
+demanded from the department forty-eight places; the work was in his
+district. No one questioned his right to make this demand; these places
+represented his political capital. In no way could his demands be met
+except by the discharge of forty-eight men then at work who lived outside
+the district. It was done. The men laid off, almost to a man, accepted it
+as the fortune of the political protégé. Scarcely a word of resentment was
+expressed. There were removals into this special district before the next
+municipal election, and new enrollments under the leader's banner,
+irrespective of the political bias of the voters. Some of the men were
+sullen and felt the loss of manhood; some said, "I'll vote as I like, but I
+must have work;" others believed that only under this leader's banner could
+a poor man hope to get his rights--the privilege to earn his living; or, in
+their language, "He is hustling for his friends."
+
+Not only does the skilled and unskilled manual laborer find that the
+approval of his district leaders is necessary to secure work under the
+city, but that the affiliations and power of the district leader and his
+political followers can secure him work under corporations holding public
+franchises. He knows that the district leader secures privileges,
+licenses, votes for franchises, directly or indirectly, with the distinct
+understanding that his recommendations insure places to the men who carry
+them. Under corrupt city government the man in business who does not cater
+to the political powers finds his privileges curtailed; that he is made the
+target for petty annoyances. Especially is this true in the downtown
+districts, where in the transaction of business the rights of citizens to
+the streets are ignored. Until one has lived close to it, it is almost
+impossible to believe the power over the working masses the smallest cog in
+the political machine exercises. It is this that makes imperative the
+control of the city by men of high moral standing. No amount of unselfish
+philanthropy can save a city governed by the corrupt.
+
+There are sections in the city of New York where from the time the boy is
+old enough to recognize the power of a policeman he guides his life to
+curry favor with this visible expression of power. He knows almost as soon
+as he can talk the man who rules in the world in which he lives. He sees
+his playmate defy the policeman because his father is a man of power, or
+the friend of the man who rules the district. "Pull" is the law, all the
+law he recognizes. He hears discussed from his earliest years the
+dependence of his class on the political powers who govern, not for the
+good of the city, but that they may have their rights; their rights, as
+interpreted, being the securing of a place for a longer or shorter period
+at the nod of a "boss." Their district is all the city thousands of the
+inhabitants of these sections know. How can it be otherwise? They are never
+called for any purpose to any other part of the city, unless it be the
+cemetery. Family, friends, business all center within a score of blocks. If
+a distance must be traversed, it is through thoroughfares that but
+duplicate regions they know, all a part of the kingdom of the "boss."
+
+When the observer sees five thousand men walking behind a banner conferred
+on the leader of the district because every man in it who votes votes at
+his dictation, there comes to him a faint apprehension of what political
+power in the tenement-house district is. This district leader interprets
+all these men know of this country or its institutions. They know that he
+secures work for them; that he befriends them in time of trouble. He
+interprets Christ's doctrine to them: "I was hungry and ye gave me meat;
+thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and
+ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came
+unto me." This is what the district leader does, if not in person, by
+proxy. Is it any wonder he can control votes? Is it any wonder that the
+poor, ignorant, unequipped voter should curry favor, bow to him,
+acknowledge his supremacy even to the law? For this the voter can break the
+law, and the leader secure remission of the penalty. The leader's nod has
+been known to guide the judge on the bench. The leader can make the
+innocent suffer because his power is greater than the law to which the
+innocent appeal. This is the moral doctrine with which we inoculate our
+newly made citizens, and under which the children of our overcrowded
+tenement houses grow up. As the boys approach manhood they know no greater
+privilege than to serve the man who has the power to give them place, and
+he begins to cultivate their acquaintance early.
+
+It takes brains, moral standards, a knowledge of life and experience to put
+the district leaders and their cohorts in the place they belong. Talking
+against them accomplishes nothing while the majority he represents keeps
+him in power, yes, makes him possible. He makes morality an evil,
+dishonesty justice to the people who know him as the representative of
+republican principles. They are the people. They have left one land because
+it deprived them of rights. Rights as they know them are personal, and the
+district leader secures them.
+
+[Illustration: MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.]
+
+The opposition to the reform movement by the people governed by the
+district leader comes from the conviction, dimly conceived or implanted,
+that the election of the men who represent it would mean that everywhere
+merit and not "pull" would keep the voter at work; that business would have
+to be conducted according to law; that crime would be punished; that no man
+would hold the keys of the prison for their benefit, but for the protection
+of the community.
+
+One of the greatest moral lessons administered to the people of New York in
+a language that all understood, and one which all classes in the community
+needed, was given by the late Colonel George E. Waring. When he organized
+the Department of Street Cleaning on the merit system; when he proved to
+every man in the department that if he did his work no man could displace
+him; that he could defend himself, a man before men, if charges were
+brought against him, Colonel Waring changed the moral character of New
+York. Every man in that department had his friends to whom he carried the
+message; stood a free man employed by the city; a man who dared to vote as
+he would though in public service; would not be deprived of the right to
+earn his daily bread because of the use he made of his rights as an
+American citizen. This moral lesson went into every home. The woman whose
+husband handled a broom, drove a cart, held her head up, for the magic D.
+S. C. had changed a "job" that enslaved her husband to an employment that
+honored him.
+
+The enforcement of the law in the gathering of the garbage; the cleanliness
+of the streets in the tenement-house districts equal to those of the
+avenues, for the first time in generations brought the great truth to the
+consciousness of the people in the tenement-house regions that all men were
+equal. That the clean streets led to clean halls and cleaner homes was
+natural; and the further evolution meant clean characters, because of moral
+freedom to express opinion in a ballot cast at no man's command.
+
+And then came the summers when, for the sake of the children, extra
+exertions were made to keep the streets clean. Slowly the truth dawned on
+the dullest mother that the babies were not dying in such numbers; were not
+so ill, because the streets were clean, the garbage collected and the
+streets washed and cool. Twenty years of Colonel Waring, and the moral tone
+of the most ignorant would be changed. For the right to earn his living
+honestly, honorably, to cast his ballot as an American citizen, would be
+guaranteed to every voter employed in a city department employing the
+greatest number of voters with the least manual ability, the least
+education.
+
+A city is just as honest as the greatest number of citizens casting a
+ballot with the least knowledge of its value and effect; it comes no higher
+in the scale of integrity than that. Every man who stands behind a broom
+because he earns what is paid him, and knows that he stays there just as
+long as he continues to earn his wages, represents a wealth of manhood in a
+democracy, a part of the nation's capital as a world power.
+
+When Colonel Waring discharged the first man convicted of accepting a bribe
+for collecting the refuse of the city contrary to the law of the
+department, he gave a practical demonstration of the truth of the
+Declaration of Independence that all men are born free and equal. He showed
+by that act that the poor man who could not pay a bribe was protected by
+the law; that wealth purchased no privileges at the expense of the city.
+Just where the spoils system had worked its deepest degradation it received
+its most effective lesson. The greatest benefit that Colonel Waring, that
+man of law and order, conferred upon New York, was not its clean streets,
+but the moral lesson that a city department can be administered to secure
+the best interests of the people on the principles that control the best
+business houses of the city.
+
+To the shame of the city be it said that it had so long been accustomed to
+the spoils system that it could not accept the theory of Colonel Waring. It
+was impossible for even the philanthropic workers to believe that a man
+would not be placed, if they used their personal "pull" with the head of
+the department. The politicians learned quickly that the system in that
+department ignored "pull." When they did accept it, they determined to
+overthrow the man who robbed the spoils system of its largest perquisite
+where it was most effective in numbers. The combination of the political
+machines accomplished the city's disgrace in 1897. It was redeemed in 1901
+by a people who had suffered cruelly; who saw in the four years of misrule
+that they had made their own chains of bondage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF.
+
+
+The importance of environment is at last admitted as a factor in
+character-building. That light and air are indispensable to cleanliness,
+and physical cleanliness to health, and health to morals, is the gospel
+that the evils of the tenements have forced the philanthropists to declare
+until the thinking public is convinced of its truth.
+
+There are tenement houses that have reputations as positive as individuals.
+Thoughtful, intelligent wives of working-men would not, could not be
+persuaded to move into them because of their reputations. Often the evils
+of these tenements are justly attributed to the housekeepers. Housekeepers
+of tenements are women who pay the whole or a part of their rent by
+overseeing the house; attending to the cleaning, collecting the rents,
+letting the rooms, adjusting differences between tenants--"a go-between"
+between the agent or the owner and the tenants. The owner or agent
+employing these women upholds their decisions when differences between the
+tenants and housekeepers arise. This clothes them with great authority,
+and often enables them to do great injustice. They are feared usually.
+Families will endure restrictions of liberties, every deprivation of their
+rights, because protest would mean eviction or discomforts that would
+compel them to move.
+
+Under some agents and owners these housekeepers have absolute control of
+the property. They frequently make and enforce rules that utterly ignore
+the rights of tenants. This rule is often as absolute as though they were
+the owners of the house. Strange as it may seem, this class of housekeepers
+usually make the property under their control pay; they usually keep up the
+character of the houses under their control because they have standards and
+compel those about them to live up to them.
+
+[Illustration: A REMNANT OF THE PAST.]
+
+On an East Side street a few blocks from the East River are four 27-foot
+front houses of the English-basement type. The plan of these houses
+indicates that they were designed as residences for people of ample means.
+The halls are broad, the stairways wide, ascending in recesses on the first
+floor that leaves the entrance halls clear from front to rear doorways. The
+yards of these four houses, wide and deep, are paved with broad flagging
+stones, such as are used on the sidewalks. The fences are kept in good
+order and well painted. Not a child living in these four houses dares to
+play in those yards. The housekeeper--one woman has charge of the four
+houses--would order them out. If the children did not leave at once,
+complaint would be made to the mothers; and if they did not uphold the
+housekeeper and insist that the children play in the street, the mothers
+who failed would have to move. Every mother-tenant knows this well. A
+mother of three children who had lived in these houses all her married
+life, when asked why the children could not play in the yard, where she
+could watch them, replied: "Why, if the children played in the yard they
+would make a lot of work for the housekeeper. She would not stand it." This
+mother's tone indicated that she thought the housekeeper was right. The
+youngest of the three children in another family living in these houses was
+ill all winter. When convalescent, the doctor ordered him to be kept out of
+doors as much as possible. The mother had all the work to do for five in
+family, and had to devise some means of keeping the child out that would
+not interfere with her work. She arranged the fire-escape outside of the
+window, putting pillows and toys out there. The little fellow climbed over
+the rail and struck a stone beneath, breaking his arms.
+
+"Why did you not put him in the yard, where you could watch him, and where
+he could run about?"
+
+"Oh! the housekeeper would be so angry; I wouldn't dare."
+
+"Must you keep the children out of the yard?"
+
+"Yes; they would make an awful lot of work for the housekeeper."
+
+Investigation proved that the owner of this property supported the
+housekeeper in depriving even the babies of the use of these yards. A
+mother could not roll a baby carriage around the yards, because her older
+children, if she had any, would be sure to go into the yards to see her.
+The rents for four rooms, two absolutely dark, ventilated through the dark
+and unventilated halls by a window eighteen inches square, were $22, $20
+and $18 per month, respectively, for each floor. The streets in front are
+overcrowded, dirty; when the trucks were in the streets, two were always
+standing in front of these houses. Push-carts now replace the trucks.
+
+The people stay in these houses year after year. A bill never appears on
+them. The arbitrary restriction as to the use of the yard is not counted
+against the property, because it is so clean, kept in such good repair, and
+the character of the people scrutinized before they are accepted as
+tenants. It is generally understood that the renting of furnished rooms is
+not approved. The housekeeper finds a tenant who rents rooms objectionable.
+In a neighborhood where every house shows year after year a loss of
+character, people poorer and more ignorant becoming tenants, these four
+houses retain the appearance of comfort and respectability. Among the
+tenants there is but little intimacy; they appear to have little in common.
+The women are never heard in the halls, nor do they loiter about the
+doorways. The men are all skilled workmen, earning good wages--clerks on
+small salaries, or in city departments, all natives of New York. The wives
+were all wage-earners before they were married. They dress well; most of
+them are fairly good housekeepers. All buy their children's clothes ready
+made; two make their own dresses. For their children they are ambitious,
+and expect to keep them in school until they are sixteen. This the children
+defeat. The boys get places during the summer vacations in their fourteenth
+year, refusing to go back to school. The girls are contented until
+fourteen, and then they grow restless, becoming wage-earners; all that they
+earn is spent for their clothes. The wages of the father may no more than
+meet the expenses of the family, but this is not considered. Clothes are
+the essentials. A man having a salary of $1,400, living in one of these
+houses, had to go in debt the first week of a serious illness of his wife.
+He did not have a dollar in advance to meet emergencies. He was a proud,
+indulgent, tender husband and father.
+
+This type of house and this class of tenants are disappearing from the East
+Side. The remnant of this class who remain are held by political
+affiliations or family ties. The men enjoy the sense of power that comes
+from this connection, and realize fully that to leave the district would
+mean a loss of social prestige, or, if minor politicians, a loosening of
+their hold on the people to whom they represent political power. Many of
+this class remain in the section because they hold positions in the city
+departments in return for active service in the interest of the political
+machines.
+
+Not far away from these tenements is another in which are sixteen families.
+The rents in this house range from $5 to $9.50 per month for two to three
+rooms. The house is dirty, neglected; violations of the sanitary laws are
+evident from the front door to the roof, on which tenants occupying the
+front rooms must dry their clothes. The water is in the dark halls; in
+winter, for days at a time, the pipes, both water and drain, are frozen and
+burst; yet the tenants stay year after year. One woman, the mother of four
+children, was born, married, her four children were born, and her husband,
+mother and father died in this house. She has never moved, except across
+the hall, up and downstairs, as she has been able to pay more or has been
+forced to reduce her rent. The women in this house know almost nothing of
+housekeeping. The men are employed only about half the time. The number of
+children in the house averages three to each family. It is a New England
+hamlet under one roof in this particular. If there is sickness in any
+family, it is the concern of every tenant; if a man is out of work, it is a
+community misfortune, and to be shared. A new hat for man or woman is the
+cause of rejoicing, for it is the badge of respectability for any in the
+house who may need it in an emergency. The whole household, for such it
+seems to be, are poor, very poor; thriftless, unambitious; the men somewhat
+given to drink to excess; yet the spirit of neighborliness shames
+criticism. A woman in this house ill four months was nursed by her
+neighbors night and day. Her house and children were cared for, food
+provided when necessary. Comment on their loyalty and devotion was met with
+the response: "God knows how soon she may be doing it for one of us." Yet
+when that woman, whom most of them had known all her life, gave evidence of
+pregnancy a few months after her husband's death, not a woman crossed her
+doorsill until the birth of twin babies within the period of time redeemed
+her character. Whether from remorse or love, ample return for this cruelty
+has been made many times.
+
+In the two-room apartments in this house there is one closet, with shelves
+about six inches wide. This is in the one room that serves as living-room,
+kitchen, dining-room--a room less than eight feet wide. The bedroom is
+perfectly dark, ventilated by a square window into perfectly dark,
+unventilated halls. A full-sized bed leaves the width of the door between
+it and the wall. The three-room apartments have outside windows--five to
+the three rooms. There is a closet in the kitchen and one in the large
+room. People talk of poverty, but few people know what it is. A woman who
+had moved into the three-room apartment had hung all the clothing for five
+in family in the one bedroom on four nails. In reply to a protest, she said
+patiently and quietly: "There are no hooks in the closet in the front room,
+and I hadn't a penny to buy any." Ten cents provided that closet with
+hooks. A comment was made on the keeping of the washtub under the kitchen
+table. "Why do you not have the tub carried to the cellar?" An expression
+of self-pity passed over the woman's face as she explained that the tub
+would have to be carried down three flights of stairs, out on the street,
+around the corner, down the cellar stairs, and then to her coal cellar at
+the extreme end of the cellar.
+
+The house stands on a corner, the entrance from the street at the extreme
+end of the west wall. The cellar door was formerly close to the entrance
+door, but the landlord built in the back end of the cellar an oven when a
+baker hired the store on the first floor. A cellar door was then opened at
+the farthest part of the front, or south wall, one hundred and twenty-five
+feet from the entrance door of the house. Is it surprising that coal is
+bought by the pail by all the tenants? That tubs are kept anywhere in their
+rooms where there is space?
+
+Shiftlessness, thriftless uncleanliness marks even the sidewalk about this
+house. The dirt inside or out troubles nobody. Children will spill half the
+contents of the garbage pail they are carrying to the cans in the tiny
+yard, in halls and on the stairway. It is kicked out of the way without
+comment. Dogs or cats, and ofttimes both, are members of the families who
+live under this roof. The unsanitary conditions of the closets in the yard
+arouse pity for the tenants on the first floor; but no tenant thinks of
+complaining to either the housekeeper or the authorities. It would be
+useless, and would get them into trouble. The present owner is willing to
+kalsomine the bedrooms and halls each spring, but the tenants object
+because it makes a lot of work.
+
+In August, two years ago, the writer was going up the first flight of
+stairs in this house, when a baby voice was heard pleading: "Pease tum
+fas'er; oh, pease tum fas'er; I 'ant to do p'ay; I 'ant to doe on steet;
+pease tum fas'er." On the third floor a tiny boy stood in front of the sink
+talking to the faucet, from which a tiny stream was flowing into a little
+tin pail. An infant's voice from one of the rooms told the story. The
+mother needed water and could not leave the baby. Perhaps this was the tiny
+nurse of mother and baby, big enough to call a neighbor to do what he could
+not do.
+
+When it is remembered that this stream of water from the faucet represented
+the water supply for four families, the difficulties of cleanliness under
+those conditions may be slightly appreciated. In spite of the dirt, the
+darkness, the unsanitary conditions of this house, the thriftlessness and
+ignorance of the tenants, there is a spirit of neighborliness in it that
+puts the critical to blush. Without a doubt the housekeeper, who is a
+shrewd woman, fosters this spirit of neighborliness. She smiles as she
+says: "They gets so used to each other they hates to be separated." Neither
+house nor tenants seem to go below the level established twelve years ago.
+
+There is a housekeeper who does mission work of which the world takes no
+note. She is the woman who in the true sense is an altruist. By her force
+of character, her hatred of inefficiency, her love of order, she compels
+the women who become tenants who do not know how to keep house to learn
+how.
+
+The writer knows intimately such a housekeeper. She had charge of a
+four-story tenement on the lower East Side. The house was of the type known
+as "double decker." There were four apartments on each floor; the front
+consisting of a kitchen, living-room and two bedrooms; the back, of one
+room and two bedrooms. Small windows near the ceiling in kitchen and
+bedrooms opened on a narrow space between this and the next house, which
+was an old-fashioned residence. A similar opening in that house enabled the
+neighbors to look into each other's rooms. Water and refuse were thrown
+into this space between the two houses, and sometimes into the rooms of
+neighbors unintentionally. There was war, bitter war, because of this; for
+the large tenement was occupied by a part of the remnant having social
+standards left on the lower East Side.
+
+There was water in all the kitchens of the large tenement. The halls were
+absolutely dark, but were free from the nuisances of hallways having sinks.
+Stairs and halls were covered with light oilcloth, the stairs having brass
+treads on the edge. Everything was kept as clean as soap, water and
+muscular strength could keep it.
+
+The first visit was made to this house long before Colonel Waring had shown
+what clean streets would do in the tenement-house districts. On the street
+curb in front of the door stood three ash barrels filled within three
+inches of the top, carefully covered with newspapers tucked in around the
+edge of the contents. This indicates the standards of this housekeeper. She
+hated dirt and disorder. She could not be happy where it was. She forced by
+tact, coercion, persuasion, any and every means, her way to the heart and
+home of every ignorant housekeeper who came under that roof. She taught
+cooking by sending cake, bread, soup she had made to the tenants, and
+arousing the desire in them to learn how to make that particular dish. She
+instituted an exchange of skill among the tenants. The woman who could make
+a dress and not a hat exchanged skill with the one who had been a milliner.
+The woman who made bread and failed with cake exchanged skill with the
+cakemaker. They even took turns in going to the theatre, the neighbor
+staying home and taking care of the children.
+
+The property was more valuable every year; no bill appeared at the door. It
+stood apart from its neighbors for years. This housekeeper was compelled to
+give up her responsibility and left the house, as she wisely said: "No one
+would manage it in my way. I could not get on in peace." Six months after
+every tenant had moved but the liquor dealer; and even his bar-room had
+sunk to a lower level. A building in which many homes might be maintained
+is now merely a place of shelter. People move in and out; no relations are
+established; there is nothing to hold the tenant here above any other
+house. The owner has sold the property, hating its present character.
+
+Again, tenants will be the victims of vindictive housekeepers, who for any
+and no reason will begin a system of petty persecutions to compel a tenant
+to move. Then there is the gossiping housekeeper, who keeps the tenants at
+war. It is no secret that the method of rent collecting of some
+housekeepers holds tenants year after year. They will take the rent in the
+smallest sums, daily or weekly. By the end of the month they will usually
+have the full amount collected. The houses where this system prevails are
+the most objectionable. The tenants for this leniency endure positive
+evils. The important thing is a place of shelter for the family. Work is
+uncertain, or long periods of idleness has made the payment of rent
+impossible for a period. The housekeeper understands and becomes
+responsible for keeping the tenant until the rent is paid. In return the
+tenants endure neglect of duty on the part of the housekeeper. Silence is
+their expression of gratitude. No repairs are made, for none are demanded.
+The house sinks lower and lower; anybody can move in on the payment of part
+of a month's rent. The vacant rooms are dirty--give visible evidence of the
+presence of vermin; but the family evicted with only half a month's rent in
+hand cannot afford to be critical. This is the house that makes the slum.
+
+Two housekeepers of tenements were discussing owners and tenants before the
+writer. One was rigid, keeping the house astonishingly clean, with rooms
+rarely vacant; the other, always in trouble with the tenants, always having
+some one to evict, threw the blame for her troubles on the tenants. The
+first one listened, finally saying slowly: "No, you are the one. You get
+cross and abuse the children. You make pets of some children and some
+mothers, and the others see it and get mad. Then there is a fight. To keep
+a house you must treat everybody the same. You must make good rules; you
+must do your part and make every tenant do her part. I've had two of the
+tenants you put out of your house five years. They are good tenants; watch
+yourself."
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE OF THE PRESENT.]
+
+There are landlords who care for nothing but the income from their
+property. Any kind of tenant who will pay rent is acceptable. Any
+housekeeper who collects the specified amount may hold control without
+question. The housekeeper may have standards, but these are swept aside by
+the exactions of the landlord. The rents in such houses are usually high,
+because there is such a percentage of loss in rents. This house also
+contributes to the creation of the slum.
+
+The careless and apparently malicious destruction of property by tenants is
+not appreciated by those who touch this question of tenement houses
+superficially. No means has yet been found to make the tenement-house
+population understand that the abuse of property is a factor in their rent
+problem. Within a year the writer was walking with a group of women, two of
+whom were housekeepers in tenement houses. This question of tenants was
+being discussed freely by the women who were tenants as well as the
+housekeepers. It was interesting to find that all agreed that one family
+could change the character of a tenement house for the worst, but one
+family could not improve its character. The reason was that the family
+above the tenement came only to reduce their rent during a hard time, while
+the family with evil tendencies stayed until they were put out, to go into
+a cheaper tenement and lower that. They agreed that where housekeeper and
+tenant got on well together both hated a change. The two things that
+dragged down the character of a tenement was beer-drinking and destructive
+children--children allowed to "run wild." These women insisted that there
+never would be quarrels in tenement houses were it not for these two
+causes. A woman who drank beer would invite her new neighbors to drink.
+They would treat in return, and the house would show it at once. The women
+who drink beer in this fashion grow careless of their persons and their
+homes; they get rid of their children, who soon learn to enjoy the freedom
+from control. The children destroy the property first in play, through
+carelessness, and later grow malicious.
+
+If a housekeeper is sharp and shrewd, these women tenants claimed that she
+could at any time get rid of an objectionable tenant; but the housekeepers
+held that if the owner did not care for anything but rents, the
+housekeeper was often compelled to let in and keep in objectionable
+tenants. They admitted, one and all, that houses fairly indicated the
+character of the people who would live in them, and that rents regulated
+the class of tenants to a very great degree. They admitted that at times
+one could find tenants who had lived for many years in one house where
+conditions had changed for the worst. But it was unusual. People now
+selected houses where those of their own faith, and, if foreign, those of
+their own nationality, at least predominated. That this tendency was seen
+more and more every year. This group of women were among the remnant of
+Christians left on the lower East Side. All had been born there of Irish
+parentage. They lived in the houses bordering on the edge of the East
+River--old houses on the plan of the first tenements erected in New York,
+or in houses designed for one family and now holding four to eight. Two of
+them lived in houses built in a row erected eighty-three years ago. They
+were two-story, dormer windows and basement frame houses, built without an
+area, the door to the basements opening like a cellar door on the street.
+These basements were occupied by a family each. Fourteen of these houses
+are still standing. The people in this section live a life entirely their
+own. They have been crowded out, the more prosperous, by the Hebrews,
+while the remnant find themselves hemmed in by them.
+
+These people live in the confines of a Roman Catholic parish that twenty
+years ago contained nearly eleven thousand souls of that faith. Three years
+ago the priest in charge estimated his parish at less than four thousand,
+and that four thousand remained because they were too poor to get away, he
+declared.
+
+The Hebrews, as tenants will, on the same block show many social grades,
+many degrees of poverty and prosperity, many stages of development in
+American civilization. There is a sense of feeling of brotherhood that
+other people lack. The houses will range from the most uncleanly, ill-kept,
+to the new tenement with ornate entrance and modern improvements. The most
+modern will, on entering, be found with walls marked and broken when the
+wood-work is new. No one seems troubled by this destruction. The
+housekeeper does not struggle, for it is expected and charged for in the
+rent. Plumbing is of the simplest, for it is expected to present the
+largest percentage of loss in the administration of the property. One of
+the most elaborate of the new tenements erected on the lower East Side was
+visited three months after it was occupied. Every hallway from top to
+bottom of the house had broken plaster and was marked by pencil and crayon.
+The plumber was then a daily visitor. This house a year afterward bore on
+the interior evidences that years of hard usage might have brought. The
+housekeeper collected rents and attended to the garbage. She was utterly
+indifferent to the appearance of the house, which, intended for prosperous
+families, was a nest of sweat-shops, where even children of six and seven
+were employed. The rents had been collected; that was the owner's only
+requirement.
+
+The West Side is congested, because manufacture and storehouses are
+displacing the houses. Rents are high, and the houses for the most part old
+residences occupied by several families. The people, generally, are
+Americans. They are deeply attached to this old section, because it is
+their birthplace; and for many of them an even deeper attachment prevails,
+for this section was the birthplace of parents. The houses often are found
+to have lifelong friends, often relatives, as tenants. The tenants keep the
+halls and stairways clean in turn, and the houses generally are well kept
+up. Here one tenant is allowed a rebate on rent for renting rooms,
+collecting the rent, caring for the sidewalk and stoop, the garbage and
+ash-cans. The majority of the people in this section are Protestants. The
+Protestant churches are well maintained. The Trinity Corporation supports
+kindergartens, cooking and sewing schools. The Judson Memorial is a very
+attractive gymnasium, that brings children from as far west as the North
+River. The Methodist Church holds many who in no other section could find
+the same equality and freedom. The vocabulary of the people through this
+section shows the effect of the newer activities in the modern churches;
+the effect of the enlarging interests of the children in art and nature
+through the public school education.
+
+While the people are living on small incomes, often on uncertain incomes,
+life is lived at a much higher level than on the East Side. Children are
+not so precocious in evil knowledge. This difference is due largely to the
+fact that the houses contain three and four families at the most; that the
+apartment houses in the section are beyond the reach of any but the skilled
+working man. He holds his own at high rental in the house that shelters but
+three other families like his own. His neighbors are people of like
+ambitions as his own, and demand what he demands.
+
+[Illustration: A CORNER IN A WORKINGMAN'S HOME.]
+
+The housekeepers in this section differ essentially in their relation to
+the tenants from those of the more heterogeneous population of the East
+Side of the city. One resemblance is recognized--the effect of the
+character of the housekeeper. Here, as on the East Side, to a very large
+degree, the comfort, health, peace and good-will of the tenants in every
+house depends on the character and the spirit of the woman who controls the
+property for the landlord.
+
+The law of natural selection holds good. The housekeeper holds the tenants
+who are satisfied with the conditions she creates. They, especially the
+children, develop in habits of cleanliness, in care of property, in respect
+for the rights of others, as the rules of the house enforced by the
+housekeeper compel. It is in her power to get rid of those who do not
+accept her dictates, let them be what they may--just or unjust. The
+housekeeper will make her presence felt. If she violates the law in the
+disposal of garbage outside of the house, tenants will violate the law she
+makes for them in the care and disposal of garbage inside the house. If she
+is compelled to obey the law, she will compel tenants to obey the law. It
+is this that makes the morale of the Department of Street Cleaning so
+important. If the part of the house which in renting tenants agree to keep
+clean is not kept clean, the observer will discover that the housekeeper
+does not keep her part of the agreement in keeping the entrance clean.
+
+A large factor in the tenement house for character building or destroying
+is the housekeeper who has charge of it. Where she is well paid she makes
+the property valuable. She cares for it, for the character of the tenants.
+Tenants remain in the house because of the advantages her offices control
+for the poor man and his wife anxious to provide for their children's best
+welfare. Property under this type of woman resists decay. She holds it in
+spite of the decay about it. The characterless, slovenly, indifferent
+housekeeper is a factor in destroying property, because of the destructive
+character of the tenants who will tolerate her and her methods.
+
+The house that is the property of the man with "a pull" is an obstruction
+to civilization almost impossible to overcome. By connivance the law is
+inoperative. If pushed, such an owner can easily rid himself of the tenants
+who attempt, or have attempted for them, efforts to compel the owners to
+repair the property. A mill owner on the water front on the lower East Side
+owned three three-story and basement houses adjoining the mill property.
+They had been built for one family each. The basements were altered into
+stores, and the floors above altered at the least cost to accommodate one
+or two families. This meant two inside bedrooms absolutely without
+ventilation. The tenants of this property and all in the neighborhood were
+tormented by the smoke and gas from the chimney of the mill. When the wind
+blew directly toward the houses, windows were kept closed for hours in the
+warmest weather. All the tenants dried their clothes on pulley lines.
+Frequently the soot made the clothes unwearable, and they had to be washed
+the second time. Ten years of effort have failed to compel the building of
+the chimney of that mill to the legal height.
+
+The houses the mill owner owned were in a disgraceful condition. The
+closets in the yards had no flow of water. The engineer of the mill was
+required to carry a hose from the mill over the fences to the closets to
+flush them. Sometimes he forgot to turn the water off, and the yards were
+flooded and made disgusting. Sometimes he forgot for days at a time to
+flush the closets, when the conditions were even worse. Only people who
+were helpless or hopeless would endure such conditions. One of the workers
+of the College Settlement discovered the conditions in these houses. She
+took immediate steps to compel the necessary improvements. The owner
+discovered that the wife and children of one of the tenants went to clubs
+at the Settlement, and he ordered that family to move. Before the mother
+moved her education had begun, and she imparted to her neighbors the
+information that the conditions were unlawful and could be changed if they
+would fight for it. The man exacted his rent on the first of the month; he
+was hard and unyielding; the tenants continued the warfare until he had
+evicted every one who spoke English and filled his houses with foreigners.
+One of the stores is used for storing and sorting rags and paper; next door
+is a meat shop. The fight was given up. The owner had "a pull," and the law
+is defied to this day on that property.
+
+All the land on the river front in this neighborhood for blocks is made
+land, filled in by the city refuse, on which houses were built years ago.
+This kind of property extends back from the North River for three, and at
+one point four, blocks. In some of the houses near the river the high tides
+of spring and fall rise in the cellars. The College Settlement workers who
+visited families in one of these houses had been distressed by the amount
+of illness in it. Malaria had attacked every family. Spring and fall wages
+were lost at times by as many as three wage-earners in one family for two
+and three days each week. In addition to loss of wages, there was the
+expense of medicine and doctors. At last came the urgent request that a
+worker should call on a girl of sixteen who was dying of consumption on the
+first floor. This consisted of four rooms, two being inside bedrooms, each
+of which would hold a three-quarter bed and a chair between the bed and the
+wall. One was absolutely unventilated, except through the doors. It was, in
+fact, a passageway between the front and rear rooms. This plan is the usual
+plan in houses altered from residences for one family to a tenement house.
+
+The door of the other bedroom, which opened into the large room, was closed
+at night because the large room was used as a bedroom by the male members
+of the family and one lodger. The girl of sixteen had slept with two others
+in that room for eight years. The floors of the four rooms were covered
+with carpets. The odor was sickening. The visitor asked the tenant who
+brought her to the sick girl what caused the odor perceptible in the hall,
+with front and rear windows always open, unbearable in the rooms where
+doors and windows were closed.
+
+"Oh, that! The water has been in the cellar now for two or three weeks. The
+tides are high now." A visit to the cellar showed the water at the height
+of the second step of the cellar stairs; also a sewer pipe that had burst.
+Visits were made to the proper city department once a week for eleven
+weeks. The clerk, on the last visit, evidently intending to be facetious,
+said: "Say, what's the matter with those people taking baths in that
+cellar? They ain't got no bathtubs."
+
+The owner of the property had "pull" enough to escape even an investigation
+by the department. It was years before the cellar of that house was
+concreted and the necessary connections of pipes and sewers made. It was
+done when the property had changed hands and a man comparatively poor and
+wholly free from political affiliations became the owner.
+
+The people of this whole region are the victims of political corruption.
+Some of them have more fear of offending a political light, let his glimmer
+be ever so small, than of offending against even God's law. They could be
+turned out of house and home, deprived of the means of earning a living, by
+men who openly defy the law, and who become heroes to the growing boys and
+girls for no reason but because of their power to use and defy the law.
+
+The moral natures of the men and the women who grow up under this influence
+are dwarfed and warped until it is impossible for them to have distinct
+conceptions of right and wrong. The education they receive does not reveal
+the relations of ethics to life; the struggle for existence dulls the mind;
+while the depleted physical conditions caused by bad air, mal-nutrition and
+ignorance of real values reduce moral resistance almost to zero. Enforce
+the tenement-house laws, and the moral strength of the people of New York
+will rise to higher levels of moral resistance. Not poverty, but the burden
+imposed by political corruption, is the blight of home life in the
+tenement-house sections of New York.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS.
+
+
+In a preceding chapter an attempt was made to show how hopeless the task of
+home-making was for women who had neither knowledge nor ideals to guide
+them. When it is remembered that the environment of these homes was in
+itself degrading, to maintain even the semblance of a home was a remarkable
+achievement.
+
+These women knew but three educating influences--home, school and Church.
+Four, perhaps, if one chooses to count the streets, where most of their
+time was spent, as one. The value of the first they revealed in the homes
+they made. The school at the time it was a factor in their development was
+a place that had no connection with anything else in their lives. What they
+learned there was but to the exceptional few without any practical value.
+They learned to read to get promoted, or because they could not help it.
+The arithmetic which they found valuable they learned in doing errands and
+spending their own pennies. They learned to form letters with their pens;
+but as they had no use for the knowledge, they soon forgot it. Their
+conception of education and that of their world left them perfectly at ease
+in their accomplishment. The Church had to do with their souls; and to the
+majority the care of their souls was a delegated responsibility, and gave
+them little concern, if any. Personal effort in that direction was a matter
+of old age.
+
+The Church was, by its own traditions and sentiment, a spiritual light and
+guide; the end and aim of its service to develop spiritual life by teaching
+and prayer. The social life of the people, or, for that matter, the civic
+conditions that to the last degree regulated and controlled their
+pleasures, were not the concern of the Church. The parish house did not
+exist. The institutional church had not been conceived even in thought.
+
+Yet at this period, 1880 and 1881, there was a growing consciousness that
+something was wrong in the social order; that neither churches, schools nor
+homes were meeting the necessities of the working people or their children.
+The Church found itself losing ground; the people could not be held in
+allegiance to it. This was so true of the Protestant churches downtown that
+already the wisdom of moving uptown was being questioned. Some had even
+then left their old buildings to be used as mission churches; others sold
+their downtown buildings, moving uptown, giving up any attempt at holding
+the masses, who manifested no interest in the Church or its work. The
+missions then established were and are maintained with more or less wisdom
+and success. That mistakes should be made was natural. There was no
+precedent as to how one class in this democratic community should work for
+another. It took years for the churches to learn that the secret of success
+was in working _with_, and not _for_, the people.
+
+The overcrowding went on. Neighborhoods changed so rapidly that it was
+impossible to adopt any system to meet the necessities of the social
+conditions. These conditions were created by race standards of living,
+pleasure and religion. No man or organization was prepared to grapple with
+them intelligently, for they viewed them as observers.
+
+The Church had still the first interpretation of feeding the hungry,
+clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison. Secular work was
+not yet a part of the redemptive work of the Church. Poverty and ignorance
+reigned where prosperity and intelligence had been. The mission church
+became a distributing station. It was but natural that the men and women
+who followed Christ in their lives should feed and clothe the hungry and
+the naked. It was quite as natural that people whose struggle for life was
+constant, a struggle in which they were rarely successful, even when they
+accepted their own standards of success, should develop shrewdness in
+securing all possible aid at the least possible effort. The more they
+received without effort, the easier life was made for them. This was one
+method of adjustment. Where there were several children in a family they
+were often sent to as many Sunday-schools. The churches, all unconsciously,
+for a long period carried on the work of the missions on a commercial
+basis, competing energetically to secure attendants at mission services and
+Sunday-schools. The workers found their success measured by the numbers
+that appeared in their reports. It was the American standard of success. It
+became profitable to go to Sunday-school. The approach of the holidays
+found them crowded. The mission churches boomed. They provided an outlet
+for the energies of devoted, consecrated men and women, determined to make
+the world better because they were in it. The missions were an outlet for
+the generous; for the men and the women who considered themselves stewards
+of the properties in their possession. The blunders made are a tribute to
+the faith which established and maintained churches. The very blunders of
+those years were the seeds of wisdom these latter days are beginning to
+garner in the fruits of coöperation and federation. The forces are
+beginning to marshal under one banner and emblem, with one aim born of the
+nineteenth century conception, that Christ taught civic duty to His
+followers when He declared, "Render unto Cæsar the things that are
+Cæsar's." That the Church is the guardian of the people's rights, as well
+as their example, is a long-delayed conception. It has taken thirty years
+to bring the evolution in Church work from competition to coöperation in
+the work of personal and civic regeneration.
+
+Many of the difficulties hardest to overcome have grown out of the mistakes
+of those years, when the rapid influx of foreigners changed the character
+of the people of the tenement regions, and the Church failed to change its
+methods. They came, many of them, paupers, a charge at once upon the
+charitable and the humane. Neither their ignorance nor poverty was a bar to
+their citizenship; their presence on the municipal stage in the character
+of voters, sovereigns, increased the civic problems of New York, and
+naturally these the Church problems.
+
+Unfortunately the charitable work of the churches was too often left to the
+management of sentimental people, who failed to see what has been forced
+upon workers of the present day: that hunger is sometimes a moral educator;
+that the salvation of a family may sometimes be best secured by letting
+them suffer, the innocent with the guilty, because in the suffering is an
+educating power impossible to secure in any other way.
+
+One evening to a working-girls' club a teacher in a mission school not far
+away brought a girl of sixteen, introducing her as one of her girls who had
+been in her class two years. Privately she told one of the directors of the
+club of the poverty of the girl's family. The father was a man of
+seventy-five, who could do only the lightest work, and found getting the
+work he could do very difficult. This girl was the eldest of seven
+children, all attending the mission. "It is a mystery what would become of
+the family, were it not for what the mission does for them," was the
+comment of the teacher. A close inspection of the girl did not reveal
+distressing poverty, and the directors of the club were puzzled. The girl
+was employed in a store at a very small salary. She was anxious to go to
+the country. Of course, she must be sent away without any cost to herself.
+She doubted if the family could spare her wages, even if she could go free.
+She explained that she and her brothers and sisters had gone in "Tribune
+Fresh-Air Parties," but she was now too old. "The trouble with our family
+is," she commented, "that we are all too old." It seemed a hopeless
+doctrine to become fixed in the mind of a girl of sixteen, so the club
+directors secured a vacation for her through the Working-Girls' Vacation
+Society, deciding that, if it were necessary, they would pay the mother her
+wages for the time the girl was away. No question arose as to her wages. At
+the expiration of her two weeks' vacation, when she should have been
+penniless, she appeared at the club in a new hat and gloves. When the girl
+joined the club her Sunday-school teacher paid one month's dues. She had
+been present at several business meetings; she had seen the other girls
+paying their dues, she had heard the treasurer's report, but she never
+attempted to assume her financial obligations. She was spoken to finally in
+regard to her dues, and responded calmly by saying she could not pay her
+dues; she had no money. Various suggestions were made as to the possibility
+of her paying part. At last, to relieve the club treasury, one of the
+directors said: "I will pay what you owe and one month in advance. You may
+pay me as you can." The girl never came to the club again. No effort was
+made to trace her, as she contributed nothing to the life of the club, and
+many girls kept their dues paid who dressed far more plainly; these very
+girls she had on more than one occasion treated discourteously.
+
+Two years afterward one of the club officers was calling on a friend. "I am
+so glad you came in," she exclaimed. "One of your club girls is in trouble
+and is coming here with Miss ----, a mission worker in Dr. ----'s church,
+this morning. Now you can help solve her problem." To have a member of a
+working-girls' club go to an outsider for help is to have one of your own
+family appeal to strangers in time of need. The club worker kept still. She
+was covered with shame. She had failed to establish relations with one it
+was her sole purpose to help. Who the girl was she did not know, as her
+friend had forgotten the girl's name. The girl came. It was our old friend
+of sixteen. She was, as may be imagined, not pleased to see the director of
+the club. The history of that family is fairly indicative of how missions
+were conducted at that time. How many of them are conducted at the present
+with the same results? Originally this family was found by the workers of a
+mission established by a wealthy church, and apparently in need. Rent was
+paid; food and clothes provided; doctors sent when necessary. The return
+for this, as tacitly agreed, was the presence of the children, as rapidly
+as they were old enough, in the Sunday-school, and the father and mother at
+the Sunday evening service, the only service this mission maintained.
+
+The timidity of the first contact disappeared early. The wants soon outgrew
+the needs of the family. The mission people failed to respond to the wants,
+and watched more closely what it cost the church to meet the needs after
+the first years of acquaintance. This was not to be borne. The family went
+in a body to another mission of the same church ten blocks away. They made
+not the slightest effort to deceive, for they did not change their address.
+Here were nine persons to add to the roll of the mission, and they were
+added. The family was enthusiastically welcomed. No impudent or intrusive
+questions were asked. Shoes, coats, rent money in whole or part was
+generously given. At the end of two years discoveries were made that led
+the mission workers to question what was done with the supplies provided.
+The family would not stand this. They went bodily to a church less than a
+mile away, still living at the old address. The family was again taken up
+without question. That the father could not work was accepted and
+generosity was increased. The other missions contrasted unfavorably in
+generous impulses; the girl urged her former classmates to join the last
+mission. The church meanwhile was walking by faith in its treatment of the
+poor; aiming to live up to the conception of its days; strengthening the
+influence of its prayers with gifts of potatoes; certainly a great advance
+on prayers and no potatoes.
+
+At about this time a young girl was met in a Sunday-school class very
+attractive, always well and prettily dressed. She had been in the
+Sunday-school all her life, and had joined the church with her mother, a
+gentle, quiet woman, who leaned on her daughter for guidance. The daughter
+was a tower of strength. By accident it was learned that the girl was a
+wage-earner, working with her mother in a large suit house in New York;
+that they kept house, doing the housework, even the washing and ironing,
+before and after their day's work. Added to this they made all their own
+clothes, which must have involved a vast amount of labor, as they both
+dressed well.
+
+The position of this mother and daughter is fairly typical of a large army
+of women workers, and explains, in part, at least, why two women of so much
+character should have accepted charity for so many years and why they could
+not change their economic relation. The work they did was to a degree a
+trade. Each was a special "hand" on a certain part of women's suits. They
+were paid by the piece. When they had work, they made good wages; but the
+seasons were short. The beginning of every season found them in debt. By
+the time the debt was paid work had grown slack or stopped. It was simply
+impossible to get beyond this, try as they would. When the girl broke down,
+she explained it by saying, "I worked all night to finish my dress. If I
+could buy the material in the slack season I could make our things then. We
+never have the money, and they have to be made just when work is hardest at
+the store." She was but nineteen. The girl was pretty, ambitious, entirely
+above the men of her own station in refinement, and yet quite as far
+beneath the brothers of the girls she met in her Sunday-school class. She
+lived in mental terror lest they should attempt to call on her. It was
+pitiful to see the struggle she made to conceal the fact that she was poor.
+The other girls knew she worked, knew the church helped the family, but
+were very tactful in assisting her in keeping her secret.
+
+When the mother came to the notice of the officers of the church she was a
+widow with three young children, one a baby. She could support her family
+if the rent was paid. The church officers were glad to do this. They did
+not support a mission and had very little outlet for the church's
+generosity, except the mission societies--Home and Foreign--to which they
+were devoted as a church.
+
+For thirteen years the church had been faithful to its promise and paid the
+rent. Nobody questioned the mother as to how her children were getting on,
+or what was being done to make them self-supporting. The younger were two
+boys. When they were large enough to play on the street, the mother put
+them in an institution and paid a small sum for them. The girl went to work
+with the mother as soon as she could. The elder boy came home at fourteen
+and became a wage-earner. He was troublesome, most difficult to manage, was
+out of work more time than he was employed, and yet he would not when
+unemployed even keep the fire, that the house might be comfortable when his
+mother and sister came home. They always left the house in order when they
+went to work, but found it littered when they returned. The boy had no
+sense of moral responsibility for his own support. His temper was wholly
+untrained. At the time the family history was connected, the youngest boy
+was to come home, and naturally his return was dreaded. The mother and
+daughter met the problem unaided as to advice or suggestion. Apparently the
+church would continue to pay the rent without question, though there were
+three, and would soon be four, wage-earners in the family.
+
+When these facts were discovered, the church committee was asked to advance
+money enough to pay for the girl's lessons at a school where dress-cutting
+was taught, and to notify the widow that her rent would no longer be paid.
+
+The girl accepted the offer at once. She proved a great success, and to-day
+is earning a salary as a designer equal to that of many college professors.
+She educated her younger brother in a profession, and has entirely
+forgotten the days when the church helped her. Her social affiliations are
+in another part of the city, and she bows, or forgets to bow, when she
+meets those who may remember it, as they would, to her credit. Had the
+church retained its claim on her through its financial aid, she would not
+be where she is to-day. Her development came when the church made another
+future possible to her by refusing to pauperize the family.
+
+We all know the families who have more turkeys at Christmas than members.
+We still have churches and sewing schools in the same neighborhood, giving
+their Christmas entertainments at different hours and at different dates,
+to suit the convenience of those who attend both and profit thereby. We
+even have different entertainments given for different branches of work in
+the same church at different hours. We succeeded in impressing one boy with
+the idea that what he received at the various organizations maintained for
+his profit was "Christmas loot," and that he was clever at getting more
+than his share. We have become accustomed to conducting an exchange after
+our Christmas entertainments, because in giving we have, unfortunately,
+duplicated the gifts received elsewhere. Mollie finds herself with two
+dolls and no bed, and Katie has two beds and no doll, and Alice has two
+sets of dishes and no table. Like fate has attended the gifts to the boys.
+We, as a result, enact the rôle of patient, sweet generosity and
+redistribute gifts.
+
+We know that comparisons are made as to which church, sewing school or club
+is the one to give the major portion of the coming year's attendance. But
+all this will disappear as rapidly as sectarianism and competition between
+churches and in philanthropic effort disappear. Competition created it;
+coöperation will dispel it, because all will come to a higher conception of
+the relations of efforts toward improvement. Then the "profit" of church
+and Sunday-school attendance will not be measured by the "things"
+distributed.
+
+Nothing marks the growth of public intelligence more than the federations,
+and the systems that have grown out of the knowledge of the injury done the
+poor by misplaced generosity. Sometimes the children of the poor seem
+uncanny in the knowledge they possess of how to use the public and private
+charities.
+
+A girl of seventeen gave astonishing evidence of this in a family crisis.
+She was a member of a working-girls' club; quiet, studious, reserved. She
+was always one of the poorest dressed girls in the club. Her devotion to
+those classes which she joined and attended regularly attracted the
+attention and admiration of the club directors. Discovering that her dress
+was in part responsible for the treatment accorded her by two or three
+members, it was decided to make it possible for her to make a better
+appearance. She had shown qualities which, if allowed free play, would make
+her an influential member of the club.
+
+It was discovered that she attended a near-by mission of a Congregational
+church. Consultation with the mission workers brought the unwelcome
+knowledge that the mother was immoral, hopelessly immoral, but that her
+children loved her dearly and that she was devoted to them. The paying of
+rent seemed to support a shelter that ought not to exist, but no one had
+the courage to attempt to separate the mother and children. Even this girl
+of seventeen had no idea of her mother's wrong-doing. It was a case that
+needed the wisdom of Solomon to solve. Just before Christmas the mother
+fell ill. The passion of grief that convulsed that group of children was
+convincing testimony of the mother's tenderness and devotion. Her eyes
+followed them constantly. When able to speak, she would whisper: "What will
+become of them? There is no one to care for them." She was removed to a
+hospital, with the knowledge that the rent had been paid for a month and
+that the children would be looked after. She died two days later. When the
+house was visited that morning, the elder girl was out "getting things,"
+the children said. When she came in, she was told that provision had been
+made to send them all together to a home, where they would not be separated
+for a month. The girl sprang to her feet, grabbed the fifteen-months-old
+baby from the floor, and swept the others in a circle about her. She
+panted, rather than said: "You shall not take the baby away! I will not let
+them go! Nobody shall take them. They are mine. I can take care of them.
+You just pay the rent. I can do everything else. See?" She put the baby
+down, and thrusting her hands into her pockets, brought out tickets to the
+Diet Kitchen, the Charities Department for coal and groceries. She had
+been to two missionaries connected with different churches she knew, and
+secured orders on a near-by grocery for dry groceries. There was not a
+public or private charity that gave out-door assistance that that girl of
+seventeen did not know just what must be done to get their help. The amount
+of knowledge of this kind that she possessed was astounding.
+
+Besides, there was not an institution in the city where children were taken
+for longer or shorter periods of time that she did not know. In many of
+them she had been herself. In others she had visited the other children of
+the family when they were inmates. She found out the defects of each
+one--the kind of matron, of food, of punishments that governed in each, and
+made out a case against each one. White, with blazing eyes, she looked
+capable of doing just what she said she would do, take care of the family
+of five little children. They were grouped about her, clinging to her, all
+crying in the face of the awful calamity that was about to befall
+them--separation. It was agreed that they should stay where they were for
+the balance of the month. The question of the future beyond that would be
+discussed later. The girl quieted down.
+
+The mother had been insured in one of the insurance companies on the weekly
+payment plan. The girl had secured an undertaker who would go to the
+hospital and take the mother's body to his establishment for the funeral to
+be held the next morning.
+
+"We will have our own minister," she said, with dignity, "not the mission."
+Her visitors were again astounded. The mission had looked after the family
+for years. The girl had for several years been connected with the
+Sunday-school. The address of the minister was secured. The girl explained:
+"My mother was confirmed in that church, in her own country, her own home.
+She had a letter to the church when she came to this country with my father
+after they were married. At first my father earned good money, but he got
+sick and they did not get along, and my mother stopped going there, except
+to communion; and for three years now she ain't had the clothes to go even
+then. She had us confirmed there as soon as we were old enough, and we went
+there to communion when we had the clothes. The minister is going to come
+to the funeral, and I am going to send word to some of mother's friends
+from the old country who go there to church. I could not have them come
+here; mother would feel awful." Glancing about the barren, dirty rooms with
+a look of scorn, she continued: "We could not let our church friends know
+how poor we are. Mother tried hard enough. She was away from home days at a
+time looking for work. She took boarders. She did everything she could. You
+know I've worked when I could get it." Her voice broke for the first time.
+"She took boarders and gave them the beds; we all slept on the floor. She
+married the last boarder, the baby's father. She told me to stay here until
+he came home, this month--he's a sailor--and to do just what he says. He
+was always kind to me and gave me things. You've paid the rent, and you
+need not do anything more. I'll stay right here and keep the children till
+the baby's father comes home; you need not trouble any more."
+
+She was quiet a moment, but evidently felt the doubt and the decision in
+her visitors' minds. Rising, she said fiercely: "I'll not; I'll never let
+these children be taken from me!"
+
+The problem was too much for her visitors. They decided to leave the
+question of the immediate future to the family's own minister, who
+certainly had not carried these lambs in his arms, nor watched very closely
+over their erring mother.
+
+The family was separated. Nothing else was possible. The baby's father
+repudiated any responsibility for any of the children, and disappeared. The
+girl drooped for a time after the separation; but she finally secured a
+good home, making a capable, devoted servant until she married. She owes
+allegiance only to her own church, saying: "The minister talked so
+beautifully at mother's funeral." Her whole conception of the mission
+church is that it is an institution for helping the poor.
+
+She never doubted her mother, whose picture, enlarged from a small
+photograph, is the chief ornament in her parlor, her most cherished
+possession, outside of her husband and children.
+
+In spite of the outburst of passionate devotion at the time of her mother's
+funeral, this woman, now with a comfortable home of her own, knows nothing
+of the children for whose protection she attained, for a time at least,
+sublime heroism. In a few months her indifference was as astonishing as her
+devotion had been. Her own life and its concerns filled her mental horizon
+to their entire exclusion. For her own home and children she has the
+passionate love that she gave to her mother and the crowd of half-brothers
+and sisters. She is ambitious for her children, and has two in the High
+School. This woman is a fair illustration of the evolution that is making
+this nation great.
+
+The churches, when first the social disintegration began, had neither the
+intelligence born of experience nor the money to place the mission work in
+charge of people of high intellectual and social development. There were no
+training schools for Christian workers, and to that degree the Church was
+hampered in inaugurating its work among the poor. The selection was too
+often a question of pleasing some wealthy member of the church, by giving
+positions to protégés who had absolutely no qualification for the work but
+their necessities. This basis of selection--not yet wholly eliminated--put
+the work of the missions under the control of men and women who lacked
+social training. Neither by nature nor grace were they fitted for the work
+they attempted to do.
+
+Their attitude of mind was too often that of patron, which, as any one of
+experience knows, is one of the most demoralizing influences active among
+the poor.
+
+There comes to mind now a downtown church, the mission of one of the
+leading uptown churches. It was Thanksgiving evening. For weeks placards
+had been on the front of the building announcing an entertainment for that
+evening, to which all the people were invited. On the platform were a
+number of young men and women, sons and daughters of the uptown church
+members, the entertainers for the evening.
+
+The church was packed with the people of the region, self-respecting poor.
+The mission, fortunately for them, was limited in money, so its
+possibility for pauperizing was limited to just that degree. The mission
+pastor, before the entertainment began, opened with a prayer, in which he
+thanked God for the warm-hearted, generous people who were giving
+themselves and their money for the uplifting of the poor and degraded. God
+was asked to implant a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of those
+assembled to enjoy this pure entertainment provided for their benefit. When
+he opened his eyes he continued his theme in two variations for twenty
+minutes longer, in what he called an address. It was this attitude of mind
+on the part of many of the workers that drove out of the church the mass of
+the poor; that began the breach that has widened, until in September, 1901,
+we stand appalled as we realize all that has entered into the making of
+that awful national tragedy.
+
+The standards of cleanliness and beauty maintained in the mission churches
+have been far from what they should be. As the visitor enters to-day one of
+the first buildings erected on the East Side as a mission church, he is
+repelled by the general air of neglect; the dirt on walls and ceiling, made
+still more repellent by water stains from leaks; the ugliness of the whole
+interior, as well as the entire lack of adaptation to the work of to-day,
+which one of the most devoted of pastors, a friend to every man, woman and
+child in the region, is establishing. There is not one thing in that
+building that is not ugly and cheap. The very platform on which the pastor
+preaches lacks furniture, that would impart an air of cheer or
+impressiveness. Instead of the building being an unconscious influence in
+the neighborhood for beauty, tidiness, cleanliness, it is a part of the
+general result of the greed and poverty which has made one of the most
+sordid, character-destroying neighborhoods in New York.
+
+One Sunday afternoon, as the writer was passing this building, the children
+began pouring out of it. The Sunday-school had just closed. They yelled,
+fought, ran. Suddenly they discovered a half-drunken wretch of a woman
+reeling down the street. The elder boys pulled her clothes, dragged off her
+hat, tormented her, yelling and laughing at the foul language they called
+forth. It was appalling, yet not surprising. The building remains as first
+erected. No attempt has been made to adapt it to the needs of the region.
+It was built for church and Sunday-school services, and the work which the
+devoted, consecrated pastor has put into it to meet the needs of the time
+is done under conditions that make the highest success impossible. There is
+not a room in the neighborhood for boys' clubs, for reading-room, for
+pleasure, where boy nature can have the fullest expression under wise
+direction. For adults the saloon and the streets are the only resources
+outside of their overcrowded homes. The pastor knows that to succeed in
+changing the character of that neighborhood it is necessary to hold the
+people through seven days of the week. He knows that this can be done if he
+can provide for the people pleasures, opportunities that express their
+social development. He knows that people express themselves in their
+pleasures, and that, whether they will or not, that expression is
+controlled by environment. If the trustees will not, cannot be made to see
+this, let the pastor of the mission be what he will, his work will be
+limited by the men who, in the very nature of their relations to the
+mission, cannot see the truth.
+
+The pastor of the mission had a long vacation given him. The man sent to
+take his place wore soiled linen, would sit for an hour at a time tipped on
+the back legs of his chair. He would refer to the people in their presence
+as "they" and "these people." One of the young men who belonged to a club
+where some attention had been paid to manners and dress said one night:
+"Say, wouldn't you think that feller would wear clean collars, and stand
+up when talking to a lady? I don't care if he is a minister, he ain't
+much."
+
+The people who were responsible for putting that man in that position were
+generous, held the best social positions, filled responsible positions in
+the commercial world. Not one of them would have chosen that man to
+represent them in the business world, because of his carelessness in dress
+and lack of manners. But they did not hesitate to send him to represent the
+Lord Jesus Christ to the poor; not a demoralized and degraded people, but a
+self-respecting body of Americans, born and trained, so far as they had
+been trained, to believe in the equality of man under the flag and before
+God. Is it any wonder that the more intelligent of the people resented the
+placing of this man over them, and remained away from the church of which
+he had charge? His person, his mind or his manners were not contradictory.
+
+One evening, going through the audience room of this building on an errand
+to the rear room, the visitor heard one of the women missionaries say to a
+little girl who had evidently been troublesome and inattentive: "If you
+don't sit still, Mollie, I'll come there and shake you until you'll be glad
+to sit still." The woman was training a group of little girls to take part
+in a Christmas entertainment. They were each to recite a verse and turn a
+gold paper-covered letter as they recited, so that when the last one had
+spoken her verse the sentence "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth
+and good-will to men" would be revealed. The woman, in temper, language,
+conception of her duty to these children, differed in nowise from their
+ignorant, tired, worried mothers at home, who probably made no claim as a
+teacher of morals and religion. What ideals of womanhood did this woman
+represent?
+
+A minister came to attend the funeral of a little baby in a surplice so
+soiled and rumpled that a friend of the mother, who was a good laundress,
+said afterward: "I wish he'd given me that yesterday morning. I would have
+washed and ironed it." "He wouldn't have worn it if it had been a rich
+man's child," was the little mother's response. "Well, he acted like his
+surplice, rumpled," said the first speaker. And the writer was struck with
+the perfect characterization of the man's manner.
+
+Fortunately, there are men who see the divine in every human being; who
+know that sorrow, grief, shame and suffering bear as cruelly, as bitterly
+on the poor as the rich, and in their ministration know no difference
+between them.
+
+The writer was present at a funeral in an East Side home in a tenement
+having sixteen families. A wife and mother had died. The family occupied
+the floor through. Nothing was known to the writer of the creed of the
+family, though she had known them for years. The minister came in a
+spotless surplice, most carefully put on. His manner of greeting the family
+and friends was so expressive of fraternal sympathy that one felt it a
+privilege to witness it. He stood in that East Side home the herald of
+hope. Since the blow had fallen he had visited it every day. On the day of
+the funeral he had so filled the hearts in that home with the spirit of
+resignation that the lesson that it taught left an impress on all who were
+present. Not once in the earnest address did he use the word "death." It
+was "release," and he made all feel that gratitude for relief from cruel
+suffering was the occasion for the assembling of the friends together. He
+gave out the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee." There was no musical
+instrument in the home. All present were wage-earners. The writer trembled
+for the result. The minister's beautiful tenor voice started the hymn,
+assisted at once by boys' voices in the different rooms. He had brought the
+choir of his church to assist, and stationed them through the rooms by
+direction before they came to the house. The people all sang. When the
+services were over, this minister remained with the family, a courtesy
+which to the poor is so unusual that the memory of it is still one of the
+events of life on the East Side.
+
+[Illustration: A SPIRITUAL BULWARK.]
+
+This represents this clergyman's attitude toward his people; and all who
+are their friends are his people. Is it any wonder that they never go
+beyond his care? He has baptized the children of three generations. Easter
+service is the home-coming of these families. They come from as far as they
+have money to pay their fare. The gray stone church is pretty. It has
+stained-glass windows, a baptistry, and maintains a surpliced choir. It is
+delightful to see the positive influence of these accessories on the
+people. Other churches to which they have access lack them, and the
+contrast deepens the love for the old church. It needs renovating, a parish
+house, a corps of modern workers. But these can well be dispensed with
+while that towering gray head leads the people. For the noble, unselfish
+life of the man stands before them always, the embodiment of eternal love
+and sympathy, interpreting both under conditions that would at times seem
+to justify doubt.
+
+There is another phase of the Church's attitude toward its work in the
+poorer districts that lies at the root of the rejection of the Church by
+the majority of the thinking, self-respecting poor, and that is the
+assembling of the poor together as an exhibit of its work; the making of
+reports of which the poor are the statistics. The defence that this is
+necessary to stimulate the interest of the rich, and by that means secure
+the money for the continuing of the work in the poorer sections of the
+city, is but the evidence of the lack of spiritual life in the Church; the
+absence of the very foundation of Christianity and brotherly love.
+
+The consciousness that watching the hungry eating Christmas and
+Thanksgiving dinners is hardly what Christ meant when he gave forth the
+decree, "Feed my lambs," is becoming a conviction; but it is due to the
+positive teaching of workers outside of the Church, who felt the
+irreparable loss of self-respect that must follow from such an exhibition.
+To gather the beneficiaries of their generosity together and take stock, as
+it were, of the investments, the dividends of which are to be realized
+wholly in the future life, has antagonized the self-respecting poor. They
+refuse to assemble as objects of interest, even in a church.
+
+So dense is the spiritual perception of even some very good people, so
+materialistic is the plane on which work for the poor is conducted in some
+churches, that the results have been cruel--unconscious on the part of the
+offenders--but nevertheless cruel.
+
+A group of very young girls worked in a factory on the borders of a section
+in which lived people of wealth and intelligence. The factory made no
+provision for a lunch room. When the weather permitted, the girls ate their
+lunches on the curbs and on the stoops of houses in the immediate
+neighborhood. This was demoralizing to the girls and distressing to several
+women in the neighborhood. Not far away was a large house hired and
+controlled by a church long noted for its broadness and its generosity. The
+basement of the house was not used, except twice a week in the evening by a
+working-girls' club. The use of this basement from half-past eleven till
+one was asked for and granted.
+
+The plan was to have a woman arrange the tables, make tea, and wash the
+dishes used by the girls each day. The girls were to pay five cents a week
+for the use of the room and the tea. They were to bring their own lunches.
+The plan met with their warmest approval, and the lunch room was opened,
+with three young girls from a society in the church to help. The girls
+poured their own tea. For three days everything promised well. The girls
+accepted the one condition imposed, that they would go quietly to and from
+the factory at the noon hour, to avoid comments from the residents about.
+The fourth day some of the righteous, energetic souls belonging to the
+church thought they would see the result of their generous gift of the use
+of the room for which they had no other use.
+
+Nine of them, personally conducted by one of the assistant ministers,
+crowded the two doorways to see these girls eat the lunch they brought from
+their own homes and drink the tea for which they were paying all they had
+been asked to pay. One small girl, with her hair still hanging in braids
+down her back, tried in every way to break off pieces of her luncheon
+without uncovering it. Finding she could not, she gave up, and tied the
+string about the paper again, sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. It
+was this child's first week out of school. Her father was now in the
+hospital for the third month. There were five children, of which this girl
+was the eldest. All the money saved by this skillful mechanic and his
+thrifty wife was gone, and this girl had to go to work. One can imagine
+faintly her feelings as she looked at the crowded doorways and knew that
+the whispered comments included her. The less refined, though more
+independent, girls sat with flaming cheeks, and holding papers over their
+lunches, ate them and drank the tea.
+
+The first week represented the life of that lunch club. The girls went back
+to the curb and the sidewalk and stoops as lunch rooms. Here, at least, no
+personally conducted parties came to view them. If any one looked at them
+and they objected, they were on terms of equality, and at once notified the
+offenders of their offence. To the credit of the people who used that
+street, few stopped to look at the girls.
+
+It would have surprised those very good people to have known the opinion
+those crude, uneducated girls had of them. A day or two later, standing
+with a group of girls who had not been present, with a half dozen of the
+men who worked in the factory, as spectators, the leader of the girls
+described the scene, caricaturing the "church gang," as she called them,
+and some of the girls who had been distressed by their presence. The group
+shrieked with laughter; yet there was an unpleasant note in it. "---- them!
+That's what they always do. Stay away from them after this," was the
+comment and advice of one of the men. "You bet!" responded the girl actor,
+as she curveted down toward the factory in response to the whistle calling
+them back to their work.
+
+If the years as they passed did not clearly reveal that the Church that
+holds the poor is one over which men of the highest intellectual and social
+training are placed in charge, the mistakes of the present would be
+extenuated. Such churches do exist. Men of strong, vivid spiritual
+perception have erected and maintained bulwarks of righteousness in
+neighborhoods where the environment, the civic order is degrading. They
+have done this by conducting all the departments of their work with the
+view of developing the gifts of the people to whom they are ministering.
+The choir is the boys and girls trained by the best teachers they can
+secure. The Sunday-school teachers are the working boys, girls, men and
+women who are instructed by the pastor for their Sunday-school work. The
+officers of the church are the men of the neighborhood. The people are
+married and buried from the church; the children are baptized in it. The
+preaching is teaching that salvation is of time, as well as of eternity.
+The sins of the people are made visible. The pulpit holds the mirror up to
+nature. It is a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading them
+into the promised land, made so by their own civic honesty, their own
+personal character.
+
+These men do not have to make reports; to bow before a board of trustees.
+They do not have to suppress or expand to meet the ideas of theorists. A
+few men give them the financial support they need, and let them, like men,
+stand before God and their own souls responsible for what they do for the
+people whom, when Christ was on earth, He chose for His friends--the poor.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE THE PEOPLE SHARE.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS.
+
+
+Twenty-five or thirty years ago in New York the question of the wisdom, if
+not the necessity, of moving the downtown churches uptown began to agitate
+the pastors and church leaders. The congregations, or part of the
+congregations, who had contributed most liberally to the support of the
+Church were beginning to move uptown, crowded out by business and the
+incoming foreign element which settles near the shipping and factory
+districts. The new-comers did not support the churches, especially the
+Protestant, not even by attendance. It was natural that the churches should
+follow their congregations. Some sold their buildings to the sects that
+came with the foreigners; some made a brave effort to maintain a church for
+the people; some became missions, distributing stations to the poor people
+who had settled in the now overcrowded houses that formerly were the homes
+of one family. The change in the downtown communities was so rapid that no
+one could understand how to deal with the new element. The Church had to
+spend years in learning how to adapt its methods to the needs of the new
+peoples who settled by hundreds where scores had been. Not only was this
+feature bewildering in itself, but the people spoke an unknown tongue, were
+foreign in thought and sentiment; were social, rather than religious.
+
+The saloon far outstripped the Church in the ease with which it adapted
+itself to the new element. The Church encountered not merely the new people
+degraded, but an environment that in itself was a tremendous obstacle to
+decent living. The Church shortly discovered an entirely unlooked-for evil,
+insidious, demoralizing--the political corruption of voters. The Church to
+the smallest degree only in recent times has come into the larger
+conception of its function as a teacher of good citizenship, a link between
+the voter and the ballot-box, preaching the duty of the exercise of the
+franchise governed by conscience. It took the moral degradation of the city
+to rouse the churches to activity as redemptive civic powers.
+
+The corrupting influence of corrupt politicians was evidenced in the
+conditions that developed in sections of the city left to their control. As
+the years went on and the men of conscience and intelligence became more
+absorbed in business and profession, more given to money-making, because of
+increasing social demands, the city became, in the minds not only of these
+politicians, but of the voters they trained, a mine to be worked for
+personal gain. Ignorance contributed to the rapid degeneracy of the people
+in the old home sections of New York.
+
+The saloon became very early in the development of the tenement-house
+sections the only social center. The result was an increasing of the drink
+habit and the establishment of political headquarters in saloons. Often the
+politician in embryo was the saloon-keeper, often the bartender. The social
+side of life thirty years ago was not a subject for church consideration
+and study.
+
+The Church ministering to a people having standards of social life
+established by the churches, the outgrowth of its teachings and creeds, can
+ignore questions that the Church ministering, or trying to minister, to a
+people poverty-stricken, overworked, living lives barren of any pleasures
+but those of the senses, in an environment that of itself would be a
+deteriorating influence, must meet and answer.
+
+The Church downtown discovered it must work seven days in the week; that
+its office, its function was secular, as well as religious; that its Sunday
+work was but one-seventh of its work, and that the six-sevenths must
+minister to that one. The Church must go out into the highways and hedges,
+to use a misplaced metaphor for a city street, and win the people. This
+evolution of conception marks a spiritual Renaissance.
+
+Industrial training was introduced by the churches, the natural result of
+discovering the ignorance of the women of household arts. Far more valuable
+than the skill imparted to the children gathered in these classes was the
+contact with the earnest, refined women and young girls who were the
+teachers in the now established mission churches. The revelation was
+mutual. If the tenement-house child gained new ideas of cleanliness, of
+order, of neatness, of dexterity, of manners, the uptown teacher also
+gained knowledge of which she stood quite as much in need. When a panting,
+shining-faced child came to sewing school half to three-quarters of an hour
+late because she scrubbed the halls and stairs of a three-story tenement
+house to help her mother, the housekeeper, who paid the whole or part of
+the rent for the family by this service, the uptown woman of leisure gained
+a new view of life and its responsibilities. When the mission worker who
+was giving time and strength and knowledge as the expression of her faith
+and conscience, found children scarcely more than babies working far beyond
+their strength in the service of their families, the uptown worker gained a
+new conception of sacrifice, of poverty, and, what was far more important,
+a new conception of the causes of ignorance. The uptown woman of leisure
+saw that often children were sacrificed to greed; forced to become
+wage-earners by parents anxious to increase their bank accounts.
+
+As time went on, they saw that, whether poverty or greed was responsible
+for the sacrifice of the children, the protection of the children was the
+safeguard of the State, of the nation. There came from this, by the process
+of evolution, the factory laws for the protection of women and children;
+the compulsory school law. In these latter days this last has been made
+ridiculous by the failure of the municipality to provide school
+accommodations for the children of school age, especially the children
+under fourteen living in the overcrowded sections.
+
+The church workers in the tenement-house sections were able to find means
+to meet some of the evils of oppression, of poverty, of ignorance. They had
+concrete facts to present to a semi-indifferent public; but when the social
+side of the people in the tenements became a problem, especially the social
+life of the young people, the remedies did not present themselves. The
+legislation proposed and executed was restrictive, not recreative. It was
+not the function of the State or the Church to provide social
+opportunities for uneducated, overworked young people.
+
+The older girls in the Sunday-school classes presented not only all the
+problems of the little children, but the larger one of social opportunity.
+The homes were too small, too overcrowded to give social opportunity to the
+family. Besides, there was that saddest of all features too often found in
+the home of the working girls--the absence of all sense of personal
+responsibility on the part of parents for the social life of the children,
+girls and boys. The children in all but the exceptional home were free to
+choose friends, free to go and come as suited them. Home was a place in
+which to eat and to sleep; a place of shelter; a place often entered only
+when there was no place to go out of working hours.
+
+The problem of providing social opportunity faced the downtown churches. In
+the very nature of things the social opportunities the Church could offer
+must be limited; must be of the nature that appealed to the more quiet, the
+phlegmatic, the element that presented the least factors in the social
+problem. The parish house, the church house did not exist. All the
+amusements offered the people must be in a building consecrated to
+religious life and service. It was a serious question how far the Church
+was justified in introducing the purely social.
+
+It was natural that the young women brought into touch with the young
+working girls in the Sunday-school should apprehend the restrictions that
+life in a tenement imposed on a working girl. Everything in this life
+tended to make her gregarious. She was born into a house probably
+overcrowded before she came into it; she slept, ate, lived with crowds. The
+street, her only playground, was teeming with children like herself. When
+she worked, she rubbed elbows with the workers on each side of her. She
+went and came from her work one of a group. The working girl lived free,
+and pleasure she would have.
+
+The girl of wealth and leisure working in the mission Sunday-school, by her
+own youth and natural inclinations, could appreciate this side of the
+working-girl's nature, and with the same clearness of vision see the
+limitations imposed on the Church in trying to meet the social needs of the
+people for whom it primarily existed.
+
+Visiting the homes of their girl pupils, the Sunday-school teachers
+discovered the limitations of the homes. Between the homes as they existed
+and the churches as they must exist, the social center for the working girl
+must be created that would meet her social needs. The streets were the
+working-girl's reception-room, drawing-room, living-room, where she
+received her most intimate friends; where mutual entertainment was provided
+in ways that made no drafts on purse or inventiveness. Halls were open for
+dancing, where her presence was so desirable that she was admitted free or
+at half the price demanded of her brother. Excursion grounds with dancing
+platforms were then popular within the city limits. The immorality of the
+present temptations that make perilous the way of the working girl in 1901
+were almost wholly unknown twenty years ago.
+
+The work the earnest-hearted women interested in the working-girl's life
+faced was how to enlarge her social opportunities in connection with
+educational opportunities that would meet her peculiar need, and which she
+would accept. New methods of intercourse, new places of meeting must be
+found.
+
+Every organization that has developed in these latter days for bettering
+the condition of the people has its root in the doctrines of the churches;
+workers and money come from the people who receive their impulse from the
+teachings of Christ. These organizations are as truly as the churches the
+expression of brotherly love; the positive declaration of the
+consciousness that no man liveth to himself.
+
+To Miss Grace H. Dodge the women of this country owe a great debt. She,
+from the standpoint of a Church worker, devoted and faithful, saw that
+outside of the Church, but governed by all that the Church believed and
+taught, the natural outcome of both, a social center for working girls must
+be created. This center must be independent of any other organization. It
+must be at once a natural expression of the working-girls' standards. It
+must be flexible, as well as progressive, during every period of evolution
+in each group; it must keep in touch with the least progressive mentally,
+the most progressive socially.
+
+A place must be created where recreation was possible; where classes to
+meet the educational wants of every member could be established. Above all,
+a place must be made where wealth and poverty, education and ignorance,
+could meet on the common level of mutual helpfulness.
+
+A conference with a group of working girls but strengthened Miss Dodge's
+conviction that this social center would not only give to the working girls
+the social opportunity that New York lacked, but it would give to the woman
+of wealth and leisure the opportunity to meet the people whom she must know
+if she would use her time, her money, her education wisely in the interest
+of social development.
+
+With Miss Dodge as president, the first working-girls' club was organized.
+It marked a new epoch. It made the opportunity that had never existed--the
+working of rich and poor to secure the same end. This country reaps the
+benefit of this first step in altruism based on the highest Christian and
+democratic doctrines.
+
+The working-girls' club has from that time been a positive factor in the
+social development of working women, not only of New York, but the whole
+country. It has enabled the students of economics and sociology to get at
+facts that have revolutionized theories. The working-girls' club taught the
+working girls themselves the causes of their economic disadvantages.
+
+Hardly was the first club formed when the practical results inseparable
+from this new combination of interests and sympathies met the approval of
+all interested in the problem of the working-girl's life. Everywhere clubs
+began to form. The idea has been adapted and adopted by the churches.
+Working-girls' clubs of all degrees of development, under many kinds of
+constitutions, managed and mismanaged, are to be found north, east, south
+and west.
+
+The question of support was one of primary importance. Miss Dodge had
+studied this side of the question thoroughly, and from the first it was
+decided that dues must be paid by the members. As new clubs were formed,
+this question of dues was met differently. Usually the wages of the
+majority of each group of girls forming a club decided the amount of dues,
+and naturally the dues varied in the clubs. In some clubs the dues were
+five cents per month; in others, five cents per week; in some the dues were
+twenty-five cents per month. Even this amount could not meet the expenses
+of a club conducted to elevate the standards of the members by the
+environment, as well as the social and educational opportunities provided.
+The financial managements of the clubs differ greatly, and always have.
+Strenuous effort has always been made in some clubs to make them
+self-supporting; they seem almost to live for that purpose. Entertainments,
+sub-letting of rooms, fairs, every means is resorted to accomplish this
+end. Naturally the members of such clubs develop a good deal of business
+ability; sometimes at the expense of qualities that in a woman count for
+more in life.
+
+The highest form of club life developed among working girls represents, to
+the working girl, her college. She realizes, as does the rich girl or boy
+who enters college, that what she pays does not, cannot, pay for what she
+receives. This conception of the financial side of the working-girls' club
+management controls in the clubs, with few exceptions, to-day.
+
+The club must give every educational and social opportunity that will meet
+the needs of the members. As the college meets the demands of its students
+in the electives it offers, so must the working-girls' club. As the college
+student must meet the financial obligations he assumes when he enters
+college, so must the member of the working-girls' club keep her financial
+engagement. As the college makes it possible for the worthy student to
+complete his course of study after financial disaster makes it impossible
+for him to meet his financial obligations, so must the working girl who has
+contributed to the life of the club, or who has shown her desire to profit
+by what it offers, be kept in good and regular standing when financial
+disaster makes personal independence impossible. In short, the
+working-girls' clubs that are conducted on the broader lines, and with the
+most comprehensive knowledge of our social conditions, are in management
+and purpose a college for working girls. The idea of self-support may have
+been strained for a time, but it was an error in the right direction, and
+led to the truer conception which regulates the management of the best
+clubs to-day.
+
+It was curious, is curious, the attitude of mind with which some girls
+approach the club idea. There comes to mind now the effort to form a second
+club in the rooms of a club of several years' standing. The need of the
+second club had grown out of the refusal of the girls who earned from five
+to nine dollars a week in various employments to associate with a number of
+girls working in a tobacco factory, and earning on an average three dollars
+and a half per week. The last-named were rough in speech and manner, and
+far from stylish in dress--the standard of the elder club. The introduction
+of the girls from the tobacco factory to the club was the result of the
+sentiment of one of the members of the club, a bright, wealthy, healthy
+girl, a great favorite with the other club girls. She had wanted for two
+years to work with girls less prosperous than the girls in the club of
+which she was a member.
+
+A large tobacco factory not far from where the club met attracted her
+attention, and she invited the girls working there to join the club.
+Twenty-two came to the club-room. Mentally they were in a state of nature.
+This group of girls represented just what intermittent school attendance,
+uninterrupted freedom of the streets, from the time they could walk alone
+to the present time, might be expected to produce. They were strangers even
+to the degree of social opportunities the members of the club represented.
+
+Their standards of manners and morals were what the neighborhood in which
+they grew up made them. Their homes were in one of the worse sections of
+the city, in which an institution wholly charitable pretending to do
+educational work had been, not what was intended, an elevating influence,
+but the reverse for the children of this section. When these girls went to
+school they alternated between this and the public school, so that it was
+impossible to compel their attendance at the public school through officers
+of the law. The neighborhood in which most of these girls had been born and
+grew up was a section as remote from the life of the city of which it was a
+part as though it were in another country. Through it ran a thoroughfare in
+which were stores that could supply every want. It was another political
+unit where one man ruled, whose approval meant work in the city department,
+in the street railroads, on the docks; even in the factories, of which
+there were many in the section. The streets were in a shocking condition,
+unpaved and dirty, and no one objected because no one cared.
+
+The tenement houses were formerly the residences of the prosperous. These
+houses were badly kept, old and unsanitary. Liquor saloons were on two, and
+sometimes three, corners of the streets through the whole section.
+Beer-sodden women were so common a sight that the women who did not bear
+evidence of over-indulgence were remarkable. These girls had never known
+personal ownership, even in a bureau drawer; not so much as the right to
+one peg on which to hang their clothes to the exclusion of others. It is
+doubtful if they ever owned a change of under-clothing that another child
+of the family could not claim.
+
+Naturally, the girls took possession of the club-rooms. Quite as naturally
+the older members resented it. It was seen at once that an attempt to have
+the new girls elected as club members would be equivalent to ejection. They
+were tolerated, but not tolerable to the older members. At the end of four
+weeks the two sets of girls lined up on opposite sides of the room, utterly
+refusing to intermingle. This passive attitude changed to the aggressive,
+which approached open hostilities so closely as to make the danger line.
+When this point was reached it was decided to form the new girls into a
+club by themselves. The rooms were not used every evening by the club for
+which they were hired. Sub-letting would give more money for educational
+purposes.
+
+As this attempt at club-making is one of the worst, and for that reason one
+of the failures, it would be well to describe it:
+
+The directors hired rooms each fall, in September or October, until the
+first of May following. As one recalls this club, it presents one of the
+best evidences of the barrenness of the working-girl's life in New York.
+Every fall for years a few notes written to the leading girls, and a group
+of twenty or twenty-five working girls, would gather and start anew on this
+club life. This method of conducting a club made it seem useless to spend
+money in making the rooms attractive. They were usually on the second floor
+of a house occupied by two or more families; the halls dark and bare; the
+rooms rarely clean as to walls and ceiling, barren of ornament. The floors
+were bare, and not infrequently stood sadly in need of scrubbing. They were
+lighted by smoking kerosene lamps, which but added to their
+unattractiveness. Frequently the caretaker started the fires a few minutes
+before the time for the girls to appear. Yet the girls came and remained
+winter after winter.
+
+The new girls accepted the same conditions, and assembled one stormy night
+to form their own club, with several additions to their number of their
+own selection, among the rest their forewoman. The leaders of the club
+realized that she might be an element of strength; she might be the source
+of infinite trouble. She had been young many years before, a fact of which
+she was wholly unconscious. She was dressed in what at the time was called
+laquer--a warm shade of tan--silk, trimmed with bead trimming; a lace
+collar, and a most remarkable hat completed the kind of a costume that
+always is discouraging to a true club worker.
+
+Naturally the forewoman was the spokeswoman for the girls. It was useless
+to attempt to draw out a personal opinion from the girls, all of whom
+worked under her. Knowing the wages of the girls, it had been decided that
+five cents per month should be the dues, leaving the girls a margin from
+which they might pay for classes. The indignation of the forewoman at the
+suggestion of five cents a month dues would have been amusing if it had not
+revealed her utter blindness to the poverty of the girls. Being determined
+that no girl there should be kept out of her club by poverty, the
+suggestion was made to the forewoman that as her wages equalled the wages
+of any three of the girls, and as she chose to join a club where the others
+received such small wages, she might pay the same dues, and each month
+make a donation to the club to meet its current expenses. She could see the
+dues alone would not do that.
+
+The forewoman, after a few minutes, consented to accept the condition. The
+worried look left the faces of the young girls, and they beamed on the
+gracious lady who consented to waive her own dignity in their behalf.
+Perhaps it is well to state here that the forewoman never made any
+donation, and that she would have been dropped from the club for
+non-payment of dues but for the knowledge that such a step would mean that
+she would make the girls leave the club. She was by them considered a good
+forewoman, kind, and ready to help a girl if a girl tried to earn more
+money. She had to be consulted in everything attempted for the girls.
+Fortunately she was so afraid of revealing her ignorance, which was dense
+outside of her work, that she always supported the workers directing the
+club affairs.
+
+This woman was taken ill. The director of the club found that she boarded
+with a family consisting of a father, mother and three children, living in
+three rooms. She was found lying on a mattress on the floor, destitute of
+sheets or pillow-cases. She did not own a nightdress. The tan silk dress
+with the bead trimming hung on a nail over her head, surmounted by the
+gorgeous hat. She was very ill and penniless; yet the poor about her were
+devoted to her and considered her most remarkable.
+
+[Illustration: A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]
+
+Several years ago both of the clubs referred to consolidated with another
+club whose directors kept the club-rooms open throughout the entire year.
+After the consolidation a house of three stories in a good neighborhood was
+rented, and devoted entirely to the use of the club. Only those who have
+watched the development of these girls could appreciate what the club has
+done for them. Cooking and sewing classes, lectures on city government,
+talks on books, on art and nature; the weekly contact with women of culture
+and refinement, who carry the conviction that club work is a pleasure, that
+service for others is a delight, has borne fruit, and the girls in turn
+give their service to those whom they may help--oftenest the members of
+their own club.
+
+The evolution of character through the contact with others is, after all,
+the highest attainment of the working-girls' club movement. It brought the
+working girl into entirely new relations. Constantly she was forced to see
+the folly of placing emphasis on the wrong thing.
+
+A nice-looking girl, very well dressed, joined a working-girls' club. Her
+face indicated character and intelligence. She was elected to office, but
+never re-elected, for she was ignorant--too ignorant to perform the
+smallest duties in club life. She came every week on the social evening,
+always the best-dressed girl in the club. As she grew more familiar she
+grew snobbish. She lived in a very poor neighborhood, where her clothes
+must have been even more out of place than in the club-room. She held a
+position which required special manual skill, and in her own field was an
+expert. Unfortunately, she obtained an influence over certain girls and
+headed a clique. Every week she became a greater problem. One night a
+rather rough, but frank and intelligent, girl was introduced as a candidate
+for membership by a member who worked in the same shop. The girl who was
+the club problem had been away two weeks working overtime, and did not come
+to the club until after the new girl had been elected a member. The
+amazement of both as they faced each other as members of the same club
+aroused questions as to their social and family background. All that
+appeared was that they were neighbors.
+
+[Illustration: OPPOSITE A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]
+
+The first reception to mothers was given by the club about this time. When
+the night of the reception came, the "problem" came in a new dress having a
+jetted front. Her appearance amazed the members, and made it clear that the
+"problem" must be solved or eliminated. The new member appeared with two
+mothers, both plainly dressed, one not warmly enough. This one was timid,
+reluctant to enter the room, and but for the urging of the new member and
+her mother she would have gone home. She refused to remove the shabby shawl
+she wore, and adjusted again and again the straw hat, on which a narrow
+black ribbon was pinned. The "problem" stood in front of the mantel,
+surrounded by an admiring crowd. The two mothers and the new member walked
+into the room. It was a dramatic moment. The new member, with an expression
+of deep scorn, said: "You forgot to ask your mother; we brought her." The
+"problem" grew white and then crimson. The girls fell back and gazed
+spellbound at the shabby, uncomfortable, timid mother. The scales fell from
+their eyes. The "problem," so far as influence in the club was concerned,
+ceased to be a problem. A girl who would sacrifice her mother's comfort,
+who used her simply to keep house for her, could not hold any position in a
+working-girls' club.
+
+The story crept out. The "problem" felt the loss of prestige. Clothes had
+satisfied her ambition; she had through them enjoyed a sense of power. The
+experience of that evening doubtless opened her eyes to things in life to
+which she had been blind. Again and again she was seen during that evening
+reception to look at her mother searchingly. She seemed to see her in a new
+light, and by its reflection, herself. The mother was afraid of her and
+showed it. The daughter, it was evident, discovered that fear for the first
+time and sought to overcome it. It was determined to hold fast to the
+"problem" and help her solve herself. Great progress was made. Her dress no
+longer astonished; her mother came to the club receptions comfortably and
+suitably dressed. Out of consideration for her mother, she remained in the
+wretched tenement, because the mother and the house had grown old together;
+but the rooms were now furnished. The new member had supplanted the
+"problem" as an influence in the club. The "problem" became engaged, and
+the club lost her. The man was a store-keeper in a town not far from New
+York. The girl married and forgot to take her mother to her new home. The
+mother remained a club legacy for two years, when she died. The daughter
+sent the money to bury her, but did not come to the funeral. Her husband is
+successful, and she is a social power in the Church to-day; a devoted
+mother and wife, strange as it may seem.
+
+The centering of experience, the revelations of character inevitable in a
+working-girls' club, are the largest factors in educating the members. As
+the years go on, emphasis is laid on the right things. Harmony results,
+because a sense of proportion is gained. Girls who have had the benefit of
+a public school education that enables them to fill positions that prove
+they have had such opportunities, often in the beginning of their club life
+will manifest a feeling of superiority over the girl who works with her
+hands. But eventually some experience will reveal to them the pettiness of
+their estimate, and a readjustment of values is made.
+
+A girl, long a member of a club, had won the love and admiration of all
+connected with it. She earned wages far above the average of working girls,
+a fact well understood in the club. She was always an officer, and a
+dependable power in the management of the club. The girls were to give a
+play. No amount of urging won this girl's consent to take part in the play.
+A girl who had taken a part dropped out, and some one must take her place
+at once. Now the girls refused to take "no" for an answer, and the favorite
+went down in the basement with the others who were in the play. Each had
+her book to read her part, as a help to the girl pressed into the service.
+When it came her turn to read there was absolute silence. The girl sat
+white and trembling, trying to speak. At last jerkingly the words came: "I
+cannot read. I never learned beyond the small words. I had to take care of
+the children when mother went to work, while my father was sick. I went to
+work as soon as I could and helped keep them in school. They all read and
+write. I cannot. Now you know why I did not say 'yes.'"
+
+There was silence for the space of several minutes. No one could speak.
+Then the baby of the club, the one everybody petted, whose very naughtiness
+was attractive, ran around the table, threw her arms around the speaker's
+neck, saying: "You're worth all the rest of us put together. We'll never
+give the old play. We all hate it." This followed by a half dozen kisses
+placed wherever she could touch the crimson, tear-stained face of the girl
+through her hands.
+
+Education had been put in its right place in the field of accomplishment.
+When the entertainment was given, the girl who could not read was made
+manager, because no one could do so well.
+
+For more than twenty years the working-girls' club has been a power in
+thousands of lives. The process of character building through accretion and
+elimination has been going on. Through its influence the club method has
+been applied under every guise, but perhaps it is just to say that it has
+been at its best where its formation and management has been purely
+democratic and absolutely non-sectarian. In the nature of things, in
+affiliation with any organization, it must take its place as the fraction
+of a unit, and be in its management considered always as only a part of a
+whole to whose success it owes an allegiance.
+
+Now the working-girls' clubs have their State organizations, even their
+national organization. The Pan-American Exposition brought working girls to
+the number of five hundred together in a convention to consider the
+questions vital to club life and management. Can any one doubt the effect
+of this journey into the world, the first that hundreds of these girls had
+ever made? Of the readjustment of ideas, the revelation of beauty, the new
+birth of values, because of the vision of a larger world lying beyond
+factory, workshop, office, school-room? For it has come to this: that the
+professional as well as the manual worker finds inspiration in the
+working-girls' club.
+
+As the years went on, a new problem grew out of the working-girls' club
+movement. The members married, but they were not willing to lose the social
+affiliations of girlhood; they were unwilling often, reluctant always, to
+sever club relationship. On the other hand, the members felt that a married
+woman should remain home in the evening with her husband. Often the
+married member would come carrying her baby, for the club represented the
+mother's social relations. The next step was natural, the forming of a club
+of the married members to meet in the afternoon. The first working-girls'
+club, of which Miss Dodge is still president, formed, as the Domestic
+Circle, a club of married members.
+
+The A. O. V. Matrons at the Cottage Settlement are the married members of
+the A. O. V. Club, formed when the matrons were little girls. Other
+working-girls' clubs have contributed to the membership of other married
+women's clubs.
+
+Naturally, the subjects discussed in these clubs are those bearing on
+housekeeping and the training of children. The training received in the
+clubs enables the married members to conduct their business with dignity
+and dispatch. They are trained to club life, and have learned how to avoid
+unnecessary friction.
+
+Some clubs plan a winter's work ahead. These programmes show a broadening
+of interest and sympathy, not only in the technical affairs, the home and
+the care of children, but the larger affairs outside of the home that makes
+its environment. It must be that the girls who have been club members make
+more companionable wives than the women who have not had their
+opportunities. The children are always present at the meetings of the
+mothers. Various devices and methods are employed to entertain and interest
+them. What the mothers' club means to the little ones was unconsciously
+revealed very recently in the statement of a young mother: "---- is always
+home from school five minutes earlier club day. She runs home to get
+ready."
+
+The working-girls' club has in the process of its evolution become a family
+institution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT.
+
+
+The Residents of the College Settlement learned in the first year of their
+work in Rivington Street to sympathize deeply with the married women, the
+mothers in the region.
+
+Mothers, after nights spent in overcrowded, unventilated bedrooms caring
+for nursing babies, began getting breakfast at five o'clock in the morning.
+Husband and children of every age must be wakened for work or for school,
+often irritable because of the unhygienic conditions under which they had
+slept. Friction and quarreling is to be expected when there is one
+wash-basin for the use of the whole family; one sink for the morning bath
+of the family when there is running water in the rooms. Breakfast of bread
+and strong coffee, perhaps with the family waiting turns because only three
+sides of the table are available, as there is not room to pull the table
+out from the wall to make the four sides useful. Floor space costs in the
+tenements.
+
+Friction, adjustment and hurry do not tend to develop a serene spirit in
+the house-mother whose office is purely executive. How much less in the
+house-mother whose hands must do all the work of the home? When the working
+and school-going members of the family are cared for and have gone their
+several ways, there is left to the house-mother almost always a baby and
+another child too young to go to school, to care for and amuse. In addition
+there is the round of work--washing, ironing, mending, making, cooking--all
+to be done under limitations of space and conveniences; often with the
+handicap of ignorance. Whatever the advantage of self-made money-makers,
+the self-made housekeeper, taught only by experience, not only pays dearly
+for her education, but is more than apt to be satisfied with her
+self-taught accomplishments, thus increasing her disadvantages in the use
+of time and money.
+
+Even with a small family the house-mother with the usual round of work
+would not have many moments of leisure. When it is a large family, with all
+the disadvantages of the tenement-house home, the days are not long enough
+for the work to be done. It crowds the hours, and accumulates until often
+discouragement and nervous exhaustion follow. If the mother have a
+conscience, she wars with herself, battling against conditions that she
+feels but cannot understand nor overcome.
+
+Three hundred and sixty-five days in the year the Residents found these
+mothers who needed the change of pleasure that made no demands on purses.
+Even good wages did not permit these families money to buy pleasure and
+recreation. Mothers, good mothers, grew old before their time. They often
+grew careless of their personal appearance, and by this risked their
+influence in their homes, separation from their children, alert and often
+overconscious on the subject of dress.
+
+Then there were semi-apathetic mothers because of discouragement; the
+mothers who drifted, never having an aim in life or an ideal; then the
+mothers who long ago ceased to make any struggle against environment, every
+year becoming more inert; the mothers, now grand-mothers, who were
+remembered only in time of need by their children. The Residents saw the
+need of the mothers of all types. How could the apathetic be awakened, the
+discouraged stimulated, the overworked rested and cheered? Hundreds,
+thousands of mothers were losing the best things of life because for them
+the activities that increase interest and sympathies could not be brought
+into their lives. Their environment made social opportunities in their own
+homes impossible. Husband and children, through contact with life in shop,
+factory, store, street and school, enlarged their interest every day; while
+the wife and mother came to a mental standstill, often losing interest in
+everything outside of her home; often failing through lack of knowledge and
+discouragement in making that a place of rest and refreshing.
+
+The Settlement was the bright spot in the lives of hundreds of young people
+and children. The mothers who could be stimulated must be reached and held
+in a center where pleasure would be the controlling element and education
+an incident. There were mothers who had lost all desire for social life. It
+was found difficult to arouse in them even a momentary interest in the
+thought of seeing new things, new people. The grind of life had blunted all
+social instincts. There were women who on the social side of their natures
+were dead; could not be roused by any thought outside of the routine of
+their lives. Interest enough to do for their families what required the
+least effort of mind and body was all that was left. The hope in these
+homes was the children. To them the Settlement must give inspiration and
+ideals; the home would never give either.
+
+In the second year of the College Settlement's activity a persistent effort
+was made to reach the mothers, especially the mothers of the more alert and
+active boys and girls affiliated with the Settlement, in clubs and classes.
+These mothers came, but never the same group twice. The smallest obstacle
+would prevent the very women who most needed social opportunity from
+accepting it. When they needed help, they came to the Settlement; they were
+most cordial hostesses when the Residents called; delighted in the
+opportunities the Settlement made for their children; but the habit of
+staying indoors, out of touch with any life but that of the tenement-house
+halls, was a fixed habit most difficult to dislodge.
+
+Some of the workers who were interested in this question were led to
+conclude that it was only the exceptional woman in the tenements who
+retained the capacity to plan her work to secure a specified hour or two of
+freedom in a whole week. The life imposed on the tenement-house mother does
+not make time an element in adjustment of her day, still less of her week.
+The breakfast over, the day unfolds itself, and the mother is free to meet
+it. Only in the exceptional home is life considered in its relation to the
+time of day. One thing was clear: that in the homes of the better paid
+wage-earners the mothers did not get their share of life's brightness. A
+College Settlement worker, enthusiastically supported by the Head Resident,
+determined to secure it for some of them. Failures would not discourage the
+worker, for every effort would be considered an experiment until success
+was attained. The club idea had proved successful for the children and
+young people; it had for mothers of larger opportunities elsewhere in the
+social world; it might for these mothers. At least, it could be tried.
+
+Twenty-two calls were made on the mothers of children and young people then
+coming to the Settlement, asking them to the Settlement for a certain
+afternoon in the following week. All accepted the invitation; ten came. The
+women who responded were told of the plan to start a club to meet once a
+week. There would be music, a short talk and refreshments. The plan seemed
+to please all who were present, and it was agreed to meet the following
+week.
+
+At once a problem was faced. Some of the mothers came without hats, wearing
+not overclean aprons, and apparently looking upon the movement as some new
+phase of almsgiving. Others were alert, well-dressed, comprehended that
+they must contribute their share in money and interest or the effort would
+die out. The children of these two types of mothers could not be
+distinguished by outward signs. American public school life and the very
+atmosphere of the street life had already begun its leveling-up process in
+dress and independence. How could these two types be brought into a common
+social relation, when they held nothing in common but the experience of
+living under the roof with many?
+
+It was decided to let the law of natural selection operate freely. The club
+was an experiment, and it must not start with preconceived plans; its life
+must be one of evolution. The next week only the alert women appeared.
+
+The club was formed, a president elected, and dues placed at ten cents per
+week. This the projectors tried to reduce, but the members insisted that
+they could and would pay it. That it would cost almost that to pay for the
+cake and coffee, and they could help somebody if there was any money over.
+The club was limited to ten members, and filled at the second meeting. It
+enlarged to fifteen the next year. In its fifth year it numbered
+forty-five.
+
+The subject of the first formal talk, informally conducted, as its subject
+demanded, was: "How long after the hair is out of curling-papers is it
+becoming?" This, of course, gave the opportunity of laying stress on a
+wife's personal appearance; the necessity of being as attractive as
+possible to one's own husband and children. That was, is, the keynote of
+the club, its creed, its religion to-day, when mothers and married
+daughters are members. The time of meeting was two o'clock, that the
+mothers might be at home in time to get supper for their husbands and
+children. Babies came with their mothers, and children in school came to
+the Settlement instead of going home after school. Many of the little girls
+belonged to a sewing club that met the same afternoon at the Settlement.
+The club, named in the first month of its existence "The Woman's Home
+Improvement Club," celebrated its eleventh anniversary at the College
+Settlement, October, 1901.
+
+[Illustration: THE WOMAN'S HOME IMPROVEMENT CLUB AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+As the first anniversary approached, the members suggested an evening
+meeting, that their husbands might come. The proposition received the most
+enthusiastic support from the Settlement Residents. Husbands, all the
+children who worked, and a friend of each member--if married, her
+husband--were included in the invitation. Dancing and music occupied the
+evening. What a revelation! Fathers dancing with their own daughters for
+the first time; mothers with their sons; daughters and sons spellbound at
+the sight of their mothers and fathers dancing together! It was evident
+that the club was a feature of the family life. The husbands and grown
+children knew what had been talked about, what had been done at the
+meetings. One husband, watching his wife dancing with their son, said: "I
+don't know how you've done it, but this club has made my wife young again;
+she's as young as when we were married." This wife and mother of nine
+children at the club one afternoon wished there were a hundred such clubs.
+"'Tis a mistake to just stay shut up." She waited a minute, and then said:
+"I had not bought a hat for eighteen years until I joined this club; I did
+not need it; I never went anywhere; the children did all the errands."
+
+This was the very type of mother the projectors of the club hoped to reach.
+The first evening reception proved such a success that it was decided to
+hold one evening reception each month for the family and friends of the
+members. Thanksgiving and Christmas receptions belonged to the children.
+Apples, nuts, gingerbread, cake and peanut brittle, with coffee, are the
+refreshments for Thanksgiving evening; new milk for the children. The games
+are Blind Man's Buff, Going to Jerusalem, with the Virginia Reel as an
+alternate, because the little children can dance it. "America" and "Home,
+Sweet Home," sung in chorus, close the evening. More than one family is now
+represented by three generations on these evenings. At the first evening
+reception a father and son of twenty years stood side by side. When the
+father began singing, the son stopped and looked at him in amazement. This
+changed to one of enjoyment, as he said between the verses: "Dad, I didn't
+know you could sing." "I haven't in twenty years, I guess," was the reply.
+Both father and son had good voices. The son had made the discovery that he
+had a voice, at the Settlement, in his club. He edged closer to his father;
+there was a new bond of sympathy. The boy's Christmas present from his
+father, mother, brother and sisters was a mandolin, the first time a
+combination present had been given. It was quite natural that the next year
+a table for the new parlor should be the gift of the children to the
+parents.
+
+An incident occurring in the third year after the club was organized is,
+perhaps, as perfect an illustration of the lack of social opportunity in a
+tenement-house home as can be given.
+
+One of the most faithful and interested of the members was a woman about
+fifty-seven when she joined the club. She was slow to respond to the club
+idea; to the right of personal judgment outside her own affairs. Her
+responses to a question that involved an expression of opinion was usually:
+"It don't make no difference to me." After a time she grasped the idea that
+she was one of many, but had equal rights with all the members in deciding
+questions relating to the club, and she began assuming responsibilities;
+expressing her views. In the third year she came to the president, and
+with every evidence of wishing to disclose a secret, said: "Next week
+Thursday is my birthday. I never had a birthday party in my life. I've
+always wanted one, but never had the room, and I never had the dishes. Do
+you believe I could have a birthday party here next week?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure you could."
+
+"I can't do much; and I only have two friends besides the club that I want
+to have. I want to pay for all the coffee and cake, that I may feel that
+it's my party. Just my two daughters, and my two friends, and my
+grandchildren--four, that's all. I've been saving the money for a year."
+
+One night early in the next week the bell rang. A working man stood at the
+door. He handed a five-dollar bill to one of the Residents, saying: "My
+wife, she's goin' to have a party here Thursday. I want you to give her a
+good time. She's been a good wife to me. Don't tell her; just spend it for
+her;" and the man disappeared in the darkness.
+
+It was decided to order a birthday cake and light sixty candles.
+
+The day came. Every member brought a remembrance. Radiantly, tearfully
+happy stood the hostess. She loved music, and a sweet, gracious woman whose
+music wins the most cultured sang song after song. Time for refreshments
+came. In the front parlor a club of little girls were sewing. It seemed a
+pity that they should not see the cake and the candles lighted. They were
+told that the doors would open, a lady was having her first birthday party,
+and it would be kind to wish her many returns of the day.
+
+The cake was brought in with the sixty candles burning, and placed before
+the hostess, a gift from her husband. "I didn't know," the wife kept
+whispering under her breath as she stood beside it at the table. The doors
+rolled slowly backward, and twenty children breathed "Ah!" Then in a piping
+chorus, "Wish you many returns of the day." A moment the woman stood still.
+Then turning a shining face on all about, she moved toward the children,
+the tears falling fast. Raising her hands and face heavenward, she said
+solemnly: "O God, what have I done that you should be so good to me?" The
+volume of her life was opened.
+
+A cake with a few shining candles, a few friends with their little
+offerings, and the wishes of a few children, and to one woman God had
+reached out of His high heaven and selected her as the special object of
+His care and love.
+
+Not all of the five dollars had been used. The hostess was asked what she
+wanted done with it. She was radiant. "I'll give a party to those children
+what said that sweet thing to me." Suggestions of other uses were cast
+aside. The children must have a party--ice cream and cake. When she found
+out that cake and ice cream would cost more than the money in hand, she
+announced: "I will wait to give it. In a month I save money to put to it."
+She made all her own arrangements, and proved a hostess of resource and
+tact.
+
+She received her guests most cordially. Perhaps the most wildly exciting
+hours of her life were when, after much coaxing, she joined in the games of
+Drop the Handkerchief, Blind Man's Buff and Going to Jerusalem, the last
+game sending her crimson and panting into a chair in the corner, with the
+children crowding about her shrieking with laughter.
+
+Time for refreshments found her anxious and watchful. The members of the
+club had fallen into the spirit of the day, and nobody was grown up.
+
+An incident occurred during the serving of refreshments which showed the
+educational value of a story written for pleasure, not education; at the
+same time a very deep compliment to the book. "The Birds' Christmas Carol"
+was a favorite book in the club. It had been read twenty-seven times in
+one tenement house by eleven members of one family, and four times by one
+member, who said she would own a copy whenever she could spare the money.
+She wanted to read it when she felt cross. As there were not chairs enough
+for all at the party, some of the children sat on the floor. The little
+daughter of the mother who wanted to own "The Birds' Christmas Carol" sat
+on the floor in front of her mother. She did something while eating her ice
+cream of which her mother disapproved. With a quick glance at one of the
+workers who stood near her, the mother said: "If I had been as wise as Mrs.
+Ruggles, she would not have done that." Mrs. Ruggles was a thoroughly
+appreciated character. Her struggles to equip her children were perfectly
+understood, as were her ambitions for them. The hostess of the day was as
+disappointed as the youngest child when the lighting of the gas told that
+the day was done. She was the last to leave, saying: "I never was so happy
+in my life. It has been beautiful. All my life I wanted a birthday party.
+Now I have two;" and she turned a radiant face to say "Good-night" as she
+went down the stoop into the gathering darkness.
+
+The weeks went by. The club had tickets to go to Glen Island, through the
+generosity of Mr. Starin. In August another member had a birthday, and
+confided the secret to the giver of the birthday party, saying, "I wanted
+to give a birthday party as you did. I never had one in my life; but I
+could not get money enough. I tried hard since yours." In September the
+elder member confided this conversation to the president of the club,
+saying, "Now we will give her a surprise. She shall have the party. I have
+talked with every member. But we will not each buy her a present; we put
+our money together and buy her a dress." The president doubted the wisdom
+of this, and suggested a dozen other gifts. "No, we give a dress. She does
+not have as nice a dress as other members. It is not right that one member
+of a club should not dress as good as every other member. Why not she take
+that dress? She know we love her, and we give her this because we want her
+to look as good as anybody; she is so pretty."
+
+The dress was bought and given by the oldest member of the club, who in her
+speech announced her views on dress, and the need of one member looking as
+well-dressed as any other member; that if one could not have things, then
+the others must share with her; that was being a true member. The dress was
+received in the spirit in which it was given. When it was found that it
+could not be made by the receiver in time for the next reception because
+she had so much work, it was cut and made by five members of the club. The
+wisdom of putting money together to buy one present was learned, and from
+that time on the custom has been to make joint gifts when gifts are given.
+This is done in families, greatly reducing the valueless things that were
+formerly bought when only a little money, a few cents perhaps, could be
+spent by each one.
+
+About the time this club was established the kindergarten had been added to
+the vocabulary of philanthropists. The kindergarten existed as part of the
+secular work of many of the churches, and individuals here and there
+supported kindergartens. It was generally conceded that the mothers of the
+children did not appreciate the work the kindergarten was doing for their
+children; that too often they felt that permitting them to go was
+conferring a favor on the kindergartners or those who had asked for their
+children's attendance. The Residents and workers at the Settlement did not
+believe that this was a healthy attitude of mind. They believed it was
+responsible for the irregular attendance of many of the children, as well
+as the lack of punctuality. There was no kindergarten in connection with
+the Settlement, nor room for one, but one was greatly needed. Much as it
+was needed, it must not come until the mothers wanted it and were willing
+to work for it.
+
+Miss Brooks was then at the head of the Kindergarten Training School in
+connection with the Teachers' College. She was consulted. The result was
+that the members of the Woman's Home Improvement Club became on several
+afternoons members of a kindergarten. They used the materials, took part in
+the games directed by Miss Brooks and the members of her training class.
+The names of the material used, the things made, the stories, the games,
+the songs, became a part of the vocabulary of the mothers. Some of the
+material was bought and taken home to entertain the children. The natural
+result followed. "If only we could have a kindergarten for our children!"
+
+[Illustration: THE KINDERGARTEN OF THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+It was suggested that if seventy children could be found near enough to the
+DeWitt Memorial, where a room for the kindergarten was available, that
+perhaps the kindergarten would be established there. Over one hundred calls
+were made by the nine members of this club, which resulted in securing the
+promised attendance of seventy children. The Lowell Kindergarten was then
+opened at the DeWitt Memorial by the New York Kindergarten Association as a
+result of this effort. The difficulties the mothers put in the way of good
+work in the kindergarten was explained to the members of the club, who
+agreed to call on mothers whose children did not come to the kindergarten
+in time, or were irregular in attendance. It was most interesting to watch
+the growth of public sentiment in favor of regular and punctual attendance,
+not only at the kindergarten, but at school. If the kindergarten child
+reported Johnny Jones, who was a neighbor's child, as absent, the elder
+brother or visitor after school was sent to find out if Johnny Jones were
+ill. It became a badge of good motherhood to have the child in the
+kindergarten on time. Before this, through talks by doctors and nurses, the
+relation between health and cleanliness had been discovered. Cleanliness
+was imposed on their own children, and exacted from other mothers of
+kindergarten children.
+
+The influx of Hebrews, toward whom the members of this club had a deep race
+prejudice, drove them out of this neighborhood. Before seven years had
+passed but four of the members were residents of this district. But a
+change of residence did not change their belief in the value of the
+kindergarten. Wherever they have gone they have sought it for their young
+children, who have found always intelligent and sympathetic listeners in
+their mothers to all the events and incidents in their kindergarten world.
+One mother learned accompaniments to songs, and the children sing
+kindergarten songs at the club entertainments, even those in the grammar
+grade join.
+
+As time went on, the conviction grew stronger that the real pressure of
+poverty or lack of money, among the self-respecting independent poor came
+not on the physical nature but the mental and emotional. The pressure was
+incessant. There never was a time when there was money to buy pleasure.
+Months, years went by without life offering the opportunity for enlarging
+the mental horizon of thousands of capable, receptive, devoted mothers. To
+the children the Church entertainments were opportunities; clubs and sewing
+schools were doing their share, but the mothers were only onlookers. There
+was no active part for them except in the world of work. The churches
+provided religious opportunity and social opportunity, regulated by the
+Church environment. Hundreds were not attracted, and often one sympathized
+with their rejection of this kind of social opportunity, tinged too
+frequently with patronage, and of necessity, narrow in its scope.
+
+Early in the history of this club the love of music was so evident that it
+was decided that the members should hear "The Messiah." That would be the
+Christmas treat that year. The cost of the tickets was far beyond the means
+of the members, but friends made the purchase of the tickets for every
+member possible.
+
+Two days before the giving of the Oratorio, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith came
+to the Settlement and gave a recital. Handel's picture was displayed, the
+story of his life told. The themes of the Oratorio were explained, and then
+sung by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. A new world was opened. The night for the
+Oratorio came. The journey so far uptown was into a land wholly unknown.
+Carnegie Hall was a revelation of another world. Its size and beauty, the
+audience, all a revelation. From the opening bar to the close of the
+Oratorio the club members listened entranced. It was the enlarging of the
+world revealed by Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith. As the chorus "Unto us a child
+is born, Unto us a son is given," closed, every one of the mothers sat with
+shining face but moist eyes. A new message had come. One little mother,
+whose battle so bravely fought won reverence for her, leaned down and
+whispered: "I'm so glad I have sons; I'm so glad. I think I know now what
+it means." The echo came back for weeks, yes, for years. One member, in
+trying to tell her husband, said: "I saw while I was talking how
+impossible it was to make him understand, so I said: 'John, you'll never
+know till you get to Heaven what I heard and saw to-night.'"
+
+The result justified the effort. It was seen that it was wise to have the
+best of everything for the members of the club in the way of entertainment.
+Musicians have given most generously of their time and talent. Speakers who
+are sought for in the highest intellectual world have been secured for the
+evening receptions, when the husbands and working children and friends were
+present. The result has been to develop just at the level where it was most
+needed standards that protect the home from enjoyments tinged with
+vulgarity, and even crudeness is now detected and accepted grudgingly or
+with apology.
+
+The hard times of 1893-94 gave a new opportunity to test the value of such
+a club. The stories of suffering, of helplessness, made it seem wise to
+control money to be expended through the club members. They were brought
+into contact with families who never before were reduced to the point of
+asking charity. About four hundred dollars was expended under the direction
+of the members of this club. Work tickets were bought and given to men and
+women whose life history they knew, men and women they had known for years.
+When cases of strangers were brought to their notice, they investigated
+and advised as to the best way to give help. To prevent eviction, payment
+of rent was the first effort of the club members.
+
+The education they received was invaluable. For the first time it was
+possible for them to help others in a large way; they saw that the number
+they could help depended on the wisdom shown in expending the money on
+which they could call. Their indignation knew no bounds when they found
+they had been deceived, as they were in half a dozen cases of families
+brought to their attention. One case caused a complete revolution in their
+theory that if people suffered it was because the world was hard with them,
+had not given them a chance. One woman, a widow, was brought to the
+attention of the club early in the winter. She had one child, and they had
+not had a fire in weeks; had no outside garments to go on the street,
+because they had pawned them for food. They had eaten nothing but bread and
+coffee for seven weeks. Now they were to be evicted from the one room they
+had occupied, because no rent had been paid for two months. The club had
+decided that paying back rents only benefited landlords; that, having so
+little money and so many demands, rent in advance was all they could pay.
+They voted to move the woman, then to find work for her. It was decided
+that she must learn to operate a sewing machine. The Charities'
+Organization Society made that possible. After two weeks' trial, it was
+found that the woman could not learn. Then the society gave her a chance to
+learn laundry work, and for two weeks more money to support the woman and
+child--cared for by one of the members in turn while the mother was away
+from home--was given. Again the report came that the woman would not learn.
+Then the members decided to teach her. This individual teaching, with what
+the society had done, seemed to make an impression. It was decided that the
+woman could iron.
+
+[Illustration: MAKING A SELECTION.]
+
+When this stage was reached the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of the
+members passed on her way from work a laundry. At the door a sign hung,
+"Hands Wanted." The little girl went in and asked about wages. The man at
+the desk laughed at her. "It made me mad. I just looked at him," drawing
+herself up as she told the story. "I said: 'I do not want the work for
+myself, but for a woman _our_ club is trying to help; she's poor, and a
+widow.' Then the man looked at me, and told me to tell the woman to come. I
+told him we'd all been teaching her." The use of the plural possessive
+thrilled the heart of the workers; the club was a family possession. The
+woman was told to go to work the next morning. As the little girl was
+returning from work the next night, she stopped at the laundry to ask about
+the woman; to walk home with her, if she were going home. She was told the
+woman had not appeared. Before going to her own home, the child went to see
+why the woman had not gone to work. The woman had overslept. For three
+weeks that little girl got up earlier and went after that woman, delivering
+her at the laundry as though she were a package. It was decided that the
+sacrifice was too much; if the woman was not willing to keep the work by
+her own effort, she was not worth helping. An alarm clock was bought and
+given her, and she was taught how to wind it. She lost the place before the
+end of the first week because she could not get there on time.
+
+The club found out that there were people it was impossible to help, do
+what the world would.
+
+This little girl during this period of struggle with this woman was met one
+Sunday afternoon. She carried a doll to which she was devoted, and for
+which she made a cloak that Sunday morning. "Isn't she pretty?" she said,
+holding up the doll. "I often wish I could see her when I'm working." What
+a combination of child and woman! As the years have passed, this little
+girl has paid the penalty of shop life. She has grown hard, aggressive,
+self-assertive, untruthful. If only her environment could have been
+different, she would have made a magnificent woman. The world of struggle
+has been too much for her; it has strangled the spirit of helpfulness.
+
+The lessons of that winter have been well learned. Every mother in the club
+wants a trade for her child; something learned that has in it wage-earning
+promise because the worker has special knowledge.
+
+The time came when it was possible to turn the attention of these mothers
+to the administration of those city departments that make the environment
+of their homes. The streets naturally claimed first attention. They learned
+to take the numbers of the street sweepers who failed to do their work; to
+take the numbers of the carts improperly and carelessly filled, and report
+them at the club meeting. Leaking roofs, broken stairways, unlighted halls,
+contagious diseases were reported, and conditions in the stores and
+factories where their daughters worked.
+
+The criminality of concealing dangers that threatened many to protect one
+was comprehended. The club motto became "A helping hand to all."
+
+The club members felt that it was possible for them to give special help
+to little children. In a thousand ways the women in the house of many
+families find the opportunity to help children; often through the children
+they helped the mothers. Sometimes through personal influence they secured
+the regular attendance of children at school; sometimes it meant calling in
+the aid of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to secure
+the rights of children, to protect them from evils in their own homes.
+
+One day a wealthy woman who had lost a little girl told the president of
+this club this incident, which, she said, changed the course of her life.
+For months she had shut out the world. God and man were cruel. Nothing
+interested her; life was empty. She sat by the window in her home one
+November afternoon. It was drizzling and blowing. A little girl without hat
+or coat stood shivering and crying against the church railing opposite. As
+she watched the child her mind reverted to the clothes she handled so
+constantly, because they had been worn by her child. She sent for the
+little stranger, and when she went on the street again she was warm, tidy
+and comfortable. Then came the thought, "God never meant a woman should be
+a mother just to one little girl. She must be a mother to every child who
+needs her." From that day this woman has given her life and service to
+children. The story was told to the club.
+
+One of the members, after the meeting had adjourned and while the
+refreshments were being served, was overheard saying: "Why, certainly it
+would change everything if every woman would live in that way. Think how
+many times you could save children, how many times you could help them, if
+you were their mother just for the time they needed you--often only a few
+minutes."
+
+Months after a member reported: "Well, I don't know what you'll all think
+when I tell you what I did last week. I've been bothered because such a
+nice-looking little girl came every morning about school time and went
+upstairs in the house opposite. She carried a lunch-box and books. I would
+see her with a baby at the window, and see her in the morning run on
+errands. At three o'clock she went away in the direction from which she
+came. That child is playing 'hookey.' That woman is to blame, I said to
+myself. One morning last week I saw the child go to the corner grocery. I
+went after her.
+
+[Illustration: AT THE SETTLEMENT--A STORMY DAY.]
+
+"'Where you live, little girl?' I asked. She grew red and hung her head,
+and tried to get out of the store. I stand in front of her. 'No, you must
+not be afraid of me. I have little girls. I love all little girls. Where is
+your mother? Child, you deceive her. She thinks you are in school, and you
+play "hookey."' The child ran out of the store, crying. I went right
+upstairs after her. I knock. The woman would not open the door. I knock
+louder, then she come. When she see me, she tried to close the door. I put
+my foot in the door and keep it open. I say, 'You are doing wrong. I belong
+to a club where every member is to be a mother to every child what needs
+her. If that little girl come here one more day, I follow her home and tell
+her mother. It be bad for you if any child come here so young as that
+child. It is against the law for such little children to work. That little
+girl is playing "hookey," and you make her. You do that any more, and I
+make a complaint against you to the Children's Society. Good-morning;' and
+I took out my foot, bowed and went downstairs. When I got home, that little
+girl is running down the street where she comes every morning. I never see
+her now, and that woman do her own errands and mind her own baby."
+
+The members applauded. A child out of school is a child to be looked after.
+It has been concluded by the members of this club that they can do their
+best missionary work in the houses where they live, by keeping their rooms
+and their children in the best possible condition; that every home, every
+child so cared for, is the best possible sermon preached, the purpose of
+which is to make life better.
+
+The League for Political Education, the Woman's Auxiliary of the Civil
+Service Reform Association, the City History Club have sent speakers to the
+club, some conducting courses of lectures. Even the Assembly District work
+undertaken by the League for Political Education was attempted by the club,
+but did not succeed. It could hardly be expected that it would.
+
+During all those years the members had been trained to self-government. All
+questions are decided by the majority. There came a time when the majority
+voted to leave the College Settlement. It was deplored by the projectors,
+but accepted. After a few weeks a small house was taken a couple of blocks
+from the East River. The house had a large yard, and by expending a small
+amount of money was made very attractive. The attempt was made to have the
+members of the club do neighborhood work. A very short trial proved this
+was impracticable. Two things were revealed: That the mother of a
+working-man's family has neither strength nor time to give away; that the
+very conditions of tenement-house neighborhoods require trained, impersonal
+workers. The women who gave time to the club work in the neighborhood
+neglected their homes and families. The few members who tried to do
+neighborhood work in the house used every advantage the club-house offered,
+which they controlled, to curry favor, to revenge slights, real or fancied,
+to themselves or their children. The best mothers made no attempt to do any
+neighborhood work. The house became a social center, an educational center.
+But it was not a success until paid workers were put in charge of different
+departments, with a very few volunteer workers; and the most faithful of
+these were women of wealth.
+
+It was hoped that uptown organizations would establish branches of their
+work in this house. Some did attempt it, but it failed for the reason that
+so many efforts to better the conditions of the tenement-house dwellers
+fail. Women lacking the right qualities volunteered, or the work was
+important when other things did not interfere. Clubs were established to
+which the organizers came when it was convenient. Again and again children
+connected with clubs waited until darkness came, but no "dear lady" whom
+they trusted appeared. In another case, numbers were the standard of
+success, and scores were crowded in where units should have been. All this
+forced the employment of paid workers, and centered the responsibility on
+one until the burden was too great to be borne.
+
+Added to this, the principle of self-government had given a one-sided
+development to some of the members, and friction would develop when large
+questions were to be decided, an aggressive minority combating a
+conservative and less demonstrative majority.
+
+The reform campaign of 1897 began. The picture of the candidate of the
+Citizens' Union hung in the window. The Citizens' Union used the house and
+yard for its lectures. When the campaign was ended, the friction developed
+to the unbearable point, and it seemed, in view of the dissension, best to
+disband the club. The club voted to keep together and return to the College
+Settlement, if the privilege could be secured. This was generously given,
+and the club unanimously voted to return, pledging the members to give all
+the aid possible to the Settlement work. Since 1898 the club has again been
+a part of the work at the Settlement.
+
+For six years this club has had a country club-house--a large house, easy
+of access, in New Jersey, admirably adapted to the purposes of the club.
+The house is surrounded by lawns and an apple orchard. Two kitchens make it
+possible for two families to occupy the house at the same time. The rent
+is paid and the house cleaned each spring. All other expenses, including
+car fares, are paid by the members of the club using the house. The plan is
+for each member to use half the house for two weeks. By a system of
+evolution and working of the law of natural selection, four families use
+the house at the same time. Mrs. A. invites Mrs. B. for the two weeks that
+she is entitled to half of the house; and Mrs. B., arranging her two weeks
+to follow Mrs. A., reciprocates by asking Mrs. A. to remain for her two
+weeks. Co-operative housekeeping has developed, as has the sharing in the
+care of the children. The barn, equipped for the children, has been an
+endless delight. Two members have in the past been debarred the use of the
+house. One because of the character of the men invited by the husband; one
+because of the language used to her children. Both were asked to resign
+from the club, or to make it inconvenient to use the club-house. One
+resigned. The average number of people using this club-house has been
+between four and five hundred each season. Sick children of neighbors have
+been taken up by the members and cared for during their whole vacation. On
+Sundays, friends, relatives and city neighbors are guests.
+
+There has never been any supervision over the house, except that of the
+members. Each member leaves the part of the house she has used clean for
+the one coming after her. For several years the club paid part of two
+months' rent, raised through entertainments. One year the members made a
+donation of thirty dollars. Broken dishes are replaced, and the cost of
+repairing furniture broken is paid by the member using the furniture at the
+time. The large parlor is a club-room, and used by every member who goes up
+for a day. A closet is provided with dishes to be used when picnics are
+given by the members. The theory is that the grounds--four acres--can be
+used by the members at any time, but the families in the house must not be
+interfered with in any way.
+
+The story of this club has been told at this length because it has proved
+what can be done in broadening the life of women of natural intelligence
+living under tenement-house conditions; how the family can have a common
+interest, to which each contributes, a center that can create social
+opportunity for the friends of every member and the members of every
+family.
+
+This club has been able to do much to lighten the burdens in the time of
+financial crisis for people who could only have been helped through such a
+medium. It was the help of a friend always. For years it has been able to
+distribute Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners; but it grows more cautious
+every year, for it has made discoveries of the abuses of the Christmas
+dinner-giving. Through the children it has been possible to reach other
+children who needed Christmas cheer, but who would not take it from ever so
+kind-hearted a public.
+
+The long years of working together has cemented friendships that are the
+inheritances of the children, and sons and daughters have intermarried.
+Baby after baby finds its godmother in the club.
+
+There have been mortifying failures, but there have been positive successes
+in the eleven years. The club has proved conclusively that the
+working-men's wives can be determining factors in arousing and demanding
+better environment for their homes; that the wife and mother who keeps in
+touch with life commands greater influence in and outside her home, where
+all that she learns is used to make that home better; that she keeps her
+place in her family best when she makes herself the companion of her
+husband and children; when she, as far as she may, is herself the source of
+their social life, and contributes to their mental interests by sharing
+with them all the educational opportunity that life gives her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME.
+
+
+One day a group of unusually intelligent wives of working men were driving
+through Central Park in a Park carriage. All were mothers, some of grown
+children, yet it was the first time that twelve of the twenty (all but two
+born in New York) had seen Central Park. Coming back on the east drive, the
+closed houses on Fifth Avenue attracted their attention. Various
+suggestions were made as to what use these houses could be put in the
+summer, when one woman, slight, delicate and extremely nervous, said: "I
+don't want anything in those houses but the room, just the room. I've never
+had all the room I want. I would have if I lived in them." After a moment
+she continued: "The reason we don't love each other as we should is because
+we don't have room; we crowd each other. All the time I lived in my
+father's home I was crowded. How we used to fight! Fight in the night, as
+well as the day, just because we did not have room. The beds were so
+crowded that one of the young ones had to sleep across the foot. The big
+ones would keep their feet up while they were awake, but when they went to
+sleep they would stretch out and kick the one across the foot. When I was
+so little that I slept that way, I used to lie awake in terror expecting
+the kick, and how I scratched when it came! I know we would have loved each
+other much more if we could have had room to grow up in, as the children in
+those houses do. And my mother! She didn't have a room to herself when she
+had the sickness that killed her."
+
+[Illustration: YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the little miseries of childhood
+due to lack of room in the home. "My mother used to drive us out of the
+house to get a chance to sweep it," said another mother of children. "I
+remember lots of times standing down at the hall door, shivering, waiting
+for her to get through. I would go into the neighbors' rooms, but often
+they had got rid of their own children for the reason my mother had of
+hers."
+
+"I tell you what used to make me mad; it was to have to wait for the others
+to get through eating," said another. "When I hire a place I always look
+first to see if the kitchen is big enough to pull the table from the wall
+and sit about it. I don't think I ever had any hot dinner when I was
+little, and it used to make me mad. When I had three children I moved just
+to get a large kitchen; it ain't near so nice a place, but the kitchen is
+big." There was not a woman there who did not have a grievance against her
+childhood because there was not room. One of them with crimson cheeks told
+how she remembered the sense of comfort that came to her after the death of
+an older sister because she had a bed to herself; she said it was a long
+time before she knew the cause, for she missed her sister's companionship,
+but she was more comfortable; she enjoyed having the five nails at the foot
+of the bed for her own clothes. The woman who spoke first interrupted: "I
+never in my life had even a hook in the wall that was my own until I was
+married. We were so near of a size we could wear each other's things, and
+we did. The one who was quickest got the best of that size. You never knew
+whose clothes you'd have to put on in the morning. I'll never have but this
+child. She likes me. She hates being pushed and crowded. She has a bed and
+bureau of her own. Never, never until my husband can pay more rent will we
+have another child." She paid the penalty of death for this determination.
+
+As one thinks of the number of human beings with all their belongings
+crowded into the floor space of a tenement-house home, the marvel at the
+endurance grows greater. Think of its limitations of conveniences!
+
+To those who know the limitations of a tenement-house home, the criticisms
+and suggestions that the superficially informed reformers make on and for
+the hygienic management of these homes are at once the source of amusement
+and indignation. When stress is laid on airing a bed every morning, and one
+in imagination sees the only windows in another room with a breakfast table
+between them, a room already overcrowded with things, the only room for the
+mother and baby during the process, one wonders what the speaker would do
+under the same circumstances. Then when the horrors of dust are revealed
+and the necessity of keeping the floors clean by frequent washing is made
+to be imperative, one sees the bed that just fits between the walls at the
+head and foot, with half of its own space free in front of it, and again
+comes the question, what would the expert do living under like
+circumstances? What is needed everywhere is scientific knowledge in
+conjunction with intimate knowledge of the evils inseparable from the small
+dark rooms of even the best tenements, and then we will have suggestions
+that the woman can use--can apply to her own family conditions--who must do
+the work for a family within this space.
+
+In the best of the tenements it will be found that where the tenants can
+afford a parlor, access to it is across the kitchen, where all the work of
+the family must be done. It will be seen at once the disadvantage at which
+the house-mother is when friends who are not intimate call. Nothing stands
+between her and the outer world but the door into a public hallway. The
+bedrooms admit of a bed, and sometimes, but only in the exceptional
+bedroom, a bureau. This is usually found in the parlor, if there is one,
+and in it all the clothes that can be folded, all the little accessories
+belonging to the family; to this, however, all must have access. If there
+is a closet for clothes, or if the family can own and house a wardrobe, it
+is usually in this room, and the common convenience of the family. The
+bedrooms, dark, offer no space for a washstand. The kitchen is the common
+wash-room. The kitchens of the tenement houses built in these later years
+are a marvel of inconvenience. The dish closet is a few shelves up near the
+ceiling, the lower one of which can be reached by a woman five feet four
+standing on the soles of her feet; a chair is necessary to reach the other
+shelves. Beneath this space is the pot closet, or it may be the stationary
+tubs, the top of which provides table space for cooking conveniences.
+
+[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S HOUR AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+There comes to mind now one of the best plans for a tenement having four
+families on each floor on the East Side. The stairways are lighted by a
+window on each landing opening on an air shaft, and on each floor is a
+lavatory with a large window. Each suite consists of four rooms. The parlor
+has two windows on the street; a kitchen window opening into the parlor,
+never raised if the family have social standards; and a window on a large
+air shaft, or space between the two houses, on which the bedroom windows,
+which are large, open. The rent for these four rooms is seventeen dollars
+per month, and they are on the fifth floor. The kitchens in this house have
+been described. The family have to sit at three sides of the table; there
+is no room to pull it from the wall; even then one side is uncomfortably
+near the stove. The only space except the parlor for a refrigerator is in
+the bedroom. As there are three young wage-earners supporting the home, who
+are social, who are encouraged by the widowed mother to have their friends
+in their own home, this is not to be tolerated. The refrigerator is in the
+bedroom. It was in that room when it was occupied for four years by a girl
+dying of tuberculosis. Is it any wonder that the fight against this disease
+is again being waged in that family? Yet it is above the average of its
+class in intelligence, as the apartments are above the average in the
+region.
+
+The very elementary necessity of space and place for privacy in taking a
+bath is exceptional. For space, place and light are necessary. A very
+bright woman, perfectly familiar with the limitations of the tenement-house
+homes, once said to the writer: "The truth is they cannot be clean if they
+are decent." A cruel truth which was brought forcibly to the remembrance of
+the writer one winter afternoon in an East Side home, where a mother was
+trying to bring up a family to the best of her ability. When the caller
+went into the living-room of the family a tub stood at the side of the
+stove, in which was the youngest daughter, a girl about eight; a brother of
+ten and his boy friend of twelve or fourteen years were playing checkers on
+the other side of the room. The mother was ironing. There was no
+consciousness of embarrassment shown by the children. The mother was
+ashamed, not at the exposure, but at being found out in permitting such an
+exposure. She was a member of a club where the training of children was a
+constant theme. The necessity of physical cleanliness, its relation to
+health, she had grasped, and her children profited by it. The relation
+between privacy and morals she had not grasped. It was as though a veil
+had fallen from her eyes as she looked at her daughter of eight standing
+naked before the two boys. Whether such a thing ever occurred again the
+caller does not know; that the mother never forgave the caller for finding
+her out she does know. The family had three bedrooms, but none would permit
+the placing of a washstand in them. One was the passageway from front to
+rear, for the family occupied a floor, but could afford only one fire.
+
+Privacy is almost impossible in the tenement-house home. One bedroom is
+usually the passageway to the next, if there are two, or both bedrooms are
+passageways from front to rear of the home, and must be used by all the
+family. Privacy is impossible in these rooms, and there are thousands of
+just such apartments. Children must grow up in them subject to the
+limitations, restrictions and exposures their walls compel. This division
+of space must fix standards of reserve, of privacy, of social life. No
+amount of love, not even of intelligence, can save the children from the
+evils such division of space imposes on family life. It deadens the
+sensibilities. The insidious effects of this is not always realized, even
+by the intelligent parents who accept them as inevitable.
+
+One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the inconsistencies of the
+standards of those who go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the
+betterment of the conditions of the working people. We have secured a law
+compelling separate closets for men and women in stores and factories, a
+righteous measure in the interest of morality. But the closets in the
+tenements must be used by men, women and children of several families. A
+neighborly courtesy is the loaning of the key, to save a neighbor a journey
+upstairs. Children run in from the street, several at a time, for it is the
+only place provided. This publicity and freedom is the crying evil of the
+tenements, the one from which tragedies come. The marvel is that so few
+follow; that in spite, seemingly in defiance, of it all, characters develop
+that are beautiful, harmonious, true.
+
+Can one condemn the girl facing the worst that can befall her who under
+pressure that her appeal justifies, yes, makes necessary, confides that her
+relations with the man who is the father of the coming child began when
+each were little things six or eight years old? A relation that grew out of
+lack of privacy, the intimacy forced by tenement-house conditions. Both
+families have gone far beyond their social position at the time these two
+were children, but the blasting of innocency has left its burning scar on
+the girl, and she must bear it alone.
+
+Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that gives the love-making in
+the tenement region a character peculiarly its own. When interest between
+the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so frankly and publicly. There are
+times when restraint would seem to improve manners; but among the working
+young men and women one is constantly reminded of Adam and Eve in the
+garden of Eden. How frankly and unconsciously they must have shown their
+interest in each other, and how unconsciously they must have revealed their
+interest in each other to all the other breathing creatures. Perhaps
+nothing about the love-making is more interesting than that numbers add to
+the enjoyment of both lovers. Nothing adds more to the happiness of a
+wage-earning girl than to have her "chum" deeply interested in and deeply
+interesting to a young man at the same time she is. It seems to be conceded
+that two couples can have so much more pleasure than one. The terms applied
+by these young people to each other will reveal their social level in the
+wage-earning world. If the term "steady" is used where the world of wealth
+and leisure would use _fiancé_, the under wage-earning world is reached. If
+"friend" is used, the social ladder covered by that word, used in that
+sense, has many rounds. Knowing many working girls who would use the term
+"friend" when referring to the man they had accepted as a future husband,
+or who would in time hold that relation, the writer was constantly
+impressed by the unconscious protection the girls threw about each other.
+One would rarely hear of plans made that did not include two beside the
+couple engaged, or willing to be. Sometimes two girls were to complete the
+party. It is evident that the more means the merrier time. In every group
+of girls there will be two or three who cause anxiety; two or three whose
+influence, unchecked, may lead to trouble. It is not easy to restrain the
+young people, for so often the offenses are so naturally the result of
+environment that to speak directly of them would be most unwise. The
+chances are that reference to them would put the speaker in the position of
+possessing knowledge of an undesirable kind; it would seem to suggest evil.
+Often it would be a moral shock to many working girls to have their actions
+criticised from the impression their freedom makes before the cause is
+understood.
+
+[Illustration: MUTUAL INTERESTS.]
+
+A young girl joined a club for young people. From the first she caused
+anxiety. Her face was innocent and attractive, but her actions with young
+men were just the reverse. At last it became necessary to speak to her. It
+was evident that she attributed the criticism to what she termed
+"fussiness." Not the least modification in her manner followed. At last,
+after many interviews, she was told that she would never be spoken to
+again. If she offended in the club-room once more, she would be given her
+hat. That would mean that she was not to again enter those rooms. She
+confided to her intimate friend that no one had ever told her that what she
+did was wrong. After this interview, a modification of her manner was
+noticed, not because she was convinced she was wrong, but because she
+thought it wise to heed. A group of young people were returning from a
+picnic. Just after the homeward journey had begun, it was seen that this
+young girl was sitting in the lap of a young man whom she had always known;
+as children they lived for years in the same tenement. Beside him sat the
+young girl whom he had invited to the club picnic. The club girl sat so
+unconscious of any infringement of manners, public or private, that a young
+man who had grown up under the same conditions was asked what he thought of
+the act. He started at once to tell the girl to stand up, but was
+restrained. Evidently he was shocked, and the act was wrong from his
+standpoint, the only standpoint fair to the girl. A seat was made for the
+girl elsewhere, who, for the first time, showed distress, or rather
+anxiety, because of her own acts. Nothing was said to her.
+
+Occasion was made to speak to the young man who had kept his seat and let
+the girl sit in his lap. He was a working man, and his hands showed it. All
+his life of twenty-two years he had lived under tenement-house conditions.
+
+"Frank, would you marry a girl who sat in a man's lap in a railroad train?"
+he was asked.
+
+"No," he responded indignantly.
+
+"Do you suppose you are the only man in the world who has that feeling?
+What right have you to let any girl cheapen herself so that the man who saw
+her with you, doing what you permitted, if you did not suggest and
+encourage, would not marry her?"
+
+The man's face grew white. He had a sister of whom he was very fond and
+very proud.
+
+"What would you do to the man who permitted your sister, when she was
+tired, to do what you permitted a girl to do to-night--a girl who has no
+brother to watch over her?"
+
+The young man was six feet tall. He rose to his feet, and, raising his
+hands toward the starlit sky, he said:
+
+"As true as there is a God above me, I will never while I live let any girl
+do what I am not willing my own sister should do anywhere."
+
+After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said:
+
+"I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold you responsible. You are
+stronger mentally, morally and physically, and are wholly to blame."
+Whether he spoke to the girl or not, no one knows, but never again was it
+necessary to even mentally criticise that young girl's manners with young
+men. Not only did her manners change, but the expression of her face. One
+grew to love and trust her, and ask her help for other girls.
+
+The chivalry of the working boys and young men is constantly seen,
+unconsciously revealed. Sometimes it is dangerous the degree in which it
+shows itself among the finest of the boys. A sick girl, unable to go out,
+will command attentions so special and direct that the fear of her
+misunderstanding, and suffering because she has not understood, will make
+those interested who know the danger unhappy; sympathy from any cause will
+make a great-hearted working boy place himself in a position where he may
+be easily misunderstood.
+
+It is astonishing how long the spirit of childhood will live in working
+boys and girls, even under conditions that seem never to justify happiness
+and spontaneity!
+
+One Sunday a group of working men and girls went nutting, being duly and
+properly chaperoned. Four of the young men climbed a big walnut tree. The
+girls, with some of the young men, were gathered at the foot, waiting for
+the shower of nuts. The chaperon sat on a stone fence a little way off. The
+wind began to blow, swaying the top branches. One of the young men having a
+good voice laid himself along a limb high from the ground, singing
+"Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top." The others took it up and the girls
+joined in. Over and over it was sung. Then the girls and boys on the ground
+joined hands outside the span of the tree and sang "Ring around a rosy."
+Every singing game of childhood was enthusiastically played. Every one of
+these young people were poor as the world counts wealth--every one over
+eighteen--all had worked from the first moment they could earn wages. Each
+one had suffered the wearing anxiety of no wages when the family needed
+what they could earn, and yet they sang--they felt like children. No amount
+of money at the time could have bought them this happiness.
+
+The sun poured down a glory of yellow light on the trees that seemed to
+have caught its color dashed with red flames. Across the field came one of
+the girls slowly--a girl who never had manifested any enthusiasm, except
+for dancing; who never gave expression to any emotion of feeling. It was
+thought impossible to move her. As she came nearer, it was seen that she
+was deeply stirred; her face was expressive. Putting her head against the
+arm of the chaperon, she whispered, rather than spoke: "I did not know
+trees were any color but green before." The tears were chasing each other
+down her cheeks, while her mouth was wreathed with smiles. The girl was
+over twenty. Had she been born in a family that would use the privileges of
+the various Fresh-Air organizations, she would have known more of the
+country. It was this year that she first saw the stars over the trees, and
+the moon at the full in the sky when it had a horizon. Obedience to her was
+not easy, but to her brother she gave it willingly; he had been her nurse
+in babyhood, her friend and companion in childhood, and was now her
+protector. In every plan of these young people he considered his sister
+first. If she had an escort, he invited some other girl to go with him; if
+not, he took his sister. The girl never manifested any interest in young
+men beyond their ability to dance well. She would find a dozen reasons for
+not dancing if she found herself on the floor with an awkward dancer.
+
+This group of twenty-two young men and women, all from homes that would
+bar the door to charity, even when suffering, were fairly representative of
+the social standard of the better part of the wage-earning world of New
+York. Among them was the independent girl, the one who had no desire to be
+sought in marriage; she saw the worries of her sisters married to men
+having small and uncertain wages; saw the wearing side of motherhood rather
+than its joys. She skillfully kept her young men friends as friends,
+changing from one to the other as soon as she saw the line of friendship
+being crossed. The girl who never won attention till she wooed it was among
+them; the girl who was treated discourteously or neglected was one of them.
+The girl who was sought for exhibition because she dressed well, yet who
+never roused any deeper feeling, was there, for some of the men were very
+observant, and had standards of style for the girls they escorted.
+
+[Illustration: THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.]
+
+There was the young man who willfully played with a girl's feelings; the
+young man who openly exhibited the love he had awakened, but to which he
+did not respond; the girl whose adoration received indifferent treatment,
+yet who was never entirely cast aside by the man too selfish to marry. In
+that company there was one couple who were sentimental in their actions;
+they would sit and hold hands, if permitted, rather than dance. As soon as
+it was discovered that their actions were influencing others, they were
+given the choice to restrain the expression of their affection in public
+completely or resign. The lesson was effectual. When it was seen that one
+of the young men was very deeply interested in one of the young women, that
+she was only semi-conscious of his interest, yet enjoyed it, while not at
+all interested in him, just a few words, pointing out how unkind it was to
+permit his interest to develop and how unfair to let him spend money for
+her when she never meant to hold any relation but that of friend, changed
+her attitude toward him. She made the young man understand her position.
+More than that, she gave her lesson to the other girls, and escorts were
+changed frequently; groups arranged to go to the theater instead of
+couples. As one girl put it, "We don't want any nonsense." Yet several
+marriages have occurred among these members, the new homes making centers
+of social interest for the others. The babies are objects of deepest
+interest to all, and it is a lesson to see the ease and freedom with which
+even the young men will hold them. Much is said of the "little mothers,"
+but the "little fathers" are as unselfish and devoted a part of the family
+life in the tenements as the little mothers. When a great, strong young man
+picks up a baby with the ease of a woman, is interested in its ills of the
+moment, one is grateful for the hours that, as a child, he spent as nurse;
+sees the beauty of strength and tenderness, and the humanizing effect of
+the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by
+the environment of a tenement-house region.
+
+The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be
+attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was
+possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad
+began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who
+chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening
+in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people
+entered the car laughing, pushing, slapping one another. The young men and
+women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer
+looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at
+the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in
+perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is
+this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things,
+that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning young
+people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement.
+
+These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word
+means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew
+parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but
+principally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work
+anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the
+deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many
+Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their
+daughters. That parents would dare to assume such authority in so personal
+a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation.
+One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of
+these girls marry against her will.
+
+No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of
+these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a
+privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be
+at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This
+freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls
+in New York. Were it not for their common sense and the knowledge of life
+thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the
+country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness
+of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality
+between the sexes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes
+from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors
+asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy.
+This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.
+
+At the lower rounds of the social ladder in the wage-earning world the
+mother and baby are inseparable, if the mother does not drink. Night and
+day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ignorance, but cared for.
+Often everything else is neglected. When the baby sleeps, the mother is too
+tired to work, too indifferent. When awake, the baby insists on being held.
+One is frequently reminded of the story of the woman whose moan when her
+baby died was: "What excuse can I give John now?" Yet the day that baby is
+able to walk alone on the street the mother loosens her hold. The baby
+finds its freedom limited only by its ability to remain upright, and to
+return to its home for meals and at night. "Throw me the key and a piece of
+bread," is often the extent of its demands from the sidewalk. True, the
+mother knows every woman in the block will be, in an emergency, a mother.
+The child learns to care for itself; it makes less and less demands on the
+mother, who may even now have another baby compelling all her thought and
+time. Above this scale, where home-making assumes importance, the child
+remains longer under the mother's care; is watched when on the street by
+glances from the window; is sent to school, and some oversight maintained
+over its school life; but the wage-earning period means emancipation from
+oversight often even at this level. Hundreds of girls start out and find
+work for the first time without any evident responsibility on the part of
+even good mothers. No amount of familiarity with this exercise of freedom
+deadens the horror of it to the outsider. Women, mothers of attractive
+daughters, will not know the street on which the daughters work. After one
+of the most disastrous fires in New York, in which many working girls
+perished, four mothers notified the police the next day that their
+daughters had disappeared. It was the failure to trace the girls and the
+advertising of their disappearance that led, through companions who had
+escaped from the building, to the awful conclusion that these four had
+perished in the flames.
+
+Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to go to the place where the
+daughter finds employment; but here, as in everything else in life, that
+which is deemed the more important receives attention. Perhaps it is the
+habit of trust, or indifference, that governs mothers' activities.
+
+A girl will make intimate friendships unhindered, unguided by mothers who
+act up to the measure of their comprehension of the duties of a mother.
+Girls are admitted to the homes who are unknown outside of the workshop;
+they work with the daughter; no other background is known. The mother knows
+that other mothers are accepting her daughters on the same basis of
+knowledge. For their young men friends there may be, but as frequently
+there will not be, any greater sense of responsibility than for the girl
+friends. In homes where the income would seem to demand a sense of social
+responsibility it is found wanting, and young people come and go
+unhindered. If there are two or more young wage-earners in the family,
+their conversation may bring knowledge of what they are doing, where they
+are going. But they also make compacts at concealments of disobedience
+where there are laws to be obeyed.
+
+[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND.]
+
+The world has been shocked by the tragedies of death and disgrace that came
+to the homes of two young working girls within the past year. In each case
+the father and mother had gone to bed with the daughters out in the night,
+where they did not know; one a girl of eighteen, the other less. The
+"cadet" system would never exist were the parents of every girl alert to
+train and guard her the more closely because she was a working girl.
+
+Until by some direct process the control of daughters and of sons is made
+desirable, and then natural in the wage-earners' homes, the problem of
+family life in the tenements will remain unsolved. It is a question
+sometimes whether, and sometimes it is very evident, that by the giving up
+of wages to the parents the freedom of the workers, even though but
+children, from obedience and parental oversight is purchased.
+
+Those who know working girls know how high is the average of morality.
+Years will go by in intimate relations with the same group of girls and no
+tragedy will mar it; no echo of tragedy among their friends. The hardness
+with which even the suggestion of looseness is treated in any group of
+working girls is simply an expression of self-preservation. A group of
+sixty girls, earning the lowest wages and living under the worst
+conditions, were watched five years and one girl fell. As one goes over her
+history from birth, any other result would seem a miracle. A girl arrested
+gave the first name and address of one of the girls in this factory. The
+case was reported in the papers. By an unfortunate circumstance, the
+working girl living at that number was away from the factory two days at
+this time. When she learned of the connection that had been made because of
+the chance use of her Christian name and her address, she told a lie as to
+where she was at the time of that arrest. The other girls struck until she
+was discharged. The girl was innocent of everything but the lie;
+investigation proved this. The girls would not recede from their position;
+work had to be found for the girl elsewhere. She was publicly marked. They
+could not convince everybody of her innocence; lots of people believed the
+story, and they would not work with her; go back and forth with her.
+
+A room was hired as a lunch-room for these girls. They brought their own
+lunches and paid a small amount of dues, which were used to pay for tea
+served daily. The projectors of this little enterprise were girls of wealth
+and social position; three were at the lunch-room every day. By
+representing themselves as friends of the projectors to the caretaker, two
+representatives of a "yellow journal" gained access to the room. One, a
+woman, engaged the caretaker in conversation for some time in the hall,
+getting all the information she could give her. The Sunday edition of that
+paper contained an illustration of the room filled with wretched-looking
+girls, while young women holding up trailing skirts were passing cups. The
+text was as far from the truth as the picture. The working girls absolutely
+refused to go to the lunch-room again. At last they agreed that if the
+paper would publish a true account--that they provided their own lunches
+and paid dues, and waited on themselves--they would go back. The paper
+refused. Two of those girls would never enter the rooms again.
+
+The working girl has suffered quite as much at the hands of yellow
+journalism as the woman of wealth and social position. Not one of these
+girls went to school until she was fourteen; nor during any year since she
+began working had she earned on an average more than $3.50 per week. Yet
+they had social standards to maintain, and compelled recognition of them by
+those who opened opportunities to them.
+
+The inspiring fact remains that the standard of home life in ethics, as in
+necessities, is raising. Without doubt much of this is due to the
+improvement in the class of readers used in our public schools. They are
+not perfect in the matter of selection, but they carry messages to the
+hearts, as well as the heads, of the children, few of whom would pass an
+examination on their contents. Even the primary grades introduce the
+children to the best thoughts of all time, and the crumbs, at least, are
+carried to the homes.
+
+The girls who belong to the working-girls' club carry with them everywhere
+the influence that is molding their characters to a brighter type of
+American womanhood. The Settlements soon become centers of education
+through the social activities they make possible to the people. They
+surpass the clubs in this, that boys and girls, young men and women, each
+have in them the center that makes possible social occasions that are
+within their means and under rightful guides; together men and women are
+trained socially. The Settlements have been in existence long enough to
+have the children that were the first friends of the Residents now the
+fathers and mothers of children. The years of contact show results in the
+homes established, in the kind of care and the ambitions held for the
+children still babies. Wages have not greatly changed from those earned by
+the fathers of these new home-makers; but money represents different
+values. The kindergarten is the first thing demanded for their children,
+and the seeds sown in the minds of these young mothers bear fruit one
+hundred-fold because it is prepared.
+
+The kindergarten mother clubs have also borne fruit in the homes where even
+the youngest child has gone beyond the kindergarten's age. These mothers
+learn for the first time the need of sympathy; of living with the children
+through every period of growth; of sharing and of making together a home.
+The result is, the homes gain in moral fiber and moral purpose. The schools
+and the homes are brought into close relation through these beginnings, and
+the child finds its interests a unit, and home the place where its whole
+good is of vital importance. The mother establishes the home often on the
+basis of contrast. "It shall not be what mine was; their lives shall not be
+what mine was when I was a child."
+
+The churches, many of them, provide for the social life of their people;
+these social activities must be of a character that wins those who have the
+least to contend with in themselves, who find a pleasure and inspiration in
+religious life, which often is far more a matter of temperament than of
+spiritual development.
+
+One sees the highest expression of spiritual development in lives apart
+from the Church as well as in the Church. This it is that develops a
+feeling of reverence for any movement having for its object the bettering
+of the social life of the people. One learns that every vulgarity that
+becomes obnoxious; every freedom that is brought within the bounds of
+restraint by new standards of education and refinement; every influence set
+in motion because of the spiritual perception of the answer to the
+question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" means spiritual life growing toward
+that of the Master of time, whose laws are but two for the guiding of men,
+"Love the Lord thy God," "Thy neighbor as thyself;" and these make neither
+cross nor steeple necessary, for they may be obeyed in the heart and guide
+the life wherever it is lived.
+
+[Illustration: LIBRARY DAY AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+FINANCIAL RELATIONS IN FAMILIES.
+
+
+The women of education who attempted to make the conditions of
+working-men's families better, found their own education advanced, their
+values of essentials greatly modified in some respects, greatly enlarged in
+others. This was due to the bravery, the unselfishness, the contradictions
+of character forced on their attention through the natural, familiar
+intercourse made possible through neighborhood and club relations.
+
+Probably the most astonishing experience in working-girls' club life is the
+revelation of the entire lack of self-consciousness on the part of working
+girls as to anything remarkable in their giving up wages not only week
+after week, but year after year, for the benefit of their families. The
+closer one gets to the poorest paid of the working girls, the more common
+is this unconscious unselfishness. In fact, the girl at this level who
+would attempt to hold or even to introduce a business relation in her
+family relation, would find herself an object of contempt, even when the
+personal habits of those who controlled the use of the money she earned
+were of such a character as to certainly mean waste of the money, perhaps
+worse.
+
+However one's judgment may at times condemn this unselfishness and
+recognize in it a positive evil, one's heart is thrilled by the spirit of
+loyalty and devotion of which it is the evidence. Three sisters belonged to
+a working-girls' club. They were all employed in one establishment and
+earned good wages, yet they never had clothes that made them even
+comfortable. It was a mystery. They did not belong to the race which too
+frequently make thrift a vice, but were descendants of one the world counts
+thriftless. The months passed on. One of the sisters became indispensable
+to the club. She had the rarest tact, while straightforward and frank. When
+the second winter came, the pressure of life on these girls was very
+evident. How to relieve it, how even to approach the subject without
+appearing intrusive and meddlesome, was the wearing problem of the club
+directors. After the holidays the influence of one of the directors was
+asked by one of the sisters in behalf of a brother. Then the cause of the
+pressure was unconsciously revealed. There were five brothers and a father
+in the family.
+
+The story unfolded. For years these three girls had supported the family;
+the six men had always been the victims of cruel "bosses." Worthy,
+industrious, anxious to work, looking for work all the time, they never
+succeeded in finding work under conditions that made it possible for them
+to continue. The years of self-sacrifice had not shaken the faith of these
+sisters in the smallest degree. "What would happen if your foreman would
+become arbitrary and cross?" was asked. The reply revealed the whole
+conception of woman's relation to life as they held it. "It's different
+with women; they have to bear things."
+
+Another year passed without any change, except that the sisters grew old
+faster than they should. A quiet, determined effort was made to influence
+these girls to pay board to their mother instead of giving all their wages.
+They listened to the argument that as long as they continued their present
+system the brothers would not work steadily. The sisters listened, but the
+system did not change. Every penny was handed to the mother for
+disbursement.
+
+One morning in the early spring, three years after these girls had joined
+the club, word came that the sister who had grown dear to the club
+directors, to every member of the club, was dead. She had dropped to the
+floor at her bench the day before, and died in the night. "Greater love
+hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." The
+sacrifice was complete. Standing in the room of death with the six
+able-bodied men for whom this girl had given up her life, the sacrifice
+seemed barren, for its fruits had been garnered in her own character and
+had gone out of this life.
+
+A year later the mother sent for one of the directors of the club to have
+her plead with the sisters remaining that they would give her their wages
+as formerly. "They only pay board now; they refuse to do anything for the
+poor boys. 'Twas a bad day when ---- died. Shure, she gave me every cent.
+Not one did she keep back. Ever since she died, the girls just pay board,
+not a cent more. See how comfortable they are. They bought waterproofs,
+both of them, last week, and Jim has no overcoat. ---- would have bought
+him an overcoat."
+
+"Yes, doubtless she would. I remember the winter before she died she wore a
+spring jacket all winter, and that her shoes had been broken for weeks
+before she died." "Shure, I know." Tears fell from the woman's eyes, and
+her face bore every evidence of sorrow. "The boys could not get work that
+winter. God knows they tried. They had to have clothes, and ---- was a good
+daughter. 'Twas a bad day for me when she died." The mother had not the
+slightest conception of the sacrifice her daughter had made--a sacrifice
+that had cost her her life. Her thought was for her sons; their comforts
+were to be secured through the daughters, who were a secondary
+consideration.
+
+When her visitor protested against the sisters working to support the
+brothers in idleness, the mother was indignant. When she tried to show the
+woman that if the boys were forced by hunger and cold to go to work it
+would be their moral salvation, the mother insisted that they did try to
+get work, but that it was their "fate" to have unreasonable "bosses," who
+made it impossible for them to work under them.
+
+"Do you think the girls always work under conditions that are easy?"
+
+"No; but it is easier for a woman to stand a hard 'boss,'" was the mother's
+answer, without any expression of sympathy. Again she urged that the
+visitor use her influence with the two sisters for them to go back to their
+old method of giving the mother their wages. When the visitor refused, the
+amazement of the woman at her refusal was pathetic. When the visitor
+confessed that she was largely responsible for the change in the girls' use
+of their wages, the mother's indignation rose to the point of abuse. That
+her boys were robbed was the idea fastened in her mind. That the club was
+the enemy of that home was the mother's conviction.
+
+The mental attitude of this mother is by no means unusual. It is a common
+thing to find mothers who insist on controlling the wages of daughters who
+make no exactions in regard to the wages of sons. The effect is to lessen
+the self-respect of the girls and the sense of personal responsibility of
+the boys. In the family referred to the experiment of paying board to the
+mother was watched carefully. It was a success. The effect on the girls was
+positive. They developed a sense of personal responsibility; they grew more
+dignified and more reliable; above all, they developed self-respect. The
+fight was a hard one, but the moral victory was won. The brothers either
+found work under men who were fair, or they learned to endure control and
+discipline under a "boss," which was probably what they needed. The girls
+grew to have a care for their father's and mother's appearance and bought
+them clothes. Never as long as the mother lived did her feeling of her
+resentment against working-girls' clubs die out.
+
+After her death, the father and brothers agreed to pay one of the sisters
+so much each week if she would stay home and keep the house. The sister did
+it, though it meant hours of loneliness, and, from her point of view,
+dependence. She had taken courses in cooking and sewing in the club; she
+had listened to talks on sanitation and hygiene; she had learned the value
+of money through the management of her own wages. She created for that
+family a far better home than it had ever known under the shiftless,
+thriftless management of an undisciplined mother.
+
+The daughter was able to pay more rent from the money given to support the
+house, and the pride and self-respect of the family were greatly increased
+by the possession of a parlor, which was furnished on the installment plan
+out of the weekly sum paid to the sister. The home became a social center
+for the friends. The boys bring even their girl friends to their home,
+because it possesses more attractions than any other place to which they
+have access. A banjo lies on top of a piano--hired--and two of the boys
+take music lessons. In a family of seven wage-earners, even though the
+wages of each may be small, the combined income is large in proportion to
+the standards of outlay, and secures more than comfort, if rightly managed.
+
+In this family a home maintained at a social level is of greater importance
+than clothes, and all work to keep it. Sacrifices are made to buy things
+for the home by every member of the family. The sisters are to these
+brothers the finest type of women, and no girl whom they meet quite comes
+to their level. The sisters will never marry. The home, the father and
+brothers fill their cup of interest. There is still a latent suspicion that
+men are non-dependable, and they must be in a position to meet emergencies;
+the unjust "boss" may appear at any time, and they may be needed. Their
+brothers are a trust and must be guarded.
+
+A visit was made to a home in which a girl of sixteen was dying of
+tuberculosis. The plaint of the mother, even in the presence of the girl,
+was, "She was such a good child. She always brought home her envelope
+unopened." To the visitor this was at the time incomprehensible, as the
+advantages of the envelope to her were two-fold, that it could be opened as
+well as closed. The child had worked nearly three years, had been paid her
+wages in a sealed envelope, which she always gave to her mother as she
+received it. This is the measure of goodness for husband and child in
+thousands of working-men's homes. This mother was unconsciously brutal.
+Whether from lack of sensitiveness, or because of a life spent in fighting
+just homelessness and hunger, to the very last hour of her child's life her
+moan was, "What will I do without her wages?"
+
+Not once did that little girl hear her mother give expression to any sense
+of personal loss for her companionship. The child herself became weighed
+down with the sense of responsibility, and resented the lack of strength
+because it added to her mother's burdens. This was her regret, the only
+thing she mentioned: "I wish I could have helped mother till the others
+grew up. I've cost such a lot being sick so long and not earning anything."
+That was her estimate of life at sixteen.
+
+A son went wrong in that family, and as the time approached for his return
+home, the mother moved, lest he should be annoyed by questions and comments
+on his absence by neighbors. No power could be brought to bear on that
+mother to make her move that the daughter might sleep in a room having an
+outside window. One influence came within the range of her experience, the
+other was beyond her comprehension, and her daughter died in an absolutely
+dark, unventilated bedroom, in which she had slept eight years.
+
+She was a dainty girl, in spite of the bad taste with which she dressed,
+this second victim. She floated, rather than walked, and her cheeks were
+like carnations. The girls in the club all liked her, and their young men
+friends at the receptions showed at once how attractive they found this
+girl. She was reticent as to her affairs, except in the question of work.
+When out of work, she did not hesitate to speak of it and ask to be
+remembered if any of the club members knew where she could get work. At
+last she came quietly one morning to the director and said the doctor told
+her she must stop working for three months. The expression in her eyes
+filled the listener with fear. In a voice that trembled, she said: "I am
+the only one working. Mother has a baby and cannot work, and--and"--her
+voice lowered and her eyes fell--"my father will not be home for three
+months from last Monday. He got into trouble. He would not if he had been
+sober," she added, in proud defence. Two months later the end was near, and
+the girl knew it. All that could be done under the conditions had been
+done. It was little, for an unreasonable, drunken mother had to be reckoned
+with all the time. She would stand railing against the girl for not going
+to work when the girl could not walk across the floor for lack of strength.
+The girl was under eighteen, and her mother was the controlling power in
+her life.
+
+One of the young men who had been frequently a guest at the club receptions
+worked in an office near the girl's home. He passed one day as she sat by
+the window, and she saw him. "If he knew where I lived, he'd come in and
+see me," she said with a smile, full of friendship as the young man turned
+down the street. "I'll run after him. I know he would like to see you. He
+asked about you at the club last night." She clutched convulsively at her
+visitor's hand, saying: "Oh, don't! I wouldn't for the world have him see
+this place." She closed her eyes, after a searching glance about the room.
+Of course, the mother broke out in wailing about how hard she tried to do
+for the children and how ungrateful they were--ashamed of their home.
+
+The girl gathered her strength and sat up, her eyes blazing with
+indignation. "Mamma, I'm dying. I'll not be here another week. There are
+three more girls; I don't want them to live through what I have." Slowly,
+solemnly, she continued: "You have not been good. Papa earned good wages,
+enough to keep us all comfortable; you know what you did with the money. He
+stopped giving it to you, and you got what you wanted on credit. You kept
+that up. You know what happened to him. I went to work. You know what you
+did with my money. I could not keep it from you even when I knew the little
+ones were hungry, for you beat me and took it, unless I had spent it for
+groceries and meat and coal before I came home pay-day. I heard what the
+doctor said, that I was dying because I have not had food and have to sleep
+in that hole, or holes like it." She pointed to the horrible bedroom. "I am
+dying. You are planning with the insurance money to have a big funeral.
+Have your own friends, but not one of the girls from the club or their
+friends, even when I am dead. I don't want them to come here. Promise me,"
+she panted to her visitor, "that you will not let them come." The promise
+was given.
+
+The mother was shrieking, whether from grief, or rage, or remorse the
+visitor could not determine. That night death came.
+
+The girl was buried from the church she attended. When the club members
+were requested not to go to the house, there was scarcely concealed
+indignation. "Did she ever ask you to call on her when she was well?" There
+was no assent. "Have you any right to intrude there when she is silent? The
+church is open to all." No comment was made. At the church early in the
+morning the young men and women friends met. The mother could not even that
+morning hold herself in control. The girl's secret was out, and a great
+sympathy was added to the love her friends bore her. Her memory was an
+incense because of what her life must have been. Her unconscious
+unselfishness, her devotion to her little brothers and sisters, was
+revealed to them when they saw her mother. Good fathers and mothers found
+new expressions of affection for awhile at least, while the sharpness of
+contrast stood out between the dead girl's parents and their own, her life
+and theirs.
+
+[Illustration: A STREET ON THE EAST SIDE.]
+
+The girl who presents the most difficult problem in club life is the one
+whose social impulses are dominant. Noise, activity, excitement, seem
+inseparable from her presence. This type of girl arouses enthusiastic
+friends. She leads because she is daring; because she does not in any
+experience question results. One such girl had been studied for months.
+There was a superficial response to the efforts to win her regard, but the
+response was too transparent not to be understood. The girl would speak to
+any man who looked at her. One day she was playing "tag" with the other
+girls in front of the factory where she worked. A rag-picker pushing a cart
+made some remark as he passed. The girl, Molly, gave a spring and alighted
+on the man's shoulders like a cat. She clung there. He began to run, but he
+could not throw her off. She twined her fingers in his hair, made him turn
+back and carry her to the place where her shrieking, laughing companions
+stood. She sprang off. Still holding the man, she made him get down on his
+knees on the curb to the girls and apologize. Like a bird she flew to the
+place where he had dropped his push-cart, and, pumping the handle up and
+down to make the bells jingle, she brought it back to the man, still
+exhausted by his unwonted exertions, and with a mocking bow placed the
+handle of the cart in his hand. Then she stood up straight and ordered him
+to move on, adding: "If you ever show your nose around here again, you'll
+get more than you got this time." The man ran as if for his life.
+
+Molly then turned and saw the friend whom she had promised she would be
+more quiet on the street. Her face crimsoned as she came toward her. "I
+could not help it. You don't know what he said. He won't never speak to
+another girl minding her own business as he spoke to us. I won't tell you
+what he said; it was too bad." The girl was about seventeen years old. She
+had cut off her hair, and it was bleached. She wore the gayest hats, which
+only served to emphasize the poverty and shabbiness of the rest of her
+clothes. One day she passed her friend's house without a jacket. She ran,
+holding her hands under her arms. Her jacket had been bought with money
+earned by working overtime, a result secured by the most persistent effort
+and argument.
+
+Now the jacket was gone, and the slack season coming. As five o'clock
+approached, the girl's self-appointed guardian took her station at the
+window to watch for the girl on her way home. She came skipping along,
+slapping her arms to keep warm. She entered the house reluctantly in
+response to the call, "Where is your jacket, Molly?"
+
+"I ain't cold. I ain't a bit cold."
+
+"Where is your jacket?"
+
+"Really and truly, I ain't cold. I'm thin, but I don't feel the cold as
+much as other girls. I ain't a mite cold."
+
+It was impossible for the girl to stand still. She was shivering with cold,
+and her teeth, which were beautiful, were chattering. After a time the
+explanation was given.
+
+There were five in family. The girl's mother, a stepfather about fifteen
+years younger than the mother, a brother one year younger than the girl,
+and a feeble-minded sister of fourteen. The girl was the only regular
+wage-earner in the family. The brother was a worthless fellow, who bore
+every evidence of degeneracy and rarely worked. The stepfather drank, and
+worked only occasionally. Molly earned six dollars a week, except in the
+slack seasons, two a year, when she earned about three dollars a week for
+four weeks each time. She began working when she was fourteen, and had
+never kept back one penny of her wages. Her mother had bought her new hats,
+but in all her life no other new garment except the jacket had ever been
+bought for her. She never asked any questions about the money, but she
+supposed the rent was paid. When she reached home the night before
+everything was on the sidewalk, and her feeble-minded sister was watching
+them. The jacket was the only thing owned on which money could be raised;
+it was pawned. "Molly, may I call on your mother?" A reluctant consent was
+given.
+
+The home now was in a rear basement, the ceiling just above the level of
+the yard. The mother and husband occupied the bedroom; Molly and her sister
+slept on a narrow lounge covered with Brussels carpet, every spring broken.
+It was a series of humps. It was impossible to sit on it. In reply to a
+question, the mother acknowledged that no provision was made to make it
+more comfortable. The brother slept on the floor. The rooms were dirty and
+overcrowded. Food was of necessity poor, and because of the mother's
+indifference and ignorance, was poorer than it need have been.
+
+This was what Molly received for six dollars a week. The moment the mother
+knew who the visitor was, she began abusing the girl. One special cause of
+offense was the keeping back of overtime money to buy a new jacket. She
+evidently imagined that she did not get all the girl's money every week.
+When it was pointed out to her that the new jacket had paid half a month's
+rent, she refused to be mollified, because the money paid for it would have
+paid the rent for a month and a half. Of course, this extra money would
+have gone like the regular wages if it had been given to the woman.
+
+The walls were covered with pretty advertising cards and pictures cut from
+papers. Not a vulgar nor ugly picture was on the walls. "Who put up those
+pictures?" "Molly. Shure, that's all she's good for when she's home,
+a-cutting and putting up these things." This was one more charge against
+the girl. Evidently the girl gave her wages, and gave them willingly; but
+that ended her interest in her home and measured the mother's in her.
+
+It was decided to move the family into one of the model tenements and
+furnish a room for the girl and her sister, paying the difference in rent
+for one year, to see what the result would be in health and morals in that
+family. When the proposition was made one evening to Molly, her face
+lighted and she emitted a sigh of perfect consent. But the light died out,
+and an expression of almost self-pity supplanted it.
+
+"No, I must not let you do it. It would be lovely to have a room for Katie
+and me alone. I must not let you do it." She was silent for some minutes;
+then, with eyes cast down, she said in a quiet voice that indicated that
+persuasion was useless: "I know them houses. They're awful nice. I'd like
+to live in them. They're awful particular. They won't let no noisy people
+in. They make them move right out." Then slowly, with burning cheeks, she
+said in barely distinct tones: "Mamma is noisy sometimes, and when she's
+noisy she gets into fights with people. There ain't no use of moving in
+there; they'd not let us stay. Then, Billy"--the stepfather--"and I fight.
+I never speaks to him, excepts when he speaks ugly to Katie or mamma. He's
+drunk a lot now, most all the time, and then he's ugly to them. He ain't to
+me, 'cos he knows I'd break his head; but he is to them, and then I has to
+shut him up. I ain't spoke to him since he struck mamma, just after they
+was married."
+
+"But your wages give him a home and food."
+
+"Yes, I know it, but I can't help that, 'cos he's married to mamma and must
+be where she is." There was silence again, and then the girl continued:
+"Mamma didn't do it so much till she married him; she's worse now. I wish
+I was dead;" and the head of many shades was buried with the limp,
+"frowzled" feathers in the sofa cushion. "No, I can earn enough to keep
+them where they are. I must not move; but it would be lovely," she added
+with a sob.
+
+A couple of weeks later she came in the evening. It was raining hard. After
+a moment's silence, she announced, with shining face: "We have the
+loveliest baby at our house, born last night week. I wanted to tell you
+before, but I had to do the work night and morning. He's lovely." She
+fussed at her pocket and brought out a pair of baby shoes of worsted. "I
+got them with some money I earned overtime. You say I ought to get what I
+want with that money." The eyes of the hostess followed the lines of
+Molly's dress to her feet. Her swollen, purple foot was seen through the
+broken upper of her shoe. Molly was looking with pride and love at the tiny
+shoes on her knee. "I named the baby Willie, and I'm his godmother," she
+added with pride, without the slightest conception of the relation between
+"Billy" and "Willie."
+
+"Billy? Oh, he's drunk; been drunk a week. I ain't let him in yet; I'm
+goin' to wait until the baby's bigger and mamma's up. She'll let him in,"
+she added, with disgust.
+
+Matters grew worse with the advent of the new baby, for Molly had to fight
+with her mother to get it cared for. At last it died, to Molly's pathetic
+grief. The mother had consented to Katie's removal to an institution, where
+she could receive care and training. Molly was persuaded she owed a duty to
+herself. No impression was made until her mother had been arrested twice.
+Then Molly consented to leave home. It was deemed best that she should
+contribute part of the rent to insure her mother a home and to maintain a
+natural human tie. Molly did this _for three years_. Then she married a man
+controlling a good business. Molly is a quiet, devoted wife. She married a
+man old enough to be her father. When the wisdom of this was questioned,
+she said, with emphasis and a nod of her curly head: "No young man for me,
+thank you. Look at Billy!"
+
+It was Friday morning--a warm, sultry morning in August. The bell rang. A
+mother in black and a young daughter of eighteen were in the
+reception-room. The daughter had evidently been crying. "I've come to tell
+yer that Annie can't go to the country to-morrow. She's sick'm. She's cried
+all night. Her brother was discharged'm. He do be havin' a bad man for a
+'boss.' He's discharged'm, and Annie can't go to the country with the girls
+to-morrow. I can't spare her wages. It's all I got. Shure, if I could get
+work in washin', or anything to do, I'd do it, but I can't'm. I'll look all
+the week; and the boy'll get somethin', perhaps. She can't go this week;
+will yer let her go next? Shure, the rent is due, and her wages is all I
+got for three of us. Yer can go to work to-day, even if it be a bit late,
+and yer can go next week to the country."
+
+[Illustration: A COOKING CLASS OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.]
+
+"Oh, mamma! the girls talk nothing but country. I can't go to-day," was the
+sobbing response.
+
+The girl did not go that summer. There was no room for her until September.
+By that time the work at the factory had increased and not one girl could
+be spared. Patiently Annie commented: "It wouldn't be any good if they
+could spare me. My brother is out of work yet. He's awfully unlucky."
+
+The quiet heroism of thousands of working girls can be appreciated only by
+those who become familiar with their lives in the natural intercourse of
+club life. There is, of course, the other type of girl--the girl who
+insists on spending the major portion, if not all, of her wages for
+clothes; who assumes no responsibility for the family, and who has conceded
+to her the right to spend her money for clothes. She would make life most
+uncomfortable if she were compelled to share what she earned, even when the
+family live under conditions that make the home merely a place of
+shelter--conditions that make even decency impossible. The fathers and
+mothers seemingly have no rights that this type of girl feels she is bound
+to respect. When such girls marry, the mothers will do the washing for
+their daughters, hold the menial relation, and neither mother nor daughter
+questions the justice of the relation. Sometimes the daughter will pay the
+mother for doing the washing, "to," as she expresses it, "help her mother
+out." Such families usually cannot be helped through any influence but the
+evolution that comes through environment and neighborhood development.
+There is a superficial difference in the social development of such parents
+and children. The parents concede the higher position to their children,
+and the children take it as a matter of right.
+
+The wages of skilled workmen enable them to keep their children in school
+until they are sixteen or seventeen years old, if the children will stay.
+These fathers can support their families, but not dress them as they
+desire. The girls go to work for the sole purpose of dressing better than
+their fathers could dress them. This indulgence creates false standards,
+and is a serious blot on the American working-man's life. It prevents
+marriage. Both young men and young women understand that the wages of one
+cannot buy luxuries for two that the wages used for one bought. The army of
+clerks on small salaries increase yearly. This class, through association,
+develop tastes and standards of living that make impossible the
+establishment of homes on their incomes and at the same time the continued
+indulgence of developed tastes. No type of family develops less that adds
+to the wealth and attainment of the country than this type. The children
+are selfish; they marry; they discover that the wages that bought clothes
+to suit the extravagance of one is wholly inadequate to support a family.
+Discouragement, friction, ennui follow, and life becomes a grind, without
+hope, without inspiration. The second family slips backward, and it is but
+two generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves, with this difference,
+that the arms covered by the shirt sleeves of the third generation lack the
+muscles of the first, as the spirit lacks its moral fiber. It is this type
+of family that keeps alive the most vexing of social problems. The skilled
+working-man's family, the family of the small salaried men, present the
+most difficult problems not only in the use of money, but the use of time.
+Their daughters are often far more helpless than the daughters of men of
+wealth. During their school days, except in the exceptional home, they are
+not trained to do housework; do not learn to sew. As soon as school days
+end, office or store work begins, and then there is no time to learn the
+household arts. If in these homes the money-saving value of time were
+taught, independence and freedom impossible in wage-earning would be
+secured; the standards of life would be the essentials, not the
+non-essentials, that so often rob life of what is best and most valuable.
+
+Hundreds of girls become wage-earners because they dislike housework.
+Anything else is preferable. Dean Gill, of Barnard College, New York, in an
+address recently delivered, said there were three types of college girl:
+The girl who never could learn any of the arts of home-making. She advised
+that that girl be allowed to choose a career, and that men make no attempt
+to interfere with it. The girl who had in her the latent qualities that, if
+developed, would make her a home-maker. Such a girl it might be wise to
+keep home for one year between Sophomore and Junior year. And the third
+girl had the home-making gifts so well developed naturally that no amount
+of college training would modify them. This classification holds good of
+the daughters of men earning small salaries, wages, and no wages.
+
+As the Domestic Science department is developed in our public schools, the
+homes of working men of the better class will benefit by it. This distaste
+of housework will disappear, because it will have gained a place equal in
+value to geography and mental arithmetic, and these will have value because
+a knowledge of them adds to the home-maker's ability.
+
+There are homes of thrift and order where all must be wage-earners; homes
+where the claims of parents on the wages of children are conceded. There is
+a bank account, but on this the children have no claim, no matter how much
+of their wages may have gone into it, or how much educational opportunity
+they may have lost because its demands have been paramount. When the
+children marry they establish homes without any or very little help from
+their parents. They do not expect it. Home, food, clothes have been given
+them; all claims have been met. They are as free as their parents when they
+began. Usually there is a gift of a piece of furniture or table linen; but
+money to start a new bank account is not expected. Without doubt, much of
+the inability to use money to prepare for future emergencies is due to the
+fact that financially the new home-makers from these homes are infants in
+practical experience. The marvel is that they keep homes as well as they
+do, and meet the future as well as they do without planning to meet it.
+
+The second generation of this type of thrifty families rarely carry the
+habits of thrift of their parents into their home-making. The new financial
+freedom is a novelty, and presents in itself enjoyment that the new
+home-makers use. Here and there is a recovery from the danger of
+extravagance by a young couple, but the recovery is rarely so complete as
+to repeat the restrictions that the thrift of the parents compelled in
+their homes. The new generation demand better clothes and better furniture.
+Food and rent are regulated to meet these demands.
+
+One stands appalled sometimes at the degree of vitality, the hope and the
+cheerfulness that prevail in the homes protected only by the muscles of one
+man; what they can buy representing all that the home may have. There is no
+spirit of recklessness; there is no failure to comprehend the slight
+protection a husband and father can give, though he be skillful; but there
+is a sublime confidence in the future. Though familiar with suffering, if
+not personally, then sympathetically, with full knowledge of what sickness
+and death bring to other unprotected homes, such men and women, and there
+are thousands, live from youth to and through age cheerfully, happily,
+without any financial safeguard except against Potter's Field. This weekly
+insurance is kept up; the family live cheerfully, gayly, sometimes to the
+end.
+
+[Illustration: A MEETING OF NEIGHBORS.]
+
+One result of doling out small sums to young wage-earners, whether thrift
+or necessity is responsible, is disastrous, especially disastrous for young
+girls. It has seemed to the writer that if mothers and fathers could be
+brought to a realizing sense of its dangers, they would endure hunger
+rather than have their daughters exposed to it. After all, it could be
+averted by making a division of the money spent for dress. Girls are often
+dressed out of all proportion to the sums they earn, if a fair division of
+their wages were made, if the dignity of the daughters was protected by any
+degree of independence financially. Of course this disproportionate use of
+money is due to false standards that will only be regulated when the people
+on salaries learn to universally live true to the law of proportion in
+their expenditures.
+
+It seems to be a fixed idea that a girl is dependent on invitations from
+young men for her social pleasures. If she is not invited, it is not only
+her misfortune, but her fault; she should be more attractive. On the other
+hand, the young man is scarcely any better off than the young girl
+financially, yet he expects, and his world expects, that he shall bear, not
+only his own social expenses, but those of at least one girl. His impulse
+is to be chivalrous, for chivalry is not regulated by income nor deadened
+by pennilessness.
+
+It is oppressive at times to see how the lack of money prevents the natural
+association of young men and women; how often the young men are forced to
+give up the society of girls for this reason. Girls often unconsciously
+force invitations. As one goes down the scale, the girls invite themselves,
+where the young men have to bear the expenses. So small a matter as carfare
+will make a girl thrust herself on a young man's care. The girl will not
+resent indifference, even discourtesy and neglect, if only her aim is
+accomplished. The young men suffer the reflex of this attitude of mind, and
+their estimate of women is regulated by these misconceptions, and even
+their manner as husbands is regulated by this conception of the relations
+of the sexes, and wife and daughters suffer in consequence.
+
+The higher up one goes in the social scale, the less evident is this
+aggressiveness on the part of girls, and the more natural relation of man
+as the suitor is apparent. As girls are brought more familiarly under the
+guidance of women willing to discuss the financial relations that should be
+maintained between the unmarried of both sexes, the more careful girls
+become in permitting the expending of money by men for their social
+pleasures; especially so where the limitation of a man's resources is
+understood, or even suspected.
+
+How to make mothers put their daughters in an independent position where
+their pleasures are concerned is a very important and at the same time a
+very difficult question. When it is a question, as it often is, of the very
+necessities of life for a family and the allowing of money for the pleasure
+of a fun-loving daughter, necessities bear down the scale, even of justice,
+and dignity ceases to have value. For it must be remembered that the girl's
+wages, used for her exclusively, would often allow the exercise of
+independence in her social affiliations. This it is that makes Settlements
+so important in our social life. Here boys and girls do meet on a platform
+of independence, chaperoned naturally by those who know intimately the home
+surroundings, the social standards, the limitations of life in the regions,
+and all that creates environment, that most positive factor in the making
+of character. The social attitude of the young people who grow up in
+affiliation with the Settlements is found to differ greatly from that of
+young people untrammeled by oversight or influence that develops dignity.
+
+The influence of working-girls' clubs is positive in its effect on the
+majority of the members. The girls are taught in the clubs directly and
+indirectly. It is not only in the teaching of the home arts, but through
+lectures, talks, books and contact with women of education. The members
+often astonish those who know them best by their responses to their
+opportunities. This mental development makes them critical. The men they
+meet rarely have had their opportunities, and they suffer by comparison.
+The young women often find they have larger interests and sympathies; far
+clearer ideas of the responsibilities of life; are better equipped than the
+men they meet. Every girls' club shows members who thus develop. Often they
+will not marry. They are the support of one or both parents, now too old to
+work; they help married sisters and brothers; they are the prop and stay of
+all the halt and lame of their families; wiser and better guides for
+growing nephews and nieces than their own mothers and fathers. Frequently
+they are the most important helpers in club life, exerting a positive,
+upbuilding influence. Yet one always grows sad when thinking of them. Not
+thriftlessness, but unselfishness, may leave them penniless in old age.
+There is no place for them. Rarely is there a corner to which they are
+welcome in the tenement house; often even where there is love and gratitude
+there may not be space. Floor space often regulates the expression of love,
+where the heart may have unlimited space.
+
+[Illustration: THE READING ROOM AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+The saddest figure in tenement-house life is the unmarried woman who can no
+longer work and is dependent. In her effort to serve her people she may
+have played the critic, and that is remembered when her service is
+forgotten. It is this type of girl who by instinct refuses to accept
+attentions that mean the spending of money by men who cannot afford it.
+Their wages would, if used for themselves, have given social opportunities
+that did not involve obligations, but family demands seemed to make such
+use impossible. Sometimes the fun-loving sister will secure both shares.
+One is taken to a home of her own; the other left to carry the family
+burden, and no one questions why. If it is unanswered, it is attributed to
+the lack of attraction in the unmarried sister.
+
+There are homes in the tenements where the wages of the earners make a
+family income, in which all share equally, independent of the amount
+contributed. There is a bank account. It may be in the joint name of father
+and mother, but it is far more commonly the unquestioned property of the
+mother. The children look upon this as the protection of the parents from
+dependence in old age, should it not be called upon by illness or
+misfortune. Such families represent the highest moral development in
+tenement-house life. The children have been trained to appreciate
+educational opportunities, and school is through childhood an important
+factor in life. When the wage-earning period comes, night-school advantages
+are appreciated and used. When the work is chosen, some thought is given to
+the promise of future wage-earning powers by the acquiring of skill in that
+employment. The maximum wages possible at the present time is not the
+controlling element in the decision. The future is not sacrificed to the
+present. Such a home is kept, no matter how small, in a condition that
+makes social life in it possible.
+
+Hallways, street corners, store steps are not the only places for the
+development of the social instincts of the members of such families. After
+marriage the family is united, and home, though it be in the top of a
+tenement, is the Mecca for children and grandchildren.
+
+At the other end of the social scale in this world of workers is the
+happy-go-lucky family. Here the system of financial management has its
+faults, but much is found that is better than wisdom in money matters.
+Spending extravagantly when there is money, going without cheerfully when
+there is none. Why, the going without is scarcely treated even with the
+respect of making it a subject of conversation. The habit of sharing when
+any member has anything to share becomes a fixed habit, and "mine" and
+"thine" are not in the family vocabulary. The result is a close and
+inter-dependent family relation, of which the mother is the center. Often
+you will find that this mother has never had any clothes that would do to
+wear on the street, except to early Mass, if she is a Romanist, or that she
+rarely goes to church, if a Protestant, because her clothes are not what
+she calls "fit." Her life is the gospel of unselfishness, and she reaps the
+reward of love. One may fret at the waste, resent the short-sightedness,
+which means ignorance and shiftlessness; but there is so much pleasure in
+these families, so much that means happiness in them, that one even learns
+to forget the frets. They never grow beyond childhood in worldly wisdom,
+and childhood is always attractive. It is so rich in promise. Happiness is
+the cement of human life. Poverty does not change its power of holding the
+members together through weal or woe. There is a common inheritance of
+memories that never lose their power of cohesion where love and friendship
+reign in families.
+
+The people who do not know the lives of the working people can have no idea
+of the extent to which the working men trust their wives. The majority of
+working-men's wives are financially in a far more independent position than
+the wives even of capitalists, where the wives are without an independent
+income. Not only is the money given to the wives, but their use of the
+money is unquestioned. There is a constant revelation of the unselfishness
+of these men. Children will be overdressed, while the father will not even
+be comfortable; but there is no complaint, for the pride of the father is
+gratified. He, with the mother, has one standard--clothes. There are men
+who say frankly that they would waste the money if it were in their care;
+that their wives secure far better results than they could; that the
+practice of having only carfare, at the most lunch money, reduces greatly
+the much abused social habit of "treating." The married man who can
+"treat," it is generally conceded, is not fair to his family; he keeps his
+wages at their expense.
+
+Sometimes the observer marvels at the infinite patience of many men. Their
+wives drift. Neither money nor time is used for their families. A week's
+loss of work, and there is debt; a day's sickness, and to its suffering is
+added the knowledge that there is no money in reserve to meet this
+emergency, even though the wages insure it. While knowing well the cause,
+one resents the unjust conditions that control many marriages among the
+young people of the wage-earning class. The young women rarely have the
+knowledge that will enable them to do their share in establishing the home.
+The young man contracting a marriage without the prospect of supporting a
+home is condemned and his bride pitied; but there is little criticism if
+she spends years--years that mean discomfort and waste--in learning to do
+her part, if she ever learns.
+
+[Illustration: AFTER SCHOOL AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+The mental attitude of the wage-earners toward their income is confusing
+and yet interesting. In reply to any question of wages, the maximum sum is
+always given. The question of idle time does not enter into computations of
+the year's possible income and necessary outlays. This holds good before as
+well as after marriage. Work may last for only forty weeks of the year, but
+the other twelve, even among intelligent wage-earners, sometimes are not
+counted in their relation to income. This perhaps explains much that is
+counted as thriftlessness. It is, in fact, a failure to apply arithmetic to
+daily life.
+
+After all is said, no one who is familiar with the income of the
+wage-earning class can fail to see that the results obtained prove
+conclusively that the use of money in the well-regulated home is a fine
+art; that many working-men's wives could give post-graduate courses in the
+use of money to women who consider they have the right to teach them. Even
+waste and misuse are regulated by education and experience where there is
+even a modicum of intelligence. The second conclusion is that thrift under
+certain conditions is a vice that causes distinct deterioration of
+character. It should be combated as vigorously as thriftlessness. It can
+only be done by raising the standards of living; by creating other
+standards of value than money.
+
+But everywhere among the wage-earning people the independence of the wife
+in money matters is apparent.
+
+There are men who are niggardly and who hand out small sums daily, and
+never recognize that the wife has a right to anything beyond food and
+shelter, who grudgingly buy clothes when they must. These men are despised,
+spoken of with contempt as not being good fathers or husbands, and their
+wives are openly pitied. But the mass of working men place their wives in a
+perfectly independent position by making them the absolute disbursers of
+their incomes. The small shopkeepers, to all intents and purposes, treat
+their wives as partners. The wives work with them, sharing their knowledge,
+their responsibilities, and appear as joint owner in the bank account. The
+wife usually is the safe until the money goes to the bank account.
+
+When a wife is a good financial manager, she is the head of the house,
+whose reign is never questioned. "Her children rise up and call her
+blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her," though the Book of
+Proverbs may be unknown. This financial independence of the wives of
+working men develops the spirit of independence and aggressiveness that so
+often disturbs and upsets the plans of the woman who would do them good,
+and is the cause of the charge of ingratitude that is often made against
+the women of the tenement-house regions. It is scarcely natural to develop
+gratitude for efforts made in the wrong direction. Poverty has its degrees,
+as has wealth. There are families living in tenements whose conditions
+represent wealth when contrasted with that of their neighbors. One fact
+remains. Both women do not need the same opportunities, the same help. The
+student of the management of wages in a tenement-house home rapidly
+acquires a spirit of humility. While everywhere there is waste, there are
+times when money seems to buy double the amount that the student thought
+possible. With the wage-earners' families, as with all others, the income
+buys that which is most desired by those spending it. Choice is the master
+of decision, even in necessities. What is needed in the wage-earner's
+family is that education, that opportunity for development that will make a
+choice of the highest things, those that will mean a body and mind so
+nourished and cared for that moral resistance is the available capital of
+every member of the family in time of need.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+HOME STANDARDS.
+
+
+The world knows two aspects of involuntary poverty: The one inseparable
+from degradation; the other picturesque, appealing to the emotions, and
+giving a field for the play of sympathetic activity that frequently
+neglects to note the results it attains.
+
+There are few who discern that poverty is a comparative term, and these do
+not use the word in its financial sense wholly.
+
+Those who know intimately the struggling, up-growing poor know that the
+rich can never give the exquisite expression to love that life at this
+level makes possible. Who would dream when looking at the Hercules, with
+clothes and hands soiled by his daily labor, that he is the tender nurse of
+wife and baby; that he is hurrying to a house cared for with joy. He will
+wash dishes, cook, scrub the floor, walk the baby to sleep, and coddle and
+pet a wife who from sheer loneliness and worry over work undone may be the
+harder to please and quiet. All this, and perhaps, almost certainly, not
+once will any terms of endearment be heard, and, strange as it may seem, no
+kiss given. How one rebels and rejoices that love can be thus expressed!
+
+When sickness enters the home of the poor man, money is not present to
+relieve the able from personal service, often made more difficult through
+ignorance. Pride shuts the door to charity and the burden is carried in
+love. Those who know life at this level can never, never lose faith in the
+Eternal love, for they see always, however disguised, the divine spark in
+every human being. The silence of love thus expressed, the revelation of it
+where least expected, makes the one who witnesses it conscious of what
+power lies outside and beyond and above his own life, not witnessed to the
+ear. Every day at this level of life in our great city it is proved to the
+privileged that tenderness is the winning element in strength; that love
+daily, hourly here proves its power of self-abnegation. Here, too, it fills
+its function of inspiration. Days, weeks, months, years go by and the
+burden of moral weakness is borne with the cloak of faith wrapped about its
+fears. When so expressed, its loyal unconsciousness adds to its beauty and
+makes it an inspiration to all who come into its presence as friends; the
+lips voice its faith, the eyes alone reveal its fears even to friends.
+
+[Illustration: THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS.]
+
+The more intimately one comes into the home circle of the independent
+wage-earners the more clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand
+revealed. Life must be lived so simply, the interests of life are so
+evident, that the value of words decreases; action expresses the heart
+perfectly. The very services the children render each other train them for
+the family life they will establish. The baby tended by an older brother
+and sister learns to depend on them for care, and that dependence in turn
+draws out a love and responsibility that could not have birth under any
+other conditions. The child who finds that in pain, weariness, suffering, a
+father and mother alone share its care; the elder children who see how
+naturally sacrifices are made for them, how little the father and mother
+value themselves, their ease, even their comfort, learn to value the love
+in the home and depend on it, give love to it, that money to buy service
+would bar out. The child who sees parents make sacrifices to enlarge his
+opportunities for education, seeing him as a positive factor in his own
+manhood, sees more than parental love in such sacrifices and stands in more
+than the relation of child to parents.
+
+At the level where charity and dependence are large factors in the home
+life, the relation of parents to children is changed by their presence.
+Art has given Charity the figure of a noble, benign woman, in the ample
+folds of whose garments children are protected. Too often in life she wears
+a short skirt, to make speed possible, suggesting in movements and voice
+the need of nervines, when she does not seem to have taken the bandage from
+the eyes of Justice for her own use, while neglecting to borrow her scales.
+Where Charity is the welcome guest, instinct is greater than intelligence
+in the parental relation. The home tie is slight; children become shrewdly
+self-dependent, physical hardships are more easily borne, and life is often
+a mere matter of shelter and food; the animal alone is kept alive. This
+represents a social level as remote from that of the independent
+wage-earner as is represented between the home's standards and requirements
+of a family living on fifteen hundred dollars a year and that of a family
+living on fifteen thousand dollars a year.
+
+We use the word poor so carelessly that there is confusion where absolute
+misapprehension has not developed as to the character of the largest, most
+receptive, most responsive and most responsible class of citizens of New
+York. Politically they have been neglected, until the Citizens' Union gave
+them a formative part in political decisions. Here and there a score or
+more independent working men would be found in political organizations,
+because of an active political conscience, always hoping for better days,
+when the city would be given its imperative rights without regard to the
+State or national political complications. It was a hopeless fight, and has
+sent into the erratic political parties the majority of the independent
+working men now in them. The schemes of the politicians disgusted them, and
+new principals seemed to be the only hope for the clean-minded mind who did
+its own thinking.
+
+The great mass of these independent, self-respecting, intelligent
+working-men voters were hunted for at election, but were not counted worthy
+to take a place in the councils of the politically active because they were
+feared. The Citizens' Union recognized their value and power, and they have
+come into their own as citizens. No greater service have the Settlements
+done the city than discovering this unused element in political power and
+centering it where it is recognized as the saving power in municipal
+government. These men stand at the head of the homes that reveal
+love--tender, protecting inspiring love--serving in unspoken unselfishness
+to the largest degree.
+
+Thousands of mothers can testify to the cheerful sharing by fathers in the
+household burdens after a day of hard work; of cheerful going without
+necessities on the part of a father to give more than necessities to the
+children. Thousands of husbands and fathers will note the unselfishness and
+wisdom of a mother in caring for and enlarging the opportunities for the
+children, who are the common objects of love and ambition, and the
+confidence and love of the husband grows with the years. To the observer
+there is at the same time no more inspiring and depressing revelation than
+the parental love which asks nothing for itself, but all that life can give
+for the children, the visible expression of their mutual love. Often there
+is no thought given to a future of possible dependence. Wages do not make
+possible the care of the children at the standards of the parents, the
+buying of an environment that the experience of intelligent parents demands
+for them, and a bank account. The last is desirable, the first demand
+imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be thrown out when the life
+currents are running toward the rocks of want and dependence. Nothing is
+kept back for personal use by these fathers and mothers. Sometimes this
+very unselfishness, when unregulated by wisdom, leaves them lonely and
+forsaken in old age. Those to whom they have given their lives have by the
+gift been placed in social positions that seemingly bar out the parents who
+made achievement possible. Even in the loneliness of old age the parents
+rejoice at the success and forget and forgive the separation. The end for
+which they worked has been attained, their children are successful, and
+they still count themselves nothing compared with their children.
+
+It is the independent wage-earners who make the largest contributions to
+our wealth, commercial greatness, national prestige; yet the world,
+counting wealth by dollars, classifies these as poor. They are as far
+removed from the incapable, the degraded, the vicious, the dependent, the
+ignorant--who provide the themes for books--as far removed from the
+worthless, the deficient, the mentally, morally weak, so familiar to the
+people of wealth who give money or time, or both, to lessen their miseries,
+as they are in standard and ambition from the people counted wealthy. The
+cost of floor space on which to make a home may make them neighbors of the
+people who are the problems of a great city; they may live in regions that
+are the laboratory of the student of social and political conditions, but
+they live behind closed doors, bring up their children, so far as they can,
+uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and overcome their environment to a
+surprising degree. There is no word to distinguish them from those who make
+capital of their poverty, and the world loses much because of the lack of a
+term that would express the class who are the hope of this nation, whose
+children are the promise of its established greatness.
+
+The very limitations that small incomes impose on husbands and wives,
+strangers to social ambitions, bring into the relation an independence and
+_camaraderie_ that possibilities of wealth would bar out. When a father and
+mother have one object in life, their children, they have no personal
+ambitions; their minds run in the same groove; they live of necessity a
+unit. When the aim is to give their children a better education than they
+had; to place them on a firmer foundation in the wage-earning world than
+the one on which the father and mother started; to save the children from
+the contaminating world as they had to meet it, there of necessity is a
+welded interest that bars out a world of distractions. The world in which
+such fathers and mothers live may seem narrow, but the smallness of the
+world makes the companionship the closer. As one gets into the inner circle
+of these homes, the small part that wealth plays in happiness is realized,
+and the comprehension of what constitutes essentials is gained. The man who
+knows the measure of his wage-earning power does not waste his nerve and
+vitality to earn more; the family grow to have fixed habits of expenditure,
+and content is attained that the social strugglers never know. The victim
+of nervous prostration is not found in the working-man's world; the fixed
+rate of wages relieves the nerves, but exercises the muscles and the
+balance of health is kept. The exceptions to this happy attainment are
+those whose mental or moral natures have not been adjusted to the happy,
+even life of the skilled, sober, industrious, thrifty working-man's family
+in New York.
+
+The world of wealth would find itself rejected if it brought with it into
+the wage-earning world its moral standards, the rules of conduct are so
+simple in this world, the standards so elemental. An aldermanic candidate
+who in his own world is not counted ignorant, during the campaign of 1901
+conceived the idea, which he had never held before, though this was the
+fourth time he had appealed to the suffrages of the people, that the women
+were a factor in political success. He decided to call on the wives,
+mothers and sisters of the voters in his district. It would be interesting
+to know his conclusions after his experience. He must have gained wisdom by
+his experiment, and heard some unwelcome truths. He announced to one of his
+hostesses that he thought if he called and showed himself they might see in
+him something that would persuade them that their husbands, fathers,
+brothers, or sons ought to vote for him. It would have been interesting to
+have seen his face when more than one hostess assured him that, having seen
+him, she felt bound to urge her husband to vote for the other candidate. Or
+when he was told by others that he must understand how certain he was of
+defeat, or he would not appeal to women. Still more interesting it would
+have been to see him when an outraged wife let down the flood-gates of her
+wrath because she blamed him for the periodic lapses from industry and
+sobriety of which her husband was guilty. The better class of voters of
+this candidate's party resented angrily the man calling on their wives. The
+root cause of the indignation of the men and women it was found was that
+this man dared to call when the husbands were not at home. In the world of
+work there is no place for social life in the day-time, and it argues ill
+for those who indulge in it. The Metropolitan Opera House in the evening
+would so shock the working man and his wife that they would never recover
+respect for those who frequent it. A high-necked lace dress with a low
+lining, worn in the evening by one from the other world to an East Side
+party, brought out this comment: "Oh! yes, she's all right. They all do it,
+the women; but isn't it awful?"
+
+The moral standards for men and women in the world of work are the same.
+The immoral man is despised and avoided by the women. A woman who should
+maintain the smallest degree of friendship or acquaintance with a man known
+to be immoral would be avoided by her neighbors; she would be made to
+realize at once the cause of her offending.
+
+A silly, pretty little woman, whose husband at times was cruel and brutal,
+ran away from him with another man. No one in the neighborhood could
+remember when such a thing had happened before, and the neighborhood
+resented it as a disgrace. The husband's brutality was well known; he was
+despised and ignored by the better element of men in the neighborhood. Had
+the wife gone alone, she would have had the support of a respectable
+minority, but now the husband was the object of deep sympathy. When the
+wife was found, and declared she would gladly starve with the partner of
+her disgrace--and there was a fair prospect at the time that she
+would--"than have the best in the land with my husband; he has kicked me
+out for the last time," she was cast out of the books of remembrance in
+that neighborhood. "She married him for better or worse," was the measure
+of a wife's duty among these wives and mothers.
+
+The admiration of the explorer into this world of work and homes grows with
+the years for the people who make it, as indignation grows at the
+misunderstanding of its limitations, its possibilities, its beauty and
+greatness. For Matthew Arnold gave the true definition of greatness when he
+said it was the obstacles overcome, not his attainments, that made a man
+great. The explorer makes many discoveries--some that stimulate and
+surprise, some that puzzle and depress. The silence of love in this world
+is a revelation. Whether the terms of endearment are not in the language of
+this world, or whether the want of leisure and privacy stifle them, it is
+difficult to decide. Perhaps it is that the language of love is learned in
+a mother's arms; that when her service to her child must be physical, when
+it is but one of a thousand things demanding her care and thought--when her
+muscles must serve unceasingly--she has no time to express the love that
+strengthens them by words. It may be that the language of love does not
+grow within crowded walls, and that it is forced to express itself in
+service.
+
+[Illustration: A BIT OF OLD GREENWICH.]
+
+A man ranking high in the intellectual world once took for his theme, when
+preaching to a company of wage-earners and their wives, "Home Life." It was
+a rare inspiration that moved him to point out how much was lost to the
+home where the verbal expression of love was never heard. He said no higher
+inspiration to work his best could be given a man than his wife's good-bye
+kiss in the morning; nor a charm that would drive away care, worry and
+exhaustion more perfect than her welcoming kiss when he returned from his
+work at the close of the day. He pictured the feelings of the man who found
+his wife silent and unresponsive when he entered the house; who answered
+his query as to what was the matter with "Nothing." In his audience was a
+wife whose faithfulness and intelligence had made her husband far more than
+he could ever have been without her, a fact of which he was fully
+conscious; he was not allowed to forget it. This wife was deeply impressed
+by what she heard. She was ignorant because of lack of opportunity,
+untruthful because she was ignorant; she could not see the relations of
+things. Vindictive, because in her moral code you must resent any wrong,
+real or fancied, by an action that goes far deeper than that of the
+offender in its effect. Anything else would be an evidence of weakness. She
+expressed her contempt for one who would forgive an injury, and prided
+herself that she never did. She had enthusiasm, could inspire others, and
+proved herself as capable in leading them to do wrong as to do right. She
+was the power in her home, and established its standard of right and wrong
+that gave motive to the lives of her children. This night the speaker
+lifted the veil. There was something that belonged in the home that she
+alone could put there, and she had not. She resolved that she would part
+from and meet her husband with a kiss. It is best to let her tell her own
+story:
+
+"I just made up my mind I'd do it." No girl of eighteen giving a confidence
+of a love affair could have shown more embarrassment than this mother of
+wage-earning children. "I did not know how I would do it, or what ----
+would say, but I just made up my mind I would kiss him when he came home. I
+thought about it all the next day. Late in the afternoon I made up my mind.
+Of course, I could not kiss him before the children. When it was most time
+for ---- to come home, I sent them each on an errand that would keep them
+away until long after ---- got home. I had the table all set and the supper
+cooking. At last I heard him come up the stairs. My land! How I trembled! I
+stood so that when the door opened he would not see me, and then I just
+kissed him before I had a chance to think. He staggered back, he was so
+surprised." She waited while an expression that should have been habitual
+changed her shrewd, hard face into a loving woman's. "But I never saw him
+look so happy," she continued. "I made up my mind I would kiss him every
+day when he came home. I could not kiss him in the morning, for the
+children were all there," she added decidedly; "but I can always send the
+little ones on errands at night."
+
+Perhaps it was three weeks later that she told of the climax. "I had a
+toothache all day; I was tired and cross, for I had been washing. I stood
+by the fire, making the hash. Kittie was setting the table, when ----
+opened the door. I did not look up. He stood in the door a minute; then he
+asked, 'What's the matter, Jennie?' 'Nothing.' I knew I said it cross. I
+looked up then. ---- looked so disappointed that I thought he'd cry. I just
+forgot the children, and right before them I kissed ---- twice. I wish you
+could have seen his face. I burst out laughing when I looked at the two
+children. They stood staring at us with their mouths wide open. Do you know
+what I did? I kissed each of them. I don't believe I've kissed either since
+they were babies. I think they told the big ones in the front room when
+they came from work." This experiment in love-making did not continue. ----
+came home drunk one night, and for punishment the experiment was dropped
+and never resumed. While it lasted, it had a most harmonizing effect on
+the whole family, and one wondered if it had been begun earlier, when the
+habit could have been easily fixed, what would have been the result.
+
+The mother, from a worldly point of view, has been most successful. The
+children are in positions where skill is required, and wages seem to depend
+on health only. Yet they are not popular; are selfish and unsympathetic.
+They point to their own success as the reason why every family should
+succeed. The family has moved into new environment, establishing relations
+that have placed it several rounds higher than the level at which the
+home-making began; but it has no fixed place in the social world. The
+combined income of the five wages equals at times two thousand dollars a
+year.
+
+Not every wife in this world of silent love is encouraged as this wife was.
+Another, a gentle, quiet woman, without children, thought she would try.
+"He sit so still when he came home. I bought a flower and put it on the
+table. I have what he like best for supper, and I wait. I listen over the
+banister. When he come near our flight, I slip back and wait in the room,
+leaving the door open so he can see. When he close the door I go up to him,
+put mine arms around his neck and kiss him. He take my arms, shove me back
+and say: 'What the matter mit you? You crazy?'" The woman was crying. The
+three friends sat silent a moment, and then one said: "You haf no
+children," and the wife nodded. That was her explanation, and theirs.
+
+Perhaps no greater charm prevails in this world of wage-earners than the
+attitude toward motherhood. There will be found here and there the young
+woman who rebels against it, who may risk life rather than assume the care
+of a baby. When one goes back of this rebellion there is always found the
+influence of some older woman who has other ambitions, clothes, pleasure;
+who influences, or tries to influence, the young married women she meets; a
+woman who will even talk freely to girls against motherhood. There is in
+this world of workers the strong active public sentiment against childless
+women that more than counteracts this influence, and babies are welcomed
+when there is nothing but love to greet them, not much more to feed them or
+clothe them; but they are welcomed. The training of the children--natural,
+not acquired--to be fathers and mothers has doubtless a far-reaching effect
+in keeping this natural attitude of mind toward parenthood.
+
+We get up a lot of wasted sentiment about the little mothers and fathers,
+not seeing that the offices are fitting them to meet a future when all
+that they learn in the care of baby brothers and sisters will make their
+lives easier as fathers and mothers. Often the only opportunity they have
+for expressing affection is the little baby given to their care.
+
+How well one must know this part of the wage-earning world before it is
+possible to appreciate the fact that the boy is being trained by "his baby"
+for that future when he will share with the mother of his child its care.
+It is a constant revelation to find how intelligent the young men at this
+level are about children, and how frankly and unconsciously they will
+express it and condemn the ignorant or careless treatment of a child. The
+relation of the wage-earning children to the little children is paternal
+often. The little ones know that the elder ones work and care for them, and
+they render an obedience that is often amusing. With sisters this takes
+another form. If the elder girl has ideas and tastes, especially if she has
+skill, she will often entirely decide how the younger children shall dress;
+often the younger children would not be at all satisfied with clothes the
+elder girls did not select and design. Here again will be found a
+half-maternal attitude that secures obedience and regulates privileges;
+that sometimes ignores the rightful authority in the home. The young girl
+who has an elder sister working and secures work with her is considered
+very fortunate. Two sisters are known, now past middle life. One is quite a
+handsome woman, the other plain. The handsome sister is the younger; she
+never, when she was a wage-earner, went through the streets alone. The
+elder sister, when they did not work together, escorted the younger one
+back and forth to her work. Now, the mother of three children, nothing
+could persuade her to go on the streets alone beyond the corner store. Her
+husband, in a city department on a small salary, always attends her in
+shopping expeditions, and all social engagements are made with respect to
+his hours of freedom. She receives a wealth of love, and tenderness, and
+protection. Selfish? Yes, till one wonders at the blindness of those who do
+her homage.
+
+[Illustration: A LITTLE FATHER.]
+
+Once a very sensible wife and mother, whose intelligence and devotion are
+raising the family many degrees above that of the generation preceding her
+and her husband, said: "I shall watch my children. My mother let one of my
+sisters exact far more than her share of wages. She coaxed or cried, or
+both, until she got what she wanted. The rest of us gave in, because we
+would not worry mother; you see that, now we are all married, she expects
+us to save her from worry and work; we have to; she cannot get along." In
+a moment she continued: "Haven't you seen it, that in every large family
+there is one who gets more and gives less than the others?" A statement
+profoundly true, but not confined to any one social level.
+
+Among the discoveries the explorer into this world makes is that life is
+full of compensations. One learns to overlook bad housekeeping, when it is
+discovered that a cross, impatient word is never spoken by the
+house-mother; that the children are the companions of the mother; that no
+one else is so attractive; that she is never too busy to listen to anything
+that interests them. One learns to forgive the needlessly shabby dressing
+of children, when it is discovered that they are well nourished and cared
+for, and that the husband and father never fails to declare that his wife
+is the best cook in the city and always has his meals on time. Usually this
+mother is fat, full of fun, and laughs as though tears were not in the
+world.
+
+Order, cleanliness and economy do not appeal as cardinal virtues when it is
+found that there is no room for the children in the house, no money to buy
+them the smallest pleasure where these over-estimated virtues predominate.
+It is found usually that the worry of maintaining standards that ignore
+the rights of the family, and to which they have been sacrificed, have
+seared the mother's head and heart, and she no longer responds to the
+maternal emotions; she becomes the victim of her own habits and cannot
+reform. Perhaps it is this type of woman who creates the most barren home;
+the one that is quite as prolific a source of supply to the saloons and the
+streets as that of the degenerate housekeeper out of whose life spiritual
+impulse has departed, and into which ideals and ambitions were never born.
+
+It is difficult at times to decide whether to laugh at or resent the
+criticisms one often hears of the extravagances of the poor. When one
+becomes familiar with the demands for rent, coal, shoes, for clothes that
+must be worn to work and school; for the things the cost of which cannot be
+put below a certain sum--food always can be regulated--and compares these
+fixed charges with the income available, the management of money in the
+independent working man's family amounts to genius, and it must take
+generations of economists to produce it.
+
+Unfortunately, in New York emphasis is laid on clothes. Extravagance in
+dress is the habit of the city. The people seen in the streets, in the
+stores, in public conveyances, show a singular uniformity in clothes; this
+is as true of men as of women. The differences are in manners and English.
+The spirit of the land is as yet materialistic, and the democratic spirit
+shows itself in the outward forms. The tailor-made gown was not looked upon
+as a regenerator of æsthetic standards, but it has proved that. Its
+simplicity and durability has released money that formerly was used in
+useless trimming. The ready-trimmed hat is also a lever in throwing the
+scale in the right direction.
+
+The attention to school decoration of recent years has given new standards
+for the home. The wage-earning world grows more harmonious in its demands
+on wages; the home now makes its demands for decoration that the workers
+obey. Signs outside of tenement houses renting suites of four rooms for
+twenty and twenty-five dollars per month announce: "Burlaped halls; parlors
+in white and blue;" or, "Tiled halls, open gas grates, fancy chandeliers."
+The men who hire these apartments earn from fifteen to twenty-five dollars
+a week or more. Thousands of American working men pay these rentals to save
+their children from the environment inseparable from the surroundings that
+must be endured if a fair proportion of their wages were used for rent. One
+grows to reverence the courage that enables a husband and wife, with only
+one pair of hands earning the home needs, to assume such rents. No higher
+evidence of the manhood and righteous ambition of the American citizen
+could be given than this: that he places his all to secure for his children
+a home that is reasonably protected; that offers opportunities for
+cleanliness and privacy. Renting a room to a lodger will sometimes make
+less demands on a father's wages for rent; sometimes the rent is assumed in
+the hope of securing lodgers, and then the struggle is pathetic, but borne
+because the children must not grow up in a less desirable neighborhood. If
+one were asked for the standard by which to measure the civilization of
+each family in the wage-earning world, the reply would have to be, "Rent."
+It at once makes the most and the least return; it is the tyrant which
+makes or mars the home life. When a family of eight, having a combined
+income of thirty-six dollars a week, are content to live in three rooms,
+one knows about what to expect in social standards, and how many
+generations it will take to raise the home level. When a family of
+six--five wage-earners--who began life at almost the homeless level,
+gradually come into a combined income of two thousand dollars a year, it is
+not to be expected that its standards of needs will be those of a college
+graduate on the same income. Often no member of the family can read
+readily. School life was, especially for the elder children, an
+intermittent one, and truth did not regulate the beginning of wage-earning
+of any of the children. The younger children probably warred against school
+long before fourteen years of life gave them freedom. There is natural
+intelligence, a certain manner acquired through observation, but no
+standard of intellectual life. Their very intelligence makes such families
+conscious of their shortcomings, and it is this consciousness that leads to
+the aggressiveness of manner that is so offensive, so often mistakenly
+called the American manner. It is the manner that is due to awakened
+consciousness which in the next generation will know when to wear evening
+dress, if not how.
+
+The use of money in such families is for show. It would be counted
+extravagant to buy a book, or a ticket to an oratorio or a concert to hear
+the best music. It would in such a family be counted useless to train the
+younger children to wage-earning by education. The heads of the family will
+be hospitable where it counts as showing how much more they have than the
+others in their world. They receive from their world what snobbishness
+receives everywhere. Snobbishness, on the whole, is not common even where
+the income would remove the family from a tenement-house environment. The
+uncertainty of work, and the absolute dependence of the worker on wages,
+make snobbishness dangerous; that often proves a boomerang their
+observation shows.
+
+[Illustration: A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.]
+
+The spirit of helpfulness may not find so free a field of operations when
+wages are two dollars and a half and over a day, but it is in readiness.
+Sickness in a neighbor's family will show that it has not been lost because
+of prosperity, but it is less lavish; there is dawning consciousness that
+self-preservation is the first law of nature; that home has the first right
+to strength and thought; that only the surplus is available for the world
+of friends. The same thriftlessness which makes a family accept charity
+without question is the cause of their generosity. As the sense of
+responsibility develops, the observer discovers a reserve in the giving of
+either their money or their strength to those about them; kindness abounds,
+but generosity is regulated as one goes up the scale in the world of
+wage-earners. Not only that, but in the direst need the needy, as one goes
+up the scale, regulate the degree of freedom given the closest friends. It
+often borders on the tragic, the suffering borne in silence, and revealed
+often when the time for help is passed.
+
+This division of the people into rich and poor without gradations and
+without a comprehension of the standards and needs that make new worlds up
+and down the scale, has had a serious effect on the home life, the church
+life of the people, the political life of the people. The churches have
+driven out the very people in the tenement-house regions who needed them
+and whom they needed.
+
+Corrupt administration has imposed burdens on the homes which for a time
+the voters in turn felt powerless to lift. The independent wage-earner
+found his hope of political recognition in allegiance to the political
+machines. The leaders, his inferiors often mentally, and still more surely
+morally, were at least approachable and familiar, and the man who made his
+own life found too often that only in the political circle of interest was
+he the equal of those who led. Here there was no manner that expressed
+condescension or superiority. His own language was spoken; he was at home.
+That these men allowed themselves to be used was the natural result of the
+habit of indifference to the real issues in a municipal campaign so common
+in New York. When the burdens of a corrupt administration pressed on the
+homes; when the leaders for righteous government acknowledged by appealing
+to the makers of this country, the plain people, that they were an integral
+part of the city's government, they responded, and by their response
+overthrew the corrupt government that the indifference of all classes had
+helped to make powerful.
+
+The century opens well. Capitalist and wage-earner sit at the same board,
+having equal voice in the plans for redeeming the city from partisan
+machine control.
+
+As one thinks of the change, one sees that the evils that disgraced New
+York were due to the indifference of the millionaires and the honest
+working men. It is the response of the political conscience of both to the
+need of the city that has been its redemption; its only sure protection is
+the activity of that conscience three hundred and sixty-five days of each
+year in all the years to come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?
+
+
+It took years for the evils of political machines to make life unbearable
+in New York. Not until the tremendous evils it imposed on child-life were
+given emphasis did the public sentiment of the city find intelligent
+expression--voice the moral conscience of the whole people. That dishonest
+administration of the city government imposed burdens on the home of the
+poor man no intelligent person disputed; but few knew how heavy the burdens
+or how far-reaching the effects on character. The people who suffered most
+were, in the very nature of things, the ones who could not see these
+influences, or estimate truly the degrading effect on character. The people
+who resented the conditions that made life harder in the tenements; who
+resented the environment which made the bringing up of children in
+innocence, integrity, and decency often impossible, were those who were in
+the minority. Hopelessness of overcoming the evils made some voters the
+forgers of their own chains.
+
+Newspapers gave columns to the exposure of the evils of the political
+methods which made individuals rich at the cost of the homes of the city,
+especially the homes of the poor. But the phase of this influence that was
+most degrading could only be learned by living in the regions, one of the
+people, suffering with them the burdens dishonesty imposed.
+
+When college-trained men and women established their homes in the regions
+of the tenements, making friends with the people, associating freely with
+them, especially with the young people and the children, they discovered
+that the worst evil with which the people were contending was the constant
+lowering of the moral standards due to the influence of the political
+organization that seemed to regulate even the right of the people to earn a
+living. It was but a step from fear to favor; but a little time before the
+man out-weighed the principle; Justice became the hand-maid of "pull," and
+the people living wholly under the environment corrupt political power
+created, knew no government but that of the "leader" and the man who
+represented him. To trade votes was no disgrace, for it meant a share in
+the perquisites that political power held. These men and women of trained
+intelligence saw that the corrupting of the moral standards of the people
+was a far greater evil--an evil that was of far greater moment to the
+whole people than the maladministrations that affected their physical
+being, though it led to death.
+
+It was the revelations the Settlement workers were able to make to a
+half-informed community of wealth and trained intelligence that led to the
+redeeming of the city. It made the active combination of wealth and poverty
+that brought into the political arena the dormant consciences that created
+in 1901 the Apotheosis, New York redeemed, that is the justification of
+democracy to the world.
+
+The iniquity, ignorance and indifference that create and maintain a system
+of municipal administration based on the theory that politics is a
+profession, and each promoter the architect of his own fortune, to be built
+at the expense of the citizens, is the reflection of the character of the
+citizens. The system is never the product of one man's brains, nor does its
+growth ever begin at the top. It begins always in the smallest political
+unit, where the man who wishes the office in the gift of that unit stands
+closest to the people. The bargaining for votes begins there. The number of
+exchanges of votes for favors and places successfully accomplished makes
+the "boss," the man who represents law and order; who is judge, and jury,
+and keeper of the jail to those who do his bidding. As the political units
+develop their bosses--"leaders," in voters' parlance--the system grows
+until the chain is complete, and each political henchman, in the order of
+his importance, takes his share of the people's money. The perquisites
+reach millions before the thousands are distributed that enables the leader
+to pose as the all-pervading friend to the district in time of need.
+
+The political units where this system of government in the interest of the
+"boss" have their strongest hold are the best evidences of the moral
+degeneracy that follows. Here the liquor saloons flourish, the headquarters
+of the "leader" and his cohorts, used in the order of rank in the system,
+from the gayly lighted, silver-bedecked, mirror-lined bar-room to the
+smoky, dirty, vilely kept den where those gather who have no use in life
+but to vote according to orders and work for the political leader's
+entrenchment. These saloons represent the primary school and the university
+of the voters of the district. They represent all the educational and
+recreative opportunity of most of the adults. They establish the habits of
+thinking for the majority of the people, for they are the lyceum where all
+questions are discussed that interest the people. The most interesting is
+how to get wages, as it is the most important. The common struggle creates
+common bonds of sympathy. All principles go down before the concrete,
+understandable fact that if the "boss" is beaten, work will cease for
+neighbor, friend, and friend's friend. Each man learns through every course
+in this training school of citizens that the paramount duty of each voter
+is to keep the "boss" in power. It means wages, or the hope of wages, under
+the least strenuous of employers, the city. Men work hard for the system,
+not because the moral nature of many of them is not in revolt against the
+system, but because the keeping of a home for wife and children is at
+stake. Often the voter's necessities, his ignorance often, his rebellion
+against wealth often, his unrest, undermine his moral nature, blind his
+intelligence, and he forges the chains that bind him in slavery to a system
+that will cast him aside, and refuse him a reason when there is no use for
+him. The voter may work during an election campaign half knowing that to
+secure another worker in the interests of the political system the place he
+holds has been promised to another after election. This fear and this hope
+enters the homes; women and children are educated under the moral
+degradation that enslaves husbands, sons, brothers, friends, lovers. The
+standards of morals are established even in childhood by the working of the
+systems of political machines. There is one measure of morals, _success_.
+What succeeds is right.
+
+[Illustration: TAKING THEIR TURN IN THE YARD AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+A small house was hired, through the generosity of several women, for the
+purpose of providing a place for recreation and social opportunity for a
+number of Christians--that is, people not Hebrews--left in a thickly
+settled Hebrew district. These Christians, a mere remnant, resented the
+opportunities offered the Hebrews, and while they might have availed
+themselves of them, they would not, so strong was the race prejudice.
+Shortly after the house was opened a delegation of boys appeared asking for
+the use of the large room for a boys' club. The privilege was given on the
+conditions that one of the workers interested in the house should have the
+privilege of visiting the room freely when the club was in session; that
+the club should pay twenty cents per month for the use of the room; that it
+should be limited to twenty members for three months. Before the first
+month had passed, it was decided that unless the club would accept a
+director, it was a waste of the space and light to let these boys use the
+room. They called themselves a debating and literary club. They knew
+nothing of literature naturally and less of debating. They were told that
+they must accept a director, a man who would instruct them in parliamentary
+law, guide them in debate and suggest subjects for study, or they must
+give up the room. They were very angry, but finally decided to accept the
+director. Their constitution provided for an election every month, a
+provision which kept them in a turmoil all the time. When the majority were
+convinced of this, and voted that officers should be elected every three
+months, the dissenting minority withdrew to form a new club, to meet
+somewhere else. Two weeks later, on club night, the bell rang. The leader
+of the minority, who had been elected president of the new club, asked if
+they might come back. They did not like the place where they met. After a
+conference with the original club, it was decided that, if they chose to
+come back as members of the club and pay their dues--three cents per
+week--they might come back. The conditions were accepted, and the seceding
+minority were to be reinstated as members of the original club on the next
+meeting night. As the petitioner was leaving, he turned innocently to the
+director and said: "Say, we've elected a couple of new fellows. They can
+come in, can't they?" The club consented conditionally on the "new fellows"
+being peaceable. The next meeting night came. The bell rang. In order to do
+full honor to the returning prodigals, the president went to the door.
+There was a rush and a scramble; the eight boys who withdrew, followed by
+twenty-two others, crowded into the room and demanded an election at once.
+They declared they were in the majority now, and had a right to the
+presidency for one of their own number. It was impossible to eject them,
+had it been wise. The question was postponed for one week and an arbitrator
+selected.
+
+When the next meeting night came, some of the new recruits had dropped out
+and their places had been taken by older boys. The original members, who
+had maintained the club, were told to sit together and keep absolutely
+quiet. The constitution declared that no boy was a member of the club who
+did not pay an initiation fee of five cents; this included the first
+month's dues. The first strange boy was asked: "Have you paid your
+initiation fee?" The leader, a boy not fourteen, sprang forward and pressed
+a five-cent piece in the boy's hand, saying: "Pay it now. Joe's the
+treasurer." The cue had been given him, and he proceeded to give out
+nickels to the new boys, urging them to "pay Joe quick." During this scene
+another of the receding minority took his position in front of the door to
+prevent any boy leaving the room with the money. The performance was
+stopped; the opulent small boy, who it was evident was buying votes for the
+presidency, was told to gather up his nickels. The recruits were told,
+after an explanation, why they must leave, and to their credit be it
+recorded some of them resented the position in which they had been placed
+and promised the misleading leader an unhappy next day before they left. It
+was then decided that the twelve members who had constituted the majority
+should ballot individually for the eight who had seceded, as though they
+had never belonged to the club. It is unnecessary to say that the boy who
+made the trouble was rejected. Not one of those boys was fifteen years old,
+yet they had learned and understood the method of the political
+organizations of the region. Their elders, those they loved, used these
+methods, and succeeded by them in getting place and power. The man who
+succeeded in sharp practice in politics was the "boss." The man who was
+beaten was not smart. The measure of morals was success, not methods used
+to attain that success.
+
+A woman's club, organized several years before, used this house. The
+husbands of several of them organized a men's club, and met in the house
+one evening in the week. Several of those men were affiliated with the
+political organizations of the district; some held positions under the city
+government through these affiliations.
+
+When the Citizens' Union campaign began in 1897, the women who established
+the house offered it and the yard for one evening a week to the Citizens'
+Union Campaign Committee. Illustrated lectures were given to the people of
+the neighborhood, the friends of the clubs using the house, and the parents
+of children in the children's clubs. This declared the sentiments of the
+women who established the house, which were emphasized when a picture of
+the Citizens' Union candidate for Mayor was put in the window. It became
+evident at once that there was trouble in the women's club; some of the
+members of the men's club never entered the house after the picture was
+placed. The Citizens' Union was defeated. At once the friction in the
+women's club developed, till it seemed wise to disband it. It was announced
+that the house had been given up, and that all the work done there must be
+placed elsewhere. The younger clubs were housed in the Clark Memorial. The
+women's club, in spite of the friction, voted to keep together, and, with
+the City History Club, asked to be received at the College Settlement,
+which generously, and at great inconvenience, arranged to receive them. The
+members of the women's club, numbering forty-five, voted unanimously to
+become identified with the College Settlement work, and pledged themselves
+to that work. The one woman who had resisted this decision in secret stood
+with the rest pledged to the Settlement. At once she incited trouble at the
+Settlement. She was voted out of the club. When the decision was announced,
+she, with the treasurer of the club and three others, walked out of the
+house, the treasurer taking the club treasurer's book and the money, over
+seventeen dollars. Sunday's papers announced the incorporation of a club
+under the old name. The incorporators were the five women who had left the
+club at the Settlement. The business of incorporating was attended to by a
+political leader in the State Assembly. One of these women had held a
+position in a city department, secured for her by a leader of one of the
+political parties; one was the wife of a man holding a city position
+through active affiliation with the other political party; another was the
+wife of a man who was striving for prominence in political affairs in the
+district, irrespective of party; the other was shrewd, ambitious,
+vindictive. The club before this break had done charitable work; had helped
+families who needed help, through the generosity of friends of wealth. It
+had a limited membership, and election was the assurance of certain
+qualities in the woman who was received as a member. All this had commanded
+attention and could furnish political capital. To hold this for one or the
+other of the political parties was the intention of the women who
+incorporated under the club name and persuaded six of the club members to
+join them.
+
+The treasurer was so evidently the cat's-paw of those who were managing the
+affair that, while steps were being taken to punish her for taking the
+money, the club at the Settlement voted not to prosecute her, because it
+would be a stigma on her as long as she lived, because she would have to
+stand with women arrested for drunkenness and disorderly characters in the
+dock. The original club remained at the Settlement. The minority who
+withdrew, a total of eleven, began active and aggressive work. They hired
+the use of a working-girls' club-room. They began to work according to the
+most approved methods of political leaders. They attended the outings of a
+political association; tried to do what they called charitable work, but
+which this very group proved they could not do justly while in the little
+house.
+
+The Fusion campaign of 1901 brought unexpected complications to the club
+woman. The Tammany influence was stronger than the Republican, and the
+women who had led in the incorporating of the club withdrew. Unfortunately,
+the opportunity to give this whole group a strong lesson in morals was
+lost, and they have been accepted where, had the genesis of their club been
+understood, it is but reasonable to suppose they would have had no moral
+support, and for that reason would have gained a moral lesson.
+
+The training most needed by the people of narrow experience and limited
+intelligence is that of clear distinctions between right and wrong by those
+they class above themselves. That shrewdness is not a moral virtue; that
+revenge is mean and not the function of mortals, is the one lesson
+intelligence and moral standards can teach convincingly.
+
+Recently it was the privilege of the writer to visit a Parents' Society
+connected with a school in the outskirts of Brooklyn. The spirit of good
+fellowship that existed, not only among the teachers of the school, but
+between the teachers and the parents, was a revelation. That there was a
+unifying cause was certain. What was it? One of the mothers, during a walk
+to the station, revealed it. In response to a comment on the good feeling
+so evident, the mother replied: "Yes, I feel it. Mr. ----," naming a member
+of the Board of Education, "at prayer meeting the other night spoke of the
+school and what a power it was in this part of the city. We owe it all to
+him. He's done everything he could do for the school, and he has made all
+the ministers and the priests friends of the school." She was quiet a
+minute, and then added: "Years ago, when he first began fighting for the
+school, people used to call him a 'boss.' I think that kind of a boss would
+be good in every school. I tell my husband we ought to be glad that we
+bought that lot out here and built when we did, for we helped to make Mr.
+---- successful. If leading men to do your will means being a 'boss,' Mr.
+---- is one. But the city needs hundreds of such 'bosses.'" The man is a
+simple American citizen, bearing a foreign name, who saw clearly there were
+more ways of serving and saving his country than by carrying a rifle.
+
+In the last analysis the "boss" as he is in New York to-day is the product
+of many roots. The one that goes deepest in the soil, the course of his
+deepest hold, can be traced to the doors of our churches. The men who have
+failed to see that they owed an allegiance to the city that does not differ
+in degree from what they owed the Church; the men who failed to see that
+the Church was a positive factor in civic life; that its effectiveness in
+the community was dependent on the standards it demanded and helped to
+maintain in the city; that on it rested the responsibility for civic
+character-building--on these men rest the heaviest responsibility for the
+evolution of the political "boss" and the evils of which he is the
+personification.
+
+Men and women give money to maintain church services in sections where
+political corruption and civic neglect have resulted in creating an
+environment that makes decent living impossible; an environment that has so
+degenerating an influence that the people become a factor in the problem it
+presents, for they have sunk to its level.
+
+In those sections the tools of the "boss," his active political agents, use
+the most despicable methods. The tool of the principal is valuable as he is
+conscienceless. His crumbs are the minor offices in the gift of the people;
+the lesser tools get "jobs," which the very limitations of their minds make
+them believe they must use to secure the largest return of money and power
+to themselves--a conception largely due to the indifference of the men who
+willingly delegate their civic responsibilities. Every man and woman who
+pays the slightest attention to the conditions under which the poor are
+forced to live, know that these conditions are responsible for the
+existence of nine-tenths of the eleemosynary institutions, private and
+public. They know that many of these institutions, could they stand before
+the community in their true character, would be recognized as disgraceful
+blots upon our civilization. They exist because so many good people in the
+community have found greater pleasure in establishing and maintaining them
+than in working actively to prevent the growth of the conditions that
+peoples them.
+
+Again and again one sees the names of men and women working actively on
+these boards of management who would not give a moment's thought to a
+meeting called in the interests of better civilization in sections of the
+city where their own homes are located; who know nothing of the conditions
+of the schools, the streets, the tenement houses, the factories, or the
+administration of the law in regard to them. There are men who would resent
+the charge of ignorance who do not know the names of the officers they
+either actively or passively elected to office in the political unit in
+which are their homes. They do not attend the primaries, defending their
+absence on the ground that they could accomplish nothing by their
+presence--a defense that is in itself a self-accusation. If their divine
+right of citizenship has been forfeited, it is by their own civic sin of
+omission. The longer one studies the evils that have grown up in the
+administration of the business of the great municipality of New York, the
+clearer one sees that the sins of omission are responsible for their
+growth--far more responsible than the sins of commission against which
+intelligent voters rail, when they do not use them as salve for their
+political consciences. It is a profound truth that in a republic the
+character of the people is shown in the character of the men the people
+elect to office. This is as true of the ward as of the nation.
+
+The political units of government in New York are, in the main, inhabited
+by the rich and poor, the intelligent and the ignorant; those who can
+reason from effect to cause, and those who cannot reason at all. Yet in
+these sections the worst possible home conditions will exist--unsanitary
+schools, dirty streets, badly paved. Saloons will abound and political
+corruption will go unheeded. Why? Because no men of intelligence and
+responsibility will accept the minor offices that mean the administration
+of the affairs of this unit in the interest and for the protection of the
+whole people.
+
+When men of position in the professional and business world signify their
+willingness to accept the least office in the gift of the people, the daily
+papers announce the fact in large headlines, and the men become marked as
+capable of great self-sacrifice, they become preëminent for the time. The
+men who have controlled the nominations, those who have no other visible
+means of support than these minor offices and political patronage, resent
+the suggestion of men of professional and financial fortunes accepting
+these offices; they consider the appearance of a man holding business or
+professional positions of power or influence as a candidate for a minor
+office as an invasion, an intrusion of their personal rights; it is an
+attempt to defraud them. They do not hesitate to publicly claim the right
+to nomination and election as the reward for their activity in politics.
+And they do this when they cannot point to one thing done officially to
+justify their claims to the suffrages of the people. They dare to do it in
+the face of the knowledge, held by the people, that they use their offices
+often for personal ends, defrauding the people.
+
+The scores of voters who have places within the patronage of a minor
+official see the danger to them of an official who would place merit in
+advance of votes. The man of position may be far from wealthy; may consent
+to serve the city at a financial loss; but the active voters live so remote
+from the voters at the top that the election is almost certain to be
+decided on class lines; and the defeat of the non-professional politician
+is accepted by every man, woman and child in the poorer portion of the
+district as a personal triumph; the evidence that the poor man has friends
+to back him in his fight for place and power; that the poor must work
+together politically.
+
+Whose fault is it? The good, intelligent, responsible citizens who
+delegated the government of their city to the men who use it for their
+personal gain. The good men in active politics, who openly concede the
+right to the minor offices in the city government to men whom they know are
+ignorant, and not infrequently know equally well are dishonest, and who
+will sacrifice the interest of the people to strengthen the system that
+means personal gains.
+
+The political conditions of the city several years ago gave birth to one of
+the periodic moral upheavals that resulted in the election of a strong,
+earnest, loyal, church-supporting citizen as Mayor. This Mayor was anxious
+to raise the character of the city government. He determined to accomplish
+this by the character of his appointments. He had more than a superficial
+knowledge of the public schools, which at that time were the theater for
+the exercise of political "pulls." It was known for years that the Board of
+Education had been used to a greater or less extent to pay political debts,
+to create political capital for future use by some of its most active
+members. The new Mayor had it in his power to change the character of the
+Board, and he carefully considered his appointments.
+
+In one of the sections of the city where, numerically as to families,
+wealth and poverty were fairly balanced, a section having in it churches of
+every denomination, many of them maintaining missions in the same political
+unit--there was at least this expression of neighborly interest--the
+schools were among the first built in the city. The last school building
+erected at the time of this Mayor's election had been built twenty years
+before; one had been built when the foundation for the pillars of the
+elevated road had been set in front of the site before it was purchased by
+the Board of Education, and was now in the heart of a crowded foreign
+settlement, had no out-door playground; the third building in the school
+district was so old, so badly planned, that for years effort had been made
+to secure a new building, but were defeated by the indifference, and at
+times the opposition, of the best citizens of the district, according to
+their own estimate.
+
+The new Mayor determined to put the best men in the district on the Board.
+Twenty-eight men in that district, men of power, men of standards, some of
+them philanthropists actively interested in work for the poor, declined.
+The men appointed, the best he could get to serve, were unfit for the
+position--mentally unfit, for they were uneducated; or morally unfit,
+because any position paid or unpaid under the city government was conceived
+by them as just so great an opportunity to create political capital or
+realize perquisites put within their control by their appointments. The
+Mayor had begun at the top to make his appointments. The declinations of
+the honor were because of lack of time, a lack of knowledge. When the
+appointments were announced, there was a storm of criticism, and none more
+violent than the majority of the men who declined to serve on the Board.
+
+At this time there was a great deal of activity among many leading women in
+the State to have a bill passed by the Legislature that would compel the
+Mayor of cities of the first class to appoint women in the proportion of
+one-third of the whole number appointed to the Boards of Education of those
+cities. The greatest activity for this measure was exercised in Brooklyn.
+One of the leaders, when asked a question about one of the schools in her
+own district, did not know where the school was. She had been a tax-payer
+in the district twenty-two years, and was considered a progressive woman.
+Her chief reason for working for this bill, for spending money freely in
+the interest of its success, was man's indifference to school matters.
+Perhaps if the command, "Feed my lambs" had been given to Dorcas instead of
+Peter, she might have developed enough sense of responsibility about the
+mental food given to know where the school buildings of her own school
+district were located.
+
+In this school district, October, 1901, there were 574 children on half-day
+classes. There was no manual training, though the pupils in the schools
+were, for the most part, the children of day laborers, mechanics, and
+clerks on small salaries. There was no free library, nor prospect of any,
+because public sentiment did not demand it. There was one small park,
+difficult of access. To reach it from the outer sections of the district,
+the tracks used by nine lines of trolley cars must be crossed. There were
+no public baths, except one in summer, near the mouth of a large sewer. One
+of the schools had no out-door playground; two had the closets in the
+in-door playgrounds. There was no room where the teachers could retire if
+ill, or where they could take their luncheons; no rooms where pupils could
+be privately interviewed or taken if ill. Yet it is in this very district,
+where the oldest and wealthiest families of the city live; where
+nine-tenths of the philanthropic enterprises of the city have been born,
+and where the moral upheavals for the regeneration of the city will always
+find their quota of leaders, that there is developing some of the worst
+evils of a cosmopolitan city. Within its borders is a fair-sized Italian
+city, with scores of sweat-shops. Across the thoroughfare is a large Irish
+village lying at the foot of the hill, the streets dirty, unpaved, the
+houses in an unsanitary condition. Some of them are overrun with rats of
+enormous size. The streets at the top of the hill are beginning to yield to
+the pressure of the crowds at the foot. Specific houses seem to have in
+them the very germs of immorality and degeneracy. Women who have made a
+struggle when, by misfortune, forced to move into these houses cease to
+struggle, and yield to the influences about them. The tenement-house laws
+are violated openly.
+
+There are not less than six missions, with twice that number of churches,
+in this one section; but so far as the environment of the poor is
+concerned, they might as well not exist. The majority of the tax-payers,
+those who command public respect and confidence, will not serve
+authoritatively in the political unit in which are their homes, in which
+their children must grow up. They will not take offices that would put it
+in their power to change the environment of the homes of the poor by
+securing the rights, enforcing the laws, that would protect all of the
+homes from the evils of vice, ignorance and unsanitary conditions. But
+these men when wealthy will support liberally institutions made necessary
+by their civic indifference.
+
+No man in a pulpit in the section has ever made a study of it to arouse the
+conscience and energies of the members of his church to their political
+duties. Unfortunately the women, for the most part, are as ignorant of the
+condition, and as indifferent. Because of the unsanitary conditions of the
+houses occupied by the poor, the dirty streets, the restrictions of child
+life, the lack of opportunity for moral development, the total dearth of
+recreative opportunity for the boys and girls, the young men and women who
+are wage-earners, the lack of educational facilities for the children who
+must be educated, if at all, at the expense of the State, the section is a
+prolific source of supply to the institutions the intelligent, sympathetic,
+wealthy women of the section are so active in creating and sustaining.
+
+The indifference of the wealthy and responsible to the conditions
+prevailing in parts of this section is so well known that officers at the
+heads of the city department ignore complaints, or treat them as incidents
+to be tolerated as part of the experiences of their official life.
+
+The penalty is being paid in the steady decline of real estate values, the
+gradual spread of the undesirable part of the community, the exodus of the
+wealthiest to the sections more remote from the tenements.
+
+The environment that has a degenerating influence on the people of limited
+means in that section is not due primarily to the political corruption of
+those using their positions to secure their own ends, but to the criminal
+attitude of the men in the churches and intelligent men not in them, who
+refuse to assume the political responsibilities that are their birthrights;
+the criminal indifference of those who fail to know the necessities of
+which the homes of the poor whom God gave into their charge stand in need.
+This section of the city is typical, not peculiar. Every section of New
+York gives evidence of the divorce between the churches and the political
+control that makes the environment of the home and the churches.
+
+The city is what the good, active people of the city want it to be--no
+better, no worse. The condition of the most uncared-for section gives the
+church's answer to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The mark of
+Cain may not be visible, but every child who goes out of life because its
+right to light, air, sunshine has not been protected is a charge against
+the Church. Every boy and girl whose life record is shadowed, blackened
+because their right to education, to training, to freedom to develop
+physically, mentally, morally, spiritually was denied them through
+political indifference, are the evidences of the failure of the churches to
+live up to the light which Christ left to their keeping. His followers do
+not march through the cities of the poor, an army.
+
+When Christ said, "The second is like unto it, love thy neighbor as
+thyself," He did not not mean the ethical conception for which the Church
+has stood, but the broad, Christ-like conception of brotherhood which would
+protect "thy neighbor" from the evils of his own ignorance and weakness;
+that would use one's best strength in his interest seven days in the week.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY***
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Leaven in a Great City, by Lillian William Betts</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
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+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Leaven in a Great City, by Lillian
+William Betts</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Leaven in a Great City</p>
+<p>Author: Lillian William Betts</p>
+<p>Release Date: December 3, 2011  [eBook #38205]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by<br />
+    Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Josephine Paolucci,<br />
+    and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 416px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="416" height="640" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><a name="front" id="front"></a></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 281px;">
+<img src="images/fig001.jpg" width="281" height="640" alt="NO LONGER PROFITABLE." title="" />
+<span class="caption">NO LONGER PROFITABLE.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY</h1>
+
+<h2><i>By</i> <span class="smcap">Lillian W. Betts</span></h2>
+
+<h3>ILLUSTRATED</h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 87px;">
+<img src="images/tp.jpg" width="87" height="150" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">New York</span><br />
+DODD, MEAD &amp; COMPANY<br />
+1903<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1902</span>,<br />
+By <span class="smcap">Dodd, Mead and Company</span>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>First Edition published September, 1902.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+CHAPTER                                                          <span class="tocnum">PAGE</span><br />
+<br />
+I. <span class="smcap">At the Bottom</span>,                                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></span><br />
+<br />
+II. <span class="smcap">The Development of Social Centers</span>,                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_37'>37</a></span><br />
+<br />
+III. <span class="smcap">The Homes Under One Roof</span>,                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_75'>75</a></span><br />
+<br />
+IV. <span class="smcap">Slow-Dawning Consciousness</span>,                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_102'>102</a></span><br />
+<br />
+V. <span class="smcap">Working-Girls' Clubs</span>,                                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_135'>135</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VI. <span class="smcap">A Social Experiment</span>,                                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_162'>162</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VII. <span class="smcap">Within the Walls of Home</span>,                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_196'>196</a></span><br />
+<br />
+VIII. <span class="smcap">Financial Relations in Families</span>,                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_225'>225</a></span><br />
+<br />
+IX. <span class="smcap">Home Standards</span>,                                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_263'>263</a></span><br />
+<br />
+X. <span class="smcap">Where Lies the Responsibility?</span>                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_290'>290</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<span class="tocnum">PAGE</span><br />
+<br />
+No Longer Profitable&mdash;<i><a href="#front">Frontispiece</a></i><br />
+<br />
+The Site of the Old Runway                                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_12'>12</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Your Choice                                                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_24'>24</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Saturday Morning on the East Side                                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_38'>38</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Past, Present, and Middle Period                              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_44'>44</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Social Centre that Becomes Political                            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_56'>56</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Doorway on the East Side                                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_60'>60</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Early Morning among the Push-Carts                                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_64'>64</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Meeting the Needs of the Neighbourhood                            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_70'>70</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Remnant of the Past                                             <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_76'>76</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Type of the Present                                             <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_88'>88</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Corner in a Workingman's Home                                   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_94'>94</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Spiritual Bulwark                                              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_128'>128</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Where the People Share                                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_134'>134</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Corner in an Old Section                                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_152'>152</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Opposite a Corner in an Old Section                              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_154'>154</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Woman's Home Improvement Club at the Settlement              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_168'>168</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Kindergarten of the College Settlement                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_178'>178</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Making a Selection                                               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_184'>184</a></span><br />
+<br />
+At the Settlement&mdash;A Stormy Day                                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_188'>188</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Yard Day at the Settlement                                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_196'>196</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Children's Hour at the College Settlement                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_200'>200</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Mutual Interests                                                 <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_206'>206</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Forest of the Tenements                                      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_212'>212</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Children's Playground                                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_218'>218</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Library Day at the College Settlement                            <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_224'>224</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Street on the East Side                                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_236'>236</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Cooking Class of Mothers and Children                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_244'>244</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Meeting of Neighbours                                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_250'>250</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Reading-Room at the Settlement                               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_254'>254</a></span><br />
+<br />
+After School at the College Settlement                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_258'>258</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Morning Airing of an East Side Heiress                       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_264'>264</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Bit of Old Greenwich                                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_274'>274</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Little Father                                                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_280'>280</a></span><br />
+<br />
+A Corner in Old Greenwich                                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_286'>286</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Taking their Turn in the Yard at the Settlement                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_294'>294</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<h3>AT THE BOTTOM.</h3>
+
+
+<p>One of the first, and, up to the present time, one of the most interesting
+experiments made in New York for the better housing of the poor, was made
+in the early eighties by a score or less of philanthropic capitalists.
+These gentlemen organized a stock company to hold and manage tenement-house
+property, limiting their dividends to three per cent. on the capital; the
+surplus dividends, if any, over this amount, to be used in improving the
+property, and securing such conditions and opportunities for the tenants as
+would stimulate pride and independence. The formation of this company
+followed one of the periodic agitations of the tenement-house problems
+customary in New York.</p>
+
+<p>In 1878 a conference was called by the State Charities' Aid Association to
+consider the condition of the tenement houses in this city. Mr. Alfred T.
+White, of Brooklyn, had at this time proved that model tenements, conducted
+on strictly business principles, paid as investments, and stated at this
+conference that his model houses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> made a return of seven one-half per cent.
+As a result of this conference a committee was appointed who reported that
+they did not find it desirable to recommend the building of model tenements
+in New York at this time. Mr. White for many years stood alone as the man
+of wealth with the courage of his convictions, that there were wage-earners
+compelled to live under tenement-house conditions who would pay for and
+respect the best housing that capital would offer them, within their
+rent-paying capacity.</p>
+
+<p>The tenement-house agitation continued.</p>
+
+<p>In 1879 Mayor Cooper had appointed a committee known as the "Mayor's
+Committee," to devise means to effect tenement-house reforms. This
+committee reported, and among other suggestions recommended, that companies
+be organized to build modern tenements. Some members of this committee,
+with others, formed the stock company alluded to with a capital of
+$300,000. With a wisdom peculiarly their own, they did not wait until model
+buildings could be erected according to plans not yet drawn on sites not
+yet selected, but they leased on a long lease property that had been
+unproductive for a long time, and occupied by a people at the lowest level
+of the home-making people of the city. Below them are the people who do not
+even pretend to make a home. This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> property was located in the old Fourth
+Ward. It was the reputation of this ward, and the record of the particular
+property, which doubtless led these capitalists to secure it. It was
+conceded that the poverty and degradation of the Fourth Ward was at least
+as great as in any other section of the city. The property leased had
+attracted public attention and been the subject of special investigation
+and reports in every agitation of the tenement-house problem since 1856.</p>
+
+<p>The Fourth Ward criminal and health records figure for an even longer
+period in every effort at bettering municipal conditions by the example it
+presented of civic indifference, neglect and maladministration. The houses
+faced on two alleys, known in their best days as "Single" and "Double"
+alley, respectively. As this distinction indicates, on Single Alley one row
+of houses faced the walls of the adjoining property, while two rows of
+houses faced each other across Double Alley. Later known as Swipe's Alley,
+Guzzle Row, Hell's Kitchen, Murderers' Row, showing the gradual descent
+from respectability. There is a tradition that Single Alley once had
+gardens that extended to Roosevelt Street; that the houses had been
+occupied by one family; but this cannot be verified. In their most
+degenerate days these houses had an air of exclusiveness, due doubtless to
+their fronting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> on courts and the tall iron fences, with gates, that
+separated the houses from the street. The neighborhood at one time was
+aristocratic; Franklin Square, but a short distance from the property, was
+a social center of national greatness. As business went northward, the
+merchants, bankers, tradespeople, followed, for the tie between home and
+business was still very close; the midday dinner made distance between the
+two impossible. The old homes were left for subdivision among the skilled
+workmen and clerks.</p>
+
+<p>The tide of immigration set in, and the strangers settled near the docks
+and wharfs&mdash;the source of their wages; in time they crowded into the old
+residences, beginning the housing problem of New York. These old homes were
+soon overcrowded. They could not be made sanitary. The demand for room was
+so great that the large closets&mdash;the necessity of the old-time
+housekeepers&mdash;were counted bedrooms, and are to-day in houses of this type
+in tenement-house regions throughout the city.</p>
+
+<p>The property secured by the new company at the time it was leased was a
+part of a large estate, the owner of which during his lifetime had
+personally cared for it. He was both strict and just, and these two
+attributes preserved these houses for years after the property in the
+neighborhood had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> begun to yield to the character of later residents. This
+owner kept the alleys and the houses in repair. The semi-privacy the iron
+gate gave the tenants was for years the reason that the better-paid
+mechanics remained in the courts or alleys. When the owner died, the
+property was put in control of an agent, with the usual result&mdash;rapid
+degeneracy. It was now conducted to secure the largest returns at the least
+outlay. The evils of the absentee landlord are not confined to Ireland.
+Absenteeism on the part of owners of tenement-house property is one of the
+causes of the social and civic problems that retard the growth of the
+highest civilization in New York. Under the management of an agent, the
+character of the tenants in the courts changed rapidly, and the people who
+took possession added to the disreputable character of the Fourth Ward. For
+years before this the largest per cent. of the immigrants settling in New
+York settled in this section. They came with distorted notions as to their
+place in the new land. Liberty meant to the majority the right to follow
+their own will. When hunger and loneliness and nakedness forced them to
+reconsider their first conception of what America was, resentment,
+recklessness, or adaptability developed. The difference was a matter of
+temperament quite as much as of race.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In 1880 the heads of the families living in the courts were day
+laborers&mdash;men who worked along the docks, coal shovelers, hucksters, women
+who did a day's work, sold newspapers at the ferries, or worked in the
+factories. Every child in the alley was ready to do anything that would
+earn money from the time he could walk. The people knew every benefit the
+city dispensed to the poor: free coal; homes available and how to get in
+them; free burial; every organization that dispersed charity, and how to
+get it. Even the children were clever in their extremities, and knew how to
+get assistance when the Island claimed their parents. From infancy the
+children looked forward to wage-earning as a time of happiness. School was
+a prison-house to be avoided, except when its warmth and shelter were
+preferable to the street, or the home, when intemperance and temper made
+life unendurable in it; then they attended school willingly. The truant
+officers in this region were not feared. They were the fags of the "boss,"
+not the officers of a city department. None of the fads of to-day, which so
+disturb the conservative people who see ruin of mental ability in modern
+educational systems, were then thought of. The kindergarten, nature study,
+manual training, were on the educational horizon of New York, in a cloud
+scarcely so large as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> man's hand. The trustee system was in perfect
+working order. The teachers were what God made them, unhampered by the
+pressure of superintendent and supervisors to maintain standards.</p>
+
+<p>It was as true in that day as in 1892, when a man, wholly familiar with all
+the systems of education in the country, to the question, "Why is there
+such uniformity in the defects of the schools in the tenement-house
+regions?" replied, "They represent the demands of the people in the
+district who elect the men who control them. You will find that the public
+schools always represent the public sentiment and demands of the people
+interested in them."</p>
+
+<p>This was profoundly true of the schools in this region at this time. To-day
+there is scarcely any change in the buildings except that of added age. At
+least two of them are a disgrace to the city. But there is a great change
+in the system. To-day the civilizing force in this community is the public
+schools; the remnant does not attract the philanthropist. To the men and
+women of our public schools who, preserving the highest ideals, work with
+enthusiasm amid the most discouraging surroundings, the city owes a debt
+that money cannot repay.</p>
+
+<p>The liquor saloons numbered then about as they do now, occupying every
+available space. More<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> elaborate now, perhaps, for they represent political
+headquarters, if not proprietorship, of men identified with the worst forms
+of political corruption; then, as now, openly used in the interest of these
+men. There is this great change, that children dare not now, as they did
+then, enter and leave these places fearlessly at any hour carrying pails,
+pitchers or bottles. It was then a neighborly kindness to let children thus
+serve a neighbor; it was a source of revenue to the children.</p>
+
+<p>The gangs were many and notorious in the ward. Frequent were the clashes
+and loyal the spirit with which assailed and assailants maintained silence
+if there was danger of arrest because of these conflicts. "To squeal" was
+to earn the contempt of the community. The number of crimes, the full
+measure of degradation, reached in this ward will never be known. The dense
+population of this ward is so hidden by business and traffic that in 1901
+the statement was made by some people interested in civic affairs that the
+region was given over to office buildings. The district of which the Fourth
+Ward is a part cast 10,000 votes in the mayoralty campaign of that year.
+Votes that represent a civilization as peculiarly its own as though oceans
+separated it from the people a mile and a half away.</p>
+
+<p>Target companies were the social clubs of that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> day, the forerunners of the
+political organizations of to-day. The climax of their existence were the
+annual excursions to some near-by grove for shooting matches. These matches
+were the great social occasions of the many "sets." The question of who was
+the reigning belle of the locality was settled beyond dispute by selection
+of one to present the wreath for the target, or a big bunch of flowers, to
+the captain of the target company on the day of the annual parade. These
+were always of artificial flowers, and were made gorgeous and splendid by
+floating strips and fringes of tinsel paper. The greatest feuds in the Ward
+have grown out of the selection of the fair lady to present these trophies.
+Her selection changed the political history of her friends often, and her
+knights' fists fought her cause, and crowned her, their wounds testifying
+to their devotion. The political "boss" of that period presented the
+organizations that acknowledged his leadership with silver mugs, castors or
+pitchers&mdash;prizes for the shooters&mdash;but he presented money to keep the
+balance of his popularity. The gifts were carried conspicuously over the
+route of the procession, which always stopped in front of the house of the
+lady, who was to express her favor in the gifts of floral trophies&mdash;usually
+paid for by the company, sometimes by her knight, or knights<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> combined for
+her honor. This house was for the time being the center of interest for the
+crowd, as she was of envy or pride to the community. The day of the target
+parade was one that called for great sacrifice, that it might be attended
+by the requisite formalities and new clothes. Money must be raised to
+provide barouches for the great political lights of the ward who gave this
+particular company their favor; to pay the attendant colored men who
+carried the target and the water and tin cups; for the band with the drum
+major. All cost money, and money was scarce; but the prominence and
+pleasure paid; and the Fourth Ward had many of these organizations, which
+made life exciting, and at times dangerous, when their several groups met,
+each struggling for supremacy, each with a leader who must be defended.</p>
+
+<p>Fresh-air organizations, seaside resorts, were as unknown as trolleys;
+hundreds in the Fourth Ward lived and died without ever having seen Central
+Park or the ocean. The relief from the sufferings of summer was sitting and
+sleeping on the near-by piers. Man's humanity to man at this period of New
+York's social history was expressed in hospitals, infirmaries, homes of
+many kinds, distribution of food, clothes and medicine. The more
+applications secured for these sources<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> of relief, the more tickets given
+out in a year at any point for outside relief, the more easy the conscience
+of the men who sent the money that maintained them, who measured the value
+of their charities by the figures representing human beings that appeared
+in the reports. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were then, as now,
+"round-ups" for the wretched, the needy and the lazy. The pleasure of the
+givers was greatly added to by watching the hungry eating.</p>
+
+<p>What caused the misery and wretchedness was no secret; but with few
+exceptions the men of money and brains were not ready to remove the
+prevailing and rooted cause. The exceptions were the men who, impressed by
+the example of Mr. Alfred T. White, leased the tenements known as Single
+and Double alley, or Gotham Court, the worst piece of property in what was
+acknowledged to be the worst ward in the city.</p>
+
+<p>It had grown more and more difficult to collect rents, and the destruction
+of the property by the tenants made any effort at repair futile. Lead pipe,
+brass faucets, were wrenched off and sold as rapidly as they were put in;
+banisters, stair-rails, blinds, even wooden floors had been used as
+firewood. The very bricks on the chimneys were used as missiles of offense
+and defense. The Double Alley boasted of a haunted house, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> at times
+created the greatest excitement in the neighborhood because of mysterious
+noises and lights seen and heard at night. Again and again the house had
+been raided by the police and stolen goods recovered after the ghostly
+exhibits. The police showed to the brave of the neighborhood that sulphur
+and brimstone were the ghostly lights, and clever arrangements of ropes and
+pulleys and pans the source of the cries and groans that had frozen them
+with fear. It was useless. The next appearance of the lights and the sound
+of awful groans filled the neighborhood with terror.</p>
+
+<p>For obvious reasons the only source of water supply was a hydrant in the
+center of each alley. The only drainage was the sink sunk in front of it.
+When it is remembered that between five and six hundred people lived in
+these houses, the opportunities for cleanliness will be appreciated. All
+the water used was carried up and down stairs. That pans and pails of water
+were emptied from the windows without careful note of the passer-by beneath
+is not surprising. This naturally was not conducive to peace; but peace was
+not the aim of the people of the court; in fact, its disturbance varied the
+monotony of life in the alleys.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 630px;">
+<img src="images/fig020.jpg" width="630" height="480" alt="THE SITE OF THE OLD RUNWAY." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE SITE OF THE OLD RUNWAY.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Single Alley had a narrow opening from its rear, or western, end to
+Roosevelt Street. This was paved with brick sunken and broken. It was a
+dormitory for the drunken and homeless, a depository for all kinds of
+refuse. This alley was a runway. The entrance on the two streets offered
+every opportunity of escape to the fleeing fugitive from justice or
+vengeance. The code of honor of the alley was to speed the hunted and
+obstruct the hunter. The policeman entering the alley in pursuit of a
+transgressor knew his fate; he was a target for water, wood, coal, bricks
+and unlimited language; unexpected obstructions would be found in the
+alley, and the attentions he received when he tripped or fell were intended
+to increase the distance between the representative of law and order and
+the fleeing offender. He or she might or might not be a friend. The alley's
+activity in behalf of the fugitive was based on a new interpretation of the
+promised return of bread cast on the waters.</p>
+
+<p>No matter how bitter the feuds that divided the tenants in the alley, the
+appearance of a rent collector in the later days healed the breach, bridged
+the widest chasm. He was a common foe and to be downed by common consent.
+If abuse and defiance did not drive him beyond the gates, bricks dropped
+from the roofs, after a vigorous campaign of water and cooking utensils,
+conducted by the feminine contingent from the windows, usually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+accomplished his complete rout, not only for that time, but for the future.
+As the years passed on, it became almost impossible to get any agent to
+make the second attempt to collect rent from the tenants of the alleys.</p>
+
+<p>The home life of the people in the alley was interesting. Every inch of
+space was occupied. The families ranged from a childless old couple, past
+seventy, who had lived twenty-eight years in the Single Alley, to the boy
+and girl who had just started housekeeping on nothing at all. The women in
+the alleys had married, it was found, at about eighteen. They knew
+absolutely nothing of housekeeping. Many of them acknowledged that they had
+never made a fire before they married. The most elementary knowledge of
+cooking, sewing or the use of money was lacking. Of the two hundred and one
+mothers in the alley, one could cut and make the garments for herself and
+children; four could make bread&mdash;one did; one made soup sometimes, but
+could not remember the last time. Meals consisted of bread and coffee, or
+tea, with beer provided for "him" for breakfast and supper. Dinner was a
+"bit" of meat or fish, thought of and cooked between eleven and twelve; the
+cooking was frying. Potatoes were substituted for bread at this meal;
+rarely any other vegetable except Sunday. On that day, if there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> was money
+enough in the morning, dinner was of corned beef and cabbage, or bacon and
+cabbage. One family standing at the head of this community socially had
+meat three times each day. This family had in it five wage-earners. They
+paid four dollars a month rent for two rooms. The children had all been
+born and had grown to manhood and womanhood in the alley. As the writer was
+able to win the confidence of these people, it was evident that each mother
+was conscious that something was wrong that life yielded no better return.
+What was wrong? Where the remedy was to be found did not seem to interest
+them. The days drifted. Children ran half naked or in rags, while mothers
+sat in neighbors' rooms, stood in doorways, in the halls, or lounged in the
+alleys. There were homes in which neither needles, thread nor scissors
+could be found. The mother did not know how to use them. A pot and a frying
+pan were the only cooking utensils the most lavish closet revealed. Washing
+and scrubbing are laborious at any time, but when carrying water from ten
+to fifty feet on the level, then up one to four flights of stairs and down
+again is added to the labor, it is not astonishing that dishes, clothes and
+bodies were at all times freighted with disease and death. A knowledge of
+the relation between dirt and disease, cleanliness and health<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> was not the
+general knowledge it is to-day. Their relation to moral elevation or
+degradation is barely understood to-day.</p>
+
+<p>The average weekly wages of the men living in the alleys at this period was
+between eight and nine dollars per week, and sometimes kept at the latter
+figure for weeks. It will be seen at once that the poverty, misery,
+degradation and dirt that kept life at the level it was in the alleys was
+due to some other cause than wages, for rent was only four dollars a month,
+when paid, and it was paid less than eight months of the year. Beer flowed
+in the alley; tin cans, pitchers, pails, went back and forth at all times
+of the day and night. It was the first errand on which the baby feet were
+sent. Every woman in the alley acknowledged that she had seen her husband
+drunk before she married him. She knew better how to manage him when he was
+drunk than when he was sober. A blow given in drink was not recorded
+against a husband either by the wife or her neighbors. A blow given when
+the man was sober was remembered and aroused pity and sympathy. Over
+seventy per cent. of the women drank to the point of unconsciousness. All
+used liquor. Of child training there was none. The act that was laughed at
+this hour brought a blow the next. Attending school was for the child to
+decide. If he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> wanted to go, he went. Usually lack of clothing shut out
+about half the children of school age in the alley.</p>
+
+<p>Mother love was largely a matter of animal instinct. While the baby
+depended on her for nourishment, she could be found with it in her arms at
+all times; it was, so far as life had a concentrated thought, her constant
+care. The moment the baby found its feet and used them, the child was cut
+loose and began his individual life. His standards, language, habits, were
+what his environment made them. His care, so far as the mother was
+concerned, was conducted on the lines of the least resistance. If the child
+was struck by an outsider, it raised the tiger in the mother; if ill, a
+burden to carry for which there was neither money nor knowledge; the mother
+had no strength and could not meet cares that demanded continuous thought;
+her mind was not trained to it. Health and disease were largely a matter of
+luck. Death brought pangs, but life was too much of a struggle for it to be
+a crushing blow, even when it was one's child. Children came and went too
+fast in the alleys for their coming or going to fill or empty even a
+mother's life.</p>
+
+<p>Not one woman in the alley could remember ever having an entire new outfit
+in her life, nor had any of her children; her first baby had worn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> garments
+that had been made for some more fortunate baby.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the dead level of existence lived in the alleys. Without the
+stimulus of drink it would be lethargy, and was when there was no money to
+treat or be treated. Pleasure? It was unknown outside of the beer can. If
+that did not give pleasure, why life was a hand-to-hand, hopeless struggle
+with homelessness, hunger and nakedness. In the alleys a fight became a
+pleasure and death a social opportunity. Even love seemed denied the people
+of the alleys. Marriage often was a part of the habitual drifting when not
+a matter of compulsion. Homes were established with no bond but that of
+law, and sometimes not that. That they even were what they were was a
+tribute to the fundamental morality that is the salvation of the civilized
+world.</p>
+
+<p>These were the people who had made the alleys between 1855 and 1880, when
+the owners of the estate gladly leased the property on a long lease. As has
+been stated, spasmodic attempts had been made to reclaim the property, to
+make it productive, but always by men acting for the owners; they never
+came in personal contact with the tenants. It is doubtful if they even had
+any conception of the effect of their delegated responsibility on the
+people, or had any knowledge of the change<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> that resulted when the property
+ceased to have the personal supervision of the owner.</p>
+
+<p>The lessees put two ladies in control of the property. One or the other was
+to be found there each day.</p>
+
+<p>The tenants were notified that rent must be paid weekly; that the rooms
+would be white-washed and painted; that the agents would be at liberty to
+visit the rooms daily; that no child would be permitted to carry liquor on
+the premises; every bundle or basket carried by a child would be examined,
+and any liquor found would be emptied into the sink in the yard. Water
+would be put in the halls on each floor; destruction of property would mean
+eviction. All who were unwilling to accept these conditions were asked to
+move at once. The rent remained the same, four dollars per month for two
+rooms. Families desiring four rooms could have them for eight dollars per
+month, the company cutting a door through the party walls, giving direct
+ventilation through the floor, with windows opening on both alleys. The
+absolute impossibility of getting two equally good rooms in the
+neighborhood for the same rent kept the majority of the families. A few
+tacitly accepted the change, largely because acquiescence was their habit
+of mind, while some expected to set at naught any rules or regulations
+that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> they found obnoxious. No tenant moved voluntarily.</p>
+
+<p>The new ownership took possession with the same human beings who had
+occupied the houses for years. The first step was to insist on cleanliness.
+The alleys were swept and washed every morning, as were the halls and
+stairways. Garbage cans were provided and their use insisted on. Every can
+or bundle carried by a child was examined, and all liquors found in them
+were emptied into the sink in the yard. Quarrels and fights grew less
+frequent, especially among the women. The children attended school, for
+their appearance during school hours led to investigations that the
+majority of the tenants preferred to avoid. The aim was to establish such
+relations between the representatives of the company and the tenants as
+would give opportunities to reduce the ignorance and indifference that were
+quite as responsible, if not more responsible, for the misery in the homes
+than lack of money. The tenants held aloof. They were tenants because they
+could not get as much comfort for the money elsewhere; but there could be
+no friendship where the payment of rent was insisted upon, where
+drunkenness involved the risk of, and abuse of property positive, eviction.</p>
+
+<p>Several young couples were tenants. The aim and hope of the agents were to
+gain the confidence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> of these young mothers. The first child of one died
+late that summer. Potter's Field was the place of burial. The young father
+could have worked six days in the week, but that would have been slavery
+intolerable. He refused it, and followed his lifelong habit of drifting,
+which was also that of the young mother. She had never resented her
+husband's days of idleness until this baby died and there was not one cent
+to provide for the care and disposition of the little body. This was the
+opportunity of the two women who were waiting to prove that they were not
+oppressors. A little coffin, a white slip and socks, some flowers&mdash;at that
+time an unheard-of tribute to death&mdash;a carriage and a grave in the cemetery
+approved by the mother's church was provided. The battle was won. Every
+man, woman and child in the alley surrendered to this evidence of
+comradeship. That this act gave birth to hopes that must be stifled was
+natural. Rules must be enforced and comradeship expressed at the times of
+emergency. The first and hardest battle was won. Confidences were gained
+that led to marriages and baptisms that had been neglected or forgotten.
+The office, simply but tastefully furnished, became a school-room, where
+the mothers and the children learned to sew. Goods were bought in
+quantities and sold at cost to the learners. A sewing machine and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+teacher appeared and were welcomed. Practical talks, or, more properly,
+conversations, were held; but no one took note of them as special efforts
+in philanthropy, they were so naturally a part of each day's experience.
+The daily visits to each tenant resulted in establishing relations that
+justified reproof, suggestion, commendation. The standards of pleasure,
+pain, suffering, accomplishment were elementary in the alleys. An hour's
+work with the needle left the worker exhausted, and diversion then meant
+moral safety. The homes were barren, and the acme of hope was wages to pay
+rent, buy food and clothes; the last rarely realized. The months, and even
+years, passed without the people passing beyond the confines of the ward.
+The generations lived this life, and it was a fixed habit. The world had
+nothing to offer to the habitual residents of the ward that the ward did
+not provide; it has but little to-day to offer them.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the emptiness of life and barrenness of these homes, they were
+on the whole better than the homes of the preceding generation.</p>
+
+<p>When the wives laid the cause of their burdens on their husbands' shoulders
+because they drank, the question, "Did you know he drank when you married
+him?" would be answered easily, with no thought of self-condemnation,
+"Yes," in frank confession.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Do you drink?"</p>
+
+<p>"I drink beer, mostly. Sure, ye get discouraged just working and washing,
+and never a cent; not a decent rag to go on the street, and no place to go
+when you get there but a neighbor's house. What is there but a glass of
+beer? You don't mean to get drunk; yer that before ye know."</p>
+
+<p>This total lack of personal relation to life was me mental attitude of
+almost every woman. If she was a widow, she worked to make a home for her
+children, who, again and again, so often that it ceased to attract
+attention, heard how much harder life was because they were in it. This
+seemed the accepted attitude, and accounted for the expression on the faces
+of these children&mdash;a puzzled, hardened expression that blotted out all
+suggestion of childhood. That time was an element in the problem of life
+was not accepted. That the garment made at home would last longer and cost
+less was conceded; but what was the use of making things when they could be
+bought so cheaply. The total absence of reasoning powers was shown here. To
+make soup would mean staying at home, thinking and planning for hours in
+advance of a meal. The soup would cost no more than steak and provide two
+meals, but it would mean loneliness, when the time, through ignorance,
+could not be turned to interesting uses.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There were women in these alleys, mothers of grown children, who could not
+tell a bias from a straight edge; who could not put a gingham apron
+together having straight and bias selvages. Beyond sewing on occasional
+buttons, there was no use in their minds for needles. They had worked in
+tin factories. They had worked at all kinds of employment that called into
+play the minimum amount of brains and the maximum of muscles. Not one woman
+was found who before her marriage had worked in any line of employment that
+had the slightest connection with the arts of home-making. The wages they
+earned was that of unskilled labor, in lines of employment known to be
+intermittent. Wages, large or small, went into the common family fund. The
+future was not a matter of care. When all in the family worked, life was
+lived merrily; when hard luck came, life was lived stoically. This spirit
+went into the home of the wage-earners when they married. There was far
+less physical suffering than the privations of their lives made natural.
+Often these limitations were self-imposed; there was money enough to give
+life color and purpose, if only there had been knowledge to guide in the
+adjustment between necessities and income; a conception of time as an
+element in the financial problem.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig034.jpg" width="640" height="432" alt="YOUR CHOICE." title="" />
+<span class="caption">YOUR CHOICE.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The closer one entered into the individual life, the more clearly was it
+revealed that the problems of poverty grew out of the inability to see the
+relations of things, to comprehend life in its entirety. Even after two
+years of close relation with these people in the alleys, it was with the
+utmost caution and tact that the subject of free coal could be broached. It
+was then distributed by the city&mdash;an intimate source of political
+corruption. A large quantity of coal was purchased and put in the cellar.
+It was offered to the tenants at the same price the grocer sold it by the
+pail, with the difference that it was delivered in the rooms. First, pride,
+a desire to appear somewhat above the neighbors, moved to independence on
+the coal question. In two years' time free coal was in the category of
+disgraces in the alley, and marked a rising moral tide.</p>
+
+<p>A young woman and her husband were special objects of attention to the
+agents. They were young, good-looking, bright, and, when sober, ambitious
+as their conception of life made possible. Both drank, the woman more than
+the man, and she sank lower when drunk. For years she had spent more time
+on the Island than off it. What could be done? The whitewashing and
+painting of the two hopelessly barren rooms seemed to bring the woman to a
+pause. It was not possible to get beer through a neighbor's child<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> now, and
+until she was drunk this woman would not go into a saloon. The clean alley,
+washed every morning, by some process of reasoning seemed to demand
+corresponding effort indoors, and the barren rooms were never dirty when
+the woman was sober. Even this gave employment to hands that had never used
+a needle, therefore less time was spent lounging in the doorway or other
+rooms. The washing of clothes, though ragged and few, took time and
+centered the interest, if but for a short time. The look of utter weariness
+and indifference in the face of the woman was slowly disappearing. There
+was really a purpose in life; the four walls and little else that was home
+required thought and effort. Life had an object at last. But the devil of
+drink was not so easily conquered; she was gone one morning from home. The
+neighbors explained to the agents her absence, being familiar with the
+habits of the type. In court she listened again indifferently to "Ten
+dollars or ten days." This time a woman came forward, paid the ten dollars,
+and Agnes was free. Surprised, dumb-stricken, wondering why, Agnes followed
+the friend home. New clothes, simple, suitable, were waiting for her. Then
+the fight began. At times it was hourly. Work was provided that the clumsy,
+untrained hands could do. The proceeds were to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> pay for a new carpet, that
+had to be unrolled many times to hold Agnes from the street. At last it was
+down, and the two friends added a rocker and a picture. Tom was a new man,
+and every penny of his wages came home. All this time the prosperity of the
+couple was viewed by most of the people as due to passing "good luck." That
+there was a moral battle being fought did not seem to enter their
+consciousness. Four years later, on the stairway, the writer saw Agnes with
+her beautiful baby boy, her first-born, on her arm. The comprehension of
+what the sight must have been on the Mount of Transfiguration has always
+been clearer when the expression on the face of Agnes, as she met the woman
+who had fought for her salvation for time and eternity, is recalled. Two
+years had passed since Agnes had tasted liquor in any form. Her passionate
+devotion to her baby, her new knowledge of the arts of home-making, kept
+her so busy that Agnes was rarely a visitor to her neighbors, except in the
+case of sickness. Tom's love of liquor seemed limited; largely a matter of
+companionship or discouragement. When his home became a center of interest
+to Agnes, his buoyant nature responded to the new environment. When liquor
+disappeared from the home, it ceased to be a constant temptation. Outside
+of his home Tom found for a time that his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> new departure attracted to him
+unpleasant attention, guying, teasing, coaxing, which he met with jokes.
+Force as an inducement to make him drink was met by blows; and Tom struck
+heavily. The new impulse for a better life brought heavy social penalties
+on Tom and Agnes. It meant nothing in common with those about them. When a
+man and woman will neither treat nor be treated at that social level social
+ostracism follows. Their home was the refuge of the children driven by
+frenzied, drunken parents from their own homes. What they had they shared
+with the children when the parents were on the Island. When sickness came
+to homes in the alleys, Tom and Agnes could be relied upon to share and
+help in carrying the added burdens. Tom's muscles and the knowledge of
+their power saved many a wife from blows that, without Tom, would have
+fallen freely. Back of their every effort stood the two wise women who were
+redeeming this corner of the great city. The day came when Tom and Agnes
+realized the boy must grow up in a different neighborhood, and Tom and
+Agnes moved.</p>
+
+<p>The making of a laundry compelled the removal of a childless couple who had
+occupied their rooms over thirty years. It was impossible to make them
+accept the fact that the children could play in the alley under the new
+<i>r&eacute;gime</i>. For years<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> the old woman and her stick were familiar to the sight
+and the feelings of the children of the alley. "I'm in Dixie's Land. Dixie
+ain't home!" had been shouted under their windows, at their room door,
+which was very near the alley door, to bring them out in torrents of rage.
+As age made the old couple less fleet and more quarrelsome, the daring of
+the children grew, and any time of the day or night the conflict between
+the old couple and the children, in which parents figured, was a
+possibility. Peace became impossible. The decision was final; the old
+couple must go; their rooms were necessary to the new improvements. It was
+pathetic to discover that no amount of persuasion would make the old couple
+live north of Roosevelt Street; it meant a lowering in their social world.
+"I've always lived respectable, and I always will. I would not live in that
+block," announced the old woman, with conscious pride. Even the alley, it
+was found, had standards of residence, a line that must not be crossed, to
+maintain respectability.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the mental attitude of every woman in the alleys had changed
+toward her home. Positive determination to overcome inertia, or ambition to
+excel, it was impossible to create. Innate predilections were the chief
+factor in individual development among the women.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> What a woman liked to do
+she attempted to learn how to do, or what she found she could do most
+easily. Some would learn to cook who absolutely refused to sew; some would
+sew who refused to cook; some would take care of the babies while the
+mothers were learning who would neither cook nor sew, feeling they could do
+both well enough; these it was impossible to make home-makers. The shackles
+of the past could never be thrown off wholly by the home-makers in the
+alleys. The children responded; could be won by personal affection, by
+prizes, by the mother's insistence. For it was soon learned that nimble
+fingers in the home lightened the mother's work; but the mothers were the
+unwilling victims of their own past.</p>
+
+<p>The use of money was the most difficult lesson of all to teach. If there
+was money, the food was bought lavishly; pennies were given freely to the
+children. If there was no money, the barrenness was accepted even
+cheerfully. Wages were given at the maximum weekly amount remembered. No
+deductions were made for idle days. It requires a knowledge of advanced
+arithmetic to adjust intelligently forty weeks of wages to fifty-two weeks
+of expenses. It requires more than an elementary knowledge of arithmetic to
+adjust five days' wages to the seven days' expenses, fixed and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> emergency,
+of a growing family. When a week comes that brings six or seven days'
+wages, is it a marvel that in view of the many weeks of imposed
+restrictions this week of wealth should be welcomed as a period of freedom
+from care? That the money should be lavishly used? It takes the ability to
+think, to connect cause and effect, imagination, to see possible results,
+memory of experiences to hold men and women constantly in check, and this
+means mental training. Not a woman in the alley had attended school
+regularly during even the short period of her school life; each one had
+gone to work the moment she could earn money. Neither she nor any one about
+her questioned the value of the work she found to do beyond the money it
+gave at once. Nobody ever thought of the present as in relation to the
+future. Now that she was a mother, she met life the same way. Her children
+must earn money. To make sacrifices that their wage-earning capacity in the
+future might be greater would, if suggested to her, have been merely an
+evidence of how little the rich know of life. What was the estimate of life
+these mothers in the alley made? The differences between them were
+external, not mental. One answers for nearly all. To get as much comfort
+out of to-day as possible and to-morrow work hard, and be careful. To the
+majority that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> to be used to-morrow never came. When plenty came, it was
+always to-day&mdash;a glad, free day that might never come again.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of four years but four of the tenants of the alleys who were
+tenants when the lease was executed had been evicted. The death rate had
+lowered from 85 to 22 per cent. The tenants rarely appeared in the police
+courts. Wife-beating created excitement and indignation. But in spite of
+the awakening, a moral, mental, physical inertia, stagnation, held more
+than the majority of the tenants in control. There was spasmodic response;
+but the painful truth had to be accepted that there must be redemptive
+power within to respond to redemptive conditions without before the home
+could be vitalized with the spirit of hope and energy. Fifty years and more
+of neglect and indifference cannot be overcome in five years of moral
+activity exerted to overcome the evils man neglected to prevent.</p>
+
+<p>The alleys are gone; some tenants drifted to other scenes, more settled in
+the tall, dark tenements that have sprung up through the whole district,
+the worst type erected in New York. The rear buildings abound even back of
+the tall factories, reached by dark, noisome alleys. No amount of care or
+repair could save the old houses. They have gone the way of all material<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+things. Their history is a part of the social and political history of New
+York.</p>
+
+<p>How slowly moral sentiment grows in a large city is shown by the years that
+elapsed before active measures were taken to redeem what was known as a
+plague spot, a menace to the body politic, a constant source of moral
+degeneracy.</p>
+
+<p>The Citizens' Association, organized in 1864, through its Council of
+Hygiene and Public Health, districted the city for special investigation by
+sanitary experts. One of these gives a large part of his report to Gotham
+Court, and presents sectional drawings to show the impossibility of
+securing proper sanitary conditions for the people living in the notorious
+houses. It seems incredible that these conditions once known should not
+have aroused public interest to the point of action. Nothing was done. The
+physical and moral degeneracy continued until 1880, when a few private
+individuals made the experiment of redemption. Even this came when the
+houses had gone beyond the point of reclaiming. On the site of the old
+buildings rises a new business building.</p>
+
+<p>Not far away two of the most brutal and atrocious murders of recent years
+in New York have occurred. In July, 1901, three blocks from the old
+buildings, in broad daylight, a man known<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> to be the collecting agent for
+property in the neighborhood was robbed by three members of a well-known
+gang. The children are thin, precocious. Their language, even in their
+play, is vulgar, coarse, profane. Babies have at their command strange
+oaths, probably never heard elsewhere. The streets are neglected, the
+sidewalks uneven and broken. For almost half a century this region has had
+a reputation peculiar to itself. Efforts have been made to reach the
+people, but they have not been persistent. Even the church efforts are
+perfunctory, as though faith as to the redemptive power in this people did
+not exist.</p>
+
+<p>This fact remains: within the boundaries of this region lives a community
+that is shaping the political control of New York City and State, and will
+for years to come. It has its traditions of loyalty; it has fixed standards
+of its own peculiar privileges; its standards of rights. The very police of
+the region expect certain things to occur; misdemeanors of a certain
+character that would bring punishment anywhere else are passed by here;
+they are part of the civilization of the region. Snuggled down under the
+shadow of the bridge and the elevated road, a center of business interests
+which the moral standards of the residents do not affect, because their
+activities, other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> than of the muscles, are not exercised until carts,
+drays, drivers, clerks, proprietors have gone northward or across the
+river. The community lives within itself, has created its own standards,
+and is New York in its own estimation.</p>
+
+<p>Writing of the people in this section in 1865, a sanitary expert quotes
+with an apology a medical term common in the hospitals and dispensaries as
+a disease of the people in this section, "tenement-house rot." The term
+has, perhaps, in the interests of civilization, died out; but no one can
+walk through these streets, observing the faces of the people, and not
+realize that the old, unsanitary, germ-laden tenements of this section have
+produced a physical condition peculiar to this region, as it has a moral
+degeneracy that is peculiarly its own. The section, as a whole, has not
+attracted the philanthropist. He is wise in his day and generation and puts
+forth his efforts where the tide of humanity is rising, and not falling,
+even though it means three or four generations before the tide is out.</p>
+
+<p>New York has a gospel all its own. Work where the crowds are greatest, that
+the printed reports may count people in great numbers, for ye gain dollars
+thereby. New York counts the remnant only at the polls, and ignores the
+penalty her indifference imposes on her own advancement.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The opening years of the century hold promise that there is at least a
+partial realization of the solidarity of the interest of the people. That
+conditions make for degradation in the homes means degradation of citizens;
+and this means burdens laid, not on the sections where the homes and the
+citizens are found, but on the whole city. What altruism has not
+accomplished, selfishness may. It may be that where all else has failed,
+intelligent politics may redeem, and the section again may be the center of
+the moral as well as commercial activity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The centralization of the interests of the tenement-house population is not
+understood by those who broaden their mental, if not their active, interest
+by reading and travel; who in the varied interest of a broader life are
+forced to see the multiplicity of factors that enter into the settlement of
+every problem. This is what we mean by knowing the relation of things;
+marking the distinction between those who see only and those who
+comprehend. The man who is a machine set in the place where he bears his
+relation to the whole by an authority which he dares not question loses all
+opportunity to comprehend his relation to that whole. He is interested in
+immediate results as related to himself only. This is the relation which
+the mass of the tenement-house workers and voters bear to life.</p>
+
+<p>The people of whole sections live entirely within certain geographical
+lines, every interest centered within these limits.</p>
+
+<p>The race sections are logical, based on the law<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> of natural selection; of
+family interest. The first generation of immigrants naturally hold the
+second generation of home-makers near them, and these together hold the
+relatives and friends who follow. Three generations are not infrequently
+found in the same house, each maintaining its own home. The new arrivals
+keep alive the foreign home traditions, the foreign home habits of living.
+Poverty and greed make the people crowd together. The last arrivals are
+taught what their predecessors have learned of American life and law. The
+race section perpetuates itself; it retains all that it can of the old
+life, and interprets the new according to the lessons learned from
+environment, and power as it is exercised on the people. Each race section
+has its own thoroughfare. The people on the street use their own language,
+and trade in shops of their own countrymen. In some sections newspapers are
+published in the language of the section, giving prominence to the local
+news. Were it not for the public schools, one wonders what would be the
+result of this race centralization.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 599px;">
+<img src="images/fig050.jpg" width="599" height="480" alt="SATURDAY MORNING ON THE EAST SIDE." title="" />
+<span class="caption">SATURDAY MORNING ON THE EAST SIDE.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The writer once met a man who had voted for twenty-three years in one ward.
+For sixteen of these years he had cast his vote from one house in Orchard
+Street. He had never been farther north than Houston Street, farther south
+than Hester and had never crossed the Bowery. He had positive convictions
+on every subject relating to the ward; he knew the life history of every
+political leader in that portion of the city; could rehearse the disasters
+that had followed every man who failed to fall in line at the polls; knew
+what saloon-keepers were forced to obey the law, and who "didn't care a
+cent" for the law; knew why this man could put his goods on the walk and
+why the other man could not. He protected his own two daughters from the
+evils of his home environment as he saw them; was strict to rigorousness
+about their home-coming; watched the kind of people who moved into the
+house in which he lived, and doubtless kept it above the average of the
+neighborhood by his watchfulness. But he did not know who was President of
+the United States, and did not consider it the business of the poor man. He
+refused a "job" under the city, because he didn't want to be "beholden." It
+was all right for the man who needed a job to take it. The only grievance
+the man had was that the Hebrews were crowding into the neighborhood. This
+was an invasion of his personal rights; they had their own place on the
+south side of Grand Street, as the Italians had west of the Bowery, and
+coming into that region north of Grand Street was an intrusion on the
+personal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> rights of himself and his countrymen. The first thing which would
+happen, if they&mdash;his own people&mdash;did not look sharp, would be the Hebrews
+would have a say in politics. The man's mental attitude is typical of the
+race settlement, the race political rights theory in many sections of New
+York; the difference is only in the race dominant.</p>
+
+<p>This man was a porter, who for seventeen years was employed in an East Side
+department store, working in a sub-cellar nine hours a day for nine dollars
+a week. He could not read, though he came to this country when five years
+of age. He became a wage-earner at eleven. His daughters became
+wage-earners at fourteen, having attended public schools until that age.
+The pride with which this man referred to his daughters' education made one
+comprehend the gradual absorption by the foreign peoples who come to us of
+American ideas. Those girls knew they were not educated; they had been
+forced to contrast their mental equipment with that of the "club ladies,"
+as they called the residents at the College Settlement, where the club of
+which they were members met. They, too, had been satisfied until brought
+into relationship with those who represented another world. The revelation,
+because of contact with the minds of these college-trained women, showed
+them, so far as they could comprehend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> it, their own lack of mental
+training, the first step in their true education.</p>
+
+<p>Women are by nature more conservative than men; they cling longer to early
+traditions and habits; find it more difficult to adopt new habits of
+thought. The more closely they are surrounded by people of their own way of
+life, their own habits of thinking, the more strongly intrenched are they
+in the customs and habits of their native country, the less are the homes
+they regulate modified by the new environment. The result is that whole
+sections of New York to-day are as foreign as the villages from which the
+people in them came. There are women in New York whose children and
+grandchildren were born in the city who cannot speak English, nor
+understand it beyond the merest assent or dissent. Their lives in old age
+are pitiable.</p>
+
+<p>A sweet, motherly German once said to the writer, and but a short time ago:
+"I am so lonely. I cannot speak English. I never learn it. I sit in my
+daughter's house, where German is not used. The children all want to be
+Americans; they will not talk German. When I sit at the table, I never
+speak. They all talk, but I do not understand. Sometimes I ask, and the
+children say they have not time to tell me. They buy only the English
+papers, and so I cannot read. I wish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> I had learned English when I first
+came. I was young then, but I had eight children after I came here, and I
+did everything for them. I could not take the time, I thought. I see now
+the children could have taught me. Now they have not the time." This woman
+was a German in her sympathies, her interests, her standards. Positive race
+antagonism existed between her and her family. She measured everything by
+German life and rule, and lived a critic among a people her own only in
+blood. In answer to the question, she explained that her husband learned
+English for his "work." The family attended the mission church when they
+attended church. She attended the German services, but the rest of the
+family, even her husband, the English services. Her constant plaint was: "I
+am so lonely. Some day I never speak all day. At the table they speak
+English."</p>
+
+<p>Hundreds of women like this one sit in homes in New York in which they have
+no part, barred out by the fact that they speak a foreign tongue. One of
+the mistakes made in even our church work has been the maintaining of
+distinctive church services in a foreign tongue. In so far as the churches
+have done this, they have been an obstruction to good citizenship for time,
+whatever they may have accomplished for eternity, for the people they call
+their own.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One of the most earnest of missionary workers in New York, an American
+citizen born in Italy, protested vigorously to the writer on the policy of
+maintaining church services in New York in a foreign tongue. "You cannot
+make a united people using many languages. I would preach that to the
+people all the time. I use English words in my sermons to my own people,
+and I tell them to learn English; it is better for them in business. The
+women ought to learn, for they lose their children. They go away from them
+because they do not speak the English. In New York they are the victims of
+oppression, my people, because they cannot speak English. They have to bow
+the head to the yoke because they are foreigners in a strange land in which
+they vote. It is a great wrong to them and to the country. It makes the
+'boss.'"</p>
+
+<p>The first interest of the mother in the tenement, as of the mother
+everywhere, is the support of her children; to get for them all that she
+can. She would prefer that her husband should be honest, which may mean
+that the only dishonesty of which she has any comprehension is stealing
+money or other tangible property. In politics the tenement-house women have
+only a secondary interest. They accept without question the statements of
+their male relatives as to issues and men.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> Even this degree of interest
+represents only the most intelligent of the tenement-house women. The
+charge that a man used his political position and affiliations to further
+his own advancement, that he purchased the votes and enthusiasms of less
+clever voters, would mean to the women educated in their conception of
+right and wrong under the systems of machine politics that the man was
+intelligent and trying to do the best he could for his family and his
+friends. To say that he refused to rally voters to support the party that
+gave him a position because he was convinced that the party was dishonest
+in the use it made of the victory it gained at the polls, would arouse the
+deepest contempt for the man. He would be considered not only untrue to his
+family, but to his friends. Had he remained in close relation to the
+politicians who gave him his chance, he would not only provide for his
+family, but his friends would have the benefit of his influence; he could
+give them a chance in time.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 420px;">
+<img src="images/fig058i.jpg" width="420" height="640" alt="THE PAST, PRESENT AND MIDDLE PERIOD." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PAST, PRESENT AND MIDDLE PERIOD.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The man of brains they see drop his tools, take off his overalls and stand
+in high hat, and eventually frock-coat, the center of a crowd of men who
+smile at his nod, though they worked shoulder to shoulder but a short time
+ago&mdash;in a trench, perhaps; yes, even came over in the same ship with him.
+The women do not understand the process of evolution, but they see the
+results. They soon know that from street sweeper to car conductor, the man
+who has become a politician under a strong partisan government regulates,
+and often decides, the wage-earning opportunities of the greater portion of
+the men in the tenement-house sections. They learn, these women, that it is
+not a question of how faithful the worker is in the discharge of his duty
+that insures him work, but that it is some mysterious influence they call
+"politics," that means work and wages or no work and no wages, and
+suffering. This conception of the relation of the petty politician to the
+voters' chance to earn even a meager and uncertain living under the sway of
+his influence rarely excites more than passing indignation from the women
+who suffer most because of the system. When the women of the politician's
+family grow arrogant and snobbish, then the floods of eloquence break loose
+for a time, and the listener may learn many things of which he would
+otherwise be ignorant. The increased power of the petty henchman rarely
+enables him to change the way of living of his family. Sometimes he does
+not when he can, for he knows that he increases his power as he lives on
+the level of the average voter in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> district. The less conscience he
+has, the more patient he is in waiting for the day when his district is
+only one factor in his political strength.</p>
+
+<p>Even the little children reveal deference to the family of the man who is
+known to have "pull." There came to an East Side library one afternoon a
+little girl better dressed than any child who had yet appeared there. She
+was impudent, noisy, aggressive. In the game-room she cheated in the games,
+and finally broke up several games of checkers and dominoes by pushing over
+the boards. No child resented this. The little girl when spoken to seemed
+astonished by the reprimand. As she was leaving, the writer said to her: "I
+am sorry, little girl, but I shall have to tell you that you must not come
+here again unless you mean to obey; you must not talk in the reading-room,
+and in the games you must play fair. I hope I shall not have to tell you
+not to come here again." The child stared in astonishment. She went out on
+the street. In a few minutes several little girls who had frequented the
+rooms for months came running back in great excitement, one saying
+breathlessly: "Why, that little girl's father is a school trustee; she does
+just as she likes in school." "Yes," added another, "and now she says she
+won't come here any more. She's awful mad." From her point of view this was
+a calamity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> "Well, I hope she will not come if she cannot behave," was the
+comment made. The children stood aghast. The trustee system had been
+abolished in New York at least two years when this incident occurred. Later
+the writer found that the father was in the council of Tammany Hall.</p>
+
+<p>A boy of the same neighborhood rang the bell, interfered with children
+leaving the house, and broke the windows. The time for kindly persuasion
+ended. When the members of a woman's club in that section using that house
+were consulted, it was made perfectly clear to the writer that worse
+troubles would follow if the boy were arrested, for he would not be
+detained and he would be more ugly than ever. His father was a ward leader
+who had formerly been a street sweeper, then foreman of the gang, etc.,
+going through the gradations that mark the making of the minor "boss." This
+boy bullied little children, stole their toys, would break up their games.
+Yet to have him join in their play was evidently an honor which they bore
+much to retain. He was only fourteen, yet he was found to be the leader of
+a gang of boys in the most disgusting immoralities. Even this did not rouse
+the mothers of the neighborhood to fight for their children's protection.
+The boy was spreading immorality<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> of a disgusting nature through a whole
+neighborhood. The evil he wrought was told in tears in private, but denied
+in public through fear of the father's power in preventing the accusers'
+husbands and sons from getting work&mdash;one result of the Tammany system that
+enslaves homes and blasts the innocence of little children in New York.</p>
+
+<p>A clever, hard-working Irish woman was once telling the writer the story of
+her life and that of her children. At the time she was deeply interested in
+the future of four nephews, who were the motherless sons of her brother.
+Out of her experience with sons-in-law she enunciated her conclusions: "I
+tell me brother, don't let them b'ys learn politics; it's a mighty poor
+thrade. Sure, when Tammany's in they're all right; but when Tammany's out,
+where are they? Sure, it's a mighty poor thrade, as I learnt to me sorrer.
+Betther have them blacksmiths, sez I, like their grandfather at home. I do
+hope he be's listening to me, for they're foine b'ys." It will be easier
+for the four "b'ys" to learn politics than any other "thrade," for it is an
+open union making one demand, obedience to the "boss."</p>
+
+<p>To this woman Tammany was an employer good to the poor man&mdash;a doctrine that
+is taught to the smallest boy. He breathes it in the air; he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> nurses it in
+the milk that nourishes him. As he gets older he adds a new article to his
+faith. The Tammany system is the protector of his liberties. It does not
+restrict him in his right of private judgment. As one studies the race
+sections, the discovery is made that hundreds of votes are cast for Tammany
+candidates in the belief that obnoxious restrictions on the sale of liquor
+on Sundays will be removed, or that the laws will not be enforced. The hope
+of raising the moral tone of the voters is futile while any portion of them
+justify the casting of a ballot for the sole reason that it will make it
+possible for the voter to break the law with impunity. The most
+demoralizing legislation is that which makes a man a sneak as well as a
+law-breaker. May the day be hastened when no man who stands in moral
+rectitude in the presence of man and God will be forced to maintain what he
+believes his rights in defiance of the law. We are a cosmopolitan country,
+owing power and greatness to the sons and daughters of many lands. The
+Puritan conception of government is out of place to-day. The larger
+conception of man not controlled by the law, but the master in himself of
+the restraints it would place upon him, is the American conception of
+manhood, and toward this the best legislative action must trend. Thinking
+men and women who have studied the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> social conditions of New York know that
+no more calamitous influence is set in motion in New York than a sense of
+injustice that protects and justifies to the people the breaking of a law.
+When this goes farther, and any considerable number of the citizens combine
+for the purpose of overcoming it by defying or by ignoring it, the
+foundations of the government are threatened. It is time for fanaticism to
+feel the pressure of broad-minded balanced public opinion. A law
+administered at the demand and according to the conscience of people
+unaffected by its administration, used by them against an equally
+intelligent class who feel that personal liberty has been curtailed at the
+expense of their right of judgment, is class legislation. No greater evil
+influence has been active in New York than the creating of a sentiment that
+endorsed the breaking of the liquor laws. It has been a prolific source of
+blackmail; it has enabled politicians, who live at the public expense, to
+pose to men whose personal right of judgment had been curtailed as the
+apostles of freedom. The short-sighted friends of temperance have by their
+misdirected activities created political capital for the men who in
+official life have made New York's problems.</p>
+
+<p>Legislation enacted without the will of the people governed is provocative
+of two things: contempt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> and defiance of the law; unrest that makes for
+antagonism to government. The lower in the scale of reason the voter is,
+the less able he is to get any point of view but his own. His comprehension
+of the rights of others depends on the comprehension of his rights
+expressed in the law designed for his regeneration. He certainly never goes
+higher in the scale of reason while he defies the law in satisfying his
+sense of justice and freedom; he cannot rise in the scale of living while
+he stoops to acts he would avoid if his sense of justice were not outraged.
+He justifies his act because of his sense of oppression. He cannot respond
+to any effort looking to the general good of the city while he smarts under
+a sense of liberties curtailed by the very people who ask for his help.</p>
+
+<p>When President Roosevelt was Police Commissioner he enforced the law
+governing the sale of liquor on Sunday. The city was torn asunder for
+weeks. The discussion filled the columns of the daily press. The fact,
+after weeks of discussion with one group of tenement-house women&mdash;all the
+wives of skilled workers&mdash;was finally made clear that the law was at fault,
+if fault there was, not the Commissioner. The law, if bad, must be
+repealed; but as long as it was the law it must be enforced. During this
+discussion much light was obtained. One woman told how cleverly the law<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+was evaded by the liquor dealer two doors from her house. He hired the back
+room on the top floor of the house next door, keeping the liquor in a
+closet. The men in the secret entered the house two doors distant, went up
+to the roof and down the scuttle to the room where the liquor was to be
+had. Some of the group listened to her description with flashing eyes. When
+she finished she was given to understand that she had played the part of
+traitor. It was all right for her to do it. She was safe. Her husband was
+in a good, independent position; it made no difference to him how much
+trouble came because of her "telling tales." To others it was a disgrace
+that men who had only a few cents to spend for a little pleasure with their
+friends should have to sneak like thieves, as one of the women expressed
+it. All condemned having the liquor in their own homes in quantities, as
+they condemned the illegal selling. "When a man sneaks in like that he
+stays longer and spends more than when he can walk in openly and walk out
+again as he does other days. When he has it in the house he never stops
+treating and drinking until it's gone." The "free lunch" was deplored; but
+every one of the forty-five women decided that it was the only meal fit to
+eat that hundreds of laboring men ever had; that men were forced to eat at
+lunch counters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> in barrooms and buy liquor who would never go there if
+their mothers and wives knew how to cook. They claimed that the women would
+cook for their families if they knew how. They did not know how. They were
+forced to go to work in factories as soon as they left school, and never
+had a chance to learn anything about housekeeping; their mothers never knew
+how to keep house. Could a stronger argument for domestic science teaching
+in our public schools be advanced?</p>
+
+<p>When the High License bill was before the Legislature at Albany several
+years ago, the writer was asked to speak at a mothers' meeting in one of
+the poorest sections of what was then the city of Brooklyn. On her way to
+the mission she counted nineteen liquor saloons on three blocks; in every
+case they were on the lower floor of a tenement house. The hall was over a
+pork and provision store; a loft without any attempt at more than broom
+cleanliness, walls bare, grimy, and seeming to ooze grease. The atmosphere
+of smoked meat was sickening. Nothing in the way of a shelter could have
+been more barren and repellent, yet it was a mission maintained by a
+church.</p>
+
+<p>About one hundred women&mdash;the wives of day laborers and longshoremen&mdash;were
+present. Some were bareheaded: several with babies in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> arms. The
+subject chosen was the High License bill. It was a discussion. At least ten
+of the women spoke. The scene will never be forgotten. One woman, about
+thirty, after listening intently, rose with a baby on her arm, and turning
+passionately to those in the hall, said: "Why don't yer talk honest? Every
+one of us drink. Some of us, not many, drink because we love it. Most of us
+drink because we're discouraged and don't know what else to do. We're
+fools; it don't help us; it makes it worse. Some of us would never touch it
+if it were not brought to us. We know that anything that would take away
+the drink from our doors would save us. Drive them out!" She turned to the
+platform appealingly. "Drive them out, so that we, yes, and the men, would
+have to walk four or five blocks to them, and we'll be different. It is
+easy sending the children now. Make it harder! Make it harder!"</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we close them?"</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't do it," she said. "You couldn't do that. Make it cost more to
+start them, and there won't be so many. They'll be farther apart, and they
+won't try so hard to make us drink. Many a woman has learned to drink
+because she had to pass the holes to get to her home. Tell the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> truth like
+me, or say whether I'm telling the truth!" was her appeal to the audience.</p>
+
+<p>The flood-gates were opened. Every woman agreed with the first speaker that
+the saloon could never be abolished; it could be regulated. Beer, they
+thought, to most women was a greater temptation than strong liquors. The
+number of saloons near their homes they thought the heaviest burden the
+poor man's family had to bear. They understood perfectly that the brewers
+paid for the licenses, and that the saloons were the meeting places where
+votes were controlled. They thought the saloons ought to be open at least
+Sunday afternoon, but they would have them close earlier Saturday night.
+They thought that any law that made a man a sneak to get a drink was an
+evil. They saw that such a law enabled the politician to say which man
+could sell liquor and which could not. One of them, who could neither read
+nor write, had discovered that the saloons selling a certain brewer's beer
+had more freedom than any of the saloons selling other beers; they thought
+the saloon-keepers paid either in money or drinks for the votes of the men
+who frequented their places in the interest of the politicians who owned
+the saloons or protected them. There was not the slightest evidence that
+one woman there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> saw any dishonesty in the system. There were no principles
+in politics, only men. Things remained with them the same no matter who was
+elected. It was a district which was under the control of one party, having
+an unquestioned majority, which steadily increased through the efforts of a
+shrewd leader who had no visible means of support.</p>
+
+<p>The section in which this group of women lived was a long, narrow strip
+bordering on the East River. The residences of a population each occupying
+its own house at this time held the reeking tenements in check on the east.
+Within ten years this has been wholly changed. The handsome old residences
+have become tenement houses, overcrowded, uncared for, occupied by people
+now at the level of former despised neighbors. The better class of the
+laborers' families have left the houses bordering on the river, and these
+have been given over to the poorest and most hopeless of the day laborers.
+There is a thoroughfare which has stores brilliantly lighted for five
+blocks. Every want of the people can be supplied in them. The people, old
+and young, settle placidly in the region. It is their world. The language
+of the little children on the streets, from early morning until late at
+night, is appalling. A kindergarten was started, but the people who started
+it did not have money enough to secure the right kind of a room, nor to
+make the room attractive, nor to keep it so clean that that would in itself
+make it more attractive than the homes of the children. It was finally
+given up, because even the small amount expended was not forthcoming at the
+end of the third year. It could have had four times the number of children
+the room would accommodate at one time, but no one cared enough to support
+it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 509px;">
+<img src="images/fig072.jpg" width="509" height="480" alt="A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The half-grown boys are coarse-looking, use profane and coarse language
+unknowingly in their ordinary conversation on the street. Their attitude
+toward girls is brutal. The girls of this section are free in their
+manners, slangy and coarse in their conversation. They earn the lowest
+wages paid to women in the factories and lofts that abound in the region.
+The schoolhouses are old and dark; the streets are neglected and dirty. The
+smoky, grimy mission-room disappeared long ago. Not one influence is at
+work to raise the general moral tone of this community, the voting power of
+which outnumbers four to one regions where every influence in and out of
+the homes tends to develop moral standards and political intelligence in
+the same political unit.</p>
+
+<p>The region is a social plague spot, neglected and allowed to spread. It
+does not present as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> special feature to arouse activity the evils of the
+"Red Light" district, but only the blasting influence of a region sunk in
+the apathy of deadened moral natures, killed by the hopelessness of
+changing the environment of their homes until it represents all they ask of
+life. The poverty of the people makes well-nourished bodies impossible, and
+lack of physical power makes moral resistance impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Recently in one of the most crowded of the tenement-house sections of New
+York, where the grip of poverty holds degradation, where the people live as
+remote from American civilization as when in their own land, the writer
+viewed the parade in the evening of the voters of the district, who had
+been the guests of the district leader, a State Senator, at an outing.
+These outings are the annual "round-ups" of the voters. The expenses of
+these outings run into the five figures, it is said, in this district.
+Boats and a grove are hired. Chowder, coffee, sandwiches and beer are
+provided free. Games of chance, to which, it is whispered, the district
+leaders are not disinterested observers, and athletics are the features of
+the outings. The return at night is an occasion for fireworks and a parade.
+Caps and canes are provided for the voters often; sometimes only a ribbon
+badge. The expenses are met by the sale<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> of tickets, which sometimes sell
+as high as five dollars. These tickets the liquor dealers, in fact, the
+tradesmen of all kinds in the district, men holding office under the city
+government who are affiliated with the leader and the men who hope to
+secure rights or privileges, legal or illegal, through the leader's
+influence, know it is wise to purchase. To the mass of the men of the
+district it means perhaps the one day of freedom in the year, when they
+have the pleasure of enjoying drinks and food wholly at the cost of
+another.</p>
+
+<p>In this particular parade were five thousand men, not one thousand of whom
+bore the slightest outward evidence of American citizenship, but the right
+to vote, as their presence in the column indicated. It scarcely seemed
+possible that the scene was in America. Swarthy women and children crowded
+gayly decorated fire-escapes, crowded the windows, and made movement
+impossible on the streets. Arches of lights, lanterns swinging from
+fire-escapes and on ropes from sidewalks to roofs, were in the colors of
+the land from which these people came. The flags and bunting displayed
+presented colors of a foreign land, with here and there the flag of the
+country whose political destiny their votes controlled to a large degree.
+The next day the white caps worn by the men in this parade appeared on the
+heads of schoolboys and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> working boys by the hundred, the wearers proud to
+wear the colors of the man who, so far as their knowledge or experience, or
+that of their parents, went, was the greatest man, the man of the widest
+range of authority, in the United States. What do they care who is at the
+head of the city government? The men do not need to ask who is the district
+leader; he finds them through his unpaid workers and the coalition is
+accomplished. Soon the immigrant, turned citizen, understands the
+principle. He gets work and votes for the leader. It is simple and direct.
+When the extent of one's knowledge enables him to handle a broom or to sell
+peanuts or bananas in the new country, and that under the supervision of a
+blue-coated tyrant who levies on the voter's cart, if not his pocket, when
+and where he pleases, moral arguments in a foreign tongue are not
+convincing to that voter. He would rather not submit to the supervision and
+its attendant tax; he would rather not have his work intermittent; but he
+learns that protest increases his evils, and he submits. The blue-coated
+tyrant is a friend of the "boss" who helped get his license, and it must be
+right. Whatever comes to him, he must not antagonize the "boss." That is
+the first lesson he learns in American citizenship, at the point where it
+is most effective, his wage-earning privileges.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 555px;">
+<img src="images/fig078.jpg" width="555" height="480" alt="A DOORWAY ON THE EAST SIDE." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A DOORWAY ON THE EAST SIDE.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are leaders so strong and tactful that year after year their reign is
+unquestioned. Only the police and the ambulance surgeons know when there is
+an attempted revolution&mdash;when the leader's right is questioned by another
+would-be leader. There is only one issue&mdash;the man; nobody cares for the
+principle&mdash;if there be a difference of principle&mdash;involved.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the old sections of the city in which is a ward that for forty
+years has excelled in crime; a section which at the present time presents
+the meanest and lowest of the tenements in New York; in which there is less
+effort to counteract the evils of the environment of the homes or change
+the environment due to the control of the "boss" than in any other section,
+a political feud culminated in the fall of 1901, defeating the man who had
+been the leader for years. It was stated that the man who won had expended
+$35,000; the man who lost, $12,000 in the struggle. This is a section where
+poverty is the universal inheritance of the people who make this section
+home.</p>
+
+<p>For weeks the section was in a condition of constant warfare. The smallest
+boys were organized as gangs and shouted the name of the leader they had
+chosen their hero. Boys of five wore the buttons of their heroes. From
+fire-escapes,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> on wagons hung bits of white cloth declaring the names of
+the contestants. One of these, to avoid unpleasant embarrassment, had gone
+to California after the Lexow investigation. A favorite legend displayed by
+his enemy's friends was, "Paddy is the man who to Californy ran." This was
+displayed on one fire-escape on which opened the windows of two families,
+each espousing the cause of the contending leaders. The week before the
+balloting for leader the legend was kept in place by the constant vigilance
+for twenty-four hours of the day by the family whose sentiments it
+expressed. "Paddy" was defeated. The next morning the two neighbors, who
+had been enemies for weeks, leaned, each from her own window, chatting
+amicably, while the son of one was arranging the legend on the fire-escape
+to include both families. On either side was gracefully arranged an
+American flag, while the harp of Erin hung just in the middle of the
+fire-escape. Peace reigned in Warsaw. "Paddy's" friends, like the fairies
+of childhood, disappeared in the night. The whole district, as one man,
+accepted the change of rulers, and the new leader's banners were thrown to
+the breeze everywhere. Nothing succeeds like success in the tenement-house
+regions. For a couple of weeks peace seemed to reign in the district. The
+followers of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> the old leader found themselves displaced; new followers
+controlled the favors in the district. There began a new distribution of
+patronage. Then the old leader's displaced friends, with a few loyal souls,
+rallied about him. He had made money enough through his political
+affiliations to be defiant, and announced that the political corruption of
+the party to which he had belonged compelled him to rally to the support of
+the movement to overthrow it. Some of his followers were loyal to bravery,
+and declared, too, against the political system. Two of them, because of
+these declarations, were discharged forty-eight hours later from places in
+a city department where they drew salaries of $1200 per year. Their places
+were given to two of the new leader's followers. Two weeks later all had
+returned to the old allegiance, and the papers announced that the head of
+the Tammany system had decided that the patronage of the district would be
+evenly divided between the two factions.</p>
+
+<p>Independence of action is costly under such a system; costly in loss of
+wages to the voter; of food, raiment, shelter to his family.</p>
+
+<p>A voter who refuses to surrender the ease of his home or the pleasure of
+his club for the good of the district in which his home is located is not
+in a position to criticise his poor neighbor who will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> not jeopardize the
+position secured by his vote that supports his family to maintain the
+theory of American citizenship. Why should he make sacrifices to free the
+city from disgrace when his independent neighbor refuses to sacrifice his
+ease to protect his family from the inevitable evils of a corrupt city
+government?</p>
+
+<p>It was the conferring the rights of citizenship on immigrants almost as
+soon as they landed that fastened on New York an evil that has grown until
+the city has been held in the shackles of a spoils system that overshadows
+its commercial supremacy and makes it the argument against democratic
+government. The heaviest disgrace for this condition rests not on the men
+who profit by the system but on the good men who permit it to develop. It
+was the logical result of their indifference to the city's good and their
+responsibility for that good. This inactivity on the part of the mass of
+responsible citizens made the control of the city offices for personal ends
+easy to the men who, because of lack of training and moral turpitude, could
+not conceive of a service for other than personal ends. Shrewdness made
+them see that the immigrant was the ladder on which they could climb to
+political power and stability. They met the immigrant as friend and
+neighbor; they secured him work; they schooled him to citizenship, and
+began at once to train him in that deadliest of all influences in a
+democracy, class in politics. So long as this system of education prevails,
+the appearance of a candidate for local office who does not bear the
+"hall-mark" of the neighborhood will be resented.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 429px;">
+<img src="images/fig084.jpg" width="429" height="640" alt="EARLY MORNING AMONG THE PUSHCARTS." title="" />
+<span class="caption">EARLY MORNING AMONG THE PUSHCARTS.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As time went on and the immigrants came from many countries, a new evil
+sprang up&mdash;the race section; the section where, maintaining all the
+characteristics of the country from which the people came, the men exercise
+the rights of citizenship at the behest of a political trainer who is able
+to promise favors for obedience, and work vengeance for disobedience.
+Behind him is a power which he must obey until the day comes when by his
+own shrewdness he is able to cross swords with those above him in the
+political system, becoming himself a dictator. In the process of his
+evolution from ward heeler to district leader he has trained those who
+follow him so well that he duplicates himself scores of times, increasing
+his power every time he makes a follower, either by fear or favor,
+perpetuating the system that makes the city, as has been aptly said, a
+"gold mine" which it costs the operators nothing to work.</p>
+
+<p>The man at the bottom knows the duplicate of the leader nearest his own
+level; this man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> is his friend, his countryman often. The links in the
+chain are unbroken, and the man who dares to disobey the orders issued from
+the top feels not only the displeasure of the henchman, but the combined
+strength of the chain, or as much of it as is necessary to compel him to
+obey or to crush him. The poor man whose tool to earn a living is a shovel,
+a pick or a broom is not in a position to defend his rights; he has no
+public sentiment in the only world he knows to support him in any attempt
+he may make to attain his rights when defrauded by the political system he,
+in utter ignorance, has helped to establish. When he is thrown out of work
+given to secure his vote, he has no redress. The man at the bottom must
+make the rule of his life "Small favors thankfully received." His hope for
+work in the future depends on keeping in friendly touch with the system;
+this is the first principle of American citizenship grasped by the
+naturalized citizen.</p>
+
+<p>Just before our last national election a number of men employed in skilled
+labor in one of our city departments were laid off. To some of those men
+this loss of work meant suffering for their families; to others it meant
+debt and dependence. It was startling the spirit in which this loss of work
+and wages were accepted by these men. The district leader, elected by the
+people to make the laws<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> at Albany, in order "to hold his district in line"
+for this election, had to provide forty-eight voters with places. He
+demanded from the department forty-eight places; the work was in his
+district. No one questioned his right to make this demand; these places
+represented his political capital. In no way could his demands be met
+except by the discharge of forty-eight men then at work who lived outside
+the district. It was done. The men laid off, almost to a man, accepted it
+as the fortune of the political prot&eacute;g&eacute;. Scarcely a word of resentment was
+expressed. There were removals into this special district before the next
+municipal election, and new enrollments under the leader's banner,
+irrespective of the political bias of the voters. Some of the men were
+sullen and felt the loss of manhood; some said, "I'll vote as I like, but I
+must have work;" others believed that only under this leader's banner could
+a poor man hope to get his rights&mdash;the privilege to earn his living; or, in
+their language, "He is hustling for his friends."</p>
+
+<p>Not only does the skilled and unskilled manual laborer find that the
+approval of his district leaders is necessary to secure work under the
+city, but that the affiliations and power of the district leader and his
+political followers can secure him work under corporations holding public
+franchises. He knows that the district leader secures<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> privileges,
+licenses, votes for franchises, directly or indirectly, with the distinct
+understanding that his recommendations insure places to the men who carry
+them. Under corrupt city government the man in business who does not cater
+to the political powers finds his privileges curtailed; that he is made the
+target for petty annoyances. Especially is this true in the downtown
+districts, where in the transaction of business the rights of citizens to
+the streets are ignored. Until one has lived close to it, it is almost
+impossible to believe the power over the working masses the smallest cog in
+the political machine exercises. It is this that makes imperative the
+control of the city by men of high moral standing. No amount of unselfish
+philanthropy can save a city governed by the corrupt.</p>
+
+<p>There are sections in the city of New York where from the time the boy is
+old enough to recognize the power of a policeman he guides his life to
+curry favor with this visible expression of power. He knows almost as soon
+as he can talk the man who rules in the world in which he lives. He sees
+his playmate defy the policeman because his father is a man of power, or
+the friend of the man who rules the district. "Pull" is the law, all the
+law he recognizes. He hears discussed from his earliest years the
+dependence of his class<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> on the political powers who govern, not for the
+good of the city, but that they may have their rights; their rights, as
+interpreted, being the securing of a place for a longer or shorter period
+at the nod of a "boss." Their district is all the city thousands of the
+inhabitants of these sections know. How can it be otherwise? They are never
+called for any purpose to any other part of the city, unless it be the
+cemetery. Family, friends, business all center within a score of blocks. If
+a distance must be traversed, it is through thoroughfares that but
+duplicate regions they know, all a part of the kingdom of the "boss."</p>
+
+<p>When the observer sees five thousand men walking behind a banner conferred
+on the leader of the district because every man in it who votes votes at
+his dictation, there comes to him a faint apprehension of what political
+power in the tenement-house district is. This district leader interprets
+all these men know of this country or its institutions. They know that he
+secures work for them; that he befriends them in time of trouble. He
+interprets Christ's doctrine to them: "I was hungry and ye gave me meat;
+thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and
+ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came
+unto me." This is what the district leader does, if not in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> person, by
+proxy. Is it any wonder he can control votes? Is it any wonder that the
+poor, ignorant, unequipped voter should curry favor, bow to him,
+acknowledge his supremacy even to the law? For this the voter can break the
+law, and the leader secure remission of the penalty. The leader's nod has
+been known to guide the judge on the bench. The leader can make the
+innocent suffer because his power is greater than the law to which the
+innocent appeal. This is the moral doctrine with which we inoculate our
+newly made citizens, and under which the children of our overcrowded
+tenement houses grow up. As the boys approach manhood they know no greater
+privilege than to serve the man who has the power to give them place, and
+he begins to cultivate their acquaintance early.</p>
+
+<p>It takes brains, moral standards, a knowledge of life and experience to put
+the district leaders and their cohorts in the place they belong. Talking
+against them accomplishes nothing while the majority he represents keeps
+him in power, yes, makes him possible. He makes morality an evil,
+dishonesty justice to the people who know him as the representative of
+republican principles. They are the people. They have left one land because
+it deprived them of rights. Rights as they know them are personal, and the
+district leader secures them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 622px;">
+<img src="images/fig092.jpg" width="622" height="480" alt="MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD." title="" />
+<span class="caption">MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The opposition to the reform movement by the people governed by the
+district leader comes from the conviction, dimly conceived or implanted,
+that the election of the men who represent it would mean that everywhere
+merit and not "pull" would keep the voter at work; that business would have
+to be conducted according to law; that crime would be punished; that no man
+would hold the keys of the prison for their benefit, but for the protection
+of the community.</p>
+
+<p>One of the greatest moral lessons administered to the people of New York in
+a language that all understood, and one which all classes in the community
+needed, was given by the late Colonel George E. Waring. When he organized
+the Department of Street Cleaning on the merit system; when he proved to
+every man in the department that if he did his work no man could displace
+him; that he could defend himself, a man before men, if charges were
+brought against him, Colonel Waring changed the moral character of New
+York. Every man in that department had his friends to whom he carried the
+message; stood a free man employed by the city; a man who dared to vote as
+he would though in public service;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> would not be deprived of the right to
+earn his daily bread because of the use he made of his rights as an
+American citizen. This moral lesson went into every home. The woman whose
+husband handled a broom, drove a cart, held her head up, for the magic D.
+S. C. had changed a "job" that enslaved her husband to an employment that
+honored him.</p>
+
+<p>The enforcement of the law in the gathering of the garbage; the cleanliness
+of the streets in the tenement-house districts equal to those of the
+avenues, for the first time in generations brought the great truth to the
+consciousness of the people in the tenement-house regions that all men were
+equal. That the clean streets led to clean halls and cleaner homes was
+natural; and the further evolution meant clean characters, because of moral
+freedom to express opinion in a ballot cast at no man's command.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the summers when, for the sake of the children, extra
+exertions were made to keep the streets clean. Slowly the truth dawned on
+the dullest mother that the babies were not dying in such numbers; were not
+so ill, because the streets were clean, the garbage collected and the
+streets washed and cool. Twenty years of Colonel Waring, and the moral tone
+of the most ignorant would be changed. For the right to earn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> his living
+honestly, honorably, to cast his ballot as an American citizen, would be
+guaranteed to every voter employed in a city department employing the
+greatest number of voters with the least manual ability, the least
+education.</p>
+
+<p>A city is just as honest as the greatest number of citizens casting a
+ballot with the least knowledge of its value and effect; it comes no higher
+in the scale of integrity than that. Every man who stands behind a broom
+because he earns what is paid him, and knows that he stays there just as
+long as he continues to earn his wages, represents a wealth of manhood in a
+democracy, a part of the nation's capital as a world power.</p>
+
+<p>When Colonel Waring discharged the first man convicted of accepting a bribe
+for collecting the refuse of the city contrary to the law of the
+department, he gave a practical demonstration of the truth of the
+Declaration of Independence that all men are born free and equal. He showed
+by that act that the poor man who could not pay a bribe was protected by
+the law; that wealth purchased no privileges at the expense of the city.
+Just where the spoils system had worked its deepest degradation it received
+its most effective lesson. The greatest benefit that Colonel Waring, that
+man of law and order, conferred upon New York, was not its clean streets,
+but the moral lesson that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> a city department can be administered to secure
+the best interests of the people on the principles that control the best
+business houses of the city.</p>
+
+<p>To the shame of the city be it said that it had so long been accustomed to
+the spoils system that it could not accept the theory of Colonel Waring. It
+was impossible for even the philanthropic workers to believe that a man
+would not be placed, if they used their personal "pull" with the head of
+the department. The politicians learned quickly that the system in that
+department ignored "pull." When they did accept it, they determined to
+overthrow the man who robbed the spoils system of its largest perquisite
+where it was most effective in numbers. The combination of the political
+machines accomplished the city's disgrace in 1897. It was redeemed in 1901
+by a people who had suffered cruelly; who saw in the four years of misrule
+that they had made their own chains of bondage.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The importance of environment is at last admitted as a factor in
+character-building. That light and air are indispensable to cleanliness,
+and physical cleanliness to health, and health to morals, is the gospel
+that the evils of the tenements have forced the philanthropists to declare
+until the thinking public is convinced of its truth.</p>
+
+<p>There are tenement houses that have reputations as positive as individuals.
+Thoughtful, intelligent wives of working-men would not, could not be
+persuaded to move into them because of their reputations. Often the evils
+of these tenements are justly attributed to the housekeepers. Housekeepers
+of tenements are women who pay the whole or a part of their rent by
+overseeing the house; attending to the cleaning, collecting the rents,
+letting the rooms, adjusting differences between tenants&mdash;"a go-between"
+between the agent or the owner and the tenants. The owner or agent
+employing these women upholds their decisions when differences between the
+tenants and housekeepers arise. This clothes them with great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> authority,
+and often enables them to do great injustice. They are feared usually.
+Families will endure restrictions of liberties, every deprivation of their
+rights, because protest would mean eviction or discomforts that would
+compel them to move.</p>
+
+<p>Under some agents and owners these housekeepers have absolute control of
+the property. They frequently make and enforce rules that utterly ignore
+the rights of tenants. This rule is often as absolute as though they were
+the owners of the house. Strange as it may seem, this class of housekeepers
+usually make the property under their control pay; they usually keep up the
+character of the houses under their control because they have standards and
+compel those about them to live up to them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/fig100.jpg" width="480" height="624" alt="A REMNANT OF THE PAST." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A REMNANT OF THE PAST.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On an East Side street a few blocks from the East River are four 27-foot
+front houses of the English-basement type. The plan of these houses
+indicates that they were designed as residences for people of ample means.
+The halls are broad, the stairways wide, ascending in recesses on the first
+floor that leaves the entrance halls clear from front to rear doorways. The
+yards of these four houses, wide and deep, are paved with broad flagging
+stones, such as are used on the sidewalks. The fences are kept in good
+order and well painted. Not a child living in these four houses dares to
+play in those yards. The housekeeper&mdash;one woman has charge of the four
+houses&mdash;would order them out. If the children did not leave at once,
+complaint would be made to the mothers; and if they did not uphold the
+housekeeper and insist that the children play in the street, the mothers
+who failed would have to move. Every mother-tenant knows this well. A
+mother of three children who had lived in these houses all her married
+life, when asked why the children could not play in the yard, where she
+could watch them, replied: "Why, if the children played in the yard they
+would make a lot of work for the housekeeper. She would not stand it." This
+mother's tone indicated that she thought the housekeeper was right. The
+youngest of the three children in another family living in these houses was
+ill all winter. When convalescent, the doctor ordered him to be kept out of
+doors as much as possible. The mother had all the work to do for five in
+family, and had to devise some means of keeping the child out that would
+not interfere with her work. She arranged the fire-escape outside of the
+window, putting pillows and toys out there. The little fellow climbed over
+the rail and struck a stone beneath, breaking his arms.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why did you not put him in the yard, where you could watch him, and where
+he could run about?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! the housekeeper would be so angry; I wouldn't dare."</p>
+
+<p>"Must you keep the children out of the yard?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; they would make an awful lot of work for the housekeeper."</p>
+
+<p>Investigation proved that the owner of this property supported the
+housekeeper in depriving even the babies of the use of these yards. A
+mother could not roll a baby carriage around the yards, because her older
+children, if she had any, would be sure to go into the yards to see her.
+The rents for four rooms, two absolutely dark, ventilated through the dark
+and unventilated halls by a window eighteen inches square, were $22, $20
+and $18 per month, respectively, for each floor. The streets in front are
+overcrowded, dirty; when the trucks were in the streets, two were always
+standing in front of these houses. Push-carts now replace the trucks.</p>
+
+<p>The people stay in these houses year after year. A bill never appears on
+them. The arbitrary restriction as to the use of the yard is not counted
+against the property, because it is so clean, kept in such good repair, and
+the character of the people scrutinized before they are accepted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> as
+tenants. It is generally understood that the renting of furnished rooms is
+not approved. The housekeeper finds a tenant who rents rooms objectionable.
+In a neighborhood where every house shows year after year a loss of
+character, people poorer and more ignorant becoming tenants, these four
+houses retain the appearance of comfort and respectability. Among the
+tenants there is but little intimacy; they appear to have little in common.
+The women are never heard in the halls, nor do they loiter about the
+doorways. The men are all skilled workmen, earning good wages&mdash;clerks on
+small salaries, or in city departments, all natives of New York. The wives
+were all wage-earners before they were married. They dress well; most of
+them are fairly good housekeepers. All buy their children's clothes ready
+made; two make their own dresses. For their children they are ambitious,
+and expect to keep them in school until they are sixteen. This the children
+defeat. The boys get places during the summer vacations in their fourteenth
+year, refusing to go back to school. The girls are contented until
+fourteen, and then they grow restless, becoming wage-earners; all that they
+earn is spent for their clothes. The wages of the father may no more than
+meet the expenses of the family, but this is not considered. Clothes are
+the essentials.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> A man having a salary of $1,400, living in one of these
+houses, had to go in debt the first week of a serious illness of his wife.
+He did not have a dollar in advance to meet emergencies. He was a proud,
+indulgent, tender husband and father.</p>
+
+<p>This type of house and this class of tenants are disappearing from the East
+Side. The remnant of this class who remain are held by political
+affiliations or family ties. The men enjoy the sense of power that comes
+from this connection, and realize fully that to leave the district would
+mean a loss of social prestige, or, if minor politicians, a loosening of
+their hold on the people to whom they represent political power. Many of
+this class remain in the section because they hold positions in the city
+departments in return for active service in the interest of the political
+machines.</p>
+
+<p>Not far away from these tenements is another in which are sixteen families.
+The rents in this house range from $5 to $9.50 per month for two to three
+rooms. The house is dirty, neglected; violations of the sanitary laws are
+evident from the front door to the roof, on which tenants occupying the
+front rooms must dry their clothes. The water is in the dark halls; in
+winter, for days at a time, the pipes, both water and drain, are frozen and
+burst; yet the tenants stay year after year. One woman, the mother of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> four
+children, was born, married, her four children were born, and her husband,
+mother and father died in this house. She has never moved, except across
+the hall, up and downstairs, as she has been able to pay more or has been
+forced to reduce her rent. The women in this house know almost nothing of
+housekeeping. The men are employed only about half the time. The number of
+children in the house averages three to each family. It is a New England
+hamlet under one roof in this particular. If there is sickness in any
+family, it is the concern of every tenant; if a man is out of work, it is a
+community misfortune, and to be shared. A new hat for man or woman is the
+cause of rejoicing, for it is the badge of respectability for any in the
+house who may need it in an emergency. The whole household, for such it
+seems to be, are poor, very poor; thriftless, unambitious; the men somewhat
+given to drink to excess; yet the spirit of neighborliness shames
+criticism. A woman in this house ill four months was nursed by her
+neighbors night and day. Her house and children were cared for, food
+provided when necessary. Comment on their loyalty and devotion was met with
+the response: "God knows how soon she may be doing it for one of us." Yet
+when that woman, whom most of them had known all her life, gave evidence of
+pregnancy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> a few months after her husband's death, not a woman crossed her
+doorsill until the birth of twin babies within the period of time redeemed
+her character. Whether from remorse or love, ample return for this cruelty
+has been made many times.</p>
+
+<p>In the two-room apartments in this house there is one closet, with shelves
+about six inches wide. This is in the one room that serves as living-room,
+kitchen, dining-room&mdash;a room less than eight feet wide. The bedroom is
+perfectly dark, ventilated by a square window into perfectly dark,
+unventilated halls. A full-sized bed leaves the width of the door between
+it and the wall. The three-room apartments have outside windows&mdash;five to
+the three rooms. There is a closet in the kitchen and one in the large
+room. People talk of poverty, but few people know what it is. A woman who
+had moved into the three-room apartment had hung all the clothing for five
+in family in the one bedroom on four nails. In reply to a protest, she said
+patiently and quietly: "There are no hooks in the closet in the front room,
+and I hadn't a penny to buy any." Ten cents provided that closet with
+hooks. A comment was made on the keeping of the washtub under the kitchen
+table. "Why do you not have the tub carried to the cellar?" An expression
+of self-pity passed over the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> woman's face as she explained that the tub
+would have to be carried down three flights of stairs, out on the street,
+around the corner, down the cellar stairs, and then to her coal cellar at
+the extreme end of the cellar.</p>
+
+<p>The house stands on a corner, the entrance from the street at the extreme
+end of the west wall. The cellar door was formerly close to the entrance
+door, but the landlord built in the back end of the cellar an oven when a
+baker hired the store on the first floor. A cellar door was then opened at
+the farthest part of the front, or south wall, one hundred and twenty-five
+feet from the entrance door of the house. Is it surprising that coal is
+bought by the pail by all the tenants? That tubs are kept anywhere in their
+rooms where there is space?</p>
+
+<p>Shiftlessness, thriftless uncleanliness marks even the sidewalk about this
+house. The dirt inside or out troubles nobody. Children will spill half the
+contents of the garbage pail they are carrying to the cans in the tiny
+yard, in halls and on the stairway. It is kicked out of the way without
+comment. Dogs or cats, and ofttimes both, are members of the families who
+live under this roof. The unsanitary conditions of the closets in the yard
+arouse pity for the tenants on the first floor; but no tenant thinks of
+complaining to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> either the housekeeper or the authorities. It would be
+useless, and would get them into trouble. The present owner is willing to
+kalsomine the bedrooms and halls each spring, but the tenants object
+because it makes a lot of work.</p>
+
+<p>In August, two years ago, the writer was going up the first flight of
+stairs in this house, when a baby voice was heard pleading: "Pease tum
+fas'er; oh, pease tum fas'er; I 'ant to do p'ay; I 'ant to doe on steet;
+pease tum fas'er." On the third floor a tiny boy stood in front of the sink
+talking to the faucet, from which a tiny stream was flowing into a little
+tin pail. An infant's voice from one of the rooms told the story. The
+mother needed water and could not leave the baby. Perhaps this was the tiny
+nurse of mother and baby, big enough to call a neighbor to do what he could
+not do.</p>
+
+<p>When it is remembered that this stream of water from the faucet represented
+the water supply for four families, the difficulties of cleanliness under
+those conditions may be slightly appreciated. In spite of the dirt, the
+darkness, the unsanitary conditions of this house, the thriftlessness and
+ignorance of the tenants, there is a spirit of neighborliness in it that
+puts the critical to blush. Without a doubt the housekeeper, who is a
+shrewd woman, fosters this spirit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> of neighborliness. She smiles as she
+says: "They gets so used to each other they hates to be separated." Neither
+house nor tenants seem to go below the level established twelve years ago.</p>
+
+<p>There is a housekeeper who does mission work of which the world takes no
+note. She is the woman who in the true sense is an altruist. By her force
+of character, her hatred of inefficiency, her love of order, she compels
+the women who become tenants who do not know how to keep house to learn
+how.</p>
+
+<p>The writer knows intimately such a housekeeper. She had charge of a
+four-story tenement on the lower East Side. The house was of the type known
+as "double decker." There were four apartments on each floor; the front
+consisting of a kitchen, living-room and two bedrooms; the back, of one
+room and two bedrooms. Small windows near the ceiling in kitchen and
+bedrooms opened on a narrow space between this and the next house, which
+was an old-fashioned residence. A similar opening in that house enabled the
+neighbors to look into each other's rooms. Water and refuse were thrown
+into this space between the two houses, and sometimes into the rooms of
+neighbors unintentionally. There was war, bitter war, because of this; for
+the large tenement was occupied by a part of the remnant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> having social
+standards left on the lower East Side.</p>
+
+<p>There was water in all the kitchens of the large tenement. The halls were
+absolutely dark, but were free from the nuisances of hallways having sinks.
+Stairs and halls were covered with light oilcloth, the stairs having brass
+treads on the edge. Everything was kept as clean as soap, water and
+muscular strength could keep it.</p>
+
+<p>The first visit was made to this house long before Colonel Waring had shown
+what clean streets would do in the tenement-house districts. On the street
+curb in front of the door stood three ash barrels filled within three
+inches of the top, carefully covered with newspapers tucked in around the
+edge of the contents. This indicates the standards of this housekeeper. She
+hated dirt and disorder. She could not be happy where it was. She forced by
+tact, coercion, persuasion, any and every means, her way to the heart and
+home of every ignorant housekeeper who came under that roof. She taught
+cooking by sending cake, bread, soup she had made to the tenants, and
+arousing the desire in them to learn how to make that particular dish. She
+instituted an exchange of skill among the tenants. The woman who could make
+a dress and not a hat exchanged skill with the one who had been a milliner.
+The woman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> who made bread and failed with cake exchanged skill with the
+cakemaker. They even took turns in going to the theatre, the neighbor
+staying home and taking care of the children.</p>
+
+<p>The property was more valuable every year; no bill appeared at the door. It
+stood apart from its neighbors for years. This housekeeper was compelled to
+give up her responsibility and left the house, as she wisely said: "No one
+would manage it in my way. I could not get on in peace." Six months after
+every tenant had moved but the liquor dealer; and even his bar-room had
+sunk to a lower level. A building in which many homes might be maintained
+is now merely a place of shelter. People move in and out; no relations are
+established; there is nothing to hold the tenant here above any other
+house. The owner has sold the property, hating its present character.</p>
+
+<p>Again, tenants will be the victims of vindictive housekeepers, who for any
+and no reason will begin a system of petty persecutions to compel a tenant
+to move. Then there is the gossiping housekeeper, who keeps the tenants at
+war. It is no secret that the method of rent collecting of some
+housekeepers holds tenants year after year. They will take the rent in the
+smallest sums, daily or weekly. By the end of the month they will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> usually
+have the full amount collected. The houses where this system prevails are
+the most objectionable. The tenants for this leniency endure positive
+evils. The important thing is a place of shelter for the family. Work is
+uncertain, or long periods of idleness has made the payment of rent
+impossible for a period. The housekeeper understands and becomes
+responsible for keeping the tenant until the rent is paid. In return the
+tenants endure neglect of duty on the part of the housekeeper. Silence is
+their expression of gratitude. No repairs are made, for none are demanded.
+The house sinks lower and lower; anybody can move in on the payment of part
+of a month's rent. The vacant rooms are dirty&mdash;give visible evidence of the
+presence of vermin; but the family evicted with only half a month's rent in
+hand cannot afford to be critical. This is the house that makes the slum.</p>
+
+<p>Two housekeepers of tenements were discussing owners and tenants before the
+writer. One was rigid, keeping the house astonishingly clean, with rooms
+rarely vacant; the other, always in trouble with the tenants, always having
+some one to evict, threw the blame for her troubles on the tenants. The
+first one listened, finally saying slowly: "No, you are the one. You get
+cross and abuse the children. You make pets of some children and some
+mothers, and the others see it and get mad. Then there is a fight. To keep
+a house you must treat everybody the same. You must make good rules; you
+must do your part and make every tenant do her part. I've had two of the
+tenants you put out of your house five years. They are good tenants; watch
+yourself."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/fig114.jpg" width="480" height="595" alt="A TYPE OF THE PRESENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A TYPE OF THE PRESENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There are landlords who care for nothing but the income from their
+property. Any kind of tenant who will pay rent is acceptable. Any
+housekeeper who collects the specified amount may hold control without
+question. The housekeeper may have standards, but these are swept aside by
+the exactions of the landlord. The rents in such houses are usually high,
+because there is such a percentage of loss in rents. This house also
+contributes to the creation of the slum.</p>
+
+<p>The careless and apparently malicious destruction of property by tenants is
+not appreciated by those who touch this question of tenement houses
+superficially. No means has yet been found to make the tenement-house
+population understand that the abuse of property is a factor in their rent
+problem. Within a year the writer was walking with a group of women, two of
+whom were housekeepers in tenement houses. This question of tenants was
+being discussed freely by the women who were tenants as well as the
+housekeepers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> It was interesting to find that all agreed that one family
+could change the character of a tenement house for the worst, but one
+family could not improve its character. The reason was that the family
+above the tenement came only to reduce their rent during a hard time, while
+the family with evil tendencies stayed until they were put out, to go into
+a cheaper tenement and lower that. They agreed that where housekeeper and
+tenant got on well together both hated a change. The two things that
+dragged down the character of a tenement was beer-drinking and destructive
+children&mdash;children allowed to "run wild." These women insisted that there
+never would be quarrels in tenement houses were it not for these two
+causes. A woman who drank beer would invite her new neighbors to drink.
+They would treat in return, and the house would show it at once. The women
+who drink beer in this fashion grow careless of their persons and their
+homes; they get rid of their children, who soon learn to enjoy the freedom
+from control. The children destroy the property first in play, through
+carelessness, and later grow malicious.</p>
+
+<p>If a housekeeper is sharp and shrewd, these women tenants claimed that she
+could at any time get rid of an objectionable tenant; but the housekeepers
+held that if the owner did not care<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> for anything but rents, the
+housekeeper was often compelled to let in and keep in objectionable
+tenants. They admitted, one and all, that houses fairly indicated the
+character of the people who would live in them, and that rents regulated
+the class of tenants to a very great degree. They admitted that at times
+one could find tenants who had lived for many years in one house where
+conditions had changed for the worst. But it was unusual. People now
+selected houses where those of their own faith, and, if foreign, those of
+their own nationality, at least predominated. That this tendency was seen
+more and more every year. This group of women were among the remnant of
+Christians left on the lower East Side. All had been born there of Irish
+parentage. They lived in the houses bordering on the edge of the East
+River&mdash;old houses on the plan of the first tenements erected in New York,
+or in houses designed for one family and now holding four to eight. Two of
+them lived in houses built in a row erected eighty-three years ago. They
+were two-story, dormer windows and basement frame houses, built without an
+area, the door to the basements opening like a cellar door on the street.
+These basements were occupied by a family each. Fourteen of these houses
+are still standing. The people in this section live a life entirely their
+own.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> They have been crowded out, the more prosperous, by the Hebrews,
+while the remnant find themselves hemmed in by them.</p>
+
+<p>These people live in the confines of a Roman Catholic parish that twenty
+years ago contained nearly eleven thousand souls of that faith. Three years
+ago the priest in charge estimated his parish at less than four thousand,
+and that four thousand remained because they were too poor to get away, he
+declared.</p>
+
+<p>The Hebrews, as tenants will, on the same block show many social grades,
+many degrees of poverty and prosperity, many stages of development in
+American civilization. There is a sense of feeling of brotherhood that
+other people lack. The houses will range from the most uncleanly, ill-kept,
+to the new tenement with ornate entrance and modern improvements. The most
+modern will, on entering, be found with walls marked and broken when the
+wood-work is new. No one seems troubled by this destruction. The
+housekeeper does not struggle, for it is expected and charged for in the
+rent. Plumbing is of the simplest, for it is expected to present the
+largest percentage of loss in the administration of the property. One of
+the most elaborate of the new tenements erected on the lower East Side was
+visited three months after it was occupied. Every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> hallway from top to
+bottom of the house had broken plaster and was marked by pencil and crayon.
+The plumber was then a daily visitor. This house a year afterward bore on
+the interior evidences that years of hard usage might have brought. The
+housekeeper collected rents and attended to the garbage. She was utterly
+indifferent to the appearance of the house, which, intended for prosperous
+families, was a nest of sweat-shops, where even children of six and seven
+were employed. The rents had been collected; that was the owner's only
+requirement.</p>
+
+<p>The West Side is congested, because manufacture and storehouses are
+displacing the houses. Rents are high, and the houses for the most part old
+residences occupied by several families. The people, generally, are
+Americans. They are deeply attached to this old section, because it is
+their birthplace; and for many of them an even deeper attachment prevails,
+for this section was the birthplace of parents. The houses often are found
+to have lifelong friends, often relatives, as tenants. The tenants keep the
+halls and stairways clean in turn, and the houses generally are well kept
+up. Here one tenant is allowed a rebate on rent for renting rooms,
+collecting the rent, caring for the sidewalk and stoop, the garbage and
+ash-cans. The majority of the people in this section are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> Protestants. The
+Protestant churches are well maintained. The Trinity Corporation supports
+kindergartens, cooking and sewing schools. The Judson Memorial is a very
+attractive gymnasium, that brings children from as far west as the North
+River. The Methodist Church holds many who in no other section could find
+the same equality and freedom. The vocabulary of the people through this
+section shows the effect of the newer activities in the modern churches;
+the effect of the enlarging interests of the children in art and nature
+through the public school education.</p>
+
+<p>While the people are living on small incomes, often on uncertain incomes,
+life is lived at a much higher level than on the East Side. Children are
+not so precocious in evil knowledge. This difference is due largely to the
+fact that the houses contain three and four families at the most; that the
+apartment houses in the section are beyond the reach of any but the skilled
+working man. He holds his own at high rental in the house that shelters but
+three other families like his own. His neighbors are people of like
+ambitions as his own, and demand what he demands.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig122.jpg" width="640" height="457" alt="A CORNER IN A WORKINGMAN&#39;S HOME." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A CORNER IN A WORKINGMAN&#39;S HOME.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The housekeepers in this section differ essentially in their relation to
+the tenants from those of the more heterogeneous population of the East
+Side of the city. One resemblance is recognized&mdash;the effect of the
+character of the housekeeper. Here, as on the East Side, to a very large
+degree, the comfort, health, peace and good-will of the tenants in every
+house depends on the character and the spirit of the woman who controls the
+property for the landlord.</p>
+
+<p>The law of natural selection holds good. The housekeeper holds the tenants
+who are satisfied with the conditions she creates. They, especially the
+children, develop in habits of cleanliness, in care of property, in respect
+for the rights of others, as the rules of the house enforced by the
+housekeeper compel. It is in her power to get rid of those who do not
+accept her dictates, let them be what they may&mdash;just or unjust. The
+housekeeper will make her presence felt. If she violates the law in the
+disposal of garbage outside of the house, tenants will violate the law she
+makes for them in the care and disposal of garbage inside the house. If she
+is compelled to obey the law, she will compel tenants to obey the law. It
+is this that makes the morale of the Department of Street Cleaning so
+important. If the part of the house which in renting tenants agree to keep
+clean is not kept clean, the observer will discover that the housekeeper
+does not keep her part of the agreement in keeping the entrance clean.</p>
+
+<p>A large factor in the tenement house for character<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> building or destroying
+is the housekeeper who has charge of it. Where she is well paid she makes
+the property valuable. She cares for it, for the character of the tenants.
+Tenants remain in the house because of the advantages her offices control
+for the poor man and his wife anxious to provide for their children's best
+welfare. Property under this type of woman resists decay. She holds it in
+spite of the decay about it. The characterless, slovenly, indifferent
+housekeeper is a factor in destroying property, because of the destructive
+character of the tenants who will tolerate her and her methods.</p>
+
+<p>The house that is the property of the man with "a pull" is an obstruction
+to civilization almost impossible to overcome. By connivance the law is
+inoperative. If pushed, such an owner can easily rid himself of the tenants
+who attempt, or have attempted for them, efforts to compel the owners to
+repair the property. A mill owner on the water front on the lower East Side
+owned three three-story and basement houses adjoining the mill property.
+They had been built for one family each. The basements were altered into
+stores, and the floors above altered at the least cost to accommodate one
+or two families. This meant two inside bedrooms absolutely without
+ventilation. The tenants of this property and all in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> the neighborhood were
+tormented by the smoke and gas from the chimney of the mill. When the wind
+blew directly toward the houses, windows were kept closed for hours in the
+warmest weather. All the tenants dried their clothes on pulley lines.
+Frequently the soot made the clothes unwearable, and they had to be washed
+the second time. Ten years of effort have failed to compel the building of
+the chimney of that mill to the legal height.</p>
+
+<p>The houses the mill owner owned were in a disgraceful condition. The
+closets in the yards had no flow of water. The engineer of the mill was
+required to carry a hose from the mill over the fences to the closets to
+flush them. Sometimes he forgot to turn the water off, and the yards were
+flooded and made disgusting. Sometimes he forgot for days at a time to
+flush the closets, when the conditions were even worse. Only people who
+were helpless or hopeless would endure such conditions. One of the workers
+of the College Settlement discovered the conditions in these houses. She
+took immediate steps to compel the necessary improvements. The owner
+discovered that the wife and children of one of the tenants went to clubs
+at the Settlement, and he ordered that family to move. Before the mother
+moved her education had begun, and she imparted to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> neighbors the
+information that the conditions were unlawful and could be changed if they
+would fight for it. The man exacted his rent on the first of the month; he
+was hard and unyielding; the tenants continued the warfare until he had
+evicted every one who spoke English and filled his houses with foreigners.
+One of the stores is used for storing and sorting rags and paper; next door
+is a meat shop. The fight was given up. The owner had "a pull," and the law
+is defied to this day on that property.</p>
+
+<p>All the land on the river front in this neighborhood for blocks is made
+land, filled in by the city refuse, on which houses were built years ago.
+This kind of property extends back from the North River for three, and at
+one point four, blocks. In some of the houses near the river the high tides
+of spring and fall rise in the cellars. The College Settlement workers who
+visited families in one of these houses had been distressed by the amount
+of illness in it. Malaria had attacked every family. Spring and fall wages
+were lost at times by as many as three wage-earners in one family for two
+and three days each week. In addition to loss of wages, there was the
+expense of medicine and doctors. At last came the urgent request that a
+worker should call on a girl of sixteen who was dying of consumption on the
+first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> floor. This consisted of four rooms, two being inside bedrooms, each
+of which would hold a three-quarter bed and a chair between the bed and the
+wall. One was absolutely unventilated, except through the doors. It was, in
+fact, a passageway between the front and rear rooms. This plan is the usual
+plan in houses altered from residences for one family to a tenement house.</p>
+
+<p>The door of the other bedroom, which opened into the large room, was closed
+at night because the large room was used as a bedroom by the male members
+of the family and one lodger. The girl of sixteen had slept with two others
+in that room for eight years. The floors of the four rooms were covered
+with carpets. The odor was sickening. The visitor asked the tenant who
+brought her to the sick girl what caused the odor perceptible in the hall,
+with front and rear windows always open, unbearable in the rooms where
+doors and windows were closed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that! The water has been in the cellar now for two or three weeks. The
+tides are high now." A visit to the cellar showed the water at the height
+of the second step of the cellar stairs; also a sewer pipe that had burst.
+Visits were made to the proper city department once a week for eleven
+weeks. The clerk, on the last visit, evidently intending to be facetious,
+said: "Say,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> what's the matter with those people taking baths in that
+cellar? They ain't got no bathtubs."</p>
+
+<p>The owner of the property had "pull" enough to escape even an investigation
+by the department. It was years before the cellar of that house was
+concreted and the necessary connections of pipes and sewers made. It was
+done when the property had changed hands and a man comparatively poor and
+wholly free from political affiliations became the owner.</p>
+
+<p>The people of this whole region are the victims of political corruption.
+Some of them have more fear of offending a political light, let his glimmer
+be ever so small, than of offending against even God's law. They could be
+turned out of house and home, deprived of the means of earning a living, by
+men who openly defy the law, and who become heroes to the growing boys and
+girls for no reason but because of their power to use and defy the law.</p>
+
+<p>The moral natures of the men and the women who grow up under this influence
+are dwarfed and warped until it is impossible for them to have distinct
+conceptions of right and wrong. The education they receive does not reveal
+the relations of ethics to life; the struggle for existence dulls the mind;
+while the depleted physical conditions caused by bad air, mal-nutrition and
+ignorance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> of real values reduce moral resistance almost to zero. Enforce
+the tenement-house laws, and the moral strength of the people of New York
+will rise to higher levels of moral resistance. Not poverty, but the burden
+imposed by political corruption, is the blight of home life in the
+tenement-house sections of New York.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<h3>SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>In a preceding chapter an attempt was made to show how hopeless the task of
+home-making was for women who had neither knowledge nor ideals to guide
+them. When it is remembered that the environment of these homes was in
+itself degrading, to maintain even the semblance of a home was a remarkable
+achievement.</p>
+
+<p>These women knew but three educating influences&mdash;home, school and Church.
+Four, perhaps, if one chooses to count the streets, where most of their
+time was spent, as one. The value of the first they revealed in the homes
+they made. The school at the time it was a factor in their development was
+a place that had no connection with anything else in their lives. What they
+learned there was but to the exceptional few without any practical value.
+They learned to read to get promoted, or because they could not help it.
+The arithmetic which they found valuable they learned in doing errands and
+spending their own pennies. They learned to form letters with their pens;
+but as they had no use for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> knowledge, they soon forgot it. Their
+conception of education and that of their world left them perfectly at ease
+in their accomplishment. The Church had to do with their souls; and to the
+majority the care of their souls was a delegated responsibility, and gave
+them little concern, if any. Personal effort in that direction was a matter
+of old age.</p>
+
+<p>The Church was, by its own traditions and sentiment, a spiritual light and
+guide; the end and aim of its service to develop spiritual life by teaching
+and prayer. The social life of the people, or, for that matter, the civic
+conditions that to the last degree regulated and controlled their
+pleasures, were not the concern of the Church. The parish house did not
+exist. The institutional church had not been conceived even in thought.</p>
+
+<p>Yet at this period, 1880 and 1881, there was a growing consciousness that
+something was wrong in the social order; that neither churches, schools nor
+homes were meeting the necessities of the working people or their children.
+The Church found itself losing ground; the people could not be held in
+allegiance to it. This was so true of the Protestant churches downtown that
+already the wisdom of moving uptown was being questioned. Some had even
+then left their old buildings to be used as mission churches; others sold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>
+their downtown buildings, moving uptown, giving up any attempt at holding
+the masses, who manifested no interest in the Church or its work. The
+missions then established were and are maintained with more or less wisdom
+and success. That mistakes should be made was natural. There was no
+precedent as to how one class in this democratic community should work for
+another. It took years for the churches to learn that the secret of success
+was in working <i>with</i>, and not <i>for</i>, the people.</p>
+
+<p>The overcrowding went on. Neighborhoods changed so rapidly that it was
+impossible to adopt any system to meet the necessities of the social
+conditions. These conditions were created by race standards of living,
+pleasure and religion. No man or organization was prepared to grapple with
+them intelligently, for they viewed them as observers.</p>
+
+<p>The Church had still the first interpretation of feeding the hungry,
+clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison. Secular work was
+not yet a part of the redemptive work of the Church. Poverty and ignorance
+reigned where prosperity and intelligence had been. The mission church
+became a distributing station. It was but natural that the men and women
+who followed Christ in their lives should feed and clothe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> the hungry and
+the naked. It was quite as natural that people whose struggle for life was
+constant, a struggle in which they were rarely successful, even when they
+accepted their own standards of success, should develop shrewdness in
+securing all possible aid at the least possible effort. The more they
+received without effort, the easier life was made for them. This was one
+method of adjustment. Where there were several children in a family they
+were often sent to as many Sunday-schools. The churches, all unconsciously,
+for a long period carried on the work of the missions on a commercial
+basis, competing energetically to secure attendants at mission services and
+Sunday-schools. The workers found their success measured by the numbers
+that appeared in their reports. It was the American standard of success. It
+became profitable to go to Sunday-school. The approach of the holidays
+found them crowded. The mission churches boomed. They provided an outlet
+for the energies of devoted, consecrated men and women, determined to make
+the world better because they were in it. The missions were an outlet for
+the generous; for the men and the women who considered themselves stewards
+of the properties in their possession. The blunders made are a tribute to
+the faith which established and maintained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> churches. The very blunders of
+those years were the seeds of wisdom these latter days are beginning to
+garner in the fruits of co&ouml;peration and federation. The forces are
+beginning to marshal under one banner and emblem, with one aim born of the
+nineteenth century conception, that Christ taught civic duty to His
+followers when He declared, "Render unto C&aelig;sar the things that are
+C&aelig;sar's." That the Church is the guardian of the people's rights, as well
+as their example, is a long-delayed conception. It has taken thirty years
+to bring the evolution in Church work from competition to co&ouml;peration in
+the work of personal and civic regeneration.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the difficulties hardest to overcome have grown out of the mistakes
+of those years, when the rapid influx of foreigners changed the character
+of the people of the tenement regions, and the Church failed to change its
+methods. They came, many of them, paupers, a charge at once upon the
+charitable and the humane. Neither their ignorance nor poverty was a bar to
+their citizenship; their presence on the municipal stage in the character
+of voters, sovereigns, increased the civic problems of New York, and
+naturally these the Church problems.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately the charitable work of the churches was too often left to the
+management of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> sentimental people, who failed to see what has been forced
+upon workers of the present day: that hunger is sometimes a moral educator;
+that the salvation of a family may sometimes be best secured by letting
+them suffer, the innocent with the guilty, because in the suffering is an
+educating power impossible to secure in any other way.</p>
+
+<p>One evening to a working-girls' club a teacher in a mission school not far
+away brought a girl of sixteen, introducing her as one of her girls who had
+been in her class two years. Privately she told one of the directors of the
+club of the poverty of the girl's family. The father was a man of
+seventy-five, who could do only the lightest work, and found getting the
+work he could do very difficult. This girl was the eldest of seven
+children, all attending the mission. "It is a mystery what would become of
+the family, were it not for what the mission does for them," was the
+comment of the teacher. A close inspection of the girl did not reveal
+distressing poverty, and the directors of the club were puzzled. The girl
+was employed in a store at a very small salary. She was anxious to go to
+the country. Of course, she must be sent away without any cost to herself.
+She doubted if the family could spare her wages, even if she could go free.
+She explained that she and her brothers and sisters had gone in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> "Tribune
+Fresh-Air Parties," but she was now too old. "The trouble with our family
+is," she commented, "that we are all too old." It seemed a hopeless
+doctrine to become fixed in the mind of a girl of sixteen, so the club
+directors secured a vacation for her through the Working-Girls' Vacation
+Society, deciding that, if it were necessary, they would pay the mother her
+wages for the time the girl was away. No question arose as to her wages. At
+the expiration of her two weeks' vacation, when she should have been
+penniless, she appeared at the club in a new hat and gloves. When the girl
+joined the club her Sunday-school teacher paid one month's dues. She had
+been present at several business meetings; she had seen the other girls
+paying their dues, she had heard the treasurer's report, but she never
+attempted to assume her financial obligations. She was spoken to finally in
+regard to her dues, and responded calmly by saying she could not pay her
+dues; she had no money. Various suggestions were made as to the possibility
+of her paying part. At last, to relieve the club treasury, one of the
+directors said: "I will pay what you owe and one month in advance. You may
+pay me as you can." The girl never came to the club again. No effort was
+made to trace her, as she contributed nothing to the life of the club, and
+many girls<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> kept their dues paid who dressed far more plainly; these very
+girls she had on more than one occasion treated discourteously.</p>
+
+<p>Two years afterward one of the club officers was calling on a friend. "I am
+so glad you came in," she exclaimed. "One of your club girls is in trouble
+and is coming here with Miss &mdash;&mdash;, a mission worker in Dr. &mdash;&mdash;'s church,
+this morning. Now you can help solve her problem." To have a member of a
+working-girls' club go to an outsider for help is to have one of your own
+family appeal to strangers in time of need. The club worker kept still. She
+was covered with shame. She had failed to establish relations with one it
+was her sole purpose to help. Who the girl was she did not know, as her
+friend had forgotten the girl's name. The girl came. It was our old friend
+of sixteen. She was, as may be imagined, not pleased to see the director of
+the club. The history of that family is fairly indicative of how missions
+were conducted at that time. How many of them are conducted at the present
+with the same results? Originally this family was found by the workers of a
+mission established by a wealthy church, and apparently in need. Rent was
+paid; food and clothes provided; doctors sent when necessary. The return
+for this, as tacitly agreed, was the presence of the children, as rapidly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+as they were old enough, in the Sunday-school, and the father and mother at
+the Sunday evening service, the only service this mission maintained.</p>
+
+<p>The timidity of the first contact disappeared early. The wants soon outgrew
+the needs of the family. The mission people failed to respond to the wants,
+and watched more closely what it cost the church to meet the needs after
+the first years of acquaintance. This was not to be borne. The family went
+in a body to another mission of the same church ten blocks away. They made
+not the slightest effort to deceive, for they did not change their address.
+Here were nine persons to add to the roll of the mission, and they were
+added. The family was enthusiastically welcomed. No impudent or intrusive
+questions were asked. Shoes, coats, rent money in whole or part was
+generously given. At the end of two years discoveries were made that led
+the mission workers to question what was done with the supplies provided.
+The family would not stand this. They went bodily to a church less than a
+mile away, still living at the old address. The family was again taken up
+without question. That the father could not work was accepted and
+generosity was increased. The other missions contrasted unfavorably in
+generous impulses; the girl urged her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> former classmates to join the last
+mission. The church meanwhile was walking by faith in its treatment of the
+poor; aiming to live up to the conception of its days; strengthening the
+influence of its prayers with gifts of potatoes; certainly a great advance
+on prayers and no potatoes.</p>
+
+<p>At about this time a young girl was met in a Sunday-school class very
+attractive, always well and prettily dressed. She had been in the
+Sunday-school all her life, and had joined the church with her mother, a
+gentle, quiet woman, who leaned on her daughter for guidance. The daughter
+was a tower of strength. By accident it was learned that the girl was a
+wage-earner, working with her mother in a large suit house in New York;
+that they kept house, doing the housework, even the washing and ironing,
+before and after their day's work. Added to this they made all their own
+clothes, which must have involved a vast amount of labor, as they both
+dressed well.</p>
+
+<p>The position of this mother and daughter is fairly typical of a large army
+of women workers, and explains, in part, at least, why two women of so much
+character should have accepted charity for so many years and why they could
+not change their economic relation. The work they did was to a degree a
+trade. Each was a special "hand" on a certain part of women's suits. They
+were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> paid by the piece. When they had work, they made good wages; but the
+seasons were short. The beginning of every season found them in debt. By
+the time the debt was paid work had grown slack or stopped. It was simply
+impossible to get beyond this, try as they would. When the girl broke down,
+she explained it by saying, "I worked all night to finish my dress. If I
+could buy the material in the slack season I could make our things then. We
+never have the money, and they have to be made just when work is hardest at
+the store." She was but nineteen. The girl was pretty, ambitious, entirely
+above the men of her own station in refinement, and yet quite as far
+beneath the brothers of the girls she met in her Sunday-school class. She
+lived in mental terror lest they should attempt to call on her. It was
+pitiful to see the struggle she made to conceal the fact that she was poor.
+The other girls knew she worked, knew the church helped the family, but
+were very tactful in assisting her in keeping her secret.</p>
+
+<p>When the mother came to the notice of the officers of the church she was a
+widow with three young children, one a baby. She could support her family
+if the rent was paid. The church officers were glad to do this. They did
+not support a mission and had very little outlet for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> church's
+generosity, except the mission societies&mdash;Home and Foreign&mdash;to which they
+were devoted as a church.</p>
+
+<p>For thirteen years the church had been faithful to its promise and paid the
+rent. Nobody questioned the mother as to how her children were getting on,
+or what was being done to make them self-supporting. The younger were two
+boys. When they were large enough to play on the street, the mother put
+them in an institution and paid a small sum for them. The girl went to work
+with the mother as soon as she could. The elder boy came home at fourteen
+and became a wage-earner. He was troublesome, most difficult to manage, was
+out of work more time than he was employed, and yet he would not when
+unemployed even keep the fire, that the house might be comfortable when his
+mother and sister came home. They always left the house in order when they
+went to work, but found it littered when they returned. The boy had no
+sense of moral responsibility for his own support. His temper was wholly
+untrained. At the time the family history was connected, the youngest boy
+was to come home, and naturally his return was dreaded. The mother and
+daughter met the problem unaided as to advice or suggestion. Apparently the
+church would continue to pay the rent without question, though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> there were
+three, and would soon be four, wage-earners in the family.</p>
+
+<p>When these facts were discovered, the church committee was asked to advance
+money enough to pay for the girl's lessons at a school where dress-cutting
+was taught, and to notify the widow that her rent would no longer be paid.</p>
+
+<p>The girl accepted the offer at once. She proved a great success, and to-day
+is earning a salary as a designer equal to that of many college professors.
+She educated her younger brother in a profession, and has entirely
+forgotten the days when the church helped her. Her social affiliations are
+in another part of the city, and she bows, or forgets to bow, when she
+meets those who may remember it, as they would, to her credit. Had the
+church retained its claim on her through its financial aid, she would not
+be where she is to-day. Her development came when the church made another
+future possible to her by refusing to pauperize the family.</p>
+
+<p>We all know the families who have more turkeys at Christmas than members.
+We still have churches and sewing schools in the same neighborhood, giving
+their Christmas entertainments at different hours and at different dates,
+to suit the convenience of those who attend both and profit thereby. We
+even have different entertainments<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> given for different branches of work in
+the same church at different hours. We succeeded in impressing one boy with
+the idea that what he received at the various organizations maintained for
+his profit was "Christmas loot," and that he was clever at getting more
+than his share. We have become accustomed to conducting an exchange after
+our Christmas entertainments, because in giving we have, unfortunately,
+duplicated the gifts received elsewhere. Mollie finds herself with two
+dolls and no bed, and Katie has two beds and no doll, and Alice has two
+sets of dishes and no table. Like fate has attended the gifts to the boys.
+We, as a result, enact the r&ocirc;le of patient, sweet generosity and
+redistribute gifts.</p>
+
+<p>We know that comparisons are made as to which church, sewing school or club
+is the one to give the major portion of the coming year's attendance. But
+all this will disappear as rapidly as sectarianism and competition between
+churches and in philanthropic effort disappear. Competition created it;
+co&ouml;peration will dispel it, because all will come to a higher conception of
+the relations of efforts toward improvement. Then the "profit" of church
+and Sunday-school attendance will not be measured by the "things"
+distributed.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing marks the growth of public intelligence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> more than the federations,
+and the systems that have grown out of the knowledge of the injury done the
+poor by misplaced generosity. Sometimes the children of the poor seem
+uncanny in the knowledge they possess of how to use the public and private
+charities.</p>
+
+<p>A girl of seventeen gave astonishing evidence of this in a family crisis.
+She was a member of a working-girls' club; quiet, studious, reserved. She
+was always one of the poorest dressed girls in the club. Her devotion to
+those classes which she joined and attended regularly attracted the
+attention and admiration of the club directors. Discovering that her dress
+was in part responsible for the treatment accorded her by two or three
+members, it was decided to make it possible for her to make a better
+appearance. She had shown qualities which, if allowed free play, would make
+her an influential member of the club.</p>
+
+<p>It was discovered that she attended a near-by mission of a Congregational
+church. Consultation with the mission workers brought the unwelcome
+knowledge that the mother was immoral, hopelessly immoral, but that her
+children loved her dearly and that she was devoted to them. The paying of
+rent seemed to support a shelter that ought not to exist, but no one had
+the courage to attempt to separate the mother and children.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> Even this girl
+of seventeen had no idea of her mother's wrong-doing. It was a case that
+needed the wisdom of Solomon to solve. Just before Christmas the mother
+fell ill. The passion of grief that convulsed that group of children was
+convincing testimony of the mother's tenderness and devotion. Her eyes
+followed them constantly. When able to speak, she would whisper: "What will
+become of them? There is no one to care for them." She was removed to a
+hospital, with the knowledge that the rent had been paid for a month and
+that the children would be looked after. She died two days later. When the
+house was visited that morning, the elder girl was out "getting things,"
+the children said. When she came in, she was told that provision had been
+made to send them all together to a home, where they would not be separated
+for a month. The girl sprang to her feet, grabbed the fifteen-months-old
+baby from the floor, and swept the others in a circle about her. She
+panted, rather than said: "You shall not take the baby away! I will not let
+them go! Nobody shall take them. They are mine. I can take care of them.
+You just pay the rent. I can do everything else. See?" She put the baby
+down, and thrusting her hands into her pockets, brought out tickets to the
+Diet Kitchen, the Charities Department for coal and groceries.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> She had
+been to two missionaries connected with different churches she knew, and
+secured orders on a near-by grocery for dry groceries. There was not a
+public or private charity that gave out-door assistance that that girl of
+seventeen did not know just what must be done to get their help. The amount
+of knowledge of this kind that she possessed was astounding.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, there was not an institution in the city where children were taken
+for longer or shorter periods of time that she did not know. In many of
+them she had been herself. In others she had visited the other children of
+the family when they were inmates. She found out the defects of each
+one&mdash;the kind of matron, of food, of punishments that governed in each, and
+made out a case against each one. White, with blazing eyes, she looked
+capable of doing just what she said she would do, take care of the family
+of five little children. They were grouped about her, clinging to her, all
+crying in the face of the awful calamity that was about to befall
+them&mdash;separation. It was agreed that they should stay where they were for
+the balance of the month. The question of the future beyond that would be
+discussed later. The girl quieted down.</p>
+
+<p>The mother had been insured in one of the insurance companies on the weekly
+payment plan.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> The girl had secured an undertaker who would go to the
+hospital and take the mother's body to his establishment for the funeral to
+be held the next morning.</p>
+
+<p>"We will have our own minister," she said, with dignity, "not the mission."
+Her visitors were again astounded. The mission had looked after the family
+for years. The girl had for several years been connected with the
+Sunday-school. The address of the minister was secured. The girl explained:
+"My mother was confirmed in that church, in her own country, her own home.
+She had a letter to the church when she came to this country with my father
+after they were married. At first my father earned good money, but he got
+sick and they did not get along, and my mother stopped going there, except
+to communion; and for three years now she ain't had the clothes to go even
+then. She had us confirmed there as soon as we were old enough, and we went
+there to communion when we had the clothes. The minister is going to come
+to the funeral, and I am going to send word to some of mother's friends
+from the old country who go there to church. I could not have them come
+here; mother would feel awful." Glancing about the barren, dirty rooms with
+a look of scorn, she continued: "We could not let our church friends<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> know
+how poor we are. Mother tried hard enough. She was away from home days at a
+time looking for work. She took boarders. She did everything she could. You
+know I've worked when I could get it." Her voice broke for the first time.
+"She took boarders and gave them the beds; we all slept on the floor. She
+married the last boarder, the baby's father. She told me to stay here until
+he came home, this month&mdash;he's a sailor&mdash;and to do just what he says. He
+was always kind to me and gave me things. You've paid the rent, and you
+need not do anything more. I'll stay right here and keep the children till
+the baby's father comes home; you need not trouble any more."</p>
+
+<p>She was quiet a moment, but evidently felt the doubt and the decision in
+her visitors' minds. Rising, she said fiercely: "I'll not; I'll never let
+these children be taken from me!"</p>
+
+<p>The problem was too much for her visitors. They decided to leave the
+question of the immediate future to the family's own minister, who
+certainly had not carried these lambs in his arms, nor watched very closely
+over their erring mother.</p>
+
+<p>The family was separated. Nothing else was possible. The baby's father
+repudiated any responsibility for any of the children, and disappeared. The
+girl drooped for a time after the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> separation; but she finally secured a
+good home, making a capable, devoted servant until she married. She owes
+allegiance only to her own church, saying: "The minister talked so
+beautifully at mother's funeral." Her whole conception of the mission
+church is that it is an institution for helping the poor.</p>
+
+<p>She never doubted her mother, whose picture, enlarged from a small
+photograph, is the chief ornament in her parlor, her most cherished
+possession, outside of her husband and children.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the outburst of passionate devotion at the time of her mother's
+funeral, this woman, now with a comfortable home of her own, knows nothing
+of the children for whose protection she attained, for a time at least,
+sublime heroism. In a few months her indifference was as astonishing as her
+devotion had been. Her own life and its concerns filled her mental horizon
+to their entire exclusion. For her own home and children she has the
+passionate love that she gave to her mother and the crowd of half-brothers
+and sisters. She is ambitious for her children, and has two in the High
+School. This woman is a fair illustration of the evolution that is making
+this nation great.</p>
+
+<p>The churches, when first the social disintegration began, had neither the
+intelligence born of experience nor the money to place the mission<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> work in
+charge of people of high intellectual and social development. There were no
+training schools for Christian workers, and to that degree the Church was
+hampered in inaugurating its work among the poor. The selection was too
+often a question of pleasing some wealthy member of the church, by giving
+positions to prot&eacute;g&eacute;s who had absolutely no qualification for the work but
+their necessities. This basis of selection&mdash;not yet wholly eliminated&mdash;put
+the work of the missions under the control of men and women who lacked
+social training. Neither by nature nor grace were they fitted for the work
+they attempted to do.</p>
+
+<p>Their attitude of mind was too often that of patron, which, as any one of
+experience knows, is one of the most demoralizing influences active among
+the poor.</p>
+
+<p>There comes to mind now a downtown church, the mission of one of the
+leading uptown churches. It was Thanksgiving evening. For weeks placards
+had been on the front of the building announcing an entertainment for that
+evening, to which all the people were invited. On the platform were a
+number of young men and women, sons and daughters of the uptown church
+members, the entertainers for the evening.</p>
+
+<p>The church was packed with the people of the region, self-respecting poor.
+The mission, fortunately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> for them, was limited in money, so its
+possibility for pauperizing was limited to just that degree. The mission
+pastor, before the entertainment began, opened with a prayer, in which he
+thanked God for the warm-hearted, generous people who were giving
+themselves and their money for the uplifting of the poor and degraded. God
+was asked to implant a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of those
+assembled to enjoy this pure entertainment provided for their benefit. When
+he opened his eyes he continued his theme in two variations for twenty
+minutes longer, in what he called an address. It was this attitude of mind
+on the part of many of the workers that drove out of the church the mass of
+the poor; that began the breach that has widened, until in September, 1901,
+we stand appalled as we realize all that has entered into the making of
+that awful national tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>The standards of cleanliness and beauty maintained in the mission churches
+have been far from what they should be. As the visitor enters to-day one of
+the first buildings erected on the East Side as a mission church, he is
+repelled by the general air of neglect; the dirt on walls and ceiling, made
+still more repellent by water stains from leaks; the ugliness of the whole
+interior, as well as the entire lack of adaptation to the work of to-day,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+which one of the most devoted of pastors, a friend to every man, woman and
+child in the region, is establishing. There is not one thing in that
+building that is not ugly and cheap. The very platform on which the pastor
+preaches lacks furniture, that would impart an air of cheer or
+impressiveness. Instead of the building being an unconscious influence in
+the neighborhood for beauty, tidiness, cleanliness, it is a part of the
+general result of the greed and poverty which has made one of the most
+sordid, character-destroying neighborhoods in New York.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday afternoon, as the writer was passing this building, the children
+began pouring out of it. The Sunday-school had just closed. They yelled,
+fought, ran. Suddenly they discovered a half-drunken wretch of a woman
+reeling down the street. The elder boys pulled her clothes, dragged off her
+hat, tormented her, yelling and laughing at the foul language they called
+forth. It was appalling, yet not surprising. The building remains as first
+erected. No attempt has been made to adapt it to the needs of the region.
+It was built for church and Sunday-school services, and the work which the
+devoted, consecrated pastor has put into it to meet the needs of the time
+is done under conditions that make the highest success impossible. There is
+not a room in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> neighborhood for boys' clubs, for reading-room, for
+pleasure, where boy nature can have the fullest expression under wise
+direction. For adults the saloon and the streets are the only resources
+outside of their overcrowded homes. The pastor knows that to succeed in
+changing the character of that neighborhood it is necessary to hold the
+people through seven days of the week. He knows that this can be done if he
+can provide for the people pleasures, opportunities that express their
+social development. He knows that people express themselves in their
+pleasures, and that, whether they will or not, that expression is
+controlled by environment. If the trustees will not, cannot be made to see
+this, let the pastor of the mission be what he will, his work will be
+limited by the men who, in the very nature of their relations to the
+mission, cannot see the truth.</p>
+
+<p>The pastor of the mission had a long vacation given him. The man sent to
+take his place wore soiled linen, would sit for an hour at a time tipped on
+the back legs of his chair. He would refer to the people in their presence
+as "they" and "these people." One of the young men who belonged to a club
+where some attention had been paid to manners and dress said one night:
+"Say, wouldn't you think that feller would wear clean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> collars, and stand
+up when talking to a lady? I don't care if he is a minister, he ain't
+much."</p>
+
+<p>The people who were responsible for putting that man in that position were
+generous, held the best social positions, filled responsible positions in
+the commercial world. Not one of them would have chosen that man to
+represent them in the business world, because of his carelessness in dress
+and lack of manners. But they did not hesitate to send him to represent the
+Lord Jesus Christ to the poor; not a demoralized and degraded people, but a
+self-respecting body of Americans, born and trained, so far as they had
+been trained, to believe in the equality of man under the flag and before
+God. Is it any wonder that the more intelligent of the people resented the
+placing of this man over them, and remained away from the church of which
+he had charge? His person, his mind or his manners were not contradictory.</p>
+
+<p>One evening, going through the audience room of this building on an errand
+to the rear room, the visitor heard one of the women missionaries say to a
+little girl who had evidently been troublesome and inattentive: "If you
+don't sit still, Mollie, I'll come there and shake you until you'll be glad
+to sit still." The woman was training a group of little girls to take part
+in a Christmas entertainment. They were each to recite a verse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> and turn a
+gold paper-covered letter as they recited, so that when the last one had
+spoken her verse the sentence "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth
+and good-will to men" would be revealed. The woman, in temper, language,
+conception of her duty to these children, differed in nowise from their
+ignorant, tired, worried mothers at home, who probably made no claim as a
+teacher of morals and religion. What ideals of womanhood did this woman
+represent?</p>
+
+<p>A minister came to attend the funeral of a little baby in a surplice so
+soiled and rumpled that a friend of the mother, who was a good laundress,
+said afterward: "I wish he'd given me that yesterday morning. I would have
+washed and ironed it." "He wouldn't have worn it if it had been a rich
+man's child," was the little mother's response. "Well, he acted like his
+surplice, rumpled," said the first speaker. And the writer was struck with
+the perfect characterization of the man's manner.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, there are men who see the divine in every human being; who
+know that sorrow, grief, shame and suffering bear as cruelly, as bitterly
+on the poor as the rich, and in their ministration know no difference
+between them.</p>
+
+<p>The writer was present at a funeral in an East Side home in a tenement
+having sixteen families.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> A wife and mother had died. The family occupied
+the floor through. Nothing was known to the writer of the creed of the
+family, though she had known them for years. The minister came in a
+spotless surplice, most carefully put on. His manner of greeting the family
+and friends was so expressive of fraternal sympathy that one felt it a
+privilege to witness it. He stood in that East Side home the herald of
+hope. Since the blow had fallen he had visited it every day. On the day of
+the funeral he had so filled the hearts in that home with the spirit of
+resignation that the lesson that it taught left an impress on all who were
+present. Not once in the earnest address did he use the word "death." It
+was "release," and he made all feel that gratitude for relief from cruel
+suffering was the occasion for the assembling of the friends together. He
+gave out the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee." There was no musical
+instrument in the home. All present were wage-earners. The writer trembled
+for the result. The minister's beautiful tenor voice started the hymn,
+assisted at once by boys' voices in the different rooms. He had brought the
+choir of his church to assist, and stationed them through the rooms by
+direction before they came to the house. The people all sang. When the
+services were over, this minister remained with the family, a courtesy
+which to the poor is so unusual that the memory of it is still one of the
+events of life on the East Side.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 442px;">
+<img src="images/fig158.jpg" width="442" height="640" alt="A SPIRITUAL BULWARK." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A SPIRITUAL BULWARK.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This represents this clergyman's attitude toward his people; and all who
+are their friends are his people. Is it any wonder that they never go
+beyond his care? He has baptized the children of three generations. Easter
+service is the home-coming of these families. They come from as far as they
+have money to pay their fare. The gray stone church is pretty. It has
+stained-glass windows, a baptistry, and maintains a surpliced choir. It is
+delightful to see the positive influence of these accessories on the
+people. Other churches to which they have access lack them, and the
+contrast deepens the love for the old church. It needs renovating, a parish
+house, a corps of modern workers. But these can well be dispensed with
+while that towering gray head leads the people. For the noble, unselfish
+life of the man stands before them always, the embodiment of eternal love
+and sympathy, interpreting both under conditions that would at times seem
+to justify doubt.</p>
+
+<p>There is another phase of the Church's attitude toward its work in the
+poorer districts that lies at the root of the rejection of the Church by
+the majority of the thinking, self-respecting poor, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> that is the
+assembling of the poor together as an exhibit of its work; the making of
+reports of which the poor are the statistics. The defence that this is
+necessary to stimulate the interest of the rich, and by that means secure
+the money for the continuing of the work in the poorer sections of the
+city, is but the evidence of the lack of spiritual life in the Church; the
+absence of the very foundation of Christianity and brotherly love.</p>
+
+<p>The consciousness that watching the hungry eating Christmas and
+Thanksgiving dinners is hardly what Christ meant when he gave forth the
+decree, "Feed my lambs," is becoming a conviction; but it is due to the
+positive teaching of workers outside of the Church, who felt the
+irreparable loss of self-respect that must follow from such an exhibition.
+To gather the beneficiaries of their generosity together and take stock, as
+it were, of the investments, the dividends of which are to be realized
+wholly in the future life, has antagonized the self-respecting poor. They
+refuse to assemble as objects of interest, even in a church.</p>
+
+<p>So dense is the spiritual perception of even some very good people, so
+materialistic is the plane on which work for the poor is conducted in some
+churches, that the results have been cruel&mdash;unconscious on the part of the
+offenders&mdash;but nevertheless cruel.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A group of very young girls worked in a factory on the borders of a section
+in which lived people of wealth and intelligence. The factory made no
+provision for a lunch room. When the weather permitted, the girls ate their
+lunches on the curbs and on the stoops of houses in the immediate
+neighborhood. This was demoralizing to the girls and distressing to several
+women in the neighborhood. Not far away was a large house hired and
+controlled by a church long noted for its broadness and its generosity. The
+basement of the house was not used, except twice a week in the evening by a
+working-girls' club. The use of this basement from half-past eleven till
+one was asked for and granted.</p>
+
+<p>The plan was to have a woman arrange the tables, make tea, and wash the
+dishes used by the girls each day. The girls were to pay five cents a week
+for the use of the room and the tea. They were to bring their own lunches.
+The plan met with their warmest approval, and the lunch room was opened,
+with three young girls from a society in the church to help. The girls
+poured their own tea. For three days everything promised well. The girls
+accepted the one condition imposed, that they would go quietly to and from
+the factory at the noon hour, to avoid comments from the residents about.
+The fourth day some of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> righteous, energetic souls belonging to the
+church thought they would see the result of their generous gift of the use
+of the room for which they had no other use.</p>
+
+<p>Nine of them, personally conducted by one of the assistant ministers,
+crowded the two doorways to see these girls eat the lunch they brought from
+their own homes and drink the tea for which they were paying all they had
+been asked to pay. One small girl, with her hair still hanging in braids
+down her back, tried in every way to break off pieces of her luncheon
+without uncovering it. Finding she could not, she gave up, and tied the
+string about the paper again, sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. It
+was this child's first week out of school. Her father was now in the
+hospital for the third month. There were five children, of which this girl
+was the eldest. All the money saved by this skillful mechanic and his
+thrifty wife was gone, and this girl had to go to work. One can imagine
+faintly her feelings as she looked at the crowded doorways and knew that
+the whispered comments included her. The less refined, though more
+independent, girls sat with flaming cheeks, and holding papers over their
+lunches, ate them and drank the tea.</p>
+
+<p>The first week represented the life of that lunch club. The girls went back
+to the curb and the sidewalk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> and stoops as lunch rooms. Here, at least, no
+personally conducted parties came to view them. If any one looked at them
+and they objected, they were on terms of equality, and at once notified the
+offenders of their offence. To the credit of the people who used that
+street, few stopped to look at the girls.</p>
+
+<p>It would have surprised those very good people to have known the opinion
+those crude, uneducated girls had of them. A day or two later, standing
+with a group of girls who had not been present, with a half dozen of the
+men who worked in the factory, as spectators, the leader of the girls
+described the scene, caricaturing the "church gang," as she called them,
+and some of the girls who had been distressed by their presence. The group
+shrieked with laughter; yet there was an unpleasant note in it. "&mdash;&mdash; them!
+That's what they always do. Stay away from them after this," was the
+comment and advice of one of the men. "You bet!" responded the girl actor,
+as she curveted down toward the factory in response to the whistle calling
+them back to their work.</p>
+
+<p>If the years as they passed did not clearly reveal that the Church that
+holds the poor is one over which men of the highest intellectual and social
+training are placed in charge, the mistakes of the present would be
+extenuated. Such churches<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> do exist. Men of strong, vivid spiritual
+perception have erected and maintained bulwarks of righteousness in
+neighborhoods where the environment, the civic order is degrading. They
+have done this by conducting all the departments of their work with the
+view of developing the gifts of the people to whom they are ministering.
+The choir is the boys and girls trained by the best teachers they can
+secure. The Sunday-school teachers are the working boys, girls, men and
+women who are instructed by the pastor for their Sunday-school work. The
+officers of the church are the men of the neighborhood. The people are
+married and buried from the church; the children are baptized in it. The
+preaching is teaching that salvation is of time, as well as of eternity.
+The sins of the people are made visible. The pulpit holds the mirror up to
+nature. It is a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading them
+into the promised land, made so by their own civic honesty, their own
+personal character.</p>
+
+<p>These men do not have to make reports; to bow before a board of trustees.
+They do not have to suppress or expand to meet the ideas of theorists. A
+few men give them the financial support they need, and let them, like men,
+stand before God and their own souls responsible for what they do for the
+people whom, when Christ was on earth, He chose for His friends&mdash;the poor.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/fig166.jpg" width="480" height="561" alt="WHERE THE PEOPLE SHARE." title="" />
+<span class="caption">WHERE THE PEOPLE SHARE.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<h3>WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Twenty-five or thirty years ago in New York the question of the wisdom, if
+not the necessity, of moving the downtown churches uptown began to agitate
+the pastors and church leaders. The congregations, or part of the
+congregations, who had contributed most liberally to the support of the
+Church were beginning to move uptown, crowded out by business and the
+incoming foreign element which settles near the shipping and factory
+districts. The new-comers did not support the churches, especially the
+Protestant, not even by attendance. It was natural that the churches should
+follow their congregations. Some sold their buildings to the sects that
+came with the foreigners; some made a brave effort to maintain a church for
+the people; some became missions, distributing stations to the poor people
+who had settled in the now overcrowded houses that formerly were the homes
+of one family. The change in the downtown communities was so rapid that no
+one could understand how to deal with the new element. The Church had to
+spend years in learning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> how to adapt its methods to the needs of the new
+peoples who settled by hundreds where scores had been. Not only was this
+feature bewildering in itself, but the people spoke an unknown tongue, were
+foreign in thought and sentiment; were social, rather than religious.</p>
+
+<p>The saloon far outstripped the Church in the ease with which it adapted
+itself to the new element. The Church encountered not merely the new people
+degraded, but an environment that in itself was a tremendous obstacle to
+decent living. The Church shortly discovered an entirely unlooked-for evil,
+insidious, demoralizing&mdash;the political corruption of voters. The Church to
+the smallest degree only in recent times has come into the larger
+conception of its function as a teacher of good citizenship, a link between
+the voter and the ballot-box, preaching the duty of the exercise of the
+franchise governed by conscience. It took the moral degradation of the city
+to rouse the churches to activity as redemptive civic powers.</p>
+
+<p>The corrupting influence of corrupt politicians was evidenced in the
+conditions that developed in sections of the city left to their control. As
+the years went on and the men of conscience and intelligence became more
+absorbed in business and profession, more given to money-making, because of
+increasing social demands, the city became, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> the minds not only of these
+politicians, but of the voters they trained, a mine to be worked for
+personal gain. Ignorance contributed to the rapid degeneracy of the people
+in the old home sections of New York.</p>
+
+<p>The saloon became very early in the development of the tenement-house
+sections the only social center. The result was an increasing of the drink
+habit and the establishment of political headquarters in saloons. Often the
+politician in embryo was the saloon-keeper, often the bartender. The social
+side of life thirty years ago was not a subject for church consideration
+and study.</p>
+
+<p>The Church ministering to a people having standards of social life
+established by the churches, the outgrowth of its teachings and creeds, can
+ignore questions that the Church ministering, or trying to minister, to a
+people poverty-stricken, overworked, living lives barren of any pleasures
+but those of the senses, in an environment that of itself would be a
+deteriorating influence, must meet and answer.</p>
+
+<p>The Church downtown discovered it must work seven days in the week; that
+its office, its function was secular, as well as religious; that its Sunday
+work was but one-seventh of its work, and that the six-sevenths must
+minister to that one. The Church must go out into the highways and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> hedges,
+to use a misplaced metaphor for a city street, and win the people. This
+evolution of conception marks a spiritual Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>Industrial training was introduced by the churches, the natural result of
+discovering the ignorance of the women of household arts. Far more valuable
+than the skill imparted to the children gathered in these classes was the
+contact with the earnest, refined women and young girls who were the
+teachers in the now established mission churches. The revelation was
+mutual. If the tenement-house child gained new ideas of cleanliness, of
+order, of neatness, of dexterity, of manners, the uptown teacher also
+gained knowledge of which she stood quite as much in need. When a panting,
+shining-faced child came to sewing school half to three-quarters of an hour
+late because she scrubbed the halls and stairs of a three-story tenement
+house to help her mother, the housekeeper, who paid the whole or part of
+the rent for the family by this service, the uptown woman of leisure gained
+a new view of life and its responsibilities. When the mission worker who
+was giving time and strength and knowledge as the expression of her faith
+and conscience, found children scarcely more than babies working far beyond
+their strength in the service of their families, the uptown worker gained a
+new conception<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> of sacrifice, of poverty, and, what was far more important,
+a new conception of the causes of ignorance. The uptown woman of leisure
+saw that often children were sacrificed to greed; forced to become
+wage-earners by parents anxious to increase their bank accounts.</p>
+
+<p>As time went on, they saw that, whether poverty or greed was responsible
+for the sacrifice of the children, the protection of the children was the
+safeguard of the State, of the nation. There came from this, by the process
+of evolution, the factory laws for the protection of women and children;
+the compulsory school law. In these latter days this last has been made
+ridiculous by the failure of the municipality to provide school
+accommodations for the children of school age, especially the children
+under fourteen living in the overcrowded sections.</p>
+
+<p>The church workers in the tenement-house sections were able to find means
+to meet some of the evils of oppression, of poverty, of ignorance. They had
+concrete facts to present to a semi-indifferent public; but when the social
+side of the people in the tenements became a problem, especially the social
+life of the young people, the remedies did not present themselves. The
+legislation proposed and executed was restrictive, not recreative. It was
+not the function of the State or the Church<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> to provide social
+opportunities for uneducated, overworked young people.</p>
+
+<p>The older girls in the Sunday-school classes presented not only all the
+problems of the little children, but the larger one of social opportunity.
+The homes were too small, too overcrowded to give social opportunity to the
+family. Besides, there was that saddest of all features too often found in
+the home of the working girls&mdash;the absence of all sense of personal
+responsibility on the part of parents for the social life of the children,
+girls and boys. The children in all but the exceptional home were free to
+choose friends, free to go and come as suited them. Home was a place in
+which to eat and to sleep; a place of shelter; a place often entered only
+when there was no place to go out of working hours.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of providing social opportunity faced the downtown churches. In
+the very nature of things the social opportunities the Church could offer
+must be limited; must be of the nature that appealed to the more quiet, the
+phlegmatic, the element that presented the least factors in the social
+problem. The parish house, the church house did not exist. All the
+amusements offered the people must be in a building consecrated to
+religious life and service. It was a serious question<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> how far the Church
+was justified in introducing the purely social.</p>
+
+<p>It was natural that the young women brought into touch with the young
+working girls in the Sunday-school should apprehend the restrictions that
+life in a tenement imposed on a working girl. Everything in this life
+tended to make her gregarious. She was born into a house probably
+overcrowded before she came into it; she slept, ate, lived with crowds. The
+street, her only playground, was teeming with children like herself. When
+she worked, she rubbed elbows with the workers on each side of her. She
+went and came from her work one of a group. The working girl lived free,
+and pleasure she would have.</p>
+
+<p>The girl of wealth and leisure working in the mission Sunday-school, by her
+own youth and natural inclinations, could appreciate this side of the
+working-girl's nature, and with the same clearness of vision see the
+limitations imposed on the Church in trying to meet the social needs of the
+people for whom it primarily existed.</p>
+
+<p>Visiting the homes of their girl pupils, the Sunday-school teachers
+discovered the limitations of the homes. Between the homes as they existed
+and the churches as they must exist, the social center for the working girl
+must be created that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> would meet her social needs. The streets were the
+working-girl's reception-room, drawing-room, living-room, where she
+received her most intimate friends; where mutual entertainment was provided
+in ways that made no drafts on purse or inventiveness. Halls were open for
+dancing, where her presence was so desirable that she was admitted free or
+at half the price demanded of her brother. Excursion grounds with dancing
+platforms were then popular within the city limits. The immorality of the
+present temptations that make perilous the way of the working girl in 1901
+were almost wholly unknown twenty years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The work the earnest-hearted women interested in the working-girl's life
+faced was how to enlarge her social opportunities in connection with
+educational opportunities that would meet her peculiar need, and which she
+would accept. New methods of intercourse, new places of meeting must be
+found.</p>
+
+<p>Every organization that has developed in these latter days for bettering
+the condition of the people has its root in the doctrines of the churches;
+workers and money come from the people who receive their impulse from the
+teachings of Christ. These organizations are as truly as the churches the
+expression of brotherly love; the positive declaration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> of the
+consciousness that no man liveth to himself.</p>
+
+<p>To Miss Grace H. Dodge the women of this country owe a great debt. She,
+from the standpoint of a Church worker, devoted and faithful, saw that
+outside of the Church, but governed by all that the Church believed and
+taught, the natural outcome of both, a social center for working girls must
+be created. This center must be independent of any other organization. It
+must be at once a natural expression of the working-girls' standards. It
+must be flexible, as well as progressive, during every period of evolution
+in each group; it must keep in touch with the least progressive mentally,
+the most progressive socially.</p>
+
+<p>A place must be created where recreation was possible; where classes to
+meet the educational wants of every member could be established. Above all,
+a place must be made where wealth and poverty, education and ignorance,
+could meet on the common level of mutual helpfulness.</p>
+
+<p>A conference with a group of working girls but strengthened Miss Dodge's
+conviction that this social center would not only give to the working girls
+the social opportunity that New York lacked, but it would give to the woman
+of wealth and leisure the opportunity to meet the people whom she must know
+if she would use her time,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> her money, her education wisely in the interest
+of social development.</p>
+
+<p>With Miss Dodge as president, the first working-girls' club was organized.
+It marked a new epoch. It made the opportunity that had never existed&mdash;the
+working of rich and poor to secure the same end. This country reaps the
+benefit of this first step in altruism based on the highest Christian and
+democratic doctrines.</p>
+
+<p>The working-girls' club has from that time been a positive factor in the
+social development of working women, not only of New York, but the whole
+country. It has enabled the students of economics and sociology to get at
+facts that have revolutionized theories. The working-girls' club taught the
+working girls themselves the causes of their economic disadvantages.</p>
+
+<p>Hardly was the first club formed when the practical results inseparable
+from this new combination of interests and sympathies met the approval of
+all interested in the problem of the working-girl's life. Everywhere clubs
+began to form. The idea has been adapted and adopted by the churches.
+Working-girls' clubs of all degrees of development, under many kinds of
+constitutions, managed and mismanaged, are to be found north, east, south
+and west.</p>
+
+<p>The question of support was one of primary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> importance. Miss Dodge had
+studied this side of the question thoroughly, and from the first it was
+decided that dues must be paid by the members. As new clubs were formed,
+this question of dues was met differently. Usually the wages of the
+majority of each group of girls forming a club decided the amount of dues,
+and naturally the dues varied in the clubs. In some clubs the dues were
+five cents per month; in others, five cents per week; in some the dues were
+twenty-five cents per month. Even this amount could not meet the expenses
+of a club conducted to elevate the standards of the members by the
+environment, as well as the social and educational opportunities provided.
+The financial managements of the clubs differ greatly, and always have.
+Strenuous effort has always been made in some clubs to make them
+self-supporting; they seem almost to live for that purpose. Entertainments,
+sub-letting of rooms, fairs, every means is resorted to accomplish this
+end. Naturally the members of such clubs develop a good deal of business
+ability; sometimes at the expense of qualities that in a woman count for
+more in life.</p>
+
+<p>The highest form of club life developed among working girls represents, to
+the working girl, her college. She realizes, as does the rich girl or boy
+who enters college, that what she pays does not,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> cannot, pay for what she
+receives. This conception of the financial side of the working-girls' club
+management controls in the clubs, with few exceptions, to-day.</p>
+
+<p>The club must give every educational and social opportunity that will meet
+the needs of the members. As the college meets the demands of its students
+in the electives it offers, so must the working-girls' club. As the college
+student must meet the financial obligations he assumes when he enters
+college, so must the member of the working-girls' club keep her financial
+engagement. As the college makes it possible for the worthy student to
+complete his course of study after financial disaster makes it impossible
+for him to meet his financial obligations, so must the working girl who has
+contributed to the life of the club, or who has shown her desire to profit
+by what it offers, be kept in good and regular standing when financial
+disaster makes personal independence impossible. In short, the
+working-girls' clubs that are conducted on the broader lines, and with the
+most comprehensive knowledge of our social conditions, are in management
+and purpose a college for working girls. The idea of self-support may have
+been strained for a time, but it was an error in the right direction, and
+led to the truer conception<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> which regulates the management of the best
+clubs to-day.</p>
+
+<p>It was curious, is curious, the attitude of mind with which some girls
+approach the club idea. There comes to mind now the effort to form a second
+club in the rooms of a club of several years' standing. The need of the
+second club had grown out of the refusal of the girls who earned from five
+to nine dollars a week in various employments to associate with a number of
+girls working in a tobacco factory, and earning on an average three dollars
+and a half per week. The last-named were rough in speech and manner, and
+far from stylish in dress&mdash;the standard of the elder club. The introduction
+of the girls from the tobacco factory to the club was the result of the
+sentiment of one of the members of the club, a bright, wealthy, healthy
+girl, a great favorite with the other club girls. She had wanted for two
+years to work with girls less prosperous than the girls in the club of
+which she was a member.</p>
+
+<p>A large tobacco factory not far from where the club met attracted her
+attention, and she invited the girls working there to join the club.
+Twenty-two came to the club-room. Mentally they were in a state of nature.
+This group of girls represented just what intermittent school attendance,
+uninterrupted freedom of the streets, from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> time they could walk alone
+to the present time, might be expected to produce. They were strangers even
+to the degree of social opportunities the members of the club represented.</p>
+
+<p>Their standards of manners and morals were what the neighborhood in which
+they grew up made them. Their homes were in one of the worse sections of
+the city, in which an institution wholly charitable pretending to do
+educational work had been, not what was intended, an elevating influence,
+but the reverse for the children of this section. When these girls went to
+school they alternated between this and the public school, so that it was
+impossible to compel their attendance at the public school through officers
+of the law. The neighborhood in which most of these girls had been born and
+grew up was a section as remote from the life of the city of which it was a
+part as though it were in another country. Through it ran a thoroughfare in
+which were stores that could supply every want. It was another political
+unit where one man ruled, whose approval meant work in the city department,
+in the street railroads, on the docks; even in the factories, of which
+there were many in the section. The streets were in a shocking condition,
+unpaved and dirty, and no one objected because no one cared.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The tenement houses were formerly the residences of the prosperous. These
+houses were badly kept, old and unsanitary. Liquor saloons were on two, and
+sometimes three, corners of the streets through the whole section.
+Beer-sodden women were so common a sight that the women who did not bear
+evidence of over-indulgence were remarkable. These girls had never known
+personal ownership, even in a bureau drawer; not so much as the right to
+one peg on which to hang their clothes to the exclusion of others. It is
+doubtful if they ever owned a change of under-clothing that another child
+of the family could not claim.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, the girls took possession of the club-rooms. Quite as naturally
+the older members resented it. It was seen at once that an attempt to have
+the new girls elected as club members would be equivalent to ejection. They
+were tolerated, but not tolerable to the older members. At the end of four
+weeks the two sets of girls lined up on opposite sides of the room, utterly
+refusing to intermingle. This passive attitude changed to the aggressive,
+which approached open hostilities so closely as to make the danger line.
+When this point was reached it was decided to form the new girls into a
+club by themselves. The rooms were not used every evening by the club for
+which they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> were hired. Sub-letting would give more money for educational
+purposes.</p>
+
+<p>As this attempt at club-making is one of the worst, and for that reason one
+of the failures, it would be well to describe it:</p>
+
+<p>The directors hired rooms each fall, in September or October, until the
+first of May following. As one recalls this club, it presents one of the
+best evidences of the barrenness of the working-girl's life in New York.
+Every fall for years a few notes written to the leading girls, and a group
+of twenty or twenty-five working girls, would gather and start anew on this
+club life. This method of conducting a club made it seem useless to spend
+money in making the rooms attractive. They were usually on the second floor
+of a house occupied by two or more families; the halls dark and bare; the
+rooms rarely clean as to walls and ceiling, barren of ornament. The floors
+were bare, and not infrequently stood sadly in need of scrubbing. They were
+lighted by smoking kerosene lamps, which but added to their
+unattractiveness. Frequently the caretaker started the fires a few minutes
+before the time for the girls to appear. Yet the girls came and remained
+winter after winter.</p>
+
+<p>The new girls accepted the same conditions, and assembled one stormy night
+to form their own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> club, with several additions to their number of their
+own selection, among the rest their forewoman. The leaders of the club
+realized that she might be an element of strength; she might be the source
+of infinite trouble. She had been young many years before, a fact of which
+she was wholly unconscious. She was dressed in what at the time was called
+laquer&mdash;a warm shade of tan&mdash;silk, trimmed with bead trimming; a lace
+collar, and a most remarkable hat completed the kind of a costume that
+always is discouraging to a true club worker.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the forewoman was the spokeswoman for the girls. It was useless
+to attempt to draw out a personal opinion from the girls, all of whom
+worked under her. Knowing the wages of the girls, it had been decided that
+five cents per month should be the dues, leaving the girls a margin from
+which they might pay for classes. The indignation of the forewoman at the
+suggestion of five cents a month dues would have been amusing if it had not
+revealed her utter blindness to the poverty of the girls. Being determined
+that no girl there should be kept out of her club by poverty, the
+suggestion was made to the forewoman that as her wages equalled the wages
+of any three of the girls, and as she chose to join a club where the others
+received such small wages, she might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> pay the same dues, and each month
+make a donation to the club to meet its current expenses. She could see the
+dues alone would not do that.</p>
+
+<p>The forewoman, after a few minutes, consented to accept the condition. The
+worried look left the faces of the young girls, and they beamed on the
+gracious lady who consented to waive her own dignity in their behalf.
+Perhaps it is well to state here that the forewoman never made any
+donation, and that she would have been dropped from the club for
+non-payment of dues but for the knowledge that such a step would mean that
+she would make the girls leave the club. She was by them considered a good
+forewoman, kind, and ready to help a girl if a girl tried to earn more
+money. She had to be consulted in everything attempted for the girls.
+Fortunately she was so afraid of revealing her ignorance, which was dense
+outside of her work, that she always supported the workers directing the
+club affairs.</p>
+
+<p>This woman was taken ill. The director of the club found that she boarded
+with a family consisting of a father, mother and three children, living in
+three rooms. She was found lying on a mattress on the floor, destitute of
+sheets or pillow-cases. She did not own a nightdress. The tan silk dress
+with the bead trimming hung on a nail over her head, surmounted by the
+gorgeous hat. She was very ill and penniless; yet the poor about her were
+devoted to her and considered her most remarkable.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 603px;">
+<img src="images/fig186.jpg" width="603" height="480" alt="A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Several years ago both of the clubs referred to consolidated with another
+club whose directors kept the club-rooms open throughout the entire year.
+After the consolidation a house of three stories in a good neighborhood was
+rented, and devoted entirely to the use of the club. Only those who have
+watched the development of these girls could appreciate what the club has
+done for them. Cooking and sewing classes, lectures on city government,
+talks on books, on art and nature; the weekly contact with women of culture
+and refinement, who carry the conviction that club work is a pleasure, that
+service for others is a delight, has borne fruit, and the girls in turn
+give their service to those whom they may help&mdash;oftenest the members of
+their own club.</p>
+
+<p>The evolution of character through the contact with others is, after all,
+the highest attainment of the working-girls' club movement. It brought the
+working girl into entirely new relations. Constantly she was forced to see
+the folly of placing emphasis on the wrong thing.</p>
+
+<p>A nice-looking girl, very well dressed, joined a working-girls' club. Her
+face indicated character and intelligence. She was elected to office,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> but
+never re-elected, for she was ignorant&mdash;too ignorant to perform the
+smallest duties in club life. She came every week on the social evening,
+always the best-dressed girl in the club. As she grew more familiar she
+grew snobbish. She lived in a very poor neighborhood, where her clothes
+must have been even more out of place than in the club-room. She held a
+position which required special manual skill, and in her own field was an
+expert. Unfortunately, she obtained an influence over certain girls and
+headed a clique. Every week she became a greater problem. One night a
+rather rough, but frank and intelligent, girl was introduced as a candidate
+for membership by a member who worked in the same shop. The girl who was
+the club problem had been away two weeks working overtime, and did not come
+to the club until after the new girl had been elected a member. The
+amazement of both as they faced each other as members of the same club
+aroused questions as to their social and family background. All that
+appeared was that they were neighbors.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig190.jpg" width="640" height="446" alt="OPPOSITE A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION." title="" />
+<span class="caption">OPPOSITE A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The first reception to mothers was given by the club about this time. When
+the night of the reception came, the "problem" came in a new dress having a
+jetted front. Her appearance amazed the members, and made it clear that the
+"problem" must be solved or eliminated. The new member appeared with two
+mothers, both plainly dressed, one not warmly enough. This one was timid,
+reluctant to enter the room, and but for the urging of the new member and
+her mother she would have gone home. She refused to remove the shabby shawl
+she wore, and adjusted again and again the straw hat, on which a narrow
+black ribbon was pinned. The "problem" stood in front of the mantel,
+surrounded by an admiring crowd. The two mothers and the new member walked
+into the room. It was a dramatic moment. The new member, with an expression
+of deep scorn, said: "You forgot to ask your mother; we brought her." The
+"problem" grew white and then crimson. The girls fell back and gazed
+spellbound at the shabby, uncomfortable, timid mother. The scales fell from
+their eyes. The "problem," so far as influence in the club was concerned,
+ceased to be a problem. A girl who would sacrifice her mother's comfort,
+who used her simply to keep house for her, could not hold any position in a
+working-girls' club.</p>
+
+<p>The story crept out. The "problem" felt the loss of prestige. Clothes had
+satisfied her ambition; she had through them enjoyed a sense of power. The
+experience of that evening doubtless opened her eyes to things in life to
+which she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> had been blind. Again and again she was seen during that evening
+reception to look at her mother searchingly. She seemed to see her in a new
+light, and by its reflection, herself. The mother was afraid of her and
+showed it. The daughter, it was evident, discovered that fear for the first
+time and sought to overcome it. It was determined to hold fast to the
+"problem" and help her solve herself. Great progress was made. Her dress no
+longer astonished; her mother came to the club receptions comfortably and
+suitably dressed. Out of consideration for her mother, she remained in the
+wretched tenement, because the mother and the house had grown old together;
+but the rooms were now furnished. The new member had supplanted the
+"problem" as an influence in the club. The "problem" became engaged, and
+the club lost her. The man was a store-keeper in a town not far from New
+York. The girl married and forgot to take her mother to her new home. The
+mother remained a club legacy for two years, when she died. The daughter
+sent the money to bury her, but did not come to the funeral. Her husband is
+successful, and she is a social power in the Church to-day; a devoted
+mother and wife, strange as it may seem.</p>
+
+<p>The centering of experience, the revelations of character inevitable in a
+working-girls' club, are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> the largest factors in educating the members. As
+the years go on, emphasis is laid on the right things. Harmony results,
+because a sense of proportion is gained. Girls who have had the benefit of
+a public school education that enables them to fill positions that prove
+they have had such opportunities, often in the beginning of their club life
+will manifest a feeling of superiority over the girl who works with her
+hands. But eventually some experience will reveal to them the pettiness of
+their estimate, and a readjustment of values is made.</p>
+
+<p>A girl, long a member of a club, had won the love and admiration of all
+connected with it. She earned wages far above the average of working girls,
+a fact well understood in the club. She was always an officer, and a
+dependable power in the management of the club. The girls were to give a
+play. No amount of urging won this girl's consent to take part in the play.
+A girl who had taken a part dropped out, and some one must take her place
+at once. Now the girls refused to take "no" for an answer, and the favorite
+went down in the basement with the others who were in the play. Each had
+her book to read her part, as a help to the girl pressed into the service.
+When it came her turn to read there was absolute silence. The girl sat
+white and trembling, trying to speak.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> At last jerkingly the words came: "I
+cannot read. I never learned beyond the small words. I had to take care of
+the children when mother went to work, while my father was sick. I went to
+work as soon as I could and helped keep them in school. They all read and
+write. I cannot. Now you know why I did not say 'yes.'"</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for the space of several minutes. No one could speak.
+Then the baby of the club, the one everybody petted, whose very naughtiness
+was attractive, ran around the table, threw her arms around the speaker's
+neck, saying: "You're worth all the rest of us put together. We'll never
+give the old play. We all hate it." This followed by a half dozen kisses
+placed wherever she could touch the crimson, tear-stained face of the girl
+through her hands.</p>
+
+<p>Education had been put in its right place in the field of accomplishment.
+When the entertainment was given, the girl who could not read was made
+manager, because no one could do so well.</p>
+
+<p>For more than twenty years the working-girls' club has been a power in
+thousands of lives. The process of character building through accretion and
+elimination has been going on. Through its influence the club method has
+been applied under every guise, but perhaps it is just to say that it has
+been at its best where its formation and management<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> has been purely
+democratic and absolutely non-sectarian. In the nature of things, in
+affiliation with any organization, it must take its place as the fraction
+of a unit, and be in its management considered always as only a part of a
+whole to whose success it owes an allegiance.</p>
+
+<p>Now the working-girls' clubs have their State organizations, even their
+national organization. The Pan-American Exposition brought working girls to
+the number of five hundred together in a convention to consider the
+questions vital to club life and management. Can any one doubt the effect
+of this journey into the world, the first that hundreds of these girls had
+ever made? Of the readjustment of ideas, the revelation of beauty, the new
+birth of values, because of the vision of a larger world lying beyond
+factory, workshop, office, school-room? For it has come to this: that the
+professional as well as the manual worker finds inspiration in the
+working-girls' club.</p>
+
+<p>As the years went on, a new problem grew out of the working-girls' club
+movement. The members married, but they were not willing to lose the social
+affiliations of girlhood; they were unwilling often, reluctant always, to
+sever club relationship. On the other hand, the members felt that a married
+woman should remain home in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> evening with her husband. Often the
+married member would come carrying her baby, for the club represented the
+mother's social relations. The next step was natural, the forming of a club
+of the married members to meet in the afternoon. The first working-girls'
+club, of which Miss Dodge is still president, formed, as the Domestic
+Circle, a club of married members.</p>
+
+<p>The A. O. V. Matrons at the Cottage Settlement are the married members of
+the A. O. V. Club, formed when the matrons were little girls. Other
+working-girls' clubs have contributed to the membership of other married
+women's clubs.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, the subjects discussed in these clubs are those bearing on
+housekeeping and the training of children. The training received in the
+clubs enables the married members to conduct their business with dignity
+and dispatch. They are trained to club life, and have learned how to avoid
+unnecessary friction.</p>
+
+<p>Some clubs plan a winter's work ahead. These programmes show a broadening
+of interest and sympathy, not only in the technical affairs, the home and
+the care of children, but the larger affairs outside of the home that makes
+its environment. It must be that the girls who have been club members make
+more companionable wives than the women who have not had their
+opportunities.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> The children are always present at the meetings of the
+mothers. Various devices and methods are employed to entertain and interest
+them. What the mothers' club means to the little ones was unconsciously
+revealed very recently in the statement of a young mother: "&mdash;&mdash; is always
+home from school five minutes earlier club day. She runs home to get
+ready."</p>
+
+<p>The working-girls' club has in the process of its evolution become a family
+institution.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<h3>A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The Residents of the College Settlement learned in the first year of their
+work in Rivington Street to sympathize deeply with the married women, the
+mothers in the region.</p>
+
+<p>Mothers, after nights spent in overcrowded, unventilated bedrooms caring
+for nursing babies, began getting breakfast at five o'clock in the morning.
+Husband and children of every age must be wakened for work or for school,
+often irritable because of the unhygienic conditions under which they had
+slept. Friction and quarreling is to be expected when there is one
+wash-basin for the use of the whole family; one sink for the morning bath
+of the family when there is running water in the rooms. Breakfast of bread
+and strong coffee, perhaps with the family waiting turns because only three
+sides of the table are available, as there is not room to pull the table
+out from the wall to make the four sides useful. Floor space costs in the
+tenements.</p>
+
+<p>Friction, adjustment and hurry do not tend to develop a serene spirit in
+the house-mother whose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> office is purely executive. How much less in the
+house-mother whose hands must do all the work of the home? When the working
+and school-going members of the family are cared for and have gone their
+several ways, there is left to the house-mother almost always a baby and
+another child too young to go to school, to care for and amuse. In addition
+there is the round of work&mdash;washing, ironing, mending, making, cooking&mdash;all
+to be done under limitations of space and conveniences; often with the
+handicap of ignorance. Whatever the advantage of self-made money-makers,
+the self-made housekeeper, taught only by experience, not only pays dearly
+for her education, but is more than apt to be satisfied with her
+self-taught accomplishments, thus increasing her disadvantages in the use
+of time and money.</p>
+
+<p>Even with a small family the house-mother with the usual round of work
+would not have many moments of leisure. When it is a large family, with all
+the disadvantages of the tenement-house home, the days are not long enough
+for the work to be done. It crowds the hours, and accumulates until often
+discouragement and nervous exhaustion follow. If the mother have a
+conscience, she wars with herself, battling against conditions that she
+feels but cannot understand nor overcome.</p>
+
+<p>Three hundred and sixty-five days in the year<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> the Residents found these
+mothers who needed the change of pleasure that made no demands on purses.
+Even good wages did not permit these families money to buy pleasure and
+recreation. Mothers, good mothers, grew old before their time. They often
+grew careless of their personal appearance, and by this risked their
+influence in their homes, separation from their children, alert and often
+overconscious on the subject of dress.</p>
+
+<p>Then there were semi-apathetic mothers because of discouragement; the
+mothers who drifted, never having an aim in life or an ideal; then the
+mothers who long ago ceased to make any struggle against environment, every
+year becoming more inert; the mothers, now grand-mothers, who were
+remembered only in time of need by their children. The Residents saw the
+need of the mothers of all types. How could the apathetic be awakened, the
+discouraged stimulated, the overworked rested and cheered? Hundreds,
+thousands of mothers were losing the best things of life because for them
+the activities that increase interest and sympathies could not be brought
+into their lives. Their environment made social opportunities in their own
+homes impossible. Husband and children, through contact with life in shop,
+factory, store, street and school, enlarged their interest every day; while
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> wife and mother came to a mental standstill, often losing interest in
+everything outside of her home; often failing through lack of knowledge and
+discouragement in making that a place of rest and refreshing.</p>
+
+<p>The Settlement was the bright spot in the lives of hundreds of young people
+and children. The mothers who could be stimulated must be reached and held
+in a center where pleasure would be the controlling element and education
+an incident. There were mothers who had lost all desire for social life. It
+was found difficult to arouse in them even a momentary interest in the
+thought of seeing new things, new people. The grind of life had blunted all
+social instincts. There were women who on the social side of their natures
+were dead; could not be roused by any thought outside of the routine of
+their lives. Interest enough to do for their families what required the
+least effort of mind and body was all that was left. The hope in these
+homes was the children. To them the Settlement must give inspiration and
+ideals; the home would never give either.</p>
+
+<p>In the second year of the College Settlement's activity a persistent effort
+was made to reach the mothers, especially the mothers of the more alert and
+active boys and girls affiliated with the Settlement, in clubs and classes.
+These mothers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> came, but never the same group twice. The smallest obstacle
+would prevent the very women who most needed social opportunity from
+accepting it. When they needed help, they came to the Settlement; they were
+most cordial hostesses when the Residents called; delighted in the
+opportunities the Settlement made for their children; but the habit of
+staying indoors, out of touch with any life but that of the tenement-house
+halls, was a fixed habit most difficult to dislodge.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the workers who were interested in this question were led to
+conclude that it was only the exceptional woman in the tenements who
+retained the capacity to plan her work to secure a specified hour or two of
+freedom in a whole week. The life imposed on the tenement-house mother does
+not make time an element in adjustment of her day, still less of her week.
+The breakfast over, the day unfolds itself, and the mother is free to meet
+it. Only in the exceptional home is life considered in its relation to the
+time of day. One thing was clear: that in the homes of the better paid
+wage-earners the mothers did not get their share of life's brightness. A
+College Settlement worker, enthusiastically supported by the Head Resident,
+determined to secure it for some of them. Failures would not discourage the
+worker, for every effort would be considered an experiment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> until success
+was attained. The club idea had proved successful for the children and
+young people; it had for mothers of larger opportunities elsewhere in the
+social world; it might for these mothers. At least, it could be tried.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-two calls were made on the mothers of children and young people then
+coming to the Settlement, asking them to the Settlement for a certain
+afternoon in the following week. All accepted the invitation; ten came. The
+women who responded were told of the plan to start a club to meet once a
+week. There would be music, a short talk and refreshments. The plan seemed
+to please all who were present, and it was agreed to meet the following
+week.</p>
+
+<p>At once a problem was faced. Some of the mothers came without hats, wearing
+not overclean aprons, and apparently looking upon the movement as some new
+phase of almsgiving. Others were alert, well-dressed, comprehended that
+they must contribute their share in money and interest or the effort would
+die out. The children of these two types of mothers could not be
+distinguished by outward signs. American public school life and the very
+atmosphere of the street life had already begun its leveling-up process in
+dress and independence. How could these two types be brought into a common
+social relation, when they held<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> nothing in common but the experience of
+living under the roof with many?</p>
+
+<p>It was decided to let the law of natural selection operate freely. The club
+was an experiment, and it must not start with preconceived plans; its life
+must be one of evolution. The next week only the alert women appeared.</p>
+
+<p>The club was formed, a president elected, and dues placed at ten cents per
+week. This the projectors tried to reduce, but the members insisted that
+they could and would pay it. That it would cost almost that to pay for the
+cake and coffee, and they could help somebody if there was any money over.
+The club was limited to ten members, and filled at the second meeting. It
+enlarged to fifteen the next year. In its fifth year it numbered
+forty-five.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of the first formal talk, informally conducted, as its subject
+demanded, was: "How long after the hair is out of curling-papers is it
+becoming?" This, of course, gave the opportunity of laying stress on a
+wife's personal appearance; the necessity of being as attractive as
+possible to one's own husband and children. That was, is, the keynote of
+the club, its creed, its religion to-day, when mothers and married
+daughters are members. The time of meeting was two o'clock, that the
+mothers might be at home in time to get supper for their husbands and
+children. Babies came with their mothers, and children in school came to
+the Settlement instead of going home after school. Many of the little girls
+belonged to a sewing club that met the same afternoon at the Settlement.
+The club, named in the first month of its existence "The Woman's Home
+Improvement Club," celebrated its eleventh anniversary at the College
+Settlement, October, 1901.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig206.jpg" width="640" height="445" alt="THE WOMAN&#39;S HOME IMPROVEMENT CLUB AT THE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE WOMAN&#39;S HOME IMPROVEMENT CLUB AT THE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As the first anniversary approached, the members suggested an evening
+meeting, that their husbands might come. The proposition received the most
+enthusiastic support from the Settlement Residents. Husbands, all the
+children who worked, and a friend of each member&mdash;if married, her
+husband&mdash;were included in the invitation. Dancing and music occupied the
+evening. What a revelation! Fathers dancing with their own daughters for
+the first time; mothers with their sons; daughters and sons spellbound at
+the sight of their mothers and fathers dancing together! It was evident
+that the club was a feature of the family life. The husbands and grown
+children knew what had been talked about, what had been done at the
+meetings. One husband, watching his wife dancing with their son, said: "I
+don't know how you've done it, but this club has made my wife young again;
+she's as young as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> when we were married." This wife and mother of nine
+children at the club one afternoon wished there were a hundred such clubs.
+"'Tis a mistake to just stay shut up." She waited a minute, and then said:
+"I had not bought a hat for eighteen years until I joined this club; I did
+not need it; I never went anywhere; the children did all the errands."</p>
+
+<p>This was the very type of mother the projectors of the club hoped to reach.
+The first evening reception proved such a success that it was decided to
+hold one evening reception each month for the family and friends of the
+members. Thanksgiving and Christmas receptions belonged to the children.
+Apples, nuts, gingerbread, cake and peanut brittle, with coffee, are the
+refreshments for Thanksgiving evening; new milk for the children. The games
+are Blind Man's Buff, Going to Jerusalem, with the Virginia Reel as an
+alternate, because the little children can dance it. "America" and "Home,
+Sweet Home," sung in chorus, close the evening. More than one family is now
+represented by three generations on these evenings. At the first evening
+reception a father and son of twenty years stood side by side. When the
+father began singing, the son stopped and looked at him in amazement. This
+changed to one of enjoyment, as he said between the verses:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> "Dad, I didn't
+know you could sing." "I haven't in twenty years, I guess," was the reply.
+Both father and son had good voices. The son had made the discovery that he
+had a voice, at the Settlement, in his club. He edged closer to his father;
+there was a new bond of sympathy. The boy's Christmas present from his
+father, mother, brother and sisters was a mandolin, the first time a
+combination present had been given. It was quite natural that the next year
+a table for the new parlor should be the gift of the children to the
+parents.</p>
+
+<p>An incident occurring in the third year after the club was organized is,
+perhaps, as perfect an illustration of the lack of social opportunity in a
+tenement-house home as can be given.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most faithful and interested of the members was a woman about
+fifty-seven when she joined the club. She was slow to respond to the club
+idea; to the right of personal judgment outside her own affairs. Her
+responses to a question that involved an expression of opinion was usually:
+"It don't make no difference to me." After a time she grasped the idea that
+she was one of many, but had equal rights with all the members in deciding
+questions relating to the club, and she began assuming responsibilities;
+expressing her views. In the third year she came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> to the president, and
+with every evidence of wishing to disclose a secret, said: "Next week
+Thursday is my birthday. I never had a birthday party in my life. I've
+always wanted one, but never had the room, and I never had the dishes. Do
+you believe I could have a birthday party here next week?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I'm sure you could."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't do much; and I only have two friends besides the club that I want
+to have. I want to pay for all the coffee and cake, that I may feel that
+it's my party. Just my two daughters, and my two friends, and my
+grandchildren&mdash;four, that's all. I've been saving the money for a year."</p>
+
+<p>One night early in the next week the bell rang. A working man stood at the
+door. He handed a five-dollar bill to one of the Residents, saying: "My
+wife, she's goin' to have a party here Thursday. I want you to give her a
+good time. She's been a good wife to me. Don't tell her; just spend it for
+her;" and the man disappeared in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>It was decided to order a birthday cake and light sixty candles.</p>
+
+<p>The day came. Every member brought a remembrance. Radiantly, tearfully
+happy stood the hostess. She loved music, and a sweet, gracious woman whose
+music wins the most cultured sang<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> song after song. Time for refreshments
+came. In the front parlor a club of little girls were sewing. It seemed a
+pity that they should not see the cake and the candles lighted. They were
+told that the doors would open, a lady was having her first birthday party,
+and it would be kind to wish her many returns of the day.</p>
+
+<p>The cake was brought in with the sixty candles burning, and placed before
+the hostess, a gift from her husband. "I didn't know," the wife kept
+whispering under her breath as she stood beside it at the table. The doors
+rolled slowly backward, and twenty children breathed "Ah!" Then in a piping
+chorus, "Wish you many returns of the day." A moment the woman stood still.
+Then turning a shining face on all about, she moved toward the children,
+the tears falling fast. Raising her hands and face heavenward, she said
+solemnly: "O God, what have I done that you should be so good to me?" The
+volume of her life was opened.</p>
+
+<p>A cake with a few shining candles, a few friends with their little
+offerings, and the wishes of a few children, and to one woman God had
+reached out of His high heaven and selected her as the special object of
+His care and love.</p>
+
+<p>Not all of the five dollars had been used. The hostess was asked what she
+wanted done with it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> She was radiant. "I'll give a party to those children
+what said that sweet thing to me." Suggestions of other uses were cast
+aside. The children must have a party&mdash;ice cream and cake. When she found
+out that cake and ice cream would cost more than the money in hand, she
+announced: "I will wait to give it. In a month I save money to put to it."
+She made all her own arrangements, and proved a hostess of resource and
+tact.</p>
+
+<p>She received her guests most cordially. Perhaps the most wildly exciting
+hours of her life were when, after much coaxing, she joined in the games of
+Drop the Handkerchief, Blind Man's Buff and Going to Jerusalem, the last
+game sending her crimson and panting into a chair in the corner, with the
+children crowding about her shrieking with laughter.</p>
+
+<p>Time for refreshments found her anxious and watchful. The members of the
+club had fallen into the spirit of the day, and nobody was grown up.</p>
+
+<p>An incident occurred during the serving of refreshments which showed the
+educational value of a story written for pleasure, not education; at the
+same time a very deep compliment to the book. "The Birds' Christmas Carol"
+was a favorite book in the club. It had been read twenty-seven times in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+one tenement house by eleven members of one family, and four times by one
+member, who said she would own a copy whenever she could spare the money.
+She wanted to read it when she felt cross. As there were not chairs enough
+for all at the party, some of the children sat on the floor. The little
+daughter of the mother who wanted to own "The Birds' Christmas Carol" sat
+on the floor in front of her mother. She did something while eating her ice
+cream of which her mother disapproved. With a quick glance at one of the
+workers who stood near her, the mother said: "If I had been as wise as Mrs.
+Ruggles, she would not have done that." Mrs. Ruggles was a thoroughly
+appreciated character. Her struggles to equip her children were perfectly
+understood, as were her ambitions for them. The hostess of the day was as
+disappointed as the youngest child when the lighting of the gas told that
+the day was done. She was the last to leave, saying: "I never was so happy
+in my life. It has been beautiful. All my life I wanted a birthday party.
+Now I have two;" and she turned a radiant face to say "Good-night" as she
+went down the stoop into the gathering darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The weeks went by. The club had tickets to go to Glen Island, through the
+generosity of Mr. Starin. In August another member had a birthday,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> and
+confided the secret to the giver of the birthday party, saying, "I wanted
+to give a birthday party as you did. I never had one in my life; but I
+could not get money enough. I tried hard since yours." In September the
+elder member confided this conversation to the president of the club,
+saying, "Now we will give her a surprise. She shall have the party. I have
+talked with every member. But we will not each buy her a present; we put
+our money together and buy her a dress." The president doubted the wisdom
+of this, and suggested a dozen other gifts. "No, we give a dress. She does
+not have as nice a dress as other members. It is not right that one member
+of a club should not dress as good as every other member. Why not she take
+that dress? She know we love her, and we give her this because we want her
+to look as good as anybody; she is so pretty."</p>
+
+<p>The dress was bought and given by the oldest member of the club, who in her
+speech announced her views on dress, and the need of one member looking as
+well-dressed as any other member; that if one could not have things, then
+the others must share with her; that was being a true member. The dress was
+received in the spirit in which it was given. When it was found that it
+could not be made by the receiver in time for the next<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> reception because
+she had so much work, it was cut and made by five members of the club. The
+wisdom of putting money together to buy one present was learned, and from
+that time on the custom has been to make joint gifts when gifts are given.
+This is done in families, greatly reducing the valueless things that were
+formerly bought when only a little money, a few cents perhaps, could be
+spent by each one.</p>
+
+<p>About the time this club was established the kindergarten had been added to
+the vocabulary of philanthropists. The kindergarten existed as part of the
+secular work of many of the churches, and individuals here and there
+supported kindergartens. It was generally conceded that the mothers of the
+children did not appreciate the work the kindergarten was doing for their
+children; that too often they felt that permitting them to go was
+conferring a favor on the kindergartners or those who had asked for their
+children's attendance. The Residents and workers at the Settlement did not
+believe that this was a healthy attitude of mind. They believed it was
+responsible for the irregular attendance of many of the children, as well
+as the lack of punctuality. There was no kindergarten in connection with
+the Settlement, nor room for one, but one was greatly needed. Much as it
+was needed, it must not come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> until the mothers wanted it and were willing
+to work for it.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brooks was then at the head of the Kindergarten Training School in
+connection with the Teachers' College. She was consulted. The result was
+that the members of the Woman's Home Improvement Club became on several
+afternoons members of a kindergarten. They used the materials, took part in
+the games directed by Miss Brooks and the members of her training class.
+The names of the material used, the things made, the stories, the games,
+the songs, became a part of the vocabulary of the mothers. Some of the
+material was bought and taken home to entertain the children. The natural
+result followed. "If only we could have a kindergarten for our children!"</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig218.jpg" width="640" height="414" alt="THE KINDERGARTEN OF THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE KINDERGARTEN OF THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was suggested that if seventy children could be found near enough to the
+DeWitt Memorial, where a room for the kindergarten was available, that
+perhaps the kindergarten would be established there. Over one hundred calls
+were made by the nine members of this club, which resulted in securing the
+promised attendance of seventy children. The Lowell Kindergarten was then
+opened at the DeWitt Memorial by the New York Kindergarten Association as a
+result of this effort. The difficulties the mothers put in the way of good
+work in the kindergarten was explained to the members of the club, who
+agreed to call on mothers whose children did not come to the kindergarten
+in time, or were irregular in attendance. It was most interesting to watch
+the growth of public sentiment in favor of regular and punctual attendance,
+not only at the kindergarten, but at school. If the kindergarten child
+reported Johnny Jones, who was a neighbor's child, as absent, the elder
+brother or visitor after school was sent to find out if Johnny Jones were
+ill. It became a badge of good motherhood to have the child in the
+kindergarten on time. Before this, through talks by doctors and nurses, the
+relation between health and cleanliness had been discovered. Cleanliness
+was imposed on their own children, and exacted from other mothers of
+kindergarten children.</p>
+
+<p>The influx of Hebrews, toward whom the members of this club had a deep race
+prejudice, drove them out of this neighborhood. Before seven years had
+passed but four of the members were residents of this district. But a
+change of residence did not change their belief in the value of the
+kindergarten. Wherever they have gone they have sought it for their young
+children, who have found always intelligent and sympathetic listeners in
+their mothers to all the events and incidents in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> their kindergarten world.
+One mother learned accompaniments to songs, and the children sing
+kindergarten songs at the club entertainments, even those in the grammar
+grade join.</p>
+
+<p>As time went on, the conviction grew stronger that the real pressure of
+poverty or lack of money, among the self-respecting independent poor came
+not on the physical nature but the mental and emotional. The pressure was
+incessant. There never was a time when there was money to buy pleasure.
+Months, years went by without life offering the opportunity for enlarging
+the mental horizon of thousands of capable, receptive, devoted mothers. To
+the children the Church entertainments were opportunities; clubs and sewing
+schools were doing their share, but the mothers were only onlookers. There
+was no active part for them except in the world of work. The churches
+provided religious opportunity and social opportunity, regulated by the
+Church environment. Hundreds were not attracted, and often one sympathized
+with their rejection of this kind of social opportunity, tinged too
+frequently with patronage, and of necessity, narrow in its scope.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the history of this club the love of music was so evident that it
+was decided that the members should hear "The Messiah." That<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> would be the
+Christmas treat that year. The cost of the tickets was far beyond the means
+of the members, but friends made the purchase of the tickets for every
+member possible.</p>
+
+<p>Two days before the giving of the Oratorio, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith came
+to the Settlement and gave a recital. Handel's picture was displayed, the
+story of his life told. The themes of the Oratorio were explained, and then
+sung by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. A new world was opened. The night for the
+Oratorio came. The journey so far uptown was into a land wholly unknown.
+Carnegie Hall was a revelation of another world. Its size and beauty, the
+audience, all a revelation. From the opening bar to the close of the
+Oratorio the club members listened entranced. It was the enlarging of the
+world revealed by Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith. As the chorus "Unto us a child
+is born, Unto us a son is given," closed, every one of the mothers sat with
+shining face but moist eyes. A new message had come. One little mother,
+whose battle so bravely fought won reverence for her, leaned down and
+whispered: "I'm so glad I have sons; I'm so glad. I think I know now what
+it means." The echo came back for weeks, yes, for years. One member, in
+trying to tell her husband, said: "I saw while I was talking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> how
+impossible it was to make him understand, so I said: 'John, you'll never
+know till you get to Heaven what I heard and saw to-night.'"</p>
+
+<p>The result justified the effort. It was seen that it was wise to have the
+best of everything for the members of the club in the way of entertainment.
+Musicians have given most generously of their time and talent. Speakers who
+are sought for in the highest intellectual world have been secured for the
+evening receptions, when the husbands and working children and friends were
+present. The result has been to develop just at the level where it was most
+needed standards that protect the home from enjoyments tinged with
+vulgarity, and even crudeness is now detected and accepted grudgingly or
+with apology.</p>
+
+<p>The hard times of 1893-94 gave a new opportunity to test the value of such
+a club. The stories of suffering, of helplessness, made it seem wise to
+control money to be expended through the club members. They were brought
+into contact with families who never before were reduced to the point of
+asking charity. About four hundred dollars was expended under the direction
+of the members of this club. Work tickets were bought and given to men and
+women whose life history they knew, men and women they had known for years.
+When cases of strangers were brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> to their notice, they investigated
+and advised as to the best way to give help. To prevent eviction, payment
+of rent was the first effort of the club members.</p>
+
+<p>The education they received was invaluable. For the first time it was
+possible for them to help others in a large way; they saw that the number
+they could help depended on the wisdom shown in expending the money on
+which they could call. Their indignation knew no bounds when they found
+they had been deceived, as they were in half a dozen cases of families
+brought to their attention. One case caused a complete revolution in their
+theory that if people suffered it was because the world was hard with them,
+had not given them a chance. One woman, a widow, was brought to the
+attention of the club early in the winter. She had one child, and they had
+not had a fire in weeks; had no outside garments to go on the street,
+because they had pawned them for food. They had eaten nothing but bread and
+coffee for seven weeks. Now they were to be evicted from the one room they
+had occupied, because no rent had been paid for two months. The club had
+decided that paying back rents only benefited landlords; that, having so
+little money and so many demands, rent in advance was all they could pay.
+They voted to move the woman, then to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> find work for her. It was decided
+that she must learn to operate a sewing machine. The Charities'
+Organization Society made that possible. After two weeks' trial, it was
+found that the woman could not learn. Then the society gave her a chance to
+learn laundry work, and for two weeks more money to support the woman and
+child&mdash;cared for by one of the members in turn while the mother was away
+from home&mdash;was given. Again the report came that the woman would not learn.
+Then the members decided to teach her. This individual teaching, with what
+the society had done, seemed to make an impression. It was decided that the
+woman could iron.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig226.jpg" width="640" height="463" alt="MAKING A SELECTION." title="" />
+<span class="caption">MAKING A SELECTION.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When this stage was reached the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of the
+members passed on her way from work a laundry. At the door a sign hung,
+"Hands Wanted." The little girl went in and asked about wages. The man at
+the desk laughed at her. "It made me mad. I just looked at him," drawing
+herself up as she told the story. "I said: 'I do not want the work for
+myself, but for a woman <i>our</i> club is trying to help; she's poor, and a
+widow.' Then the man looked at me, and told me to tell the woman to come. I
+told him we'd all been teaching her." The use of the plural possessive
+thrilled the heart of the workers; the club was a family possession. The
+woman was told to go to work the next morning. As the little girl was
+returning from work the next night, she stopped at the laundry to ask about
+the woman; to walk home with her, if she were going home. She was told the
+woman had not appeared. Before going to her own home, the child went to see
+why the woman had not gone to work. The woman had overslept. For three
+weeks that little girl got up earlier and went after that woman, delivering
+her at the laundry as though she were a package. It was decided that the
+sacrifice was too much; if the woman was not willing to keep the work by
+her own effort, she was not worth helping. An alarm clock was bought and
+given her, and she was taught how to wind it. She lost the place before the
+end of the first week because she could not get there on time.</p>
+
+<p>The club found out that there were people it was impossible to help, do
+what the world would.</p>
+
+<p>This little girl during this period of struggle with this woman was met one
+Sunday afternoon. She carried a doll to which she was devoted, and for
+which she made a cloak that Sunday morning. "Isn't she pretty?" she said,
+holding up the doll. "I often wish I could see her when I'm working." What
+a combination of child and woman! As the years have passed, this little
+girl has paid the penalty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> of shop life. She has grown hard, aggressive,
+self-assertive, untruthful. If only her environment could have been
+different, she would have made a magnificent woman. The world of struggle
+has been too much for her; it has strangled the spirit of helpfulness.</p>
+
+<p>The lessons of that winter have been well learned. Every mother in the club
+wants a trade for her child; something learned that has in it wage-earning
+promise because the worker has special knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>The time came when it was possible to turn the attention of these mothers
+to the administration of those city departments that make the environment
+of their homes. The streets naturally claimed first attention. They learned
+to take the numbers of the street sweepers who failed to do their work; to
+take the numbers of the carts improperly and carelessly filled, and report
+them at the club meeting. Leaking roofs, broken stairways, unlighted halls,
+contagious diseases were reported, and conditions in the stores and
+factories where their daughters worked.</p>
+
+<p>The criminality of concealing dangers that threatened many to protect one
+was comprehended. The club motto became "A helping hand to all."</p>
+
+<p>The club members felt that it was possible for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> them to give special help
+to little children. In a thousand ways the women in the house of many
+families find the opportunity to help children; often through the children
+they helped the mothers. Sometimes through personal influence they secured
+the regular attendance of children at school; sometimes it meant calling in
+the aid of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to secure
+the rights of children, to protect them from evils in their own homes.</p>
+
+<p>One day a wealthy woman who had lost a little girl told the president of
+this club this incident, which, she said, changed the course of her life.
+For months she had shut out the world. God and man were cruel. Nothing
+interested her; life was empty. She sat by the window in her home one
+November afternoon. It was drizzling and blowing. A little girl without hat
+or coat stood shivering and crying against the church railing opposite. As
+she watched the child her mind reverted to the clothes she handled so
+constantly, because they had been worn by her child. She sent for the
+little stranger, and when she went on the street again she was warm, tidy
+and comfortable. Then came the thought, "God never meant a woman should be
+a mother just to one little girl. She must be a mother to every child who
+needs her." From that day this woman has given her life and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> service to
+children. The story was told to the club.</p>
+
+<p>One of the members, after the meeting had adjourned and while the
+refreshments were being served, was overheard saying: "Why, certainly it
+would change everything if every woman would live in that way. Think how
+many times you could save children, how many times you could help them, if
+you were their mother just for the time they needed you&mdash;often only a few
+minutes."</p>
+
+<p>Months after a member reported: "Well, I don't know what you'll all think
+when I tell you what I did last week. I've been bothered because such a
+nice-looking little girl came every morning about school time and went
+upstairs in the house opposite. She carried a lunch-box and books. I would
+see her with a baby at the window, and see her in the morning run on
+errands. At three o'clock she went away in the direction from which she
+came. That child is playing 'hookey.' That woman is to blame, I said to
+myself. One morning last week I saw the child go to the corner grocery. I
+went after her.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 361px;">
+<img src="images/fig232.jpg" width="361" height="640" alt="AT THE SETTLEMENT&mdash;A STORMY DAY." title="" />
+<span class="caption">AT THE SETTLEMENT&mdash;A STORMY DAY.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"'Where you live, little girl?' I asked. She grew red and hung her head,
+and tried to get out of the store. I stand in front of her. 'No, you must
+not be afraid of me. I have little girls. I love all little girls. Where is
+your mother? Child, you deceive her. She thinks you are in school, and you
+play "hookey."' The child ran out of the store, crying. I went right
+upstairs after her. I knock. The woman would not open the door. I knock
+louder, then she come. When she see me, she tried to close the door. I put
+my foot in the door and keep it open. I say, 'You are doing wrong. I belong
+to a club where every member is to be a mother to every child what needs
+her. If that little girl come here one more day, I follow her home and tell
+her mother. It be bad for you if any child come here so young as that
+child. It is against the law for such little children to work. That little
+girl is playing "hookey," and you make her. You do that any more, and I
+make a complaint against you to the Children's Society. Good-morning;' and
+I took out my foot, bowed and went downstairs. When I got home, that little
+girl is running down the street where she comes every morning. I never see
+her now, and that woman do her own errands and mind her own baby."</p>
+
+<p>The members applauded. A child out of school is a child to be looked after.
+It has been concluded by the members of this club that they can do their
+best missionary work in the houses where they live, by keeping their rooms
+and their children in the best possible condition; that every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> home, every
+child so cared for, is the best possible sermon preached, the purpose of
+which is to make life better.</p>
+
+<p>The League for Political Education, the Woman's Auxiliary of the Civil
+Service Reform Association, the City History Club have sent speakers to the
+club, some conducting courses of lectures. Even the Assembly District work
+undertaken by the League for Political Education was attempted by the club,
+but did not succeed. It could hardly be expected that it would.</p>
+
+<p>During all those years the members had been trained to self-government. All
+questions are decided by the majority. There came a time when the majority
+voted to leave the College Settlement. It was deplored by the projectors,
+but accepted. After a few weeks a small house was taken a couple of blocks
+from the East River. The house had a large yard, and by expending a small
+amount of money was made very attractive. The attempt was made to have the
+members of the club do neighborhood work. A very short trial proved this
+was impracticable. Two things were revealed: That the mother of a
+working-man's family has neither strength nor time to give away; that the
+very conditions of tenement-house neighborhoods require trained, impersonal
+workers. The women who gave time to the club work in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> the neighborhood
+neglected their homes and families. The few members who tried to do
+neighborhood work in the house used every advantage the club-house offered,
+which they controlled, to curry favor, to revenge slights, real or fancied,
+to themselves or their children. The best mothers made no attempt to do any
+neighborhood work. The house became a social center, an educational center.
+But it was not a success until paid workers were put in charge of different
+departments, with a very few volunteer workers; and the most faithful of
+these were women of wealth.</p>
+
+<p>It was hoped that uptown organizations would establish branches of their
+work in this house. Some did attempt it, but it failed for the reason that
+so many efforts to better the conditions of the tenement-house dwellers
+fail. Women lacking the right qualities volunteered, or the work was
+important when other things did not interfere. Clubs were established to
+which the organizers came when it was convenient. Again and again children
+connected with clubs waited until darkness came, but no "dear lady" whom
+they trusted appeared. In another case, numbers were the standard of
+success, and scores were crowded in where units should have been. All this
+forced the employment of paid workers, and centered the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> responsibility on
+one until the burden was too great to be borne.</p>
+
+<p>Added to this, the principle of self-government had given a one-sided
+development to some of the members, and friction would develop when large
+questions were to be decided, an aggressive minority combating a
+conservative and less demonstrative majority.</p>
+
+<p>The reform campaign of 1897 began. The picture of the candidate of the
+Citizens' Union hung in the window. The Citizens' Union used the house and
+yard for its lectures. When the campaign was ended, the friction developed
+to the unbearable point, and it seemed, in view of the dissension, best to
+disband the club. The club voted to keep together and return to the College
+Settlement, if the privilege could be secured. This was generously given,
+and the club unanimously voted to return, pledging the members to give all
+the aid possible to the Settlement work. Since 1898 the club has again been
+a part of the work at the Settlement.</p>
+
+<p>For six years this club has had a country club-house&mdash;a large house, easy
+of access, in New Jersey, admirably adapted to the purposes of the club.
+The house is surrounded by lawns and an apple orchard. Two kitchens make it
+possible for two families to occupy the house at the same time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> The rent
+is paid and the house cleaned each spring. All other expenses, including
+car fares, are paid by the members of the club using the house. The plan is
+for each member to use half the house for two weeks. By a system of
+evolution and working of the law of natural selection, four families use
+the house at the same time. Mrs. A. invites Mrs. B. for the two weeks that
+she is entitled to half of the house; and Mrs. B., arranging her two weeks
+to follow Mrs. A., reciprocates by asking Mrs. A. to remain for her two
+weeks. Co-operative housekeeping has developed, as has the sharing in the
+care of the children. The barn, equipped for the children, has been an
+endless delight. Two members have in the past been debarred the use of the
+house. One because of the character of the men invited by the husband; one
+because of the language used to her children. Both were asked to resign
+from the club, or to make it inconvenient to use the club-house. One
+resigned. The average number of people using this club-house has been
+between four and five hundred each season. Sick children of neighbors have
+been taken up by the members and cared for during their whole vacation. On
+Sundays, friends, relatives and city neighbors are guests.</p>
+
+<p>There has never been any supervision over the house, except that of the
+members. Each member<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> leaves the part of the house she has used clean for
+the one coming after her. For several years the club paid part of two
+months' rent, raised through entertainments. One year the members made a
+donation of thirty dollars. Broken dishes are replaced, and the cost of
+repairing furniture broken is paid by the member using the furniture at the
+time. The large parlor is a club-room, and used by every member who goes up
+for a day. A closet is provided with dishes to be used when picnics are
+given by the members. The theory is that the grounds&mdash;four acres&mdash;can be
+used by the members at any time, but the families in the house must not be
+interfered with in any way.</p>
+
+<p>The story of this club has been told at this length because it has proved
+what can be done in broadening the life of women of natural intelligence
+living under tenement-house conditions; how the family can have a common
+interest, to which each contributes, a center that can create social
+opportunity for the friends of every member and the members of every
+family.</p>
+
+<p>This club has been able to do much to lighten the burdens in the time of
+financial crisis for people who could only have been helped through such a
+medium. It was the help of a friend always. For years it has been able to
+distribute Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners; but it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> grows more cautious
+every year, for it has made discoveries of the abuses of the Christmas
+dinner-giving. Through the children it has been possible to reach other
+children who needed Christmas cheer, but who would not take it from ever so
+kind-hearted a public.</p>
+
+<p>The long years of working together has cemented friendships that are the
+inheritances of the children, and sons and daughters have intermarried.
+Baby after baby finds its godmother in the club.</p>
+
+<p>There have been mortifying failures, but there have been positive successes
+in the eleven years. The club has proved conclusively that the
+working-men's wives can be determining factors in arousing and demanding
+better environment for their homes; that the wife and mother who keeps in
+touch with life commands greater influence in and outside her home, where
+all that she learns is used to make that home better; that she keeps her
+place in her family best when she makes herself the companion of her
+husband and children; when she, as far as she may, is herself the source of
+their social life, and contributes to their mental interests by sharing
+with them all the educational opportunity that life gives her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<h3>WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME.</h3>
+
+
+<p>One day a group of unusually intelligent wives of working men were driving
+through Central Park in a Park carriage. All were mothers, some of grown
+children, yet it was the first time that twelve of the twenty (all but two
+born in New York) had seen Central Park. Coming back on the east drive, the
+closed houses on Fifth Avenue attracted their attention. Various
+suggestions were made as to what use these houses could be put in the
+summer, when one woman, slight, delicate and extremely nervous, said: "I
+don't want anything in those houses but the room, just the room. I've never
+had all the room I want. I would have if I lived in them." After a moment
+she continued: "The reason we don't love each other as we should is because
+we don't have room; we crowd each other. All the time I lived in my
+father's home I was crowded. How we used to fight! Fight in the night, as
+well as the day, just because we did not have room. The beds were so
+crowded that one of the young ones had to sleep across the foot. The big
+ones would keep their feet up while they were awake, but when they went to
+sleep they would stretch out and kick the one across the foot. When I was
+so little that I slept that way, I used to lie awake in terror expecting
+the kick, and how I scratched when it came! I know we would have loved each
+other much more if we could have had room to grow up in, as the children in
+those houses do. And my mother! She didn't have a room to herself when she
+had the sickness that killed her."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 563px;">
+<img src="images/fig242.jpg" width="563" height="480" alt="YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the little miseries of childhood
+due to lack of room in the home. "My mother used to drive us out of the
+house to get a chance to sweep it," said another mother of children. "I
+remember lots of times standing down at the hall door, shivering, waiting
+for her to get through. I would go into the neighbors' rooms, but often
+they had got rid of their own children for the reason my mother had of
+hers."</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you what used to make me mad; it was to have to wait for the others
+to get through eating," said another. "When I hire a place I always look
+first to see if the kitchen is big enough to pull the table from the wall
+and sit about it. I don't think I ever had any hot dinner when I was
+little, and it used to make me mad. When I had three children I moved just
+to get a large kitchen;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> it ain't near so nice a place, but the kitchen is
+big." There was not a woman there who did not have a grievance against her
+childhood because there was not room. One of them with crimson cheeks told
+how she remembered the sense of comfort that came to her after the death of
+an older sister because she had a bed to herself; she said it was a long
+time before she knew the cause, for she missed her sister's companionship,
+but she was more comfortable; she enjoyed having the five nails at the foot
+of the bed for her own clothes. The woman who spoke first interrupted: "I
+never in my life had even a hook in the wall that was my own until I was
+married. We were so near of a size we could wear each other's things, and
+we did. The one who was quickest got the best of that size. You never knew
+whose clothes you'd have to put on in the morning. I'll never have but this
+child. She likes me. She hates being pushed and crowded. She has a bed and
+bureau of her own. Never, never until my husband can pay more rent will we
+have another child." She paid the penalty of death for this determination.</p>
+
+<p>As one thinks of the number of human beings with all their belongings
+crowded into the floor space of a tenement-house home, the marvel at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+endurance grows greater. Think of its limitations of conveniences!</p>
+
+<p>To those who know the limitations of a tenement-house home, the criticisms
+and suggestions that the superficially informed reformers make on and for
+the hygienic management of these homes are at once the source of amusement
+and indignation. When stress is laid on airing a bed every morning, and one
+in imagination sees the only windows in another room with a breakfast table
+between them, a room already overcrowded with things, the only room for the
+mother and baby during the process, one wonders what the speaker would do
+under the same circumstances. Then when the horrors of dust are revealed
+and the necessity of keeping the floors clean by frequent washing is made
+to be imperative, one sees the bed that just fits between the walls at the
+head and foot, with half of its own space free in front of it, and again
+comes the question, what would the expert do living under like
+circumstances? What is needed everywhere is scientific knowledge in
+conjunction with intimate knowledge of the evils inseparable from the small
+dark rooms of even the best tenements, and then we will have suggestions
+that the woman can use&mdash;can apply to her own family conditions&mdash;who must do
+the work for a family within this space.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the best of the tenements it will be found that where the tenants can
+afford a parlor, access to it is across the kitchen, where all the work of
+the family must be done. It will be seen at once the disadvantage at which
+the house-mother is when friends who are not intimate call. Nothing stands
+between her and the outer world but the door into a public hallway. The
+bedrooms admit of a bed, and sometimes, but only in the exceptional
+bedroom, a bureau. This is usually found in the parlor, if there is one,
+and in it all the clothes that can be folded, all the little accessories
+belonging to the family; to this, however, all must have access. If there
+is a closet for clothes, or if the family can own and house a wardrobe, it
+is usually in this room, and the common convenience of the family. The
+bedrooms, dark, offer no space for a washstand. The kitchen is the common
+wash-room. The kitchens of the tenement houses built in these later years
+are a marvel of inconvenience. The dish closet is a few shelves up near the
+ceiling, the lower one of which can be reached by a woman five feet four
+standing on the soles of her feet; a chair is necessary to reach the other
+shelves. Beneath this space is the pot closet, or it may be the stationary
+tubs, the top of which provides table space for cooking conveniences.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 589px;">
+<img src="images/fig248.jpg" width="589" height="480" alt="THE CHILDREN&#39;S HOUR AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE CHILDREN&#39;S HOUR AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There comes to mind now one of the best plans for a tenement having four
+families on each floor on the East Side. The stairways are lighted by a
+window on each landing opening on an air shaft, and on each floor is a
+lavatory with a large window. Each suite consists of four rooms. The parlor
+has two windows on the street; a kitchen window opening into the parlor,
+never raised if the family have social standards; and a window on a large
+air shaft, or space between the two houses, on which the bedroom windows,
+which are large, open. The rent for these four rooms is seventeen dollars
+per month, and they are on the fifth floor. The kitchens in this house have
+been described. The family have to sit at three sides of the table; there
+is no room to pull it from the wall; even then one side is uncomfortably
+near the stove. The only space except the parlor for a refrigerator is in
+the bedroom. As there are three young wage-earners supporting the home, who
+are social, who are encouraged by the widowed mother to have their friends
+in their own home, this is not to be tolerated. The refrigerator is in the
+bedroom. It was in that room when it was occupied for four years by a girl
+dying of tuberculosis. Is it any wonder that the fight against this disease
+is again being waged in that family? Yet it is above the average of its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+class in intelligence, as the apartments are above the average in the
+region.</p>
+
+<p>The very elementary necessity of space and place for privacy in taking a
+bath is exceptional. For space, place and light are necessary. A very
+bright woman, perfectly familiar with the limitations of the tenement-house
+homes, once said to the writer: "The truth is they cannot be clean if they
+are decent." A cruel truth which was brought forcibly to the remembrance of
+the writer one winter afternoon in an East Side home, where a mother was
+trying to bring up a family to the best of her ability. When the caller
+went into the living-room of the family a tub stood at the side of the
+stove, in which was the youngest daughter, a girl about eight; a brother of
+ten and his boy friend of twelve or fourteen years were playing checkers on
+the other side of the room. The mother was ironing. There was no
+consciousness of embarrassment shown by the children. The mother was
+ashamed, not at the exposure, but at being found out in permitting such an
+exposure. She was a member of a club where the training of children was a
+constant theme. The necessity of physical cleanliness, its relation to
+health, she had grasped, and her children profited by it. The relation
+between privacy and morals she had not grasped. It was as though a veil
+had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> fallen from her eyes as she looked at her daughter of eight standing
+naked before the two boys. Whether such a thing ever occurred again the
+caller does not know; that the mother never forgave the caller for finding
+her out she does know. The family had three bedrooms, but none would permit
+the placing of a washstand in them. One was the passageway from front to
+rear, for the family occupied a floor, but could afford only one fire.</p>
+
+<p>Privacy is almost impossible in the tenement-house home. One bedroom is
+usually the passageway to the next, if there are two, or both bedrooms are
+passageways from front to rear of the home, and must be used by all the
+family. Privacy is impossible in these rooms, and there are thousands of
+just such apartments. Children must grow up in them subject to the
+limitations, restrictions and exposures their walls compel. This division
+of space must fix standards of reserve, of privacy, of social life. No
+amount of love, not even of intelligence, can save the children from the
+evils such division of space imposes on family life. It deadens the
+sensibilities. The insidious effects of this is not always realized, even
+by the intelligent parents who accept them as inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the inconsistencies of the
+standards of those who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the
+betterment of the conditions of the working people. We have secured a law
+compelling separate closets for men and women in stores and factories, a
+righteous measure in the interest of morality. But the closets in the
+tenements must be used by men, women and children of several families. A
+neighborly courtesy is the loaning of the key, to save a neighbor a journey
+upstairs. Children run in from the street, several at a time, for it is the
+only place provided. This publicity and freedom is the crying evil of the
+tenements, the one from which tragedies come. The marvel is that so few
+follow; that in spite, seemingly in defiance, of it all, characters develop
+that are beautiful, harmonious, true.</p>
+
+<p>Can one condemn the girl facing the worst that can befall her who under
+pressure that her appeal justifies, yes, makes necessary, confides that her
+relations with the man who is the father of the coming child began when
+each were little things six or eight years old? A relation that grew out of
+lack of privacy, the intimacy forced by tenement-house conditions. Both
+families have gone far beyond their social position at the time these two
+were children, but the blasting of innocency has left its burning scar on
+the girl, and she must bear it alone.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that gives the love-making in
+the tenement region a character peculiarly its own. When interest between
+the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so frankly and publicly. There are
+times when restraint would seem to improve manners; but among the working
+young men and women one is constantly reminded of Adam and Eve in the
+garden of Eden. How frankly and unconsciously they must have shown their
+interest in each other, and how unconsciously they must have revealed their
+interest in each other to all the other breathing creatures. Perhaps
+nothing about the love-making is more interesting than that numbers add to
+the enjoyment of both lovers. Nothing adds more to the happiness of a
+wage-earning girl than to have her "chum" deeply interested in and deeply
+interesting to a young man at the same time she is. It seems to be conceded
+that two couples can have so much more pleasure than one. The terms applied
+by these young people to each other will reveal their social level in the
+wage-earning world. If the term "steady" is used where the world of wealth
+and leisure would use <i>fianc&eacute;</i>, the under wage-earning world is reached. If
+"friend" is used, the social ladder covered by that word, used in that
+sense, has many rounds. Knowing many working girls who would use the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> term
+"friend" when referring to the man they had accepted as a future husband,
+or who would in time hold that relation, the writer was constantly
+impressed by the unconscious protection the girls threw about each other.
+One would rarely hear of plans made that did not include two beside the
+couple engaged, or willing to be. Sometimes two girls were to complete the
+party. It is evident that the more means the merrier time. In every group
+of girls there will be two or three who cause anxiety; two or three whose
+influence, unchecked, may lead to trouble. It is not easy to restrain the
+young people, for so often the offenses are so naturally the result of
+environment that to speak directly of them would be most unwise. The
+chances are that reference to them would put the speaker in the position of
+possessing knowledge of an undesirable kind; it would seem to suggest evil.
+Often it would be a moral shock to many working girls to have their actions
+criticised from the impression their freedom makes before the cause is
+understood.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig256.jpg" width="640" height="453" alt="MUTUAL INTERESTS." title="" />
+<span class="caption">MUTUAL INTERESTS.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A young girl joined a club for young people. From the first she caused
+anxiety. Her face was innocent and attractive, but her actions with young
+men were just the reverse. At last it became necessary to speak to her. It
+was evident that she attributed the criticism to what she termed
+"fussiness." Not the least modification in her manner followed. At last,
+after many interviews, she was told that she would never be spoken to
+again. If she offended in the club-room once more, she would be given her
+hat. That would mean that she was not to again enter those rooms. She
+confided to her intimate friend that no one had ever told her that what she
+did was wrong. After this interview, a modification of her manner was
+noticed, not because she was convinced she was wrong, but because she
+thought it wise to heed. A group of young people were returning from a
+picnic. Just after the homeward journey had begun, it was seen that this
+young girl was sitting in the lap of a young man whom she had always known;
+as children they lived for years in the same tenement. Beside him sat the
+young girl whom he had invited to the club picnic. The club girl sat so
+unconscious of any infringement of manners, public or private, that a young
+man who had grown up under the same conditions was asked what he thought of
+the act. He started at once to tell the girl to stand up, but was
+restrained. Evidently he was shocked, and the act was wrong from his
+standpoint, the only standpoint fair to the girl. A seat was made for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> the
+girl elsewhere, who, for the first time, showed distress, or rather
+anxiety, because of her own acts. Nothing was said to her.</p>
+
+<p>Occasion was made to speak to the young man who had kept his seat and let
+the girl sit in his lap. He was a working man, and his hands showed it. All
+his life of twenty-two years he had lived under tenement-house conditions.</p>
+
+<p>"Frank, would you marry a girl who sat in a man's lap in a railroad train?"
+he was asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he responded indignantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you suppose you are the only man in the world who has that feeling?
+What right have you to let any girl cheapen herself so that the man who saw
+her with you, doing what you permitted, if you did not suggest and
+encourage, would not marry her?"</p>
+
+<p>The man's face grew white. He had a sister of whom he was very fond and
+very proud.</p>
+
+<p>"What would you do to the man who permitted your sister, when she was
+tired, to do what you permitted a girl to do to-night&mdash;a girl who has no
+brother to watch over her?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man was six feet tall. He rose to his feet, and, raising his
+hands toward the starlit sky, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"As true as there is a God above me, I will never while I live let any girl
+do what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> I am not willing my own sister should do anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said:</p>
+
+<p>"I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold you responsible. You are
+stronger mentally, morally and physically, and are wholly to blame."
+Whether he spoke to the girl or not, no one knows, but never again was it
+necessary to even mentally criticise that young girl's manners with young
+men. Not only did her manners change, but the expression of her face. One
+grew to love and trust her, and ask her help for other girls.</p>
+
+<p>The chivalry of the working boys and young men is constantly seen,
+unconsciously revealed. Sometimes it is dangerous the degree in which it
+shows itself among the finest of the boys. A sick girl, unable to go out,
+will command attentions so special and direct that the fear of her
+misunderstanding, and suffering because she has not understood, will make
+those interested who know the danger unhappy; sympathy from any cause will
+make a great-hearted working boy place himself in a position where he may
+be easily misunderstood.</p>
+
+<p>It is astonishing how long the spirit of childhood will live in working
+boys and girls, even under conditions that seem never to justify happiness
+and spontaneity!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One Sunday a group of working men and girls went nutting, being duly and
+properly chaperoned. Four of the young men climbed a big walnut tree. The
+girls, with some of the young men, were gathered at the foot, waiting for
+the shower of nuts. The chaperon sat on a stone fence a little way off. The
+wind began to blow, swaying the top branches. One of the young men having a
+good voice laid himself along a limb high from the ground, singing
+"Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top." The others took it up and the girls
+joined in. Over and over it was sung. Then the girls and boys on the ground
+joined hands outside the span of the tree and sang "Ring around a rosy."
+Every singing game of childhood was enthusiastically played. Every one of
+these young people were poor as the world counts wealth&mdash;every one over
+eighteen&mdash;all had worked from the first moment they could earn wages. Each
+one had suffered the wearing anxiety of no wages when the family needed
+what they could earn, and yet they sang&mdash;they felt like children. No amount
+of money at the time could have bought them this happiness.</p>
+
+<p>The sun poured down a glory of yellow light on the trees that seemed to
+have caught its color dashed with red flames. Across the field came one of
+the girls slowly&mdash;a girl who never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> had manifested any enthusiasm, except
+for dancing; who never gave expression to any emotion of feeling. It was
+thought impossible to move her. As she came nearer, it was seen that she
+was deeply stirred; her face was expressive. Putting her head against the
+arm of the chaperon, she whispered, rather than spoke: "I did not know
+trees were any color but green before." The tears were chasing each other
+down her cheeks, while her mouth was wreathed with smiles. The girl was
+over twenty. Had she been born in a family that would use the privileges of
+the various Fresh-Air organizations, she would have known more of the
+country. It was this year that she first saw the stars over the trees, and
+the moon at the full in the sky when it had a horizon. Obedience to her was
+not easy, but to her brother she gave it willingly; he had been her nurse
+in babyhood, her friend and companion in childhood, and was now her
+protector. In every plan of these young people he considered his sister
+first. If she had an escort, he invited some other girl to go with him; if
+not, he took his sister. The girl never manifested any interest in young
+men beyond their ability to dance well. She would find a dozen reasons for
+not dancing if she found herself on the floor with an awkward dancer.</p>
+
+<p>This group of twenty-two young men and women,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> all from homes that would
+bar the door to charity, even when suffering, were fairly representative of
+the social standard of the better part of the wage-earning world of New
+York. Among them was the independent girl, the one who had no desire to be
+sought in marriage; she saw the worries of her sisters married to men
+having small and uncertain wages; saw the wearing side of motherhood rather
+than its joys. She skillfully kept her young men friends as friends,
+changing from one to the other as soon as she saw the line of friendship
+being crossed. The girl who never won attention till she wooed it was among
+them; the girl who was treated discourteously or neglected was one of them.
+The girl who was sought for exhibition because she dressed well, yet who
+never roused any deeper feeling, was there, for some of the men were very
+observant, and had standards of style for the girls they escorted.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 451px;">
+<img src="images/fig264.jpg" width="451" height="640" alt="THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was the young man who willfully played with a girl's feelings; the
+young man who openly exhibited the love he had awakened, but to which he
+did not respond; the girl whose adoration received indifferent treatment,
+yet who was never entirely cast aside by the man too selfish to marry. In
+that company there was one couple who were sentimental in their actions;
+they would sit and hold hands, if permitted, rather than dance. As soon as
+it was discovered that their actions were influencing others, they were
+given the choice to restrain the expression of their affection in public
+completely or resign. The lesson was effectual. When it was seen that one
+of the young men was very deeply interested in one of the young women, that
+she was only semi-conscious of his interest, yet enjoyed it, while not at
+all interested in him, just a few words, pointing out how unkind it was to
+permit his interest to develop and how unfair to let him spend money for
+her when she never meant to hold any relation but that of friend, changed
+her attitude toward him. She made the young man understand her position.
+More than that, she gave her lesson to the other girls, and escorts were
+changed frequently; groups arranged to go to the theater instead of
+couples. As one girl put it, "We don't want any nonsense." Yet several
+marriages have occurred among these members, the new homes making centers
+of social interest for the others. The babies are objects of deepest
+interest to all, and it is a lesson to see the ease and freedom with which
+even the young men will hold them. Much is said of the "little mothers,"
+but the "little fathers" are as unselfish and devoted a part of the family
+life in the tenements as the little mothers. When a great, strong young man
+picks up a baby<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> with the ease of a woman, is interested in its ills of the
+moment, one is grateful for the hours that, as a child, he spent as nurse;
+sees the beauty of strength and tenderness, and the humanizing effect of
+the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by
+the environment of a tenement-house region.</p>
+
+<p>The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be
+attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was
+possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad
+began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who
+chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening
+in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people
+entered the car laughing, pushing, slapping one another. The young men and
+women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer
+looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at
+the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in
+perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is
+this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things,
+that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> young
+people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement.</p>
+
+<p>These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word
+means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew
+parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but
+principally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work
+anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the
+deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many
+Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their
+daughters. That parents would dare to assume such authority in so personal
+a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation.
+One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of
+these girls marry against her will.</p>
+
+<p>No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of
+these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a
+privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be
+at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This
+freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls
+in New York. Were it not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> for their common sense and the knowledge of life
+thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the
+country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness
+of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality
+between the sexes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes
+from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors
+asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy.
+This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.</p>
+
+<p>At the lower rounds of the social ladder in the wage-earning world the
+mother and baby are inseparable, if the mother does not drink. Night and
+day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ignorance, but cared for.
+Often everything else is neglected. When the baby sleeps, the mother is too
+tired to work, too indifferent. When awake, the baby insists on being held.
+One is frequently reminded of the story of the woman whose moan when her
+baby died was: "What excuse can I give John now?" Yet the day that baby is
+able to walk alone on the street the mother loosens her hold. The baby
+finds its freedom limited only by its ability to remain upright, and to
+return to its home for meals and at night. "Throw me the key and a piece of
+bread," is often the extent of its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> demands from the sidewalk. True, the
+mother knows every woman in the block will be, in an emergency, a mother.
+The child learns to care for itself; it makes less and less demands on the
+mother, who may even now have another baby compelling all her thought and
+time. Above this scale, where home-making assumes importance, the child
+remains longer under the mother's care; is watched when on the street by
+glances from the window; is sent to school, and some oversight maintained
+over its school life; but the wage-earning period means emancipation from
+oversight often even at this level. Hundreds of girls start out and find
+work for the first time without any evident responsibility on the part of
+even good mothers. No amount of familiarity with this exercise of freedom
+deadens the horror of it to the outsider. Women, mothers of attractive
+daughters, will not know the street on which the daughters work. After one
+of the most disastrous fires in New York, in which many working girls
+perished, four mothers notified the police the next day that their
+daughters had disappeared. It was the failure to trace the girls and the
+advertising of their disappearance that led, through companions who had
+escaped from the building, to the awful conclusion that these four had
+perished in the flames.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to go to the place where the
+daughter finds employment; but here, as in everything else in life, that
+which is deemed the more important receives attention. Perhaps it is the
+habit of trust, or indifference, that governs mothers' activities.</p>
+
+<p>A girl will make intimate friendships unhindered, unguided by mothers who
+act up to the measure of their comprehension of the duties of a mother.
+Girls are admitted to the homes who are unknown outside of the workshop;
+they work with the daughter; no other background is known. The mother knows
+that other mothers are accepting her daughters on the same basis of
+knowledge. For their young men friends there may be, but as frequently
+there will not be, any greater sense of responsibility than for the girl
+friends. In homes where the income would seem to demand a sense of social
+responsibility it is found wanting, and young people come and go
+unhindered. If there are two or more young wage-earners in the family,
+their conversation may bring knowledge of what they are doing, where they
+are going. But they also make compacts at concealments of disobedience
+where there are laws to be obeyed.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig272.jpg" width="640" height="462" alt="THE CHILDREN&#39;S PLAYGROUND." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE CHILDREN&#39;S PLAYGROUND.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The world has been shocked by the tragedies of death and disgrace that came
+to the homes of two young working girls within the past year. In each case
+the father and mother had gone to bed with the daughters out in the night,
+where they did not know; one a girl of eighteen, the other less. The
+"cadet" system would never exist were the parents of every girl alert to
+train and guard her the more closely because she was a working girl.</p>
+
+<p>Until by some direct process the control of daughters and of sons is made
+desirable, and then natural in the wage-earners' homes, the problem of
+family life in the tenements will remain unsolved. It is a question
+sometimes whether, and sometimes it is very evident, that by the giving up
+of wages to the parents the freedom of the workers, even though but
+children, from obedience and parental oversight is purchased.</p>
+
+<p>Those who know working girls know how high is the average of morality.
+Years will go by in intimate relations with the same group of girls and no
+tragedy will mar it; no echo of tragedy among their friends. The hardness
+with which even the suggestion of looseness is treated in any group of
+working girls is simply an expression of self-preservation. A group of
+sixty girls, earning the lowest wages and living under the worst
+conditions, were watched five years and one girl fell. As one goes over her
+history from birth, any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> other result would seem a miracle. A girl arrested
+gave the first name and address of one of the girls in this factory. The
+case was reported in the papers. By an unfortunate circumstance, the
+working girl living at that number was away from the factory two days at
+this time. When she learned of the connection that had been made because of
+the chance use of her Christian name and her address, she told a lie as to
+where she was at the time of that arrest. The other girls struck until she
+was discharged. The girl was innocent of everything but the lie;
+investigation proved this. The girls would not recede from their position;
+work had to be found for the girl elsewhere. She was publicly marked. They
+could not convince everybody of her innocence; lots of people believed the
+story, and they would not work with her; go back and forth with her.</p>
+
+<p>A room was hired as a lunch-room for these girls. They brought their own
+lunches and paid a small amount of dues, which were used to pay for tea
+served daily. The projectors of this little enterprise were girls of wealth
+and social position; three were at the lunch-room every day. By
+representing themselves as friends of the projectors to the caretaker, two
+representatives of a "yellow journal" gained access to the room. One, a
+woman, engaged the caretaker in conversation for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> some time in the hall,
+getting all the information she could give her. The Sunday edition of that
+paper contained an illustration of the room filled with wretched-looking
+girls, while young women holding up trailing skirts were passing cups. The
+text was as far from the truth as the picture. The working girls absolutely
+refused to go to the lunch-room again. At last they agreed that if the
+paper would publish a true account&mdash;that they provided their own lunches
+and paid dues, and waited on themselves&mdash;they would go back. The paper
+refused. Two of those girls would never enter the rooms again.</p>
+
+<p>The working girl has suffered quite as much at the hands of yellow
+journalism as the woman of wealth and social position. Not one of these
+girls went to school until she was fourteen; nor during any year since she
+began working had she earned on an average more than $3.50 per week. Yet
+they had social standards to maintain, and compelled recognition of them by
+those who opened opportunities to them.</p>
+
+<p>The inspiring fact remains that the standard of home life in ethics, as in
+necessities, is raising. Without doubt much of this is due to the
+improvement in the class of readers used in our public schools. They are
+not perfect in the matter of selection, but they carry messages to the
+hearts, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> well as the heads, of the children, few of whom would pass an
+examination on their contents. Even the primary grades introduce the
+children to the best thoughts of all time, and the crumbs, at least, are
+carried to the homes.</p>
+
+<p>The girls who belong to the working-girls' club carry with them everywhere
+the influence that is molding their characters to a brighter type of
+American womanhood. The Settlements soon become centers of education
+through the social activities they make possible to the people. They
+surpass the clubs in this, that boys and girls, young men and women, each
+have in them the center that makes possible social occasions that are
+within their means and under rightful guides; together men and women are
+trained socially. The Settlements have been in existence long enough to
+have the children that were the first friends of the Residents now the
+fathers and mothers of children. The years of contact show results in the
+homes established, in the kind of care and the ambitions held for the
+children still babies. Wages have not greatly changed from those earned by
+the fathers of these new home-makers; but money represents different
+values. The kindergarten is the first thing demanded for their children,
+and the seeds sown in the minds of these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> young mothers bear fruit one
+hundred-fold because it is prepared.</p>
+
+<p>The kindergarten mother clubs have also borne fruit in the homes where even
+the youngest child has gone beyond the kindergarten's age. These mothers
+learn for the first time the need of sympathy; of living with the children
+through every period of growth; of sharing and of making together a home.
+The result is, the homes gain in moral fiber and moral purpose. The schools
+and the homes are brought into close relation through these beginnings, and
+the child finds its interests a unit, and home the place where its whole
+good is of vital importance. The mother establishes the home often on the
+basis of contrast. "It shall not be what mine was; their lives shall not be
+what mine was when I was a child."</p>
+
+<p>The churches, many of them, provide for the social life of their people;
+these social activities must be of a character that wins those who have the
+least to contend with in themselves, who find a pleasure and inspiration in
+religious life, which often is far more a matter of temperament than of
+spiritual development.</p>
+
+<p>One sees the highest expression of spiritual development in lives apart
+from the Church as well as in the Church. This it is that develops a
+feeling of reverence for any movement having for its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> object the bettering
+of the social life of the people. One learns that every vulgarity that
+becomes obnoxious; every freedom that is brought within the bounds of
+restraint by new standards of education and refinement; every influence set
+in motion because of the spiritual perception of the answer to the
+question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" means spiritual life growing toward
+that of the Master of time, whose laws are but two for the guiding of men,
+"Love the Lord thy God," "Thy neighbor as thyself;" and these make neither
+cross nor steeple necessary, for they may be obeyed in the heart and guide
+the life wherever it is lived.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig280.jpg" width="640" height="443" alt="LIBRARY DAY AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">LIBRARY DAY AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<h3>FINANCIAL RELATIONS IN FAMILIES.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The women of education who attempted to make the conditions of
+working-men's families better, found their own education advanced, their
+values of essentials greatly modified in some respects, greatly enlarged in
+others. This was due to the bravery, the unselfishness, the contradictions
+of character forced on their attention through the natural, familiar
+intercourse made possible through neighborhood and club relations.</p>
+
+<p>Probably the most astonishing experience in working-girls' club life is the
+revelation of the entire lack of self-consciousness on the part of working
+girls as to anything remarkable in their giving up wages not only week
+after week, but year after year, for the benefit of their families. The
+closer one gets to the poorest paid of the working girls, the more common
+is this unconscious unselfishness. In fact, the girl at this level who
+would attempt to hold or even to introduce a business relation in her
+family relation, would find herself an object of contempt, even when the
+personal habits of those who controlled the use of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> the money she earned
+were of such a character as to certainly mean waste of the money, perhaps
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>However one's judgment may at times condemn this unselfishness and
+recognize in it a positive evil, one's heart is thrilled by the spirit of
+loyalty and devotion of which it is the evidence. Three sisters belonged to
+a working-girls' club. They were all employed in one establishment and
+earned good wages, yet they never had clothes that made them even
+comfortable. It was a mystery. They did not belong to the race which too
+frequently make thrift a vice, but were descendants of one the world counts
+thriftless. The months passed on. One of the sisters became indispensable
+to the club. She had the rarest tact, while straightforward and frank. When
+the second winter came, the pressure of life on these girls was very
+evident. How to relieve it, how even to approach the subject without
+appearing intrusive and meddlesome, was the wearing problem of the club
+directors. After the holidays the influence of one of the directors was
+asked by one of the sisters in behalf of a brother. Then the cause of the
+pressure was unconsciously revealed. There were five brothers and a father
+in the family.</p>
+
+<p>The story unfolded. For years these three girls had supported the family;
+the six men had always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> been the victims of cruel "bosses." Worthy,
+industrious, anxious to work, looking for work all the time, they never
+succeeded in finding work under conditions that made it possible for them
+to continue. The years of self-sacrifice had not shaken the faith of these
+sisters in the smallest degree. "What would happen if your foreman would
+become arbitrary and cross?" was asked. The reply revealed the whole
+conception of woman's relation to life as they held it. "It's different
+with women; they have to bear things."</p>
+
+<p>Another year passed without any change, except that the sisters grew old
+faster than they should. A quiet, determined effort was made to influence
+these girls to pay board to their mother instead of giving all their wages.
+They listened to the argument that as long as they continued their present
+system the brothers would not work steadily. The sisters listened, but the
+system did not change. Every penny was handed to the mother for
+disbursement.</p>
+
+<p>One morning in the early spring, three years after these girls had joined
+the club, word came that the sister who had grown dear to the club
+directors, to every member of the club, was dead. She had dropped to the
+floor at her bench the day before, and died in the night. "Greater love
+hath no man than this,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> that a man lay down his life for his friends." The
+sacrifice was complete. Standing in the room of death with the six
+able-bodied men for whom this girl had given up her life, the sacrifice
+seemed barren, for its fruits had been garnered in her own character and
+had gone out of this life.</p>
+
+<p>A year later the mother sent for one of the directors of the club to have
+her plead with the sisters remaining that they would give her their wages
+as formerly. "They only pay board now; they refuse to do anything for the
+poor boys. 'Twas a bad day when &mdash;&mdash; died. Shure, she gave me every cent.
+Not one did she keep back. Ever since she died, the girls just pay board,
+not a cent more. See how comfortable they are. They bought waterproofs,
+both of them, last week, and Jim has no overcoat. &mdash;&mdash; would have bought
+him an overcoat."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, doubtless she would. I remember the winter before she died she wore a
+spring jacket all winter, and that her shoes had been broken for weeks
+before she died." "Shure, I know." Tears fell from the woman's eyes, and
+her face bore every evidence of sorrow. "The boys could not get work that
+winter. God knows they tried. They had to have clothes, and &mdash;&mdash; was a good
+daughter. 'Twas a bad day for me when she died." The mother had not the
+slightest conception<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> of the sacrifice her daughter had made&mdash;a sacrifice
+that had cost her her life. Her thought was for her sons; their comforts
+were to be secured through the daughters, who were a secondary
+consideration.</p>
+
+<p>When her visitor protested against the sisters working to support the
+brothers in idleness, the mother was indignant. When she tried to show the
+woman that if the boys were forced by hunger and cold to go to work it
+would be their moral salvation, the mother insisted that they did try to
+get work, but that it was their "fate" to have unreasonable "bosses," who
+made it impossible for them to work under them.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think the girls always work under conditions that are easy?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; but it is easier for a woman to stand a hard 'boss,'" was the mother's
+answer, without any expression of sympathy. Again she urged that the
+visitor use her influence with the two sisters for them to go back to their
+old method of giving the mother their wages. When the visitor refused, the
+amazement of the woman at her refusal was pathetic. When the visitor
+confessed that she was largely responsible for the change in the girls' use
+of their wages, the mother's indignation rose to the point of abuse. That
+her boys were robbed was the idea fastened in her mind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> That the club was
+the enemy of that home was the mother's conviction.</p>
+
+<p>The mental attitude of this mother is by no means unusual. It is a common
+thing to find mothers who insist on controlling the wages of daughters who
+make no exactions in regard to the wages of sons. The effect is to lessen
+the self-respect of the girls and the sense of personal responsibility of
+the boys. In the family referred to the experiment of paying board to the
+mother was watched carefully. It was a success. The effect on the girls was
+positive. They developed a sense of personal responsibility; they grew more
+dignified and more reliable; above all, they developed self-respect. The
+fight was a hard one, but the moral victory was won. The brothers either
+found work under men who were fair, or they learned to endure control and
+discipline under a "boss," which was probably what they needed. The girls
+grew to have a care for their father's and mother's appearance and bought
+them clothes. Never as long as the mother lived did her feeling of her
+resentment against working-girls' clubs die out.</p>
+
+<p>After her death, the father and brothers agreed to pay one of the sisters
+so much each week if she would stay home and keep the house. The sister did
+it, though it meant hours of loneliness, and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> from her point of view,
+dependence. She had taken courses in cooking and sewing in the club; she
+had listened to talks on sanitation and hygiene; she had learned the value
+of money through the management of her own wages. She created for that
+family a far better home than it had ever known under the shiftless,
+thriftless management of an undisciplined mother.</p>
+
+<p>The daughter was able to pay more rent from the money given to support the
+house, and the pride and self-respect of the family were greatly increased
+by the possession of a parlor, which was furnished on the installment plan
+out of the weekly sum paid to the sister. The home became a social center
+for the friends. The boys bring even their girl friends to their home,
+because it possesses more attractions than any other place to which they
+have access. A banjo lies on top of a piano&mdash;hired&mdash;and two of the boys
+take music lessons. In a family of seven wage-earners, even though the
+wages of each may be small, the combined income is large in proportion to
+the standards of outlay, and secures more than comfort, if rightly managed.</p>
+
+<p>In this family a home maintained at a social level is of greater importance
+than clothes, and all work to keep it. Sacrifices are made to buy things
+for the home by every member of the family.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> The sisters are to these
+brothers the finest type of women, and no girl whom they meet quite comes
+to their level. The sisters will never marry. The home, the father and
+brothers fill their cup of interest. There is still a latent suspicion that
+men are non-dependable, and they must be in a position to meet emergencies;
+the unjust "boss" may appear at any time, and they may be needed. Their
+brothers are a trust and must be guarded.</p>
+
+<p>A visit was made to a home in which a girl of sixteen was dying of
+tuberculosis. The plaint of the mother, even in the presence of the girl,
+was, "She was such a good child. She always brought home her envelope
+unopened." To the visitor this was at the time incomprehensible, as the
+advantages of the envelope to her were two-fold, that it could be opened as
+well as closed. The child had worked nearly three years, had been paid her
+wages in a sealed envelope, which she always gave to her mother as she
+received it. This is the measure of goodness for husband and child in
+thousands of working-men's homes. This mother was unconsciously brutal.
+Whether from lack of sensitiveness, or because of a life spent in fighting
+just homelessness and hunger, to the very last hour of her child's life her
+moan was, "What will I do without her wages?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Not once did that little girl hear her mother give expression to any sense
+of personal loss for her companionship. The child herself became weighed
+down with the sense of responsibility, and resented the lack of strength
+because it added to her mother's burdens. This was her regret, the only
+thing she mentioned: "I wish I could have helped mother till the others
+grew up. I've cost such a lot being sick so long and not earning anything."
+That was her estimate of life at sixteen.</p>
+
+<p>A son went wrong in that family, and as the time approached for his return
+home, the mother moved, lest he should be annoyed by questions and comments
+on his absence by neighbors. No power could be brought to bear on that
+mother to make her move that the daughter might sleep in a room having an
+outside window. One influence came within the range of her experience, the
+other was beyond her comprehension, and her daughter died in an absolutely
+dark, unventilated bedroom, in which she had slept eight years.</p>
+
+<p>She was a dainty girl, in spite of the bad taste with which she dressed,
+this second victim. She floated, rather than walked, and her cheeks were
+like carnations. The girls in the club all liked her, and their young men
+friends at the receptions showed at once how attractive they found this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+girl. She was reticent as to her affairs, except in the question of work.
+When out of work, she did not hesitate to speak of it and ask to be
+remembered if any of the club members knew where she could get work. At
+last she came quietly one morning to the director and said the doctor told
+her she must stop working for three months. The expression in her eyes
+filled the listener with fear. In a voice that trembled, she said: "I am
+the only one working. Mother has a baby and cannot work, and&mdash;and"&mdash;her
+voice lowered and her eyes fell&mdash;"my father will not be home for three
+months from last Monday. He got into trouble. He would not if he had been
+sober," she added, in proud defence. Two months later the end was near, and
+the girl knew it. All that could be done under the conditions had been
+done. It was little, for an unreasonable, drunken mother had to be reckoned
+with all the time. She would stand railing against the girl for not going
+to work when the girl could not walk across the floor for lack of strength.
+The girl was under eighteen, and her mother was the controlling power in
+her life.</p>
+
+<p>One of the young men who had been frequently a guest at the club receptions
+worked in an office near the girl's home. He passed one day as she sat by
+the window, and she saw him. "If<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> he knew where I lived, he'd come in and
+see me," she said with a smile, full of friendship as the young man turned
+down the street. "I'll run after him. I know he would like to see you. He
+asked about you at the club last night." She clutched convulsively at her
+visitor's hand, saying: "Oh, don't! I wouldn't for the world have him see
+this place." She closed her eyes, after a searching glance about the room.
+Of course, the mother broke out in wailing about how hard she tried to do
+for the children and how ungrateful they were&mdash;ashamed of their home.</p>
+
+<p>The girl gathered her strength and sat up, her eyes blazing with
+indignation. "Mamma, I'm dying. I'll not be here another week. There are
+three more girls; I don't want them to live through what I have." Slowly,
+solemnly, she continued: "You have not been good. Papa earned good wages,
+enough to keep us all comfortable; you know what you did with the money. He
+stopped giving it to you, and you got what you wanted on credit. You kept
+that up. You know what happened to him. I went to work. You know what you
+did with my money. I could not keep it from you even when I knew the little
+ones were hungry, for you beat me and took it, unless I had spent it for
+groceries and meat and coal before I came home pay-day. I heard what the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+doctor said, that I was dying because I have not had food and have to sleep
+in that hole, or holes like it." She pointed to the horrible bedroom. "I am
+dying. You are planning with the insurance money to have a big funeral.
+Have your own friends, but not one of the girls from the club or their
+friends, even when I am dead. I don't want them to come here. Promise me,"
+she panted to her visitor, "that you will not let them come." The promise
+was given.</p>
+
+<p>The mother was shrieking, whether from grief, or rage, or remorse the
+visitor could not determine. That night death came.</p>
+
+<p>The girl was buried from the church she attended. When the club members
+were requested not to go to the house, there was scarcely concealed
+indignation. "Did she ever ask you to call on her when she was well?" There
+was no assent. "Have you any right to intrude there when she is silent? The
+church is open to all." No comment was made. At the church early in the
+morning the young men and women friends met. The mother could not even that
+morning hold herself in control. The girl's secret was out, and a great
+sympathy was added to the love her friends bore her. Her memory was an
+incense because of what her life must have been. Her unconscious
+unselfishness, her devotion to her little brothers and sisters, was
+revealed to them when they saw her mother. Good fathers and mothers found
+new expressions of affection for awhile at least, while the sharpness of
+contrast stood out between the dead girl's parents and their own, her life
+and theirs.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig294.jpg" width="640" height="441" alt="A STREET ON THE EAST SIDE." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A STREET ON THE EAST SIDE.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The girl who presents the most difficult problem in club life is the one
+whose social impulses are dominant. Noise, activity, excitement, seem
+inseparable from her presence. This type of girl arouses enthusiastic
+friends. She leads because she is daring; because she does not in any
+experience question results. One such girl had been studied for months.
+There was a superficial response to the efforts to win her regard, but the
+response was too transparent not to be understood. The girl would speak to
+any man who looked at her. One day she was playing "tag" with the other
+girls in front of the factory where she worked. A rag-picker pushing a cart
+made some remark as he passed. The girl, Molly, gave a spring and alighted
+on the man's shoulders like a cat. She clung there. He began to run, but he
+could not throw her off. She twined her fingers in his hair, made him turn
+back and carry her to the place where her shrieking, laughing companions
+stood. She sprang off. Still holding the man, she made him get down on his
+knees on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> the curb to the girls and apologize. Like a bird she flew to the
+place where he had dropped his push-cart, and, pumping the handle up and
+down to make the bells jingle, she brought it back to the man, still
+exhausted by his unwonted exertions, and with a mocking bow placed the
+handle of the cart in his hand. Then she stood up straight and ordered him
+to move on, adding: "If you ever show your nose around here again, you'll
+get more than you got this time." The man ran as if for his life.</p>
+
+<p>Molly then turned and saw the friend whom she had promised she would be
+more quiet on the street. Her face crimsoned as she came toward her. "I
+could not help it. You don't know what he said. He won't never speak to
+another girl minding her own business as he spoke to us. I won't tell you
+what he said; it was too bad." The girl was about seventeen years old. She
+had cut off her hair, and it was bleached. She wore the gayest hats, which
+only served to emphasize the poverty and shabbiness of the rest of her
+clothes. One day she passed her friend's house without a jacket. She ran,
+holding her hands under her arms. Her jacket had been bought with money
+earned by working overtime, a result secured by the most persistent effort
+and argument.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now the jacket was gone, and the slack season coming. As five o'clock
+approached, the girl's self-appointed guardian took her station at the
+window to watch for the girl on her way home. She came skipping along,
+slapping her arms to keep warm. She entered the house reluctantly in
+response to the call, "Where is your jacket, Molly?"</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't cold. I ain't a bit cold."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is your jacket?"</p>
+
+<p>"Really and truly, I ain't cold. I'm thin, but I don't feel the cold as
+much as other girls. I ain't a mite cold."</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible for the girl to stand still. She was shivering with cold,
+and her teeth, which were beautiful, were chattering. After a time the
+explanation was given.</p>
+
+<p>There were five in family. The girl's mother, a stepfather about fifteen
+years younger than the mother, a brother one year younger than the girl,
+and a feeble-minded sister of fourteen. The girl was the only regular
+wage-earner in the family. The brother was a worthless fellow, who bore
+every evidence of degeneracy and rarely worked. The stepfather drank, and
+worked only occasionally. Molly earned six dollars a week, except in the
+slack seasons, two a year, when she earned about three dollars a week for
+four weeks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> each time. She began working when she was fourteen, and had
+never kept back one penny of her wages. Her mother had bought her new hats,
+but in all her life no other new garment except the jacket had ever been
+bought for her. She never asked any questions about the money, but she
+supposed the rent was paid. When she reached home the night before
+everything was on the sidewalk, and her feeble-minded sister was watching
+them. The jacket was the only thing owned on which money could be raised;
+it was pawned. "Molly, may I call on your mother?" A reluctant consent was
+given.</p>
+
+<p>The home now was in a rear basement, the ceiling just above the level of
+the yard. The mother and husband occupied the bedroom; Molly and her sister
+slept on a narrow lounge covered with Brussels carpet, every spring broken.
+It was a series of humps. It was impossible to sit on it. In reply to a
+question, the mother acknowledged that no provision was made to make it
+more comfortable. The brother slept on the floor. The rooms were dirty and
+overcrowded. Food was of necessity poor, and because of the mother's
+indifference and ignorance, was poorer than it need have been.</p>
+
+<p>This was what Molly received for six dollars a week. The moment the mother
+knew who the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> visitor was, she began abusing the girl. One special cause of
+offense was the keeping back of overtime money to buy a new jacket. She
+evidently imagined that she did not get all the girl's money every week.
+When it was pointed out to her that the new jacket had paid half a month's
+rent, she refused to be mollified, because the money paid for it would have
+paid the rent for a month and a half. Of course, this extra money would
+have gone like the regular wages if it had been given to the woman.</p>
+
+<p>The walls were covered with pretty advertising cards and pictures cut from
+papers. Not a vulgar nor ugly picture was on the walls. "Who put up those
+pictures?" "Molly. Shure, that's all she's good for when she's home,
+a-cutting and putting up these things." This was one more charge against
+the girl. Evidently the girl gave her wages, and gave them willingly; but
+that ended her interest in her home and measured the mother's in her.</p>
+
+<p>It was decided to move the family into one of the model tenements and
+furnish a room for the girl and her sister, paying the difference in rent
+for one year, to see what the result would be in health and morals in that
+family. When the proposition was made one evening to Molly, her face
+lighted and she emitted a sigh of perfect consent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> But the light died out,
+and an expression of almost self-pity supplanted it.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I must not let you do it. It would be lovely to have a room for Katie
+and me alone. I must not let you do it." She was silent for some minutes;
+then, with eyes cast down, she said in a quiet voice that indicated that
+persuasion was useless: "I know them houses. They're awful nice. I'd like
+to live in them. They're awful particular. They won't let no noisy people
+in. They make them move right out." Then slowly, with burning cheeks, she
+said in barely distinct tones: "Mamma is noisy sometimes, and when she's
+noisy she gets into fights with people. There ain't no use of moving in
+there; they'd not let us stay. Then, Billy"&mdash;the stepfather&mdash;"and I fight.
+I never speaks to him, excepts when he speaks ugly to Katie or mamma. He's
+drunk a lot now, most all the time, and then he's ugly to them. He ain't to
+me, 'cos he knows I'd break his head; but he is to them, and then I has to
+shut him up. I ain't spoke to him since he struck mamma, just after they
+was married."</p>
+
+<p>"But your wages give him a home and food."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I know it, but I can't help that, 'cos he's married to mamma and must
+be where she is." There was silence again, and then the girl continued:
+"Mamma didn't do it so much till she married<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> him; she's worse now. I wish
+I was dead;" and the head of many shades was buried with the limp,
+"frowzled" feathers in the sofa cushion. "No, I can earn enough to keep
+them where they are. I must not move; but it would be lovely," she added
+with a sob.</p>
+
+<p>A couple of weeks later she came in the evening. It was raining hard. After
+a moment's silence, she announced, with shining face: "We have the
+loveliest baby at our house, born last night week. I wanted to tell you
+before, but I had to do the work night and morning. He's lovely." She
+fussed at her pocket and brought out a pair of baby shoes of worsted. "I
+got them with some money I earned overtime. You say I ought to get what I
+want with that money." The eyes of the hostess followed the lines of
+Molly's dress to her feet. Her swollen, purple foot was seen through the
+broken upper of her shoe. Molly was looking with pride and love at the tiny
+shoes on her knee. "I named the baby Willie, and I'm his godmother," she
+added with pride, without the slightest conception of the relation between
+"Billy" and "Willie."</p>
+
+<p>"Billy? Oh, he's drunk; been drunk a week. I ain't let him in yet; I'm
+goin' to wait until the baby's bigger and mamma's up. She'll let him in,"
+she added, with disgust.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Matters grew worse with the advent of the new baby, for Molly had to fight
+with her mother to get it cared for. At last it died, to Molly's pathetic
+grief. The mother had consented to Katie's removal to an institution, where
+she could receive care and training. Molly was persuaded she owed a duty to
+herself. No impression was made until her mother had been arrested twice.
+Then Molly consented to leave home. It was deemed best that she should
+contribute part of the rent to insure her mother a home and to maintain a
+natural human tie. Molly did this <i>for three years</i>. Then she married a man
+controlling a good business. Molly is a quiet, devoted wife. She married a
+man old enough to be her father. When the wisdom of this was questioned,
+she said, with emphasis and a nod of her curly head: "No young man for me,
+thank you. Look at Billy!"</p>
+
+<p>It was Friday morning&mdash;a warm, sultry morning in August. The bell rang. A
+mother in black and a young daughter of eighteen were in the
+reception-room. The daughter had evidently been crying. "I've come to tell
+yer that Annie can't go to the country to-morrow. She's sick'm. She's cried
+all night. Her brother was discharged'm. He do be havin' a bad man for a
+'boss.' He's discharged'm, and Annie can't go to the country with the girls
+to-morrow. I can't spare her wages. It's all I got. Shure, if I could get
+work in washin', or anything to do, I'd do it, but I can't'm. I'll look all
+the week; and the boy'll get somethin', perhaps. She can't go this week;
+will yer let her go next? Shure, the rent is due, and her wages is all I
+got for three of us. Yer can go to work to-day, even if it be a bit late,
+and yer can go next week to the country."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig304.jpg" width="640" height="400" alt="A COOKING CLASS OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A COOKING CLASS OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mamma! the girls talk nothing but country. I can't go to-day," was the
+sobbing response.</p>
+
+<p>The girl did not go that summer. There was no room for her until September.
+By that time the work at the factory had increased and not one girl could
+be spared. Patiently Annie commented: "It wouldn't be any good if they
+could spare me. My brother is out of work yet. He's awfully unlucky."</p>
+
+<p>The quiet heroism of thousands of working girls can be appreciated only by
+those who become familiar with their lives in the natural intercourse of
+club life. There is, of course, the other type of girl&mdash;the girl who
+insists on spending the major portion, if not all, of her wages for
+clothes; who assumes no responsibility for the family, and who has conceded
+to her the right to spend her money for clothes. She would make life most
+uncomfortable if she were compelled to share what she earned, even when the
+family live under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> conditions that make the home merely a place of
+shelter&mdash;conditions that make even decency impossible. The fathers and
+mothers seemingly have no rights that this type of girl feels she is bound
+to respect. When such girls marry, the mothers will do the washing for
+their daughters, hold the menial relation, and neither mother nor daughter
+questions the justice of the relation. Sometimes the daughter will pay the
+mother for doing the washing, "to," as she expresses it, "help her mother
+out." Such families usually cannot be helped through any influence but the
+evolution that comes through environment and neighborhood development.
+There is a superficial difference in the social development of such parents
+and children. The parents concede the higher position to their children,
+and the children take it as a matter of right.</p>
+
+<p>The wages of skilled workmen enable them to keep their children in school
+until they are sixteen or seventeen years old, if the children will stay.
+These fathers can support their families, but not dress them as they
+desire. The girls go to work for the sole purpose of dressing better than
+their fathers could dress them. This indulgence creates false standards,
+and is a serious blot on the American working-man's life. It prevents
+marriage. Both young men and young women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> understand that the wages of one
+cannot buy luxuries for two that the wages used for one bought. The army of
+clerks on small salaries increase yearly. This class, through association,
+develop tastes and standards of living that make impossible the
+establishment of homes on their incomes and at the same time the continued
+indulgence of developed tastes. No type of family develops less that adds
+to the wealth and attainment of the country than this type. The children
+are selfish; they marry; they discover that the wages that bought clothes
+to suit the extravagance of one is wholly inadequate to support a family.
+Discouragement, friction, ennui follow, and life becomes a grind, without
+hope, without inspiration. The second family slips backward, and it is but
+two generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves, with this difference,
+that the arms covered by the shirt sleeves of the third generation lack the
+muscles of the first, as the spirit lacks its moral fiber. It is this type
+of family that keeps alive the most vexing of social problems. The skilled
+working-man's family, the family of the small salaried men, present the
+most difficult problems not only in the use of money, but the use of time.
+Their daughters are often far more helpless than the daughters of men of
+wealth. During their school days, except in the exceptional home, they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> are
+not trained to do housework; do not learn to sew. As soon as school days
+end, office or store work begins, and then there is no time to learn the
+household arts. If in these homes the money-saving value of time were
+taught, independence and freedom impossible in wage-earning would be
+secured; the standards of life would be the essentials, not the
+non-essentials, that so often rob life of what is best and most valuable.</p>
+
+<p>Hundreds of girls become wage-earners because they dislike housework.
+Anything else is preferable. Dean Gill, of Barnard College, New York, in an
+address recently delivered, said there were three types of college girl:
+The girl who never could learn any of the arts of home-making. She advised
+that that girl be allowed to choose a career, and that men make no attempt
+to interfere with it. The girl who had in her the latent qualities that, if
+developed, would make her a home-maker. Such a girl it might be wise to
+keep home for one year between Sophomore and Junior year. And the third
+girl had the home-making gifts so well developed naturally that no amount
+of college training would modify them. This classification holds good of
+the daughters of men earning small salaries, wages, and no wages.</p>
+
+<p>As the Domestic Science department is developed in our public schools, the
+homes of working<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> men of the better class will benefit by it. This distaste
+of housework will disappear, because it will have gained a place equal in
+value to geography and mental arithmetic, and these will have value because
+a knowledge of them adds to the home-maker's ability.</p>
+
+<p>There are homes of thrift and order where all must be wage-earners; homes
+where the claims of parents on the wages of children are conceded. There is
+a bank account, but on this the children have no claim, no matter how much
+of their wages may have gone into it, or how much educational opportunity
+they may have lost because its demands have been paramount. When the
+children marry they establish homes without any or very little help from
+their parents. They do not expect it. Home, food, clothes have been given
+them; all claims have been met. They are as free as their parents when they
+began. Usually there is a gift of a piece of furniture or table linen; but
+money to start a new bank account is not expected. Without doubt, much of
+the inability to use money to prepare for future emergencies is due to the
+fact that financially the new home-makers from these homes are infants in
+practical experience. The marvel is that they keep homes as well as they
+do, and meet the future as well as they do without planning to meet it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The second generation of this type of thrifty families rarely carry the
+habits of thrift of their parents into their home-making. The new financial
+freedom is a novelty, and presents in itself enjoyment that the new
+home-makers use. Here and there is a recovery from the danger of
+extravagance by a young couple, but the recovery is rarely so complete as
+to repeat the restrictions that the thrift of the parents compelled in
+their homes. The new generation demand better clothes and better furniture.
+Food and rent are regulated to meet these demands.</p>
+
+<p>One stands appalled sometimes at the degree of vitality, the hope and the
+cheerfulness that prevail in the homes protected only by the muscles of one
+man; what they can buy representing all that the home may have. There is no
+spirit of recklessness; there is no failure to comprehend the slight
+protection a husband and father can give, though he be skillful; but there
+is a sublime confidence in the future. Though familiar with suffering, if
+not personally, then sympathetically, with full knowledge of what sickness
+and death bring to other unprotected homes, such men and women, and there
+are thousands, live from youth to and through age cheerfully, happily,
+without any financial safeguard except against Potter's Field. This weekly
+insurance is kept up; the family live cheerfully, gayly, sometimes to the
+end.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig312.jpg" width="640" height="461" alt="A MEETING OF NEIGHBORS." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A MEETING OF NEIGHBORS.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One result of doling out small sums to young wage-earners, whether thrift
+or necessity is responsible, is disastrous, especially disastrous for young
+girls. It has seemed to the writer that if mothers and fathers could be
+brought to a realizing sense of its dangers, they would endure hunger
+rather than have their daughters exposed to it. After all, it could be
+averted by making a division of the money spent for dress. Girls are often
+dressed out of all proportion to the sums they earn, if a fair division of
+their wages were made, if the dignity of the daughters was protected by any
+degree of independence financially. Of course this disproportionate use of
+money is due to false standards that will only be regulated when the people
+on salaries learn to universally live true to the law of proportion in
+their expenditures.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to be a fixed idea that a girl is dependent on invitations from
+young men for her social pleasures. If she is not invited, it is not only
+her misfortune, but her fault; she should be more attractive. On the other
+hand, the young man is scarcely any better off than the young girl
+financially, yet he expects, and his world expects, that he shall bear, not
+only his own social expenses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> but those of at least one girl. His impulse
+is to be chivalrous, for chivalry is not regulated by income nor deadened
+by pennilessness.</p>
+
+<p>It is oppressive at times to see how the lack of money prevents the natural
+association of young men and women; how often the young men are forced to
+give up the society of girls for this reason. Girls often unconsciously
+force invitations. As one goes down the scale, the girls invite themselves,
+where the young men have to bear the expenses. So small a matter as carfare
+will make a girl thrust herself on a young man's care. The girl will not
+resent indifference, even discourtesy and neglect, if only her aim is
+accomplished. The young men suffer the reflex of this attitude of mind, and
+their estimate of women is regulated by these misconceptions, and even
+their manner as husbands is regulated by this conception of the relations
+of the sexes, and wife and daughters suffer in consequence.</p>
+
+<p>The higher up one goes in the social scale, the less evident is this
+aggressiveness on the part of girls, and the more natural relation of man
+as the suitor is apparent. As girls are brought more familiarly under the
+guidance of women willing to discuss the financial relations that should be
+maintained between the unmarried of both sexes, the more careful girls
+become in permitting the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> expending of money by men for their social
+pleasures; especially so where the limitation of a man's resources is
+understood, or even suspected.</p>
+
+<p>How to make mothers put their daughters in an independent position where
+their pleasures are concerned is a very important and at the same time a
+very difficult question. When it is a question, as it often is, of the very
+necessities of life for a family and the allowing of money for the pleasure
+of a fun-loving daughter, necessities bear down the scale, even of justice,
+and dignity ceases to have value. For it must be remembered that the girl's
+wages, used for her exclusively, would often allow the exercise of
+independence in her social affiliations. This it is that makes Settlements
+so important in our social life. Here boys and girls do meet on a platform
+of independence, chaperoned naturally by those who know intimately the home
+surroundings, the social standards, the limitations of life in the regions,
+and all that creates environment, that most positive factor in the making
+of character. The social attitude of the young people who grow up in
+affiliation with the Settlements is found to differ greatly from that of
+young people untrammeled by oversight or influence that develops dignity.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of working-girls' clubs is positive in its effect on the
+majority of the members. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> girls are taught in the clubs directly and
+indirectly. It is not only in the teaching of the home arts, but through
+lectures, talks, books and contact with women of education. The members
+often astonish those who know them best by their responses to their
+opportunities. This mental development makes them critical. The men they
+meet rarely have had their opportunities, and they suffer by comparison.
+The young women often find they have larger interests and sympathies; far
+clearer ideas of the responsibilities of life; are better equipped than the
+men they meet. Every girls' club shows members who thus develop. Often they
+will not marry. They are the support of one or both parents, now too old to
+work; they help married sisters and brothers; they are the prop and stay of
+all the halt and lame of their families; wiser and better guides for
+growing nephews and nieces than their own mothers and fathers. Frequently
+they are the most important helpers in club life, exerting a positive,
+upbuilding influence. Yet one always grows sad when thinking of them. Not
+thriftlessness, but unselfishness, may leave them penniless in old age.
+There is no place for them. Rarely is there a corner to which they are
+welcome in the tenement house; often even where there is love and gratitude
+there may not be space. Floor space often regulates the expression of love,
+where the heart may have unlimited space.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig318.jpg" width="640" height="437" alt="THE READING ROOM AT THE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE READING ROOM AT THE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The saddest figure in tenement-house life is the unmarried woman who can no
+longer work and is dependent. In her effort to serve her people she may
+have played the critic, and that is remembered when her service is
+forgotten. It is this type of girl who by instinct refuses to accept
+attentions that mean the spending of money by men who cannot afford it.
+Their wages would, if used for themselves, have given social opportunities
+that did not involve obligations, but family demands seemed to make such
+use impossible. Sometimes the fun-loving sister will secure both shares.
+One is taken to a home of her own; the other left to carry the family
+burden, and no one questions why. If it is unanswered, it is attributed to
+the lack of attraction in the unmarried sister.</p>
+
+<p>There are homes in the tenements where the wages of the earners make a
+family income, in which all share equally, independent of the amount
+contributed. There is a bank account. It may be in the joint name of father
+and mother, but it is far more commonly the unquestioned property of the
+mother. The children look upon this as the protection of the parents from
+dependence in old age, should it not be called upon by illness or
+misfortune. Such families represent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> the highest moral development in
+tenement-house life. The children have been trained to appreciate
+educational opportunities, and school is through childhood an important
+factor in life. When the wage-earning period comes, night-school advantages
+are appreciated and used. When the work is chosen, some thought is given to
+the promise of future wage-earning powers by the acquiring of skill in that
+employment. The maximum wages possible at the present time is not the
+controlling element in the decision. The future is not sacrificed to the
+present. Such a home is kept, no matter how small, in a condition that
+makes social life in it possible.</p>
+
+<p>Hallways, street corners, store steps are not the only places for the
+development of the social instincts of the members of such families. After
+marriage the family is united, and home, though it be in the top of a
+tenement, is the Mecca for children and grandchildren.</p>
+
+<p>At the other end of the social scale in this world of workers is the
+happy-go-lucky family. Here the system of financial management has its
+faults, but much is found that is better than wisdom in money matters.
+Spending extravagantly when there is money, going without cheerfully when
+there is none. Why, the going without is scarcely treated even with the
+respect of making it a subject<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> of conversation. The habit of sharing when
+any member has anything to share becomes a fixed habit, and "mine" and
+"thine" are not in the family vocabulary. The result is a close and
+inter-dependent family relation, of which the mother is the center. Often
+you will find that this mother has never had any clothes that would do to
+wear on the street, except to early Mass, if she is a Romanist, or that she
+rarely goes to church, if a Protestant, because her clothes are not what
+she calls "fit." Her life is the gospel of unselfishness, and she reaps the
+reward of love. One may fret at the waste, resent the short-sightedness,
+which means ignorance and shiftlessness; but there is so much pleasure in
+these families, so much that means happiness in them, that one even learns
+to forget the frets. They never grow beyond childhood in worldly wisdom,
+and childhood is always attractive. It is so rich in promise. Happiness is
+the cement of human life. Poverty does not change its power of holding the
+members together through weal or woe. There is a common inheritance of
+memories that never lose their power of cohesion where love and friendship
+reign in families.</p>
+
+<p>The people who do not know the lives of the working people can have no idea
+of the extent to which the working men trust their wives. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> majority of
+working-men's wives are financially in a far more independent position than
+the wives even of capitalists, where the wives are without an independent
+income. Not only is the money given to the wives, but their use of the
+money is unquestioned. There is a constant revelation of the unselfishness
+of these men. Children will be overdressed, while the father will not even
+be comfortable; but there is no complaint, for the pride of the father is
+gratified. He, with the mother, has one standard&mdash;clothes. There are men
+who say frankly that they would waste the money if it were in their care;
+that their wives secure far better results than they could; that the
+practice of having only carfare, at the most lunch money, reduces greatly
+the much abused social habit of "treating." The married man who can
+"treat," it is generally conceded, is not fair to his family; he keeps his
+wages at their expense.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the observer marvels at the infinite patience of many men. Their
+wives drift. Neither money nor time is used for their families. A week's
+loss of work, and there is debt; a day's sickness, and to its suffering is
+added the knowledge that there is no money in reserve to meet this
+emergency, even though the wages insure it. While knowing well the cause,
+one resents the unjust conditions that control many marriages among the
+young people of the wage-earning class. The young women rarely have the
+knowledge that will enable them to do their share in establishing the home.
+The young man contracting a marriage without the prospect of supporting a
+home is condemned and his bride pitied; but there is little criticism if
+she spends years&mdash;years that mean discomfort and waste&mdash;in learning to do
+her part, if she ever learns.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 624px;">
+<img src="images/fig324.jpg" width="624" height="480" alt="AFTER SCHOOL AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">AFTER SCHOOL AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The mental attitude of the wage-earners toward their income is confusing
+and yet interesting. In reply to any question of wages, the maximum sum is
+always given. The question of idle time does not enter into computations of
+the year's possible income and necessary outlays. This holds good before as
+well as after marriage. Work may last for only forty weeks of the year, but
+the other twelve, even among intelligent wage-earners, sometimes are not
+counted in their relation to income. This perhaps explains much that is
+counted as thriftlessness. It is, in fact, a failure to apply arithmetic to
+daily life.</p>
+
+<p>After all is said, no one who is familiar with the income of the
+wage-earning class can fail to see that the results obtained prove
+conclusively that the use of money in the well-regulated home<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> is a fine
+art; that many working-men's wives could give post-graduate courses in the
+use of money to women who consider they have the right to teach them. Even
+waste and misuse are regulated by education and experience where there is
+even a modicum of intelligence. The second conclusion is that thrift under
+certain conditions is a vice that causes distinct deterioration of
+character. It should be combated as vigorously as thriftlessness. It can
+only be done by raising the standards of living; by creating other
+standards of value than money.</p>
+
+<p>But everywhere among the wage-earning people the independence of the wife
+in money matters is apparent.</p>
+
+<p>There are men who are niggardly and who hand out small sums daily, and
+never recognize that the wife has a right to anything beyond food and
+shelter, who grudgingly buy clothes when they must. These men are despised,
+spoken of with contempt as not being good fathers or husbands, and their
+wives are openly pitied. But the mass of working men place their wives in a
+perfectly independent position by making them the absolute disbursers of
+their incomes. The small shopkeepers, to all intents and purposes, treat
+their wives as partners. The wives work with them, sharing their knowledge,
+their responsibilities,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> and appear as joint owner in the bank account. The
+wife usually is the safe until the money goes to the bank account.</p>
+
+<p>When a wife is a good financial manager, she is the head of the house,
+whose reign is never questioned. "Her children rise up and call her
+blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her," though the Book of
+Proverbs may be unknown. This financial independence of the wives of
+working men develops the spirit of independence and aggressiveness that so
+often disturbs and upsets the plans of the woman who would do them good,
+and is the cause of the charge of ingratitude that is often made against
+the women of the tenement-house regions. It is scarcely natural to develop
+gratitude for efforts made in the wrong direction. Poverty has its degrees,
+as has wealth. There are families living in tenements whose conditions
+represent wealth when contrasted with that of their neighbors. One fact
+remains. Both women do not need the same opportunities, the same help. The
+student of the management of wages in a tenement-house home rapidly
+acquires a spirit of humility. While everywhere there is waste, there are
+times when money seems to buy double the amount that the student thought
+possible. With the wage-earners' families, as with all others, the income
+buys that which is most desired by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> those spending it. Choice is the master
+of decision, even in necessities. What is needed in the wage-earner's
+family is that education, that opportunity for development that will make a
+choice of the highest things, those that will mean a body and mind so
+nourished and cared for that moral resistance is the available capital of
+every member of the family in time of need.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<h3>HOME STANDARDS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The world knows two aspects of involuntary poverty: The one inseparable
+from degradation; the other picturesque, appealing to the emotions, and
+giving a field for the play of sympathetic activity that frequently
+neglects to note the results it attains.</p>
+
+<p>There are few who discern that poverty is a comparative term, and these do
+not use the word in its financial sense wholly.</p>
+
+<p>Those who know intimately the struggling, up-growing poor know that the
+rich can never give the exquisite expression to love that life at this
+level makes possible. Who would dream when looking at the Hercules, with
+clothes and hands soiled by his daily labor, that he is the tender nurse of
+wife and baby; that he is hurrying to a house cared for with joy. He will
+wash dishes, cook, scrub the floor, walk the baby to sleep, and coddle and
+pet a wife who from sheer loneliness and worry over work undone may be the
+harder to please and quiet. All this, and perhaps, almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> certainly, not
+once will any terms of endearment be heard, and, strange as it may seem, no
+kiss given. How one rebels and rejoices that love can be thus expressed!</p>
+
+<p>When sickness enters the home of the poor man, money is not present to
+relieve the able from personal service, often made more difficult through
+ignorance. Pride shuts the door to charity and the burden is carried in
+love. Those who know life at this level can never, never lose faith in the
+Eternal love, for they see always, however disguised, the divine spark in
+every human being. The silence of love thus expressed, the revelation of it
+where least expected, makes the one who witnesses it conscious of what
+power lies outside and beyond and above his own life, not witnessed to the
+ear. Every day at this level of life in our great city it is proved to the
+privileged that tenderness is the winning element in strength; that love
+daily, hourly here proves its power of self-abnegation. Here, too, it fills
+its function of inspiration. Days, weeks, months, years go by and the
+burden of moral weakness is borne with the cloak of faith wrapped about its
+fears. When so expressed, its loyal unconsciousness adds to its beauty and
+makes it an inspiration to all who come into its presence as friends; the
+lips voice its faith, the eyes alone reveal its fears even to friends.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig332.jpg" width="640" height="437" alt="THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS." title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The more intimately one comes into the home circle of the independent
+wage-earners the more clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand
+revealed. Life must be lived so simply, the interests of life are so
+evident, that the value of words decreases; action expresses the heart
+perfectly. The very services the children render each other train them for
+the family life they will establish. The baby tended by an older brother
+and sister learns to depend on them for care, and that dependence in turn
+draws out a love and responsibility that could not have birth under any
+other conditions. The child who finds that in pain, weariness, suffering, a
+father and mother alone share its care; the elder children who see how
+naturally sacrifices are made for them, how little the father and mother
+value themselves, their ease, even their comfort, learn to value the love
+in the home and depend on it, give love to it, that money to buy service
+would bar out. The child who sees parents make sacrifices to enlarge his
+opportunities for education, seeing him as a positive factor in his own
+manhood, sees more than parental love in such sacrifices and stands in more
+than the relation of child to parents.</p>
+
+<p>At the level where charity and dependence are large factors in the home
+life, the relation of parents to children is changed by their presence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+Art has given Charity the figure of a noble, benign woman, in the ample
+folds of whose garments children are protected. Too often in life she wears
+a short skirt, to make speed possible, suggesting in movements and voice
+the need of nervines, when she does not seem to have taken the bandage from
+the eyes of Justice for her own use, while neglecting to borrow her scales.
+Where Charity is the welcome guest, instinct is greater than intelligence
+in the parental relation. The home tie is slight; children become shrewdly
+self-dependent, physical hardships are more easily borne, and life is often
+a mere matter of shelter and food; the animal alone is kept alive. This
+represents a social level as remote from that of the independent
+wage-earner as is represented between the home's standards and requirements
+of a family living on fifteen hundred dollars a year and that of a family
+living on fifteen thousand dollars a year.</p>
+
+<p>We use the word poor so carelessly that there is confusion where absolute
+misapprehension has not developed as to the character of the largest, most
+receptive, most responsive and most responsible class of citizens of New
+York. Politically they have been neglected, until the Citizens' Union gave
+them a formative part in political decisions. Here and there a score or
+more independent working<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> men would be found in political organizations,
+because of an active political conscience, always hoping for better days,
+when the city would be given its imperative rights without regard to the
+State or national political complications. It was a hopeless fight, and has
+sent into the erratic political parties the majority of the independent
+working men now in them. The schemes of the politicians disgusted them, and
+new principals seemed to be the only hope for the clean-minded mind who did
+its own thinking.</p>
+
+<p>The great mass of these independent, self-respecting, intelligent
+working-men voters were hunted for at election, but were not counted worthy
+to take a place in the councils of the politically active because they were
+feared. The Citizens' Union recognized their value and power, and they have
+come into their own as citizens. No greater service have the Settlements
+done the city than discovering this unused element in political power and
+centering it where it is recognized as the saving power in municipal
+government. These men stand at the head of the homes that reveal
+love&mdash;tender, protecting inspiring love&mdash;serving in unspoken unselfishness
+to the largest degree.</p>
+
+<p>Thousands of mothers can testify to the cheerful sharing by fathers in the
+household burdens after a day of hard work; of cheerful going without
+necessities<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> on the part of a father to give more than necessities to the
+children. Thousands of husbands and fathers will note the unselfishness and
+wisdom of a mother in caring for and enlarging the opportunities for the
+children, who are the common objects of love and ambition, and the
+confidence and love of the husband grows with the years. To the observer
+there is at the same time no more inspiring and depressing revelation than
+the parental love which asks nothing for itself, but all that life can give
+for the children, the visible expression of their mutual love. Often there
+is no thought given to a future of possible dependence. Wages do not make
+possible the care of the children at the standards of the parents, the
+buying of an environment that the experience of intelligent parents demands
+for them, and a bank account. The last is desirable, the first demand
+imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be thrown out when the life
+currents are running toward the rocks of want and dependence. Nothing is
+kept back for personal use by these fathers and mothers. Sometimes this
+very unselfishness, when unregulated by wisdom, leaves them lonely and
+forsaken in old age. Those to whom they have given their lives have by the
+gift been placed in social positions that seemingly bar out the parents who
+made achievement possible. Even in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> loneliness of old age the parents
+rejoice at the success and forget and forgive the separation. The end for
+which they worked has been attained, their children are successful, and
+they still count themselves nothing compared with their children.</p>
+
+<p>It is the independent wage-earners who make the largest contributions to
+our wealth, commercial greatness, national prestige; yet the world,
+counting wealth by dollars, classifies these as poor. They are as far
+removed from the incapable, the degraded, the vicious, the dependent, the
+ignorant&mdash;who provide the themes for books&mdash;as far removed from the
+worthless, the deficient, the mentally, morally weak, so familiar to the
+people of wealth who give money or time, or both, to lessen their miseries,
+as they are in standard and ambition from the people counted wealthy. The
+cost of floor space on which to make a home may make them neighbors of the
+people who are the problems of a great city; they may live in regions that
+are the laboratory of the student of social and political conditions, but
+they live behind closed doors, bring up their children, so far as they can,
+uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and overcome their environment to a
+surprising degree. There is no word to distinguish them from those who make
+capital of their poverty, and the world loses much because of the lack of a
+term that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> would express the class who are the hope of this nation, whose
+children are the promise of its established greatness.</p>
+
+<p>The very limitations that small incomes impose on husbands and wives,
+strangers to social ambitions, bring into the relation an independence and
+<i>camaraderie</i> that possibilities of wealth would bar out. When a father and
+mother have one object in life, their children, they have no personal
+ambitions; their minds run in the same groove; they live of necessity a
+unit. When the aim is to give their children a better education than they
+had; to place them on a firmer foundation in the wage-earning world than
+the one on which the father and mother started; to save the children from
+the contaminating world as they had to meet it, there of necessity is a
+welded interest that bars out a world of distractions. The world in which
+such fathers and mothers live may seem narrow, but the smallness of the
+world makes the companionship the closer. As one gets into the inner circle
+of these homes, the small part that wealth plays in happiness is realized,
+and the comprehension of what constitutes essentials is gained. The man who
+knows the measure of his wage-earning power does not waste his nerve and
+vitality to earn more; the family grow to have fixed habits of expenditure,
+and content is attained that the social strugglers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> never know. The victim
+of nervous prostration is not found in the working-man's world; the fixed
+rate of wages relieves the nerves, but exercises the muscles and the
+balance of health is kept. The exceptions to this happy attainment are
+those whose mental or moral natures have not been adjusted to the happy,
+even life of the skilled, sober, industrious, thrifty working-man's family
+in New York.</p>
+
+<p>The world of wealth would find itself rejected if it brought with it into
+the wage-earning world its moral standards, the rules of conduct are so
+simple in this world, the standards so elemental. An aldermanic candidate
+who in his own world is not counted ignorant, during the campaign of 1901
+conceived the idea, which he had never held before, though this was the
+fourth time he had appealed to the suffrages of the people, that the women
+were a factor in political success. He decided to call on the wives,
+mothers and sisters of the voters in his district. It would be interesting
+to know his conclusions after his experience. He must have gained wisdom by
+his experiment, and heard some unwelcome truths. He announced to one of his
+hostesses that he thought if he called and showed himself they might see in
+him something that would persuade them that their husbands, fathers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+brothers, or sons ought to vote for him. It would have been interesting to
+have seen his face when more than one hostess assured him that, having seen
+him, she felt bound to urge her husband to vote for the other candidate. Or
+when he was told by others that he must understand how certain he was of
+defeat, or he would not appeal to women. Still more interesting it would
+have been to see him when an outraged wife let down the flood-gates of her
+wrath because she blamed him for the periodic lapses from industry and
+sobriety of which her husband was guilty. The better class of voters of
+this candidate's party resented angrily the man calling on their wives. The
+root cause of the indignation of the men and women it was found was that
+this man dared to call when the husbands were not at home. In the world of
+work there is no place for social life in the day-time, and it argues ill
+for those who indulge in it. The Metropolitan Opera House in the evening
+would so shock the working man and his wife that they would never recover
+respect for those who frequent it. A high-necked lace dress with a low
+lining, worn in the evening by one from the other world to an East Side
+party, brought out this comment: "Oh! yes, she's all right. They all do it,
+the women; but isn't it awful?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The moral standards for men and women in the world of work are the same.
+The immoral man is despised and avoided by the women. A woman who should
+maintain the smallest degree of friendship or acquaintance with a man known
+to be immoral would be avoided by her neighbors; she would be made to
+realize at once the cause of her offending.</p>
+
+<p>A silly, pretty little woman, whose husband at times was cruel and brutal,
+ran away from him with another man. No one in the neighborhood could
+remember when such a thing had happened before, and the neighborhood
+resented it as a disgrace. The husband's brutality was well known; he was
+despised and ignored by the better element of men in the neighborhood. Had
+the wife gone alone, she would have had the support of a respectable
+minority, but now the husband was the object of deep sympathy. When the
+wife was found, and declared she would gladly starve with the partner of
+her disgrace&mdash;and there was a fair prospect at the time that she
+would&mdash;"than have the best in the land with my husband; he has kicked me
+out for the last time," she was cast out of the books of remembrance in
+that neighborhood. "She married him for better or worse," was the measure
+of a wife's duty among these wives and mothers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The admiration of the explorer into this world of work and homes grows with
+the years for the people who make it, as indignation grows at the
+misunderstanding of its limitations, its possibilities, its beauty and
+greatness. For Matthew Arnold gave the true definition of greatness when he
+said it was the obstacles overcome, not his attainments, that made a man
+great. The explorer makes many discoveries&mdash;some that stimulate and
+surprise, some that puzzle and depress. The silence of love in this world
+is a revelation. Whether the terms of endearment are not in the language of
+this world, or whether the want of leisure and privacy stifle them, it is
+difficult to decide. Perhaps it is that the language of love is learned in
+a mother's arms; that when her service to her child must be physical, when
+it is but one of a thousand things demanding her care and thought&mdash;when her
+muscles must serve unceasingly&mdash;she has no time to express the love that
+strengthens them by words. It may be that the language of love does not
+grow within crowded walls, and that it is forced to express itself in
+service.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 640px;">
+<img src="images/fig344.jpg" width="640" height="404" alt="A BIT OF OLD GREENWICH." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A BIT OF OLD GREENWICH.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A man ranking high in the intellectual world once took for his theme, when
+preaching to a company of wage-earners and their wives, "Home Life." It was
+a rare inspiration that moved him to point out how much was lost to the
+home where the verbal expression of love was never heard. He said no higher
+inspiration to work his best could be given a man than his wife's good-bye
+kiss in the morning; nor a charm that would drive away care, worry and
+exhaustion more perfect than her welcoming kiss when he returned from his
+work at the close of the day. He pictured the feelings of the man who found
+his wife silent and unresponsive when he entered the house; who answered
+his query as to what was the matter with "Nothing." In his audience was a
+wife whose faithfulness and intelligence had made her husband far more than
+he could ever have been without her, a fact of which he was fully
+conscious; he was not allowed to forget it. This wife was deeply impressed
+by what she heard. She was ignorant because of lack of opportunity,
+untruthful because she was ignorant; she could not see the relations of
+things. Vindictive, because in her moral code you must resent any wrong,
+real or fancied, by an action that goes far deeper than that of the
+offender in its effect. Anything else would be an evidence of weakness. She
+expressed her contempt for one who would forgive an injury, and prided
+herself that she never did. She had enthusiasm, could inspire others, and
+proved herself as capable in leading them to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> do wrong as to do right. She
+was the power in her home, and established its standard of right and wrong
+that gave motive to the lives of her children. This night the speaker
+lifted the veil. There was something that belonged in the home that she
+alone could put there, and she had not. She resolved that she would part
+from and meet her husband with a kiss. It is best to let her tell her own
+story:</p>
+
+<p>"I just made up my mind I'd do it." No girl of eighteen giving a confidence
+of a love affair could have shown more embarrassment than this mother of
+wage-earning children. "I did not know how I would do it, or what &mdash;&mdash;
+would say, but I just made up my mind I would kiss him when he came home. I
+thought about it all the next day. Late in the afternoon I made up my mind.
+Of course, I could not kiss him before the children. When it was most time
+for &mdash;&mdash; to come home, I sent them each on an errand that would keep them
+away until long after &mdash;&mdash; got home. I had the table all set and the supper
+cooking. At last I heard him come up the stairs. My land! How I trembled! I
+stood so that when the door opened he would not see me, and then I just
+kissed him before I had a chance to think. He staggered back, he was so
+surprised." She waited while an expression that should have been habitual<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+changed her shrewd, hard face into a loving woman's. "But I never saw him
+look so happy," she continued. "I made up my mind I would kiss him every
+day when he came home. I could not kiss him in the morning, for the
+children were all there," she added decidedly; "but I can always send the
+little ones on errands at night."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was three weeks later that she told of the climax. "I had a
+toothache all day; I was tired and cross, for I had been washing. I stood
+by the fire, making the hash. Kittie was setting the table, when &mdash;&mdash;
+opened the door. I did not look up. He stood in the door a minute; then he
+asked, 'What's the matter, Jennie?' 'Nothing.' I knew I said it cross. I
+looked up then. &mdash;&mdash; looked so disappointed that I thought he'd cry. I just
+forgot the children, and right before them I kissed &mdash;&mdash; twice. I wish you
+could have seen his face. I burst out laughing when I looked at the two
+children. They stood staring at us with their mouths wide open. Do you know
+what I did? I kissed each of them. I don't believe I've kissed either since
+they were babies. I think they told the big ones in the front room when
+they came from work." This experiment in love-making did not continue. &mdash;&mdash;
+came home drunk one night, and for punishment the experiment was dropped
+and never resumed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> While it lasted, it had a most harmonizing effect on
+the whole family, and one wondered if it had been begun earlier, when the
+habit could have been easily fixed, what would have been the result.</p>
+
+<p>The mother, from a worldly point of view, has been most successful. The
+children are in positions where skill is required, and wages seem to depend
+on health only. Yet they are not popular; are selfish and unsympathetic.
+They point to their own success as the reason why every family should
+succeed. The family has moved into new environment, establishing relations
+that have placed it several rounds higher than the level at which the
+home-making began; but it has no fixed place in the social world. The
+combined income of the five wages equals at times two thousand dollars a
+year.</p>
+
+<p>Not every wife in this world of silent love is encouraged as this wife was.
+Another, a gentle, quiet woman, without children, thought she would try.
+"He sit so still when he came home. I bought a flower and put it on the
+table. I have what he like best for supper, and I wait. I listen over the
+banister. When he come near our flight, I slip back and wait in the room,
+leaving the door open so he can see. When he close the door I go up to him,
+put mine arms around his neck and kiss him. He take my arms, shove me back
+and say:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> 'What the matter mit you? You crazy?'" The woman was crying. The
+three friends sat silent a moment, and then one said: "You haf no
+children," and the wife nodded. That was her explanation, and theirs.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps no greater charm prevails in this world of wage-earners than the
+attitude toward motherhood. There will be found here and there the young
+woman who rebels against it, who may risk life rather than assume the care
+of a baby. When one goes back of this rebellion there is always found the
+influence of some older woman who has other ambitions, clothes, pleasure;
+who influences, or tries to influence, the young married women she meets; a
+woman who will even talk freely to girls against motherhood. There is in
+this world of workers the strong active public sentiment against childless
+women that more than counteracts this influence, and babies are welcomed
+when there is nothing but love to greet them, not much more to feed them or
+clothe them; but they are welcomed. The training of the children&mdash;natural,
+not acquired&mdash;to be fathers and mothers has doubtless a far-reaching effect
+in keeping this natural attitude of mind toward parenthood.</p>
+
+<p>We get up a lot of wasted sentiment about the little mothers and fathers,
+not seeing that the offices<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> are fitting them to meet a future when all
+that they learn in the care of baby brothers and sisters will make their
+lives easier as fathers and mothers. Often the only opportunity they have
+for expressing affection is the little baby given to their care.</p>
+
+<p>How well one must know this part of the wage-earning world before it is
+possible to appreciate the fact that the boy is being trained by "his baby"
+for that future when he will share with the mother of his child its care.
+It is a constant revelation to find how intelligent the young men at this
+level are about children, and how frankly and unconsciously they will
+express it and condemn the ignorant or careless treatment of a child. The
+relation of the wage-earning children to the little children is paternal
+often. The little ones know that the elder ones work and care for them, and
+they render an obedience that is often amusing. With sisters this takes
+another form. If the elder girl has ideas and tastes, especially if she has
+skill, she will often entirely decide how the younger children shall dress;
+often the younger children would not be at all satisfied with clothes the
+elder girls did not select and design. Here again will be found a
+half-maternal attitude that secures obedience and regulates privileges;
+that sometimes ignores the rightful authority in the home. The young girl
+who has an elder sister working and secures work with her is considered
+very fortunate. Two sisters are known, now past middle life. One is quite a
+handsome woman, the other plain. The handsome sister is the younger; she
+never, when she was a wage-earner, went through the streets alone. The
+elder sister, when they did not work together, escorted the younger one
+back and forth to her work. Now, the mother of three children, nothing
+could persuade her to go on the streets alone beyond the corner store. Her
+husband, in a city department on a small salary, always attends her in
+shopping expeditions, and all social engagements are made with respect to
+his hours of freedom. She receives a wealth of love, and tenderness, and
+protection. Selfish? Yes, till one wonders at the blindness of those who do
+her homage.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 625px;">
+<img src="images/fig352.jpg" width="625" height="480" alt="A LITTLE FATHER." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A LITTLE FATHER.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Once a very sensible wife and mother, whose intelligence and devotion are
+raising the family many degrees above that of the generation preceding her
+and her husband, said: "I shall watch my children. My mother let one of my
+sisters exact far more than her share of wages. She coaxed or cried, or
+both, until she got what she wanted. The rest of us gave in, because we
+would not worry mother; you see that, now we are all married, she expects
+us to save her from worry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> and work; we have to; she cannot get along." In
+a moment she continued: "Haven't you seen it, that in every large family
+there is one who gets more and gives less than the others?" A statement
+profoundly true, but not confined to any one social level.</p>
+
+<p>Among the discoveries the explorer into this world makes is that life is
+full of compensations. One learns to overlook bad housekeeping, when it is
+discovered that a cross, impatient word is never spoken by the
+house-mother; that the children are the companions of the mother; that no
+one else is so attractive; that she is never too busy to listen to anything
+that interests them. One learns to forgive the needlessly shabby dressing
+of children, when it is discovered that they are well nourished and cared
+for, and that the husband and father never fails to declare that his wife
+is the best cook in the city and always has his meals on time. Usually this
+mother is fat, full of fun, and laughs as though tears were not in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>Order, cleanliness and economy do not appeal as cardinal virtues when it is
+found that there is no room for the children in the house, no money to buy
+them the smallest pleasure where these over-estimated virtues predominate.
+It is found usually that the worry of maintaining standards<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> that ignore
+the rights of the family, and to which they have been sacrificed, have
+seared the mother's head and heart, and she no longer responds to the
+maternal emotions; she becomes the victim of her own habits and cannot
+reform. Perhaps it is this type of woman who creates the most barren home;
+the one that is quite as prolific a source of supply to the saloons and the
+streets as that of the degenerate housekeeper out of whose life spiritual
+impulse has departed, and into which ideals and ambitions were never born.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult at times to decide whether to laugh at or resent the
+criticisms one often hears of the extravagances of the poor. When one
+becomes familiar with the demands for rent, coal, shoes, for clothes that
+must be worn to work and school; for the things the cost of which cannot be
+put below a certain sum&mdash;food always can be regulated&mdash;and compares these
+fixed charges with the income available, the management of money in the
+independent working man's family amounts to genius, and it must take
+generations of economists to produce it.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, in New York emphasis is laid on clothes. Extravagance in
+dress is the habit of the city. The people seen in the streets, in the
+stores, in public conveyances, show a singular uniformity in clothes; this
+is as true of men as of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> women. The differences are in manners and English.
+The spirit of the land is as yet materialistic, and the democratic spirit
+shows itself in the outward forms. The tailor-made gown was not looked upon
+as a regenerator of &aelig;sthetic standards, but it has proved that. Its
+simplicity and durability has released money that formerly was used in
+useless trimming. The ready-trimmed hat is also a lever in throwing the
+scale in the right direction.</p>
+
+<p>The attention to school decoration of recent years has given new standards
+for the home. The wage-earning world grows more harmonious in its demands
+on wages; the home now makes its demands for decoration that the workers
+obey. Signs outside of tenement houses renting suites of four rooms for
+twenty and twenty-five dollars per month announce: "Burlaped halls; parlors
+in white and blue;" or, "Tiled halls, open gas grates, fancy chandeliers."
+The men who hire these apartments earn from fifteen to twenty-five dollars
+a week or more. Thousands of American working men pay these rentals to save
+their children from the environment inseparable from the surroundings that
+must be endured if a fair proportion of their wages were used for rent. One
+grows to reverence the courage that enables a husband and wife, with only
+one pair of hands earning the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> home needs, to assume such rents. No higher
+evidence of the manhood and righteous ambition of the American citizen
+could be given than this: that he places his all to secure for his children
+a home that is reasonably protected; that offers opportunities for
+cleanliness and privacy. Renting a room to a lodger will sometimes make
+less demands on a father's wages for rent; sometimes the rent is assumed in
+the hope of securing lodgers, and then the struggle is pathetic, but borne
+because the children must not grow up in a less desirable neighborhood. If
+one were asked for the standard by which to measure the civilization of
+each family in the wage-earning world, the reply would have to be, "Rent."
+It at once makes the most and the least return; it is the tyrant which
+makes or mars the home life. When a family of eight, having a combined
+income of thirty-six dollars a week, are content to live in three rooms,
+one knows about what to expect in social standards, and how many
+generations it will take to raise the home level. When a family of
+six&mdash;five wage-earners&mdash;who began life at almost the homeless level,
+gradually come into a combined income of two thousand dollars a year, it is
+not to be expected that its standards of needs will be those of a college
+graduate on the same income. Often no member of the family can read<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+readily. School life was, especially for the elder children, an
+intermittent one, and truth did not regulate the beginning of wage-earning
+of any of the children. The younger children probably warred against school
+long before fourteen years of life gave them freedom. There is natural
+intelligence, a certain manner acquired through observation, but no
+standard of intellectual life. Their very intelligence makes such families
+conscious of their shortcomings, and it is this consciousness that leads to
+the aggressiveness of manner that is so offensive, so often mistakenly
+called the American manner. It is the manner that is due to awakened
+consciousness which in the next generation will know when to wear evening
+dress, if not how.</p>
+
+<p>The use of money in such families is for show. It would be counted
+extravagant to buy a book, or a ticket to an oratorio or a concert to hear
+the best music. It would in such a family be counted useless to train the
+younger children to wage-earning by education. The heads of the family will
+be hospitable where it counts as showing how much more they have than the
+others in their world. They receive from their world what snobbishness
+receives everywhere. Snobbishness, on the whole, is not common even where
+the income would remove the family from a tenement-house environment. The
+uncertainty of work, and the absolute dependence of the worker on wages,
+make snobbishness dangerous; that often proves a boomerang their
+observation shows.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 571px;">
+<img src="images/fig360.jpg" width="571" height="480" alt="A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH." title="" />
+<span class="caption">A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The spirit of helpfulness may not find so free a field of operations when
+wages are two dollars and a half and over a day, but it is in readiness.
+Sickness in a neighbor's family will show that it has not been lost because
+of prosperity, but it is less lavish; there is dawning consciousness that
+self-preservation is the first law of nature; that home has the first right
+to strength and thought; that only the surplus is available for the world
+of friends. The same thriftlessness which makes a family accept charity
+without question is the cause of their generosity. As the sense of
+responsibility develops, the observer discovers a reserve in the giving of
+either their money or their strength to those about them; kindness abounds,
+but generosity is regulated as one goes up the scale in the world of
+wage-earners. Not only that, but in the direst need the needy, as one goes
+up the scale, regulate the degree of freedom given the closest friends. It
+often borders on the tragic, the suffering borne in silence, and revealed
+often when the time for help is passed.</p>
+
+<p>This division of the people into rich and poor without gradations and
+without a comprehension<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> of the standards and needs that make new worlds up
+and down the scale, has had a serious effect on the home life, the church
+life of the people, the political life of the people. The churches have
+driven out the very people in the tenement-house regions who needed them
+and whom they needed.</p>
+
+<p>Corrupt administration has imposed burdens on the homes which for a time
+the voters in turn felt powerless to lift. The independent wage-earner
+found his hope of political recognition in allegiance to the political
+machines. The leaders, his inferiors often mentally, and still more surely
+morally, were at least approachable and familiar, and the man who made his
+own life found too often that only in the political circle of interest was
+he the equal of those who led. Here there was no manner that expressed
+condescension or superiority. His own language was spoken; he was at home.
+That these men allowed themselves to be used was the natural result of the
+habit of indifference to the real issues in a municipal campaign so common
+in New York. When the burdens of a corrupt administration pressed on the
+homes; when the leaders for righteous government acknowledged by appealing
+to the makers of this country, the plain people, that they were an integral
+part of the city's government, they responded, and by their response
+overthrew the corrupt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> government that the indifference of all classes had
+helped to make powerful.</p>
+
+<p>The century opens well. Capitalist and wage-earner sit at the same board,
+having equal voice in the plans for redeeming the city from partisan
+machine control.</p>
+
+<p>As one thinks of the change, one sees that the evils that disgraced New
+York were due to the indifference of the millionaires and the honest
+working men. It is the response of the political conscience of both to the
+need of the city that has been its redemption; its only sure protection is
+the activity of that conscience three hundred and sixty-five days of each
+year in all the years to come.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+<h3>WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?</h3>
+
+
+<p>It took years for the evils of political machines to make life unbearable
+in New York. Not until the tremendous evils it imposed on child-life were
+given emphasis did the public sentiment of the city find intelligent
+expression&mdash;voice the moral conscience of the whole people. That dishonest
+administration of the city government imposed burdens on the home of the
+poor man no intelligent person disputed; but few knew how heavy the burdens
+or how far-reaching the effects on character. The people who suffered most
+were, in the very nature of things, the ones who could not see these
+influences, or estimate truly the degrading effect on character. The people
+who resented the conditions that made life harder in the tenements; who
+resented the environment which made the bringing up of children in
+innocence, integrity, and decency often impossible, were those who were in
+the minority. Hopelessness of overcoming the evils made some voters the
+forgers of their own chains.</p>
+
+<p>Newspapers gave columns to the exposure of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> the evils of the political
+methods which made individuals rich at the cost of the homes of the city,
+especially the homes of the poor. But the phase of this influence that was
+most degrading could only be learned by living in the regions, one of the
+people, suffering with them the burdens dishonesty imposed.</p>
+
+<p>When college-trained men and women established their homes in the regions
+of the tenements, making friends with the people, associating freely with
+them, especially with the young people and the children, they discovered
+that the worst evil with which the people were contending was the constant
+lowering of the moral standards due to the influence of the political
+organization that seemed to regulate even the right of the people to earn a
+living. It was but a step from fear to favor; but a little time before the
+man out-weighed the principle; Justice became the hand-maid of "pull," and
+the people living wholly under the environment corrupt political power
+created, knew no government but that of the "leader" and the man who
+represented him. To trade votes was no disgrace, for it meant a share in
+the perquisites that political power held. These men and women of trained
+intelligence saw that the corrupting of the moral standards of the people
+was a far greater evil&mdash;an evil that was of far greater moment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> to the
+whole people than the maladministrations that affected their physical
+being, though it led to death.</p>
+
+<p>It was the revelations the Settlement workers were able to make to a
+half-informed community of wealth and trained intelligence that led to the
+redeeming of the city. It made the active combination of wealth and poverty
+that brought into the political arena the dormant consciences that created
+in 1901 the Apotheosis, New York redeemed, that is the justification of
+democracy to the world.</p>
+
+<p>The iniquity, ignorance and indifference that create and maintain a system
+of municipal administration based on the theory that politics is a
+profession, and each promoter the architect of his own fortune, to be built
+at the expense of the citizens, is the reflection of the character of the
+citizens. The system is never the product of one man's brains, nor does its
+growth ever begin at the top. It begins always in the smallest political
+unit, where the man who wishes the office in the gift of that unit stands
+closest to the people. The bargaining for votes begins there. The number of
+exchanges of votes for favors and places successfully accomplished makes
+the "boss," the man who represents law and order; who is judge, and jury,
+and keeper of the jail to those who do his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> bidding. As the political units
+develop their bosses&mdash;"leaders," in voters' parlance&mdash;the system grows
+until the chain is complete, and each political henchman, in the order of
+his importance, takes his share of the people's money. The perquisites
+reach millions before the thousands are distributed that enables the leader
+to pose as the all-pervading friend to the district in time of need.</p>
+
+<p>The political units where this system of government in the interest of the
+"boss" have their strongest hold are the best evidences of the moral
+degeneracy that follows. Here the liquor saloons flourish, the headquarters
+of the "leader" and his cohorts, used in the order of rank in the system,
+from the gayly lighted, silver-bedecked, mirror-lined bar-room to the
+smoky, dirty, vilely kept den where those gather who have no use in life
+but to vote according to orders and work for the political leader's
+entrenchment. These saloons represent the primary school and the university
+of the voters of the district. They represent all the educational and
+recreative opportunity of most of the adults. They establish the habits of
+thinking for the majority of the people, for they are the lyceum where all
+questions are discussed that interest the people. The most interesting is
+how to get wages, as it is the most important. The common struggle creates
+common<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> bonds of sympathy. All principles go down before the concrete,
+understandable fact that if the "boss" is beaten, work will cease for
+neighbor, friend, and friend's friend. Each man learns through every course
+in this training school of citizens that the paramount duty of each voter
+is to keep the "boss" in power. It means wages, or the hope of wages, under
+the least strenuous of employers, the city. Men work hard for the system,
+not because the moral nature of many of them is not in revolt against the
+system, but because the keeping of a home for wife and children is at
+stake. Often the voter's necessities, his ignorance often, his rebellion
+against wealth often, his unrest, undermine his moral nature, blind his
+intelligence, and he forges the chains that bind him in slavery to a system
+that will cast him aside, and refuse him a reason when there is no use for
+him. The voter may work during an election campaign half knowing that to
+secure another worker in the interests of the political system the place he
+holds has been promised to another after election. This fear and this hope
+enters the homes; women and children are educated under the moral
+degradation that enslaves husbands, sons, brothers, friends, lovers. The
+standards of morals are established even in childhood by the working of the
+systems of political machines. There is one measure of morals, <i>success</i>.
+What succeeds is right.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 480px;">
+<img src="images/fig370.jpg" width="480" height="594" alt="TAKING THEIR TURN IN THE YARD AT THE SETTLEMENT." title="" />
+<span class="caption">TAKING THEIR TURN IN THE YARD AT THE SETTLEMENT.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A small house was hired, through the generosity of several women, for the
+purpose of providing a place for recreation and social opportunity for a
+number of Christians&mdash;that is, people not Hebrews&mdash;left in a thickly
+settled Hebrew district. These Christians, a mere remnant, resented the
+opportunities offered the Hebrews, and while they might have availed
+themselves of them, they would not, so strong was the race prejudice.
+Shortly after the house was opened a delegation of boys appeared asking for
+the use of the large room for a boys' club. The privilege was given on the
+conditions that one of the workers interested in the house should have the
+privilege of visiting the room freely when the club was in session; that
+the club should pay twenty cents per month for the use of the room; that it
+should be limited to twenty members for three months. Before the first
+month had passed, it was decided that unless the club would accept a
+director, it was a waste of the space and light to let these boys use the
+room. They called themselves a debating and literary club. They knew
+nothing of literature naturally and less of debating. They were told that
+they must accept a director, a man who would instruct them in parliamentary
+law,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> guide them in debate and suggest subjects for study, or they must
+give up the room. They were very angry, but finally decided to accept the
+director. Their constitution provided for an election every month, a
+provision which kept them in a turmoil all the time. When the majority were
+convinced of this, and voted that officers should be elected every three
+months, the dissenting minority withdrew to form a new club, to meet
+somewhere else. Two weeks later, on club night, the bell rang. The leader
+of the minority, who had been elected president of the new club, asked if
+they might come back. They did not like the place where they met. After a
+conference with the original club, it was decided that, if they chose to
+come back as members of the club and pay their dues&mdash;three cents per
+week&mdash;they might come back. The conditions were accepted, and the seceding
+minority were to be reinstated as members of the original club on the next
+meeting night. As the petitioner was leaving, he turned innocently to the
+director and said: "Say, we've elected a couple of new fellows. They can
+come in, can't they?" The club consented conditionally on the "new fellows"
+being peaceable. The next meeting night came. The bell rang. In order to do
+full honor to the returning prodigals, the president went to the door.
+There was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> a rush and a scramble; the eight boys who withdrew, followed by
+twenty-two others, crowded into the room and demanded an election at once.
+They declared they were in the majority now, and had a right to the
+presidency for one of their own number. It was impossible to eject them,
+had it been wise. The question was postponed for one week and an arbitrator
+selected.</p>
+
+<p>When the next meeting night came, some of the new recruits had dropped out
+and their places had been taken by older boys. The original members, who
+had maintained the club, were told to sit together and keep absolutely
+quiet. The constitution declared that no boy was a member of the club who
+did not pay an initiation fee of five cents; this included the first
+month's dues. The first strange boy was asked: "Have you paid your
+initiation fee?" The leader, a boy not fourteen, sprang forward and pressed
+a five-cent piece in the boy's hand, saying: "Pay it now. Joe's the
+treasurer." The cue had been given him, and he proceeded to give out
+nickels to the new boys, urging them to "pay Joe quick." During this scene
+another of the receding minority took his position in front of the door to
+prevent any boy leaving the room with the money. The performance was
+stopped; the opulent small boy, who it was evident was buying votes for the
+presidency,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> was told to gather up his nickels. The recruits were told,
+after an explanation, why they must leave, and to their credit be it
+recorded some of them resented the position in which they had been placed
+and promised the misleading leader an unhappy next day before they left. It
+was then decided that the twelve members who had constituted the majority
+should ballot individually for the eight who had seceded, as though they
+had never belonged to the club. It is unnecessary to say that the boy who
+made the trouble was rejected. Not one of those boys was fifteen years old,
+yet they had learned and understood the method of the political
+organizations of the region. Their elders, those they loved, used these
+methods, and succeeded by them in getting place and power. The man who
+succeeded in sharp practice in politics was the "boss." The man who was
+beaten was not smart. The measure of morals was success, not methods used
+to attain that success.</p>
+
+<p>A woman's club, organized several years before, used this house. The
+husbands of several of them organized a men's club, and met in the house
+one evening in the week. Several of those men were affiliated with the
+political organizations of the district; some held positions under the city
+government through these affiliations.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When the Citizens' Union campaign began in 1897, the women who established
+the house offered it and the yard for one evening a week to the Citizens'
+Union Campaign Committee. Illustrated lectures were given to the people of
+the neighborhood, the friends of the clubs using the house, and the parents
+of children in the children's clubs. This declared the sentiments of the
+women who established the house, which were emphasized when a picture of
+the Citizens' Union candidate for Mayor was put in the window. It became
+evident at once that there was trouble in the women's club; some of the
+members of the men's club never entered the house after the picture was
+placed. The Citizens' Union was defeated. At once the friction in the
+women's club developed, till it seemed wise to disband it. It was announced
+that the house had been given up, and that all the work done there must be
+placed elsewhere. The younger clubs were housed in the Clark Memorial. The
+women's club, in spite of the friction, voted to keep together, and, with
+the City History Club, asked to be received at the College Settlement,
+which generously, and at great inconvenience, arranged to receive them. The
+members of the women's club, numbering forty-five, voted unanimously to
+become identified with the College Settlement work, and pledged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> themselves
+to that work. The one woman who had resisted this decision in secret stood
+with the rest pledged to the Settlement. At once she incited trouble at the
+Settlement. She was voted out of the club. When the decision was announced,
+she, with the treasurer of the club and three others, walked out of the
+house, the treasurer taking the club treasurer's book and the money, over
+seventeen dollars. Sunday's papers announced the incorporation of a club
+under the old name. The incorporators were the five women who had left the
+club at the Settlement. The business of incorporating was attended to by a
+political leader in the State Assembly. One of these women had held a
+position in a city department, secured for her by a leader of one of the
+political parties; one was the wife of a man holding a city position
+through active affiliation with the other political party; another was the
+wife of a man who was striving for prominence in political affairs in the
+district, irrespective of party; the other was shrewd, ambitious,
+vindictive. The club before this break had done charitable work; had helped
+families who needed help, through the generosity of friends of wealth. It
+had a limited membership, and election was the assurance of certain
+qualities in the woman who was received as a member. All this had commanded
+attention<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> and could furnish political capital. To hold this for one or the
+other of the political parties was the intention of the women who
+incorporated under the club name and persuaded six of the club members to
+join them.</p>
+
+<p>The treasurer was so evidently the cat's-paw of those who were managing the
+affair that, while steps were being taken to punish her for taking the
+money, the club at the Settlement voted not to prosecute her, because it
+would be a stigma on her as long as she lived, because she would have to
+stand with women arrested for drunkenness and disorderly characters in the
+dock. The original club remained at the Settlement. The minority who
+withdrew, a total of eleven, began active and aggressive work. They hired
+the use of a working-girls' club-room. They began to work according to the
+most approved methods of political leaders. They attended the outings of a
+political association; tried to do what they called charitable work, but
+which this very group proved they could not do justly while in the little
+house.</p>
+
+<p>The Fusion campaign of 1901 brought unexpected complications to the club
+woman. The Tammany influence was stronger than the Republican, and the
+women who had led in the incorporating of the club withdrew. Unfortunately,
+the opportunity to give this whole group a strong<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> lesson in morals was
+lost, and they have been accepted where, had the genesis of their club been
+understood, it is but reasonable to suppose they would have had no moral
+support, and for that reason would have gained a moral lesson.</p>
+
+<p>The training most needed by the people of narrow experience and limited
+intelligence is that of clear distinctions between right and wrong by those
+they class above themselves. That shrewdness is not a moral virtue; that
+revenge is mean and not the function of mortals, is the one lesson
+intelligence and moral standards can teach convincingly.</p>
+
+<p>Recently it was the privilege of the writer to visit a Parents' Society
+connected with a school in the outskirts of Brooklyn. The spirit of good
+fellowship that existed, not only among the teachers of the school, but
+between the teachers and the parents, was a revelation. That there was a
+unifying cause was certain. What was it? One of the mothers, during a walk
+to the station, revealed it. In response to a comment on the good feeling
+so evident, the mother replied: "Yes, I feel it. Mr. &mdash;&mdash;," naming a member
+of the Board of Education, "at prayer meeting the other night spoke of the
+school and what a power it was in this part of the city. We owe it all to
+him. He's done everything he could do for the school, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> he has made all
+the ministers and the priests friends of the school." She was quiet a
+minute, and then added: "Years ago, when he first began fighting for the
+school, people used to call him a 'boss.' I think that kind of a boss would
+be good in every school. I tell my husband we ought to be glad that we
+bought that lot out here and built when we did, for we helped to make Mr.
+---- successful. If leading men to do your will means being a 'boss,' Mr.
+---- is one. But the city needs hundreds of such 'bosses.'" The man is a
+simple American citizen, bearing a foreign name, who saw clearly there were
+more ways of serving and saving his country than by carrying a rifle.</p>
+
+<p>In the last analysis the "boss" as he is in New York to-day is the product
+of many roots. The one that goes deepest in the soil, the course of his
+deepest hold, can be traced to the doors of our churches. The men who have
+failed to see that they owed an allegiance to the city that does not differ
+in degree from what they owed the Church; the men who failed to see that
+the Church was a positive factor in civic life; that its effectiveness in
+the community was dependent on the standards it demanded and helped to
+maintain in the city; that on it rested the responsibility for civic
+character-building&mdash;on these men rest the heaviest responsibility<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> for the
+evolution of the political "boss" and the evils of which he is the
+personification.</p>
+
+<p>Men and women give money to maintain church services in sections where
+political corruption and civic neglect have resulted in creating an
+environment that makes decent living impossible; an environment that has so
+degenerating an influence that the people become a factor in the problem it
+presents, for they have sunk to its level.</p>
+
+<p>In those sections the tools of the "boss," his active political agents, use
+the most despicable methods. The tool of the principal is valuable as he is
+conscienceless. His crumbs are the minor offices in the gift of the people;
+the lesser tools get "jobs," which the very limitations of their minds make
+them believe they must use to secure the largest return of money and power
+to themselves&mdash;a conception largely due to the indifference of the men who
+willingly delegate their civic responsibilities. Every man and woman who
+pays the slightest attention to the conditions under which the poor are
+forced to live, know that these conditions are responsible for the
+existence of nine-tenths of the eleemosynary institutions, private and
+public. They know that many of these institutions, could they stand before
+the community in their true character, would be recognized as disgraceful
+blots upon our civilization.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> They exist because so many good people in the
+community have found greater pleasure in establishing and maintaining them
+than in working actively to prevent the growth of the conditions that
+peoples them.</p>
+
+<p>Again and again one sees the names of men and women working actively on
+these boards of management who would not give a moment's thought to a
+meeting called in the interests of better civilization in sections of the
+city where their own homes are located; who know nothing of the conditions
+of the schools, the streets, the tenement houses, the factories, or the
+administration of the law in regard to them. There are men who would resent
+the charge of ignorance who do not know the names of the officers they
+either actively or passively elected to office in the political unit in
+which are their homes. They do not attend the primaries, defending their
+absence on the ground that they could accomplish nothing by their
+presence&mdash;a defense that is in itself a self-accusation. If their divine
+right of citizenship has been forfeited, it is by their own civic sin of
+omission. The longer one studies the evils that have grown up in the
+administration of the business of the great municipality of New York, the
+clearer one sees that the sins of omission are responsible for their
+growth&mdash;far more responsible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> than the sins of commission against which
+intelligent voters rail, when they do not use them as salve for their
+political consciences. It is a profound truth that in a republic the
+character of the people is shown in the character of the men the people
+elect to office. This is as true of the ward as of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>The political units of government in New York are, in the main, inhabited
+by the rich and poor, the intelligent and the ignorant; those who can
+reason from effect to cause, and those who cannot reason at all. Yet in
+these sections the worst possible home conditions will exist&mdash;unsanitary
+schools, dirty streets, badly paved. Saloons will abound and political
+corruption will go unheeded. Why? Because no men of intelligence and
+responsibility will accept the minor offices that mean the administration
+of the affairs of this unit in the interest and for the protection of the
+whole people.</p>
+
+<p>When men of position in the professional and business world signify their
+willingness to accept the least office in the gift of the people, the daily
+papers announce the fact in large headlines, and the men become marked as
+capable of great self-sacrifice, they become pre&euml;minent for the time. The
+men who have controlled the nominations, those who have no other visible
+means of support<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> than these minor offices and political patronage, resent
+the suggestion of men of professional and financial fortunes accepting
+these offices; they consider the appearance of a man holding business or
+professional positions of power or influence as a candidate for a minor
+office as an invasion, an intrusion of their personal rights; it is an
+attempt to defraud them. They do not hesitate to publicly claim the right
+to nomination and election as the reward for their activity in politics.
+And they do this when they cannot point to one thing done officially to
+justify their claims to the suffrages of the people. They dare to do it in
+the face of the knowledge, held by the people, that they use their offices
+often for personal ends, defrauding the people.</p>
+
+<p>The scores of voters who have places within the patronage of a minor
+official see the danger to them of an official who would place merit in
+advance of votes. The man of position may be far from wealthy; may consent
+to serve the city at a financial loss; but the active voters live so remote
+from the voters at the top that the election is almost certain to be
+decided on class lines; and the defeat of the non-professional politician
+is accepted by every man, woman and child in the poorer portion of the
+district as a personal triumph; the evidence that the poor man has friends<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+to back him in his fight for place and power; that the poor must work
+together politically.</p>
+
+<p>Whose fault is it? The good, intelligent, responsible citizens who
+delegated the government of their city to the men who use it for their
+personal gain. The good men in active politics, who openly concede the
+right to the minor offices in the city government to men whom they know are
+ignorant, and not infrequently know equally well are dishonest, and who
+will sacrifice the interest of the people to strengthen the system that
+means personal gains.</p>
+
+<p>The political conditions of the city several years ago gave birth to one of
+the periodic moral upheavals that resulted in the election of a strong,
+earnest, loyal, church-supporting citizen as Mayor. This Mayor was anxious
+to raise the character of the city government. He determined to accomplish
+this by the character of his appointments. He had more than a superficial
+knowledge of the public schools, which at that time were the theater for
+the exercise of political "pulls." It was known for years that the Board of
+Education had been used to a greater or less extent to pay political debts,
+to create political capital for future use by some of its most active
+members. The new Mayor had it in his power to change the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> character of the
+Board, and he carefully considered his appointments.</p>
+
+<p>In one of the sections of the city where, numerically as to families,
+wealth and poverty were fairly balanced, a section having in it churches of
+every denomination, many of them maintaining missions in the same political
+unit&mdash;there was at least this expression of neighborly interest&mdash;the
+schools were among the first built in the city. The last school building
+erected at the time of this Mayor's election had been built twenty years
+before; one had been built when the foundation for the pillars of the
+elevated road had been set in front of the site before it was purchased by
+the Board of Education, and was now in the heart of a crowded foreign
+settlement, had no out-door playground; the third building in the school
+district was so old, so badly planned, that for years effort had been made
+to secure a new building, but were defeated by the indifference, and at
+times the opposition, of the best citizens of the district, according to
+their own estimate.</p>
+
+<p>The new Mayor determined to put the best men in the district on the Board.
+Twenty-eight men in that district, men of power, men of standards, some of
+them philanthropists actively interested in work for the poor, declined.
+The men appointed, the best he could get to serve, were unfit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> for the
+position&mdash;mentally unfit, for they were uneducated; or morally unfit,
+because any position paid or unpaid under the city government was conceived
+by them as just so great an opportunity to create political capital or
+realize perquisites put within their control by their appointments. The
+Mayor had begun at the top to make his appointments. The declinations of
+the honor were because of lack of time, a lack of knowledge. When the
+appointments were announced, there was a storm of criticism, and none more
+violent than the majority of the men who declined to serve on the Board.</p>
+
+<p>At this time there was a great deal of activity among many leading women in
+the State to have a bill passed by the Legislature that would compel the
+Mayor of cities of the first class to appoint women in the proportion of
+one-third of the whole number appointed to the Boards of Education of those
+cities. The greatest activity for this measure was exercised in Brooklyn.
+One of the leaders, when asked a question about one of the schools in her
+own district, did not know where the school was. She had been a tax-payer
+in the district twenty-two years, and was considered a progressive woman.
+Her chief reason for working for this bill, for spending money freely in
+the interest of its success, was man's indifference to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> school matters.
+Perhaps if the command, "Feed my lambs" had been given to Dorcas instead of
+Peter, she might have developed enough sense of responsibility about the
+mental food given to know where the school buildings of her own school
+district were located.</p>
+
+<p>In this school district, October, 1901, there were 574 children on half-day
+classes. There was no manual training, though the pupils in the schools
+were, for the most part, the children of day laborers, mechanics, and
+clerks on small salaries. There was no free library, nor prospect of any,
+because public sentiment did not demand it. There was one small park,
+difficult of access. To reach it from the outer sections of the district,
+the tracks used by nine lines of trolley cars must be crossed. There were
+no public baths, except one in summer, near the mouth of a large sewer. One
+of the schools had no out-door playground; two had the closets in the
+in-door playgrounds. There was no room where the teachers could retire if
+ill, or where they could take their luncheons; no rooms where pupils could
+be privately interviewed or taken if ill. Yet it is in this very district,
+where the oldest and wealthiest families of the city live; where
+nine-tenths of the philanthropic enterprises of the city have been born,
+and where the moral upheavals for the regeneration of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> city will always
+find their quota of leaders, that there is developing some of the worst
+evils of a cosmopolitan city. Within its borders is a fair-sized Italian
+city, with scores of sweat-shops. Across the thoroughfare is a large Irish
+village lying at the foot of the hill, the streets dirty, unpaved, the
+houses in an unsanitary condition. Some of them are overrun with rats of
+enormous size. The streets at the top of the hill are beginning to yield to
+the pressure of the crowds at the foot. Specific houses seem to have in
+them the very germs of immorality and degeneracy. Women who have made a
+struggle when, by misfortune, forced to move into these houses cease to
+struggle, and yield to the influences about them. The tenement-house laws
+are violated openly.</p>
+
+<p>There are not less than six missions, with twice that number of churches,
+in this one section; but so far as the environment of the poor is
+concerned, they might as well not exist. The majority of the tax-payers,
+those who command public respect and confidence, will not serve
+authoritatively in the political unit in which are their homes, in which
+their children must grow up. They will not take offices that would put it
+in their power to change the environment of the homes of the poor by
+securing the rights, enforcing the laws, that would protect all of the
+homes from the evils<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> of vice, ignorance and unsanitary conditions. But
+these men when wealthy will support liberally institutions made necessary
+by their civic indifference.</p>
+
+<p>No man in a pulpit in the section has ever made a study of it to arouse the
+conscience and energies of the members of his church to their political
+duties. Unfortunately the women, for the most part, are as ignorant of the
+condition, and as indifferent. Because of the unsanitary conditions of the
+houses occupied by the poor, the dirty streets, the restrictions of child
+life, the lack of opportunity for moral development, the total dearth of
+recreative opportunity for the boys and girls, the young men and women who
+are wage-earners, the lack of educational facilities for the children who
+must be educated, if at all, at the expense of the State, the section is a
+prolific source of supply to the institutions the intelligent, sympathetic,
+wealthy women of the section are so active in creating and sustaining.</p>
+
+<p>The indifference of the wealthy and responsible to the conditions
+prevailing in parts of this section is so well known that officers at the
+heads of the city department ignore complaints, or treat them as incidents
+to be tolerated as part of the experiences of their official life.</p>
+
+<p>The penalty is being paid in the steady decline<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> of real estate values, the
+gradual spread of the undesirable part of the community, the exodus of the
+wealthiest to the sections more remote from the tenements.</p>
+
+<p>The environment that has a degenerating influence on the people of limited
+means in that section is not due primarily to the political corruption of
+those using their positions to secure their own ends, but to the criminal
+attitude of the men in the churches and intelligent men not in them, who
+refuse to assume the political responsibilities that are their birthrights;
+the criminal indifference of those who fail to know the necessities of
+which the homes of the poor whom God gave into their charge stand in need.
+This section of the city is typical, not peculiar. Every section of New
+York gives evidence of the divorce between the churches and the political
+control that makes the environment of the home and the churches.</p>
+
+<p>The city is what the good, active people of the city want it to be&mdash;no
+better, no worse. The condition of the most uncared-for section gives the
+church's answer to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The mark of
+Cain may not be visible, but every child who goes out of life because its
+right to light, air, sunshine has not been protected is a charge against
+the Church. Every boy and girl whose life record is shadowed, blackened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+because their right to education, to training, to freedom to develop
+physically, mentally, morally, spiritually was denied them through
+political indifference, are the evidences of the failure of the churches to
+live up to the light which Christ left to their keeping. His followers do
+not march through the cities of the poor, an army.</p>
+
+<p>When Christ said, "The second is like unto it, love thy neighbor as
+thyself," He did not not mean the ethical conception for which the Church
+has stood, but the broad, Christ-like conception of brotherhood which would
+protect "thy neighbor" from the evils of his own ignorance and weakness;
+that would use one's best strength in his interest seven days in the week.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Leaven in a Great City, by Lillian
+William Betts
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Leaven in a Great City
+
+
+Author: Lillian William Betts
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2011  [eBook #38205]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Josephine Paolucci, and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 38205-h.htm or 38205-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38205/38205-h/38205-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38205/38205-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: NO LONGER PROFITABLE.]
+
+
+THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY
+
+by
+
+LILLIAN W. BETTS
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+New York
+Dodd, Mead & Company
+1903
+
+Copyright, 1902,
+By Dodd, Mead and Company.
+
+First Edition published September, 1902.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   CHAPTER                                                PAGE
+
+         I. AT THE BOTTOM,                                   1
+
+        II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS,              37
+
+       III. THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF,                       75
+
+        IV. SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS,                    102
+
+         V. WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS,                          135
+
+        VI. A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT,                           162
+
+       VII. WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME,                      196
+
+      VIII. FINANCIAL RELATIONS IN FAMILIES,               225
+
+        IX. HOME STANDARDS,                                263
+
+         X. WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?                 290
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+   No Longer Profitable--_Frontispiece_
+
+   The Site of the Old Runway                               12
+
+   Your Choice                                              24
+
+   Saturday Morning on the East Side                        38
+
+   The Past, Present, and Middle Period                     44
+
+   A Social Centre that Becomes Political                   56
+
+   A Doorway on the East Side                               60
+
+   Early Morning among the Push-Carts                       64
+
+   Meeting the Needs of the Neighbourhood                   70
+
+   A Remnant of the Past                                    76
+
+   A Type of the Present                                    88
+
+   A Corner in a Workingman's Home                          94
+
+   A Spiritual Bulwark                                     128
+
+   Where the People Share                                  134
+
+   A Corner in an Old Section                              152
+
+   Opposite a Corner in an Old Section                     154
+
+   The Woman's Home Improvement Club at the Settlement     168
+
+   The Kindergarten of the College Settlement              178
+
+   Making a Selection                                      184
+
+   At the Settlement--A Stormy Day                         188
+
+   Yard Day at the Settlement                              196
+
+   The Children's Hour at the College Settlement           200
+
+   Mutual Interests                                        206
+
+   The Forest of the Tenements                             212
+
+   The Children's Playground                               218
+
+   Library Day at the College Settlement                   224
+
+   A Street on the East Side                               236
+
+   A Cooking Class of Mothers and Children                 244
+
+   A Meeting of Neighbours                                 250
+
+   The Reading-Room at the Settlement                      254
+
+   After School at the College Settlement                  258
+
+   The Morning Airing of an East Side Heiress              264
+
+   A Bit of Old Greenwich                                  274
+
+   A Little Father                                         280
+
+   A Corner in Old Greenwich                               286
+
+   Taking their Turn in the Yard at the Settlement         294
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AT THE BOTTOM.
+
+
+One of the first, and, up to the present time, one of the most interesting
+experiments made in New York for the better housing of the poor, was made
+in the early eighties by a score or less of philanthropic capitalists.
+These gentlemen organized a stock company to hold and manage tenement-house
+property, limiting their dividends to three per cent. on the capital; the
+surplus dividends, if any, over this amount, to be used in improving the
+property, and securing such conditions and opportunities for the tenants as
+would stimulate pride and independence. The formation of this company
+followed one of the periodic agitations of the tenement-house problems
+customary in New York.
+
+In 1878 a conference was called by the State Charities' Aid Association to
+consider the condition of the tenement houses in this city. Mr. Alfred T.
+White, of Brooklyn, had at this time proved that model tenements, conducted
+on strictly business principles, paid as investments, and stated at this
+conference that his model houses made a return of seven one-half per cent.
+As a result of this conference a committee was appointed who reported that
+they did not find it desirable to recommend the building of model tenements
+in New York at this time. Mr. White for many years stood alone as the man
+of wealth with the courage of his convictions, that there were wage-earners
+compelled to live under tenement-house conditions who would pay for and
+respect the best housing that capital would offer them, within their
+rent-paying capacity.
+
+The tenement-house agitation continued.
+
+In 1879 Mayor Cooper had appointed a committee known as the "Mayor's
+Committee," to devise means to effect tenement-house reforms. This
+committee reported, and among other suggestions recommended, that companies
+be organized to build modern tenements. Some members of this committee,
+with others, formed the stock company alluded to with a capital of
+$300,000. With a wisdom peculiarly their own, they did not wait until model
+buildings could be erected according to plans not yet drawn on sites not
+yet selected, but they leased on a long lease property that had been
+unproductive for a long time, and occupied by a people at the lowest level
+of the home-making people of the city. Below them are the people who do not
+even pretend to make a home. This property was located in the old Fourth
+Ward. It was the reputation of this ward, and the record of the particular
+property, which doubtless led these capitalists to secure it. It was
+conceded that the poverty and degradation of the Fourth Ward was at least
+as great as in any other section of the city. The property leased had
+attracted public attention and been the subject of special investigation
+and reports in every agitation of the tenement-house problem since 1856.
+
+The Fourth Ward criminal and health records figure for an even longer
+period in every effort at bettering municipal conditions by the example it
+presented of civic indifference, neglect and maladministration. The houses
+faced on two alleys, known in their best days as "Single" and "Double"
+alley, respectively. As this distinction indicates, on Single Alley one row
+of houses faced the walls of the adjoining property, while two rows of
+houses faced each other across Double Alley. Later known as Swipe's Alley,
+Guzzle Row, Hell's Kitchen, Murderers' Row, showing the gradual descent
+from respectability. There is a tradition that Single Alley once had
+gardens that extended to Roosevelt Street; that the houses had been
+occupied by one family; but this cannot be verified. In their most
+degenerate days these houses had an air of exclusiveness, due doubtless to
+their fronting on courts and the tall iron fences, with gates, that
+separated the houses from the street. The neighborhood at one time was
+aristocratic; Franklin Square, but a short distance from the property, was
+a social center of national greatness. As business went northward, the
+merchants, bankers, tradespeople, followed, for the tie between home and
+business was still very close; the midday dinner made distance between the
+two impossible. The old homes were left for subdivision among the skilled
+workmen and clerks.
+
+The tide of immigration set in, and the strangers settled near the docks
+and wharfs--the source of their wages; in time they crowded into the old
+residences, beginning the housing problem of New York. These old homes were
+soon overcrowded. They could not be made sanitary. The demand for room was
+so great that the large closets--the necessity of the old-time
+housekeepers--were counted bedrooms, and are to-day in houses of this type
+in tenement-house regions throughout the city.
+
+The property secured by the new company at the time it was leased was a
+part of a large estate, the owner of which during his lifetime had
+personally cared for it. He was both strict and just, and these two
+attributes preserved these houses for years after the property in the
+neighborhood had begun to yield to the character of later residents. This
+owner kept the alleys and the houses in repair. The semi-privacy the iron
+gate gave the tenants was for years the reason that the better-paid
+mechanics remained in the courts or alleys. When the owner died, the
+property was put in control of an agent, with the usual result--rapid
+degeneracy. It was now conducted to secure the largest returns at the least
+outlay. The evils of the absentee landlord are not confined to Ireland.
+Absenteeism on the part of owners of tenement-house property is one of the
+causes of the social and civic problems that retard the growth of the
+highest civilization in New York. Under the management of an agent, the
+character of the tenants in the courts changed rapidly, and the people who
+took possession added to the disreputable character of the Fourth Ward. For
+years before this the largest per cent. of the immigrants settling in New
+York settled in this section. They came with distorted notions as to their
+place in the new land. Liberty meant to the majority the right to follow
+their own will. When hunger and loneliness and nakedness forced them to
+reconsider their first conception of what America was, resentment,
+recklessness, or adaptability developed. The difference was a matter of
+temperament quite as much as of race.
+
+In 1880 the heads of the families living in the courts were day
+laborers--men who worked along the docks, coal shovelers, hucksters, women
+who did a day's work, sold newspapers at the ferries, or worked in the
+factories. Every child in the alley was ready to do anything that would
+earn money from the time he could walk. The people knew every benefit the
+city dispensed to the poor: free coal; homes available and how to get in
+them; free burial; every organization that dispersed charity, and how to
+get it. Even the children were clever in their extremities, and knew how to
+get assistance when the Island claimed their parents. From infancy the
+children looked forward to wage-earning as a time of happiness. School was
+a prison-house to be avoided, except when its warmth and shelter were
+preferable to the street, or the home, when intemperance and temper made
+life unendurable in it; then they attended school willingly. The truant
+officers in this region were not feared. They were the fags of the "boss,"
+not the officers of a city department. None of the fads of to-day, which so
+disturb the conservative people who see ruin of mental ability in modern
+educational systems, were then thought of. The kindergarten, nature study,
+manual training, were on the educational horizon of New York, in a cloud
+scarcely so large as a man's hand. The trustee system was in perfect
+working order. The teachers were what God made them, unhampered by the
+pressure of superintendent and supervisors to maintain standards.
+
+It was as true in that day as in 1892, when a man, wholly familiar with all
+the systems of education in the country, to the question, "Why is there
+such uniformity in the defects of the schools in the tenement-house
+regions?" replied, "They represent the demands of the people in the
+district who elect the men who control them. You will find that the public
+schools always represent the public sentiment and demands of the people
+interested in them."
+
+This was profoundly true of the schools in this region at this time. To-day
+there is scarcely any change in the buildings except that of added age. At
+least two of them are a disgrace to the city. But there is a great change
+in the system. To-day the civilizing force in this community is the public
+schools; the remnant does not attract the philanthropist. To the men and
+women of our public schools who, preserving the highest ideals, work with
+enthusiasm amid the most discouraging surroundings, the city owes a debt
+that money cannot repay.
+
+The liquor saloons numbered then about as they do now, occupying every
+available space. More elaborate now, perhaps, for they represent political
+headquarters, if not proprietorship, of men identified with the worst forms
+of political corruption; then, as now, openly used in the interest of these
+men. There is this great change, that children dare not now, as they did
+then, enter and leave these places fearlessly at any hour carrying pails,
+pitchers or bottles. It was then a neighborly kindness to let children thus
+serve a neighbor; it was a source of revenue to the children.
+
+The gangs were many and notorious in the ward. Frequent were the clashes
+and loyal the spirit with which assailed and assailants maintained silence
+if there was danger of arrest because of these conflicts. "To squeal" was
+to earn the contempt of the community. The number of crimes, the full
+measure of degradation, reached in this ward will never be known. The dense
+population of this ward is so hidden by business and traffic that in 1901
+the statement was made by some people interested in civic affairs that the
+region was given over to office buildings. The district of which the Fourth
+Ward is a part cast 10,000 votes in the mayoralty campaign of that year.
+Votes that represent a civilization as peculiarly its own as though oceans
+separated it from the people a mile and a half away.
+
+Target companies were the social clubs of that day, the forerunners of the
+political organizations of to-day. The climax of their existence were the
+annual excursions to some near-by grove for shooting matches. These matches
+were the great social occasions of the many "sets." The question of who was
+the reigning belle of the locality was settled beyond dispute by selection
+of one to present the wreath for the target, or a big bunch of flowers, to
+the captain of the target company on the day of the annual parade. These
+were always of artificial flowers, and were made gorgeous and splendid by
+floating strips and fringes of tinsel paper. The greatest feuds in the Ward
+have grown out of the selection of the fair lady to present these trophies.
+Her selection changed the political history of her friends often, and her
+knights' fists fought her cause, and crowned her, their wounds testifying
+to their devotion. The political "boss" of that period presented the
+organizations that acknowledged his leadership with silver mugs, castors or
+pitchers--prizes for the shooters--but he presented money to keep the
+balance of his popularity. The gifts were carried conspicuously over the
+route of the procession, which always stopped in front of the house of the
+lady, who was to express her favor in the gifts of floral trophies--usually
+paid for by the company, sometimes by her knight, or knights combined for
+her honor. This house was for the time being the center of interest for the
+crowd, as she was of envy or pride to the community. The day of the target
+parade was one that called for great sacrifice, that it might be attended
+by the requisite formalities and new clothes. Money must be raised to
+provide barouches for the great political lights of the ward who gave this
+particular company their favor; to pay the attendant colored men who
+carried the target and the water and tin cups; for the band with the drum
+major. All cost money, and money was scarce; but the prominence and
+pleasure paid; and the Fourth Ward had many of these organizations, which
+made life exciting, and at times dangerous, when their several groups met,
+each struggling for supremacy, each with a leader who must be defended.
+
+Fresh-air organizations, seaside resorts, were as unknown as trolleys;
+hundreds in the Fourth Ward lived and died without ever having seen Central
+Park or the ocean. The relief from the sufferings of summer was sitting and
+sleeping on the near-by piers. Man's humanity to man at this period of New
+York's social history was expressed in hospitals, infirmaries, homes of
+many kinds, distribution of food, clothes and medicine. The more
+applications secured for these sources of relief, the more tickets given
+out in a year at any point for outside relief, the more easy the conscience
+of the men who sent the money that maintained them, who measured the value
+of their charities by the figures representing human beings that appeared
+in the reports. Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were then, as now,
+"round-ups" for the wretched, the needy and the lazy. The pleasure of the
+givers was greatly added to by watching the hungry eating.
+
+What caused the misery and wretchedness was no secret; but with few
+exceptions the men of money and brains were not ready to remove the
+prevailing and rooted cause. The exceptions were the men who, impressed by
+the example of Mr. Alfred T. White, leased the tenements known as Single
+and Double alley, or Gotham Court, the worst piece of property in what was
+acknowledged to be the worst ward in the city.
+
+It had grown more and more difficult to collect rents, and the destruction
+of the property by the tenants made any effort at repair futile. Lead pipe,
+brass faucets, were wrenched off and sold as rapidly as they were put in;
+banisters, stair-rails, blinds, even wooden floors had been used as
+firewood. The very bricks on the chimneys were used as missiles of offense
+and defense. The Double Alley boasted of a haunted house, which at times
+created the greatest excitement in the neighborhood because of mysterious
+noises and lights seen and heard at night. Again and again the house had
+been raided by the police and stolen goods recovered after the ghostly
+exhibits. The police showed to the brave of the neighborhood that sulphur
+and brimstone were the ghostly lights, and clever arrangements of ropes and
+pulleys and pans the source of the cries and groans that had frozen them
+with fear. It was useless. The next appearance of the lights and the sound
+of awful groans filled the neighborhood with terror.
+
+For obvious reasons the only source of water supply was a hydrant in the
+center of each alley. The only drainage was the sink sunk in front of it.
+When it is remembered that between five and six hundred people lived in
+these houses, the opportunities for cleanliness will be appreciated. All
+the water used was carried up and down stairs. That pans and pails of water
+were emptied from the windows without careful note of the passer-by beneath
+is not surprising. This naturally was not conducive to peace; but peace was
+not the aim of the people of the court; in fact, its disturbance varied the
+monotony of life in the alleys.
+
+[Illustration: THE SITE OF THE OLD RUNWAY.]
+
+Single Alley had a narrow opening from its rear, or western, end to
+Roosevelt Street. This was paved with brick sunken and broken. It was a
+dormitory for the drunken and homeless, a depository for all kinds of
+refuse. This alley was a runway. The entrance on the two streets offered
+every opportunity of escape to the fleeing fugitive from justice or
+vengeance. The code of honor of the alley was to speed the hunted and
+obstruct the hunter. The policeman entering the alley in pursuit of a
+transgressor knew his fate; he was a target for water, wood, coal, bricks
+and unlimited language; unexpected obstructions would be found in the
+alley, and the attentions he received when he tripped or fell were intended
+to increase the distance between the representative of law and order and
+the fleeing offender. He or she might or might not be a friend. The alley's
+activity in behalf of the fugitive was based on a new interpretation of the
+promised return of bread cast on the waters.
+
+No matter how bitter the feuds that divided the tenants in the alley, the
+appearance of a rent collector in the later days healed the breach, bridged
+the widest chasm. He was a common foe and to be downed by common consent.
+If abuse and defiance did not drive him beyond the gates, bricks dropped
+from the roofs, after a vigorous campaign of water and cooking utensils,
+conducted by the feminine contingent from the windows, usually
+accomplished his complete rout, not only for that time, but for the future.
+As the years passed on, it became almost impossible to get any agent to
+make the second attempt to collect rent from the tenants of the alleys.
+
+The home life of the people in the alley was interesting. Every inch of
+space was occupied. The families ranged from a childless old couple, past
+seventy, who had lived twenty-eight years in the Single Alley, to the boy
+and girl who had just started housekeeping on nothing at all. The women in
+the alleys had married, it was found, at about eighteen. They knew
+absolutely nothing of housekeeping. Many of them acknowledged that they had
+never made a fire before they married. The most elementary knowledge of
+cooking, sewing or the use of money was lacking. Of the two hundred and one
+mothers in the alley, one could cut and make the garments for herself and
+children; four could make bread--one did; one made soup sometimes, but
+could not remember the last time. Meals consisted of bread and coffee, or
+tea, with beer provided for "him" for breakfast and supper. Dinner was a
+"bit" of meat or fish, thought of and cooked between eleven and twelve; the
+cooking was frying. Potatoes were substituted for bread at this meal;
+rarely any other vegetable except Sunday. On that day, if there was money
+enough in the morning, dinner was of corned beef and cabbage, or bacon and
+cabbage. One family standing at the head of this community socially had
+meat three times each day. This family had in it five wage-earners. They
+paid four dollars a month rent for two rooms. The children had all been
+born and had grown to manhood and womanhood in the alley. As the writer was
+able to win the confidence of these people, it was evident that each mother
+was conscious that something was wrong that life yielded no better return.
+What was wrong? Where the remedy was to be found did not seem to interest
+them. The days drifted. Children ran half naked or in rags, while mothers
+sat in neighbors' rooms, stood in doorways, in the halls, or lounged in the
+alleys. There were homes in which neither needles, thread nor scissors
+could be found. The mother did not know how to use them. A pot and a frying
+pan were the only cooking utensils the most lavish closet revealed. Washing
+and scrubbing are laborious at any time, but when carrying water from ten
+to fifty feet on the level, then up one to four flights of stairs and down
+again is added to the labor, it is not astonishing that dishes, clothes and
+bodies were at all times freighted with disease and death. A knowledge of
+the relation between dirt and disease, cleanliness and health was not the
+general knowledge it is to-day. Their relation to moral elevation or
+degradation is barely understood to-day.
+
+The average weekly wages of the men living in the alleys at this period was
+between eight and nine dollars per week, and sometimes kept at the latter
+figure for weeks. It will be seen at once that the poverty, misery,
+degradation and dirt that kept life at the level it was in the alleys was
+due to some other cause than wages, for rent was only four dollars a month,
+when paid, and it was paid less than eight months of the year. Beer flowed
+in the alley; tin cans, pitchers, pails, went back and forth at all times
+of the day and night. It was the first errand on which the baby feet were
+sent. Every woman in the alley acknowledged that she had seen her husband
+drunk before she married him. She knew better how to manage him when he was
+drunk than when he was sober. A blow given in drink was not recorded
+against a husband either by the wife or her neighbors. A blow given when
+the man was sober was remembered and aroused pity and sympathy. Over
+seventy per cent. of the women drank to the point of unconsciousness. All
+used liquor. Of child training there was none. The act that was laughed at
+this hour brought a blow the next. Attending school was for the child to
+decide. If he wanted to go, he went. Usually lack of clothing shut out
+about half the children of school age in the alley.
+
+Mother love was largely a matter of animal instinct. While the baby
+depended on her for nourishment, she could be found with it in her arms at
+all times; it was, so far as life had a concentrated thought, her constant
+care. The moment the baby found its feet and used them, the child was cut
+loose and began his individual life. His standards, language, habits, were
+what his environment made them. His care, so far as the mother was
+concerned, was conducted on the lines of the least resistance. If the child
+was struck by an outsider, it raised the tiger in the mother; if ill, a
+burden to carry for which there was neither money nor knowledge; the mother
+had no strength and could not meet cares that demanded continuous thought;
+her mind was not trained to it. Health and disease were largely a matter of
+luck. Death brought pangs, but life was too much of a struggle for it to be
+a crushing blow, even when it was one's child. Children came and went too
+fast in the alleys for their coming or going to fill or empty even a
+mother's life.
+
+Not one woman in the alley could remember ever having an entire new outfit
+in her life, nor had any of her children; her first baby had worn garments
+that had been made for some more fortunate baby.
+
+Such was the dead level of existence lived in the alleys. Without the
+stimulus of drink it would be lethargy, and was when there was no money to
+treat or be treated. Pleasure? It was unknown outside of the beer can. If
+that did not give pleasure, why life was a hand-to-hand, hopeless struggle
+with homelessness, hunger and nakedness. In the alleys a fight became a
+pleasure and death a social opportunity. Even love seemed denied the people
+of the alleys. Marriage often was a part of the habitual drifting when not
+a matter of compulsion. Homes were established with no bond but that of
+law, and sometimes not that. That they even were what they were was a
+tribute to the fundamental morality that is the salvation of the civilized
+world.
+
+These were the people who had made the alleys between 1855 and 1880, when
+the owners of the estate gladly leased the property on a long lease. As has
+been stated, spasmodic attempts had been made to reclaim the property, to
+make it productive, but always by men acting for the owners; they never
+came in personal contact with the tenants. It is doubtful if they even had
+any conception of the effect of their delegated responsibility on the
+people, or had any knowledge of the change that resulted when the property
+ceased to have the personal supervision of the owner.
+
+The lessees put two ladies in control of the property. One or the other was
+to be found there each day.
+
+The tenants were notified that rent must be paid weekly; that the rooms
+would be white-washed and painted; that the agents would be at liberty to
+visit the rooms daily; that no child would be permitted to carry liquor on
+the premises; every bundle or basket carried by a child would be examined,
+and any liquor found would be emptied into the sink in the yard. Water
+would be put in the halls on each floor; destruction of property would mean
+eviction. All who were unwilling to accept these conditions were asked to
+move at once. The rent remained the same, four dollars per month for two
+rooms. Families desiring four rooms could have them for eight dollars per
+month, the company cutting a door through the party walls, giving direct
+ventilation through the floor, with windows opening on both alleys. The
+absolute impossibility of getting two equally good rooms in the
+neighborhood for the same rent kept the majority of the families. A few
+tacitly accepted the change, largely because acquiescence was their habit
+of mind, while some expected to set at naught any rules or regulations
+that they found obnoxious. No tenant moved voluntarily.
+
+The new ownership took possession with the same human beings who had
+occupied the houses for years. The first step was to insist on cleanliness.
+The alleys were swept and washed every morning, as were the halls and
+stairways. Garbage cans were provided and their use insisted on. Every can
+or bundle carried by a child was examined, and all liquors found in them
+were emptied into the sink in the yard. Quarrels and fights grew less
+frequent, especially among the women. The children attended school, for
+their appearance during school hours led to investigations that the
+majority of the tenants preferred to avoid. The aim was to establish such
+relations between the representatives of the company and the tenants as
+would give opportunities to reduce the ignorance and indifference that were
+quite as responsible, if not more responsible, for the misery in the homes
+than lack of money. The tenants held aloof. They were tenants because they
+could not get as much comfort for the money elsewhere; but there could be
+no friendship where the payment of rent was insisted upon, where
+drunkenness involved the risk of, and abuse of property positive, eviction.
+
+Several young couples were tenants. The aim and hope of the agents were to
+gain the confidence of these young mothers. The first child of one died
+late that summer. Potter's Field was the place of burial. The young father
+could have worked six days in the week, but that would have been slavery
+intolerable. He refused it, and followed his lifelong habit of drifting,
+which was also that of the young mother. She had never resented her
+husband's days of idleness until this baby died and there was not one cent
+to provide for the care and disposition of the little body. This was the
+opportunity of the two women who were waiting to prove that they were not
+oppressors. A little coffin, a white slip and socks, some flowers--at that
+time an unheard-of tribute to death--a carriage and a grave in the cemetery
+approved by the mother's church was provided. The battle was won. Every
+man, woman and child in the alley surrendered to this evidence of
+comradeship. That this act gave birth to hopes that must be stifled was
+natural. Rules must be enforced and comradeship expressed at the times of
+emergency. The first and hardest battle was won. Confidences were gained
+that led to marriages and baptisms that had been neglected or forgotten.
+The office, simply but tastefully furnished, became a school-room, where
+the mothers and the children learned to sew. Goods were bought in
+quantities and sold at cost to the learners. A sewing machine and a
+teacher appeared and were welcomed. Practical talks, or, more properly,
+conversations, were held; but no one took note of them as special efforts
+in philanthropy, they were so naturally a part of each day's experience.
+The daily visits to each tenant resulted in establishing relations that
+justified reproof, suggestion, commendation. The standards of pleasure,
+pain, suffering, accomplishment were elementary in the alleys. An hour's
+work with the needle left the worker exhausted, and diversion then meant
+moral safety. The homes were barren, and the acme of hope was wages to pay
+rent, buy food and clothes; the last rarely realized. The months, and even
+years, passed without the people passing beyond the confines of the ward.
+The generations lived this life, and it was a fixed habit. The world had
+nothing to offer to the habitual residents of the ward that the ward did
+not provide; it has but little to-day to offer them.
+
+In spite of the emptiness of life and barrenness of these homes, they were
+on the whole better than the homes of the preceding generation.
+
+When the wives laid the cause of their burdens on their husbands' shoulders
+because they drank, the question, "Did you know he drank when you married
+him?" would be answered easily, with no thought of self-condemnation,
+"Yes," in frank confession.
+
+"Do you drink?"
+
+"I drink beer, mostly. Sure, ye get discouraged just working and washing,
+and never a cent; not a decent rag to go on the street, and no place to go
+when you get there but a neighbor's house. What is there but a glass of
+beer? You don't mean to get drunk; yer that before ye know."
+
+This total lack of personal relation to life was me mental attitude of
+almost every woman. If she was a widow, she worked to make a home for her
+children, who, again and again, so often that it ceased to attract
+attention, heard how much harder life was because they were in it. This
+seemed the accepted attitude, and accounted for the expression on the faces
+of these children--a puzzled, hardened expression that blotted out all
+suggestion of childhood. That time was an element in the problem of life
+was not accepted. That the garment made at home would last longer and cost
+less was conceded; but what was the use of making things when they could be
+bought so cheaply. The total absence of reasoning powers was shown here. To
+make soup would mean staying at home, thinking and planning for hours in
+advance of a meal. The soup would cost no more than steak and provide two
+meals, but it would mean loneliness, when the time, through ignorance,
+could not be turned to interesting uses.
+
+There were women in these alleys, mothers of grown children, who could not
+tell a bias from a straight edge; who could not put a gingham apron
+together having straight and bias selvages. Beyond sewing on occasional
+buttons, there was no use in their minds for needles. They had worked in
+tin factories. They had worked at all kinds of employment that called into
+play the minimum amount of brains and the maximum of muscles. Not one woman
+was found who before her marriage had worked in any line of employment that
+had the slightest connection with the arts of home-making. The wages they
+earned was that of unskilled labor, in lines of employment known to be
+intermittent. Wages, large or small, went into the common family fund. The
+future was not a matter of care. When all in the family worked, life was
+lived merrily; when hard luck came, life was lived stoically. This spirit
+went into the home of the wage-earners when they married. There was far
+less physical suffering than the privations of their lives made natural.
+Often these limitations were self-imposed; there was money enough to give
+life color and purpose, if only there had been knowledge to guide in the
+adjustment between necessities and income; a conception of time as an
+element in the financial problem.
+
+[Illustration: YOUR CHOICE.]
+
+The closer one entered into the individual life, the more clearly was it
+revealed that the problems of poverty grew out of the inability to see the
+relations of things, to comprehend life in its entirety. Even after two
+years of close relation with these people in the alleys, it was with the
+utmost caution and tact that the subject of free coal could be broached. It
+was then distributed by the city--an intimate source of political
+corruption. A large quantity of coal was purchased and put in the cellar.
+It was offered to the tenants at the same price the grocer sold it by the
+pail, with the difference that it was delivered in the rooms. First, pride,
+a desire to appear somewhat above the neighbors, moved to independence on
+the coal question. In two years' time free coal was in the category of
+disgraces in the alley, and marked a rising moral tide.
+
+A young woman and her husband were special objects of attention to the
+agents. They were young, good-looking, bright, and, when sober, ambitious
+as their conception of life made possible. Both drank, the woman more than
+the man, and she sank lower when drunk. For years she had spent more time
+on the Island than off it. What could be done? The whitewashing and
+painting of the two hopelessly barren rooms seemed to bring the woman to a
+pause. It was not possible to get beer through a neighbor's child now, and
+until she was drunk this woman would not go into a saloon. The clean alley,
+washed every morning, by some process of reasoning seemed to demand
+corresponding effort indoors, and the barren rooms were never dirty when
+the woman was sober. Even this gave employment to hands that had never used
+a needle, therefore less time was spent lounging in the doorway or other
+rooms. The washing of clothes, though ragged and few, took time and
+centered the interest, if but for a short time. The look of utter weariness
+and indifference in the face of the woman was slowly disappearing. There
+was really a purpose in life; the four walls and little else that was home
+required thought and effort. Life had an object at last. But the devil of
+drink was not so easily conquered; she was gone one morning from home. The
+neighbors explained to the agents her absence, being familiar with the
+habits of the type. In court she listened again indifferently to "Ten
+dollars or ten days." This time a woman came forward, paid the ten dollars,
+and Agnes was free. Surprised, dumb-stricken, wondering why, Agnes followed
+the friend home. New clothes, simple, suitable, were waiting for her. Then
+the fight began. At times it was hourly. Work was provided that the clumsy,
+untrained hands could do. The proceeds were to pay for a new carpet, that
+had to be unrolled many times to hold Agnes from the street. At last it was
+down, and the two friends added a rocker and a picture. Tom was a new man,
+and every penny of his wages came home. All this time the prosperity of the
+couple was viewed by most of the people as due to passing "good luck." That
+there was a moral battle being fought did not seem to enter their
+consciousness. Four years later, on the stairway, the writer saw Agnes with
+her beautiful baby boy, her first-born, on her arm. The comprehension of
+what the sight must have been on the Mount of Transfiguration has always
+been clearer when the expression on the face of Agnes, as she met the woman
+who had fought for her salvation for time and eternity, is recalled. Two
+years had passed since Agnes had tasted liquor in any form. Her passionate
+devotion to her baby, her new knowledge of the arts of home-making, kept
+her so busy that Agnes was rarely a visitor to her neighbors, except in the
+case of sickness. Tom's love of liquor seemed limited; largely a matter of
+companionship or discouragement. When his home became a center of interest
+to Agnes, his buoyant nature responded to the new environment. When liquor
+disappeared from the home, it ceased to be a constant temptation. Outside
+of his home Tom found for a time that his new departure attracted to him
+unpleasant attention, guying, teasing, coaxing, which he met with jokes.
+Force as an inducement to make him drink was met by blows; and Tom struck
+heavily. The new impulse for a better life brought heavy social penalties
+on Tom and Agnes. It meant nothing in common with those about them. When a
+man and woman will neither treat nor be treated at that social level social
+ostracism follows. Their home was the refuge of the children driven by
+frenzied, drunken parents from their own homes. What they had they shared
+with the children when the parents were on the Island. When sickness came
+to homes in the alleys, Tom and Agnes could be relied upon to share and
+help in carrying the added burdens. Tom's muscles and the knowledge of
+their power saved many a wife from blows that, without Tom, would have
+fallen freely. Back of their every effort stood the two wise women who were
+redeeming this corner of the great city. The day came when Tom and Agnes
+realized the boy must grow up in a different neighborhood, and Tom and
+Agnes moved.
+
+The making of a laundry compelled the removal of a childless couple who had
+occupied their rooms over thirty years. It was impossible to make them
+accept the fact that the children could play in the alley under the new
+_regime_. For years the old woman and her stick were familiar to the sight
+and the feelings of the children of the alley. "I'm in Dixie's Land. Dixie
+ain't home!" had been shouted under their windows, at their room door,
+which was very near the alley door, to bring them out in torrents of rage.
+As age made the old couple less fleet and more quarrelsome, the daring of
+the children grew, and any time of the day or night the conflict between
+the old couple and the children, in which parents figured, was a
+possibility. Peace became impossible. The decision was final; the old
+couple must go; their rooms were necessary to the new improvements. It was
+pathetic to discover that no amount of persuasion would make the old couple
+live north of Roosevelt Street; it meant a lowering in their social world.
+"I've always lived respectable, and I always will. I would not live in that
+block," announced the old woman, with conscious pride. Even the alley, it
+was found, had standards of residence, a line that must not be crossed, to
+maintain respectability.
+
+By this time the mental attitude of every woman in the alleys had changed
+toward her home. Positive determination to overcome inertia, or ambition to
+excel, it was impossible to create. Innate predilections were the chief
+factor in individual development among the women. What a woman liked to do
+she attempted to learn how to do, or what she found she could do most
+easily. Some would learn to cook who absolutely refused to sew; some would
+sew who refused to cook; some would take care of the babies while the
+mothers were learning who would neither cook nor sew, feeling they could do
+both well enough; these it was impossible to make home-makers. The shackles
+of the past could never be thrown off wholly by the home-makers in the
+alleys. The children responded; could be won by personal affection, by
+prizes, by the mother's insistence. For it was soon learned that nimble
+fingers in the home lightened the mother's work; but the mothers were the
+unwilling victims of their own past.
+
+The use of money was the most difficult lesson of all to teach. If there
+was money, the food was bought lavishly; pennies were given freely to the
+children. If there was no money, the barrenness was accepted even
+cheerfully. Wages were given at the maximum weekly amount remembered. No
+deductions were made for idle days. It requires a knowledge of advanced
+arithmetic to adjust intelligently forty weeks of wages to fifty-two weeks
+of expenses. It requires more than an elementary knowledge of arithmetic to
+adjust five days' wages to the seven days' expenses, fixed and emergency,
+of a growing family. When a week comes that brings six or seven days'
+wages, is it a marvel that in view of the many weeks of imposed
+restrictions this week of wealth should be welcomed as a period of freedom
+from care? That the money should be lavishly used? It takes the ability to
+think, to connect cause and effect, imagination, to see possible results,
+memory of experiences to hold men and women constantly in check, and this
+means mental training. Not a woman in the alley had attended school
+regularly during even the short period of her school life; each one had
+gone to work the moment she could earn money. Neither she nor any one about
+her questioned the value of the work she found to do beyond the money it
+gave at once. Nobody ever thought of the present as in relation to the
+future. Now that she was a mother, she met life the same way. Her children
+must earn money. To make sacrifices that their wage-earning capacity in the
+future might be greater would, if suggested to her, have been merely an
+evidence of how little the rich know of life. What was the estimate of life
+these mothers in the alley made? The differences between them were
+external, not mental. One answers for nearly all. To get as much comfort
+out of to-day as possible and to-morrow work hard, and be careful. To the
+majority that to be used to-morrow never came. When plenty came, it was
+always to-day--a glad, free day that might never come again.
+
+At the end of four years but four of the tenants of the alleys who were
+tenants when the lease was executed had been evicted. The death rate had
+lowered from 85 to 22 per cent. The tenants rarely appeared in the police
+courts. Wife-beating created excitement and indignation. But in spite of
+the awakening, a moral, mental, physical inertia, stagnation, held more
+than the majority of the tenants in control. There was spasmodic response;
+but the painful truth had to be accepted that there must be redemptive
+power within to respond to redemptive conditions without before the home
+could be vitalized with the spirit of hope and energy. Fifty years and more
+of neglect and indifference cannot be overcome in five years of moral
+activity exerted to overcome the evils man neglected to prevent.
+
+The alleys are gone; some tenants drifted to other scenes, more settled in
+the tall, dark tenements that have sprung up through the whole district,
+the worst type erected in New York. The rear buildings abound even back of
+the tall factories, reached by dark, noisome alleys. No amount of care or
+repair could save the old houses. They have gone the way of all material
+things. Their history is a part of the social and political history of New
+York.
+
+How slowly moral sentiment grows in a large city is shown by the years that
+elapsed before active measures were taken to redeem what was known as a
+plague spot, a menace to the body politic, a constant source of moral
+degeneracy.
+
+The Citizens' Association, organized in 1864, through its Council of
+Hygiene and Public Health, districted the city for special investigation by
+sanitary experts. One of these gives a large part of his report to Gotham
+Court, and presents sectional drawings to show the impossibility of
+securing proper sanitary conditions for the people living in the notorious
+houses. It seems incredible that these conditions once known should not
+have aroused public interest to the point of action. Nothing was done. The
+physical and moral degeneracy continued until 1880, when a few private
+individuals made the experiment of redemption. Even this came when the
+houses had gone beyond the point of reclaiming. On the site of the old
+buildings rises a new business building.
+
+Not far away two of the most brutal and atrocious murders of recent years
+in New York have occurred. In July, 1901, three blocks from the old
+buildings, in broad daylight, a man known to be the collecting agent for
+property in the neighborhood was robbed by three members of a well-known
+gang. The children are thin, precocious. Their language, even in their
+play, is vulgar, coarse, profane. Babies have at their command strange
+oaths, probably never heard elsewhere. The streets are neglected, the
+sidewalks uneven and broken. For almost half a century this region has had
+a reputation peculiar to itself. Efforts have been made to reach the
+people, but they have not been persistent. Even the church efforts are
+perfunctory, as though faith as to the redemptive power in this people did
+not exist.
+
+This fact remains: within the boundaries of this region lives a community
+that is shaping the political control of New York City and State, and will
+for years to come. It has its traditions of loyalty; it has fixed standards
+of its own peculiar privileges; its standards of rights. The very police of
+the region expect certain things to occur; misdemeanors of a certain
+character that would bring punishment anywhere else are passed by here;
+they are part of the civilization of the region. Snuggled down under the
+shadow of the bridge and the elevated road, a center of business interests
+which the moral standards of the residents do not affect, because their
+activities, other than of the muscles, are not exercised until carts,
+drays, drivers, clerks, proprietors have gone northward or across the
+river. The community lives within itself, has created its own standards,
+and is New York in its own estimation.
+
+Writing of the people in this section in 1865, a sanitary expert quotes
+with an apology a medical term common in the hospitals and dispensaries as
+a disease of the people in this section, "tenement-house rot." The term
+has, perhaps, in the interests of civilization, died out; but no one can
+walk through these streets, observing the faces of the people, and not
+realize that the old, unsanitary, germ-laden tenements of this section have
+produced a physical condition peculiar to this region, as it has a moral
+degeneracy that is peculiarly its own. The section, as a whole, has not
+attracted the philanthropist. He is wise in his day and generation and puts
+forth his efforts where the tide of humanity is rising, and not falling,
+even though it means three or four generations before the tide is out.
+
+New York has a gospel all its own. Work where the crowds are greatest, that
+the printed reports may count people in great numbers, for ye gain dollars
+thereby. New York counts the remnant only at the polls, and ignores the
+penalty her indifference imposes on her own advancement.
+
+The opening years of the century hold promise that there is at least a
+partial realization of the solidarity of the interest of the people. That
+conditions make for degradation in the homes means degradation of citizens;
+and this means burdens laid, not on the sections where the homes and the
+citizens are found, but on the whole city. What altruism has not
+accomplished, selfishness may. It may be that where all else has failed,
+intelligent politics may redeem, and the section again may be the center of
+the moral as well as commercial activity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS.
+
+
+The centralization of the interests of the tenement-house population is not
+understood by those who broaden their mental, if not their active, interest
+by reading and travel; who in the varied interest of a broader life are
+forced to see the multiplicity of factors that enter into the settlement of
+every problem. This is what we mean by knowing the relation of things;
+marking the distinction between those who see only and those who
+comprehend. The man who is a machine set in the place where he bears his
+relation to the whole by an authority which he dares not question loses all
+opportunity to comprehend his relation to that whole. He is interested in
+immediate results as related to himself only. This is the relation which
+the mass of the tenement-house workers and voters bear to life.
+
+The people of whole sections live entirely within certain geographical
+lines, every interest centered within these limits.
+
+The race sections are logical, based on the law of natural selection; of
+family interest. The first generation of immigrants naturally hold the
+second generation of home-makers near them, and these together hold the
+relatives and friends who follow. Three generations are not infrequently
+found in the same house, each maintaining its own home. The new arrivals
+keep alive the foreign home traditions, the foreign home habits of living.
+Poverty and greed make the people crowd together. The last arrivals are
+taught what their predecessors have learned of American life and law. The
+race section perpetuates itself; it retains all that it can of the old
+life, and interprets the new according to the lessons learned from
+environment, and power as it is exercised on the people. Each race section
+has its own thoroughfare. The people on the street use their own language,
+and trade in shops of their own countrymen. In some sections newspapers are
+published in the language of the section, giving prominence to the local
+news. Were it not for the public schools, one wonders what would be the
+result of this race centralization.
+
+[Illustration: SATURDAY MORNING ON THE EAST SIDE.]
+
+The writer once met a man who had voted for twenty-three years in one ward.
+For sixteen of these years he had cast his vote from one house in Orchard
+Street. He had never been farther north than Houston Street, farther south
+than Hester and had never crossed the Bowery. He had positive convictions
+on every subject relating to the ward; he knew the life history of every
+political leader in that portion of the city; could rehearse the disasters
+that had followed every man who failed to fall in line at the polls; knew
+what saloon-keepers were forced to obey the law, and who "didn't care a
+cent" for the law; knew why this man could put his goods on the walk and
+why the other man could not. He protected his own two daughters from the
+evils of his home environment as he saw them; was strict to rigorousness
+about their home-coming; watched the kind of people who moved into the
+house in which he lived, and doubtless kept it above the average of the
+neighborhood by his watchfulness. But he did not know who was President of
+the United States, and did not consider it the business of the poor man. He
+refused a "job" under the city, because he didn't want to be "beholden." It
+was all right for the man who needed a job to take it. The only grievance
+the man had was that the Hebrews were crowding into the neighborhood. This
+was an invasion of his personal rights; they had their own place on the
+south side of Grand Street, as the Italians had west of the Bowery, and
+coming into that region north of Grand Street was an intrusion on the
+personal rights of himself and his countrymen. The first thing which would
+happen, if they--his own people--did not look sharp, would be the Hebrews
+would have a say in politics. The man's mental attitude is typical of the
+race settlement, the race political rights theory in many sections of New
+York; the difference is only in the race dominant.
+
+This man was a porter, who for seventeen years was employed in an East Side
+department store, working in a sub-cellar nine hours a day for nine dollars
+a week. He could not read, though he came to this country when five years
+of age. He became a wage-earner at eleven. His daughters became
+wage-earners at fourteen, having attended public schools until that age.
+The pride with which this man referred to his daughters' education made one
+comprehend the gradual absorption by the foreign peoples who come to us of
+American ideas. Those girls knew they were not educated; they had been
+forced to contrast their mental equipment with that of the "club ladies,"
+as they called the residents at the College Settlement, where the club of
+which they were members met. They, too, had been satisfied until brought
+into relationship with those who represented another world. The revelation,
+because of contact with the minds of these college-trained women, showed
+them, so far as they could comprehend it, their own lack of mental
+training, the first step in their true education.
+
+Women are by nature more conservative than men; they cling longer to early
+traditions and habits; find it more difficult to adopt new habits of
+thought. The more closely they are surrounded by people of their own way of
+life, their own habits of thinking, the more strongly intrenched are they
+in the customs and habits of their native country, the less are the homes
+they regulate modified by the new environment. The result is that whole
+sections of New York to-day are as foreign as the villages from which the
+people in them came. There are women in New York whose children and
+grandchildren were born in the city who cannot speak English, nor
+understand it beyond the merest assent or dissent. Their lives in old age
+are pitiable.
+
+A sweet, motherly German once said to the writer, and but a short time ago:
+"I am so lonely. I cannot speak English. I never learn it. I sit in my
+daughter's house, where German is not used. The children all want to be
+Americans; they will not talk German. When I sit at the table, I never
+speak. They all talk, but I do not understand. Sometimes I ask, and the
+children say they have not time to tell me. They buy only the English
+papers, and so I cannot read. I wish I had learned English when I first
+came. I was young then, but I had eight children after I came here, and I
+did everything for them. I could not take the time, I thought. I see now
+the children could have taught me. Now they have not the time." This woman
+was a German in her sympathies, her interests, her standards. Positive race
+antagonism existed between her and her family. She measured everything by
+German life and rule, and lived a critic among a people her own only in
+blood. In answer to the question, she explained that her husband learned
+English for his "work." The family attended the mission church when they
+attended church. She attended the German services, but the rest of the
+family, even her husband, the English services. Her constant plaint was: "I
+am so lonely. Some day I never speak all day. At the table they speak
+English."
+
+Hundreds of women like this one sit in homes in New York in which they have
+no part, barred out by the fact that they speak a foreign tongue. One of
+the mistakes made in even our church work has been the maintaining of
+distinctive church services in a foreign tongue. In so far as the churches
+have done this, they have been an obstruction to good citizenship for time,
+whatever they may have accomplished for eternity, for the people they call
+their own.
+
+One of the most earnest of missionary workers in New York, an American
+citizen born in Italy, protested vigorously to the writer on the policy of
+maintaining church services in New York in a foreign tongue. "You cannot
+make a united people using many languages. I would preach that to the
+people all the time. I use English words in my sermons to my own people,
+and I tell them to learn English; it is better for them in business. The
+women ought to learn, for they lose their children. They go away from them
+because they do not speak the English. In New York they are the victims of
+oppression, my people, because they cannot speak English. They have to bow
+the head to the yoke because they are foreigners in a strange land in which
+they vote. It is a great wrong to them and to the country. It makes the
+'boss.'"
+
+The first interest of the mother in the tenement, as of the mother
+everywhere, is the support of her children; to get for them all that she
+can. She would prefer that her husband should be honest, which may mean
+that the only dishonesty of which she has any comprehension is stealing
+money or other tangible property. In politics the tenement-house women have
+only a secondary interest. They accept without question the statements of
+their male relatives as to issues and men. Even this degree of interest
+represents only the most intelligent of the tenement-house women. The
+charge that a man used his political position and affiliations to further
+his own advancement, that he purchased the votes and enthusiasms of less
+clever voters, would mean to the women educated in their conception of
+right and wrong under the systems of machine politics that the man was
+intelligent and trying to do the best he could for his family and his
+friends. To say that he refused to rally voters to support the party that
+gave him a position because he was convinced that the party was dishonest
+in the use it made of the victory it gained at the polls, would arouse the
+deepest contempt for the man. He would be considered not only untrue to his
+family, but to his friends. Had he remained in close relation to the
+politicians who gave him his chance, he would not only provide for his
+family, but his friends would have the benefit of his influence; he could
+give them a chance in time.
+
+[Illustration: THE PAST, PRESENT AND MIDDLE PERIOD.]
+
+The man of brains they see drop his tools, take off his overalls and stand
+in high hat, and eventually frock-coat, the center of a crowd of men who
+smile at his nod, though they worked shoulder to shoulder but a short time
+ago--in a trench, perhaps; yes, even came over in the same ship with him.
+The women do not understand the process of evolution, but they see the
+results. They soon know that from street sweeper to car conductor, the man
+who has become a politician under a strong partisan government regulates,
+and often decides, the wage-earning opportunities of the greater portion of
+the men in the tenement-house sections. They learn, these women, that it is
+not a question of how faithful the worker is in the discharge of his duty
+that insures him work, but that it is some mysterious influence they call
+"politics," that means work and wages or no work and no wages, and
+suffering. This conception of the relation of the petty politician to the
+voters' chance to earn even a meager and uncertain living under the sway of
+his influence rarely excites more than passing indignation from the women
+who suffer most because of the system. When the women of the politician's
+family grow arrogant and snobbish, then the floods of eloquence break loose
+for a time, and the listener may learn many things of which he would
+otherwise be ignorant. The increased power of the petty henchman rarely
+enables him to change the way of living of his family. Sometimes he does
+not when he can, for he knows that he increases his power as he lives on
+the level of the average voter in his district. The less conscience he
+has, the more patient he is in waiting for the day when his district is
+only one factor in his political strength.
+
+Even the little children reveal deference to the family of the man who is
+known to have "pull." There came to an East Side library one afternoon a
+little girl better dressed than any child who had yet appeared there. She
+was impudent, noisy, aggressive. In the game-room she cheated in the games,
+and finally broke up several games of checkers and dominoes by pushing over
+the boards. No child resented this. The little girl when spoken to seemed
+astonished by the reprimand. As she was leaving, the writer said to her: "I
+am sorry, little girl, but I shall have to tell you that you must not come
+here again unless you mean to obey; you must not talk in the reading-room,
+and in the games you must play fair. I hope I shall not have to tell you
+not to come here again." The child stared in astonishment. She went out on
+the street. In a few minutes several little girls who had frequented the
+rooms for months came running back in great excitement, one saying
+breathlessly: "Why, that little girl's father is a school trustee; she does
+just as she likes in school." "Yes," added another, "and now she says she
+won't come here any more. She's awful mad." From her point of view this was
+a calamity. "Well, I hope she will not come if she cannot behave," was the
+comment made. The children stood aghast. The trustee system had been
+abolished in New York at least two years when this incident occurred. Later
+the writer found that the father was in the council of Tammany Hall.
+
+A boy of the same neighborhood rang the bell, interfered with children
+leaving the house, and broke the windows. The time for kindly persuasion
+ended. When the members of a woman's club in that section using that house
+were consulted, it was made perfectly clear to the writer that worse
+troubles would follow if the boy were arrested, for he would not be
+detained and he would be more ugly than ever. His father was a ward leader
+who had formerly been a street sweeper, then foreman of the gang, etc.,
+going through the gradations that mark the making of the minor "boss." This
+boy bullied little children, stole their toys, would break up their games.
+Yet to have him join in their play was evidently an honor which they bore
+much to retain. He was only fourteen, yet he was found to be the leader of
+a gang of boys in the most disgusting immoralities. Even this did not rouse
+the mothers of the neighborhood to fight for their children's protection.
+The boy was spreading immorality of a disgusting nature through a whole
+neighborhood. The evil he wrought was told in tears in private, but denied
+in public through fear of the father's power in preventing the accusers'
+husbands and sons from getting work--one result of the Tammany system that
+enslaves homes and blasts the innocence of little children in New York.
+
+A clever, hard-working Irish woman was once telling the writer the story of
+her life and that of her children. At the time she was deeply interested in
+the future of four nephews, who were the motherless sons of her brother.
+Out of her experience with sons-in-law she enunciated her conclusions: "I
+tell me brother, don't let them b'ys learn politics; it's a mighty poor
+thrade. Sure, when Tammany's in they're all right; but when Tammany's out,
+where are they? Sure, it's a mighty poor thrade, as I learnt to me sorrer.
+Betther have them blacksmiths, sez I, like their grandfather at home. I do
+hope he be's listening to me, for they're foine b'ys." It will be easier
+for the four "b'ys" to learn politics than any other "thrade," for it is an
+open union making one demand, obedience to the "boss."
+
+To this woman Tammany was an employer good to the poor man--a doctrine that
+is taught to the smallest boy. He breathes it in the air; he nurses it in
+the milk that nourishes him. As he gets older he adds a new article to his
+faith. The Tammany system is the protector of his liberties. It does not
+restrict him in his right of private judgment. As one studies the race
+sections, the discovery is made that hundreds of votes are cast for Tammany
+candidates in the belief that obnoxious restrictions on the sale of liquor
+on Sundays will be removed, or that the laws will not be enforced. The hope
+of raising the moral tone of the voters is futile while any portion of them
+justify the casting of a ballot for the sole reason that it will make it
+possible for the voter to break the law with impunity. The most
+demoralizing legislation is that which makes a man a sneak as well as a
+law-breaker. May the day be hastened when no man who stands in moral
+rectitude in the presence of man and God will be forced to maintain what he
+believes his rights in defiance of the law. We are a cosmopolitan country,
+owing power and greatness to the sons and daughters of many lands. The
+Puritan conception of government is out of place to-day. The larger
+conception of man not controlled by the law, but the master in himself of
+the restraints it would place upon him, is the American conception of
+manhood, and toward this the best legislative action must trend. Thinking
+men and women who have studied the social conditions of New York know that
+no more calamitous influence is set in motion in New York than a sense of
+injustice that protects and justifies to the people the breaking of a law.
+When this goes farther, and any considerable number of the citizens combine
+for the purpose of overcoming it by defying or by ignoring it, the
+foundations of the government are threatened. It is time for fanaticism to
+feel the pressure of broad-minded balanced public opinion. A law
+administered at the demand and according to the conscience of people
+unaffected by its administration, used by them against an equally
+intelligent class who feel that personal liberty has been curtailed at the
+expense of their right of judgment, is class legislation. No greater evil
+influence has been active in New York than the creating of a sentiment that
+endorsed the breaking of the liquor laws. It has been a prolific source of
+blackmail; it has enabled politicians, who live at the public expense, to
+pose to men whose personal right of judgment had been curtailed as the
+apostles of freedom. The short-sighted friends of temperance have by their
+misdirected activities created political capital for the men who in
+official life have made New York's problems.
+
+Legislation enacted without the will of the people governed is provocative
+of two things: contempt and defiance of the law; unrest that makes for
+antagonism to government. The lower in the scale of reason the voter is,
+the less able he is to get any point of view but his own. His comprehension
+of the rights of others depends on the comprehension of his rights
+expressed in the law designed for his regeneration. He certainly never goes
+higher in the scale of reason while he defies the law in satisfying his
+sense of justice and freedom; he cannot rise in the scale of living while
+he stoops to acts he would avoid if his sense of justice were not outraged.
+He justifies his act because of his sense of oppression. He cannot respond
+to any effort looking to the general good of the city while he smarts under
+a sense of liberties curtailed by the very people who ask for his help.
+
+When President Roosevelt was Police Commissioner he enforced the law
+governing the sale of liquor on Sunday. The city was torn asunder for
+weeks. The discussion filled the columns of the daily press. The fact,
+after weeks of discussion with one group of tenement-house women--all the
+wives of skilled workers--was finally made clear that the law was at fault,
+if fault there was, not the Commissioner. The law, if bad, must be
+repealed; but as long as it was the law it must be enforced. During this
+discussion much light was obtained. One woman told how cleverly the law
+was evaded by the liquor dealer two doors from her house. He hired the back
+room on the top floor of the house next door, keeping the liquor in a
+closet. The men in the secret entered the house two doors distant, went up
+to the roof and down the scuttle to the room where the liquor was to be
+had. Some of the group listened to her description with flashing eyes. When
+she finished she was given to understand that she had played the part of
+traitor. It was all right for her to do it. She was safe. Her husband was
+in a good, independent position; it made no difference to him how much
+trouble came because of her "telling tales." To others it was a disgrace
+that men who had only a few cents to spend for a little pleasure with their
+friends should have to sneak like thieves, as one of the women expressed
+it. All condemned having the liquor in their own homes in quantities, as
+they condemned the illegal selling. "When a man sneaks in like that he
+stays longer and spends more than when he can walk in openly and walk out
+again as he does other days. When he has it in the house he never stops
+treating and drinking until it's gone." The "free lunch" was deplored; but
+every one of the forty-five women decided that it was the only meal fit to
+eat that hundreds of laboring men ever had; that men were forced to eat at
+lunch counters in barrooms and buy liquor who would never go there if
+their mothers and wives knew how to cook. They claimed that the women would
+cook for their families if they knew how. They did not know how. They were
+forced to go to work in factories as soon as they left school, and never
+had a chance to learn anything about housekeeping; their mothers never knew
+how to keep house. Could a stronger argument for domestic science teaching
+in our public schools be advanced?
+
+When the High License bill was before the Legislature at Albany several
+years ago, the writer was asked to speak at a mothers' meeting in one of
+the poorest sections of what was then the city of Brooklyn. On her way to
+the mission she counted nineteen liquor saloons on three blocks; in every
+case they were on the lower floor of a tenement house. The hall was over a
+pork and provision store; a loft without any attempt at more than broom
+cleanliness, walls bare, grimy, and seeming to ooze grease. The atmosphere
+of smoked meat was sickening. Nothing in the way of a shelter could have
+been more barren and repellent, yet it was a mission maintained by a
+church.
+
+About one hundred women--the wives of day laborers and longshoremen--were
+present. Some were bareheaded: several with babies in their arms. The
+subject chosen was the High License bill. It was a discussion. At least ten
+of the women spoke. The scene will never be forgotten. One woman, about
+thirty, after listening intently, rose with a baby on her arm, and turning
+passionately to those in the hall, said: "Why don't yer talk honest? Every
+one of us drink. Some of us, not many, drink because we love it. Most of us
+drink because we're discouraged and don't know what else to do. We're
+fools; it don't help us; it makes it worse. Some of us would never touch it
+if it were not brought to us. We know that anything that would take away
+the drink from our doors would save us. Drive them out!" She turned to the
+platform appealingly. "Drive them out, so that we, yes, and the men, would
+have to walk four or five blocks to them, and we'll be different. It is
+easy sending the children now. Make it harder! Make it harder!"
+
+"Shall we close them?"
+
+"You couldn't do it," she said. "You couldn't do that. Make it cost more to
+start them, and there won't be so many. They'll be farther apart, and they
+won't try so hard to make us drink. Many a woman has learned to drink
+because she had to pass the holes to get to her home. Tell the truth like
+me, or say whether I'm telling the truth!" was her appeal to the audience.
+
+The flood-gates were opened. Every woman agreed with the first speaker that
+the saloon could never be abolished; it could be regulated. Beer, they
+thought, to most women was a greater temptation than strong liquors. The
+number of saloons near their homes they thought the heaviest burden the
+poor man's family had to bear. They understood perfectly that the brewers
+paid for the licenses, and that the saloons were the meeting places where
+votes were controlled. They thought the saloons ought to be open at least
+Sunday afternoon, but they would have them close earlier Saturday night.
+They thought that any law that made a man a sneak to get a drink was an
+evil. They saw that such a law enabled the politician to say which man
+could sell liquor and which could not. One of them, who could neither read
+nor write, had discovered that the saloons selling a certain brewer's beer
+had more freedom than any of the saloons selling other beers; they thought
+the saloon-keepers paid either in money or drinks for the votes of the men
+who frequented their places in the interest of the politicians who owned
+the saloons or protected them. There was not the slightest evidence that
+one woman there saw any dishonesty in the system. There were no principles
+in politics, only men. Things remained with them the same no matter who was
+elected. It was a district which was under the control of one party, having
+an unquestioned majority, which steadily increased through the efforts of a
+shrewd leader who had no visible means of support.
+
+The section in which this group of women lived was a long, narrow strip
+bordering on the East River. The residences of a population each occupying
+its own house at this time held the reeking tenements in check on the east.
+Within ten years this has been wholly changed. The handsome old residences
+have become tenement houses, overcrowded, uncared for, occupied by people
+now at the level of former despised neighbors. The better class of the
+laborers' families have left the houses bordering on the river, and these
+have been given over to the poorest and most hopeless of the day laborers.
+There is a thoroughfare which has stores brilliantly lighted for five
+blocks. Every want of the people can be supplied in them. The people, old
+and young, settle placidly in the region. It is their world. The language
+of the little children on the streets, from early morning until late at
+night, is appalling. A kindergarten was started, but the people who started
+it did not have money enough to secure the right kind of a room, nor to
+make the room attractive, nor to keep it so clean that that would in itself
+make it more attractive than the homes of the children. It was finally
+given up, because even the small amount expended was not forthcoming at the
+end of the third year. It could have had four times the number of children
+the room would accommodate at one time, but no one cared enough to support
+it.
+
+[Illustration: A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL.]
+
+The half-grown boys are coarse-looking, use profane and coarse language
+unknowingly in their ordinary conversation on the street. Their attitude
+toward girls is brutal. The girls of this section are free in their
+manners, slangy and coarse in their conversation. They earn the lowest
+wages paid to women in the factories and lofts that abound in the region.
+The schoolhouses are old and dark; the streets are neglected and dirty. The
+smoky, grimy mission-room disappeared long ago. Not one influence is at
+work to raise the general moral tone of this community, the voting power of
+which outnumbers four to one regions where every influence in and out of
+the homes tends to develop moral standards and political intelligence in
+the same political unit.
+
+The region is a social plague spot, neglected and allowed to spread. It
+does not present as a special feature to arouse activity the evils of the
+"Red Light" district, but only the blasting influence of a region sunk in
+the apathy of deadened moral natures, killed by the hopelessness of
+changing the environment of their homes until it represents all they ask of
+life. The poverty of the people makes well-nourished bodies impossible, and
+lack of physical power makes moral resistance impossible.
+
+Recently in one of the most crowded of the tenement-house sections of New
+York, where the grip of poverty holds degradation, where the people live as
+remote from American civilization as when in their own land, the writer
+viewed the parade in the evening of the voters of the district, who had
+been the guests of the district leader, a State Senator, at an outing.
+These outings are the annual "round-ups" of the voters. The expenses of
+these outings run into the five figures, it is said, in this district.
+Boats and a grove are hired. Chowder, coffee, sandwiches and beer are
+provided free. Games of chance, to which, it is whispered, the district
+leaders are not disinterested observers, and athletics are the features of
+the outings. The return at night is an occasion for fireworks and a parade.
+Caps and canes are provided for the voters often; sometimes only a ribbon
+badge. The expenses are met by the sale of tickets, which sometimes sell
+as high as five dollars. These tickets the liquor dealers, in fact, the
+tradesmen of all kinds in the district, men holding office under the city
+government who are affiliated with the leader and the men who hope to
+secure rights or privileges, legal or illegal, through the leader's
+influence, know it is wise to purchase. To the mass of the men of the
+district it means perhaps the one day of freedom in the year, when they
+have the pleasure of enjoying drinks and food wholly at the cost of
+another.
+
+In this particular parade were five thousand men, not one thousand of whom
+bore the slightest outward evidence of American citizenship, but the right
+to vote, as their presence in the column indicated. It scarcely seemed
+possible that the scene was in America. Swarthy women and children crowded
+gayly decorated fire-escapes, crowded the windows, and made movement
+impossible on the streets. Arches of lights, lanterns swinging from
+fire-escapes and on ropes from sidewalks to roofs, were in the colors of
+the land from which these people came. The flags and bunting displayed
+presented colors of a foreign land, with here and there the flag of the
+country whose political destiny their votes controlled to a large degree.
+The next day the white caps worn by the men in this parade appeared on the
+heads of schoolboys and working boys by the hundred, the wearers proud to
+wear the colors of the man who, so far as their knowledge or experience, or
+that of their parents, went, was the greatest man, the man of the widest
+range of authority, in the United States. What do they care who is at the
+head of the city government? The men do not need to ask who is the district
+leader; he finds them through his unpaid workers and the coalition is
+accomplished. Soon the immigrant, turned citizen, understands the
+principle. He gets work and votes for the leader. It is simple and direct.
+When the extent of one's knowledge enables him to handle a broom or to sell
+peanuts or bananas in the new country, and that under the supervision of a
+blue-coated tyrant who levies on the voter's cart, if not his pocket, when
+and where he pleases, moral arguments in a foreign tongue are not
+convincing to that voter. He would rather not submit to the supervision and
+its attendant tax; he would rather not have his work intermittent; but he
+learns that protest increases his evils, and he submits. The blue-coated
+tyrant is a friend of the "boss" who helped get his license, and it must be
+right. Whatever comes to him, he must not antagonize the "boss." That is
+the first lesson he learns in American citizenship, at the point where it
+is most effective, his wage-earning privileges.
+
+[Illustration: A DOORWAY ON THE EAST SIDE.]
+
+There are leaders so strong and tactful that year after year their reign is
+unquestioned. Only the police and the ambulance surgeons know when there is
+an attempted revolution--when the leader's right is questioned by another
+would-be leader. There is only one issue--the man; nobody cares for the
+principle--if there be a difference of principle--involved.
+
+In one of the old sections of the city in which is a ward that for forty
+years has excelled in crime; a section which at the present time presents
+the meanest and lowest of the tenements in New York; in which there is less
+effort to counteract the evils of the environment of the homes or change
+the environment due to the control of the "boss" than in any other section,
+a political feud culminated in the fall of 1901, defeating the man who had
+been the leader for years. It was stated that the man who won had expended
+$35,000; the man who lost, $12,000 in the struggle. This is a section where
+poverty is the universal inheritance of the people who make this section
+home.
+
+For weeks the section was in a condition of constant warfare. The smallest
+boys were organized as gangs and shouted the name of the leader they had
+chosen their hero. Boys of five wore the buttons of their heroes. From
+fire-escapes, on wagons hung bits of white cloth declaring the names of
+the contestants. One of these, to avoid unpleasant embarrassment, had gone
+to California after the Lexow investigation. A favorite legend displayed by
+his enemy's friends was, "Paddy is the man who to Californy ran." This was
+displayed on one fire-escape on which opened the windows of two families,
+each espousing the cause of the contending leaders. The week before the
+balloting for leader the legend was kept in place by the constant vigilance
+for twenty-four hours of the day by the family whose sentiments it
+expressed. "Paddy" was defeated. The next morning the two neighbors, who
+had been enemies for weeks, leaned, each from her own window, chatting
+amicably, while the son of one was arranging the legend on the fire-escape
+to include both families. On either side was gracefully arranged an
+American flag, while the harp of Erin hung just in the middle of the
+fire-escape. Peace reigned in Warsaw. "Paddy's" friends, like the fairies
+of childhood, disappeared in the night. The whole district, as one man,
+accepted the change of rulers, and the new leader's banners were thrown to
+the breeze everywhere. Nothing succeeds like success in the tenement-house
+regions. For a couple of weeks peace seemed to reign in the district. The
+followers of the old leader found themselves displaced; new followers
+controlled the favors in the district. There began a new distribution of
+patronage. Then the old leader's displaced friends, with a few loyal souls,
+rallied about him. He had made money enough through his political
+affiliations to be defiant, and announced that the political corruption of
+the party to which he had belonged compelled him to rally to the support of
+the movement to overthrow it. Some of his followers were loyal to bravery,
+and declared, too, against the political system. Two of them, because of
+these declarations, were discharged forty-eight hours later from places in
+a city department where they drew salaries of $1200 per year. Their places
+were given to two of the new leader's followers. Two weeks later all had
+returned to the old allegiance, and the papers announced that the head of
+the Tammany system had decided that the patronage of the district would be
+evenly divided between the two factions.
+
+Independence of action is costly under such a system; costly in loss of
+wages to the voter; of food, raiment, shelter to his family.
+
+A voter who refuses to surrender the ease of his home or the pleasure of
+his club for the good of the district in which his home is located is not
+in a position to criticise his poor neighbor who will not jeopardize the
+position secured by his vote that supports his family to maintain the
+theory of American citizenship. Why should he make sacrifices to free the
+city from disgrace when his independent neighbor refuses to sacrifice his
+ease to protect his family from the inevitable evils of a corrupt city
+government?
+
+It was the conferring the rights of citizenship on immigrants almost as
+soon as they landed that fastened on New York an evil that has grown until
+the city has been held in the shackles of a spoils system that overshadows
+its commercial supremacy and makes it the argument against democratic
+government. The heaviest disgrace for this condition rests not on the men
+who profit by the system but on the good men who permit it to develop. It
+was the logical result of their indifference to the city's good and their
+responsibility for that good. This inactivity on the part of the mass of
+responsible citizens made the control of the city offices for personal ends
+easy to the men who, because of lack of training and moral turpitude, could
+not conceive of a service for other than personal ends. Shrewdness made
+them see that the immigrant was the ladder on which they could climb to
+political power and stability. They met the immigrant as friend and
+neighbor; they secured him work; they schooled him to citizenship, and
+began at once to train him in that deadliest of all influences in a
+democracy, class in politics. So long as this system of education prevails,
+the appearance of a candidate for local office who does not bear the
+"hall-mark" of the neighborhood will be resented.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY MORNING AMONG THE PUSHCARTS.]
+
+As time went on and the immigrants came from many countries, a new evil
+sprang up--the race section; the section where, maintaining all the
+characteristics of the country from which the people came, the men exercise
+the rights of citizenship at the behest of a political trainer who is able
+to promise favors for obedience, and work vengeance for disobedience.
+Behind him is a power which he must obey until the day comes when by his
+own shrewdness he is able to cross swords with those above him in the
+political system, becoming himself a dictator. In the process of his
+evolution from ward heeler to district leader he has trained those who
+follow him so well that he duplicates himself scores of times, increasing
+his power every time he makes a follower, either by fear or favor,
+perpetuating the system that makes the city, as has been aptly said, a
+"gold mine" which it costs the operators nothing to work.
+
+The man at the bottom knows the duplicate of the leader nearest his own
+level; this man is his friend, his countryman often. The links in the
+chain are unbroken, and the man who dares to disobey the orders issued from
+the top feels not only the displeasure of the henchman, but the combined
+strength of the chain, or as much of it as is necessary to compel him to
+obey or to crush him. The poor man whose tool to earn a living is a shovel,
+a pick or a broom is not in a position to defend his rights; he has no
+public sentiment in the only world he knows to support him in any attempt
+he may make to attain his rights when defrauded by the political system he,
+in utter ignorance, has helped to establish. When he is thrown out of work
+given to secure his vote, he has no redress. The man at the bottom must
+make the rule of his life "Small favors thankfully received." His hope for
+work in the future depends on keeping in friendly touch with the system;
+this is the first principle of American citizenship grasped by the
+naturalized citizen.
+
+Just before our last national election a number of men employed in skilled
+labor in one of our city departments were laid off. To some of those men
+this loss of work meant suffering for their families; to others it meant
+debt and dependence. It was startling the spirit in which this loss of work
+and wages were accepted by these men. The district leader, elected by the
+people to make the laws at Albany, in order "to hold his district in line"
+for this election, had to provide forty-eight voters with places. He
+demanded from the department forty-eight places; the work was in his
+district. No one questioned his right to make this demand; these places
+represented his political capital. In no way could his demands be met
+except by the discharge of forty-eight men then at work who lived outside
+the district. It was done. The men laid off, almost to a man, accepted it
+as the fortune of the political protege. Scarcely a word of resentment was
+expressed. There were removals into this special district before the next
+municipal election, and new enrollments under the leader's banner,
+irrespective of the political bias of the voters. Some of the men were
+sullen and felt the loss of manhood; some said, "I'll vote as I like, but I
+must have work;" others believed that only under this leader's banner could
+a poor man hope to get his rights--the privilege to earn his living; or, in
+their language, "He is hustling for his friends."
+
+Not only does the skilled and unskilled manual laborer find that the
+approval of his district leaders is necessary to secure work under the
+city, but that the affiliations and power of the district leader and his
+political followers can secure him work under corporations holding public
+franchises. He knows that the district leader secures privileges,
+licenses, votes for franchises, directly or indirectly, with the distinct
+understanding that his recommendations insure places to the men who carry
+them. Under corrupt city government the man in business who does not cater
+to the political powers finds his privileges curtailed; that he is made the
+target for petty annoyances. Especially is this true in the downtown
+districts, where in the transaction of business the rights of citizens to
+the streets are ignored. Until one has lived close to it, it is almost
+impossible to believe the power over the working masses the smallest cog in
+the political machine exercises. It is this that makes imperative the
+control of the city by men of high moral standing. No amount of unselfish
+philanthropy can save a city governed by the corrupt.
+
+There are sections in the city of New York where from the time the boy is
+old enough to recognize the power of a policeman he guides his life to
+curry favor with this visible expression of power. He knows almost as soon
+as he can talk the man who rules in the world in which he lives. He sees
+his playmate defy the policeman because his father is a man of power, or
+the friend of the man who rules the district. "Pull" is the law, all the
+law he recognizes. He hears discussed from his earliest years the
+dependence of his class on the political powers who govern, not for the
+good of the city, but that they may have their rights; their rights, as
+interpreted, being the securing of a place for a longer or shorter period
+at the nod of a "boss." Their district is all the city thousands of the
+inhabitants of these sections know. How can it be otherwise? They are never
+called for any purpose to any other part of the city, unless it be the
+cemetery. Family, friends, business all center within a score of blocks. If
+a distance must be traversed, it is through thoroughfares that but
+duplicate regions they know, all a part of the kingdom of the "boss."
+
+When the observer sees five thousand men walking behind a banner conferred
+on the leader of the district because every man in it who votes votes at
+his dictation, there comes to him a faint apprehension of what political
+power in the tenement-house district is. This district leader interprets
+all these men know of this country or its institutions. They know that he
+secures work for them; that he befriends them in time of trouble. He
+interprets Christ's doctrine to them: "I was hungry and ye gave me meat;
+thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and
+ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came
+unto me." This is what the district leader does, if not in person, by
+proxy. Is it any wonder he can control votes? Is it any wonder that the
+poor, ignorant, unequipped voter should curry favor, bow to him,
+acknowledge his supremacy even to the law? For this the voter can break the
+law, and the leader secure remission of the penalty. The leader's nod has
+been known to guide the judge on the bench. The leader can make the
+innocent suffer because his power is greater than the law to which the
+innocent appeal. This is the moral doctrine with which we inoculate our
+newly made citizens, and under which the children of our overcrowded
+tenement houses grow up. As the boys approach manhood they know no greater
+privilege than to serve the man who has the power to give them place, and
+he begins to cultivate their acquaintance early.
+
+It takes brains, moral standards, a knowledge of life and experience to put
+the district leaders and their cohorts in the place they belong. Talking
+against them accomplishes nothing while the majority he represents keeps
+him in power, yes, makes him possible. He makes morality an evil,
+dishonesty justice to the people who know him as the representative of
+republican principles. They are the people. They have left one land because
+it deprived them of rights. Rights as they know them are personal, and the
+district leader secures them.
+
+[Illustration: MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.]
+
+The opposition to the reform movement by the people governed by the
+district leader comes from the conviction, dimly conceived or implanted,
+that the election of the men who represent it would mean that everywhere
+merit and not "pull" would keep the voter at work; that business would have
+to be conducted according to law; that crime would be punished; that no man
+would hold the keys of the prison for their benefit, but for the protection
+of the community.
+
+One of the greatest moral lessons administered to the people of New York in
+a language that all understood, and one which all classes in the community
+needed, was given by the late Colonel George E. Waring. When he organized
+the Department of Street Cleaning on the merit system; when he proved to
+every man in the department that if he did his work no man could displace
+him; that he could defend himself, a man before men, if charges were
+brought against him, Colonel Waring changed the moral character of New
+York. Every man in that department had his friends to whom he carried the
+message; stood a free man employed by the city; a man who dared to vote as
+he would though in public service; would not be deprived of the right to
+earn his daily bread because of the use he made of his rights as an
+American citizen. This moral lesson went into every home. The woman whose
+husband handled a broom, drove a cart, held her head up, for the magic D.
+S. C. had changed a "job" that enslaved her husband to an employment that
+honored him.
+
+The enforcement of the law in the gathering of the garbage; the cleanliness
+of the streets in the tenement-house districts equal to those of the
+avenues, for the first time in generations brought the great truth to the
+consciousness of the people in the tenement-house regions that all men were
+equal. That the clean streets led to clean halls and cleaner homes was
+natural; and the further evolution meant clean characters, because of moral
+freedom to express opinion in a ballot cast at no man's command.
+
+And then came the summers when, for the sake of the children, extra
+exertions were made to keep the streets clean. Slowly the truth dawned on
+the dullest mother that the babies were not dying in such numbers; were not
+so ill, because the streets were clean, the garbage collected and the
+streets washed and cool. Twenty years of Colonel Waring, and the moral tone
+of the most ignorant would be changed. For the right to earn his living
+honestly, honorably, to cast his ballot as an American citizen, would be
+guaranteed to every voter employed in a city department employing the
+greatest number of voters with the least manual ability, the least
+education.
+
+A city is just as honest as the greatest number of citizens casting a
+ballot with the least knowledge of its value and effect; it comes no higher
+in the scale of integrity than that. Every man who stands behind a broom
+because he earns what is paid him, and knows that he stays there just as
+long as he continues to earn his wages, represents a wealth of manhood in a
+democracy, a part of the nation's capital as a world power.
+
+When Colonel Waring discharged the first man convicted of accepting a bribe
+for collecting the refuse of the city contrary to the law of the
+department, he gave a practical demonstration of the truth of the
+Declaration of Independence that all men are born free and equal. He showed
+by that act that the poor man who could not pay a bribe was protected by
+the law; that wealth purchased no privileges at the expense of the city.
+Just where the spoils system had worked its deepest degradation it received
+its most effective lesson. The greatest benefit that Colonel Waring, that
+man of law and order, conferred upon New York, was not its clean streets,
+but the moral lesson that a city department can be administered to secure
+the best interests of the people on the principles that control the best
+business houses of the city.
+
+To the shame of the city be it said that it had so long been accustomed to
+the spoils system that it could not accept the theory of Colonel Waring. It
+was impossible for even the philanthropic workers to believe that a man
+would not be placed, if they used their personal "pull" with the head of
+the department. The politicians learned quickly that the system in that
+department ignored "pull." When they did accept it, they determined to
+overthrow the man who robbed the spoils system of its largest perquisite
+where it was most effective in numbers. The combination of the political
+machines accomplished the city's disgrace in 1897. It was redeemed in 1901
+by a people who had suffered cruelly; who saw in the four years of misrule
+that they had made their own chains of bondage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF.
+
+
+The importance of environment is at last admitted as a factor in
+character-building. That light and air are indispensable to cleanliness,
+and physical cleanliness to health, and health to morals, is the gospel
+that the evils of the tenements have forced the philanthropists to declare
+until the thinking public is convinced of its truth.
+
+There are tenement houses that have reputations as positive as individuals.
+Thoughtful, intelligent wives of working-men would not, could not be
+persuaded to move into them because of their reputations. Often the evils
+of these tenements are justly attributed to the housekeepers. Housekeepers
+of tenements are women who pay the whole or a part of their rent by
+overseeing the house; attending to the cleaning, collecting the rents,
+letting the rooms, adjusting differences between tenants--"a go-between"
+between the agent or the owner and the tenants. The owner or agent
+employing these women upholds their decisions when differences between the
+tenants and housekeepers arise. This clothes them with great authority,
+and often enables them to do great injustice. They are feared usually.
+Families will endure restrictions of liberties, every deprivation of their
+rights, because protest would mean eviction or discomforts that would
+compel them to move.
+
+Under some agents and owners these housekeepers have absolute control of
+the property. They frequently make and enforce rules that utterly ignore
+the rights of tenants. This rule is often as absolute as though they were
+the owners of the house. Strange as it may seem, this class of housekeepers
+usually make the property under their control pay; they usually keep up the
+character of the houses under their control because they have standards and
+compel those about them to live up to them.
+
+[Illustration: A REMNANT OF THE PAST.]
+
+On an East Side street a few blocks from the East River are four 27-foot
+front houses of the English-basement type. The plan of these houses
+indicates that they were designed as residences for people of ample means.
+The halls are broad, the stairways wide, ascending in recesses on the first
+floor that leaves the entrance halls clear from front to rear doorways. The
+yards of these four houses, wide and deep, are paved with broad flagging
+stones, such as are used on the sidewalks. The fences are kept in good
+order and well painted. Not a child living in these four houses dares to
+play in those yards. The housekeeper--one woman has charge of the four
+houses--would order them out. If the children did not leave at once,
+complaint would be made to the mothers; and if they did not uphold the
+housekeeper and insist that the children play in the street, the mothers
+who failed would have to move. Every mother-tenant knows this well. A
+mother of three children who had lived in these houses all her married
+life, when asked why the children could not play in the yard, where she
+could watch them, replied: "Why, if the children played in the yard they
+would make a lot of work for the housekeeper. She would not stand it." This
+mother's tone indicated that she thought the housekeeper was right. The
+youngest of the three children in another family living in these houses was
+ill all winter. When convalescent, the doctor ordered him to be kept out of
+doors as much as possible. The mother had all the work to do for five in
+family, and had to devise some means of keeping the child out that would
+not interfere with her work. She arranged the fire-escape outside of the
+window, putting pillows and toys out there. The little fellow climbed over
+the rail and struck a stone beneath, breaking his arms.
+
+"Why did you not put him in the yard, where you could watch him, and where
+he could run about?"
+
+"Oh! the housekeeper would be so angry; I wouldn't dare."
+
+"Must you keep the children out of the yard?"
+
+"Yes; they would make an awful lot of work for the housekeeper."
+
+Investigation proved that the owner of this property supported the
+housekeeper in depriving even the babies of the use of these yards. A
+mother could not roll a baby carriage around the yards, because her older
+children, if she had any, would be sure to go into the yards to see her.
+The rents for four rooms, two absolutely dark, ventilated through the dark
+and unventilated halls by a window eighteen inches square, were $22, $20
+and $18 per month, respectively, for each floor. The streets in front are
+overcrowded, dirty; when the trucks were in the streets, two were always
+standing in front of these houses. Push-carts now replace the trucks.
+
+The people stay in these houses year after year. A bill never appears on
+them. The arbitrary restriction as to the use of the yard is not counted
+against the property, because it is so clean, kept in such good repair, and
+the character of the people scrutinized before they are accepted as
+tenants. It is generally understood that the renting of furnished rooms is
+not approved. The housekeeper finds a tenant who rents rooms objectionable.
+In a neighborhood where every house shows year after year a loss of
+character, people poorer and more ignorant becoming tenants, these four
+houses retain the appearance of comfort and respectability. Among the
+tenants there is but little intimacy; they appear to have little in common.
+The women are never heard in the halls, nor do they loiter about the
+doorways. The men are all skilled workmen, earning good wages--clerks on
+small salaries, or in city departments, all natives of New York. The wives
+were all wage-earners before they were married. They dress well; most of
+them are fairly good housekeepers. All buy their children's clothes ready
+made; two make their own dresses. For their children they are ambitious,
+and expect to keep them in school until they are sixteen. This the children
+defeat. The boys get places during the summer vacations in their fourteenth
+year, refusing to go back to school. The girls are contented until
+fourteen, and then they grow restless, becoming wage-earners; all that they
+earn is spent for their clothes. The wages of the father may no more than
+meet the expenses of the family, but this is not considered. Clothes are
+the essentials. A man having a salary of $1,400, living in one of these
+houses, had to go in debt the first week of a serious illness of his wife.
+He did not have a dollar in advance to meet emergencies. He was a proud,
+indulgent, tender husband and father.
+
+This type of house and this class of tenants are disappearing from the East
+Side. The remnant of this class who remain are held by political
+affiliations or family ties. The men enjoy the sense of power that comes
+from this connection, and realize fully that to leave the district would
+mean a loss of social prestige, or, if minor politicians, a loosening of
+their hold on the people to whom they represent political power. Many of
+this class remain in the section because they hold positions in the city
+departments in return for active service in the interest of the political
+machines.
+
+Not far away from these tenements is another in which are sixteen families.
+The rents in this house range from $5 to $9.50 per month for two to three
+rooms. The house is dirty, neglected; violations of the sanitary laws are
+evident from the front door to the roof, on which tenants occupying the
+front rooms must dry their clothes. The water is in the dark halls; in
+winter, for days at a time, the pipes, both water and drain, are frozen and
+burst; yet the tenants stay year after year. One woman, the mother of four
+children, was born, married, her four children were born, and her husband,
+mother and father died in this house. She has never moved, except across
+the hall, up and downstairs, as she has been able to pay more or has been
+forced to reduce her rent. The women in this house know almost nothing of
+housekeeping. The men are employed only about half the time. The number of
+children in the house averages three to each family. It is a New England
+hamlet under one roof in this particular. If there is sickness in any
+family, it is the concern of every tenant; if a man is out of work, it is a
+community misfortune, and to be shared. A new hat for man or woman is the
+cause of rejoicing, for it is the badge of respectability for any in the
+house who may need it in an emergency. The whole household, for such it
+seems to be, are poor, very poor; thriftless, unambitious; the men somewhat
+given to drink to excess; yet the spirit of neighborliness shames
+criticism. A woman in this house ill four months was nursed by her
+neighbors night and day. Her house and children were cared for, food
+provided when necessary. Comment on their loyalty and devotion was met with
+the response: "God knows how soon she may be doing it for one of us." Yet
+when that woman, whom most of them had known all her life, gave evidence of
+pregnancy a few months after her husband's death, not a woman crossed her
+doorsill until the birth of twin babies within the period of time redeemed
+her character. Whether from remorse or love, ample return for this cruelty
+has been made many times.
+
+In the two-room apartments in this house there is one closet, with shelves
+about six inches wide. This is in the one room that serves as living-room,
+kitchen, dining-room--a room less than eight feet wide. The bedroom is
+perfectly dark, ventilated by a square window into perfectly dark,
+unventilated halls. A full-sized bed leaves the width of the door between
+it and the wall. The three-room apartments have outside windows--five to
+the three rooms. There is a closet in the kitchen and one in the large
+room. People talk of poverty, but few people know what it is. A woman who
+had moved into the three-room apartment had hung all the clothing for five
+in family in the one bedroom on four nails. In reply to a protest, she said
+patiently and quietly: "There are no hooks in the closet in the front room,
+and I hadn't a penny to buy any." Ten cents provided that closet with
+hooks. A comment was made on the keeping of the washtub under the kitchen
+table. "Why do you not have the tub carried to the cellar?" An expression
+of self-pity passed over the woman's face as she explained that the tub
+would have to be carried down three flights of stairs, out on the street,
+around the corner, down the cellar stairs, and then to her coal cellar at
+the extreme end of the cellar.
+
+The house stands on a corner, the entrance from the street at the extreme
+end of the west wall. The cellar door was formerly close to the entrance
+door, but the landlord built in the back end of the cellar an oven when a
+baker hired the store on the first floor. A cellar door was then opened at
+the farthest part of the front, or south wall, one hundred and twenty-five
+feet from the entrance door of the house. Is it surprising that coal is
+bought by the pail by all the tenants? That tubs are kept anywhere in their
+rooms where there is space?
+
+Shiftlessness, thriftless uncleanliness marks even the sidewalk about this
+house. The dirt inside or out troubles nobody. Children will spill half the
+contents of the garbage pail they are carrying to the cans in the tiny
+yard, in halls and on the stairway. It is kicked out of the way without
+comment. Dogs or cats, and ofttimes both, are members of the families who
+live under this roof. The unsanitary conditions of the closets in the yard
+arouse pity for the tenants on the first floor; but no tenant thinks of
+complaining to either the housekeeper or the authorities. It would be
+useless, and would get them into trouble. The present owner is willing to
+kalsomine the bedrooms and halls each spring, but the tenants object
+because it makes a lot of work.
+
+In August, two years ago, the writer was going up the first flight of
+stairs in this house, when a baby voice was heard pleading: "Pease tum
+fas'er; oh, pease tum fas'er; I 'ant to do p'ay; I 'ant to doe on steet;
+pease tum fas'er." On the third floor a tiny boy stood in front of the sink
+talking to the faucet, from which a tiny stream was flowing into a little
+tin pail. An infant's voice from one of the rooms told the story. The
+mother needed water and could not leave the baby. Perhaps this was the tiny
+nurse of mother and baby, big enough to call a neighbor to do what he could
+not do.
+
+When it is remembered that this stream of water from the faucet represented
+the water supply for four families, the difficulties of cleanliness under
+those conditions may be slightly appreciated. In spite of the dirt, the
+darkness, the unsanitary conditions of this house, the thriftlessness and
+ignorance of the tenants, there is a spirit of neighborliness in it that
+puts the critical to blush. Without a doubt the housekeeper, who is a
+shrewd woman, fosters this spirit of neighborliness. She smiles as she
+says: "They gets so used to each other they hates to be separated." Neither
+house nor tenants seem to go below the level established twelve years ago.
+
+There is a housekeeper who does mission work of which the world takes no
+note. She is the woman who in the true sense is an altruist. By her force
+of character, her hatred of inefficiency, her love of order, she compels
+the women who become tenants who do not know how to keep house to learn
+how.
+
+The writer knows intimately such a housekeeper. She had charge of a
+four-story tenement on the lower East Side. The house was of the type known
+as "double decker." There were four apartments on each floor; the front
+consisting of a kitchen, living-room and two bedrooms; the back, of one
+room and two bedrooms. Small windows near the ceiling in kitchen and
+bedrooms opened on a narrow space between this and the next house, which
+was an old-fashioned residence. A similar opening in that house enabled the
+neighbors to look into each other's rooms. Water and refuse were thrown
+into this space between the two houses, and sometimes into the rooms of
+neighbors unintentionally. There was war, bitter war, because of this; for
+the large tenement was occupied by a part of the remnant having social
+standards left on the lower East Side.
+
+There was water in all the kitchens of the large tenement. The halls were
+absolutely dark, but were free from the nuisances of hallways having sinks.
+Stairs and halls were covered with light oilcloth, the stairs having brass
+treads on the edge. Everything was kept as clean as soap, water and
+muscular strength could keep it.
+
+The first visit was made to this house long before Colonel Waring had shown
+what clean streets would do in the tenement-house districts. On the street
+curb in front of the door stood three ash barrels filled within three
+inches of the top, carefully covered with newspapers tucked in around the
+edge of the contents. This indicates the standards of this housekeeper. She
+hated dirt and disorder. She could not be happy where it was. She forced by
+tact, coercion, persuasion, any and every means, her way to the heart and
+home of every ignorant housekeeper who came under that roof. She taught
+cooking by sending cake, bread, soup she had made to the tenants, and
+arousing the desire in them to learn how to make that particular dish. She
+instituted an exchange of skill among the tenants. The woman who could make
+a dress and not a hat exchanged skill with the one who had been a milliner.
+The woman who made bread and failed with cake exchanged skill with the
+cakemaker. They even took turns in going to the theatre, the neighbor
+staying home and taking care of the children.
+
+The property was more valuable every year; no bill appeared at the door. It
+stood apart from its neighbors for years. This housekeeper was compelled to
+give up her responsibility and left the house, as she wisely said: "No one
+would manage it in my way. I could not get on in peace." Six months after
+every tenant had moved but the liquor dealer; and even his bar-room had
+sunk to a lower level. A building in which many homes might be maintained
+is now merely a place of shelter. People move in and out; no relations are
+established; there is nothing to hold the tenant here above any other
+house. The owner has sold the property, hating its present character.
+
+Again, tenants will be the victims of vindictive housekeepers, who for any
+and no reason will begin a system of petty persecutions to compel a tenant
+to move. Then there is the gossiping housekeeper, who keeps the tenants at
+war. It is no secret that the method of rent collecting of some
+housekeepers holds tenants year after year. They will take the rent in the
+smallest sums, daily or weekly. By the end of the month they will usually
+have the full amount collected. The houses where this system prevails are
+the most objectionable. The tenants for this leniency endure positive
+evils. The important thing is a place of shelter for the family. Work is
+uncertain, or long periods of idleness has made the payment of rent
+impossible for a period. The housekeeper understands and becomes
+responsible for keeping the tenant until the rent is paid. In return the
+tenants endure neglect of duty on the part of the housekeeper. Silence is
+their expression of gratitude. No repairs are made, for none are demanded.
+The house sinks lower and lower; anybody can move in on the payment of part
+of a month's rent. The vacant rooms are dirty--give visible evidence of the
+presence of vermin; but the family evicted with only half a month's rent in
+hand cannot afford to be critical. This is the house that makes the slum.
+
+Two housekeepers of tenements were discussing owners and tenants before the
+writer. One was rigid, keeping the house astonishingly clean, with rooms
+rarely vacant; the other, always in trouble with the tenants, always having
+some one to evict, threw the blame for her troubles on the tenants. The
+first one listened, finally saying slowly: "No, you are the one. You get
+cross and abuse the children. You make pets of some children and some
+mothers, and the others see it and get mad. Then there is a fight. To keep
+a house you must treat everybody the same. You must make good rules; you
+must do your part and make every tenant do her part. I've had two of the
+tenants you put out of your house five years. They are good tenants; watch
+yourself."
+
+[Illustration: A TYPE OF THE PRESENT.]
+
+There are landlords who care for nothing but the income from their
+property. Any kind of tenant who will pay rent is acceptable. Any
+housekeeper who collects the specified amount may hold control without
+question. The housekeeper may have standards, but these are swept aside by
+the exactions of the landlord. The rents in such houses are usually high,
+because there is such a percentage of loss in rents. This house also
+contributes to the creation of the slum.
+
+The careless and apparently malicious destruction of property by tenants is
+not appreciated by those who touch this question of tenement houses
+superficially. No means has yet been found to make the tenement-house
+population understand that the abuse of property is a factor in their rent
+problem. Within a year the writer was walking with a group of women, two of
+whom were housekeepers in tenement houses. This question of tenants was
+being discussed freely by the women who were tenants as well as the
+housekeepers. It was interesting to find that all agreed that one family
+could change the character of a tenement house for the worst, but one
+family could not improve its character. The reason was that the family
+above the tenement came only to reduce their rent during a hard time, while
+the family with evil tendencies stayed until they were put out, to go into
+a cheaper tenement and lower that. They agreed that where housekeeper and
+tenant got on well together both hated a change. The two things that
+dragged down the character of a tenement was beer-drinking and destructive
+children--children allowed to "run wild." These women insisted that there
+never would be quarrels in tenement houses were it not for these two
+causes. A woman who drank beer would invite her new neighbors to drink.
+They would treat in return, and the house would show it at once. The women
+who drink beer in this fashion grow careless of their persons and their
+homes; they get rid of their children, who soon learn to enjoy the freedom
+from control. The children destroy the property first in play, through
+carelessness, and later grow malicious.
+
+If a housekeeper is sharp and shrewd, these women tenants claimed that she
+could at any time get rid of an objectionable tenant; but the housekeepers
+held that if the owner did not care for anything but rents, the
+housekeeper was often compelled to let in and keep in objectionable
+tenants. They admitted, one and all, that houses fairly indicated the
+character of the people who would live in them, and that rents regulated
+the class of tenants to a very great degree. They admitted that at times
+one could find tenants who had lived for many years in one house where
+conditions had changed for the worst. But it was unusual. People now
+selected houses where those of their own faith, and, if foreign, those of
+their own nationality, at least predominated. That this tendency was seen
+more and more every year. This group of women were among the remnant of
+Christians left on the lower East Side. All had been born there of Irish
+parentage. They lived in the houses bordering on the edge of the East
+River--old houses on the plan of the first tenements erected in New York,
+or in houses designed for one family and now holding four to eight. Two of
+them lived in houses built in a row erected eighty-three years ago. They
+were two-story, dormer windows and basement frame houses, built without an
+area, the door to the basements opening like a cellar door on the street.
+These basements were occupied by a family each. Fourteen of these houses
+are still standing. The people in this section live a life entirely their
+own. They have been crowded out, the more prosperous, by the Hebrews,
+while the remnant find themselves hemmed in by them.
+
+These people live in the confines of a Roman Catholic parish that twenty
+years ago contained nearly eleven thousand souls of that faith. Three years
+ago the priest in charge estimated his parish at less than four thousand,
+and that four thousand remained because they were too poor to get away, he
+declared.
+
+The Hebrews, as tenants will, on the same block show many social grades,
+many degrees of poverty and prosperity, many stages of development in
+American civilization. There is a sense of feeling of brotherhood that
+other people lack. The houses will range from the most uncleanly, ill-kept,
+to the new tenement with ornate entrance and modern improvements. The most
+modern will, on entering, be found with walls marked and broken when the
+wood-work is new. No one seems troubled by this destruction. The
+housekeeper does not struggle, for it is expected and charged for in the
+rent. Plumbing is of the simplest, for it is expected to present the
+largest percentage of loss in the administration of the property. One of
+the most elaborate of the new tenements erected on the lower East Side was
+visited three months after it was occupied. Every hallway from top to
+bottom of the house had broken plaster and was marked by pencil and crayon.
+The plumber was then a daily visitor. This house a year afterward bore on
+the interior evidences that years of hard usage might have brought. The
+housekeeper collected rents and attended to the garbage. She was utterly
+indifferent to the appearance of the house, which, intended for prosperous
+families, was a nest of sweat-shops, where even children of six and seven
+were employed. The rents had been collected; that was the owner's only
+requirement.
+
+The West Side is congested, because manufacture and storehouses are
+displacing the houses. Rents are high, and the houses for the most part old
+residences occupied by several families. The people, generally, are
+Americans. They are deeply attached to this old section, because it is
+their birthplace; and for many of them an even deeper attachment prevails,
+for this section was the birthplace of parents. The houses often are found
+to have lifelong friends, often relatives, as tenants. The tenants keep the
+halls and stairways clean in turn, and the houses generally are well kept
+up. Here one tenant is allowed a rebate on rent for renting rooms,
+collecting the rent, caring for the sidewalk and stoop, the garbage and
+ash-cans. The majority of the people in this section are Protestants. The
+Protestant churches are well maintained. The Trinity Corporation supports
+kindergartens, cooking and sewing schools. The Judson Memorial is a very
+attractive gymnasium, that brings children from as far west as the North
+River. The Methodist Church holds many who in no other section could find
+the same equality and freedom. The vocabulary of the people through this
+section shows the effect of the newer activities in the modern churches;
+the effect of the enlarging interests of the children in art and nature
+through the public school education.
+
+While the people are living on small incomes, often on uncertain incomes,
+life is lived at a much higher level than on the East Side. Children are
+not so precocious in evil knowledge. This difference is due largely to the
+fact that the houses contain three and four families at the most; that the
+apartment houses in the section are beyond the reach of any but the skilled
+working man. He holds his own at high rental in the house that shelters but
+three other families like his own. His neighbors are people of like
+ambitions as his own, and demand what he demands.
+
+[Illustration: A CORNER IN A WORKINGMAN'S HOME.]
+
+The housekeepers in this section differ essentially in their relation to
+the tenants from those of the more heterogeneous population of the East
+Side of the city. One resemblance is recognized--the effect of the
+character of the housekeeper. Here, as on the East Side, to a very large
+degree, the comfort, health, peace and good-will of the tenants in every
+house depends on the character and the spirit of the woman who controls the
+property for the landlord.
+
+The law of natural selection holds good. The housekeeper holds the tenants
+who are satisfied with the conditions she creates. They, especially the
+children, develop in habits of cleanliness, in care of property, in respect
+for the rights of others, as the rules of the house enforced by the
+housekeeper compel. It is in her power to get rid of those who do not
+accept her dictates, let them be what they may--just or unjust. The
+housekeeper will make her presence felt. If she violates the law in the
+disposal of garbage outside of the house, tenants will violate the law she
+makes for them in the care and disposal of garbage inside the house. If she
+is compelled to obey the law, she will compel tenants to obey the law. It
+is this that makes the morale of the Department of Street Cleaning so
+important. If the part of the house which in renting tenants agree to keep
+clean is not kept clean, the observer will discover that the housekeeper
+does not keep her part of the agreement in keeping the entrance clean.
+
+A large factor in the tenement house for character building or destroying
+is the housekeeper who has charge of it. Where she is well paid she makes
+the property valuable. She cares for it, for the character of the tenants.
+Tenants remain in the house because of the advantages her offices control
+for the poor man and his wife anxious to provide for their children's best
+welfare. Property under this type of woman resists decay. She holds it in
+spite of the decay about it. The characterless, slovenly, indifferent
+housekeeper is a factor in destroying property, because of the destructive
+character of the tenants who will tolerate her and her methods.
+
+The house that is the property of the man with "a pull" is an obstruction
+to civilization almost impossible to overcome. By connivance the law is
+inoperative. If pushed, such an owner can easily rid himself of the tenants
+who attempt, or have attempted for them, efforts to compel the owners to
+repair the property. A mill owner on the water front on the lower East Side
+owned three three-story and basement houses adjoining the mill property.
+They had been built for one family each. The basements were altered into
+stores, and the floors above altered at the least cost to accommodate one
+or two families. This meant two inside bedrooms absolutely without
+ventilation. The tenants of this property and all in the neighborhood were
+tormented by the smoke and gas from the chimney of the mill. When the wind
+blew directly toward the houses, windows were kept closed for hours in the
+warmest weather. All the tenants dried their clothes on pulley lines.
+Frequently the soot made the clothes unwearable, and they had to be washed
+the second time. Ten years of effort have failed to compel the building of
+the chimney of that mill to the legal height.
+
+The houses the mill owner owned were in a disgraceful condition. The
+closets in the yards had no flow of water. The engineer of the mill was
+required to carry a hose from the mill over the fences to the closets to
+flush them. Sometimes he forgot to turn the water off, and the yards were
+flooded and made disgusting. Sometimes he forgot for days at a time to
+flush the closets, when the conditions were even worse. Only people who
+were helpless or hopeless would endure such conditions. One of the workers
+of the College Settlement discovered the conditions in these houses. She
+took immediate steps to compel the necessary improvements. The owner
+discovered that the wife and children of one of the tenants went to clubs
+at the Settlement, and he ordered that family to move. Before the mother
+moved her education had begun, and she imparted to her neighbors the
+information that the conditions were unlawful and could be changed if they
+would fight for it. The man exacted his rent on the first of the month; he
+was hard and unyielding; the tenants continued the warfare until he had
+evicted every one who spoke English and filled his houses with foreigners.
+One of the stores is used for storing and sorting rags and paper; next door
+is a meat shop. The fight was given up. The owner had "a pull," and the law
+is defied to this day on that property.
+
+All the land on the river front in this neighborhood for blocks is made
+land, filled in by the city refuse, on which houses were built years ago.
+This kind of property extends back from the North River for three, and at
+one point four, blocks. In some of the houses near the river the high tides
+of spring and fall rise in the cellars. The College Settlement workers who
+visited families in one of these houses had been distressed by the amount
+of illness in it. Malaria had attacked every family. Spring and fall wages
+were lost at times by as many as three wage-earners in one family for two
+and three days each week. In addition to loss of wages, there was the
+expense of medicine and doctors. At last came the urgent request that a
+worker should call on a girl of sixteen who was dying of consumption on the
+first floor. This consisted of four rooms, two being inside bedrooms, each
+of which would hold a three-quarter bed and a chair between the bed and the
+wall. One was absolutely unventilated, except through the doors. It was, in
+fact, a passageway between the front and rear rooms. This plan is the usual
+plan in houses altered from residences for one family to a tenement house.
+
+The door of the other bedroom, which opened into the large room, was closed
+at night because the large room was used as a bedroom by the male members
+of the family and one lodger. The girl of sixteen had slept with two others
+in that room for eight years. The floors of the four rooms were covered
+with carpets. The odor was sickening. The visitor asked the tenant who
+brought her to the sick girl what caused the odor perceptible in the hall,
+with front and rear windows always open, unbearable in the rooms where
+doors and windows were closed.
+
+"Oh, that! The water has been in the cellar now for two or three weeks. The
+tides are high now." A visit to the cellar showed the water at the height
+of the second step of the cellar stairs; also a sewer pipe that had burst.
+Visits were made to the proper city department once a week for eleven
+weeks. The clerk, on the last visit, evidently intending to be facetious,
+said: "Say, what's the matter with those people taking baths in that
+cellar? They ain't got no bathtubs."
+
+The owner of the property had "pull" enough to escape even an investigation
+by the department. It was years before the cellar of that house was
+concreted and the necessary connections of pipes and sewers made. It was
+done when the property had changed hands and a man comparatively poor and
+wholly free from political affiliations became the owner.
+
+The people of this whole region are the victims of political corruption.
+Some of them have more fear of offending a political light, let his glimmer
+be ever so small, than of offending against even God's law. They could be
+turned out of house and home, deprived of the means of earning a living, by
+men who openly defy the law, and who become heroes to the growing boys and
+girls for no reason but because of their power to use and defy the law.
+
+The moral natures of the men and the women who grow up under this influence
+are dwarfed and warped until it is impossible for them to have distinct
+conceptions of right and wrong. The education they receive does not reveal
+the relations of ethics to life; the struggle for existence dulls the mind;
+while the depleted physical conditions caused by bad air, mal-nutrition and
+ignorance of real values reduce moral resistance almost to zero. Enforce
+the tenement-house laws, and the moral strength of the people of New York
+will rise to higher levels of moral resistance. Not poverty, but the burden
+imposed by political corruption, is the blight of home life in the
+tenement-house sections of New York.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS.
+
+
+In a preceding chapter an attempt was made to show how hopeless the task of
+home-making was for women who had neither knowledge nor ideals to guide
+them. When it is remembered that the environment of these homes was in
+itself degrading, to maintain even the semblance of a home was a remarkable
+achievement.
+
+These women knew but three educating influences--home, school and Church.
+Four, perhaps, if one chooses to count the streets, where most of their
+time was spent, as one. The value of the first they revealed in the homes
+they made. The school at the time it was a factor in their development was
+a place that had no connection with anything else in their lives. What they
+learned there was but to the exceptional few without any practical value.
+They learned to read to get promoted, or because they could not help it.
+The arithmetic which they found valuable they learned in doing errands and
+spending their own pennies. They learned to form letters with their pens;
+but as they had no use for the knowledge, they soon forgot it. Their
+conception of education and that of their world left them perfectly at ease
+in their accomplishment. The Church had to do with their souls; and to the
+majority the care of their souls was a delegated responsibility, and gave
+them little concern, if any. Personal effort in that direction was a matter
+of old age.
+
+The Church was, by its own traditions and sentiment, a spiritual light and
+guide; the end and aim of its service to develop spiritual life by teaching
+and prayer. The social life of the people, or, for that matter, the civic
+conditions that to the last degree regulated and controlled their
+pleasures, were not the concern of the Church. The parish house did not
+exist. The institutional church had not been conceived even in thought.
+
+Yet at this period, 1880 and 1881, there was a growing consciousness that
+something was wrong in the social order; that neither churches, schools nor
+homes were meeting the necessities of the working people or their children.
+The Church found itself losing ground; the people could not be held in
+allegiance to it. This was so true of the Protestant churches downtown that
+already the wisdom of moving uptown was being questioned. Some had even
+then left their old buildings to be used as mission churches; others sold
+their downtown buildings, moving uptown, giving up any attempt at holding
+the masses, who manifested no interest in the Church or its work. The
+missions then established were and are maintained with more or less wisdom
+and success. That mistakes should be made was natural. There was no
+precedent as to how one class in this democratic community should work for
+another. It took years for the churches to learn that the secret of success
+was in working _with_, and not _for_, the people.
+
+The overcrowding went on. Neighborhoods changed so rapidly that it was
+impossible to adopt any system to meet the necessities of the social
+conditions. These conditions were created by race standards of living,
+pleasure and religion. No man or organization was prepared to grapple with
+them intelligently, for they viewed them as observers.
+
+The Church had still the first interpretation of feeding the hungry,
+clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in prison. Secular work was
+not yet a part of the redemptive work of the Church. Poverty and ignorance
+reigned where prosperity and intelligence had been. The mission church
+became a distributing station. It was but natural that the men and women
+who followed Christ in their lives should feed and clothe the hungry and
+the naked. It was quite as natural that people whose struggle for life was
+constant, a struggle in which they were rarely successful, even when they
+accepted their own standards of success, should develop shrewdness in
+securing all possible aid at the least possible effort. The more they
+received without effort, the easier life was made for them. This was one
+method of adjustment. Where there were several children in a family they
+were often sent to as many Sunday-schools. The churches, all unconsciously,
+for a long period carried on the work of the missions on a commercial
+basis, competing energetically to secure attendants at mission services and
+Sunday-schools. The workers found their success measured by the numbers
+that appeared in their reports. It was the American standard of success. It
+became profitable to go to Sunday-school. The approach of the holidays
+found them crowded. The mission churches boomed. They provided an outlet
+for the energies of devoted, consecrated men and women, determined to make
+the world better because they were in it. The missions were an outlet for
+the generous; for the men and the women who considered themselves stewards
+of the properties in their possession. The blunders made are a tribute to
+the faith which established and maintained churches. The very blunders of
+those years were the seeds of wisdom these latter days are beginning to
+garner in the fruits of cooperation and federation. The forces are
+beginning to marshal under one banner and emblem, with one aim born of the
+nineteenth century conception, that Christ taught civic duty to His
+followers when He declared, "Render unto Caesar the things that are
+Caesar's." That the Church is the guardian of the people's rights, as well
+as their example, is a long-delayed conception. It has taken thirty years
+to bring the evolution in Church work from competition to cooperation in
+the work of personal and civic regeneration.
+
+Many of the difficulties hardest to overcome have grown out of the mistakes
+of those years, when the rapid influx of foreigners changed the character
+of the people of the tenement regions, and the Church failed to change its
+methods. They came, many of them, paupers, a charge at once upon the
+charitable and the humane. Neither their ignorance nor poverty was a bar to
+their citizenship; their presence on the municipal stage in the character
+of voters, sovereigns, increased the civic problems of New York, and
+naturally these the Church problems.
+
+Unfortunately the charitable work of the churches was too often left to the
+management of sentimental people, who failed to see what has been forced
+upon workers of the present day: that hunger is sometimes a moral educator;
+that the salvation of a family may sometimes be best secured by letting
+them suffer, the innocent with the guilty, because in the suffering is an
+educating power impossible to secure in any other way.
+
+One evening to a working-girls' club a teacher in a mission school not far
+away brought a girl of sixteen, introducing her as one of her girls who had
+been in her class two years. Privately she told one of the directors of the
+club of the poverty of the girl's family. The father was a man of
+seventy-five, who could do only the lightest work, and found getting the
+work he could do very difficult. This girl was the eldest of seven
+children, all attending the mission. "It is a mystery what would become of
+the family, were it not for what the mission does for them," was the
+comment of the teacher. A close inspection of the girl did not reveal
+distressing poverty, and the directors of the club were puzzled. The girl
+was employed in a store at a very small salary. She was anxious to go to
+the country. Of course, she must be sent away without any cost to herself.
+She doubted if the family could spare her wages, even if she could go free.
+She explained that she and her brothers and sisters had gone in "Tribune
+Fresh-Air Parties," but she was now too old. "The trouble with our family
+is," she commented, "that we are all too old." It seemed a hopeless
+doctrine to become fixed in the mind of a girl of sixteen, so the club
+directors secured a vacation for her through the Working-Girls' Vacation
+Society, deciding that, if it were necessary, they would pay the mother her
+wages for the time the girl was away. No question arose as to her wages. At
+the expiration of her two weeks' vacation, when she should have been
+penniless, she appeared at the club in a new hat and gloves. When the girl
+joined the club her Sunday-school teacher paid one month's dues. She had
+been present at several business meetings; she had seen the other girls
+paying their dues, she had heard the treasurer's report, but she never
+attempted to assume her financial obligations. She was spoken to finally in
+regard to her dues, and responded calmly by saying she could not pay her
+dues; she had no money. Various suggestions were made as to the possibility
+of her paying part. At last, to relieve the club treasury, one of the
+directors said: "I will pay what you owe and one month in advance. You may
+pay me as you can." The girl never came to the club again. No effort was
+made to trace her, as she contributed nothing to the life of the club, and
+many girls kept their dues paid who dressed far more plainly; these very
+girls she had on more than one occasion treated discourteously.
+
+Two years afterward one of the club officers was calling on a friend. "I am
+so glad you came in," she exclaimed. "One of your club girls is in trouble
+and is coming here with Miss ----, a mission worker in Dr. ----'s church,
+this morning. Now you can help solve her problem." To have a member of a
+working-girls' club go to an outsider for help is to have one of your own
+family appeal to strangers in time of need. The club worker kept still. She
+was covered with shame. She had failed to establish relations with one it
+was her sole purpose to help. Who the girl was she did not know, as her
+friend had forgotten the girl's name. The girl came. It was our old friend
+of sixteen. She was, as may be imagined, not pleased to see the director of
+the club. The history of that family is fairly indicative of how missions
+were conducted at that time. How many of them are conducted at the present
+with the same results? Originally this family was found by the workers of a
+mission established by a wealthy church, and apparently in need. Rent was
+paid; food and clothes provided; doctors sent when necessary. The return
+for this, as tacitly agreed, was the presence of the children, as rapidly
+as they were old enough, in the Sunday-school, and the father and mother at
+the Sunday evening service, the only service this mission maintained.
+
+The timidity of the first contact disappeared early. The wants soon outgrew
+the needs of the family. The mission people failed to respond to the wants,
+and watched more closely what it cost the church to meet the needs after
+the first years of acquaintance. This was not to be borne. The family went
+in a body to another mission of the same church ten blocks away. They made
+not the slightest effort to deceive, for they did not change their address.
+Here were nine persons to add to the roll of the mission, and they were
+added. The family was enthusiastically welcomed. No impudent or intrusive
+questions were asked. Shoes, coats, rent money in whole or part was
+generously given. At the end of two years discoveries were made that led
+the mission workers to question what was done with the supplies provided.
+The family would not stand this. They went bodily to a church less than a
+mile away, still living at the old address. The family was again taken up
+without question. That the father could not work was accepted and
+generosity was increased. The other missions contrasted unfavorably in
+generous impulses; the girl urged her former classmates to join the last
+mission. The church meanwhile was walking by faith in its treatment of the
+poor; aiming to live up to the conception of its days; strengthening the
+influence of its prayers with gifts of potatoes; certainly a great advance
+on prayers and no potatoes.
+
+At about this time a young girl was met in a Sunday-school class very
+attractive, always well and prettily dressed. She had been in the
+Sunday-school all her life, and had joined the church with her mother, a
+gentle, quiet woman, who leaned on her daughter for guidance. The daughter
+was a tower of strength. By accident it was learned that the girl was a
+wage-earner, working with her mother in a large suit house in New York;
+that they kept house, doing the housework, even the washing and ironing,
+before and after their day's work. Added to this they made all their own
+clothes, which must have involved a vast amount of labor, as they both
+dressed well.
+
+The position of this mother and daughter is fairly typical of a large army
+of women workers, and explains, in part, at least, why two women of so much
+character should have accepted charity for so many years and why they could
+not change their economic relation. The work they did was to a degree a
+trade. Each was a special "hand" on a certain part of women's suits. They
+were paid by the piece. When they had work, they made good wages; but the
+seasons were short. The beginning of every season found them in debt. By
+the time the debt was paid work had grown slack or stopped. It was simply
+impossible to get beyond this, try as they would. When the girl broke down,
+she explained it by saying, "I worked all night to finish my dress. If I
+could buy the material in the slack season I could make our things then. We
+never have the money, and they have to be made just when work is hardest at
+the store." She was but nineteen. The girl was pretty, ambitious, entirely
+above the men of her own station in refinement, and yet quite as far
+beneath the brothers of the girls she met in her Sunday-school class. She
+lived in mental terror lest they should attempt to call on her. It was
+pitiful to see the struggle she made to conceal the fact that she was poor.
+The other girls knew she worked, knew the church helped the family, but
+were very tactful in assisting her in keeping her secret.
+
+When the mother came to the notice of the officers of the church she was a
+widow with three young children, one a baby. She could support her family
+if the rent was paid. The church officers were glad to do this. They did
+not support a mission and had very little outlet for the church's
+generosity, except the mission societies--Home and Foreign--to which they
+were devoted as a church.
+
+For thirteen years the church had been faithful to its promise and paid the
+rent. Nobody questioned the mother as to how her children were getting on,
+or what was being done to make them self-supporting. The younger were two
+boys. When they were large enough to play on the street, the mother put
+them in an institution and paid a small sum for them. The girl went to work
+with the mother as soon as she could. The elder boy came home at fourteen
+and became a wage-earner. He was troublesome, most difficult to manage, was
+out of work more time than he was employed, and yet he would not when
+unemployed even keep the fire, that the house might be comfortable when his
+mother and sister came home. They always left the house in order when they
+went to work, but found it littered when they returned. The boy had no
+sense of moral responsibility for his own support. His temper was wholly
+untrained. At the time the family history was connected, the youngest boy
+was to come home, and naturally his return was dreaded. The mother and
+daughter met the problem unaided as to advice or suggestion. Apparently the
+church would continue to pay the rent without question, though there were
+three, and would soon be four, wage-earners in the family.
+
+When these facts were discovered, the church committee was asked to advance
+money enough to pay for the girl's lessons at a school where dress-cutting
+was taught, and to notify the widow that her rent would no longer be paid.
+
+The girl accepted the offer at once. She proved a great success, and to-day
+is earning a salary as a designer equal to that of many college professors.
+She educated her younger brother in a profession, and has entirely
+forgotten the days when the church helped her. Her social affiliations are
+in another part of the city, and she bows, or forgets to bow, when she
+meets those who may remember it, as they would, to her credit. Had the
+church retained its claim on her through its financial aid, she would not
+be where she is to-day. Her development came when the church made another
+future possible to her by refusing to pauperize the family.
+
+We all know the families who have more turkeys at Christmas than members.
+We still have churches and sewing schools in the same neighborhood, giving
+their Christmas entertainments at different hours and at different dates,
+to suit the convenience of those who attend both and profit thereby. We
+even have different entertainments given for different branches of work in
+the same church at different hours. We succeeded in impressing one boy with
+the idea that what he received at the various organizations maintained for
+his profit was "Christmas loot," and that he was clever at getting more
+than his share. We have become accustomed to conducting an exchange after
+our Christmas entertainments, because in giving we have, unfortunately,
+duplicated the gifts received elsewhere. Mollie finds herself with two
+dolls and no bed, and Katie has two beds and no doll, and Alice has two
+sets of dishes and no table. Like fate has attended the gifts to the boys.
+We, as a result, enact the role of patient, sweet generosity and
+redistribute gifts.
+
+We know that comparisons are made as to which church, sewing school or club
+is the one to give the major portion of the coming year's attendance. But
+all this will disappear as rapidly as sectarianism and competition between
+churches and in philanthropic effort disappear. Competition created it;
+cooperation will dispel it, because all will come to a higher conception of
+the relations of efforts toward improvement. Then the "profit" of church
+and Sunday-school attendance will not be measured by the "things"
+distributed.
+
+Nothing marks the growth of public intelligence more than the federations,
+and the systems that have grown out of the knowledge of the injury done the
+poor by misplaced generosity. Sometimes the children of the poor seem
+uncanny in the knowledge they possess of how to use the public and private
+charities.
+
+A girl of seventeen gave astonishing evidence of this in a family crisis.
+She was a member of a working-girls' club; quiet, studious, reserved. She
+was always one of the poorest dressed girls in the club. Her devotion to
+those classes which she joined and attended regularly attracted the
+attention and admiration of the club directors. Discovering that her dress
+was in part responsible for the treatment accorded her by two or three
+members, it was decided to make it possible for her to make a better
+appearance. She had shown qualities which, if allowed free play, would make
+her an influential member of the club.
+
+It was discovered that she attended a near-by mission of a Congregational
+church. Consultation with the mission workers brought the unwelcome
+knowledge that the mother was immoral, hopelessly immoral, but that her
+children loved her dearly and that she was devoted to them. The paying of
+rent seemed to support a shelter that ought not to exist, but no one had
+the courage to attempt to separate the mother and children. Even this girl
+of seventeen had no idea of her mother's wrong-doing. It was a case that
+needed the wisdom of Solomon to solve. Just before Christmas the mother
+fell ill. The passion of grief that convulsed that group of children was
+convincing testimony of the mother's tenderness and devotion. Her eyes
+followed them constantly. When able to speak, she would whisper: "What will
+become of them? There is no one to care for them." She was removed to a
+hospital, with the knowledge that the rent had been paid for a month and
+that the children would be looked after. She died two days later. When the
+house was visited that morning, the elder girl was out "getting things,"
+the children said. When she came in, she was told that provision had been
+made to send them all together to a home, where they would not be separated
+for a month. The girl sprang to her feet, grabbed the fifteen-months-old
+baby from the floor, and swept the others in a circle about her. She
+panted, rather than said: "You shall not take the baby away! I will not let
+them go! Nobody shall take them. They are mine. I can take care of them.
+You just pay the rent. I can do everything else. See?" She put the baby
+down, and thrusting her hands into her pockets, brought out tickets to the
+Diet Kitchen, the Charities Department for coal and groceries. She had
+been to two missionaries connected with different churches she knew, and
+secured orders on a near-by grocery for dry groceries. There was not a
+public or private charity that gave out-door assistance that that girl of
+seventeen did not know just what must be done to get their help. The amount
+of knowledge of this kind that she possessed was astounding.
+
+Besides, there was not an institution in the city where children were taken
+for longer or shorter periods of time that she did not know. In many of
+them she had been herself. In others she had visited the other children of
+the family when they were inmates. She found out the defects of each
+one--the kind of matron, of food, of punishments that governed in each, and
+made out a case against each one. White, with blazing eyes, she looked
+capable of doing just what she said she would do, take care of the family
+of five little children. They were grouped about her, clinging to her, all
+crying in the face of the awful calamity that was about to befall
+them--separation. It was agreed that they should stay where they were for
+the balance of the month. The question of the future beyond that would be
+discussed later. The girl quieted down.
+
+The mother had been insured in one of the insurance companies on the weekly
+payment plan. The girl had secured an undertaker who would go to the
+hospital and take the mother's body to his establishment for the funeral to
+be held the next morning.
+
+"We will have our own minister," she said, with dignity, "not the mission."
+Her visitors were again astounded. The mission had looked after the family
+for years. The girl had for several years been connected with the
+Sunday-school. The address of the minister was secured. The girl explained:
+"My mother was confirmed in that church, in her own country, her own home.
+She had a letter to the church when she came to this country with my father
+after they were married. At first my father earned good money, but he got
+sick and they did not get along, and my mother stopped going there, except
+to communion; and for three years now she ain't had the clothes to go even
+then. She had us confirmed there as soon as we were old enough, and we went
+there to communion when we had the clothes. The minister is going to come
+to the funeral, and I am going to send word to some of mother's friends
+from the old country who go there to church. I could not have them come
+here; mother would feel awful." Glancing about the barren, dirty rooms with
+a look of scorn, she continued: "We could not let our church friends know
+how poor we are. Mother tried hard enough. She was away from home days at a
+time looking for work. She took boarders. She did everything she could. You
+know I've worked when I could get it." Her voice broke for the first time.
+"She took boarders and gave them the beds; we all slept on the floor. She
+married the last boarder, the baby's father. She told me to stay here until
+he came home, this month--he's a sailor--and to do just what he says. He
+was always kind to me and gave me things. You've paid the rent, and you
+need not do anything more. I'll stay right here and keep the children till
+the baby's father comes home; you need not trouble any more."
+
+She was quiet a moment, but evidently felt the doubt and the decision in
+her visitors' minds. Rising, she said fiercely: "I'll not; I'll never let
+these children be taken from me!"
+
+The problem was too much for her visitors. They decided to leave the
+question of the immediate future to the family's own minister, who
+certainly had not carried these lambs in his arms, nor watched very closely
+over their erring mother.
+
+The family was separated. Nothing else was possible. The baby's father
+repudiated any responsibility for any of the children, and disappeared. The
+girl drooped for a time after the separation; but she finally secured a
+good home, making a capable, devoted servant until she married. She owes
+allegiance only to her own church, saying: "The minister talked so
+beautifully at mother's funeral." Her whole conception of the mission
+church is that it is an institution for helping the poor.
+
+She never doubted her mother, whose picture, enlarged from a small
+photograph, is the chief ornament in her parlor, her most cherished
+possession, outside of her husband and children.
+
+In spite of the outburst of passionate devotion at the time of her mother's
+funeral, this woman, now with a comfortable home of her own, knows nothing
+of the children for whose protection she attained, for a time at least,
+sublime heroism. In a few months her indifference was as astonishing as her
+devotion had been. Her own life and its concerns filled her mental horizon
+to their entire exclusion. For her own home and children she has the
+passionate love that she gave to her mother and the crowd of half-brothers
+and sisters. She is ambitious for her children, and has two in the High
+School. This woman is a fair illustration of the evolution that is making
+this nation great.
+
+The churches, when first the social disintegration began, had neither the
+intelligence born of experience nor the money to place the mission work in
+charge of people of high intellectual and social development. There were no
+training schools for Christian workers, and to that degree the Church was
+hampered in inaugurating its work among the poor. The selection was too
+often a question of pleasing some wealthy member of the church, by giving
+positions to proteges who had absolutely no qualification for the work but
+their necessities. This basis of selection--not yet wholly eliminated--put
+the work of the missions under the control of men and women who lacked
+social training. Neither by nature nor grace were they fitted for the work
+they attempted to do.
+
+Their attitude of mind was too often that of patron, which, as any one of
+experience knows, is one of the most demoralizing influences active among
+the poor.
+
+There comes to mind now a downtown church, the mission of one of the
+leading uptown churches. It was Thanksgiving evening. For weeks placards
+had been on the front of the building announcing an entertainment for that
+evening, to which all the people were invited. On the platform were a
+number of young men and women, sons and daughters of the uptown church
+members, the entertainers for the evening.
+
+The church was packed with the people of the region, self-respecting poor.
+The mission, fortunately for them, was limited in money, so its
+possibility for pauperizing was limited to just that degree. The mission
+pastor, before the entertainment began, opened with a prayer, in which he
+thanked God for the warm-hearted, generous people who were giving
+themselves and their money for the uplifting of the poor and degraded. God
+was asked to implant a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of those
+assembled to enjoy this pure entertainment provided for their benefit. When
+he opened his eyes he continued his theme in two variations for twenty
+minutes longer, in what he called an address. It was this attitude of mind
+on the part of many of the workers that drove out of the church the mass of
+the poor; that began the breach that has widened, until in September, 1901,
+we stand appalled as we realize all that has entered into the making of
+that awful national tragedy.
+
+The standards of cleanliness and beauty maintained in the mission churches
+have been far from what they should be. As the visitor enters to-day one of
+the first buildings erected on the East Side as a mission church, he is
+repelled by the general air of neglect; the dirt on walls and ceiling, made
+still more repellent by water stains from leaks; the ugliness of the whole
+interior, as well as the entire lack of adaptation to the work of to-day,
+which one of the most devoted of pastors, a friend to every man, woman and
+child in the region, is establishing. There is not one thing in that
+building that is not ugly and cheap. The very platform on which the pastor
+preaches lacks furniture, that would impart an air of cheer or
+impressiveness. Instead of the building being an unconscious influence in
+the neighborhood for beauty, tidiness, cleanliness, it is a part of the
+general result of the greed and poverty which has made one of the most
+sordid, character-destroying neighborhoods in New York.
+
+One Sunday afternoon, as the writer was passing this building, the children
+began pouring out of it. The Sunday-school had just closed. They yelled,
+fought, ran. Suddenly they discovered a half-drunken wretch of a woman
+reeling down the street. The elder boys pulled her clothes, dragged off her
+hat, tormented her, yelling and laughing at the foul language they called
+forth. It was appalling, yet not surprising. The building remains as first
+erected. No attempt has been made to adapt it to the needs of the region.
+It was built for church and Sunday-school services, and the work which the
+devoted, consecrated pastor has put into it to meet the needs of the time
+is done under conditions that make the highest success impossible. There is
+not a room in the neighborhood for boys' clubs, for reading-room, for
+pleasure, where boy nature can have the fullest expression under wise
+direction. For adults the saloon and the streets are the only resources
+outside of their overcrowded homes. The pastor knows that to succeed in
+changing the character of that neighborhood it is necessary to hold the
+people through seven days of the week. He knows that this can be done if he
+can provide for the people pleasures, opportunities that express their
+social development. He knows that people express themselves in their
+pleasures, and that, whether they will or not, that expression is
+controlled by environment. If the trustees will not, cannot be made to see
+this, let the pastor of the mission be what he will, his work will be
+limited by the men who, in the very nature of their relations to the
+mission, cannot see the truth.
+
+The pastor of the mission had a long vacation given him. The man sent to
+take his place wore soiled linen, would sit for an hour at a time tipped on
+the back legs of his chair. He would refer to the people in their presence
+as "they" and "these people." One of the young men who belonged to a club
+where some attention had been paid to manners and dress said one night:
+"Say, wouldn't you think that feller would wear clean collars, and stand
+up when talking to a lady? I don't care if he is a minister, he ain't
+much."
+
+The people who were responsible for putting that man in that position were
+generous, held the best social positions, filled responsible positions in
+the commercial world. Not one of them would have chosen that man to
+represent them in the business world, because of his carelessness in dress
+and lack of manners. But they did not hesitate to send him to represent the
+Lord Jesus Christ to the poor; not a demoralized and degraded people, but a
+self-respecting body of Americans, born and trained, so far as they had
+been trained, to believe in the equality of man under the flag and before
+God. Is it any wonder that the more intelligent of the people resented the
+placing of this man over them, and remained away from the church of which
+he had charge? His person, his mind or his manners were not contradictory.
+
+One evening, going through the audience room of this building on an errand
+to the rear room, the visitor heard one of the women missionaries say to a
+little girl who had evidently been troublesome and inattentive: "If you
+don't sit still, Mollie, I'll come there and shake you until you'll be glad
+to sit still." The woman was training a group of little girls to take part
+in a Christmas entertainment. They were each to recite a verse and turn a
+gold paper-covered letter as they recited, so that when the last one had
+spoken her verse the sentence "Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth
+and good-will to men" would be revealed. The woman, in temper, language,
+conception of her duty to these children, differed in nowise from their
+ignorant, tired, worried mothers at home, who probably made no claim as a
+teacher of morals and religion. What ideals of womanhood did this woman
+represent?
+
+A minister came to attend the funeral of a little baby in a surplice so
+soiled and rumpled that a friend of the mother, who was a good laundress,
+said afterward: "I wish he'd given me that yesterday morning. I would have
+washed and ironed it." "He wouldn't have worn it if it had been a rich
+man's child," was the little mother's response. "Well, he acted like his
+surplice, rumpled," said the first speaker. And the writer was struck with
+the perfect characterization of the man's manner.
+
+Fortunately, there are men who see the divine in every human being; who
+know that sorrow, grief, shame and suffering bear as cruelly, as bitterly
+on the poor as the rich, and in their ministration know no difference
+between them.
+
+The writer was present at a funeral in an East Side home in a tenement
+having sixteen families. A wife and mother had died. The family occupied
+the floor through. Nothing was known to the writer of the creed of the
+family, though she had known them for years. The minister came in a
+spotless surplice, most carefully put on. His manner of greeting the family
+and friends was so expressive of fraternal sympathy that one felt it a
+privilege to witness it. He stood in that East Side home the herald of
+hope. Since the blow had fallen he had visited it every day. On the day of
+the funeral he had so filled the hearts in that home with the spirit of
+resignation that the lesson that it taught left an impress on all who were
+present. Not once in the earnest address did he use the word "death." It
+was "release," and he made all feel that gratitude for relief from cruel
+suffering was the occasion for the assembling of the friends together. He
+gave out the hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee." There was no musical
+instrument in the home. All present were wage-earners. The writer trembled
+for the result. The minister's beautiful tenor voice started the hymn,
+assisted at once by boys' voices in the different rooms. He had brought the
+choir of his church to assist, and stationed them through the rooms by
+direction before they came to the house. The people all sang. When the
+services were over, this minister remained with the family, a courtesy
+which to the poor is so unusual that the memory of it is still one of the
+events of life on the East Side.
+
+[Illustration: A SPIRITUAL BULWARK.]
+
+This represents this clergyman's attitude toward his people; and all who
+are their friends are his people. Is it any wonder that they never go
+beyond his care? He has baptized the children of three generations. Easter
+service is the home-coming of these families. They come from as far as they
+have money to pay their fare. The gray stone church is pretty. It has
+stained-glass windows, a baptistry, and maintains a surpliced choir. It is
+delightful to see the positive influence of these accessories on the
+people. Other churches to which they have access lack them, and the
+contrast deepens the love for the old church. It needs renovating, a parish
+house, a corps of modern workers. But these can well be dispensed with
+while that towering gray head leads the people. For the noble, unselfish
+life of the man stands before them always, the embodiment of eternal love
+and sympathy, interpreting both under conditions that would at times seem
+to justify doubt.
+
+There is another phase of the Church's attitude toward its work in the
+poorer districts that lies at the root of the rejection of the Church by
+the majority of the thinking, self-respecting poor, and that is the
+assembling of the poor together as an exhibit of its work; the making of
+reports of which the poor are the statistics. The defence that this is
+necessary to stimulate the interest of the rich, and by that means secure
+the money for the continuing of the work in the poorer sections of the
+city, is but the evidence of the lack of spiritual life in the Church; the
+absence of the very foundation of Christianity and brotherly love.
+
+The consciousness that watching the hungry eating Christmas and
+Thanksgiving dinners is hardly what Christ meant when he gave forth the
+decree, "Feed my lambs," is becoming a conviction; but it is due to the
+positive teaching of workers outside of the Church, who felt the
+irreparable loss of self-respect that must follow from such an exhibition.
+To gather the beneficiaries of their generosity together and take stock, as
+it were, of the investments, the dividends of which are to be realized
+wholly in the future life, has antagonized the self-respecting poor. They
+refuse to assemble as objects of interest, even in a church.
+
+So dense is the spiritual perception of even some very good people, so
+materialistic is the plane on which work for the poor is conducted in some
+churches, that the results have been cruel--unconscious on the part of the
+offenders--but nevertheless cruel.
+
+A group of very young girls worked in a factory on the borders of a section
+in which lived people of wealth and intelligence. The factory made no
+provision for a lunch room. When the weather permitted, the girls ate their
+lunches on the curbs and on the stoops of houses in the immediate
+neighborhood. This was demoralizing to the girls and distressing to several
+women in the neighborhood. Not far away was a large house hired and
+controlled by a church long noted for its broadness and its generosity. The
+basement of the house was not used, except twice a week in the evening by a
+working-girls' club. The use of this basement from half-past eleven till
+one was asked for and granted.
+
+The plan was to have a woman arrange the tables, make tea, and wash the
+dishes used by the girls each day. The girls were to pay five cents a week
+for the use of the room and the tea. They were to bring their own lunches.
+The plan met with their warmest approval, and the lunch room was opened,
+with three young girls from a society in the church to help. The girls
+poured their own tea. For three days everything promised well. The girls
+accepted the one condition imposed, that they would go quietly to and from
+the factory at the noon hour, to avoid comments from the residents about.
+The fourth day some of the righteous, energetic souls belonging to the
+church thought they would see the result of their generous gift of the use
+of the room for which they had no other use.
+
+Nine of them, personally conducted by one of the assistant ministers,
+crowded the two doorways to see these girls eat the lunch they brought from
+their own homes and drink the tea for which they were paying all they had
+been asked to pay. One small girl, with her hair still hanging in braids
+down her back, tried in every way to break off pieces of her luncheon
+without uncovering it. Finding she could not, she gave up, and tied the
+string about the paper again, sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. It
+was this child's first week out of school. Her father was now in the
+hospital for the third month. There were five children, of which this girl
+was the eldest. All the money saved by this skillful mechanic and his
+thrifty wife was gone, and this girl had to go to work. One can imagine
+faintly her feelings as she looked at the crowded doorways and knew that
+the whispered comments included her. The less refined, though more
+independent, girls sat with flaming cheeks, and holding papers over their
+lunches, ate them and drank the tea.
+
+The first week represented the life of that lunch club. The girls went back
+to the curb and the sidewalk and stoops as lunch rooms. Here, at least, no
+personally conducted parties came to view them. If any one looked at them
+and they objected, they were on terms of equality, and at once notified the
+offenders of their offence. To the credit of the people who used that
+street, few stopped to look at the girls.
+
+It would have surprised those very good people to have known the opinion
+those crude, uneducated girls had of them. A day or two later, standing
+with a group of girls who had not been present, with a half dozen of the
+men who worked in the factory, as spectators, the leader of the girls
+described the scene, caricaturing the "church gang," as she called them,
+and some of the girls who had been distressed by their presence. The group
+shrieked with laughter; yet there was an unpleasant note in it. "---- them!
+That's what they always do. Stay away from them after this," was the
+comment and advice of one of the men. "You bet!" responded the girl actor,
+as she curveted down toward the factory in response to the whistle calling
+them back to their work.
+
+If the years as they passed did not clearly reveal that the Church that
+holds the poor is one over which men of the highest intellectual and social
+training are placed in charge, the mistakes of the present would be
+extenuated. Such churches do exist. Men of strong, vivid spiritual
+perception have erected and maintained bulwarks of righteousness in
+neighborhoods where the environment, the civic order is degrading. They
+have done this by conducting all the departments of their work with the
+view of developing the gifts of the people to whom they are ministering.
+The choir is the boys and girls trained by the best teachers they can
+secure. The Sunday-school teachers are the working boys, girls, men and
+women who are instructed by the pastor for their Sunday-school work. The
+officers of the church are the men of the neighborhood. The people are
+married and buried from the church; the children are baptized in it. The
+preaching is teaching that salvation is of time, as well as of eternity.
+The sins of the people are made visible. The pulpit holds the mirror up to
+nature. It is a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, leading them
+into the promised land, made so by their own civic honesty, their own
+personal character.
+
+These men do not have to make reports; to bow before a board of trustees.
+They do not have to suppress or expand to meet the ideas of theorists. A
+few men give them the financial support they need, and let them, like men,
+stand before God and their own souls responsible for what they do for the
+people whom, when Christ was on earth, He chose for His friends--the poor.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE THE PEOPLE SHARE.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS.
+
+
+Twenty-five or thirty years ago in New York the question of the wisdom, if
+not the necessity, of moving the downtown churches uptown began to agitate
+the pastors and church leaders. The congregations, or part of the
+congregations, who had contributed most liberally to the support of the
+Church were beginning to move uptown, crowded out by business and the
+incoming foreign element which settles near the shipping and factory
+districts. The new-comers did not support the churches, especially the
+Protestant, not even by attendance. It was natural that the churches should
+follow their congregations. Some sold their buildings to the sects that
+came with the foreigners; some made a brave effort to maintain a church for
+the people; some became missions, distributing stations to the poor people
+who had settled in the now overcrowded houses that formerly were the homes
+of one family. The change in the downtown communities was so rapid that no
+one could understand how to deal with the new element. The Church had to
+spend years in learning how to adapt its methods to the needs of the new
+peoples who settled by hundreds where scores had been. Not only was this
+feature bewildering in itself, but the people spoke an unknown tongue, were
+foreign in thought and sentiment; were social, rather than religious.
+
+The saloon far outstripped the Church in the ease with which it adapted
+itself to the new element. The Church encountered not merely the new people
+degraded, but an environment that in itself was a tremendous obstacle to
+decent living. The Church shortly discovered an entirely unlooked-for evil,
+insidious, demoralizing--the political corruption of voters. The Church to
+the smallest degree only in recent times has come into the larger
+conception of its function as a teacher of good citizenship, a link between
+the voter and the ballot-box, preaching the duty of the exercise of the
+franchise governed by conscience. It took the moral degradation of the city
+to rouse the churches to activity as redemptive civic powers.
+
+The corrupting influence of corrupt politicians was evidenced in the
+conditions that developed in sections of the city left to their control. As
+the years went on and the men of conscience and intelligence became more
+absorbed in business and profession, more given to money-making, because of
+increasing social demands, the city became, in the minds not only of these
+politicians, but of the voters they trained, a mine to be worked for
+personal gain. Ignorance contributed to the rapid degeneracy of the people
+in the old home sections of New York.
+
+The saloon became very early in the development of the tenement-house
+sections the only social center. The result was an increasing of the drink
+habit and the establishment of political headquarters in saloons. Often the
+politician in embryo was the saloon-keeper, often the bartender. The social
+side of life thirty years ago was not a subject for church consideration
+and study.
+
+The Church ministering to a people having standards of social life
+established by the churches, the outgrowth of its teachings and creeds, can
+ignore questions that the Church ministering, or trying to minister, to a
+people poverty-stricken, overworked, living lives barren of any pleasures
+but those of the senses, in an environment that of itself would be a
+deteriorating influence, must meet and answer.
+
+The Church downtown discovered it must work seven days in the week; that
+its office, its function was secular, as well as religious; that its Sunday
+work was but one-seventh of its work, and that the six-sevenths must
+minister to that one. The Church must go out into the highways and hedges,
+to use a misplaced metaphor for a city street, and win the people. This
+evolution of conception marks a spiritual Renaissance.
+
+Industrial training was introduced by the churches, the natural result of
+discovering the ignorance of the women of household arts. Far more valuable
+than the skill imparted to the children gathered in these classes was the
+contact with the earnest, refined women and young girls who were the
+teachers in the now established mission churches. The revelation was
+mutual. If the tenement-house child gained new ideas of cleanliness, of
+order, of neatness, of dexterity, of manners, the uptown teacher also
+gained knowledge of which she stood quite as much in need. When a panting,
+shining-faced child came to sewing school half to three-quarters of an hour
+late because she scrubbed the halls and stairs of a three-story tenement
+house to help her mother, the housekeeper, who paid the whole or part of
+the rent for the family by this service, the uptown woman of leisure gained
+a new view of life and its responsibilities. When the mission worker who
+was giving time and strength and knowledge as the expression of her faith
+and conscience, found children scarcely more than babies working far beyond
+their strength in the service of their families, the uptown worker gained a
+new conception of sacrifice, of poverty, and, what was far more important,
+a new conception of the causes of ignorance. The uptown woman of leisure
+saw that often children were sacrificed to greed; forced to become
+wage-earners by parents anxious to increase their bank accounts.
+
+As time went on, they saw that, whether poverty or greed was responsible
+for the sacrifice of the children, the protection of the children was the
+safeguard of the State, of the nation. There came from this, by the process
+of evolution, the factory laws for the protection of women and children;
+the compulsory school law. In these latter days this last has been made
+ridiculous by the failure of the municipality to provide school
+accommodations for the children of school age, especially the children
+under fourteen living in the overcrowded sections.
+
+The church workers in the tenement-house sections were able to find means
+to meet some of the evils of oppression, of poverty, of ignorance. They had
+concrete facts to present to a semi-indifferent public; but when the social
+side of the people in the tenements became a problem, especially the social
+life of the young people, the remedies did not present themselves. The
+legislation proposed and executed was restrictive, not recreative. It was
+not the function of the State or the Church to provide social
+opportunities for uneducated, overworked young people.
+
+The older girls in the Sunday-school classes presented not only all the
+problems of the little children, but the larger one of social opportunity.
+The homes were too small, too overcrowded to give social opportunity to the
+family. Besides, there was that saddest of all features too often found in
+the home of the working girls--the absence of all sense of personal
+responsibility on the part of parents for the social life of the children,
+girls and boys. The children in all but the exceptional home were free to
+choose friends, free to go and come as suited them. Home was a place in
+which to eat and to sleep; a place of shelter; a place often entered only
+when there was no place to go out of working hours.
+
+The problem of providing social opportunity faced the downtown churches. In
+the very nature of things the social opportunities the Church could offer
+must be limited; must be of the nature that appealed to the more quiet, the
+phlegmatic, the element that presented the least factors in the social
+problem. The parish house, the church house did not exist. All the
+amusements offered the people must be in a building consecrated to
+religious life and service. It was a serious question how far the Church
+was justified in introducing the purely social.
+
+It was natural that the young women brought into touch with the young
+working girls in the Sunday-school should apprehend the restrictions that
+life in a tenement imposed on a working girl. Everything in this life
+tended to make her gregarious. She was born into a house probably
+overcrowded before she came into it; she slept, ate, lived with crowds. The
+street, her only playground, was teeming with children like herself. When
+she worked, she rubbed elbows with the workers on each side of her. She
+went and came from her work one of a group. The working girl lived free,
+and pleasure she would have.
+
+The girl of wealth and leisure working in the mission Sunday-school, by her
+own youth and natural inclinations, could appreciate this side of the
+working-girl's nature, and with the same clearness of vision see the
+limitations imposed on the Church in trying to meet the social needs of the
+people for whom it primarily existed.
+
+Visiting the homes of their girl pupils, the Sunday-school teachers
+discovered the limitations of the homes. Between the homes as they existed
+and the churches as they must exist, the social center for the working girl
+must be created that would meet her social needs. The streets were the
+working-girl's reception-room, drawing-room, living-room, where she
+received her most intimate friends; where mutual entertainment was provided
+in ways that made no drafts on purse or inventiveness. Halls were open for
+dancing, where her presence was so desirable that she was admitted free or
+at half the price demanded of her brother. Excursion grounds with dancing
+platforms were then popular within the city limits. The immorality of the
+present temptations that make perilous the way of the working girl in 1901
+were almost wholly unknown twenty years ago.
+
+The work the earnest-hearted women interested in the working-girl's life
+faced was how to enlarge her social opportunities in connection with
+educational opportunities that would meet her peculiar need, and which she
+would accept. New methods of intercourse, new places of meeting must be
+found.
+
+Every organization that has developed in these latter days for bettering
+the condition of the people has its root in the doctrines of the churches;
+workers and money come from the people who receive their impulse from the
+teachings of Christ. These organizations are as truly as the churches the
+expression of brotherly love; the positive declaration of the
+consciousness that no man liveth to himself.
+
+To Miss Grace H. Dodge the women of this country owe a great debt. She,
+from the standpoint of a Church worker, devoted and faithful, saw that
+outside of the Church, but governed by all that the Church believed and
+taught, the natural outcome of both, a social center for working girls must
+be created. This center must be independent of any other organization. It
+must be at once a natural expression of the working-girls' standards. It
+must be flexible, as well as progressive, during every period of evolution
+in each group; it must keep in touch with the least progressive mentally,
+the most progressive socially.
+
+A place must be created where recreation was possible; where classes to
+meet the educational wants of every member could be established. Above all,
+a place must be made where wealth and poverty, education and ignorance,
+could meet on the common level of mutual helpfulness.
+
+A conference with a group of working girls but strengthened Miss Dodge's
+conviction that this social center would not only give to the working girls
+the social opportunity that New York lacked, but it would give to the woman
+of wealth and leisure the opportunity to meet the people whom she must know
+if she would use her time, her money, her education wisely in the interest
+of social development.
+
+With Miss Dodge as president, the first working-girls' club was organized.
+It marked a new epoch. It made the opportunity that had never existed--the
+working of rich and poor to secure the same end. This country reaps the
+benefit of this first step in altruism based on the highest Christian and
+democratic doctrines.
+
+The working-girls' club has from that time been a positive factor in the
+social development of working women, not only of New York, but the whole
+country. It has enabled the students of economics and sociology to get at
+facts that have revolutionized theories. The working-girls' club taught the
+working girls themselves the causes of their economic disadvantages.
+
+Hardly was the first club formed when the practical results inseparable
+from this new combination of interests and sympathies met the approval of
+all interested in the problem of the working-girl's life. Everywhere clubs
+began to form. The idea has been adapted and adopted by the churches.
+Working-girls' clubs of all degrees of development, under many kinds of
+constitutions, managed and mismanaged, are to be found north, east, south
+and west.
+
+The question of support was one of primary importance. Miss Dodge had
+studied this side of the question thoroughly, and from the first it was
+decided that dues must be paid by the members. As new clubs were formed,
+this question of dues was met differently. Usually the wages of the
+majority of each group of girls forming a club decided the amount of dues,
+and naturally the dues varied in the clubs. In some clubs the dues were
+five cents per month; in others, five cents per week; in some the dues were
+twenty-five cents per month. Even this amount could not meet the expenses
+of a club conducted to elevate the standards of the members by the
+environment, as well as the social and educational opportunities provided.
+The financial managements of the clubs differ greatly, and always have.
+Strenuous effort has always been made in some clubs to make them
+self-supporting; they seem almost to live for that purpose. Entertainments,
+sub-letting of rooms, fairs, every means is resorted to accomplish this
+end. Naturally the members of such clubs develop a good deal of business
+ability; sometimes at the expense of qualities that in a woman count for
+more in life.
+
+The highest form of club life developed among working girls represents, to
+the working girl, her college. She realizes, as does the rich girl or boy
+who enters college, that what she pays does not, cannot, pay for what she
+receives. This conception of the financial side of the working-girls' club
+management controls in the clubs, with few exceptions, to-day.
+
+The club must give every educational and social opportunity that will meet
+the needs of the members. As the college meets the demands of its students
+in the electives it offers, so must the working-girls' club. As the college
+student must meet the financial obligations he assumes when he enters
+college, so must the member of the working-girls' club keep her financial
+engagement. As the college makes it possible for the worthy student to
+complete his course of study after financial disaster makes it impossible
+for him to meet his financial obligations, so must the working girl who has
+contributed to the life of the club, or who has shown her desire to profit
+by what it offers, be kept in good and regular standing when financial
+disaster makes personal independence impossible. In short, the
+working-girls' clubs that are conducted on the broader lines, and with the
+most comprehensive knowledge of our social conditions, are in management
+and purpose a college for working girls. The idea of self-support may have
+been strained for a time, but it was an error in the right direction, and
+led to the truer conception which regulates the management of the best
+clubs to-day.
+
+It was curious, is curious, the attitude of mind with which some girls
+approach the club idea. There comes to mind now the effort to form a second
+club in the rooms of a club of several years' standing. The need of the
+second club had grown out of the refusal of the girls who earned from five
+to nine dollars a week in various employments to associate with a number of
+girls working in a tobacco factory, and earning on an average three dollars
+and a half per week. The last-named were rough in speech and manner, and
+far from stylish in dress--the standard of the elder club. The introduction
+of the girls from the tobacco factory to the club was the result of the
+sentiment of one of the members of the club, a bright, wealthy, healthy
+girl, a great favorite with the other club girls. She had wanted for two
+years to work with girls less prosperous than the girls in the club of
+which she was a member.
+
+A large tobacco factory not far from where the club met attracted her
+attention, and she invited the girls working there to join the club.
+Twenty-two came to the club-room. Mentally they were in a state of nature.
+This group of girls represented just what intermittent school attendance,
+uninterrupted freedom of the streets, from the time they could walk alone
+to the present time, might be expected to produce. They were strangers even
+to the degree of social opportunities the members of the club represented.
+
+Their standards of manners and morals were what the neighborhood in which
+they grew up made them. Their homes were in one of the worse sections of
+the city, in which an institution wholly charitable pretending to do
+educational work had been, not what was intended, an elevating influence,
+but the reverse for the children of this section. When these girls went to
+school they alternated between this and the public school, so that it was
+impossible to compel their attendance at the public school through officers
+of the law. The neighborhood in which most of these girls had been born and
+grew up was a section as remote from the life of the city of which it was a
+part as though it were in another country. Through it ran a thoroughfare in
+which were stores that could supply every want. It was another political
+unit where one man ruled, whose approval meant work in the city department,
+in the street railroads, on the docks; even in the factories, of which
+there were many in the section. The streets were in a shocking condition,
+unpaved and dirty, and no one objected because no one cared.
+
+The tenement houses were formerly the residences of the prosperous. These
+houses were badly kept, old and unsanitary. Liquor saloons were on two, and
+sometimes three, corners of the streets through the whole section.
+Beer-sodden women were so common a sight that the women who did not bear
+evidence of over-indulgence were remarkable. These girls had never known
+personal ownership, even in a bureau drawer; not so much as the right to
+one peg on which to hang their clothes to the exclusion of others. It is
+doubtful if they ever owned a change of under-clothing that another child
+of the family could not claim.
+
+Naturally, the girls took possession of the club-rooms. Quite as naturally
+the older members resented it. It was seen at once that an attempt to have
+the new girls elected as club members would be equivalent to ejection. They
+were tolerated, but not tolerable to the older members. At the end of four
+weeks the two sets of girls lined up on opposite sides of the room, utterly
+refusing to intermingle. This passive attitude changed to the aggressive,
+which approached open hostilities so closely as to make the danger line.
+When this point was reached it was decided to form the new girls into a
+club by themselves. The rooms were not used every evening by the club for
+which they were hired. Sub-letting would give more money for educational
+purposes.
+
+As this attempt at club-making is one of the worst, and for that reason one
+of the failures, it would be well to describe it:
+
+The directors hired rooms each fall, in September or October, until the
+first of May following. As one recalls this club, it presents one of the
+best evidences of the barrenness of the working-girl's life in New York.
+Every fall for years a few notes written to the leading girls, and a group
+of twenty or twenty-five working girls, would gather and start anew on this
+club life. This method of conducting a club made it seem useless to spend
+money in making the rooms attractive. They were usually on the second floor
+of a house occupied by two or more families; the halls dark and bare; the
+rooms rarely clean as to walls and ceiling, barren of ornament. The floors
+were bare, and not infrequently stood sadly in need of scrubbing. They were
+lighted by smoking kerosene lamps, which but added to their
+unattractiveness. Frequently the caretaker started the fires a few minutes
+before the time for the girls to appear. Yet the girls came and remained
+winter after winter.
+
+The new girls accepted the same conditions, and assembled one stormy night
+to form their own club, with several additions to their number of their
+own selection, among the rest their forewoman. The leaders of the club
+realized that she might be an element of strength; she might be the source
+of infinite trouble. She had been young many years before, a fact of which
+she was wholly unconscious. She was dressed in what at the time was called
+laquer--a warm shade of tan--silk, trimmed with bead trimming; a lace
+collar, and a most remarkable hat completed the kind of a costume that
+always is discouraging to a true club worker.
+
+Naturally the forewoman was the spokeswoman for the girls. It was useless
+to attempt to draw out a personal opinion from the girls, all of whom
+worked under her. Knowing the wages of the girls, it had been decided that
+five cents per month should be the dues, leaving the girls a margin from
+which they might pay for classes. The indignation of the forewoman at the
+suggestion of five cents a month dues would have been amusing if it had not
+revealed her utter blindness to the poverty of the girls. Being determined
+that no girl there should be kept out of her club by poverty, the
+suggestion was made to the forewoman that as her wages equalled the wages
+of any three of the girls, and as she chose to join a club where the others
+received such small wages, she might pay the same dues, and each month
+make a donation to the club to meet its current expenses. She could see the
+dues alone would not do that.
+
+The forewoman, after a few minutes, consented to accept the condition. The
+worried look left the faces of the young girls, and they beamed on the
+gracious lady who consented to waive her own dignity in their behalf.
+Perhaps it is well to state here that the forewoman never made any
+donation, and that she would have been dropped from the club for
+non-payment of dues but for the knowledge that such a step would mean that
+she would make the girls leave the club. She was by them considered a good
+forewoman, kind, and ready to help a girl if a girl tried to earn more
+money. She had to be consulted in everything attempted for the girls.
+Fortunately she was so afraid of revealing her ignorance, which was dense
+outside of her work, that she always supported the workers directing the
+club affairs.
+
+This woman was taken ill. The director of the club found that she boarded
+with a family consisting of a father, mother and three children, living in
+three rooms. She was found lying on a mattress on the floor, destitute of
+sheets or pillow-cases. She did not own a nightdress. The tan silk dress
+with the bead trimming hung on a nail over her head, surmounted by the
+gorgeous hat. She was very ill and penniless; yet the poor about her were
+devoted to her and considered her most remarkable.
+
+[Illustration: A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]
+
+Several years ago both of the clubs referred to consolidated with another
+club whose directors kept the club-rooms open throughout the entire year.
+After the consolidation a house of three stories in a good neighborhood was
+rented, and devoted entirely to the use of the club. Only those who have
+watched the development of these girls could appreciate what the club has
+done for them. Cooking and sewing classes, lectures on city government,
+talks on books, on art and nature; the weekly contact with women of culture
+and refinement, who carry the conviction that club work is a pleasure, that
+service for others is a delight, has borne fruit, and the girls in turn
+give their service to those whom they may help--oftenest the members of
+their own club.
+
+The evolution of character through the contact with others is, after all,
+the highest attainment of the working-girls' club movement. It brought the
+working girl into entirely new relations. Constantly she was forced to see
+the folly of placing emphasis on the wrong thing.
+
+A nice-looking girl, very well dressed, joined a working-girls' club. Her
+face indicated character and intelligence. She was elected to office, but
+never re-elected, for she was ignorant--too ignorant to perform the
+smallest duties in club life. She came every week on the social evening,
+always the best-dressed girl in the club. As she grew more familiar she
+grew snobbish. She lived in a very poor neighborhood, where her clothes
+must have been even more out of place than in the club-room. She held a
+position which required special manual skill, and in her own field was an
+expert. Unfortunately, she obtained an influence over certain girls and
+headed a clique. Every week she became a greater problem. One night a
+rather rough, but frank and intelligent, girl was introduced as a candidate
+for membership by a member who worked in the same shop. The girl who was
+the club problem had been away two weeks working overtime, and did not come
+to the club until after the new girl had been elected a member. The
+amazement of both as they faced each other as members of the same club
+aroused questions as to their social and family background. All that
+appeared was that they were neighbors.
+
+[Illustration: OPPOSITE A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]
+
+The first reception to mothers was given by the club about this time. When
+the night of the reception came, the "problem" came in a new dress having a
+jetted front. Her appearance amazed the members, and made it clear that the
+"problem" must be solved or eliminated. The new member appeared with two
+mothers, both plainly dressed, one not warmly enough. This one was timid,
+reluctant to enter the room, and but for the urging of the new member and
+her mother she would have gone home. She refused to remove the shabby shawl
+she wore, and adjusted again and again the straw hat, on which a narrow
+black ribbon was pinned. The "problem" stood in front of the mantel,
+surrounded by an admiring crowd. The two mothers and the new member walked
+into the room. It was a dramatic moment. The new member, with an expression
+of deep scorn, said: "You forgot to ask your mother; we brought her." The
+"problem" grew white and then crimson. The girls fell back and gazed
+spellbound at the shabby, uncomfortable, timid mother. The scales fell from
+their eyes. The "problem," so far as influence in the club was concerned,
+ceased to be a problem. A girl who would sacrifice her mother's comfort,
+who used her simply to keep house for her, could not hold any position in a
+working-girls' club.
+
+The story crept out. The "problem" felt the loss of prestige. Clothes had
+satisfied her ambition; she had through them enjoyed a sense of power. The
+experience of that evening doubtless opened her eyes to things in life to
+which she had been blind. Again and again she was seen during that evening
+reception to look at her mother searchingly. She seemed to see her in a new
+light, and by its reflection, herself. The mother was afraid of her and
+showed it. The daughter, it was evident, discovered that fear for the first
+time and sought to overcome it. It was determined to hold fast to the
+"problem" and help her solve herself. Great progress was made. Her dress no
+longer astonished; her mother came to the club receptions comfortably and
+suitably dressed. Out of consideration for her mother, she remained in the
+wretched tenement, because the mother and the house had grown old together;
+but the rooms were now furnished. The new member had supplanted the
+"problem" as an influence in the club. The "problem" became engaged, and
+the club lost her. The man was a store-keeper in a town not far from New
+York. The girl married and forgot to take her mother to her new home. The
+mother remained a club legacy for two years, when she died. The daughter
+sent the money to bury her, but did not come to the funeral. Her husband is
+successful, and she is a social power in the Church to-day; a devoted
+mother and wife, strange as it may seem.
+
+The centering of experience, the revelations of character inevitable in a
+working-girls' club, are the largest factors in educating the members. As
+the years go on, emphasis is laid on the right things. Harmony results,
+because a sense of proportion is gained. Girls who have had the benefit of
+a public school education that enables them to fill positions that prove
+they have had such opportunities, often in the beginning of their club life
+will manifest a feeling of superiority over the girl who works with her
+hands. But eventually some experience will reveal to them the pettiness of
+their estimate, and a readjustment of values is made.
+
+A girl, long a member of a club, had won the love and admiration of all
+connected with it. She earned wages far above the average of working girls,
+a fact well understood in the club. She was always an officer, and a
+dependable power in the management of the club. The girls were to give a
+play. No amount of urging won this girl's consent to take part in the play.
+A girl who had taken a part dropped out, and some one must take her place
+at once. Now the girls refused to take "no" for an answer, and the favorite
+went down in the basement with the others who were in the play. Each had
+her book to read her part, as a help to the girl pressed into the service.
+When it came her turn to read there was absolute silence. The girl sat
+white and trembling, trying to speak. At last jerkingly the words came: "I
+cannot read. I never learned beyond the small words. I had to take care of
+the children when mother went to work, while my father was sick. I went to
+work as soon as I could and helped keep them in school. They all read and
+write. I cannot. Now you know why I did not say 'yes.'"
+
+There was silence for the space of several minutes. No one could speak.
+Then the baby of the club, the one everybody petted, whose very naughtiness
+was attractive, ran around the table, threw her arms around the speaker's
+neck, saying: "You're worth all the rest of us put together. We'll never
+give the old play. We all hate it." This followed by a half dozen kisses
+placed wherever she could touch the crimson, tear-stained face of the girl
+through her hands.
+
+Education had been put in its right place in the field of accomplishment.
+When the entertainment was given, the girl who could not read was made
+manager, because no one could do so well.
+
+For more than twenty years the working-girls' club has been a power in
+thousands of lives. The process of character building through accretion and
+elimination has been going on. Through its influence the club method has
+been applied under every guise, but perhaps it is just to say that it has
+been at its best where its formation and management has been purely
+democratic and absolutely non-sectarian. In the nature of things, in
+affiliation with any organization, it must take its place as the fraction
+of a unit, and be in its management considered always as only a part of a
+whole to whose success it owes an allegiance.
+
+Now the working-girls' clubs have their State organizations, even their
+national organization. The Pan-American Exposition brought working girls to
+the number of five hundred together in a convention to consider the
+questions vital to club life and management. Can any one doubt the effect
+of this journey into the world, the first that hundreds of these girls had
+ever made? Of the readjustment of ideas, the revelation of beauty, the new
+birth of values, because of the vision of a larger world lying beyond
+factory, workshop, office, school-room? For it has come to this: that the
+professional as well as the manual worker finds inspiration in the
+working-girls' club.
+
+As the years went on, a new problem grew out of the working-girls' club
+movement. The members married, but they were not willing to lose the social
+affiliations of girlhood; they were unwilling often, reluctant always, to
+sever club relationship. On the other hand, the members felt that a married
+woman should remain home in the evening with her husband. Often the
+married member would come carrying her baby, for the club represented the
+mother's social relations. The next step was natural, the forming of a club
+of the married members to meet in the afternoon. The first working-girls'
+club, of which Miss Dodge is still president, formed, as the Domestic
+Circle, a club of married members.
+
+The A. O. V. Matrons at the Cottage Settlement are the married members of
+the A. O. V. Club, formed when the matrons were little girls. Other
+working-girls' clubs have contributed to the membership of other married
+women's clubs.
+
+Naturally, the subjects discussed in these clubs are those bearing on
+housekeeping and the training of children. The training received in the
+clubs enables the married members to conduct their business with dignity
+and dispatch. They are trained to club life, and have learned how to avoid
+unnecessary friction.
+
+Some clubs plan a winter's work ahead. These programmes show a broadening
+of interest and sympathy, not only in the technical affairs, the home and
+the care of children, but the larger affairs outside of the home that makes
+its environment. It must be that the girls who have been club members make
+more companionable wives than the women who have not had their
+opportunities. The children are always present at the meetings of the
+mothers. Various devices and methods are employed to entertain and interest
+them. What the mothers' club means to the little ones was unconsciously
+revealed very recently in the statement of a young mother: "---- is always
+home from school five minutes earlier club day. She runs home to get
+ready."
+
+The working-girls' club has in the process of its evolution become a family
+institution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT.
+
+
+The Residents of the College Settlement learned in the first year of their
+work in Rivington Street to sympathize deeply with the married women, the
+mothers in the region.
+
+Mothers, after nights spent in overcrowded, unventilated bedrooms caring
+for nursing babies, began getting breakfast at five o'clock in the morning.
+Husband and children of every age must be wakened for work or for school,
+often irritable because of the unhygienic conditions under which they had
+slept. Friction and quarreling is to be expected when there is one
+wash-basin for the use of the whole family; one sink for the morning bath
+of the family when there is running water in the rooms. Breakfast of bread
+and strong coffee, perhaps with the family waiting turns because only three
+sides of the table are available, as there is not room to pull the table
+out from the wall to make the four sides useful. Floor space costs in the
+tenements.
+
+Friction, adjustment and hurry do not tend to develop a serene spirit in
+the house-mother whose office is purely executive. How much less in the
+house-mother whose hands must do all the work of the home? When the working
+and school-going members of the family are cared for and have gone their
+several ways, there is left to the house-mother almost always a baby and
+another child too young to go to school, to care for and amuse. In addition
+there is the round of work--washing, ironing, mending, making, cooking--all
+to be done under limitations of space and conveniences; often with the
+handicap of ignorance. Whatever the advantage of self-made money-makers,
+the self-made housekeeper, taught only by experience, not only pays dearly
+for her education, but is more than apt to be satisfied with her
+self-taught accomplishments, thus increasing her disadvantages in the use
+of time and money.
+
+Even with a small family the house-mother with the usual round of work
+would not have many moments of leisure. When it is a large family, with all
+the disadvantages of the tenement-house home, the days are not long enough
+for the work to be done. It crowds the hours, and accumulates until often
+discouragement and nervous exhaustion follow. If the mother have a
+conscience, she wars with herself, battling against conditions that she
+feels but cannot understand nor overcome.
+
+Three hundred and sixty-five days in the year the Residents found these
+mothers who needed the change of pleasure that made no demands on purses.
+Even good wages did not permit these families money to buy pleasure and
+recreation. Mothers, good mothers, grew old before their time. They often
+grew careless of their personal appearance, and by this risked their
+influence in their homes, separation from their children, alert and often
+overconscious on the subject of dress.
+
+Then there were semi-apathetic mothers because of discouragement; the
+mothers who drifted, never having an aim in life or an ideal; then the
+mothers who long ago ceased to make any struggle against environment, every
+year becoming more inert; the mothers, now grand-mothers, who were
+remembered only in time of need by their children. The Residents saw the
+need of the mothers of all types. How could the apathetic be awakened, the
+discouraged stimulated, the overworked rested and cheered? Hundreds,
+thousands of mothers were losing the best things of life because for them
+the activities that increase interest and sympathies could not be brought
+into their lives. Their environment made social opportunities in their own
+homes impossible. Husband and children, through contact with life in shop,
+factory, store, street and school, enlarged their interest every day; while
+the wife and mother came to a mental standstill, often losing interest in
+everything outside of her home; often failing through lack of knowledge and
+discouragement in making that a place of rest and refreshing.
+
+The Settlement was the bright spot in the lives of hundreds of young people
+and children. The mothers who could be stimulated must be reached and held
+in a center where pleasure would be the controlling element and education
+an incident. There were mothers who had lost all desire for social life. It
+was found difficult to arouse in them even a momentary interest in the
+thought of seeing new things, new people. The grind of life had blunted all
+social instincts. There were women who on the social side of their natures
+were dead; could not be roused by any thought outside of the routine of
+their lives. Interest enough to do for their families what required the
+least effort of mind and body was all that was left. The hope in these
+homes was the children. To them the Settlement must give inspiration and
+ideals; the home would never give either.
+
+In the second year of the College Settlement's activity a persistent effort
+was made to reach the mothers, especially the mothers of the more alert and
+active boys and girls affiliated with the Settlement, in clubs and classes.
+These mothers came, but never the same group twice. The smallest obstacle
+would prevent the very women who most needed social opportunity from
+accepting it. When they needed help, they came to the Settlement; they were
+most cordial hostesses when the Residents called; delighted in the
+opportunities the Settlement made for their children; but the habit of
+staying indoors, out of touch with any life but that of the tenement-house
+halls, was a fixed habit most difficult to dislodge.
+
+Some of the workers who were interested in this question were led to
+conclude that it was only the exceptional woman in the tenements who
+retained the capacity to plan her work to secure a specified hour or two of
+freedom in a whole week. The life imposed on the tenement-house mother does
+not make time an element in adjustment of her day, still less of her week.
+The breakfast over, the day unfolds itself, and the mother is free to meet
+it. Only in the exceptional home is life considered in its relation to the
+time of day. One thing was clear: that in the homes of the better paid
+wage-earners the mothers did not get their share of life's brightness. A
+College Settlement worker, enthusiastically supported by the Head Resident,
+determined to secure it for some of them. Failures would not discourage the
+worker, for every effort would be considered an experiment until success
+was attained. The club idea had proved successful for the children and
+young people; it had for mothers of larger opportunities elsewhere in the
+social world; it might for these mothers. At least, it could be tried.
+
+Twenty-two calls were made on the mothers of children and young people then
+coming to the Settlement, asking them to the Settlement for a certain
+afternoon in the following week. All accepted the invitation; ten came. The
+women who responded were told of the plan to start a club to meet once a
+week. There would be music, a short talk and refreshments. The plan seemed
+to please all who were present, and it was agreed to meet the following
+week.
+
+At once a problem was faced. Some of the mothers came without hats, wearing
+not overclean aprons, and apparently looking upon the movement as some new
+phase of almsgiving. Others were alert, well-dressed, comprehended that
+they must contribute their share in money and interest or the effort would
+die out. The children of these two types of mothers could not be
+distinguished by outward signs. American public school life and the very
+atmosphere of the street life had already begun its leveling-up process in
+dress and independence. How could these two types be brought into a common
+social relation, when they held nothing in common but the experience of
+living under the roof with many?
+
+It was decided to let the law of natural selection operate freely. The club
+was an experiment, and it must not start with preconceived plans; its life
+must be one of evolution. The next week only the alert women appeared.
+
+The club was formed, a president elected, and dues placed at ten cents per
+week. This the projectors tried to reduce, but the members insisted that
+they could and would pay it. That it would cost almost that to pay for the
+cake and coffee, and they could help somebody if there was any money over.
+The club was limited to ten members, and filled at the second meeting. It
+enlarged to fifteen the next year. In its fifth year it numbered
+forty-five.
+
+The subject of the first formal talk, informally conducted, as its subject
+demanded, was: "How long after the hair is out of curling-papers is it
+becoming?" This, of course, gave the opportunity of laying stress on a
+wife's personal appearance; the necessity of being as attractive as
+possible to one's own husband and children. That was, is, the keynote of
+the club, its creed, its religion to-day, when mothers and married
+daughters are members. The time of meeting was two o'clock, that the
+mothers might be at home in time to get supper for their husbands and
+children. Babies came with their mothers, and children in school came to
+the Settlement instead of going home after school. Many of the little girls
+belonged to a sewing club that met the same afternoon at the Settlement.
+The club, named in the first month of its existence "The Woman's Home
+Improvement Club," celebrated its eleventh anniversary at the College
+Settlement, October, 1901.
+
+[Illustration: THE WOMAN'S HOME IMPROVEMENT CLUB AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+As the first anniversary approached, the members suggested an evening
+meeting, that their husbands might come. The proposition received the most
+enthusiastic support from the Settlement Residents. Husbands, all the
+children who worked, and a friend of each member--if married, her
+husband--were included in the invitation. Dancing and music occupied the
+evening. What a revelation! Fathers dancing with their own daughters for
+the first time; mothers with their sons; daughters and sons spellbound at
+the sight of their mothers and fathers dancing together! It was evident
+that the club was a feature of the family life. The husbands and grown
+children knew what had been talked about, what had been done at the
+meetings. One husband, watching his wife dancing with their son, said: "I
+don't know how you've done it, but this club has made my wife young again;
+she's as young as when we were married." This wife and mother of nine
+children at the club one afternoon wished there were a hundred such clubs.
+"'Tis a mistake to just stay shut up." She waited a minute, and then said:
+"I had not bought a hat for eighteen years until I joined this club; I did
+not need it; I never went anywhere; the children did all the errands."
+
+This was the very type of mother the projectors of the club hoped to reach.
+The first evening reception proved such a success that it was decided to
+hold one evening reception each month for the family and friends of the
+members. Thanksgiving and Christmas receptions belonged to the children.
+Apples, nuts, gingerbread, cake and peanut brittle, with coffee, are the
+refreshments for Thanksgiving evening; new milk for the children. The games
+are Blind Man's Buff, Going to Jerusalem, with the Virginia Reel as an
+alternate, because the little children can dance it. "America" and "Home,
+Sweet Home," sung in chorus, close the evening. More than one family is now
+represented by three generations on these evenings. At the first evening
+reception a father and son of twenty years stood side by side. When the
+father began singing, the son stopped and looked at him in amazement. This
+changed to one of enjoyment, as he said between the verses: "Dad, I didn't
+know you could sing." "I haven't in twenty years, I guess," was the reply.
+Both father and son had good voices. The son had made the discovery that he
+had a voice, at the Settlement, in his club. He edged closer to his father;
+there was a new bond of sympathy. The boy's Christmas present from his
+father, mother, brother and sisters was a mandolin, the first time a
+combination present had been given. It was quite natural that the next year
+a table for the new parlor should be the gift of the children to the
+parents.
+
+An incident occurring in the third year after the club was organized is,
+perhaps, as perfect an illustration of the lack of social opportunity in a
+tenement-house home as can be given.
+
+One of the most faithful and interested of the members was a woman about
+fifty-seven when she joined the club. She was slow to respond to the club
+idea; to the right of personal judgment outside her own affairs. Her
+responses to a question that involved an expression of opinion was usually:
+"It don't make no difference to me." After a time she grasped the idea that
+she was one of many, but had equal rights with all the members in deciding
+questions relating to the club, and she began assuming responsibilities;
+expressing her views. In the third year she came to the president, and
+with every evidence of wishing to disclose a secret, said: "Next week
+Thursday is my birthday. I never had a birthday party in my life. I've
+always wanted one, but never had the room, and I never had the dishes. Do
+you believe I could have a birthday party here next week?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure you could."
+
+"I can't do much; and I only have two friends besides the club that I want
+to have. I want to pay for all the coffee and cake, that I may feel that
+it's my party. Just my two daughters, and my two friends, and my
+grandchildren--four, that's all. I've been saving the money for a year."
+
+One night early in the next week the bell rang. A working man stood at the
+door. He handed a five-dollar bill to one of the Residents, saying: "My
+wife, she's goin' to have a party here Thursday. I want you to give her a
+good time. She's been a good wife to me. Don't tell her; just spend it for
+her;" and the man disappeared in the darkness.
+
+It was decided to order a birthday cake and light sixty candles.
+
+The day came. Every member brought a remembrance. Radiantly, tearfully
+happy stood the hostess. She loved music, and a sweet, gracious woman whose
+music wins the most cultured sang song after song. Time for refreshments
+came. In the front parlor a club of little girls were sewing. It seemed a
+pity that they should not see the cake and the candles lighted. They were
+told that the doors would open, a lady was having her first birthday party,
+and it would be kind to wish her many returns of the day.
+
+The cake was brought in with the sixty candles burning, and placed before
+the hostess, a gift from her husband. "I didn't know," the wife kept
+whispering under her breath as she stood beside it at the table. The doors
+rolled slowly backward, and twenty children breathed "Ah!" Then in a piping
+chorus, "Wish you many returns of the day." A moment the woman stood still.
+Then turning a shining face on all about, she moved toward the children,
+the tears falling fast. Raising her hands and face heavenward, she said
+solemnly: "O God, what have I done that you should be so good to me?" The
+volume of her life was opened.
+
+A cake with a few shining candles, a few friends with their little
+offerings, and the wishes of a few children, and to one woman God had
+reached out of His high heaven and selected her as the special object of
+His care and love.
+
+Not all of the five dollars had been used. The hostess was asked what she
+wanted done with it. She was radiant. "I'll give a party to those children
+what said that sweet thing to me." Suggestions of other uses were cast
+aside. The children must have a party--ice cream and cake. When she found
+out that cake and ice cream would cost more than the money in hand, she
+announced: "I will wait to give it. In a month I save money to put to it."
+She made all her own arrangements, and proved a hostess of resource and
+tact.
+
+She received her guests most cordially. Perhaps the most wildly exciting
+hours of her life were when, after much coaxing, she joined in the games of
+Drop the Handkerchief, Blind Man's Buff and Going to Jerusalem, the last
+game sending her crimson and panting into a chair in the corner, with the
+children crowding about her shrieking with laughter.
+
+Time for refreshments found her anxious and watchful. The members of the
+club had fallen into the spirit of the day, and nobody was grown up.
+
+An incident occurred during the serving of refreshments which showed the
+educational value of a story written for pleasure, not education; at the
+same time a very deep compliment to the book. "The Birds' Christmas Carol"
+was a favorite book in the club. It had been read twenty-seven times in
+one tenement house by eleven members of one family, and four times by one
+member, who said she would own a copy whenever she could spare the money.
+She wanted to read it when she felt cross. As there were not chairs enough
+for all at the party, some of the children sat on the floor. The little
+daughter of the mother who wanted to own "The Birds' Christmas Carol" sat
+on the floor in front of her mother. She did something while eating her ice
+cream of which her mother disapproved. With a quick glance at one of the
+workers who stood near her, the mother said: "If I had been as wise as Mrs.
+Ruggles, she would not have done that." Mrs. Ruggles was a thoroughly
+appreciated character. Her struggles to equip her children were perfectly
+understood, as were her ambitions for them. The hostess of the day was as
+disappointed as the youngest child when the lighting of the gas told that
+the day was done. She was the last to leave, saying: "I never was so happy
+in my life. It has been beautiful. All my life I wanted a birthday party.
+Now I have two;" and she turned a radiant face to say "Good-night" as she
+went down the stoop into the gathering darkness.
+
+The weeks went by. The club had tickets to go to Glen Island, through the
+generosity of Mr. Starin. In August another member had a birthday, and
+confided the secret to the giver of the birthday party, saying, "I wanted
+to give a birthday party as you did. I never had one in my life; but I
+could not get money enough. I tried hard since yours." In September the
+elder member confided this conversation to the president of the club,
+saying, "Now we will give her a surprise. She shall have the party. I have
+talked with every member. But we will not each buy her a present; we put
+our money together and buy her a dress." The president doubted the wisdom
+of this, and suggested a dozen other gifts. "No, we give a dress. She does
+not have as nice a dress as other members. It is not right that one member
+of a club should not dress as good as every other member. Why not she take
+that dress? She know we love her, and we give her this because we want her
+to look as good as anybody; she is so pretty."
+
+The dress was bought and given by the oldest member of the club, who in her
+speech announced her views on dress, and the need of one member looking as
+well-dressed as any other member; that if one could not have things, then
+the others must share with her; that was being a true member. The dress was
+received in the spirit in which it was given. When it was found that it
+could not be made by the receiver in time for the next reception because
+she had so much work, it was cut and made by five members of the club. The
+wisdom of putting money together to buy one present was learned, and from
+that time on the custom has been to make joint gifts when gifts are given.
+This is done in families, greatly reducing the valueless things that were
+formerly bought when only a little money, a few cents perhaps, could be
+spent by each one.
+
+About the time this club was established the kindergarten had been added to
+the vocabulary of philanthropists. The kindergarten existed as part of the
+secular work of many of the churches, and individuals here and there
+supported kindergartens. It was generally conceded that the mothers of the
+children did not appreciate the work the kindergarten was doing for their
+children; that too often they felt that permitting them to go was
+conferring a favor on the kindergartners or those who had asked for their
+children's attendance. The Residents and workers at the Settlement did not
+believe that this was a healthy attitude of mind. They believed it was
+responsible for the irregular attendance of many of the children, as well
+as the lack of punctuality. There was no kindergarten in connection with
+the Settlement, nor room for one, but one was greatly needed. Much as it
+was needed, it must not come until the mothers wanted it and were willing
+to work for it.
+
+Miss Brooks was then at the head of the Kindergarten Training School in
+connection with the Teachers' College. She was consulted. The result was
+that the members of the Woman's Home Improvement Club became on several
+afternoons members of a kindergarten. They used the materials, took part in
+the games directed by Miss Brooks and the members of her training class.
+The names of the material used, the things made, the stories, the games,
+the songs, became a part of the vocabulary of the mothers. Some of the
+material was bought and taken home to entertain the children. The natural
+result followed. "If only we could have a kindergarten for our children!"
+
+[Illustration: THE KINDERGARTEN OF THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+It was suggested that if seventy children could be found near enough to the
+DeWitt Memorial, where a room for the kindergarten was available, that
+perhaps the kindergarten would be established there. Over one hundred calls
+were made by the nine members of this club, which resulted in securing the
+promised attendance of seventy children. The Lowell Kindergarten was then
+opened at the DeWitt Memorial by the New York Kindergarten Association as a
+result of this effort. The difficulties the mothers put in the way of good
+work in the kindergarten was explained to the members of the club, who
+agreed to call on mothers whose children did not come to the kindergarten
+in time, or were irregular in attendance. It was most interesting to watch
+the growth of public sentiment in favor of regular and punctual attendance,
+not only at the kindergarten, but at school. If the kindergarten child
+reported Johnny Jones, who was a neighbor's child, as absent, the elder
+brother or visitor after school was sent to find out if Johnny Jones were
+ill. It became a badge of good motherhood to have the child in the
+kindergarten on time. Before this, through talks by doctors and nurses, the
+relation between health and cleanliness had been discovered. Cleanliness
+was imposed on their own children, and exacted from other mothers of
+kindergarten children.
+
+The influx of Hebrews, toward whom the members of this club had a deep race
+prejudice, drove them out of this neighborhood. Before seven years had
+passed but four of the members were residents of this district. But a
+change of residence did not change their belief in the value of the
+kindergarten. Wherever they have gone they have sought it for their young
+children, who have found always intelligent and sympathetic listeners in
+their mothers to all the events and incidents in their kindergarten world.
+One mother learned accompaniments to songs, and the children sing
+kindergarten songs at the club entertainments, even those in the grammar
+grade join.
+
+As time went on, the conviction grew stronger that the real pressure of
+poverty or lack of money, among the self-respecting independent poor came
+not on the physical nature but the mental and emotional. The pressure was
+incessant. There never was a time when there was money to buy pleasure.
+Months, years went by without life offering the opportunity for enlarging
+the mental horizon of thousands of capable, receptive, devoted mothers. To
+the children the Church entertainments were opportunities; clubs and sewing
+schools were doing their share, but the mothers were only onlookers. There
+was no active part for them except in the world of work. The churches
+provided religious opportunity and social opportunity, regulated by the
+Church environment. Hundreds were not attracted, and often one sympathized
+with their rejection of this kind of social opportunity, tinged too
+frequently with patronage, and of necessity, narrow in its scope.
+
+Early in the history of this club the love of music was so evident that it
+was decided that the members should hear "The Messiah." That would be the
+Christmas treat that year. The cost of the tickets was far beyond the means
+of the members, but friends made the purchase of the tickets for every
+member possible.
+
+Two days before the giving of the Oratorio, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith came
+to the Settlement and gave a recital. Handel's picture was displayed, the
+story of his life told. The themes of the Oratorio were explained, and then
+sung by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. A new world was opened. The night for the
+Oratorio came. The journey so far uptown was into a land wholly unknown.
+Carnegie Hall was a revelation of another world. Its size and beauty, the
+audience, all a revelation. From the opening bar to the close of the
+Oratorio the club members listened entranced. It was the enlarging of the
+world revealed by Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith. As the chorus "Unto us a child
+is born, Unto us a son is given," closed, every one of the mothers sat with
+shining face but moist eyes. A new message had come. One little mother,
+whose battle so bravely fought won reverence for her, leaned down and
+whispered: "I'm so glad I have sons; I'm so glad. I think I know now what
+it means." The echo came back for weeks, yes, for years. One member, in
+trying to tell her husband, said: "I saw while I was talking how
+impossible it was to make him understand, so I said: 'John, you'll never
+know till you get to Heaven what I heard and saw to-night.'"
+
+The result justified the effort. It was seen that it was wise to have the
+best of everything for the members of the club in the way of entertainment.
+Musicians have given most generously of their time and talent. Speakers who
+are sought for in the highest intellectual world have been secured for the
+evening receptions, when the husbands and working children and friends were
+present. The result has been to develop just at the level where it was most
+needed standards that protect the home from enjoyments tinged with
+vulgarity, and even crudeness is now detected and accepted grudgingly or
+with apology.
+
+The hard times of 1893-94 gave a new opportunity to test the value of such
+a club. The stories of suffering, of helplessness, made it seem wise to
+control money to be expended through the club members. They were brought
+into contact with families who never before were reduced to the point of
+asking charity. About four hundred dollars was expended under the direction
+of the members of this club. Work tickets were bought and given to men and
+women whose life history they knew, men and women they had known for years.
+When cases of strangers were brought to their notice, they investigated
+and advised as to the best way to give help. To prevent eviction, payment
+of rent was the first effort of the club members.
+
+The education they received was invaluable. For the first time it was
+possible for them to help others in a large way; they saw that the number
+they could help depended on the wisdom shown in expending the money on
+which they could call. Their indignation knew no bounds when they found
+they had been deceived, as they were in half a dozen cases of families
+brought to their attention. One case caused a complete revolution in their
+theory that if people suffered it was because the world was hard with them,
+had not given them a chance. One woman, a widow, was brought to the
+attention of the club early in the winter. She had one child, and they had
+not had a fire in weeks; had no outside garments to go on the street,
+because they had pawned them for food. They had eaten nothing but bread and
+coffee for seven weeks. Now they were to be evicted from the one room they
+had occupied, because no rent had been paid for two months. The club had
+decided that paying back rents only benefited landlords; that, having so
+little money and so many demands, rent in advance was all they could pay.
+They voted to move the woman, then to find work for her. It was decided
+that she must learn to operate a sewing machine. The Charities'
+Organization Society made that possible. After two weeks' trial, it was
+found that the woman could not learn. Then the society gave her a chance to
+learn laundry work, and for two weeks more money to support the woman and
+child--cared for by one of the members in turn while the mother was away
+from home--was given. Again the report came that the woman would not learn.
+Then the members decided to teach her. This individual teaching, with what
+the society had done, seemed to make an impression. It was decided that the
+woman could iron.
+
+[Illustration: MAKING A SELECTION.]
+
+When this stage was reached the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of the
+members passed on her way from work a laundry. At the door a sign hung,
+"Hands Wanted." The little girl went in and asked about wages. The man at
+the desk laughed at her. "It made me mad. I just looked at him," drawing
+herself up as she told the story. "I said: 'I do not want the work for
+myself, but for a woman _our_ club is trying to help; she's poor, and a
+widow.' Then the man looked at me, and told me to tell the woman to come. I
+told him we'd all been teaching her." The use of the plural possessive
+thrilled the heart of the workers; the club was a family possession. The
+woman was told to go to work the next morning. As the little girl was
+returning from work the next night, she stopped at the laundry to ask about
+the woman; to walk home with her, if she were going home. She was told the
+woman had not appeared. Before going to her own home, the child went to see
+why the woman had not gone to work. The woman had overslept. For three
+weeks that little girl got up earlier and went after that woman, delivering
+her at the laundry as though she were a package. It was decided that the
+sacrifice was too much; if the woman was not willing to keep the work by
+her own effort, she was not worth helping. An alarm clock was bought and
+given her, and she was taught how to wind it. She lost the place before the
+end of the first week because she could not get there on time.
+
+The club found out that there were people it was impossible to help, do
+what the world would.
+
+This little girl during this period of struggle with this woman was met one
+Sunday afternoon. She carried a doll to which she was devoted, and for
+which she made a cloak that Sunday morning. "Isn't she pretty?" she said,
+holding up the doll. "I often wish I could see her when I'm working." What
+a combination of child and woman! As the years have passed, this little
+girl has paid the penalty of shop life. She has grown hard, aggressive,
+self-assertive, untruthful. If only her environment could have been
+different, she would have made a magnificent woman. The world of struggle
+has been too much for her; it has strangled the spirit of helpfulness.
+
+The lessons of that winter have been well learned. Every mother in the club
+wants a trade for her child; something learned that has in it wage-earning
+promise because the worker has special knowledge.
+
+The time came when it was possible to turn the attention of these mothers
+to the administration of those city departments that make the environment
+of their homes. The streets naturally claimed first attention. They learned
+to take the numbers of the street sweepers who failed to do their work; to
+take the numbers of the carts improperly and carelessly filled, and report
+them at the club meeting. Leaking roofs, broken stairways, unlighted halls,
+contagious diseases were reported, and conditions in the stores and
+factories where their daughters worked.
+
+The criminality of concealing dangers that threatened many to protect one
+was comprehended. The club motto became "A helping hand to all."
+
+The club members felt that it was possible for them to give special help
+to little children. In a thousand ways the women in the house of many
+families find the opportunity to help children; often through the children
+they helped the mothers. Sometimes through personal influence they secured
+the regular attendance of children at school; sometimes it meant calling in
+the aid of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to secure
+the rights of children, to protect them from evils in their own homes.
+
+One day a wealthy woman who had lost a little girl told the president of
+this club this incident, which, she said, changed the course of her life.
+For months she had shut out the world. God and man were cruel. Nothing
+interested her; life was empty. She sat by the window in her home one
+November afternoon. It was drizzling and blowing. A little girl without hat
+or coat stood shivering and crying against the church railing opposite. As
+she watched the child her mind reverted to the clothes she handled so
+constantly, because they had been worn by her child. She sent for the
+little stranger, and when she went on the street again she was warm, tidy
+and comfortable. Then came the thought, "God never meant a woman should be
+a mother just to one little girl. She must be a mother to every child who
+needs her." From that day this woman has given her life and service to
+children. The story was told to the club.
+
+One of the members, after the meeting had adjourned and while the
+refreshments were being served, was overheard saying: "Why, certainly it
+would change everything if every woman would live in that way. Think how
+many times you could save children, how many times you could help them, if
+you were their mother just for the time they needed you--often only a few
+minutes."
+
+Months after a member reported: "Well, I don't know what you'll all think
+when I tell you what I did last week. I've been bothered because such a
+nice-looking little girl came every morning about school time and went
+upstairs in the house opposite. She carried a lunch-box and books. I would
+see her with a baby at the window, and see her in the morning run on
+errands. At three o'clock she went away in the direction from which she
+came. That child is playing 'hookey.' That woman is to blame, I said to
+myself. One morning last week I saw the child go to the corner grocery. I
+went after her.
+
+[Illustration: AT THE SETTLEMENT--A STORMY DAY.]
+
+"'Where you live, little girl?' I asked. She grew red and hung her head,
+and tried to get out of the store. I stand in front of her. 'No, you must
+not be afraid of me. I have little girls. I love all little girls. Where is
+your mother? Child, you deceive her. She thinks you are in school, and you
+play "hookey."' The child ran out of the store, crying. I went right
+upstairs after her. I knock. The woman would not open the door. I knock
+louder, then she come. When she see me, she tried to close the door. I put
+my foot in the door and keep it open. I say, 'You are doing wrong. I belong
+to a club where every member is to be a mother to every child what needs
+her. If that little girl come here one more day, I follow her home and tell
+her mother. It be bad for you if any child come here so young as that
+child. It is against the law for such little children to work. That little
+girl is playing "hookey," and you make her. You do that any more, and I
+make a complaint against you to the Children's Society. Good-morning;' and
+I took out my foot, bowed and went downstairs. When I got home, that little
+girl is running down the street where she comes every morning. I never see
+her now, and that woman do her own errands and mind her own baby."
+
+The members applauded. A child out of school is a child to be looked after.
+It has been concluded by the members of this club that they can do their
+best missionary work in the houses where they live, by keeping their rooms
+and their children in the best possible condition; that every home, every
+child so cared for, is the best possible sermon preached, the purpose of
+which is to make life better.
+
+The League for Political Education, the Woman's Auxiliary of the Civil
+Service Reform Association, the City History Club have sent speakers to the
+club, some conducting courses of lectures. Even the Assembly District work
+undertaken by the League for Political Education was attempted by the club,
+but did not succeed. It could hardly be expected that it would.
+
+During all those years the members had been trained to self-government. All
+questions are decided by the majority. There came a time when the majority
+voted to leave the College Settlement. It was deplored by the projectors,
+but accepted. After a few weeks a small house was taken a couple of blocks
+from the East River. The house had a large yard, and by expending a small
+amount of money was made very attractive. The attempt was made to have the
+members of the club do neighborhood work. A very short trial proved this
+was impracticable. Two things were revealed: That the mother of a
+working-man's family has neither strength nor time to give away; that the
+very conditions of tenement-house neighborhoods require trained, impersonal
+workers. The women who gave time to the club work in the neighborhood
+neglected their homes and families. The few members who tried to do
+neighborhood work in the house used every advantage the club-house offered,
+which they controlled, to curry favor, to revenge slights, real or fancied,
+to themselves or their children. The best mothers made no attempt to do any
+neighborhood work. The house became a social center, an educational center.
+But it was not a success until paid workers were put in charge of different
+departments, with a very few volunteer workers; and the most faithful of
+these were women of wealth.
+
+It was hoped that uptown organizations would establish branches of their
+work in this house. Some did attempt it, but it failed for the reason that
+so many efforts to better the conditions of the tenement-house dwellers
+fail. Women lacking the right qualities volunteered, or the work was
+important when other things did not interfere. Clubs were established to
+which the organizers came when it was convenient. Again and again children
+connected with clubs waited until darkness came, but no "dear lady" whom
+they trusted appeared. In another case, numbers were the standard of
+success, and scores were crowded in where units should have been. All this
+forced the employment of paid workers, and centered the responsibility on
+one until the burden was too great to be borne.
+
+Added to this, the principle of self-government had given a one-sided
+development to some of the members, and friction would develop when large
+questions were to be decided, an aggressive minority combating a
+conservative and less demonstrative majority.
+
+The reform campaign of 1897 began. The picture of the candidate of the
+Citizens' Union hung in the window. The Citizens' Union used the house and
+yard for its lectures. When the campaign was ended, the friction developed
+to the unbearable point, and it seemed, in view of the dissension, best to
+disband the club. The club voted to keep together and return to the College
+Settlement, if the privilege could be secured. This was generously given,
+and the club unanimously voted to return, pledging the members to give all
+the aid possible to the Settlement work. Since 1898 the club has again been
+a part of the work at the Settlement.
+
+For six years this club has had a country club-house--a large house, easy
+of access, in New Jersey, admirably adapted to the purposes of the club.
+The house is surrounded by lawns and an apple orchard. Two kitchens make it
+possible for two families to occupy the house at the same time. The rent
+is paid and the house cleaned each spring. All other expenses, including
+car fares, are paid by the members of the club using the house. The plan is
+for each member to use half the house for two weeks. By a system of
+evolution and working of the law of natural selection, four families use
+the house at the same time. Mrs. A. invites Mrs. B. for the two weeks that
+she is entitled to half of the house; and Mrs. B., arranging her two weeks
+to follow Mrs. A., reciprocates by asking Mrs. A. to remain for her two
+weeks. Co-operative housekeeping has developed, as has the sharing in the
+care of the children. The barn, equipped for the children, has been an
+endless delight. Two members have in the past been debarred the use of the
+house. One because of the character of the men invited by the husband; one
+because of the language used to her children. Both were asked to resign
+from the club, or to make it inconvenient to use the club-house. One
+resigned. The average number of people using this club-house has been
+between four and five hundred each season. Sick children of neighbors have
+been taken up by the members and cared for during their whole vacation. On
+Sundays, friends, relatives and city neighbors are guests.
+
+There has never been any supervision over the house, except that of the
+members. Each member leaves the part of the house she has used clean for
+the one coming after her. For several years the club paid part of two
+months' rent, raised through entertainments. One year the members made a
+donation of thirty dollars. Broken dishes are replaced, and the cost of
+repairing furniture broken is paid by the member using the furniture at the
+time. The large parlor is a club-room, and used by every member who goes up
+for a day. A closet is provided with dishes to be used when picnics are
+given by the members. The theory is that the grounds--four acres--can be
+used by the members at any time, but the families in the house must not be
+interfered with in any way.
+
+The story of this club has been told at this length because it has proved
+what can be done in broadening the life of women of natural intelligence
+living under tenement-house conditions; how the family can have a common
+interest, to which each contributes, a center that can create social
+opportunity for the friends of every member and the members of every
+family.
+
+This club has been able to do much to lighten the burdens in the time of
+financial crisis for people who could only have been helped through such a
+medium. It was the help of a friend always. For years it has been able to
+distribute Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners; but it grows more cautious
+every year, for it has made discoveries of the abuses of the Christmas
+dinner-giving. Through the children it has been possible to reach other
+children who needed Christmas cheer, but who would not take it from ever so
+kind-hearted a public.
+
+The long years of working together has cemented friendships that are the
+inheritances of the children, and sons and daughters have intermarried.
+Baby after baby finds its godmother in the club.
+
+There have been mortifying failures, but there have been positive successes
+in the eleven years. The club has proved conclusively that the
+working-men's wives can be determining factors in arousing and demanding
+better environment for their homes; that the wife and mother who keeps in
+touch with life commands greater influence in and outside her home, where
+all that she learns is used to make that home better; that she keeps her
+place in her family best when she makes herself the companion of her
+husband and children; when she, as far as she may, is herself the source of
+their social life, and contributes to their mental interests by sharing
+with them all the educational opportunity that life gives her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+WITHIN THE WALLS OF HOME.
+
+
+One day a group of unusually intelligent wives of working men were driving
+through Central Park in a Park carriage. All were mothers, some of grown
+children, yet it was the first time that twelve of the twenty (all but two
+born in New York) had seen Central Park. Coming back on the east drive, the
+closed houses on Fifth Avenue attracted their attention. Various
+suggestions were made as to what use these houses could be put in the
+summer, when one woman, slight, delicate and extremely nervous, said: "I
+don't want anything in those houses but the room, just the room. I've never
+had all the room I want. I would have if I lived in them." After a moment
+she continued: "The reason we don't love each other as we should is because
+we don't have room; we crowd each other. All the time I lived in my
+father's home I was crowded. How we used to fight! Fight in the night, as
+well as the day, just because we did not have room. The beds were so
+crowded that one of the young ones had to sleep across the foot. The big
+ones would keep their feet up while they were awake, but when they went to
+sleep they would stretch out and kick the one across the foot. When I was
+so little that I slept that way, I used to lie awake in terror expecting
+the kick, and how I scratched when it came! I know we would have loved each
+other much more if we could have had room to grow up in, as the children in
+those houses do. And my mother! She didn't have a room to herself when she
+had the sickness that killed her."
+
+[Illustration: YARD DAY AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the little miseries of childhood
+due to lack of room in the home. "My mother used to drive us out of the
+house to get a chance to sweep it," said another mother of children. "I
+remember lots of times standing down at the hall door, shivering, waiting
+for her to get through. I would go into the neighbors' rooms, but often
+they had got rid of their own children for the reason my mother had of
+hers."
+
+"I tell you what used to make me mad; it was to have to wait for the others
+to get through eating," said another. "When I hire a place I always look
+first to see if the kitchen is big enough to pull the table from the wall
+and sit about it. I don't think I ever had any hot dinner when I was
+little, and it used to make me mad. When I had three children I moved just
+to get a large kitchen; it ain't near so nice a place, but the kitchen is
+big." There was not a woman there who did not have a grievance against her
+childhood because there was not room. One of them with crimson cheeks told
+how she remembered the sense of comfort that came to her after the death of
+an older sister because she had a bed to herself; she said it was a long
+time before she knew the cause, for she missed her sister's companionship,
+but she was more comfortable; she enjoyed having the five nails at the foot
+of the bed for her own clothes. The woman who spoke first interrupted: "I
+never in my life had even a hook in the wall that was my own until I was
+married. We were so near of a size we could wear each other's things, and
+we did. The one who was quickest got the best of that size. You never knew
+whose clothes you'd have to put on in the morning. I'll never have but this
+child. She likes me. She hates being pushed and crowded. She has a bed and
+bureau of her own. Never, never until my husband can pay more rent will we
+have another child." She paid the penalty of death for this determination.
+
+As one thinks of the number of human beings with all their belongings
+crowded into the floor space of a tenement-house home, the marvel at the
+endurance grows greater. Think of its limitations of conveniences!
+
+To those who know the limitations of a tenement-house home, the criticisms
+and suggestions that the superficially informed reformers make on and for
+the hygienic management of these homes are at once the source of amusement
+and indignation. When stress is laid on airing a bed every morning, and one
+in imagination sees the only windows in another room with a breakfast table
+between them, a room already overcrowded with things, the only room for the
+mother and baby during the process, one wonders what the speaker would do
+under the same circumstances. Then when the horrors of dust are revealed
+and the necessity of keeping the floors clean by frequent washing is made
+to be imperative, one sees the bed that just fits between the walls at the
+head and foot, with half of its own space free in front of it, and again
+comes the question, what would the expert do living under like
+circumstances? What is needed everywhere is scientific knowledge in
+conjunction with intimate knowledge of the evils inseparable from the small
+dark rooms of even the best tenements, and then we will have suggestions
+that the woman can use--can apply to her own family conditions--who must do
+the work for a family within this space.
+
+In the best of the tenements it will be found that where the tenants can
+afford a parlor, access to it is across the kitchen, where all the work of
+the family must be done. It will be seen at once the disadvantage at which
+the house-mother is when friends who are not intimate call. Nothing stands
+between her and the outer world but the door into a public hallway. The
+bedrooms admit of a bed, and sometimes, but only in the exceptional
+bedroom, a bureau. This is usually found in the parlor, if there is one,
+and in it all the clothes that can be folded, all the little accessories
+belonging to the family; to this, however, all must have access. If there
+is a closet for clothes, or if the family can own and house a wardrobe, it
+is usually in this room, and the common convenience of the family. The
+bedrooms, dark, offer no space for a washstand. The kitchen is the common
+wash-room. The kitchens of the tenement houses built in these later years
+are a marvel of inconvenience. The dish closet is a few shelves up near the
+ceiling, the lower one of which can be reached by a woman five feet four
+standing on the soles of her feet; a chair is necessary to reach the other
+shelves. Beneath this space is the pot closet, or it may be the stationary
+tubs, the top of which provides table space for cooking conveniences.
+
+[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S HOUR AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+There comes to mind now one of the best plans for a tenement having four
+families on each floor on the East Side. The stairways are lighted by a
+window on each landing opening on an air shaft, and on each floor is a
+lavatory with a large window. Each suite consists of four rooms. The parlor
+has two windows on the street; a kitchen window opening into the parlor,
+never raised if the family have social standards; and a window on a large
+air shaft, or space between the two houses, on which the bedroom windows,
+which are large, open. The rent for these four rooms is seventeen dollars
+per month, and they are on the fifth floor. The kitchens in this house have
+been described. The family have to sit at three sides of the table; there
+is no room to pull it from the wall; even then one side is uncomfortably
+near the stove. The only space except the parlor for a refrigerator is in
+the bedroom. As there are three young wage-earners supporting the home, who
+are social, who are encouraged by the widowed mother to have their friends
+in their own home, this is not to be tolerated. The refrigerator is in the
+bedroom. It was in that room when it was occupied for four years by a girl
+dying of tuberculosis. Is it any wonder that the fight against this disease
+is again being waged in that family? Yet it is above the average of its
+class in intelligence, as the apartments are above the average in the
+region.
+
+The very elementary necessity of space and place for privacy in taking a
+bath is exceptional. For space, place and light are necessary. A very
+bright woman, perfectly familiar with the limitations of the tenement-house
+homes, once said to the writer: "The truth is they cannot be clean if they
+are decent." A cruel truth which was brought forcibly to the remembrance of
+the writer one winter afternoon in an East Side home, where a mother was
+trying to bring up a family to the best of her ability. When the caller
+went into the living-room of the family a tub stood at the side of the
+stove, in which was the youngest daughter, a girl about eight; a brother of
+ten and his boy friend of twelve or fourteen years were playing checkers on
+the other side of the room. The mother was ironing. There was no
+consciousness of embarrassment shown by the children. The mother was
+ashamed, not at the exposure, but at being found out in permitting such an
+exposure. She was a member of a club where the training of children was a
+constant theme. The necessity of physical cleanliness, its relation to
+health, she had grasped, and her children profited by it. The relation
+between privacy and morals she had not grasped. It was as though a veil
+had fallen from her eyes as she looked at her daughter of eight standing
+naked before the two boys. Whether such a thing ever occurred again the
+caller does not know; that the mother never forgave the caller for finding
+her out she does know. The family had three bedrooms, but none would permit
+the placing of a washstand in them. One was the passageway from front to
+rear, for the family occupied a floor, but could afford only one fire.
+
+Privacy is almost impossible in the tenement-house home. One bedroom is
+usually the passageway to the next, if there are two, or both bedrooms are
+passageways from front to rear of the home, and must be used by all the
+family. Privacy is impossible in these rooms, and there are thousands of
+just such apartments. Children must grow up in them subject to the
+limitations, restrictions and exposures their walls compel. This division
+of space must fix standards of reserve, of privacy, of social life. No
+amount of love, not even of intelligence, can save the children from the
+evils such division of space imposes on family life. It deadens the
+sensibilities. The insidious effects of this is not always realized, even
+by the intelligent parents who accept them as inevitable.
+
+One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry at the inconsistencies of the
+standards of those who go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the
+betterment of the conditions of the working people. We have secured a law
+compelling separate closets for men and women in stores and factories, a
+righteous measure in the interest of morality. But the closets in the
+tenements must be used by men, women and children of several families. A
+neighborly courtesy is the loaning of the key, to save a neighbor a journey
+upstairs. Children run in from the street, several at a time, for it is the
+only place provided. This publicity and freedom is the crying evil of the
+tenements, the one from which tragedies come. The marvel is that so few
+follow; that in spite, seemingly in defiance, of it all, characters develop
+that are beautiful, harmonious, true.
+
+Can one condemn the girl facing the worst that can befall her who under
+pressure that her appeal justifies, yes, makes necessary, confides that her
+relations with the man who is the father of the coming child began when
+each were little things six or eight years old? A relation that grew out of
+lack of privacy, the intimacy forced by tenement-house conditions. Both
+families have gone far beyond their social position at the time these two
+were children, but the blasting of innocency has left its burning scar on
+the girl, and she must bear it alone.
+
+Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that gives the love-making in
+the tenement region a character peculiarly its own. When interest between
+the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so frankly and publicly. There are
+times when restraint would seem to improve manners; but among the working
+young men and women one is constantly reminded of Adam and Eve in the
+garden of Eden. How frankly and unconsciously they must have shown their
+interest in each other, and how unconsciously they must have revealed their
+interest in each other to all the other breathing creatures. Perhaps
+nothing about the love-making is more interesting than that numbers add to
+the enjoyment of both lovers. Nothing adds more to the happiness of a
+wage-earning girl than to have her "chum" deeply interested in and deeply
+interesting to a young man at the same time she is. It seems to be conceded
+that two couples can have so much more pleasure than one. The terms applied
+by these young people to each other will reveal their social level in the
+wage-earning world. If the term "steady" is used where the world of wealth
+and leisure would use _fiance_, the under wage-earning world is reached. If
+"friend" is used, the social ladder covered by that word, used in that
+sense, has many rounds. Knowing many working girls who would use the term
+"friend" when referring to the man they had accepted as a future husband,
+or who would in time hold that relation, the writer was constantly
+impressed by the unconscious protection the girls threw about each other.
+One would rarely hear of plans made that did not include two beside the
+couple engaged, or willing to be. Sometimes two girls were to complete the
+party. It is evident that the more means the merrier time. In every group
+of girls there will be two or three who cause anxiety; two or three whose
+influence, unchecked, may lead to trouble. It is not easy to restrain the
+young people, for so often the offenses are so naturally the result of
+environment that to speak directly of them would be most unwise. The
+chances are that reference to them would put the speaker in the position of
+possessing knowledge of an undesirable kind; it would seem to suggest evil.
+Often it would be a moral shock to many working girls to have their actions
+criticised from the impression their freedom makes before the cause is
+understood.
+
+[Illustration: MUTUAL INTERESTS.]
+
+A young girl joined a club for young people. From the first she caused
+anxiety. Her face was innocent and attractive, but her actions with young
+men were just the reverse. At last it became necessary to speak to her. It
+was evident that she attributed the criticism to what she termed
+"fussiness." Not the least modification in her manner followed. At last,
+after many interviews, she was told that she would never be spoken to
+again. If she offended in the club-room once more, she would be given her
+hat. That would mean that she was not to again enter those rooms. She
+confided to her intimate friend that no one had ever told her that what she
+did was wrong. After this interview, a modification of her manner was
+noticed, not because she was convinced she was wrong, but because she
+thought it wise to heed. A group of young people were returning from a
+picnic. Just after the homeward journey had begun, it was seen that this
+young girl was sitting in the lap of a young man whom she had always known;
+as children they lived for years in the same tenement. Beside him sat the
+young girl whom he had invited to the club picnic. The club girl sat so
+unconscious of any infringement of manners, public or private, that a young
+man who had grown up under the same conditions was asked what he thought of
+the act. He started at once to tell the girl to stand up, but was
+restrained. Evidently he was shocked, and the act was wrong from his
+standpoint, the only standpoint fair to the girl. A seat was made for the
+girl elsewhere, who, for the first time, showed distress, or rather
+anxiety, because of her own acts. Nothing was said to her.
+
+Occasion was made to speak to the young man who had kept his seat and let
+the girl sit in his lap. He was a working man, and his hands showed it. All
+his life of twenty-two years he had lived under tenement-house conditions.
+
+"Frank, would you marry a girl who sat in a man's lap in a railroad train?"
+he was asked.
+
+"No," he responded indignantly.
+
+"Do you suppose you are the only man in the world who has that feeling?
+What right have you to let any girl cheapen herself so that the man who saw
+her with you, doing what you permitted, if you did not suggest and
+encourage, would not marry her?"
+
+The man's face grew white. He had a sister of whom he was very fond and
+very proud.
+
+"What would you do to the man who permitted your sister, when she was
+tired, to do what you permitted a girl to do to-night--a girl who has no
+brother to watch over her?"
+
+The young man was six feet tall. He rose to his feet, and, raising his
+hands toward the starlit sky, he said:
+
+"As true as there is a God above me, I will never while I live let any girl
+do what I am not willing my own sister should do anywhere."
+
+After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said:
+
+"I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold you responsible. You are
+stronger mentally, morally and physically, and are wholly to blame."
+Whether he spoke to the girl or not, no one knows, but never again was it
+necessary to even mentally criticise that young girl's manners with young
+men. Not only did her manners change, but the expression of her face. One
+grew to love and trust her, and ask her help for other girls.
+
+The chivalry of the working boys and young men is constantly seen,
+unconsciously revealed. Sometimes it is dangerous the degree in which it
+shows itself among the finest of the boys. A sick girl, unable to go out,
+will command attentions so special and direct that the fear of her
+misunderstanding, and suffering because she has not understood, will make
+those interested who know the danger unhappy; sympathy from any cause will
+make a great-hearted working boy place himself in a position where he may
+be easily misunderstood.
+
+It is astonishing how long the spirit of childhood will live in working
+boys and girls, even under conditions that seem never to justify happiness
+and spontaneity!
+
+One Sunday a group of working men and girls went nutting, being duly and
+properly chaperoned. Four of the young men climbed a big walnut tree. The
+girls, with some of the young men, were gathered at the foot, waiting for
+the shower of nuts. The chaperon sat on a stone fence a little way off. The
+wind began to blow, swaying the top branches. One of the young men having a
+good voice laid himself along a limb high from the ground, singing
+"Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top." The others took it up and the girls
+joined in. Over and over it was sung. Then the girls and boys on the ground
+joined hands outside the span of the tree and sang "Ring around a rosy."
+Every singing game of childhood was enthusiastically played. Every one of
+these young people were poor as the world counts wealth--every one over
+eighteen--all had worked from the first moment they could earn wages. Each
+one had suffered the wearing anxiety of no wages when the family needed
+what they could earn, and yet they sang--they felt like children. No amount
+of money at the time could have bought them this happiness.
+
+The sun poured down a glory of yellow light on the trees that seemed to
+have caught its color dashed with red flames. Across the field came one of
+the girls slowly--a girl who never had manifested any enthusiasm, except
+for dancing; who never gave expression to any emotion of feeling. It was
+thought impossible to move her. As she came nearer, it was seen that she
+was deeply stirred; her face was expressive. Putting her head against the
+arm of the chaperon, she whispered, rather than spoke: "I did not know
+trees were any color but green before." The tears were chasing each other
+down her cheeks, while her mouth was wreathed with smiles. The girl was
+over twenty. Had she been born in a family that would use the privileges of
+the various Fresh-Air organizations, she would have known more of the
+country. It was this year that she first saw the stars over the trees, and
+the moon at the full in the sky when it had a horizon. Obedience to her was
+not easy, but to her brother she gave it willingly; he had been her nurse
+in babyhood, her friend and companion in childhood, and was now her
+protector. In every plan of these young people he considered his sister
+first. If she had an escort, he invited some other girl to go with him; if
+not, he took his sister. The girl never manifested any interest in young
+men beyond their ability to dance well. She would find a dozen reasons for
+not dancing if she found herself on the floor with an awkward dancer.
+
+This group of twenty-two young men and women, all from homes that would
+bar the door to charity, even when suffering, were fairly representative of
+the social standard of the better part of the wage-earning world of New
+York. Among them was the independent girl, the one who had no desire to be
+sought in marriage; she saw the worries of her sisters married to men
+having small and uncertain wages; saw the wearing side of motherhood rather
+than its joys. She skillfully kept her young men friends as friends,
+changing from one to the other as soon as she saw the line of friendship
+being crossed. The girl who never won attention till she wooed it was among
+them; the girl who was treated discourteously or neglected was one of them.
+The girl who was sought for exhibition because she dressed well, yet who
+never roused any deeper feeling, was there, for some of the men were very
+observant, and had standards of style for the girls they escorted.
+
+[Illustration: THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.]
+
+There was the young man who willfully played with a girl's feelings; the
+young man who openly exhibited the love he had awakened, but to which he
+did not respond; the girl whose adoration received indifferent treatment,
+yet who was never entirely cast aside by the man too selfish to marry. In
+that company there was one couple who were sentimental in their actions;
+they would sit and hold hands, if permitted, rather than dance. As soon as
+it was discovered that their actions were influencing others, they were
+given the choice to restrain the expression of their affection in public
+completely or resign. The lesson was effectual. When it was seen that one
+of the young men was very deeply interested in one of the young women, that
+she was only semi-conscious of his interest, yet enjoyed it, while not at
+all interested in him, just a few words, pointing out how unkind it was to
+permit his interest to develop and how unfair to let him spend money for
+her when she never meant to hold any relation but that of friend, changed
+her attitude toward him. She made the young man understand her position.
+More than that, she gave her lesson to the other girls, and escorts were
+changed frequently; groups arranged to go to the theater instead of
+couples. As one girl put it, "We don't want any nonsense." Yet several
+marriages have occurred among these members, the new homes making centers
+of social interest for the others. The babies are objects of deepest
+interest to all, and it is a lesson to see the ease and freedom with which
+even the young men will hold them. Much is said of the "little mothers,"
+but the "little fathers" are as unselfish and devoted a part of the family
+life in the tenements as the little mothers. When a great, strong young man
+picks up a baby with the ease of a woman, is interested in its ills of the
+moment, one is grateful for the hours that, as a child, he spent as nurse;
+sees the beauty of strength and tenderness, and the humanizing effect of
+the maternal in the character of a boy whose character must be molded by
+the environment of a tenement-house region.
+
+The rapidity with which a complete change of standard of manners can be
+attained amazed those who watched these young people. Outdoor life was
+possible to them only on Sunday. When first the trips on the railroad
+began, the noise, freedom, constant changing of seats mortified those who
+chaperoned the group. The journeys began in the spring. One Sunday evening
+in November, when returning from a nutting party, a group of young people
+entered the car laughing, pushing, slapping one another. The young men and
+women who had been going to the country almost every Sunday for the summer
+looked in amazement at one another, and with very evident disapproval at
+the new group. Yet they had offended, if offense can be committed in
+perfect innocence, in just that way many times a few months before. It is
+this adaptability, this quickness of comprehension of the little things,
+that give the outward stamp, that make the American wage-earning young
+people so intensely interesting, so wonderful in social achievement.
+
+These young people were all Americans, of Christian parentage, as the word
+means, not Hebrews. The young women worked in shops with girls of Hebrew
+parentage. There were deep race antagonisms, due to many causes, but
+principally to the willingness of the Hebrews to accept any wages and work
+anywhere and any number of hours. These American girls grew to have the
+deepest sympathy with the girls of Hebrew birth when they found that many
+Hebrew parents coerced, while all regulated, the marriage of their
+daughters. That parents would dare to assume such authority in so personal
+a matter as marriage aroused the most extravagant terms of condemnation.
+One listening could well believe the hopelessness of trying to make one of
+these girls marry against her will.
+
+No greater contrast could be conceived than the entire independence of
+these girls in their social relations, which they did not view as a
+privilege but considered a right. Beyond the fact that some of them must be
+at home at ten or half-past, there was no law but their own will. This
+freedom is one of the most serious influences in the life of working girls
+in New York. Were it not for their common sense and the knowledge of life
+thrust on them when children, the effect would be most disastrous for the
+country. As it is, in certain ways young men and women retain the frankness
+of childhood in their intercourse. One realizes what perfect equality
+between the sexes is when mingling freely with them. Doubtless this comes
+from playing in the street together from earliest childhood, with no favors
+asked or conceded because one is a girl, and the impossibility of privacy.
+This last is the saddest fact in the life of tenement-house children.
+
+At the lower rounds of the social ladder in the wage-earning world the
+mother and baby are inseparable, if the mother does not drink. Night and
+day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ignorance, but cared for.
+Often everything else is neglected. When the baby sleeps, the mother is too
+tired to work, too indifferent. When awake, the baby insists on being held.
+One is frequently reminded of the story of the woman whose moan when her
+baby died was: "What excuse can I give John now?" Yet the day that baby is
+able to walk alone on the street the mother loosens her hold. The baby
+finds its freedom limited only by its ability to remain upright, and to
+return to its home for meals and at night. "Throw me the key and a piece of
+bread," is often the extent of its demands from the sidewalk. True, the
+mother knows every woman in the block will be, in an emergency, a mother.
+The child learns to care for itself; it makes less and less demands on the
+mother, who may even now have another baby compelling all her thought and
+time. Above this scale, where home-making assumes importance, the child
+remains longer under the mother's care; is watched when on the street by
+glances from the window; is sent to school, and some oversight maintained
+over its school life; but the wage-earning period means emancipation from
+oversight often even at this level. Hundreds of girls start out and find
+work for the first time without any evident responsibility on the part of
+even good mothers. No amount of familiarity with this exercise of freedom
+deadens the horror of it to the outsider. Women, mothers of attractive
+daughters, will not know the street on which the daughters work. After one
+of the most disastrous fires in New York, in which many working girls
+perished, four mothers notified the police the next day that their
+daughters had disappeared. It was the failure to trace the girls and the
+advertising of their disappearance that led, through companions who had
+escaped from the building, to the awful conclusion that these four had
+perished in the flames.
+
+Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to go to the place where the
+daughter finds employment; but here, as in everything else in life, that
+which is deemed the more important receives attention. Perhaps it is the
+habit of trust, or indifference, that governs mothers' activities.
+
+A girl will make intimate friendships unhindered, unguided by mothers who
+act up to the measure of their comprehension of the duties of a mother.
+Girls are admitted to the homes who are unknown outside of the workshop;
+they work with the daughter; no other background is known. The mother knows
+that other mothers are accepting her daughters on the same basis of
+knowledge. For their young men friends there may be, but as frequently
+there will not be, any greater sense of responsibility than for the girl
+friends. In homes where the income would seem to demand a sense of social
+responsibility it is found wanting, and young people come and go
+unhindered. If there are two or more young wage-earners in the family,
+their conversation may bring knowledge of what they are doing, where they
+are going. But they also make compacts at concealments of disobedience
+where there are laws to be obeyed.
+
+[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND.]
+
+The world has been shocked by the tragedies of death and disgrace that came
+to the homes of two young working girls within the past year. In each case
+the father and mother had gone to bed with the daughters out in the night,
+where they did not know; one a girl of eighteen, the other less. The
+"cadet" system would never exist were the parents of every girl alert to
+train and guard her the more closely because she was a working girl.
+
+Until by some direct process the control of daughters and of sons is made
+desirable, and then natural in the wage-earners' homes, the problem of
+family life in the tenements will remain unsolved. It is a question
+sometimes whether, and sometimes it is very evident, that by the giving up
+of wages to the parents the freedom of the workers, even though but
+children, from obedience and parental oversight is purchased.
+
+Those who know working girls know how high is the average of morality.
+Years will go by in intimate relations with the same group of girls and no
+tragedy will mar it; no echo of tragedy among their friends. The hardness
+with which even the suggestion of looseness is treated in any group of
+working girls is simply an expression of self-preservation. A group of
+sixty girls, earning the lowest wages and living under the worst
+conditions, were watched five years and one girl fell. As one goes over her
+history from birth, any other result would seem a miracle. A girl arrested
+gave the first name and address of one of the girls in this factory. The
+case was reported in the papers. By an unfortunate circumstance, the
+working girl living at that number was away from the factory two days at
+this time. When she learned of the connection that had been made because of
+the chance use of her Christian name and her address, she told a lie as to
+where she was at the time of that arrest. The other girls struck until she
+was discharged. The girl was innocent of everything but the lie;
+investigation proved this. The girls would not recede from their position;
+work had to be found for the girl elsewhere. She was publicly marked. They
+could not convince everybody of her innocence; lots of people believed the
+story, and they would not work with her; go back and forth with her.
+
+A room was hired as a lunch-room for these girls. They brought their own
+lunches and paid a small amount of dues, which were used to pay for tea
+served daily. The projectors of this little enterprise were girls of wealth
+and social position; three were at the lunch-room every day. By
+representing themselves as friends of the projectors to the caretaker, two
+representatives of a "yellow journal" gained access to the room. One, a
+woman, engaged the caretaker in conversation for some time in the hall,
+getting all the information she could give her. The Sunday edition of that
+paper contained an illustration of the room filled with wretched-looking
+girls, while young women holding up trailing skirts were passing cups. The
+text was as far from the truth as the picture. The working girls absolutely
+refused to go to the lunch-room again. At last they agreed that if the
+paper would publish a true account--that they provided their own lunches
+and paid dues, and waited on themselves--they would go back. The paper
+refused. Two of those girls would never enter the rooms again.
+
+The working girl has suffered quite as much at the hands of yellow
+journalism as the woman of wealth and social position. Not one of these
+girls went to school until she was fourteen; nor during any year since she
+began working had she earned on an average more than $3.50 per week. Yet
+they had social standards to maintain, and compelled recognition of them by
+those who opened opportunities to them.
+
+The inspiring fact remains that the standard of home life in ethics, as in
+necessities, is raising. Without doubt much of this is due to the
+improvement in the class of readers used in our public schools. They are
+not perfect in the matter of selection, but they carry messages to the
+hearts, as well as the heads, of the children, few of whom would pass an
+examination on their contents. Even the primary grades introduce the
+children to the best thoughts of all time, and the crumbs, at least, are
+carried to the homes.
+
+The girls who belong to the working-girls' club carry with them everywhere
+the influence that is molding their characters to a brighter type of
+American womanhood. The Settlements soon become centers of education
+through the social activities they make possible to the people. They
+surpass the clubs in this, that boys and girls, young men and women, each
+have in them the center that makes possible social occasions that are
+within their means and under rightful guides; together men and women are
+trained socially. The Settlements have been in existence long enough to
+have the children that were the first friends of the Residents now the
+fathers and mothers of children. The years of contact show results in the
+homes established, in the kind of care and the ambitions held for the
+children still babies. Wages have not greatly changed from those earned by
+the fathers of these new home-makers; but money represents different
+values. The kindergarten is the first thing demanded for their children,
+and the seeds sown in the minds of these young mothers bear fruit one
+hundred-fold because it is prepared.
+
+The kindergarten mother clubs have also borne fruit in the homes where even
+the youngest child has gone beyond the kindergarten's age. These mothers
+learn for the first time the need of sympathy; of living with the children
+through every period of growth; of sharing and of making together a home.
+The result is, the homes gain in moral fiber and moral purpose. The schools
+and the homes are brought into close relation through these beginnings, and
+the child finds its interests a unit, and home the place where its whole
+good is of vital importance. The mother establishes the home often on the
+basis of contrast. "It shall not be what mine was; their lives shall not be
+what mine was when I was a child."
+
+The churches, many of them, provide for the social life of their people;
+these social activities must be of a character that wins those who have the
+least to contend with in themselves, who find a pleasure and inspiration in
+religious life, which often is far more a matter of temperament than of
+spiritual development.
+
+One sees the highest expression of spiritual development in lives apart
+from the Church as well as in the Church. This it is that develops a
+feeling of reverence for any movement having for its object the bettering
+of the social life of the people. One learns that every vulgarity that
+becomes obnoxious; every freedom that is brought within the bounds of
+restraint by new standards of education and refinement; every influence set
+in motion because of the spiritual perception of the answer to the
+question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" means spiritual life growing toward
+that of the Master of time, whose laws are but two for the guiding of men,
+"Love the Lord thy God," "Thy neighbor as thyself;" and these make neither
+cross nor steeple necessary, for they may be obeyed in the heart and guide
+the life wherever it is lived.
+
+[Illustration: LIBRARY DAY AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+FINANCIAL RELATIONS IN FAMILIES.
+
+
+The women of education who attempted to make the conditions of
+working-men's families better, found their own education advanced, their
+values of essentials greatly modified in some respects, greatly enlarged in
+others. This was due to the bravery, the unselfishness, the contradictions
+of character forced on their attention through the natural, familiar
+intercourse made possible through neighborhood and club relations.
+
+Probably the most astonishing experience in working-girls' club life is the
+revelation of the entire lack of self-consciousness on the part of working
+girls as to anything remarkable in their giving up wages not only week
+after week, but year after year, for the benefit of their families. The
+closer one gets to the poorest paid of the working girls, the more common
+is this unconscious unselfishness. In fact, the girl at this level who
+would attempt to hold or even to introduce a business relation in her
+family relation, would find herself an object of contempt, even when the
+personal habits of those who controlled the use of the money she earned
+were of such a character as to certainly mean waste of the money, perhaps
+worse.
+
+However one's judgment may at times condemn this unselfishness and
+recognize in it a positive evil, one's heart is thrilled by the spirit of
+loyalty and devotion of which it is the evidence. Three sisters belonged to
+a working-girls' club. They were all employed in one establishment and
+earned good wages, yet they never had clothes that made them even
+comfortable. It was a mystery. They did not belong to the race which too
+frequently make thrift a vice, but were descendants of one the world counts
+thriftless. The months passed on. One of the sisters became indispensable
+to the club. She had the rarest tact, while straightforward and frank. When
+the second winter came, the pressure of life on these girls was very
+evident. How to relieve it, how even to approach the subject without
+appearing intrusive and meddlesome, was the wearing problem of the club
+directors. After the holidays the influence of one of the directors was
+asked by one of the sisters in behalf of a brother. Then the cause of the
+pressure was unconsciously revealed. There were five brothers and a father
+in the family.
+
+The story unfolded. For years these three girls had supported the family;
+the six men had always been the victims of cruel "bosses." Worthy,
+industrious, anxious to work, looking for work all the time, they never
+succeeded in finding work under conditions that made it possible for them
+to continue. The years of self-sacrifice had not shaken the faith of these
+sisters in the smallest degree. "What would happen if your foreman would
+become arbitrary and cross?" was asked. The reply revealed the whole
+conception of woman's relation to life as they held it. "It's different
+with women; they have to bear things."
+
+Another year passed without any change, except that the sisters grew old
+faster than they should. A quiet, determined effort was made to influence
+these girls to pay board to their mother instead of giving all their wages.
+They listened to the argument that as long as they continued their present
+system the brothers would not work steadily. The sisters listened, but the
+system did not change. Every penny was handed to the mother for
+disbursement.
+
+One morning in the early spring, three years after these girls had joined
+the club, word came that the sister who had grown dear to the club
+directors, to every member of the club, was dead. She had dropped to the
+floor at her bench the day before, and died in the night. "Greater love
+hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." The
+sacrifice was complete. Standing in the room of death with the six
+able-bodied men for whom this girl had given up her life, the sacrifice
+seemed barren, for its fruits had been garnered in her own character and
+had gone out of this life.
+
+A year later the mother sent for one of the directors of the club to have
+her plead with the sisters remaining that they would give her their wages
+as formerly. "They only pay board now; they refuse to do anything for the
+poor boys. 'Twas a bad day when ---- died. Shure, she gave me every cent.
+Not one did she keep back. Ever since she died, the girls just pay board,
+not a cent more. See how comfortable they are. They bought waterproofs,
+both of them, last week, and Jim has no overcoat. ---- would have bought
+him an overcoat."
+
+"Yes, doubtless she would. I remember the winter before she died she wore a
+spring jacket all winter, and that her shoes had been broken for weeks
+before she died." "Shure, I know." Tears fell from the woman's eyes, and
+her face bore every evidence of sorrow. "The boys could not get work that
+winter. God knows they tried. They had to have clothes, and ---- was a good
+daughter. 'Twas a bad day for me when she died." The mother had not the
+slightest conception of the sacrifice her daughter had made--a sacrifice
+that had cost her her life. Her thought was for her sons; their comforts
+were to be secured through the daughters, who were a secondary
+consideration.
+
+When her visitor protested against the sisters working to support the
+brothers in idleness, the mother was indignant. When she tried to show the
+woman that if the boys were forced by hunger and cold to go to work it
+would be their moral salvation, the mother insisted that they did try to
+get work, but that it was their "fate" to have unreasonable "bosses," who
+made it impossible for them to work under them.
+
+"Do you think the girls always work under conditions that are easy?"
+
+"No; but it is easier for a woman to stand a hard 'boss,'" was the mother's
+answer, without any expression of sympathy. Again she urged that the
+visitor use her influence with the two sisters for them to go back to their
+old method of giving the mother their wages. When the visitor refused, the
+amazement of the woman at her refusal was pathetic. When the visitor
+confessed that she was largely responsible for the change in the girls' use
+of their wages, the mother's indignation rose to the point of abuse. That
+her boys were robbed was the idea fastened in her mind. That the club was
+the enemy of that home was the mother's conviction.
+
+The mental attitude of this mother is by no means unusual. It is a common
+thing to find mothers who insist on controlling the wages of daughters who
+make no exactions in regard to the wages of sons. The effect is to lessen
+the self-respect of the girls and the sense of personal responsibility of
+the boys. In the family referred to the experiment of paying board to the
+mother was watched carefully. It was a success. The effect on the girls was
+positive. They developed a sense of personal responsibility; they grew more
+dignified and more reliable; above all, they developed self-respect. The
+fight was a hard one, but the moral victory was won. The brothers either
+found work under men who were fair, or they learned to endure control and
+discipline under a "boss," which was probably what they needed. The girls
+grew to have a care for their father's and mother's appearance and bought
+them clothes. Never as long as the mother lived did her feeling of her
+resentment against working-girls' clubs die out.
+
+After her death, the father and brothers agreed to pay one of the sisters
+so much each week if she would stay home and keep the house. The sister did
+it, though it meant hours of loneliness, and, from her point of view,
+dependence. She had taken courses in cooking and sewing in the club; she
+had listened to talks on sanitation and hygiene; she had learned the value
+of money through the management of her own wages. She created for that
+family a far better home than it had ever known under the shiftless,
+thriftless management of an undisciplined mother.
+
+The daughter was able to pay more rent from the money given to support the
+house, and the pride and self-respect of the family were greatly increased
+by the possession of a parlor, which was furnished on the installment plan
+out of the weekly sum paid to the sister. The home became a social center
+for the friends. The boys bring even their girl friends to their home,
+because it possesses more attractions than any other place to which they
+have access. A banjo lies on top of a piano--hired--and two of the boys
+take music lessons. In a family of seven wage-earners, even though the
+wages of each may be small, the combined income is large in proportion to
+the standards of outlay, and secures more than comfort, if rightly managed.
+
+In this family a home maintained at a social level is of greater importance
+than clothes, and all work to keep it. Sacrifices are made to buy things
+for the home by every member of the family. The sisters are to these
+brothers the finest type of women, and no girl whom they meet quite comes
+to their level. The sisters will never marry. The home, the father and
+brothers fill their cup of interest. There is still a latent suspicion that
+men are non-dependable, and they must be in a position to meet emergencies;
+the unjust "boss" may appear at any time, and they may be needed. Their
+brothers are a trust and must be guarded.
+
+A visit was made to a home in which a girl of sixteen was dying of
+tuberculosis. The plaint of the mother, even in the presence of the girl,
+was, "She was such a good child. She always brought home her envelope
+unopened." To the visitor this was at the time incomprehensible, as the
+advantages of the envelope to her were two-fold, that it could be opened as
+well as closed. The child had worked nearly three years, had been paid her
+wages in a sealed envelope, which she always gave to her mother as she
+received it. This is the measure of goodness for husband and child in
+thousands of working-men's homes. This mother was unconsciously brutal.
+Whether from lack of sensitiveness, or because of a life spent in fighting
+just homelessness and hunger, to the very last hour of her child's life her
+moan was, "What will I do without her wages?"
+
+Not once did that little girl hear her mother give expression to any sense
+of personal loss for her companionship. The child herself became weighed
+down with the sense of responsibility, and resented the lack of strength
+because it added to her mother's burdens. This was her regret, the only
+thing she mentioned: "I wish I could have helped mother till the others
+grew up. I've cost such a lot being sick so long and not earning anything."
+That was her estimate of life at sixteen.
+
+A son went wrong in that family, and as the time approached for his return
+home, the mother moved, lest he should be annoyed by questions and comments
+on his absence by neighbors. No power could be brought to bear on that
+mother to make her move that the daughter might sleep in a room having an
+outside window. One influence came within the range of her experience, the
+other was beyond her comprehension, and her daughter died in an absolutely
+dark, unventilated bedroom, in which she had slept eight years.
+
+She was a dainty girl, in spite of the bad taste with which she dressed,
+this second victim. She floated, rather than walked, and her cheeks were
+like carnations. The girls in the club all liked her, and their young men
+friends at the receptions showed at once how attractive they found this
+girl. She was reticent as to her affairs, except in the question of work.
+When out of work, she did not hesitate to speak of it and ask to be
+remembered if any of the club members knew where she could get work. At
+last she came quietly one morning to the director and said the doctor told
+her she must stop working for three months. The expression in her eyes
+filled the listener with fear. In a voice that trembled, she said: "I am
+the only one working. Mother has a baby and cannot work, and--and"--her
+voice lowered and her eyes fell--"my father will not be home for three
+months from last Monday. He got into trouble. He would not if he had been
+sober," she added, in proud defence. Two months later the end was near, and
+the girl knew it. All that could be done under the conditions had been
+done. It was little, for an unreasonable, drunken mother had to be reckoned
+with all the time. She would stand railing against the girl for not going
+to work when the girl could not walk across the floor for lack of strength.
+The girl was under eighteen, and her mother was the controlling power in
+her life.
+
+One of the young men who had been frequently a guest at the club receptions
+worked in an office near the girl's home. He passed one day as she sat by
+the window, and she saw him. "If he knew where I lived, he'd come in and
+see me," she said with a smile, full of friendship as the young man turned
+down the street. "I'll run after him. I know he would like to see you. He
+asked about you at the club last night." She clutched convulsively at her
+visitor's hand, saying: "Oh, don't! I wouldn't for the world have him see
+this place." She closed her eyes, after a searching glance about the room.
+Of course, the mother broke out in wailing about how hard she tried to do
+for the children and how ungrateful they were--ashamed of their home.
+
+The girl gathered her strength and sat up, her eyes blazing with
+indignation. "Mamma, I'm dying. I'll not be here another week. There are
+three more girls; I don't want them to live through what I have." Slowly,
+solemnly, she continued: "You have not been good. Papa earned good wages,
+enough to keep us all comfortable; you know what you did with the money. He
+stopped giving it to you, and you got what you wanted on credit. You kept
+that up. You know what happened to him. I went to work. You know what you
+did with my money. I could not keep it from you even when I knew the little
+ones were hungry, for you beat me and took it, unless I had spent it for
+groceries and meat and coal before I came home pay-day. I heard what the
+doctor said, that I was dying because I have not had food and have to sleep
+in that hole, or holes like it." She pointed to the horrible bedroom. "I am
+dying. You are planning with the insurance money to have a big funeral.
+Have your own friends, but not one of the girls from the club or their
+friends, even when I am dead. I don't want them to come here. Promise me,"
+she panted to her visitor, "that you will not let them come." The promise
+was given.
+
+The mother was shrieking, whether from grief, or rage, or remorse the
+visitor could not determine. That night death came.
+
+The girl was buried from the church she attended. When the club members
+were requested not to go to the house, there was scarcely concealed
+indignation. "Did she ever ask you to call on her when she was well?" There
+was no assent. "Have you any right to intrude there when she is silent? The
+church is open to all." No comment was made. At the church early in the
+morning the young men and women friends met. The mother could not even that
+morning hold herself in control. The girl's secret was out, and a great
+sympathy was added to the love her friends bore her. Her memory was an
+incense because of what her life must have been. Her unconscious
+unselfishness, her devotion to her little brothers and sisters, was
+revealed to them when they saw her mother. Good fathers and mothers found
+new expressions of affection for awhile at least, while the sharpness of
+contrast stood out between the dead girl's parents and their own, her life
+and theirs.
+
+[Illustration: A STREET ON THE EAST SIDE.]
+
+The girl who presents the most difficult problem in club life is the one
+whose social impulses are dominant. Noise, activity, excitement, seem
+inseparable from her presence. This type of girl arouses enthusiastic
+friends. She leads because she is daring; because she does not in any
+experience question results. One such girl had been studied for months.
+There was a superficial response to the efforts to win her regard, but the
+response was too transparent not to be understood. The girl would speak to
+any man who looked at her. One day she was playing "tag" with the other
+girls in front of the factory where she worked. A rag-picker pushing a cart
+made some remark as he passed. The girl, Molly, gave a spring and alighted
+on the man's shoulders like a cat. She clung there. He began to run, but he
+could not throw her off. She twined her fingers in his hair, made him turn
+back and carry her to the place where her shrieking, laughing companions
+stood. She sprang off. Still holding the man, she made him get down on his
+knees on the curb to the girls and apologize. Like a bird she flew to the
+place where he had dropped his push-cart, and, pumping the handle up and
+down to make the bells jingle, she brought it back to the man, still
+exhausted by his unwonted exertions, and with a mocking bow placed the
+handle of the cart in his hand. Then she stood up straight and ordered him
+to move on, adding: "If you ever show your nose around here again, you'll
+get more than you got this time." The man ran as if for his life.
+
+Molly then turned and saw the friend whom she had promised she would be
+more quiet on the street. Her face crimsoned as she came toward her. "I
+could not help it. You don't know what he said. He won't never speak to
+another girl minding her own business as he spoke to us. I won't tell you
+what he said; it was too bad." The girl was about seventeen years old. She
+had cut off her hair, and it was bleached. She wore the gayest hats, which
+only served to emphasize the poverty and shabbiness of the rest of her
+clothes. One day she passed her friend's house without a jacket. She ran,
+holding her hands under her arms. Her jacket had been bought with money
+earned by working overtime, a result secured by the most persistent effort
+and argument.
+
+Now the jacket was gone, and the slack season coming. As five o'clock
+approached, the girl's self-appointed guardian took her station at the
+window to watch for the girl on her way home. She came skipping along,
+slapping her arms to keep warm. She entered the house reluctantly in
+response to the call, "Where is your jacket, Molly?"
+
+"I ain't cold. I ain't a bit cold."
+
+"Where is your jacket?"
+
+"Really and truly, I ain't cold. I'm thin, but I don't feel the cold as
+much as other girls. I ain't a mite cold."
+
+It was impossible for the girl to stand still. She was shivering with cold,
+and her teeth, which were beautiful, were chattering. After a time the
+explanation was given.
+
+There were five in family. The girl's mother, a stepfather about fifteen
+years younger than the mother, a brother one year younger than the girl,
+and a feeble-minded sister of fourteen. The girl was the only regular
+wage-earner in the family. The brother was a worthless fellow, who bore
+every evidence of degeneracy and rarely worked. The stepfather drank, and
+worked only occasionally. Molly earned six dollars a week, except in the
+slack seasons, two a year, when she earned about three dollars a week for
+four weeks each time. She began working when she was fourteen, and had
+never kept back one penny of her wages. Her mother had bought her new hats,
+but in all her life no other new garment except the jacket had ever been
+bought for her. She never asked any questions about the money, but she
+supposed the rent was paid. When she reached home the night before
+everything was on the sidewalk, and her feeble-minded sister was watching
+them. The jacket was the only thing owned on which money could be raised;
+it was pawned. "Molly, may I call on your mother?" A reluctant consent was
+given.
+
+The home now was in a rear basement, the ceiling just above the level of
+the yard. The mother and husband occupied the bedroom; Molly and her sister
+slept on a narrow lounge covered with Brussels carpet, every spring broken.
+It was a series of humps. It was impossible to sit on it. In reply to a
+question, the mother acknowledged that no provision was made to make it
+more comfortable. The brother slept on the floor. The rooms were dirty and
+overcrowded. Food was of necessity poor, and because of the mother's
+indifference and ignorance, was poorer than it need have been.
+
+This was what Molly received for six dollars a week. The moment the mother
+knew who the visitor was, she began abusing the girl. One special cause of
+offense was the keeping back of overtime money to buy a new jacket. She
+evidently imagined that she did not get all the girl's money every week.
+When it was pointed out to her that the new jacket had paid half a month's
+rent, she refused to be mollified, because the money paid for it would have
+paid the rent for a month and a half. Of course, this extra money would
+have gone like the regular wages if it had been given to the woman.
+
+The walls were covered with pretty advertising cards and pictures cut from
+papers. Not a vulgar nor ugly picture was on the walls. "Who put up those
+pictures?" "Molly. Shure, that's all she's good for when she's home,
+a-cutting and putting up these things." This was one more charge against
+the girl. Evidently the girl gave her wages, and gave them willingly; but
+that ended her interest in her home and measured the mother's in her.
+
+It was decided to move the family into one of the model tenements and
+furnish a room for the girl and her sister, paying the difference in rent
+for one year, to see what the result would be in health and morals in that
+family. When the proposition was made one evening to Molly, her face
+lighted and she emitted a sigh of perfect consent. But the light died out,
+and an expression of almost self-pity supplanted it.
+
+"No, I must not let you do it. It would be lovely to have a room for Katie
+and me alone. I must not let you do it." She was silent for some minutes;
+then, with eyes cast down, she said in a quiet voice that indicated that
+persuasion was useless: "I know them houses. They're awful nice. I'd like
+to live in them. They're awful particular. They won't let no noisy people
+in. They make them move right out." Then slowly, with burning cheeks, she
+said in barely distinct tones: "Mamma is noisy sometimes, and when she's
+noisy she gets into fights with people. There ain't no use of moving in
+there; they'd not let us stay. Then, Billy"--the stepfather--"and I fight.
+I never speaks to him, excepts when he speaks ugly to Katie or mamma. He's
+drunk a lot now, most all the time, and then he's ugly to them. He ain't to
+me, 'cos he knows I'd break his head; but he is to them, and then I has to
+shut him up. I ain't spoke to him since he struck mamma, just after they
+was married."
+
+"But your wages give him a home and food."
+
+"Yes, I know it, but I can't help that, 'cos he's married to mamma and must
+be where she is." There was silence again, and then the girl continued:
+"Mamma didn't do it so much till she married him; she's worse now. I wish
+I was dead;" and the head of many shades was buried with the limp,
+"frowzled" feathers in the sofa cushion. "No, I can earn enough to keep
+them where they are. I must not move; but it would be lovely," she added
+with a sob.
+
+A couple of weeks later she came in the evening. It was raining hard. After
+a moment's silence, she announced, with shining face: "We have the
+loveliest baby at our house, born last night week. I wanted to tell you
+before, but I had to do the work night and morning. He's lovely." She
+fussed at her pocket and brought out a pair of baby shoes of worsted. "I
+got them with some money I earned overtime. You say I ought to get what I
+want with that money." The eyes of the hostess followed the lines of
+Molly's dress to her feet. Her swollen, purple foot was seen through the
+broken upper of her shoe. Molly was looking with pride and love at the tiny
+shoes on her knee. "I named the baby Willie, and I'm his godmother," she
+added with pride, without the slightest conception of the relation between
+"Billy" and "Willie."
+
+"Billy? Oh, he's drunk; been drunk a week. I ain't let him in yet; I'm
+goin' to wait until the baby's bigger and mamma's up. She'll let him in,"
+she added, with disgust.
+
+Matters grew worse with the advent of the new baby, for Molly had to fight
+with her mother to get it cared for. At last it died, to Molly's pathetic
+grief. The mother had consented to Katie's removal to an institution, where
+she could receive care and training. Molly was persuaded she owed a duty to
+herself. No impression was made until her mother had been arrested twice.
+Then Molly consented to leave home. It was deemed best that she should
+contribute part of the rent to insure her mother a home and to maintain a
+natural human tie. Molly did this _for three years_. Then she married a man
+controlling a good business. Molly is a quiet, devoted wife. She married a
+man old enough to be her father. When the wisdom of this was questioned,
+she said, with emphasis and a nod of her curly head: "No young man for me,
+thank you. Look at Billy!"
+
+It was Friday morning--a warm, sultry morning in August. The bell rang. A
+mother in black and a young daughter of eighteen were in the
+reception-room. The daughter had evidently been crying. "I've come to tell
+yer that Annie can't go to the country to-morrow. She's sick'm. She's cried
+all night. Her brother was discharged'm. He do be havin' a bad man for a
+'boss.' He's discharged'm, and Annie can't go to the country with the girls
+to-morrow. I can't spare her wages. It's all I got. Shure, if I could get
+work in washin', or anything to do, I'd do it, but I can't'm. I'll look all
+the week; and the boy'll get somethin', perhaps. She can't go this week;
+will yer let her go next? Shure, the rent is due, and her wages is all I
+got for three of us. Yer can go to work to-day, even if it be a bit late,
+and yer can go next week to the country."
+
+[Illustration: A COOKING CLASS OF MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.]
+
+"Oh, mamma! the girls talk nothing but country. I can't go to-day," was the
+sobbing response.
+
+The girl did not go that summer. There was no room for her until September.
+By that time the work at the factory had increased and not one girl could
+be spared. Patiently Annie commented: "It wouldn't be any good if they
+could spare me. My brother is out of work yet. He's awfully unlucky."
+
+The quiet heroism of thousands of working girls can be appreciated only by
+those who become familiar with their lives in the natural intercourse of
+club life. There is, of course, the other type of girl--the girl who
+insists on spending the major portion, if not all, of her wages for
+clothes; who assumes no responsibility for the family, and who has conceded
+to her the right to spend her money for clothes. She would make life most
+uncomfortable if she were compelled to share what she earned, even when the
+family live under conditions that make the home merely a place of
+shelter--conditions that make even decency impossible. The fathers and
+mothers seemingly have no rights that this type of girl feels she is bound
+to respect. When such girls marry, the mothers will do the washing for
+their daughters, hold the menial relation, and neither mother nor daughter
+questions the justice of the relation. Sometimes the daughter will pay the
+mother for doing the washing, "to," as she expresses it, "help her mother
+out." Such families usually cannot be helped through any influence but the
+evolution that comes through environment and neighborhood development.
+There is a superficial difference in the social development of such parents
+and children. The parents concede the higher position to their children,
+and the children take it as a matter of right.
+
+The wages of skilled workmen enable them to keep their children in school
+until they are sixteen or seventeen years old, if the children will stay.
+These fathers can support their families, but not dress them as they
+desire. The girls go to work for the sole purpose of dressing better than
+their fathers could dress them. This indulgence creates false standards,
+and is a serious blot on the American working-man's life. It prevents
+marriage. Both young men and young women understand that the wages of one
+cannot buy luxuries for two that the wages used for one bought. The army of
+clerks on small salaries increase yearly. This class, through association,
+develop tastes and standards of living that make impossible the
+establishment of homes on their incomes and at the same time the continued
+indulgence of developed tastes. No type of family develops less that adds
+to the wealth and attainment of the country than this type. The children
+are selfish; they marry; they discover that the wages that bought clothes
+to suit the extravagance of one is wholly inadequate to support a family.
+Discouragement, friction, ennui follow, and life becomes a grind, without
+hope, without inspiration. The second family slips backward, and it is but
+two generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves, with this difference,
+that the arms covered by the shirt sleeves of the third generation lack the
+muscles of the first, as the spirit lacks its moral fiber. It is this type
+of family that keeps alive the most vexing of social problems. The skilled
+working-man's family, the family of the small salaried men, present the
+most difficult problems not only in the use of money, but the use of time.
+Their daughters are often far more helpless than the daughters of men of
+wealth. During their school days, except in the exceptional home, they are
+not trained to do housework; do not learn to sew. As soon as school days
+end, office or store work begins, and then there is no time to learn the
+household arts. If in these homes the money-saving value of time were
+taught, independence and freedom impossible in wage-earning would be
+secured; the standards of life would be the essentials, not the
+non-essentials, that so often rob life of what is best and most valuable.
+
+Hundreds of girls become wage-earners because they dislike housework.
+Anything else is preferable. Dean Gill, of Barnard College, New York, in an
+address recently delivered, said there were three types of college girl:
+The girl who never could learn any of the arts of home-making. She advised
+that that girl be allowed to choose a career, and that men make no attempt
+to interfere with it. The girl who had in her the latent qualities that, if
+developed, would make her a home-maker. Such a girl it might be wise to
+keep home for one year between Sophomore and Junior year. And the third
+girl had the home-making gifts so well developed naturally that no amount
+of college training would modify them. This classification holds good of
+the daughters of men earning small salaries, wages, and no wages.
+
+As the Domestic Science department is developed in our public schools, the
+homes of working men of the better class will benefit by it. This distaste
+of housework will disappear, because it will have gained a place equal in
+value to geography and mental arithmetic, and these will have value because
+a knowledge of them adds to the home-maker's ability.
+
+There are homes of thrift and order where all must be wage-earners; homes
+where the claims of parents on the wages of children are conceded. There is
+a bank account, but on this the children have no claim, no matter how much
+of their wages may have gone into it, or how much educational opportunity
+they may have lost because its demands have been paramount. When the
+children marry they establish homes without any or very little help from
+their parents. They do not expect it. Home, food, clothes have been given
+them; all claims have been met. They are as free as their parents when they
+began. Usually there is a gift of a piece of furniture or table linen; but
+money to start a new bank account is not expected. Without doubt, much of
+the inability to use money to prepare for future emergencies is due to the
+fact that financially the new home-makers from these homes are infants in
+practical experience. The marvel is that they keep homes as well as they
+do, and meet the future as well as they do without planning to meet it.
+
+The second generation of this type of thrifty families rarely carry the
+habits of thrift of their parents into their home-making. The new financial
+freedom is a novelty, and presents in itself enjoyment that the new
+home-makers use. Here and there is a recovery from the danger of
+extravagance by a young couple, but the recovery is rarely so complete as
+to repeat the restrictions that the thrift of the parents compelled in
+their homes. The new generation demand better clothes and better furniture.
+Food and rent are regulated to meet these demands.
+
+One stands appalled sometimes at the degree of vitality, the hope and the
+cheerfulness that prevail in the homes protected only by the muscles of one
+man; what they can buy representing all that the home may have. There is no
+spirit of recklessness; there is no failure to comprehend the slight
+protection a husband and father can give, though he be skillful; but there
+is a sublime confidence in the future. Though familiar with suffering, if
+not personally, then sympathetically, with full knowledge of what sickness
+and death bring to other unprotected homes, such men and women, and there
+are thousands, live from youth to and through age cheerfully, happily,
+without any financial safeguard except against Potter's Field. This weekly
+insurance is kept up; the family live cheerfully, gayly, sometimes to the
+end.
+
+[Illustration: A MEETING OF NEIGHBORS.]
+
+One result of doling out small sums to young wage-earners, whether thrift
+or necessity is responsible, is disastrous, especially disastrous for young
+girls. It has seemed to the writer that if mothers and fathers could be
+brought to a realizing sense of its dangers, they would endure hunger
+rather than have their daughters exposed to it. After all, it could be
+averted by making a division of the money spent for dress. Girls are often
+dressed out of all proportion to the sums they earn, if a fair division of
+their wages were made, if the dignity of the daughters was protected by any
+degree of independence financially. Of course this disproportionate use of
+money is due to false standards that will only be regulated when the people
+on salaries learn to universally live true to the law of proportion in
+their expenditures.
+
+It seems to be a fixed idea that a girl is dependent on invitations from
+young men for her social pleasures. If she is not invited, it is not only
+her misfortune, but her fault; she should be more attractive. On the other
+hand, the young man is scarcely any better off than the young girl
+financially, yet he expects, and his world expects, that he shall bear, not
+only his own social expenses, but those of at least one girl. His impulse
+is to be chivalrous, for chivalry is not regulated by income nor deadened
+by pennilessness.
+
+It is oppressive at times to see how the lack of money prevents the natural
+association of young men and women; how often the young men are forced to
+give up the society of girls for this reason. Girls often unconsciously
+force invitations. As one goes down the scale, the girls invite themselves,
+where the young men have to bear the expenses. So small a matter as carfare
+will make a girl thrust herself on a young man's care. The girl will not
+resent indifference, even discourtesy and neglect, if only her aim is
+accomplished. The young men suffer the reflex of this attitude of mind, and
+their estimate of women is regulated by these misconceptions, and even
+their manner as husbands is regulated by this conception of the relations
+of the sexes, and wife and daughters suffer in consequence.
+
+The higher up one goes in the social scale, the less evident is this
+aggressiveness on the part of girls, and the more natural relation of man
+as the suitor is apparent. As girls are brought more familiarly under the
+guidance of women willing to discuss the financial relations that should be
+maintained between the unmarried of both sexes, the more careful girls
+become in permitting the expending of money by men for their social
+pleasures; especially so where the limitation of a man's resources is
+understood, or even suspected.
+
+How to make mothers put their daughters in an independent position where
+their pleasures are concerned is a very important and at the same time a
+very difficult question. When it is a question, as it often is, of the very
+necessities of life for a family and the allowing of money for the pleasure
+of a fun-loving daughter, necessities bear down the scale, even of justice,
+and dignity ceases to have value. For it must be remembered that the girl's
+wages, used for her exclusively, would often allow the exercise of
+independence in her social affiliations. This it is that makes Settlements
+so important in our social life. Here boys and girls do meet on a platform
+of independence, chaperoned naturally by those who know intimately the home
+surroundings, the social standards, the limitations of life in the regions,
+and all that creates environment, that most positive factor in the making
+of character. The social attitude of the young people who grow up in
+affiliation with the Settlements is found to differ greatly from that of
+young people untrammeled by oversight or influence that develops dignity.
+
+The influence of working-girls' clubs is positive in its effect on the
+majority of the members. The girls are taught in the clubs directly and
+indirectly. It is not only in the teaching of the home arts, but through
+lectures, talks, books and contact with women of education. The members
+often astonish those who know them best by their responses to their
+opportunities. This mental development makes them critical. The men they
+meet rarely have had their opportunities, and they suffer by comparison.
+The young women often find they have larger interests and sympathies; far
+clearer ideas of the responsibilities of life; are better equipped than the
+men they meet. Every girls' club shows members who thus develop. Often they
+will not marry. They are the support of one or both parents, now too old to
+work; they help married sisters and brothers; they are the prop and stay of
+all the halt and lame of their families; wiser and better guides for
+growing nephews and nieces than their own mothers and fathers. Frequently
+they are the most important helpers in club life, exerting a positive,
+upbuilding influence. Yet one always grows sad when thinking of them. Not
+thriftlessness, but unselfishness, may leave them penniless in old age.
+There is no place for them. Rarely is there a corner to which they are
+welcome in the tenement house; often even where there is love and gratitude
+there may not be space. Floor space often regulates the expression of love,
+where the heart may have unlimited space.
+
+[Illustration: THE READING ROOM AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+The saddest figure in tenement-house life is the unmarried woman who can no
+longer work and is dependent. In her effort to serve her people she may
+have played the critic, and that is remembered when her service is
+forgotten. It is this type of girl who by instinct refuses to accept
+attentions that mean the spending of money by men who cannot afford it.
+Their wages would, if used for themselves, have given social opportunities
+that did not involve obligations, but family demands seemed to make such
+use impossible. Sometimes the fun-loving sister will secure both shares.
+One is taken to a home of her own; the other left to carry the family
+burden, and no one questions why. If it is unanswered, it is attributed to
+the lack of attraction in the unmarried sister.
+
+There are homes in the tenements where the wages of the earners make a
+family income, in which all share equally, independent of the amount
+contributed. There is a bank account. It may be in the joint name of father
+and mother, but it is far more commonly the unquestioned property of the
+mother. The children look upon this as the protection of the parents from
+dependence in old age, should it not be called upon by illness or
+misfortune. Such families represent the highest moral development in
+tenement-house life. The children have been trained to appreciate
+educational opportunities, and school is through childhood an important
+factor in life. When the wage-earning period comes, night-school advantages
+are appreciated and used. When the work is chosen, some thought is given to
+the promise of future wage-earning powers by the acquiring of skill in that
+employment. The maximum wages possible at the present time is not the
+controlling element in the decision. The future is not sacrificed to the
+present. Such a home is kept, no matter how small, in a condition that
+makes social life in it possible.
+
+Hallways, street corners, store steps are not the only places for the
+development of the social instincts of the members of such families. After
+marriage the family is united, and home, though it be in the top of a
+tenement, is the Mecca for children and grandchildren.
+
+At the other end of the social scale in this world of workers is the
+happy-go-lucky family. Here the system of financial management has its
+faults, but much is found that is better than wisdom in money matters.
+Spending extravagantly when there is money, going without cheerfully when
+there is none. Why, the going without is scarcely treated even with the
+respect of making it a subject of conversation. The habit of sharing when
+any member has anything to share becomes a fixed habit, and "mine" and
+"thine" are not in the family vocabulary. The result is a close and
+inter-dependent family relation, of which the mother is the center. Often
+you will find that this mother has never had any clothes that would do to
+wear on the street, except to early Mass, if she is a Romanist, or that she
+rarely goes to church, if a Protestant, because her clothes are not what
+she calls "fit." Her life is the gospel of unselfishness, and she reaps the
+reward of love. One may fret at the waste, resent the short-sightedness,
+which means ignorance and shiftlessness; but there is so much pleasure in
+these families, so much that means happiness in them, that one even learns
+to forget the frets. They never grow beyond childhood in worldly wisdom,
+and childhood is always attractive. It is so rich in promise. Happiness is
+the cement of human life. Poverty does not change its power of holding the
+members together through weal or woe. There is a common inheritance of
+memories that never lose their power of cohesion where love and friendship
+reign in families.
+
+The people who do not know the lives of the working people can have no idea
+of the extent to which the working men trust their wives. The majority of
+working-men's wives are financially in a far more independent position than
+the wives even of capitalists, where the wives are without an independent
+income. Not only is the money given to the wives, but their use of the
+money is unquestioned. There is a constant revelation of the unselfishness
+of these men. Children will be overdressed, while the father will not even
+be comfortable; but there is no complaint, for the pride of the father is
+gratified. He, with the mother, has one standard--clothes. There are men
+who say frankly that they would waste the money if it were in their care;
+that their wives secure far better results than they could; that the
+practice of having only carfare, at the most lunch money, reduces greatly
+the much abused social habit of "treating." The married man who can
+"treat," it is generally conceded, is not fair to his family; he keeps his
+wages at their expense.
+
+Sometimes the observer marvels at the infinite patience of many men. Their
+wives drift. Neither money nor time is used for their families. A week's
+loss of work, and there is debt; a day's sickness, and to its suffering is
+added the knowledge that there is no money in reserve to meet this
+emergency, even though the wages insure it. While knowing well the cause,
+one resents the unjust conditions that control many marriages among the
+young people of the wage-earning class. The young women rarely have the
+knowledge that will enable them to do their share in establishing the home.
+The young man contracting a marriage without the prospect of supporting a
+home is condemned and his bride pitied; but there is little criticism if
+she spends years--years that mean discomfort and waste--in learning to do
+her part, if she ever learns.
+
+[Illustration: AFTER SCHOOL AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+The mental attitude of the wage-earners toward their income is confusing
+and yet interesting. In reply to any question of wages, the maximum sum is
+always given. The question of idle time does not enter into computations of
+the year's possible income and necessary outlays. This holds good before as
+well as after marriage. Work may last for only forty weeks of the year, but
+the other twelve, even among intelligent wage-earners, sometimes are not
+counted in their relation to income. This perhaps explains much that is
+counted as thriftlessness. It is, in fact, a failure to apply arithmetic to
+daily life.
+
+After all is said, no one who is familiar with the income of the
+wage-earning class can fail to see that the results obtained prove
+conclusively that the use of money in the well-regulated home is a fine
+art; that many working-men's wives could give post-graduate courses in the
+use of money to women who consider they have the right to teach them. Even
+waste and misuse are regulated by education and experience where there is
+even a modicum of intelligence. The second conclusion is that thrift under
+certain conditions is a vice that causes distinct deterioration of
+character. It should be combated as vigorously as thriftlessness. It can
+only be done by raising the standards of living; by creating other
+standards of value than money.
+
+But everywhere among the wage-earning people the independence of the wife
+in money matters is apparent.
+
+There are men who are niggardly and who hand out small sums daily, and
+never recognize that the wife has a right to anything beyond food and
+shelter, who grudgingly buy clothes when they must. These men are despised,
+spoken of with contempt as not being good fathers or husbands, and their
+wives are openly pitied. But the mass of working men place their wives in a
+perfectly independent position by making them the absolute disbursers of
+their incomes. The small shopkeepers, to all intents and purposes, treat
+their wives as partners. The wives work with them, sharing their knowledge,
+their responsibilities, and appear as joint owner in the bank account. The
+wife usually is the safe until the money goes to the bank account.
+
+When a wife is a good financial manager, she is the head of the house,
+whose reign is never questioned. "Her children rise up and call her
+blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her," though the Book of
+Proverbs may be unknown. This financial independence of the wives of
+working men develops the spirit of independence and aggressiveness that so
+often disturbs and upsets the plans of the woman who would do them good,
+and is the cause of the charge of ingratitude that is often made against
+the women of the tenement-house regions. It is scarcely natural to develop
+gratitude for efforts made in the wrong direction. Poverty has its degrees,
+as has wealth. There are families living in tenements whose conditions
+represent wealth when contrasted with that of their neighbors. One fact
+remains. Both women do not need the same opportunities, the same help. The
+student of the management of wages in a tenement-house home rapidly
+acquires a spirit of humility. While everywhere there is waste, there are
+times when money seems to buy double the amount that the student thought
+possible. With the wage-earners' families, as with all others, the income
+buys that which is most desired by those spending it. Choice is the master
+of decision, even in necessities. What is needed in the wage-earner's
+family is that education, that opportunity for development that will make a
+choice of the highest things, those that will mean a body and mind so
+nourished and cared for that moral resistance is the available capital of
+every member of the family in time of need.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+HOME STANDARDS.
+
+
+The world knows two aspects of involuntary poverty: The one inseparable
+from degradation; the other picturesque, appealing to the emotions, and
+giving a field for the play of sympathetic activity that frequently
+neglects to note the results it attains.
+
+There are few who discern that poverty is a comparative term, and these do
+not use the word in its financial sense wholly.
+
+Those who know intimately the struggling, up-growing poor know that the
+rich can never give the exquisite expression to love that life at this
+level makes possible. Who would dream when looking at the Hercules, with
+clothes and hands soiled by his daily labor, that he is the tender nurse of
+wife and baby; that he is hurrying to a house cared for with joy. He will
+wash dishes, cook, scrub the floor, walk the baby to sleep, and coddle and
+pet a wife who from sheer loneliness and worry over work undone may be the
+harder to please and quiet. All this, and perhaps, almost certainly, not
+once will any terms of endearment be heard, and, strange as it may seem, no
+kiss given. How one rebels and rejoices that love can be thus expressed!
+
+When sickness enters the home of the poor man, money is not present to
+relieve the able from personal service, often made more difficult through
+ignorance. Pride shuts the door to charity and the burden is carried in
+love. Those who know life at this level can never, never lose faith in the
+Eternal love, for they see always, however disguised, the divine spark in
+every human being. The silence of love thus expressed, the revelation of it
+where least expected, makes the one who witnesses it conscious of what
+power lies outside and beyond and above his own life, not witnessed to the
+ear. Every day at this level of life in our great city it is proved to the
+privileged that tenderness is the winning element in strength; that love
+daily, hourly here proves its power of self-abnegation. Here, too, it fills
+its function of inspiration. Days, weeks, months, years go by and the
+burden of moral weakness is borne with the cloak of faith wrapped about its
+fears. When so expressed, its loyal unconsciousness adds to its beauty and
+makes it an inspiration to all who come into its presence as friends; the
+lips voice its faith, the eyes alone reveal its fears even to friends.
+
+[Illustration: THE MORNING AIRING OF AN EAST SIDE HEIRESS.]
+
+The more intimately one comes into the home circle of the independent
+wage-earners the more clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand
+revealed. Life must be lived so simply, the interests of life are so
+evident, that the value of words decreases; action expresses the heart
+perfectly. The very services the children render each other train them for
+the family life they will establish. The baby tended by an older brother
+and sister learns to depend on them for care, and that dependence in turn
+draws out a love and responsibility that could not have birth under any
+other conditions. The child who finds that in pain, weariness, suffering, a
+father and mother alone share its care; the elder children who see how
+naturally sacrifices are made for them, how little the father and mother
+value themselves, their ease, even their comfort, learn to value the love
+in the home and depend on it, give love to it, that money to buy service
+would bar out. The child who sees parents make sacrifices to enlarge his
+opportunities for education, seeing him as a positive factor in his own
+manhood, sees more than parental love in such sacrifices and stands in more
+than the relation of child to parents.
+
+At the level where charity and dependence are large factors in the home
+life, the relation of parents to children is changed by their presence.
+Art has given Charity the figure of a noble, benign woman, in the ample
+folds of whose garments children are protected. Too often in life she wears
+a short skirt, to make speed possible, suggesting in movements and voice
+the need of nervines, when she does not seem to have taken the bandage from
+the eyes of Justice for her own use, while neglecting to borrow her scales.
+Where Charity is the welcome guest, instinct is greater than intelligence
+in the parental relation. The home tie is slight; children become shrewdly
+self-dependent, physical hardships are more easily borne, and life is often
+a mere matter of shelter and food; the animal alone is kept alive. This
+represents a social level as remote from that of the independent
+wage-earner as is represented between the home's standards and requirements
+of a family living on fifteen hundred dollars a year and that of a family
+living on fifteen thousand dollars a year.
+
+We use the word poor so carelessly that there is confusion where absolute
+misapprehension has not developed as to the character of the largest, most
+receptive, most responsive and most responsible class of citizens of New
+York. Politically they have been neglected, until the Citizens' Union gave
+them a formative part in political decisions. Here and there a score or
+more independent working men would be found in political organizations,
+because of an active political conscience, always hoping for better days,
+when the city would be given its imperative rights without regard to the
+State or national political complications. It was a hopeless fight, and has
+sent into the erratic political parties the majority of the independent
+working men now in them. The schemes of the politicians disgusted them, and
+new principals seemed to be the only hope for the clean-minded mind who did
+its own thinking.
+
+The great mass of these independent, self-respecting, intelligent
+working-men voters were hunted for at election, but were not counted worthy
+to take a place in the councils of the politically active because they were
+feared. The Citizens' Union recognized their value and power, and they have
+come into their own as citizens. No greater service have the Settlements
+done the city than discovering this unused element in political power and
+centering it where it is recognized as the saving power in municipal
+government. These men stand at the head of the homes that reveal
+love--tender, protecting inspiring love--serving in unspoken unselfishness
+to the largest degree.
+
+Thousands of mothers can testify to the cheerful sharing by fathers in the
+household burdens after a day of hard work; of cheerful going without
+necessities on the part of a father to give more than necessities to the
+children. Thousands of husbands and fathers will note the unselfishness and
+wisdom of a mother in caring for and enlarging the opportunities for the
+children, who are the common objects of love and ambition, and the
+confidence and love of the husband grows with the years. To the observer
+there is at the same time no more inspiring and depressing revelation than
+the parental love which asks nothing for itself, but all that life can give
+for the children, the visible expression of their mutual love. Often there
+is no thought given to a future of possible dependence. Wages do not make
+possible the care of the children at the standards of the parents, the
+buying of an environment that the experience of intelligent parents demands
+for them, and a bank account. The last is desirable, the first demand
+imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be thrown out when the life
+currents are running toward the rocks of want and dependence. Nothing is
+kept back for personal use by these fathers and mothers. Sometimes this
+very unselfishness, when unregulated by wisdom, leaves them lonely and
+forsaken in old age. Those to whom they have given their lives have by the
+gift been placed in social positions that seemingly bar out the parents who
+made achievement possible. Even in the loneliness of old age the parents
+rejoice at the success and forget and forgive the separation. The end for
+which they worked has been attained, their children are successful, and
+they still count themselves nothing compared with their children.
+
+It is the independent wage-earners who make the largest contributions to
+our wealth, commercial greatness, national prestige; yet the world,
+counting wealth by dollars, classifies these as poor. They are as far
+removed from the incapable, the degraded, the vicious, the dependent, the
+ignorant--who provide the themes for books--as far removed from the
+worthless, the deficient, the mentally, morally weak, so familiar to the
+people of wealth who give money or time, or both, to lessen their miseries,
+as they are in standard and ambition from the people counted wealthy. The
+cost of floor space on which to make a home may make them neighbors of the
+people who are the problems of a great city; they may live in regions that
+are the laboratory of the student of social and political conditions, but
+they live behind closed doors, bring up their children, so far as they can,
+uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and overcome their environment to a
+surprising degree. There is no word to distinguish them from those who make
+capital of their poverty, and the world loses much because of the lack of a
+term that would express the class who are the hope of this nation, whose
+children are the promise of its established greatness.
+
+The very limitations that small incomes impose on husbands and wives,
+strangers to social ambitions, bring into the relation an independence and
+_camaraderie_ that possibilities of wealth would bar out. When a father and
+mother have one object in life, their children, they have no personal
+ambitions; their minds run in the same groove; they live of necessity a
+unit. When the aim is to give their children a better education than they
+had; to place them on a firmer foundation in the wage-earning world than
+the one on which the father and mother started; to save the children from
+the contaminating world as they had to meet it, there of necessity is a
+welded interest that bars out a world of distractions. The world in which
+such fathers and mothers live may seem narrow, but the smallness of the
+world makes the companionship the closer. As one gets into the inner circle
+of these homes, the small part that wealth plays in happiness is realized,
+and the comprehension of what constitutes essentials is gained. The man who
+knows the measure of his wage-earning power does not waste his nerve and
+vitality to earn more; the family grow to have fixed habits of expenditure,
+and content is attained that the social strugglers never know. The victim
+of nervous prostration is not found in the working-man's world; the fixed
+rate of wages relieves the nerves, but exercises the muscles and the
+balance of health is kept. The exceptions to this happy attainment are
+those whose mental or moral natures have not been adjusted to the happy,
+even life of the skilled, sober, industrious, thrifty working-man's family
+in New York.
+
+The world of wealth would find itself rejected if it brought with it into
+the wage-earning world its moral standards, the rules of conduct are so
+simple in this world, the standards so elemental. An aldermanic candidate
+who in his own world is not counted ignorant, during the campaign of 1901
+conceived the idea, which he had never held before, though this was the
+fourth time he had appealed to the suffrages of the people, that the women
+were a factor in political success. He decided to call on the wives,
+mothers and sisters of the voters in his district. It would be interesting
+to know his conclusions after his experience. He must have gained wisdom by
+his experiment, and heard some unwelcome truths. He announced to one of his
+hostesses that he thought if he called and showed himself they might see in
+him something that would persuade them that their husbands, fathers,
+brothers, or sons ought to vote for him. It would have been interesting to
+have seen his face when more than one hostess assured him that, having seen
+him, she felt bound to urge her husband to vote for the other candidate. Or
+when he was told by others that he must understand how certain he was of
+defeat, or he would not appeal to women. Still more interesting it would
+have been to see him when an outraged wife let down the flood-gates of her
+wrath because she blamed him for the periodic lapses from industry and
+sobriety of which her husband was guilty. The better class of voters of
+this candidate's party resented angrily the man calling on their wives. The
+root cause of the indignation of the men and women it was found was that
+this man dared to call when the husbands were not at home. In the world of
+work there is no place for social life in the day-time, and it argues ill
+for those who indulge in it. The Metropolitan Opera House in the evening
+would so shock the working man and his wife that they would never recover
+respect for those who frequent it. A high-necked lace dress with a low
+lining, worn in the evening by one from the other world to an East Side
+party, brought out this comment: "Oh! yes, she's all right. They all do it,
+the women; but isn't it awful?"
+
+The moral standards for men and women in the world of work are the same.
+The immoral man is despised and avoided by the women. A woman who should
+maintain the smallest degree of friendship or acquaintance with a man known
+to be immoral would be avoided by her neighbors; she would be made to
+realize at once the cause of her offending.
+
+A silly, pretty little woman, whose husband at times was cruel and brutal,
+ran away from him with another man. No one in the neighborhood could
+remember when such a thing had happened before, and the neighborhood
+resented it as a disgrace. The husband's brutality was well known; he was
+despised and ignored by the better element of men in the neighborhood. Had
+the wife gone alone, she would have had the support of a respectable
+minority, but now the husband was the object of deep sympathy. When the
+wife was found, and declared she would gladly starve with the partner of
+her disgrace--and there was a fair prospect at the time that she
+would--"than have the best in the land with my husband; he has kicked me
+out for the last time," she was cast out of the books of remembrance in
+that neighborhood. "She married him for better or worse," was the measure
+of a wife's duty among these wives and mothers.
+
+The admiration of the explorer into this world of work and homes grows with
+the years for the people who make it, as indignation grows at the
+misunderstanding of its limitations, its possibilities, its beauty and
+greatness. For Matthew Arnold gave the true definition of greatness when he
+said it was the obstacles overcome, not his attainments, that made a man
+great. The explorer makes many discoveries--some that stimulate and
+surprise, some that puzzle and depress. The silence of love in this world
+is a revelation. Whether the terms of endearment are not in the language of
+this world, or whether the want of leisure and privacy stifle them, it is
+difficult to decide. Perhaps it is that the language of love is learned in
+a mother's arms; that when her service to her child must be physical, when
+it is but one of a thousand things demanding her care and thought--when her
+muscles must serve unceasingly--she has no time to express the love that
+strengthens them by words. It may be that the language of love does not
+grow within crowded walls, and that it is forced to express itself in
+service.
+
+[Illustration: A BIT OF OLD GREENWICH.]
+
+A man ranking high in the intellectual world once took for his theme, when
+preaching to a company of wage-earners and their wives, "Home Life." It was
+a rare inspiration that moved him to point out how much was lost to the
+home where the verbal expression of love was never heard. He said no higher
+inspiration to work his best could be given a man than his wife's good-bye
+kiss in the morning; nor a charm that would drive away care, worry and
+exhaustion more perfect than her welcoming kiss when he returned from his
+work at the close of the day. He pictured the feelings of the man who found
+his wife silent and unresponsive when he entered the house; who answered
+his query as to what was the matter with "Nothing." In his audience was a
+wife whose faithfulness and intelligence had made her husband far more than
+he could ever have been without her, a fact of which he was fully
+conscious; he was not allowed to forget it. This wife was deeply impressed
+by what she heard. She was ignorant because of lack of opportunity,
+untruthful because she was ignorant; she could not see the relations of
+things. Vindictive, because in her moral code you must resent any wrong,
+real or fancied, by an action that goes far deeper than that of the
+offender in its effect. Anything else would be an evidence of weakness. She
+expressed her contempt for one who would forgive an injury, and prided
+herself that she never did. She had enthusiasm, could inspire others, and
+proved herself as capable in leading them to do wrong as to do right. She
+was the power in her home, and established its standard of right and wrong
+that gave motive to the lives of her children. This night the speaker
+lifted the veil. There was something that belonged in the home that she
+alone could put there, and she had not. She resolved that she would part
+from and meet her husband with a kiss. It is best to let her tell her own
+story:
+
+"I just made up my mind I'd do it." No girl of eighteen giving a confidence
+of a love affair could have shown more embarrassment than this mother of
+wage-earning children. "I did not know how I would do it, or what ----
+would say, but I just made up my mind I would kiss him when he came home. I
+thought about it all the next day. Late in the afternoon I made up my mind.
+Of course, I could not kiss him before the children. When it was most time
+for ---- to come home, I sent them each on an errand that would keep them
+away until long after ---- got home. I had the table all set and the supper
+cooking. At last I heard him come up the stairs. My land! How I trembled! I
+stood so that when the door opened he would not see me, and then I just
+kissed him before I had a chance to think. He staggered back, he was so
+surprised." She waited while an expression that should have been habitual
+changed her shrewd, hard face into a loving woman's. "But I never saw him
+look so happy," she continued. "I made up my mind I would kiss him every
+day when he came home. I could not kiss him in the morning, for the
+children were all there," she added decidedly; "but I can always send the
+little ones on errands at night."
+
+Perhaps it was three weeks later that she told of the climax. "I had a
+toothache all day; I was tired and cross, for I had been washing. I stood
+by the fire, making the hash. Kittie was setting the table, when ----
+opened the door. I did not look up. He stood in the door a minute; then he
+asked, 'What's the matter, Jennie?' 'Nothing.' I knew I said it cross. I
+looked up then. ---- looked so disappointed that I thought he'd cry. I just
+forgot the children, and right before them I kissed ---- twice. I wish you
+could have seen his face. I burst out laughing when I looked at the two
+children. They stood staring at us with their mouths wide open. Do you know
+what I did? I kissed each of them. I don't believe I've kissed either since
+they were babies. I think they told the big ones in the front room when
+they came from work." This experiment in love-making did not continue. ----
+came home drunk one night, and for punishment the experiment was dropped
+and never resumed. While it lasted, it had a most harmonizing effect on
+the whole family, and one wondered if it had been begun earlier, when the
+habit could have been easily fixed, what would have been the result.
+
+The mother, from a worldly point of view, has been most successful. The
+children are in positions where skill is required, and wages seem to depend
+on health only. Yet they are not popular; are selfish and unsympathetic.
+They point to their own success as the reason why every family should
+succeed. The family has moved into new environment, establishing relations
+that have placed it several rounds higher than the level at which the
+home-making began; but it has no fixed place in the social world. The
+combined income of the five wages equals at times two thousand dollars a
+year.
+
+Not every wife in this world of silent love is encouraged as this wife was.
+Another, a gentle, quiet woman, without children, thought she would try.
+"He sit so still when he came home. I bought a flower and put it on the
+table. I have what he like best for supper, and I wait. I listen over the
+banister. When he come near our flight, I slip back and wait in the room,
+leaving the door open so he can see. When he close the door I go up to him,
+put mine arms around his neck and kiss him. He take my arms, shove me back
+and say: 'What the matter mit you? You crazy?'" The woman was crying. The
+three friends sat silent a moment, and then one said: "You haf no
+children," and the wife nodded. That was her explanation, and theirs.
+
+Perhaps no greater charm prevails in this world of wage-earners than the
+attitude toward motherhood. There will be found here and there the young
+woman who rebels against it, who may risk life rather than assume the care
+of a baby. When one goes back of this rebellion there is always found the
+influence of some older woman who has other ambitions, clothes, pleasure;
+who influences, or tries to influence, the young married women she meets; a
+woman who will even talk freely to girls against motherhood. There is in
+this world of workers the strong active public sentiment against childless
+women that more than counteracts this influence, and babies are welcomed
+when there is nothing but love to greet them, not much more to feed them or
+clothe them; but they are welcomed. The training of the children--natural,
+not acquired--to be fathers and mothers has doubtless a far-reaching effect
+in keeping this natural attitude of mind toward parenthood.
+
+We get up a lot of wasted sentiment about the little mothers and fathers,
+not seeing that the offices are fitting them to meet a future when all
+that they learn in the care of baby brothers and sisters will make their
+lives easier as fathers and mothers. Often the only opportunity they have
+for expressing affection is the little baby given to their care.
+
+How well one must know this part of the wage-earning world before it is
+possible to appreciate the fact that the boy is being trained by "his baby"
+for that future when he will share with the mother of his child its care.
+It is a constant revelation to find how intelligent the young men at this
+level are about children, and how frankly and unconsciously they will
+express it and condemn the ignorant or careless treatment of a child. The
+relation of the wage-earning children to the little children is paternal
+often. The little ones know that the elder ones work and care for them, and
+they render an obedience that is often amusing. With sisters this takes
+another form. If the elder girl has ideas and tastes, especially if she has
+skill, she will often entirely decide how the younger children shall dress;
+often the younger children would not be at all satisfied with clothes the
+elder girls did not select and design. Here again will be found a
+half-maternal attitude that secures obedience and regulates privileges;
+that sometimes ignores the rightful authority in the home. The young girl
+who has an elder sister working and secures work with her is considered
+very fortunate. Two sisters are known, now past middle life. One is quite a
+handsome woman, the other plain. The handsome sister is the younger; she
+never, when she was a wage-earner, went through the streets alone. The
+elder sister, when they did not work together, escorted the younger one
+back and forth to her work. Now, the mother of three children, nothing
+could persuade her to go on the streets alone beyond the corner store. Her
+husband, in a city department on a small salary, always attends her in
+shopping expeditions, and all social engagements are made with respect to
+his hours of freedom. She receives a wealth of love, and tenderness, and
+protection. Selfish? Yes, till one wonders at the blindness of those who do
+her homage.
+
+[Illustration: A LITTLE FATHER.]
+
+Once a very sensible wife and mother, whose intelligence and devotion are
+raising the family many degrees above that of the generation preceding her
+and her husband, said: "I shall watch my children. My mother let one of my
+sisters exact far more than her share of wages. She coaxed or cried, or
+both, until she got what she wanted. The rest of us gave in, because we
+would not worry mother; you see that, now we are all married, she expects
+us to save her from worry and work; we have to; she cannot get along." In
+a moment she continued: "Haven't you seen it, that in every large family
+there is one who gets more and gives less than the others?" A statement
+profoundly true, but not confined to any one social level.
+
+Among the discoveries the explorer into this world makes is that life is
+full of compensations. One learns to overlook bad housekeeping, when it is
+discovered that a cross, impatient word is never spoken by the
+house-mother; that the children are the companions of the mother; that no
+one else is so attractive; that she is never too busy to listen to anything
+that interests them. One learns to forgive the needlessly shabby dressing
+of children, when it is discovered that they are well nourished and cared
+for, and that the husband and father never fails to declare that his wife
+is the best cook in the city and always has his meals on time. Usually this
+mother is fat, full of fun, and laughs as though tears were not in the
+world.
+
+Order, cleanliness and economy do not appeal as cardinal virtues when it is
+found that there is no room for the children in the house, no money to buy
+them the smallest pleasure where these over-estimated virtues predominate.
+It is found usually that the worry of maintaining standards that ignore
+the rights of the family, and to which they have been sacrificed, have
+seared the mother's head and heart, and she no longer responds to the
+maternal emotions; she becomes the victim of her own habits and cannot
+reform. Perhaps it is this type of woman who creates the most barren home;
+the one that is quite as prolific a source of supply to the saloons and the
+streets as that of the degenerate housekeeper out of whose life spiritual
+impulse has departed, and into which ideals and ambitions were never born.
+
+It is difficult at times to decide whether to laugh at or resent the
+criticisms one often hears of the extravagances of the poor. When one
+becomes familiar with the demands for rent, coal, shoes, for clothes that
+must be worn to work and school; for the things the cost of which cannot be
+put below a certain sum--food always can be regulated--and compares these
+fixed charges with the income available, the management of money in the
+independent working man's family amounts to genius, and it must take
+generations of economists to produce it.
+
+Unfortunately, in New York emphasis is laid on clothes. Extravagance in
+dress is the habit of the city. The people seen in the streets, in the
+stores, in public conveyances, show a singular uniformity in clothes; this
+is as true of men as of women. The differences are in manners and English.
+The spirit of the land is as yet materialistic, and the democratic spirit
+shows itself in the outward forms. The tailor-made gown was not looked upon
+as a regenerator of aesthetic standards, but it has proved that. Its
+simplicity and durability has released money that formerly was used in
+useless trimming. The ready-trimmed hat is also a lever in throwing the
+scale in the right direction.
+
+The attention to school decoration of recent years has given new standards
+for the home. The wage-earning world grows more harmonious in its demands
+on wages; the home now makes its demands for decoration that the workers
+obey. Signs outside of tenement houses renting suites of four rooms for
+twenty and twenty-five dollars per month announce: "Burlaped halls; parlors
+in white and blue;" or, "Tiled halls, open gas grates, fancy chandeliers."
+The men who hire these apartments earn from fifteen to twenty-five dollars
+a week or more. Thousands of American working men pay these rentals to save
+their children from the environment inseparable from the surroundings that
+must be endured if a fair proportion of their wages were used for rent. One
+grows to reverence the courage that enables a husband and wife, with only
+one pair of hands earning the home needs, to assume such rents. No higher
+evidence of the manhood and righteous ambition of the American citizen
+could be given than this: that he places his all to secure for his children
+a home that is reasonably protected; that offers opportunities for
+cleanliness and privacy. Renting a room to a lodger will sometimes make
+less demands on a father's wages for rent; sometimes the rent is assumed in
+the hope of securing lodgers, and then the struggle is pathetic, but borne
+because the children must not grow up in a less desirable neighborhood. If
+one were asked for the standard by which to measure the civilization of
+each family in the wage-earning world, the reply would have to be, "Rent."
+It at once makes the most and the least return; it is the tyrant which
+makes or mars the home life. When a family of eight, having a combined
+income of thirty-six dollars a week, are content to live in three rooms,
+one knows about what to expect in social standards, and how many
+generations it will take to raise the home level. When a family of
+six--five wage-earners--who began life at almost the homeless level,
+gradually come into a combined income of two thousand dollars a year, it is
+not to be expected that its standards of needs will be those of a college
+graduate on the same income. Often no member of the family can read
+readily. School life was, especially for the elder children, an
+intermittent one, and truth did not regulate the beginning of wage-earning
+of any of the children. The younger children probably warred against school
+long before fourteen years of life gave them freedom. There is natural
+intelligence, a certain manner acquired through observation, but no
+standard of intellectual life. Their very intelligence makes such families
+conscious of their shortcomings, and it is this consciousness that leads to
+the aggressiveness of manner that is so offensive, so often mistakenly
+called the American manner. It is the manner that is due to awakened
+consciousness which in the next generation will know when to wear evening
+dress, if not how.
+
+The use of money in such families is for show. It would be counted
+extravagant to buy a book, or a ticket to an oratorio or a concert to hear
+the best music. It would in such a family be counted useless to train the
+younger children to wage-earning by education. The heads of the family will
+be hospitable where it counts as showing how much more they have than the
+others in their world. They receive from their world what snobbishness
+receives everywhere. Snobbishness, on the whole, is not common even where
+the income would remove the family from a tenement-house environment. The
+uncertainty of work, and the absolute dependence of the worker on wages,
+make snobbishness dangerous; that often proves a boomerang their
+observation shows.
+
+[Illustration: A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.]
+
+The spirit of helpfulness may not find so free a field of operations when
+wages are two dollars and a half and over a day, but it is in readiness.
+Sickness in a neighbor's family will show that it has not been lost because
+of prosperity, but it is less lavish; there is dawning consciousness that
+self-preservation is the first law of nature; that home has the first right
+to strength and thought; that only the surplus is available for the world
+of friends. The same thriftlessness which makes a family accept charity
+without question is the cause of their generosity. As the sense of
+responsibility develops, the observer discovers a reserve in the giving of
+either their money or their strength to those about them; kindness abounds,
+but generosity is regulated as one goes up the scale in the world of
+wage-earners. Not only that, but in the direst need the needy, as one goes
+up the scale, regulate the degree of freedom given the closest friends. It
+often borders on the tragic, the suffering borne in silence, and revealed
+often when the time for help is passed.
+
+This division of the people into rich and poor without gradations and
+without a comprehension of the standards and needs that make new worlds up
+and down the scale, has had a serious effect on the home life, the church
+life of the people, the political life of the people. The churches have
+driven out the very people in the tenement-house regions who needed them
+and whom they needed.
+
+Corrupt administration has imposed burdens on the homes which for a time
+the voters in turn felt powerless to lift. The independent wage-earner
+found his hope of political recognition in allegiance to the political
+machines. The leaders, his inferiors often mentally, and still more surely
+morally, were at least approachable and familiar, and the man who made his
+own life found too often that only in the political circle of interest was
+he the equal of those who led. Here there was no manner that expressed
+condescension or superiority. His own language was spoken; he was at home.
+That these men allowed themselves to be used was the natural result of the
+habit of indifference to the real issues in a municipal campaign so common
+in New York. When the burdens of a corrupt administration pressed on the
+homes; when the leaders for righteous government acknowledged by appealing
+to the makers of this country, the plain people, that they were an integral
+part of the city's government, they responded, and by their response
+overthrew the corrupt government that the indifference of all classes had
+helped to make powerful.
+
+The century opens well. Capitalist and wage-earner sit at the same board,
+having equal voice in the plans for redeeming the city from partisan
+machine control.
+
+As one thinks of the change, one sees that the evils that disgraced New
+York were due to the indifference of the millionaires and the honest
+working men. It is the response of the political conscience of both to the
+need of the city that has been its redemption; its only sure protection is
+the activity of that conscience three hundred and sixty-five days of each
+year in all the years to come.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?
+
+
+It took years for the evils of political machines to make life unbearable
+in New York. Not until the tremendous evils it imposed on child-life were
+given emphasis did the public sentiment of the city find intelligent
+expression--voice the moral conscience of the whole people. That dishonest
+administration of the city government imposed burdens on the home of the
+poor man no intelligent person disputed; but few knew how heavy the burdens
+or how far-reaching the effects on character. The people who suffered most
+were, in the very nature of things, the ones who could not see these
+influences, or estimate truly the degrading effect on character. The people
+who resented the conditions that made life harder in the tenements; who
+resented the environment which made the bringing up of children in
+innocence, integrity, and decency often impossible, were those who were in
+the minority. Hopelessness of overcoming the evils made some voters the
+forgers of their own chains.
+
+Newspapers gave columns to the exposure of the evils of the political
+methods which made individuals rich at the cost of the homes of the city,
+especially the homes of the poor. But the phase of this influence that was
+most degrading could only be learned by living in the regions, one of the
+people, suffering with them the burdens dishonesty imposed.
+
+When college-trained men and women established their homes in the regions
+of the tenements, making friends with the people, associating freely with
+them, especially with the young people and the children, they discovered
+that the worst evil with which the people were contending was the constant
+lowering of the moral standards due to the influence of the political
+organization that seemed to regulate even the right of the people to earn a
+living. It was but a step from fear to favor; but a little time before the
+man out-weighed the principle; Justice became the hand-maid of "pull," and
+the people living wholly under the environment corrupt political power
+created, knew no government but that of the "leader" and the man who
+represented him. To trade votes was no disgrace, for it meant a share in
+the perquisites that political power held. These men and women of trained
+intelligence saw that the corrupting of the moral standards of the people
+was a far greater evil--an evil that was of far greater moment to the
+whole people than the maladministrations that affected their physical
+being, though it led to death.
+
+It was the revelations the Settlement workers were able to make to a
+half-informed community of wealth and trained intelligence that led to the
+redeeming of the city. It made the active combination of wealth and poverty
+that brought into the political arena the dormant consciences that created
+in 1901 the Apotheosis, New York redeemed, that is the justification of
+democracy to the world.
+
+The iniquity, ignorance and indifference that create and maintain a system
+of municipal administration based on the theory that politics is a
+profession, and each promoter the architect of his own fortune, to be built
+at the expense of the citizens, is the reflection of the character of the
+citizens. The system is never the product of one man's brains, nor does its
+growth ever begin at the top. It begins always in the smallest political
+unit, where the man who wishes the office in the gift of that unit stands
+closest to the people. The bargaining for votes begins there. The number of
+exchanges of votes for favors and places successfully accomplished makes
+the "boss," the man who represents law and order; who is judge, and jury,
+and keeper of the jail to those who do his bidding. As the political units
+develop their bosses--"leaders," in voters' parlance--the system grows
+until the chain is complete, and each political henchman, in the order of
+his importance, takes his share of the people's money. The perquisites
+reach millions before the thousands are distributed that enables the leader
+to pose as the all-pervading friend to the district in time of need.
+
+The political units where this system of government in the interest of the
+"boss" have their strongest hold are the best evidences of the moral
+degeneracy that follows. Here the liquor saloons flourish, the headquarters
+of the "leader" and his cohorts, used in the order of rank in the system,
+from the gayly lighted, silver-bedecked, mirror-lined bar-room to the
+smoky, dirty, vilely kept den where those gather who have no use in life
+but to vote according to orders and work for the political leader's
+entrenchment. These saloons represent the primary school and the university
+of the voters of the district. They represent all the educational and
+recreative opportunity of most of the adults. They establish the habits of
+thinking for the majority of the people, for they are the lyceum where all
+questions are discussed that interest the people. The most interesting is
+how to get wages, as it is the most important. The common struggle creates
+common bonds of sympathy. All principles go down before the concrete,
+understandable fact that if the "boss" is beaten, work will cease for
+neighbor, friend, and friend's friend. Each man learns through every course
+in this training school of citizens that the paramount duty of each voter
+is to keep the "boss" in power. It means wages, or the hope of wages, under
+the least strenuous of employers, the city. Men work hard for the system,
+not because the moral nature of many of them is not in revolt against the
+system, but because the keeping of a home for wife and children is at
+stake. Often the voter's necessities, his ignorance often, his rebellion
+against wealth often, his unrest, undermine his moral nature, blind his
+intelligence, and he forges the chains that bind him in slavery to a system
+that will cast him aside, and refuse him a reason when there is no use for
+him. The voter may work during an election campaign half knowing that to
+secure another worker in the interests of the political system the place he
+holds has been promised to another after election. This fear and this hope
+enters the homes; women and children are educated under the moral
+degradation that enslaves husbands, sons, brothers, friends, lovers. The
+standards of morals are established even in childhood by the working of the
+systems of political machines. There is one measure of morals, _success_.
+What succeeds is right.
+
+[Illustration: TAKING THEIR TURN IN THE YARD AT THE SETTLEMENT.]
+
+A small house was hired, through the generosity of several women, for the
+purpose of providing a place for recreation and social opportunity for a
+number of Christians--that is, people not Hebrews--left in a thickly
+settled Hebrew district. These Christians, a mere remnant, resented the
+opportunities offered the Hebrews, and while they might have availed
+themselves of them, they would not, so strong was the race prejudice.
+Shortly after the house was opened a delegation of boys appeared asking for
+the use of the large room for a boys' club. The privilege was given on the
+conditions that one of the workers interested in the house should have the
+privilege of visiting the room freely when the club was in session; that
+the club should pay twenty cents per month for the use of the room; that it
+should be limited to twenty members for three months. Before the first
+month had passed, it was decided that unless the club would accept a
+director, it was a waste of the space and light to let these boys use the
+room. They called themselves a debating and literary club. They knew
+nothing of literature naturally and less of debating. They were told that
+they must accept a director, a man who would instruct them in parliamentary
+law, guide them in debate and suggest subjects for study, or they must
+give up the room. They were very angry, but finally decided to accept the
+director. Their constitution provided for an election every month, a
+provision which kept them in a turmoil all the time. When the majority were
+convinced of this, and voted that officers should be elected every three
+months, the dissenting minority withdrew to form a new club, to meet
+somewhere else. Two weeks later, on club night, the bell rang. The leader
+of the minority, who had been elected president of the new club, asked if
+they might come back. They did not like the place where they met. After a
+conference with the original club, it was decided that, if they chose to
+come back as members of the club and pay their dues--three cents per
+week--they might come back. The conditions were accepted, and the seceding
+minority were to be reinstated as members of the original club on the next
+meeting night. As the petitioner was leaving, he turned innocently to the
+director and said: "Say, we've elected a couple of new fellows. They can
+come in, can't they?" The club consented conditionally on the "new fellows"
+being peaceable. The next meeting night came. The bell rang. In order to do
+full honor to the returning prodigals, the president went to the door.
+There was a rush and a scramble; the eight boys who withdrew, followed by
+twenty-two others, crowded into the room and demanded an election at once.
+They declared they were in the majority now, and had a right to the
+presidency for one of their own number. It was impossible to eject them,
+had it been wise. The question was postponed for one week and an arbitrator
+selected.
+
+When the next meeting night came, some of the new recruits had dropped out
+and their places had been taken by older boys. The original members, who
+had maintained the club, were told to sit together and keep absolutely
+quiet. The constitution declared that no boy was a member of the club who
+did not pay an initiation fee of five cents; this included the first
+month's dues. The first strange boy was asked: "Have you paid your
+initiation fee?" The leader, a boy not fourteen, sprang forward and pressed
+a five-cent piece in the boy's hand, saying: "Pay it now. Joe's the
+treasurer." The cue had been given him, and he proceeded to give out
+nickels to the new boys, urging them to "pay Joe quick." During this scene
+another of the receding minority took his position in front of the door to
+prevent any boy leaving the room with the money. The performance was
+stopped; the opulent small boy, who it was evident was buying votes for the
+presidency, was told to gather up his nickels. The recruits were told,
+after an explanation, why they must leave, and to their credit be it
+recorded some of them resented the position in which they had been placed
+and promised the misleading leader an unhappy next day before they left. It
+was then decided that the twelve members who had constituted the majority
+should ballot individually for the eight who had seceded, as though they
+had never belonged to the club. It is unnecessary to say that the boy who
+made the trouble was rejected. Not one of those boys was fifteen years old,
+yet they had learned and understood the method of the political
+organizations of the region. Their elders, those they loved, used these
+methods, and succeeded by them in getting place and power. The man who
+succeeded in sharp practice in politics was the "boss." The man who was
+beaten was not smart. The measure of morals was success, not methods used
+to attain that success.
+
+A woman's club, organized several years before, used this house. The
+husbands of several of them organized a men's club, and met in the house
+one evening in the week. Several of those men were affiliated with the
+political organizations of the district; some held positions under the city
+government through these affiliations.
+
+When the Citizens' Union campaign began in 1897, the women who established
+the house offered it and the yard for one evening a week to the Citizens'
+Union Campaign Committee. Illustrated lectures were given to the people of
+the neighborhood, the friends of the clubs using the house, and the parents
+of children in the children's clubs. This declared the sentiments of the
+women who established the house, which were emphasized when a picture of
+the Citizens' Union candidate for Mayor was put in the window. It became
+evident at once that there was trouble in the women's club; some of the
+members of the men's club never entered the house after the picture was
+placed. The Citizens' Union was defeated. At once the friction in the
+women's club developed, till it seemed wise to disband it. It was announced
+that the house had been given up, and that all the work done there must be
+placed elsewhere. The younger clubs were housed in the Clark Memorial. The
+women's club, in spite of the friction, voted to keep together, and, with
+the City History Club, asked to be received at the College Settlement,
+which generously, and at great inconvenience, arranged to receive them. The
+members of the women's club, numbering forty-five, voted unanimously to
+become identified with the College Settlement work, and pledged themselves
+to that work. The one woman who had resisted this decision in secret stood
+with the rest pledged to the Settlement. At once she incited trouble at the
+Settlement. She was voted out of the club. When the decision was announced,
+she, with the treasurer of the club and three others, walked out of the
+house, the treasurer taking the club treasurer's book and the money, over
+seventeen dollars. Sunday's papers announced the incorporation of a club
+under the old name. The incorporators were the five women who had left the
+club at the Settlement. The business of incorporating was attended to by a
+political leader in the State Assembly. One of these women had held a
+position in a city department, secured for her by a leader of one of the
+political parties; one was the wife of a man holding a city position
+through active affiliation with the other political party; another was the
+wife of a man who was striving for prominence in political affairs in the
+district, irrespective of party; the other was shrewd, ambitious,
+vindictive. The club before this break had done charitable work; had helped
+families who needed help, through the generosity of friends of wealth. It
+had a limited membership, and election was the assurance of certain
+qualities in the woman who was received as a member. All this had commanded
+attention and could furnish political capital. To hold this for one or the
+other of the political parties was the intention of the women who
+incorporated under the club name and persuaded six of the club members to
+join them.
+
+The treasurer was so evidently the cat's-paw of those who were managing the
+affair that, while steps were being taken to punish her for taking the
+money, the club at the Settlement voted not to prosecute her, because it
+would be a stigma on her as long as she lived, because she would have to
+stand with women arrested for drunkenness and disorderly characters in the
+dock. The original club remained at the Settlement. The minority who
+withdrew, a total of eleven, began active and aggressive work. They hired
+the use of a working-girls' club-room. They began to work according to the
+most approved methods of political leaders. They attended the outings of a
+political association; tried to do what they called charitable work, but
+which this very group proved they could not do justly while in the little
+house.
+
+The Fusion campaign of 1901 brought unexpected complications to the club
+woman. The Tammany influence was stronger than the Republican, and the
+women who had led in the incorporating of the club withdrew. Unfortunately,
+the opportunity to give this whole group a strong lesson in morals was
+lost, and they have been accepted where, had the genesis of their club been
+understood, it is but reasonable to suppose they would have had no moral
+support, and for that reason would have gained a moral lesson.
+
+The training most needed by the people of narrow experience and limited
+intelligence is that of clear distinctions between right and wrong by those
+they class above themselves. That shrewdness is not a moral virtue; that
+revenge is mean and not the function of mortals, is the one lesson
+intelligence and moral standards can teach convincingly.
+
+Recently it was the privilege of the writer to visit a Parents' Society
+connected with a school in the outskirts of Brooklyn. The spirit of good
+fellowship that existed, not only among the teachers of the school, but
+between the teachers and the parents, was a revelation. That there was a
+unifying cause was certain. What was it? One of the mothers, during a walk
+to the station, revealed it. In response to a comment on the good feeling
+so evident, the mother replied: "Yes, I feel it. Mr. ----," naming a member
+of the Board of Education, "at prayer meeting the other night spoke of the
+school and what a power it was in this part of the city. We owe it all to
+him. He's done everything he could do for the school, and he has made all
+the ministers and the priests friends of the school." She was quiet a
+minute, and then added: "Years ago, when he first began fighting for the
+school, people used to call him a 'boss.' I think that kind of a boss would
+be good in every school. I tell my husband we ought to be glad that we
+bought that lot out here and built when we did, for we helped to make Mr.
+---- successful. If leading men to do your will means being a 'boss,' Mr.
+---- is one. But the city needs hundreds of such 'bosses.'" The man is a
+simple American citizen, bearing a foreign name, who saw clearly there were
+more ways of serving and saving his country than by carrying a rifle.
+
+In the last analysis the "boss" as he is in New York to-day is the product
+of many roots. The one that goes deepest in the soil, the course of his
+deepest hold, can be traced to the doors of our churches. The men who have
+failed to see that they owed an allegiance to the city that does not differ
+in degree from what they owed the Church; the men who failed to see that
+the Church was a positive factor in civic life; that its effectiveness in
+the community was dependent on the standards it demanded and helped to
+maintain in the city; that on it rested the responsibility for civic
+character-building--on these men rest the heaviest responsibility for the
+evolution of the political "boss" and the evils of which he is the
+personification.
+
+Men and women give money to maintain church services in sections where
+political corruption and civic neglect have resulted in creating an
+environment that makes decent living impossible; an environment that has so
+degenerating an influence that the people become a factor in the problem it
+presents, for they have sunk to its level.
+
+In those sections the tools of the "boss," his active political agents, use
+the most despicable methods. The tool of the principal is valuable as he is
+conscienceless. His crumbs are the minor offices in the gift of the people;
+the lesser tools get "jobs," which the very limitations of their minds make
+them believe they must use to secure the largest return of money and power
+to themselves--a conception largely due to the indifference of the men who
+willingly delegate their civic responsibilities. Every man and woman who
+pays the slightest attention to the conditions under which the poor are
+forced to live, know that these conditions are responsible for the
+existence of nine-tenths of the eleemosynary institutions, private and
+public. They know that many of these institutions, could they stand before
+the community in their true character, would be recognized as disgraceful
+blots upon our civilization. They exist because so many good people in the
+community have found greater pleasure in establishing and maintaining them
+than in working actively to prevent the growth of the conditions that
+peoples them.
+
+Again and again one sees the names of men and women working actively on
+these boards of management who would not give a moment's thought to a
+meeting called in the interests of better civilization in sections of the
+city where their own homes are located; who know nothing of the conditions
+of the schools, the streets, the tenement houses, the factories, or the
+administration of the law in regard to them. There are men who would resent
+the charge of ignorance who do not know the names of the officers they
+either actively or passively elected to office in the political unit in
+which are their homes. They do not attend the primaries, defending their
+absence on the ground that they could accomplish nothing by their
+presence--a defense that is in itself a self-accusation. If their divine
+right of citizenship has been forfeited, it is by their own civic sin of
+omission. The longer one studies the evils that have grown up in the
+administration of the business of the great municipality of New York, the
+clearer one sees that the sins of omission are responsible for their
+growth--far more responsible than the sins of commission against which
+intelligent voters rail, when they do not use them as salve for their
+political consciences. It is a profound truth that in a republic the
+character of the people is shown in the character of the men the people
+elect to office. This is as true of the ward as of the nation.
+
+The political units of government in New York are, in the main, inhabited
+by the rich and poor, the intelligent and the ignorant; those who can
+reason from effect to cause, and those who cannot reason at all. Yet in
+these sections the worst possible home conditions will exist--unsanitary
+schools, dirty streets, badly paved. Saloons will abound and political
+corruption will go unheeded. Why? Because no men of intelligence and
+responsibility will accept the minor offices that mean the administration
+of the affairs of this unit in the interest and for the protection of the
+whole people.
+
+When men of position in the professional and business world signify their
+willingness to accept the least office in the gift of the people, the daily
+papers announce the fact in large headlines, and the men become marked as
+capable of great self-sacrifice, they become preeminent for the time. The
+men who have controlled the nominations, those who have no other visible
+means of support than these minor offices and political patronage, resent
+the suggestion of men of professional and financial fortunes accepting
+these offices; they consider the appearance of a man holding business or
+professional positions of power or influence as a candidate for a minor
+office as an invasion, an intrusion of their personal rights; it is an
+attempt to defraud them. They do not hesitate to publicly claim the right
+to nomination and election as the reward for their activity in politics.
+And they do this when they cannot point to one thing done officially to
+justify their claims to the suffrages of the people. They dare to do it in
+the face of the knowledge, held by the people, that they use their offices
+often for personal ends, defrauding the people.
+
+The scores of voters who have places within the patronage of a minor
+official see the danger to them of an official who would place merit in
+advance of votes. The man of position may be far from wealthy; may consent
+to serve the city at a financial loss; but the active voters live so remote
+from the voters at the top that the election is almost certain to be
+decided on class lines; and the defeat of the non-professional politician
+is accepted by every man, woman and child in the poorer portion of the
+district as a personal triumph; the evidence that the poor man has friends
+to back him in his fight for place and power; that the poor must work
+together politically.
+
+Whose fault is it? The good, intelligent, responsible citizens who
+delegated the government of their city to the men who use it for their
+personal gain. The good men in active politics, who openly concede the
+right to the minor offices in the city government to men whom they know are
+ignorant, and not infrequently know equally well are dishonest, and who
+will sacrifice the interest of the people to strengthen the system that
+means personal gains.
+
+The political conditions of the city several years ago gave birth to one of
+the periodic moral upheavals that resulted in the election of a strong,
+earnest, loyal, church-supporting citizen as Mayor. This Mayor was anxious
+to raise the character of the city government. He determined to accomplish
+this by the character of his appointments. He had more than a superficial
+knowledge of the public schools, which at that time were the theater for
+the exercise of political "pulls." It was known for years that the Board of
+Education had been used to a greater or less extent to pay political debts,
+to create political capital for future use by some of its most active
+members. The new Mayor had it in his power to change the character of the
+Board, and he carefully considered his appointments.
+
+In one of the sections of the city where, numerically as to families,
+wealth and poverty were fairly balanced, a section having in it churches of
+every denomination, many of them maintaining missions in the same political
+unit--there was at least this expression of neighborly interest--the
+schools were among the first built in the city. The last school building
+erected at the time of this Mayor's election had been built twenty years
+before; one had been built when the foundation for the pillars of the
+elevated road had been set in front of the site before it was purchased by
+the Board of Education, and was now in the heart of a crowded foreign
+settlement, had no out-door playground; the third building in the school
+district was so old, so badly planned, that for years effort had been made
+to secure a new building, but were defeated by the indifference, and at
+times the opposition, of the best citizens of the district, according to
+their own estimate.
+
+The new Mayor determined to put the best men in the district on the Board.
+Twenty-eight men in that district, men of power, men of standards, some of
+them philanthropists actively interested in work for the poor, declined.
+The men appointed, the best he could get to serve, were unfit for the
+position--mentally unfit, for they were uneducated; or morally unfit,
+because any position paid or unpaid under the city government was conceived
+by them as just so great an opportunity to create political capital or
+realize perquisites put within their control by their appointments. The
+Mayor had begun at the top to make his appointments. The declinations of
+the honor were because of lack of time, a lack of knowledge. When the
+appointments were announced, there was a storm of criticism, and none more
+violent than the majority of the men who declined to serve on the Board.
+
+At this time there was a great deal of activity among many leading women in
+the State to have a bill passed by the Legislature that would compel the
+Mayor of cities of the first class to appoint women in the proportion of
+one-third of the whole number appointed to the Boards of Education of those
+cities. The greatest activity for this measure was exercised in Brooklyn.
+One of the leaders, when asked a question about one of the schools in her
+own district, did not know where the school was. She had been a tax-payer
+in the district twenty-two years, and was considered a progressive woman.
+Her chief reason for working for this bill, for spending money freely in
+the interest of its success, was man's indifference to school matters.
+Perhaps if the command, "Feed my lambs" had been given to Dorcas instead of
+Peter, she might have developed enough sense of responsibility about the
+mental food given to know where the school buildings of her own school
+district were located.
+
+In this school district, October, 1901, there were 574 children on half-day
+classes. There was no manual training, though the pupils in the schools
+were, for the most part, the children of day laborers, mechanics, and
+clerks on small salaries. There was no free library, nor prospect of any,
+because public sentiment did not demand it. There was one small park,
+difficult of access. To reach it from the outer sections of the district,
+the tracks used by nine lines of trolley cars must be crossed. There were
+no public baths, except one in summer, near the mouth of a large sewer. One
+of the schools had no out-door playground; two had the closets in the
+in-door playgrounds. There was no room where the teachers could retire if
+ill, or where they could take their luncheons; no rooms where pupils could
+be privately interviewed or taken if ill. Yet it is in this very district,
+where the oldest and wealthiest families of the city live; where
+nine-tenths of the philanthropic enterprises of the city have been born,
+and where the moral upheavals for the regeneration of the city will always
+find their quota of leaders, that there is developing some of the worst
+evils of a cosmopolitan city. Within its borders is a fair-sized Italian
+city, with scores of sweat-shops. Across the thoroughfare is a large Irish
+village lying at the foot of the hill, the streets dirty, unpaved, the
+houses in an unsanitary condition. Some of them are overrun with rats of
+enormous size. The streets at the top of the hill are beginning to yield to
+the pressure of the crowds at the foot. Specific houses seem to have in
+them the very germs of immorality and degeneracy. Women who have made a
+struggle when, by misfortune, forced to move into these houses cease to
+struggle, and yield to the influences about them. The tenement-house laws
+are violated openly.
+
+There are not less than six missions, with twice that number of churches,
+in this one section; but so far as the environment of the poor is
+concerned, they might as well not exist. The majority of the tax-payers,
+those who command public respect and confidence, will not serve
+authoritatively in the political unit in which are their homes, in which
+their children must grow up. They will not take offices that would put it
+in their power to change the environment of the homes of the poor by
+securing the rights, enforcing the laws, that would protect all of the
+homes from the evils of vice, ignorance and unsanitary conditions. But
+these men when wealthy will support liberally institutions made necessary
+by their civic indifference.
+
+No man in a pulpit in the section has ever made a study of it to arouse the
+conscience and energies of the members of his church to their political
+duties. Unfortunately the women, for the most part, are as ignorant of the
+condition, and as indifferent. Because of the unsanitary conditions of the
+houses occupied by the poor, the dirty streets, the restrictions of child
+life, the lack of opportunity for moral development, the total dearth of
+recreative opportunity for the boys and girls, the young men and women who
+are wage-earners, the lack of educational facilities for the children who
+must be educated, if at all, at the expense of the State, the section is a
+prolific source of supply to the institutions the intelligent, sympathetic,
+wealthy women of the section are so active in creating and sustaining.
+
+The indifference of the wealthy and responsible to the conditions
+prevailing in parts of this section is so well known that officers at the
+heads of the city department ignore complaints, or treat them as incidents
+to be tolerated as part of the experiences of their official life.
+
+The penalty is being paid in the steady decline of real estate values, the
+gradual spread of the undesirable part of the community, the exodus of the
+wealthiest to the sections more remote from the tenements.
+
+The environment that has a degenerating influence on the people of limited
+means in that section is not due primarily to the political corruption of
+those using their positions to secure their own ends, but to the criminal
+attitude of the men in the churches and intelligent men not in them, who
+refuse to assume the political responsibilities that are their birthrights;
+the criminal indifference of those who fail to know the necessities of
+which the homes of the poor whom God gave into their charge stand in need.
+This section of the city is typical, not peculiar. Every section of New
+York gives evidence of the divorce between the churches and the political
+control that makes the environment of the home and the churches.
+
+The city is what the good, active people of the city want it to be--no
+better, no worse. The condition of the most uncared-for section gives the
+church's answer to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The mark of
+Cain may not be visible, but every child who goes out of life because its
+right to light, air, sunshine has not been protected is a charge against
+the Church. Every boy and girl whose life record is shadowed, blackened
+because their right to education, to training, to freedom to develop
+physically, mentally, morally, spiritually was denied them through
+political indifference, are the evidences of the failure of the churches to
+live up to the light which Christ left to their keeping. His followers do
+not march through the cities of the poor, an army.
+
+When Christ said, "The second is like unto it, love thy neighbor as
+thyself," He did not not mean the ethical conception for which the Church
+has stood, but the broad, Christ-like conception of brotherhood which would
+protect "thy neighbor" from the evils of his own ignorance and weakness;
+that would use one's best strength in his interest seven days in the week.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY***
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