The leaven in a great city

III

11
11

LILLIAN>W'BETTS

From the collection of the

x

o Prelinger h
v Jjibraary

San Francisco, California
2006

NO LONGER PROFITABLE.

THE LEAVEN IN
A GREAT CITY

By LILLIAN W. BETTS

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1902

COPYRIGHT, 1902,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY.

First Edition published September, 1902.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. AT THE BOTTOM, i

II. THE DEVELOPMENT o£ SOCIAL

CENTERS, . 37

III. THE HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF, . 75

IV. SLOW-DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS, 102

V. WORKING-GlRLS' 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 Set
tlement 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

vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

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 or
ganized a stock company to hold and manage
tenement-house property, limiting their dividends
to three per cent, on the capital ; the surplus divi
dends, if any, over this amount, to be used in im
proving the property, and securing such condi
tions and opportunities for the tenants as would
stimulate pride and independence. The forma
tion of this company followed one of the periodic
agitations of the tenement-house problems cus
tomary in New York.

In 1878 a conference was called by the State
Charities' Aid Association to consider the condi
tion of the tenement houses in this city. Mr.
Alfred T. White, of Brooklyn, had at this time
proved that model tenements, conducted on strict
ly business principles, paid as investments, and
stated at this conference that his model houses

2 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

made a return of seven one-half per cent. As a
result of this conference a committee was ap
pointed 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 tene
ment-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 com
mittee known as the "Mayor's Committee," to de
vise means to effect tenement-house reforms.
This committee reported, and among other sug
gestions recommended, that companies be organ
ized 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 accord
ing 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

AT THE BOTTOM

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 mal
administration. The houses faced on two alleys,
known in their best days as " Single" and "Dou
ble" alley, respectively. As this distinction indi
cates, 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 oc
cupied by one family ; but this cannot be verified.
In their most degenerate days these houses had an
air of exclusiveness, due doubtless to their front-

4 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

ing on courts and the tall iron fences, with gates,
that separated the houses from the street. The
neighborhood at one time was aristocratic ; Frank
lin Square, but a short distance from the property,
was a social center of national greatness. As busi
ness went northward, the merchants, bankers,
tradespeople, followed, for the tie between home
and business was still very close ; the midday din
ner 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 stran
gers 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 per
sonally 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

AT THE BOTTOM

begun to yield to the character of later residents.
This owner kept the alleys and the houses in re
pair. The semi-privacy the iron gate gave the ten
ants 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 re
turns at the least outlay. The evils of the absentee
landlord are not confined to Ireland. Absentee
ism on the part of owners of tenement-house prop
erty is one of the causes of the social and civic
problems that retard the growth of the highest
civilization in New York. Under the manage
ment of an agent, the character of the tenants in
the courts changed rapidly, and the people who
took possession added to the disreputable charac
ter 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 dif
ference was a matter of temperament quite as
much as of race.

6 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 re
gion 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 abil
ity 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

AT THE BOTTOM

man's hand. The trustee system was in perfect
working order. The teachers were what God
made them, unhampered by the pressure of super
intendent 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 edu
cation 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 dis
trict 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 philan
thropist. To the men and women of our public
schools who, preserving the highest ideals, work
with enthusiasm amid the most discouraging sur
roundings, the city owes a debt that money cannot
repay.

The liquor saloons numbered then about as they
do now, occupying every available space. More

8 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

elaborate now, perhaps, for they represent polit
ical headquarters, if not proprietorship, of men
identified with the worst forms of political cor
ruption ; 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 neighbor
ly 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 main
tained silence if there was danger of arrest be
cause 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 pe
culiarly its own as though oceans separated it
from the people a mile and a half away.

.Target companies were the social clubs of that

AT THE BOTTOM

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 ques
tion 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 pre
sented 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

io LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 par
ticular 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 su
premacy, each with a leader who must be de
fended.

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 ex
pressed in hospitals, infirmaries, homes of many
kinds, distribution of food, clothes and medicine.
The more applications secured for these sources

AT THE BOTTOM n

of relief, the more tickets given out in a year at
any point for outside relief, the more easy the con
science of the men who sent the money that main
tained them, who measured the value of their
charities by the figures representing human be
ings 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 Alky boasted of a haunted house, which

12 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 pul
leys 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 op
portunities 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.

Single Alley had a narrow opening from its
rear, or western, end to Roosevelt Street. This

AT THE BOTTOM 13

was paved with brick sunken and broken. It was
a dormitory for the drunken and homeless, a de
pository for all kinds of refuse. This alley was
a runway. The entrance on the two streets of
fered 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 ob
struct 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 col
lector 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 de
fiance did not drive him beyond the gates, bricks
dropped from the roofs, after a vigorous cam
paign of water and cooking utensils, conducted by
the feminine contingent from the windows, usual-

14 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

ly 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 in
teresting. 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 mar
ried. The most elementary knowledge of cook
ing, 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 cof
fee, or tea, with beer provided for "him" for break
fast 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

AT THE BOTTOM 15

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 com
munity 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 peo
ple, it was evident that each mother was conscious
that something was wrong that life yielded no bet
ter return. What was wrong? Where the rem
edy 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 fry
ing pan were the only cooking utensils the most
lavish closet revealed. Washing and scrubbing
are laborious at any time, but when carrying wa
ter 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

16 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

was not the general knowledge it is to-day. Their
relation to moral elevation or degradation is bare
ly 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 remem
bered and aroused pity and sympathy. Over sev
enty 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. At
tending school was for the child to decide. If he

AT THE BOTTOM 17

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 in
stinct. While the baby depended on her for nour
ishment, she could be found with it in her arms
at all times; it was, so far as life had a concen
trated 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 en
vironment 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 go
ing 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

1 8 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

garments that had been made for some more for
tunate 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 un
known outside of the beer can. If that did not
give pleasure, why life was a hand-to-hand, hope
less 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 mat
ter 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 produc
tive, but always by men acting for the owners;
they never came in personal contact with the ten
ants. It is doubtful if they even had any concep
tion of the effect of their delegated responsibility
on the people, or had any knowledge of the change

AT THE BOTTOM 19

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 prem
ises; 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 un
willing to accept these conditions were asked to
move at once. The rent remained the same, four
dollars per month for two rooms. Families desir
ing 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

20 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

they found obnoxious. No tenant moved volun
tarily.

The new ownership took possession with the
same human beings who had occupied the houses
for years. The first step was to insist on cleanli
ness. The alleys were swept and washed every
morning, as were the halls and stairways. Gar
bage cans were provided and their use insisted on.
Every can or bundle carried by a child was exam
ined, 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 dur
ing 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

AT THE BOTTOM 21

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 car
riage 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 comrade
ship 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

22 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 ten
ant resulted in establishing relations that justified
reproof, suggestion, commendation. The stand
ards of pleasure, pain, suffering, accomplishment
were elementary in the alleys. An hour's work
with the needle left the worker exhausted, and di
version 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 real
ized. The months, and even years, passed with
out 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.

AT THE BOTTOM 23

"Do you drink?"

"I drink beer, mostly. Sure, ye get discour
aged just working and washing, and never a cent;
not a decenf 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
the 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 ele
ment 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 stay
ing 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 igno
rance, could not be turned to interesting uses.

24 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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. Be
yond 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 mar
riage 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 un
skilled 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 ne
cessities and income; a conception of time as an
element in the financial problem.

The closer one entered into the individual life,

AT THE BOTTOM 25

the more clearly was it revealed that the problems
of poverty grew out of the inability to see the rela
tions 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 possi
ble. 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

'26 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 employ
ment to hands that had never used a needle, there
fore less time was spent lounging in the doorway
or other rooms. The washing of clothes, though
ragged and few, took time and centered the in
terest, 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 in
differently to "Ten dollars or ten days." This time
a woman came forward, paid the ten dollars, and
Agnes was free. Surprised, dumb-stricken, won
dering why, Agnes followed the friend home.
New clothes, simple, suitable, were waiting for
her. Then-the fight began. At times it was hour
ly. Work was provided that the clumsy, un
trained hands could do. The proceeds were to

AT THE BOTTOM 27

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 pros
perity 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 beau
tiful 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 Ag
nes, his buoyant nature responded to the new en
vironment. When liquor disappeared from the
home, it ceased to be a constant temptation. Out
side of his home Tom found for a time that his

28 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

new departure attracted to him unpleasant atten
tion, 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 fol
lows. 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 cor
ner of the great city. The day came when Tom
and Agnes realized the boy must grow up in a dif
ferent neighborhood, and Tom and Agnes moved.
The making of a laundry compelled the re
moval 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

AT THE BOTTOM 29

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 de
cision was final; the old couple must go; their
rooms were necessary to the new improvements.
It was pathetic to discover that no amount of per
suasion 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," an
nounced the old woman, with conscious pride.
Even the alley, it was found, had standards of
residence, a line that must not be crossed, to main
tain respectability.

By this time the mental attitude of every wo
man in the alleys had changed toward her home.
Positive determination to overcome inertia, or
ambition to excel, it was impossible to create. In
nate predilections were the chief factor in
individual development among the women.

30 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 moth
er's insistence. For it was soon learned that nim
ble 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 in
telligently 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

AT THE BOTTOM 31

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 im
posed 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, imag
ination, to see possible results, memory of expe
riences 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 differ
ences between them were external, not mental.
One answers for nearly all. To get as much com
fort out of to-day as possible and to-morrow
work hard, and be careful. To the majority that

32 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

to be used tomorrow 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-beat
ing 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 tene
ments that have sprung up through the whole dis
trict, the worst type erected in New York. The
rear buildings abound even back of the tall fac
tories, reached by dark, noisome alleys. No
amount of care or repair could save the old
houses. They have gone the way of all material

AT THE BOTTOM 33

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 poli
tic, 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 investiga
tion by sanitary experts. One of these gives a
large part of his report to Gotham Court, and
presents sectional drawings to show the impossi
bility 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 physi
cal and moral degeneracy continued until 1880,
when a few private individuals made the experi
ment of redemption. Even this came when the
houses had gone beyond the point of reclaim
ing. On the site of the old buildings rises a new
business building.

Not far away two of the most brutal and atro
cious murders of recent years in New York have
occurred. In July, 1901, three blocks from the
old buildings, in broad daylight, a man known

34 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

to be the collecting agent for property in the
neighborhood was robbed by three members of a
well-known gang. The children are thin, pre
cocious. 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 side
walks uneven and broken. For almost half a cen
tury this region has had a reputation peculiar to
itself. Efforts have been made to reach the peo
ple, 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 po
lice 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 re
gion. Snuggled down under the shadow of the
bridge and the elevated road, a center of business
interests which the moral standards of the resi
dents do not affect, because their activities, other

AT THE BOTTOM 35

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 in
terests 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 pro
duced 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 re
ports may count people in great numbers, for ye
gain dollars thereby. New York counts the rem
nant only at the polls, and ignores the penalty her
indifference imposes on her own advancement.

36 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 con
ditions 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 ac
tivity.

CHAPTER II.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS.

THE centralization of the interests of the tene
ment-house population is not understood by those
who broaden their mental, if not their active, in
terest by reading and travel; who in the varied
interest of a broader life are forced to see the mul
tiplicity of factors that enter into the settlement
of every problem. This is what we mean by know
ing the relation of things ; marking the distinction
between those who see only and those who com
prehend. 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 re
lated to himself only. This is the relation which
the mass of the tenement-house workers and vot
ers bear to life.

The people of whole sections live entirely with
in certain geographical lines, every interest cen
tered within these limits.

The race sections are logical, based on the law

38 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

of natural selection ; of family interest. The first
generation of immigrants naturally hold the sec
ond 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 for
eign 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 re
tains all that it can of the old life, and interprets
the new according to the lessons learned from en
vironment, and power as it is exercised on the
people. Each race section has its own thorough
fare. The people on the street use their own lan
guage, and trade in shops of their own country
men. 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.

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 Hes-

THE DEVELOPMENT 39

ter and had never crossed the Bowery. He
had positive convictions on every subject relating
to the ward ; he knew the life history of every po
litical 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 pro
tected 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 busi
ness 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 neighbor
hood. 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

40 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

rights of himself and his countrymen. The first
thing which would happen, if they — his own peo
ple—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, hav
ing attended public schools until that age. The
pride with which this man referred to his daugh
ters' 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 la
dies," 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 repre
sented another world. The revelation, because of
contact with the minds of these college-trained
women, showed them, so far as they could com-

THE DEVELOPMENT 41

prehend 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 hab
its; 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 hab
its 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 under
stand 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

42 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 sym
pathies, her interests, her standards. Positive
race antagonism existed between her and her fam
ily. 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 ex
plained 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 distinc
tive 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, what
ever they may have accomplished for eternity,
for the people they call their own.

THE DEVELOPMENT 43

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 for
eign 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 chil
dren. 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 in
terest. They accept without question the state
ments of their male relatives as to issues and men.

44 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 edu
cated in their conception of right and wrong un
der 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 con
sidered 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.

The man of brains they see drop his tools, take
off his overalls and stand in high hat, and even
tually 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, per
haps ; yes, even came over in the same ship with

THE PAST, PRESENT AND MIDDLE PERIOD.

THE DEVELOPMENT 45

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 "poli
tics," 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 arro
gant 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 igno
rant. The increased power of the petty hench
man rarely enables him to change the way of liv
ing 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

46 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

district. The less conscience he has, the more
patient he is in waiting for the day when his dis
trict 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 repri
mand. 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 read
ing-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 calam-

THE DEVELOPMENT 47

ity. "Well, I hope she will not come if she can
not behave," was the comment made. The chil
dren 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 persua
sion ended. When the members of a woman's
club in that section using that house were con
sulted, 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 chil
dren, 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 moth
ers of the neighborhood to fight for their chil
dren's protection. The boy was spreading immo-

48 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

rality 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 re
sult 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 inter
ested in the future of four nephews, who were the
motherless sons of her brother. Out of her ex
perience with sons-in-law she enunciated her con
clusions : "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. Bet-
ther 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 de
mand, 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

THE DEVELOPMENT 49

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 ob
noxious restrictions on the sale of liquor on Sun
days 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 jus
tify 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 leg
islation 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 pres
ence 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 to
ward this the best legislative action must trend.
Thinking men and women who have studied the

5°

LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 threat
ened. It is time for fanaticism to feel the press
ure of broad-minded balanced public opinion. A
law administered at the demand and according to
the conscience of people unaffected by its admin
istration, used by them against an equally intelli
gent class who feel that personal liberty has been
curtailed at the expense of their right of judg
ment, is class legislation. No greater evil influ
ence has been active in New York than the creat
ing 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 apos
tles 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 peo
ple governed is provocative of two things: con-

THE DEVELOPMENT 51

tempt 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 compre
hension 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 re
spond 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 Commis
sioner 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 discus
sion 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

52 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 fin
ished 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 dif
ference 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 coun-

THE DEVELOPMENT 53

ters 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 housekeep
ing ; 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 re
pellent, 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

54 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 intent
ly, rose with a baby on her arm, and turn
ing 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 discour
aged 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 ap-
pealingly. "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

THE DEVELOPMENT 55

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 temp
tation than strong liquors. The number of sa
loons 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 after
noon, but they would have them close earlier Sat
urday 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

56 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

saw any dishonesty in the system. There were no
principles in politics, only men. Things re
mained with them the same no matter who was
elected. It was a district which was under the
control of one party, having an unquestioned ma
jority, which steadily increased through the ef
forts 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 occu
pying 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 neigh
bors. 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 thor
oughfare 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,

A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL.

THE DEVELOPMENT 57

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 chil
dren the room would accommodate at one time,
but no one cared enough to support it.

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 low
est 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 disap
peared 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

58 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

special feature to arouse activity the evils of the
"Red Light" district, but only the blasting influ
ence of a region sunk in the apathy of deadened
moral natures, killed by the hopelessness of chang
ing the environment of their homes until it rep
resents 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 civiliza
tion as when in their own land, the writer viewed
the parade in the evening of the voters of the dis
trict, who had been the guests of the district
leader, a State Senator, at an outing. These out
ings are the annual "round-ups" of the voters.
The expenses of these outings run into the five fig
ures, 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 disinter
ested 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

THE DEVELOPMENT 59

of tickets, which sometimes sell as high as five dol
lars. 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 indi
cated. 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 des
tiny 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

60 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 govern
ment ? The men do not need to ask who is the dis
trict 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 in
creases 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.

THE DEVELOPMENT 61

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 lead
er's right is questioned by another would-be
leader. There is only one issue — the man; no
body cares for the principle — if there be a differ
ence 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 pre
sents the meanest and lowest of the tenements in
New York ; in which there is less effort to coun
teract 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,-
ooo; 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 or
ganized 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-es-

62 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

capes, on wagons hung bits of white cloth declar
ing 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 Calif orny ran."
This was displayed on one fire-escape on which
opened the windows of two families, each es
pousing 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 grace
fully 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 ban
ners 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 DEVELOPMENT 63

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 cor
ruption of the party to which he had belonged
compelled him to rally to the support of the move
ment 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 fol
lowers. 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

64 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

not jeopardize the position secured by his vote
that supports his family to maintain the theory of
American citizenship. Why should he make sac
rifices to free the city from disgrace when his in
dependent 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 un
til the city has been held in the shackles of a spoils
system that overshadows its commercial suprem
acy and makes it the argument against democratic
government. The heaviest disgrace for this con
dition rests not on the men who profit by the sys
tem 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, be
cause of lack of training and moral turpitude,
could not conceive of a service for other than per
sonal ends. Shrewdness made them see that the im
migrant 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

EARLY MORNING AMONG THE PUSHCARTS.

THE DEVELOPMENT 65

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 ap
pearance of a candidate for local office who does
not bear the "hall-mark" of the neighborhood will
be resented.

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 train
er 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 dis
trict 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 fol
lower, 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 dupli
cate of the leader nearest his own level ; this man

66 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 de
frauded by the political system he, in utter igno
rance, has helped to establish. When he is thrown
out of work given to secure his vote, he has no re
dress. 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 keep
ing 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 fami
lies; 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 dis
trict leader, elected by the people to make the laws

THE DEVELOPMENT 67

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 dis
charge 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 resent
ment was expressed. There were removals into
this special district before the next municipal elec
tion, and new enrollments under the leader's ban
ner, 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 lead
ers 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 fran
chises. He knows that the district leader se-

68 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

cures privileges, licenses, votes for franchises, di
rectly or indirectly, with the distinct understand
ing that his recommendations insure places to the
men who carry them. Under corrupt city gov
ernment the man in business who does not cater
to the political powers finds his privileges cur
tailed ; that he is made the target for petty annoy
ances. 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 rec
ognize 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

THE DEVELOPMENT 69

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 se
curing 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 thor
oughfares 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 tene
ment-house district is. This district leader inter
prets 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 trou
ble. 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

70 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

person, by proxy. Is it any wonder he can con
trol votes ? Is it any wonder that the poor, igno
rant, 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 in
nocent appeal. This is the moral doctrine with
which we inoculate our newly made citizens, and
under which the children of our overcrowded ten
ement 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. Talk
ing 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

THE DEVELOPMENT 71

them are personal, and the district leader secures
them.

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 com
munity needed, was given by the late Colonel
George E. Waring. When he organized the De
partment 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;

72 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 les
son 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 employ
ment 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 ave
nues, 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 east
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

THE DEVELOPMENT

73

his living honestly, honorably, to cast his ballot
as an American citizen, would be guaranteed to
every voter employed in a city department em
ploying 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 knowl
edge 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, repre
sents 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 de
partment, 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

74 LEAVEN. IN A GREAT CITY

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 War
ing. 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 quick
ly that the system in that department ignored
"pull." When they did accept it, they determined
to overthrow the man who robbed the spoils sys
tem of its largest perquisite where it was most
effective in numbers. The combination of the
political machines accomplished the city's dis
grace 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 ad
mitted as a factor in character-building. That
light and air are indispensable to cleanliness, and
physical cleanliness to health, and health to mor
als, 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 reputa
tions as positive as individuals. Thoughtful, in
telligent wives of workingmen would not, could
not be persuaded to move into them because of
their reputations. Often the evils of these tene
ments 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 be
tween tenants — ua go-between" between the agent
or the owner and the tenants. The owner or
agent employing these women upholds their de
cisions when differences between the tenants and
housekeepers arise. This clothes them with great

76 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

authority, and often enables them to do great in
justice. They are feared usually. Families will
endure restrictions of liberties, every deprivation
of their rights, because protest would mean evic
tion or discomforts that would compel them to
move.

Under some agents and owners these house
keepers have absolute control of the property.
They frequently make and enforce rules that ut
terly 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 char
acter of the houses under their control because
they have standards and compel those about them
to live up to them.

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, as
cending 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 flag
ging stones, such as are used on the sidewalks.

A REMNANT OF THE PAST.

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 77

The fences are kept in good order and well paint
ed. Not a child living in these four houses dares
to play in those yards. The housekeeper — one wo
man 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 moth
ers 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 in
terfere 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.

78 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

"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, venti
lated 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 char
acter of the people scrutinized before they are ac-

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 79

cepted 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 ten
ants, 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 depart
ments, all natives of New York. The wives were
all wage-earners before they were married. They
dress well; most of them are fairly good house
keepers. 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, refus
ing to go back to school. The girls are contented
until fourteen, and then they grow restless, becom
ing 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.

80 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 affilia
tions or family ties. The men enjoy the sense of
power that comes from this connection, and real
ize 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 po
sitions 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

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 81

four children, was born, married, her four chil
dren 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 num
ber 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 re
spectability 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 pro
vided 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 preg-

82 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

nancy 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, unventi-
lated 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 bed
room 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 cel
lar?" An expression of self-pity passed over the

HOMES UNDER ONE RQQF 83

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 car
rying to the cans in the tiny yard, in halls and on
the stairway. It is kicked out of the way with
out 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

84 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

either the housekeeper or the authorities. It
would be useless, and would get them into trou
ble. The present owner is willing to kalsomine
the bedrooms and halls each spring, but the ten
ants 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 turn
fas'er; oh, pease turn fas'er; I 'ant to do p'ay; I
'ant to doe on steet; pease turn 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 sup
ply for four families, the difficulties of clean
liness 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 house
keeper, who is a shrewd woman, fosters this spirit

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 85

of neighborliness. She smiles as she says : "They
gets so used to each other they hates to be sepa
rated." Neither house nor tenants seem to go be
low 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 be
come tenants who do not know how to keep house
to learn how.

The writer knows intimately such a house
keeper. She had charge of a four-story tene
ment on the lower East Side. The house was of
the type known as "double decker." There were
four apartments on each floor; the front consist
ing of a kitchen, living-room and two bedrooms ;
the back, of one room and two bedrooms. Small
windows near the ceiling in kitchen and bed
rooms opened on a narrow space between this and
the next house, which was an old-fashioned resi
dence. A similar opening in that house enabled
the neighbors to look into each other's rooms.
Water and refuse were thrown into this space be
tween 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

86 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 wo-

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 87

man who made bread and failed with cake ex
changed 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 pres
ent character.

Again, tenants will be the victims of vin
dictive housekeepers, who for any and no reason
will begin a system of petty persecutions to com
pel 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

88 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

usually have the full amount collected. The
houses where this system prevails are the most
objectionable. The tenants for this leniency en
dure positive evils. The important thing is a
place of shelter for the family. Work is uncer
tain, or long periods of idleness has made the pay
ment of rent impossible for a period. The house
keeper understands and becomes responsible for
keeping the tenant until the rent is paid. In re
turn the tenants endure neglect of duty on the
part of the housekeeper. Silence is their expres
sion 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 trou
ble with the tenants, always having some one to
evict, threw the blame for her troubles on the ten
ants. The first one listened, finally saying slowly :
"No, you are the one. You get cross and abuse
the children. You make pets of some chil-

A TYPE OF THE PRESENT.

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 89

dren 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."

There are landlords who care for nothing but
the income from their property. Any kind of ten
ant who will pay rent is acceptable. Any house
keeper 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 con
tributes to the creation of the slum.

The careless and apparently malicious destruc
tion 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 house
keepers in tenement houses. This question of
tenants was being discussed freely by the women
who were tenants as well as the housekeepers.

9o LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 im
prove 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 de
structive 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 wo
men 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

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 91

for anything but rents, the housekeeper was often
compelled to let in and keep in objectionable ten
ants. 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 ad
mitted that at times one could find tenants who
had lived for many years in one house where con
ditions 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 tene
ments erected in New York, or in houses de
signed 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 base
ments 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.

92 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

They have been crowded out, the more prosper
ous, by the Hebrews, while the remnant find them
selves 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 par
ish at less than four thousand, and that four thou
sand 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 develop
ment 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 house
keeper does not struggle, for it is expected and
charged for in the rent. Plumbing is of the sim
plest, for it is expected to present the largest per
centage of loss in the administration of the prop
erty. One of the most elaborate of the new
tenements erected on the lower East Side was vis
ited three months after it was occupied. Every

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 93

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 at
tended to the garbage. She was utterly indiffer
ent to the appearance of the house, which, in
tended 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 manufac
ture 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 deep
ly 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 birth
place of parents. The houses often are found to
have life-long 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

94 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 dif
ference 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.

The housekeepers in this section differ essen
tially in their relation to the tenants from those
of the more heterogeneous population of the East
Side of the city. One resemblance is recog-

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 95

nized — 'the effect of the character of the house
keeper. 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 con
trols 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 house
keeper 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 agree
ment in keeping the entrance clean.

A large factor in the tenement house for char-

96 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

acter 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. Prop
erty under this type of woman resists decay. She
holds it in spite of the decay about it. The char
acterless, slovenly, indifferent housekeeper is a
factor in destroying property, because of the de
structive 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 ventila
tion. The tenants of this property and all in

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 97

the neighborhood were tormented by the smoke
and gas from the chimney of the mill. When
the wind blew directly toward the houses, win
dows 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 dis
graceful 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 for
got for days at £ 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

98 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 unyield
ing; 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 neighbor
hood 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 fami
lies in one of these houses had been distressed
by the amount of illness in it. Malaria had at
tacked 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 six
teen who was dying of consumption on the first

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 99

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
passage-way 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 sicken
ing. The visitor asked the tenant who brought
her to the sick girl what caused the odor percep
tible in the hall, with front and rear windows al
ways 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, evi
dently intending to be facetious, said: "Say,

ioo LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 prop
erty had changed hands and a man comparatively
poor and wholly free from political affiliations be
came 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 rela
tions of ethics to life; the struggle for existence
dulls the mind ; while the depleted physical condi
tions caused by bad air, mal-nutrition and igno-

HOMES UNDER ONE ROOF 101

ranee of real values reduce moral resistance al
most 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 cor
ruption, 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 degrad
ing, to maintain even the semblance of a home
was a remarkable achievement.

These women knew but three educating influ
ences — home, school and Church. Four, per
haps, 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 de
velopment 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 val
uable 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

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 103

knowledge, they soon forgot it. Their concep
tion 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 sen
timent, a spiritual light and guide; the end and
aim of its service to develop spiritual life by teach
ing 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 ques
tioned. Some had even then left their old build
ings to be used as mission churches; others sold

io4 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

their downtown buildings, moving uptown, giv
ing up any attempt at holding th>e masses, who
manifested no interest in the Church or its work.
The missions then established were and are main
tained with more or less wisdom and suc
cess. 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 grap
ple 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 mis
sion church became a distributing station. It was
but natural that the men and women who fol
lowed Christ in their lives should feed and clothe

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 105

the hungry and the naked. It was quite as nat
ural 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 sev
eral children in a family they were often sent to
as many Sunday-schools. The churches, all un
consciously, for a long period carried on the work
of the missions on a commercial basis, competing
energetically to secure attendants at mission ser
vices and Sunday-schools. The workers found
their success measured by the numbers that ap
peared 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 ener
gies of devoted, consecrated men and women, de
termined 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 con
sidered themselves stewards of the properties in
their possession. The blunders made are a trib
ute to the faith which established and maintained

106 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

churches. The very blunders of those years
were the seeds of wisdom these latter days are be
ginning to garner in the fruits of cooperation
and federation. The forces are beginning to mar
shal 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 citi
zenship ; 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

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 107

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 se
cured 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 pov
erty 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 dif
ficult. This girl was the eldest of seven chil
dren, all attending the mission. "It is a mys
tery 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

108 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

4 '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 neces
sary, 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 pen
niless, she appeared at the club in a new hat and
gloves. When the girl joined the club her Sun
day-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 at
tempted 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 di
rectors 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

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 109

kept their dues paid who dressed far more plainly ;
these very girls she had on more than one occa
sion 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 morn
ing. 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 fam
ily 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 rap-

no LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

idly 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 wel
comed. 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 work
ers 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 un
favorably in generous impulses ; the girl urged her

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS in

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 Sun
day-school all her life, and had joined the church
with her mother, a gentle, quiet woman, who
leaned on her daughter for guidance. The daugh
ter 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 house
work, 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

ii2 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 impossi
ble 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 offi
cers 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 offi
cers were glad to do this. They did not support
a mission and had very little outlet for the

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 113

church's generosity, except the mission societies
— Home and Foreign — to which they were de
voted as a church.

For thirteen years the church had been faithful
to its promise and paid the rent. Nobody ques
tioned 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 natu
rally his return was dreaded. The mother and
daughter met the problem unaided as to advice or
suggestion. Apparently the church would con
tinue to pay the rent without question, though

j i4 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 de
velopment came when the church made another
future possible to her by refusing to pauperize the
family.

We all know the families who have more tur
keys at Christmas than members. We still have
churches and sewing schools in the same neigh
borhood, 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 entertain-

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 115

ments 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 ex
change after our Christmas entertainments, be
cause in giving we have, unfortunately, duplicated
the gifts received elsewhere. Mollie finds her
self 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 pa
tient, 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 at
tendance. But all this will disappear as rapidly
as sectarianism and competition between churches
and in philanthropic effort disappear. Compe
tition created it; cooperation will dispel it, be
cause all will come to a higher conception of the
relations of efforts toward improvement. Then
the "profit" of church and Sunday-school attend
ance will not be measured by the "things" dis
tributed.

Nothing marks the growth of public intelli-

n6 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

gence more than the federations, and the systems
that have grown out of the knowledge of the in
jury 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. Consulta
tion with the mission workers brought the unwel
come 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.

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 117

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 constant
ly. 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 cir
cle 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.

Ti8 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 cry
ing 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 bal
ance 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 in
surance companies on the weekly payment plan.

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 119

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 sev
eral 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 mar
ried. 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 commu
nion; 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 ; moth
er would feel awful." Glancing about the
barren, dirty rooms with a look of scorn, she con
tinued: "We could not let our church friends

120 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 al
ways 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. Ris
ing, 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 imme
diate 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 re
sponsibility for any of the children, and disap
peared. The girl drooped for a time after the

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS

separation; but she finally secured a good home,
making a capable, devoted servant until she mar
ried. 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 help
ing the poor.

She never doubted her mother, whose picture,
enlarged from a small photograph, is the chief
ornament in her parlor, her most cherished pos
session, 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 moth
er 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 disintegra
tion began, had neither the intelligence born of
experience nor the money to place the mission

T22 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

work in charge of people of high intellectual and
social development. There were no training
schools for Christian workers, and to that de
gree 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 build
ing announcing an entertainment for that evening,
to which all the people were invited. On the plat
form were a number of young men and women,
sons and daughters of the uptown church mem
bers, the entertainers for the evening.

The church was packed with the people of the
region, self-respecting poor. The mission, for-

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 123

turutely for them, was limited in money, so its
possibility for pauperizing was limited to just that
degree. The mission pastor, before the entertain
ment 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 main
tained 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,

i24 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 build
ing that is not ugly and cheap. The very plat
form on which the pastor preaches lacks furniture,
that would impart an air of cheer or impressive-
ness. 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 pass
ing 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 build
ing 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 pas
tor 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

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 125

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 re
sources outside of their overcrowded homes. The
pastor knows that to succeed in changing the char
acter 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 be
longed 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

126 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 hesi
tate to send him to represent the Lord Jesus Christ
to the poor ; not a demoralized and degraded peo
ple, 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 in
telligent 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 trouble
some and inattentive: "If you don't sit still, Mol-
lie, 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

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 127

and turn a gold paper-covered letter as they re
cited, 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, con
ception of her duty to these children, differed in
nowise from their ignorant, tired, worried moth
ers 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 yes
terday 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, rum
pled," 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 bit
terly on the poor as the rich, and in their ministra
tion know no difference between them.

The writer was present at a funeral in an East
Side home in a tenement having sixteen families.

128 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

A wife and mother had died. The family occu
pied 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 rilled 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 assem
bling 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 SPIRITUAL BULWARK.

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 129

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.

This represents this clergyman's attitude to
ward 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 influ
ence 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 un
der 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

ijo LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 spir
itual 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 convic
tion ; but it is due to the positive teaching of work
ers outside of the Church, who felt the irrepara
ble 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 an
tagonized 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 nev
ertheless cruel.

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 131

A group of very young girls worked in a fac
tory 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 im
mediate 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 base
ment 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 ta
bles, 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 soci
ety in the church to help. The girls poured their
own tea. For three days everything promised
well. The girls accepted the one condition im
posed, 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

LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

righteous, energetic souls belonging to the church
thought they would see the result of their gener
ous 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 side-

DAWNING CONSCIOUSNESS 133

walk 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, unedu
cated 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 re
veal that the Church that holds the poor is one
over which men of the highest intellectual and so
cial training are placed in charge, the mistakes of
the present would be extenuated. Such churches

i34 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

do exist. Men of strong, vivid spiritual percep
tion have erected and maintained bulwarks of
righteousness in neighborhoods where the envi
ronment, 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 wo
men 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 dc 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.

WHERE THE PEOPLE SHAKE.

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 con
gregations, 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 dis
tricts. 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 for
eigners; some made a brave effort to maintain a
church for the people; some became missions, dis
tributing stations to the poor people who had set
tled in the now overcrowded houses that for
merly 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 learn-

136 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

ing 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 so
cial, rather than religious.

The saloon far outstripped the Church in the
ease with which it adapted itself to the new ele
ment. 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 un
looked-for evil, insidious, demoralizing — the po
litical 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 in
telligence became more absorbed in business and
profession, more given to money-making, because
of increasing social demands, the city became, in

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 137

the minds not only of these politicians, but of the
voters they trained, a mine to be worked for per
sonal 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 develop
ment of the tenement-house sections the only so
cial 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 barten
der. 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 ig
nore questions that the Church ministering, or tryr
ing to minister, to a people poverty-stricken, over
worked, living lives barren of any pleasures but
those of the senses, in an environment that of it
self 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 func
tion was secular, as well as religious ; that its Sun
day 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

HO LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 oppor
tunity. The homes were too small, too over
crowded 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 chil
dren, 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 so
cial problem. The parish house, the church house
did not exist. All the amusements offered the
people must be in a building consecrated to re
ligious life and service. It was a serious question

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 141

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 gre
garious. She was born into a house probably
overcrowded before she came into it; she slept,
ate, lived with crowds. The street, her only play
ground, 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 nat
ural 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 Sun
day-school teachers discovered the limitations of
the homes. Between the homes as they existed
and the churches as they must exist, the social cen
ter for the working girl must be created that

142 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 pro
vided in ways that made no drafts on purse or in
ventiveness. Halls were open for dancing, where
her presence was so desirable that she was admit
ted free or at half the price demanded of her
brother. Excursion grounds with dancing plat
forms 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 interest
ed in the working-girl's life faced was how to en
large 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 peo
ple 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 dec-

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 143

laration 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 stand
point of a Church worker, devoted and faithful,
saw that outside of the Church, but governed by
all that the Church believed and taught, the nat
ural outcome of both, a social center for working
girls must be created. This center must be in
dependent of any other organization. It must be
at once a natural expression of the working-girls'
standards. It must be flexible, as well as pro
gressive, during every period of evolution in each
group; it must keep in touch with the least pro
gressive 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 work
ing 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,

i44 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

her money, her education wisely in the interest
of social development.

With Miss Dodge as president, the first work
ing-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 com
bination of interests and sympathies met the ap
proval of all interested in the problem of the work
ing-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

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 145

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 mem
bers. 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 ex
penses 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 to accomplish this
end. Naturally the members of such clubs de
velop 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,

146 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

cannot, pay for what she receives. This concep
tion of the financial side of the working-girls' club
management controls in the clubs, with few ex
ceptions, to-day.

The club must give every educational and so
cial 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 finan
cial 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 impossi
ble. In short, the working-girls' clubs that are
conducted on the broader lines, and with the most
comprehensive knowledge of our social condi
tions, 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 con-

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 147

ception 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 to
bacco 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 in
troduction 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 repre
sented just what intermittent school attendance,
uninterrupted freedom of the streets, from the

148 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

time they could walk alone to the present time,
might be expected to produce. They were stran
gers 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 elevat
ing 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 re
mote 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 fac
tories, 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.

WORKIiNG-GIRLS' CLUBS 149

The tenement houses were formerly the resi
dences 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 per
sonal 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 re
sented 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

150 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 Septem
ber or October, until the first of May follow
ing. As one recalls this club, it presents one of
the best evidences of the barrenness of the work
ing-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 at
tractive. 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 smok
ing kerosene lamps, which but added to their un-
attractiveness. 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

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 151

club, with several additions to their number of
their own selection, among the rest their fore
woman. 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 spokeswo
man 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 sugges
tion 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 pov
erty, 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

15* LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

pay the same dues, and each month make a dona
tion 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 dona
tion, 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 sup
ported the workers directing the club affairs.

This woman was taken ill. The director of the
club found that she boarded with a family consist
ing 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

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 153

very ill* and penniless; yet the poor about her were
devoted to her and considered her most remark
able.

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 na
ture; 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 de
light, has borne fruit, and the girls in turn give
their service to those whom they may help — of ten-
est 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. Con
stantly 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 char
acter and intelligence. She was elected to office,

i54 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 influ
ence 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 back
ground. All that appeared was that they were
neighbors.

The first reception to mothers was given by the
club about this time. When the night of the re
ception came, the "problem" came in a new dress
having a jetted front. Her appearance amazed
the members, and made it clear that the "prob-

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 155

lem" 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 re
move 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 admir
ing crowd. The two mothers and the new mem
ber 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 ambi
tion; she had through them enjoyed a sense of
power. The experience of that evening doubt
less opened her eyes to things in life to which she

156 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

had been blind. Again and again she was seen
during that evening reception to look at her moth
er 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 deter
mined 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 to
gether ; but the rooms were now furnished. The
new member had supplanted the "problem" as an
influence in the club. The "problem" became en
gaged, 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

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 157

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 pro
portion is gained. Girls who have had the bene
fit of a public school education that enables them
to fill positions that prove they have had such op
portunities, 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 con
sent 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.

158 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 min
utes. 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 wher
ever 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 entertain
ment 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 man-

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 159

agement has been purely democratic and absolute
ly non-sectarian. In the nature of things, in af
filiation with any organization, it must take its
place as the fraction of a unit, and be in its man
agement 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 fac
tory, 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 mem
bers married, but they were not willing to lose
the social affiliations of girlhood; they were un
willing often, reluctant always, to sever club re
lationship. On the other hand, the members felt
that a married woman should remain home in the

160 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 Settle
ment 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 train
ing 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 af
fairs outside of the home that makes its environ
ment. It must be that the girls who have been
club members make more companionable wives
than the women who have not had their opportuni-

WORKING-GIRLS' CLUBS 161

ties. The children are always present at the meet
ings of the mothers. Various devices and meth
ods 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 un
der which they had slept. Friction and quarrel
ing 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 wait
ing 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

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 163

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 con
veniences; 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 edu
cation, but is more than apt to be satisfied with
her self-taught accomplishments, thus increasing
her disadvantages in the us€ of time and money.

Even with a small family the house-mother with
the usual round of work would not have many mo
ments 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 fol
low. 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

164 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 be
cause 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 stim
ulated, the overworked rested and cheered ? Hun
dreds, 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 im
possible. Husband and children, through con
tact with life in shop, factory, store, street and
school, enlarged their interest every day ; while the

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 165

wife and mother came to a mental standstill, often
losing interest in everything outside of her home ;
often failing through lack of knowledge and dis
couragement 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 so
cial 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 Set
tlement 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 Set
tlement, in clubs and classes. These mothers

166 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

came, but never the same group twice. The small
est obstacle would prevent the very women who
most needed social opportunity from accepting it.
When they needed help, they came to the Settle
ment; 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 re
tained 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 experi-

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 167

ment 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 Set
tlement, asking them to the Settlement for a
certain afternoon in the following week. All ac
cepted 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 move
ment 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 inde
pendence. How could these two types be brought
into a common social relation, when they held

i68 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

nothing in common but the experience of living
under the roof with many ?

It was decided to let the law of natural selec
tion 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 pro
jectors 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 mem
bers, and filled at the second meeting. It enlarged
to fifteen the next year. In its fifth year it num
bered 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 oppor
tunity of laying stress on a wife's personal ap
pearance; 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 re
ligion to-day, when mothers and married daugh
ters are members. The time of meeting was two
o'clock, that the mothers might be at home in time

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 169

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 be
longed to a sewing club that met the same after
noon at the Settlement. The club, named in the
first month of its existence "The Woman's Home
Improvement Club," celebrated its eleventh anni
versary at the College Settlement, October, 1901.
As the first anniversary approached, the mem
bers suggested an evening meeting, that their hus
bands 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 mar
ried, her husband — were included in the invita
tion. 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 to
gether! It was evident that the club was a fea
ture 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

170 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 er
rands."

This was the very type of mother the projectors
of the club hoped to reach. The first evening re
ception proved such a success that it was decided
to hold one evening reception each month for the
family and friends of the members. Thanksgiv
ing and Christmas receptions belonged to the chil
dren. Apples, nuts, gingerbread, cake and pea
nut 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. "Amer
ica" and "Home, Sweet Home," sung in chorus,
close the evening. More than one family is now
represented by three generations on these even
ings. 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:

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 171

"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 Set
tlement, 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 illus
tration of the lack of social opportunity in a tene
ment-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 ques
tion 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 ; ex
pressing her views. In the third year she came

LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

to the president, and with every evidence of wish
ing to disclose a secret, said : Next week Thurs
day 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 Thurs
day. 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 re
membrance. Radiantly, tearfully happy stood the
hostess. She loved music, and a sweet, gracious
woman whose music wins the most cultured sang

. A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 173

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. Rais
ing her hands and face heavenward, she said sol
emnly: "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.

i74 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

She was radiant. "I'll give a party to those chil
dren what said that sweet thing to me." Sug
gestions of other uses were cast aside. The chil
dren 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 an
nounced : "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. Per
haps 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 send
ing 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 re
freshments 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

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 175

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 thor
oughly 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 birth-

176 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

day, and confided the secret to the giver of the
birthday party, saying, "I wanted to give a birth
day 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 mem
ber. 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 mem
ber. 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

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 177

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 re
ducing the valueless things that were formerly
bought when only a little money, a few cents per
haps, 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 kinder
gartens. It was generally conceded that the
mothers of the children did not appreciate the
work the kindergarten was doing for their chil
dren ; that too often they felt that permitting them
to go was conferring a favor on the kindergart-
ners 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 responsi
ble for the irregular attendance of many of the
children, as well as the lack of punctuality. There
was no kindergarten in connection with the Set
tlement, nor room for one, but one was greatly
needed. Much as it was needed, it must not come

i78 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

until the mothers wanted it and were willing to
work for it.

Miss Brooks u is then at the head of the Kin
dergarten Training School in connection with the
Teachers' College. She was consulted. The re
sult was that the members of the Woman's Home
Improvement Club became on several afternoons
members of a kindergarten. They used the ma
terials, 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 chil
dren!"

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 se
curing the promised attendance of seventy chil
dren. The Lowell Kindergarten was then opened
at the DeWitt Memorial by the New York Kin
dergarten Association as a result of this effort.
The difficulties the mothers put in the way of good

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 179

work in the kindergarten was explained to the
members of the club, who agreed to call on moth
ers whose children did not come to the kindergar
ten in time, or were irregular in attendance. It
was most interesting to watch the growth of pub
lic sentiment in favor of regular and punctual at
tendance, not only at the kindergarten, but at
school. If the kindergarten child reported John
ny 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. Clean
liness was imposed on their own children, and ex
acted from other mothers of kindergarten chil
dren.

The influx of Hebrews, toward whom the mem
bers 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 resi
dence 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

180 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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, de
voted mothers. To the children the Church en
tertainments 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 so
cial opportunity, regulated by the Church environ
ment. 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

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 181

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 dis
played, 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 rev
erence 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

i8a LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 oppor
tunity 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 his
tory they knew, men and women they had known
for years. When cases of strangers were brought

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 183

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 atten
tion. 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

•Lr

1 84 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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.

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 plu
ral possessive thrilled the heart of the workers;
the club was a family possession. The woman

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 185

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 go
ing home. She was told the woman had not ap
peared. 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 wo
man, 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 pen-

1 86 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

alty of shop life. She has grown hard, aggressive,
self-assertive, untruthful. If only her environ
ment could have been different, she would have
made a magnificent woman. The world of strug
gle 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 environ
ment 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 im
properly and carelessly filled, and report them at
the club meeting. Leaking roofs, broken stair
ways, unlighted halls, contagious diseases were
reported, and conditions in the stores and facto
ries where their daughters worked.

The criminality of concealing dangers that
threatened many to protect one was compre
hended. The club motto became "A helping hand
to all."

The club members felt that it was possible for

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 187

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 moth
ers. 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 Chil
dren 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 blow
ing. A little girl without hat or coat stood shiv
ering and crying against the church railing oppo
site. 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

188 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

service to children. The story was told to the
club.

One of the members, after the meeting had ad
journed 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 morn
ing last week I saw the child go to the corner gro
cery. I went after her.

"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,

AT THE SETTLEMENT— A STORMY DAY.

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 189

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 com
plaint against you to the Children's Society.
Good-morning;' and I took out my foot, bowed
and went downstairs. When I got home, that lit
tle 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 con
cluded 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 chil
dren in the best possible condition; that every

190 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 Wo
man's Auxiliary of the Civil Service Reform As
sociation, the City History Club have sent
speakers to the club, some conducting courses of
lectures. Even the Assembly District work un
dertaken by the League for Political Education
was attempted by the club, but did not succeed. It
could hardly be expecterd that it would.

During all those years the members had been
trained to self-government. All questions are de
cided 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 cou
ple 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 re
vealed : That the mother of a working-man's fam
ily has neither strength nor time to give away;
that the very conditions of tenement-house neigh
borhoods require trained, impersonal workers.
The women who gave time to the club work in

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 191

the neighborhood neglected their homes and fam
ilies. The few members who tried to do neigh
borhood work in the house used every advantage
the club-house offered, which they controlled,
to curry favor, to revenge slights, real or fan
cied, to themselves or their children. The best
mothers made no attempt to do any neighborhood
work. The house became a social center, an edu
cational center. But it was not a success until
paid workers were put in charge of different de
partments, 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 lack
ing the right qualities volunteered, or the work
was important when other things did not inter
fere. Clubs were established to which the organ
izers 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

192 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 mi
nority combating a conservative and less demon
strative majority.

The reform campaign of 1897 began. The pic
ture of the candidate of the Citizens' Union hung
in the window. The Citizens* Union used the
house and yard for its lectures. When the cam
paign was ended, the friction developed to the un
bearable point, and it seemed, in view of the dis
sension, best to disband the club. The club voted
to keep together and return to the College Settle
ment, 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 Set
tlement.

For six years this club has had a country club
house — a large house, easy of access, in New Jer
sey, 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.

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 193

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 fami
lies use the house at the same time. Mrs. A. in
vites 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 ask
ing 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 de
light. Two members have in the past been de
barred 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 mem-

i94 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

her 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 pic
nics 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 intelli
gence 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 mem
ber 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 al
ways. For years it has been able to distribute
Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners; but it

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 195

grows more cautious every year, for it has made
discoveries of the abuses of the Christmas dinner-
giving. Through the children it has been possi
ble 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 ce
mented friendships that are the inheritances of the
children, and sons and daughters have intermar
ried. 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 work
ing-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 inter
ests by sharing with them all the educational op
portunity 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, deli
cate 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

WITHIN THE WALLS 197

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 ex
pecting 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."

It was pathetic to hear the revelations of the lit
tle 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, wait
ing 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;

198 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 com
fort 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 be
ing pushed and crowded. She has a bed and bu
reau 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 deter
mination.

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

WITHIN THE WALLS 199

endurance grows greater. Think of its limita
tions of conveniences!

To those who know the limitations of a tene
ment-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 fre
quent 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 writh 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.

200 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 bed
room, 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 belong
ing 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 conve
nience of the family. The bedrooms, dark, offer
no space for a washstand. The kitchen is the
common wash-room. The kitchens of the tene
ment 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 conve
niences.

WITHIN THE WALLS 201

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 win
dow. 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 uncom
fortably near the stove. The only space except
the parlor for a refrigerator is in the bedroom.
As there are three young wage-earners support
ing 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

202 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 win
ter 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 conscious
ness of embarrassment shown by the children.
The mother was ashamed, not at the exposure,
but at being found out in permitting such an ex
posure. 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

WITHIN THE WALLS 203

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 for
gave 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 passage
way to the next, if there are two, or both bed
rooms 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 thou
sands of just such apartments. Children must
grow up in them subject to the limitations, restric
tions and exposures their walls compel. This di
vision 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

204 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

go to Albany to secure the passage of bills for the
betterment of the conditions of the working peo
ple. 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 free
dom 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, har
monious, 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 inno-
cency has left its burning scar on the girl, and she
must bear it alone.

WITHIN THE WALLS 205

Perhaps it is this necessarily open living that
gives the love-making in the tenement region a
character peculiarly its own. When interest be
tween the sexes is aroused, it is expressed so
frankly and publicly. There are times when re
straint 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 breath
ing 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 deep
ly 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

206 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 cou
ple 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.

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 be
came necessary to speak to her. It was evident

WITHIN THE WALLS 207

that she attributed the criticism to what she
termed "fussiness." Not the least modification
in her manner followed. At last, after many in
terviews, 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 con
vinced 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 pic
nic. The club girl sat so unconscious of any in
fringement 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

208 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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

WITHIN THE WALLS 209

I am not willing my own sister should do any
where."

After a moment's quiet, the chaperon said :

"I shall never mention this to the girl. I hold
you responsible. You are stronger mentally, mor
ally 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 misunder
standing, and suffering because she has not under
stood, 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 misunder
stood.

It is astonishing how long the spirit of child
hood will live in working boys and girls, even
under conditions that seem never to justify hap
piness and spontaneity!

210 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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/5
Every singing game of childhood was enthusi
astically played. Every one of these young peo
ple 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

WITHIN THE WALLS 211

had manifested any enthusiasm, except for dan
cing; who never gave expression to any emo
tion 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 chap
eron, she whispered, rather than spoke: "I did
not know trees wrere 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 vari-
our 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. Obe
dience 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 be
yond their ability to dance well. She would find
a dozen reasons for not dancing if she found her
self on the floor with an awkward dancer.

This group of twenty-two young men and wo-

212 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

men, all from homes that would bar the door to
charity, even when suffering, were fairly repre
sentative 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.

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 re
ceived 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

THE FOREST OF THE TENEMENTS.

WITHIN THE WALLS 213

soon as it was discovered that their actions were
influencing others, they were given the choice to
restrain the expression of their affection in pub
lic completely or resign. The lesson was effec
tual. 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 in
terested in him, just a few words, pointing out
how unkind it was to permit his interest to de
velop 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 fre
quently ; groups arranged to go to the theater in
stead 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

214 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 environ
ment 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, free
dom, constant changing of seats mortified those
who chaperoned the group. The journeys began
in the spring. One Sunday evening in Novem
ber, when returning from a nutting party, a group
of young people entered the car laughing, push
ing, slapping one another The young men and
women who had been going to the country almost
every Sunday for the summer looked in amaze
ment at one another, and with very evident disap
proval 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 compre
hension of the little things, that give the outward
stamp, that make the American wage-earning

WITHIN THE WALLS

215

young people so intensely interesting, so wonder
ful in social achievement.

These young people were all Americans, of
Christian parentage, as the word means, not He
brews. The young women worked in shops with
girls of Hebrew parentage. There were deep
race antagonisms, due to many causes, but prin
cipally to the willingness of the Hebrews to ac
cept any wages and work anywhere and any num
ber 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 condemna
tion. One listening could well believe the hope
lessness 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 free
dom is one of the most serious influences in the
life of working girls in New York. Were it not

216 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 impossi
bility 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 in
separable, if the mother does not drink. Night
and day the baby is cared for, often in hopeless ig
norance, 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

WITHIN THE WALLS 217

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 glanees from the
window; is sent to school, and some oversight
maintained over its school life; but the wage-earn
ing 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 disas
trous 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 adver
tising of their disappearance that led, through
companions who had escaped from the building,
to the awful conclusion that these four had per
ished in the flames.

2i 8 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

Sometimes it would be difficult for a mother to
go to the place where the daughter finds employ
ment; but here, as in everything else in life, that
which is deemed the more important receives at
tention. Perhaps it is the habit of trust, or in
difference, that governs mothers' activities.

A girl will make intimate friendships un
hindered, 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 accept
ing 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 want
ing, and young people come and go unhindered.
If there are two or more young wage-earners in
the family, their conversation may bring knowl
edge of what they are doing, where they are go
ing. But they also make compacts at conceal
ments of disobedience where there are laws to be
obeyed.

The world has been shocked by the tragedies
of death and disgrace that came to the homes of

WITHIN THE WALLS 219

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 un
solved. 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 obe
dience 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, earn
ing 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

220 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

other result would seem a miracle. A girl ar
rested 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 po
sition; work had to be found for the girl else
where. 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 rep
resenting themselves as friends of the projectors
to the caretaker, two representatives of a ' 'yellow
journal" gained access to the room. One, a wo
man, engaged the caretaker in conversation for

WITHIN THE WALLS

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 com
pelled 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 improve
ment in the class of readers used in our public
schools. They are not perfect in the matter of se
lection, but they carry messages to the hearts, as

222 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 cen
ter 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 kin
dergarten is the first thing demanded for their
children, and the seeds sown in the minds of these

WITHIN THE WALLS 223

young mothers bear fruit one hundred-fold be
cause 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 sym
pathy; of living with the children through every
period of growth; of sharing and of making to
gether 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 so
cial 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 de
velopment in lives apart from the Church as well
as in the Church. This it is that develops a feel
ing of reverence for any movement having for its

224 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

object the bettering of the social life of the people.
One learns that every vulgarity that becomes ob
noxious; every freedom that is brought within
the bounds of restraint by new standards of edu
cation and refinement ; every influence set in mo
tion 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.

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 re
spects, greatly enlarged in others. This was due
to the bravery, the unselfishness, the contradic
tions 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 uncon
scious 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

226 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 con
demn this unselfishness and recognize in it a posi
tive 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 mys
tery. They did not belong to the race which too
frequently make thrift a vice, but were descend
ants of one the world counts thriftless. The
months passed on. One of the sisters became in
dispensable to the club. She had the rarest tact,
while straightforward and frank. When the sec
ond winter came, the pressure of life on these
girls was very evident. How to relieve it, how
even to approach the subject without appearing in
trusive and meddlesome, was the wearing problem
of the club directors. After the holidays the in
fluence 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

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 227

been the victims of cruel "bosses." Worthy, in
dustrious, 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 de
gree. "What would happen if your foreman
would become arbitrary and cross?" was asked.
The reply revealed the whole conception of wo
man's relation to life as they held it. "It's differ
ent with women ; they have to bear things."

Another year passed without any change, ex
cept 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,

228 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

that a man lay down his life for his friends."
The sacrifice was complete. Standing in the roam
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 di
rectors 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 concep-

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 229

tion 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 se
cured through the daughters, who were a sec
ondary 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 hun
ger 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 con
ditions 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 sis
ters 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 re
fusal was pathetic. When the visitor confessed
that she was largely responsible for the change
in the girls' use of their wages, the mother's indig
nation rose to the point of abuse. That her boys
were robbed was the idea fastened in her mind.

230 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 re
sponsibility 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 de
veloped 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 un
der 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,

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 231

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 hy
giene ; 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 week
ly 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-earn
ers, 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 com
fort, 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.

232 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 sus
picion that men are non-dependable, and they
must be in a position to meet emergencies ; the un
just "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 ?"

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 233

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 six
teen.

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

234 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 re
membered 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 fre
quently 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

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 235

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, say
ing: "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 con
tinued : "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 be
fore I came home pay-day. I heard what the

236 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 insur
ance 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 deter
mine. That night death came.

The girl was buried from the church she at
tended. When the club members were requested
not to go to the house, there was scarcely con
cealed 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 un
conscious unselfishness, her devotion to her little

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 237

brothers and sisters, was revealed to them when
they saw her mother. Good fathers and moth
ers 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.

The girl who presents the most difficult prob
lem 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 ex
perience question results. One such girl had been
studied for months. There was a superficial re
sponse to the efforts to win her regard, but the
response was too transparent not to be under
stood. 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

238 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 em
phasize 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.

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 239

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 ex
planation 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

240 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 ex
cept 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 ceil
ing 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 com
fortable. The brother slept on the floor. The
rooms were dirty and overcrowded. Food was of
necessity poor, and because of the mother's indif
ference 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

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 241

visitor was, she began abusing the girl. One spe
cial cause of offense was the keeping back of over
time 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 vul
gar 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 con-

242 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

sent. 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 par
ticular. 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 contin
ued : "Mamma didn't do it so much till she mar-

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 243

ried 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.

244 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 pa
thetic 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 un
til 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 nat
ural human tie. Molly did this for three years.
Then she married a man controlling a good busi
ness. Molly is a quiet, devoted wife. She mar
ried 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 morn
ing 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 dis-
charged'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

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 245

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."

"Oh, mamma! the girls talk nothing but coun
try. 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 com
mented: "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 ma
jor 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

246 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

conditions that make the home merely a place of
shelter — conditions that make even decency im
possible. 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 neighbor
hood development. There is a superficial differ
ence in the social development of such parents and
children. The parents concede the higher posi
tion 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 six
teen 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 in
dulgence creates false standards, and is a serious
blot on the American working-man's life. It pre
vents marriage. Both young men and young wo-

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 247

men 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 in
crease yearly. This class, through association,
develop tastes and standards of living that make
impossible the establishment of homes on their in
comes and at the same time the continued in
dulgence of developed tastes. No type of family
develops less that adds to the wealth and attain
ment 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 inspira
tion. 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

248 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 be
cause 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-mak
ing. 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 devel
oped in our public schools, the homes of working

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 249

men of the better class will benefit by it. This dis
taste 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 de
mands have been paramount. When the children
marry they establish homes without any or very
little help from their parents. They do not ex
pect 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 expe
rience. 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.

250 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

The second generation of this type of thrifty
families rarely carry the habits of thrift of their
parents into their home-making. The new finan
cial 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 extrav
agance 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 pre
vail 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 reck
lessness; there is no failure to comprehend the
slight protection a husband and father can give,
though he be skillful ; but there is a sublime con
fidence in the future. Though familiar with suf
fering, 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

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 251

family live cheerfully, gayly, sometimes to the
end.

One result of doling out small sums to young
wage-earners, whether thrift or necessity is re
sponsible, is disastrous, especially disastrous for
young girls. It has seemed to the writer that if
mothers and fathers could be brought to a realiz
ing sense of its dangers, they would endure hun
ger rather than have their daughters exposed to
it. After all, it could be averted by making a di
vision 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 pro
tected 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 ex
penditures.

It seems to be a fixed idea that a girl is de
pendent 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 ex-

252 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

penses, 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 rea
son. Girls often unconsciously force invitations.
As one goes down the scale, the girls invite them
selves, 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 re
lations 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

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 253

expending of money by men for their social pleas
ures ; 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 ques
tion, 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 Settle
ments so important in our social life. Here boys
and girls do meet on a platform of independence,
chaperoned naturally by those who know inti
mately the home surroundings, the social stand
ards, the limitations of life in the regions, and all
that creates environment, that most positive fac
tor in the making of character. The social atti
tude of the young people who grow up in affilia
tion with the Settlements is found to differ greatly
from that of young people untrammeled by over
sight or influence that develops dignity.

The influence of working-girls' clubs is positive
in its effect on the majority of the members. The

254 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 as
tonish those who know them best by their re
sponses to their opportunities. This mental de
velopment 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 sup
port of one or both parents, now too old to
work; they help married sisters and broth
ers; they are the prop and stay of all the halt
and lame of their families; wiser and bet-
ter 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 wel
come in the tenement house; often even where
there is love and gratitude there may not be space.

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 255

Floor space often regulates the expression of love,
where the heart may have unlimited space.

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 de
mands 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 de
pendence in old age, should it not be called upon
by illness or misfortune. Such families repre-

256 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

sent 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 fu
ture 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 in
stincts 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 sub-

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 257

ject 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 fam
ily 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 child
hood 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 in
heritance 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

258 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 se
cure 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 knowl
edge 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 un-

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 259

just conditions that control many marriages
among the young people of the wage-earning
class. The young women rarely have the knowl
edge that will enable them to do their share in es
tablishing the home. The young man contract
ing 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.

The mental attitude of the wage-earners to
ward their income is confusing and yet interest
ing. In reply to any question of wages, the maxi
mum 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 in
come. 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

260 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 thriftless-
ness. 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 peo
ple 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 hus
bands, and their wives are openly pitied. But the
mass of working men place their wives in a per
fectly 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 responsibili-

FINANCIAL RELATIONS 261

ties, and appear as joint owner in the bank ac
count. 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 ques
tioned. "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 ag
gressiveness 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 rep
resent 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

262 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

those spending it. Choice is the master of deci
sion, even in necessities. What is needed in the
wage-earner's family is that education, that op
portunity 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

264 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 char
ity 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 wit
nesses 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 tender
ness is the winning element in strength; that
love daily, hourly here proves its power of self-
abnegation. Here, too, it fills its function of in
spiration. 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.

HOME STANDARDS 265

The more intimately one comes into the home cir
cle of the independent wage-earners the more
clearly does the disadvantages of wealth stand re
vealed. Life must be lived so simply, the inter
ests 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, suffer
ing, 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 educa
tion, 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 par
ents to children is changed by their presence.

266 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

Art has given Charity the figure of a noble, be
nign woman, in the ample folds of whose gar
ments 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 rep
resents a social level as remote from that of the in
dependent 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 respon
sible 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 work-

HOME STANDARDS 267

ing 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 po
litical 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-re
specting, intelligent working-men voters were
hunted for at election, but were not counted
worthy to take a place in the councils of the polit
ically active because they were feared. The Citi
zens' 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 ne-

268 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

cessities 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 op
portunities 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 depend
ence. Wages do not make possible the care of
the children at the standards of the parents, the
buying of an environment that the experi
ence of intelligent parents demands for them, and
a bank account. The last is desirable, the first de
mand imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be
thrown out when the life currents are running
toward the rocks of want and dependence. Noth
ing 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 par
ents who made achievement possible. Even in the

HOME STANDARDS 269

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, commer
cial 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 re
moved from the worthless, the deficient, the men
tally, 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 ambi
tion 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 prob
lems of a great city ; they may live in regions that
are the laboratory of the student of social and po
litical conditions, but they live behind closed
doors, bring up their children, so far as they can,
uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and over
come 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

2yo LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

would express the class who are the hope of this
nation, whose children are the promise of its es
tablished greatness.

The very limitations that small incomes impose
on husbands and wives, strangers to social ambi
tions, 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 ambi
tions; 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 con
taminating 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 small-
ness 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 happi
ness 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 expendi
ture, and content is attained that the social strug-

HOME STANDARDS 271

glers never know. The victim of nervous pros
tration 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, dur
ing the campaign of 1901 conceived the idea,
which he had never held before, though this
was the fourth time he had appealed to the suf
frages of the people, that the women were a fac
tor 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 con
clusions 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,

272 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 cer
tain 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 wo
men 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 in
dulge 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?"

HOME STANDARDS 273

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 wo
man 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 dis
grace. 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 re
spectable 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 neighbor
hood. "She married him for better or worse/'
.was the measure of a wife's duty among these
wives and mothers.

274 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 possibili
ties, its beauty and greatness. For Matthew Ar
nold gave the true definition of greatness when he
said it was the obstacles overcome, not his attain
ments, that made a man great. The explorer
makes many discoveries — some that stimulate and
surprise, some that puzzle and depress. The si
lence 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 de
cide. 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 unceas
ingly — 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 ser
vice.

A man ranking high in the intellectual world
once took for his theme, when preaching to a com
pany of wage-earners and their wives, "Home
Life." It was a rare inspiration that moved him

HOME STANDARDS 275

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 an
swered 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 con
scious; 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, be
cause 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. Any
thing else would be an evidence of weakness. She
expressed her contempt for one who would for
give an injury, and prided herself that she never
did. She had enthusiasm, could inspire others,
and proved herself as capable in leading them to

276 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 uo 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 habit-

HOME STANDARDS 277

ual 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?' 'Noth
ing.' 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 be
lieve 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.

278 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 posi
tions where skill is required, and wages seem to
depend on health only. Yet they are not pop
ular; are selfish and unsympathetic. They point
to their own success as the reason why every fam
ily 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 en
couraged 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 :

HOME STANDARDS 279

'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 chil
dren," and the wife nodded. That was her ex
planation, and theirs.

Perhaps no greater charm prevails in this world
of wage-earners than the attitude toward mother
hood. 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 in
fluences, 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 wel
comed 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 chil
dren — natural, not acquired — to be fathers and
mothers has doubtless a far-reaching effect in
keeping this natural attitude of mind toward par
enthood.

We get up a lot of wasted sentiment about the
little mothers and fathers, not seeing that the of-

28o LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

fices 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 uncon
sciously 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 obe
dience and regulates privileges; that sometimes
ignores the rightful authority in the home. The

HOME STANDARDS 281

young girl who has an elder sister working and
secures work with her is considered very fortu
nate. 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.

Once a very sensible wife and mother, whose
intelligence and devotion are raising the family
many degrees above that of the generation pre
ceding 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

282 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 state
ment 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 chil
dren 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 hus
band 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

HOME STANDARDS 283

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 spir
itual 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 be
comes 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 uni
formity in clothes; this is as true of men as of

284 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

women. The differences are in manners and
English. The spirit of the land is as yet ma
terialistic, 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 surround
ings 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 STANDARDS 285

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 op
portunities for cleanliness and privacy. Renting
a room to a lodger will sometimes make less de
mands on a father's wages for rent; sometimes
the rent is assumed in the hope of securing lodg
ers, 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 re
ply 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 com
bined 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

a86 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 in
telligence, a certain manner acquired through
observation, but no standard of intellectual life.
Their very intelligence makes such families con
scious of their shortcomings, and it is this con
sciousness 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 even
ing 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 use
less 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. Snobbish
ness, on the whole, is not common even where
the income would remove the family from a tene-

HOME STANDARDS 287

ment-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.

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 generos
ity 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 suf
fering 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

a88 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 alle
giance 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 in
difference to the real issues in a municipal cam
paign so common in New York. When the bur
dens of a corrupt administration pressed on the
homes; when the leaders for righteous govern
ment acknowledged by appealing to the makers of
this country, the plain people, that they were an
integral part of the city's government, they re
sponded, and by their response overthrew the cor-

HOME STANDARDS 289

rupt 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 in
difference of the millionaires and the honest work
ing men. It is the response of the political con
science 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 intelli
gent 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 de
grading effect on character. The people who re
sented the conditions that made life harder in the
tenements; who resented the environment which
made the bringing up of children in innocence, in
tegrity, and decency often impossible, were those
who were in the minority. Hopelessness of over
coming the evils made some voters the forgers of
their own chains.

Newspapers gave columns to the exposure of

THE RESPONSIBILITY 291

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 es
tablished their homes in the regions of the tene
ments, 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 peo
ple 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 mo-

292 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

ment to th<e whole people than the maladministra
tions 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 com
bination of wealth and poverty that brought into
the political arena the dormant consciences that
created in 1901 the Apotheosis, New York re
deemed, that is the justification of democracy to
the world.

The iniquity, ignorance and indifference that
create and maintain a system of municipal ad
ministration 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 citi
zens, 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 suc
cessfully 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

THE RESPONSIBILITY

bidding. As the political units develop their
bosses — "leaders," in voters' parlance — the sys
tem 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 per
quisites 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 gov
ernment in the interest of the "boss" have their
strongest hold are the best evidences of the moral
degeneracy that follows. Here the liquor sa
loons 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 sa
loons represent the primary school and the uni
versity of the voters of the district. They repre
sent 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 dis
cussed that interest the people. The most inter
esting is how to get wages, as it is the most im
portant. The common struggle creates common

294 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

bonds of sympathy. All principles go down be
fore 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 sys
tem, not because the moral nature of many of
them is not in revolt against the system, but be
cause 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 an
other worker in the interests of the political sys
tem the place he holds has been promised to
another after election. This fear and this hope
enters the homes; women and children are edu
cated under the moral degradation that enslaves
husbands, sons, brothers, friends, lovers. The
standards of morals are established even in child
hood by the working of the systems of political

TAKING THEIR TURN IN THE YARD AT THE SETTLEMENT,

THE RESPONSIBILITY 295

machines. There is one measure of morals, suc
cess. What succeeds is right.

A small house was hired, through the generos
ity of several women, for the purpose of providing
a place for recreation and social opportunity for a
number of Christians — that is, people not He
brews — 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 inter
ested in the house should have the privilege of vis
iting 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,

296 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 elec
tion 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 dissent
ing 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 confer
ence 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 meet
ing 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 condi
tionally on the "new fellows" being peaceable.
The next meeting night came. The bell rang.
In order to do full honor to the returning prodi
gals, the president went to the door. There was

THE RESPONSIBILITY 297

a rush and a scramble; the eight boys who with
drew, 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 consti
tution 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 in
itiation 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 perform
ance was stopped; the opulent small boy, who it
was evident was buying votes for the presidency,

298 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 un
happy next day before they left. It was then de
cided that the twelve members who had consti-
tituted 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 fif
teen years old, yet they had learned and under
stood 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 meas
ure of morals was success, not methods used to
attain that success.

A woman's club, organized several years be
fore, 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.

THE RESPONSIBILITY 299

When the Citizens' Union campaign began in
1897, the women who established the house of
fered it and the yard for one evening a week to
the Citizens' Union Campaign Committee. Illus
trated 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 wo
men who established the house, which were em
phasized 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 pic
ture was placed. The Citizens' Union was de
feated. 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

300 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 in
cited 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 oth
ers, walked out of the house, the treasurer tak
ing the club treasurer's book and the money,
over seventeen dollars. Sunday's papers an
nounced the incorporation of a club under the old
name. The incorporators were the five women
who had left the club at the Settlement. The busi
ness of incorporating was attended to by a po
litical 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 member
ship, and election was the assurance of certain
qualities in the woman who was received as a
member. All this had commanded attention

THE RESPONSIBILITY 301

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 un
der 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 work
ing-girls' club-room. They began to work ac
cording 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 unex
pected complications to the club woman. The
Tammany influence was stronger than the Repub
lican, and the women who had led in the incor
porating of the club withdrew. Unfortunately,
the opportunity to give this whole group a strong

302 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

lesson in morals was lost, and they have been ac
cepted 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 shrewd
ness 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 con
vincingly.

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 teach
ers of the school, but between the teachers and the
parents, was a revelation. That there was a uni
fying 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 feel
ing 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

THE RESPONSIBILITY 303

be 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 responsi-

LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

bility 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 corrup
tion and civic neglect have resulted in creating an
environment that makes decent living impossible;
an environment that has so degenerating an influ
ence that the people become a factor in the prob
lem 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 in
stitutions, 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 civiliza-

THE RESPONSIBILITY 305

tion. They exist because so many good people in
the community have found greater pleasure in es
tablishing 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
mangement who would not give a moment's
thought to a meeting called in the interests of bet
ter 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 busi
ness of the great municipality of New York, the
clearer one sees that the sins of omission are re
sponsible for their growth — far more responsible

306 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

than the sins of commission against which intelli
gent voters rail, when they do not use them as
salve for their political consciences. It is a pro
found 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 re
sponsibility 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

THE RESPONSIBILITY 307

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 pub
licly 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 suf
frages 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, de
frauding 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 ad
vance 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 tri
umph ; the evidence that the poor man has friends

308 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

to back him in his fight for place and power; that
the poor must work together politically.

Whose fault is it? The good, intelligent, re
sponsible citizens who delegated the government
of their city to the men who use it for their per
sonal 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 up
heavals 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 appoint
ments. He had more than a superficial knowl
edge 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 Edu
cation 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

THE RESPONSIBILITY 309

character of the Board, and he carefully consid
ered 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 pur
chased 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 ap
pointed, the best he could get to serve, were unfit

310 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 ap
pointments. 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 com
pel 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 meas
ure was exercised in Brooklyn. One of the lead
ers, 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 work
ing for this bill, for spending money freely in the
interest of its success, was man's indifference to

THE RESPONSIBILITY 311

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, be
cause 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 play-grounds. 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

3i2 LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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, un-
paved, 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 be
ginning 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 mis
fortune, 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

THE RESPONSIBILITY 313

of vice, ignorance and unsanitary conditions. But
these men when wealthy will support liberally
institutions made necessary by their civic indif
ference.

No man in a pulpit in the section has ever made
a study of it to arouse the conscience and ener
gies of the members of his church to their po
litical 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, sym
pathetic, 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 sec
tion 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

3H LEAVEN IN A GREAT CITY

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 in
fluence on the people of limited means in that sec
tion is not due primarily to the political corrup
tion 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 indiffer
ence 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 con
dition of the most uncared-for section gives the
church's answer to the question, "Am I my broth
er's keeper?" The mark of Cain may not be
visible, but every child who goes out of life be
cause 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, black-

THE RESPONSIBILITY 315

ened because their right to education, to training,
to freedom to develop physically, mentally, mor
ally, 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.