“Where there is no vision the people perish.” —Proverbs, 29:18.

During my social study I was asked by the president of a Charity Board to become an employee of the city Board of Charity and Corrections in a Western city. The Board consisted of three members. The president was a young Presbyterian minister who was just beginning to catch, through the mist of tradition, the light of new things. The other two members of the Board were women, one the daughter of a corporation lawyer, a young lady of large, kind heart, who for some time was connected with the United Charities of Chicago and who seemed to believe in their ancient system of charity in meeting the problem of destitution. The other was an estimable Jewish lady who had some decided opinions in regard to comfortable jails for honest, homeless, shelterless women and girls. Considering the services of these estimable people on the Board, gratuitous criticism would be unfair and much praise is due them for their conscientious work and the initiative taken in many effectual reforms which to them will be a lasting monument.

After six weeks’ service I was found fault with by the Board, but the only charge against me was that I was a visionist. It was rather singular though that this charge should come on the day following my visit to the County Poor Farm, the story of that visit being told in one of the local papers the following day. I could not deny that I was not guilty, for the press had exposed me, not only as a visionist who saw things, but as one who told things. In fact I had been seeing and telling things for six weeks. There seemed to be “the rub.” I was not a politician.

And so I was dismissed “broke” as far as the city Charity Board was concerned, as a very pleasing vision I failed to see was my six weeks’ salary. But this can readily be accounted for as the city at this writing was “broke” and I was forced to be content with a postponement. With me, to meet postponement gracefully had become a virtue, for I had long since learned to postpone such a non-consequential thing as a meal a good many times, but I think I never missed any.

Ah, the visions of that six weeks, I can assure you, were not visions of angels ascending and descending ladders! The first was that of an old rookery building, with a ten cent tin sign on which was written “City Board of Charities,” directly opposite the city jail, where all day long, and all night long, men and women either directly or indirectly, for the crime of poverty, were being forced behind its iron bars, and walls of stone.

It was obvious that the first thought of both beggar and criminal, or the supposed criminal forced to come that way, was charity and correction, one at the door of the alms station and the other at the door of the police station. But he who has been shoulder to shoulder with the victims of these two municipal institutions and has read through the pleading, parched lips and tear-stained faces of the victims of both these places, has learned an immutable lesson and can not refrain from crying out for a better and a greater social life. One who observes will quickly see throughout our nation how closely allied—in all their phases—are Charity and Prisons and Missions. While the church is lifting one thousand out of the gutter, society, by a destructive social system and evil influences, is pushing ten thousand in. Charity keeps many from actually starving to death, yet the ever-increasing number of our needy is even “greater than man can number.” What is the price we pay?

My practical work with this board was that of investigator, that is, I was sent out to see if the applicant for aid were really worthy, to see that the Charity Board was not being robbed by dishonest mendicants. Charity organizations seemed to be not so much concerned with the relief of the helpless as with protecting the well-to-do from imposition on the part of those who claim they are in distress. I was given approximately eighty questions to ask. I was expected to follow up these questions—many of them questions of reference—for the purpose of ascertaining whether the applicants for aid were really telling the truth. I rebelled a little at first at the thought of conducting this third degree inquisition. It was even repulsive for me to enter the door of the humblest home and state I was from the Charity Board. I would so much rather have said that I was from the city Department of Public Service for Labor.

From my first day, however, I continued to see visions,—not visions of great numbers, not of saints, but of thousands of workingmen’s vacant homes, deserted for lack of work due to the inability of these workingmen to earn a living. I saw the truth most forcibly revealed that again the foundation of all business was a comfortable existence and an opportunity to earn those comforts and the right of existence by labor, and that people must have that privilege or be forced to go where it can be had. I saw many of those who remained struggling to tide themselves over, hoping for a better day. Many were helpless for lack of means to get away, and had therefore become dependents of the State and city.

I saw nearly all of our attempted factories in ruins, and four thousand workingmen driven from the city by the smelter trust; and then came again the glowing vision of sixty million pounds of wool, and an enormous production of cotton, grown annually in a radius of five hundred miles around our very doors. This raw material was being shipped two thousand miles to be worked into the most essential commodities. Every day we were walking over the finest glass sand in the world, yet we were denied the benefit of that most needful and profitable industry. I knew we dwelt in the heart of the leather producing district of the nation and yet no shoe factories. These are but a few of the raw materials in the region of the Rocky Mountain Western States. One who has made a study of industrial economics knows too well why the State of Colorado has (to speak comparatively) but seven people to the square mile. He well knows one reason to be the protective associations which protect big business instead of protecting the people,—forever crying down co-operative industry which is for the good of all.

In the homes of these asking alms which I visited, I saw the fearful destroying effect on character of the wolf as he peered through broken pane, and the cracks and crannies of door and wall. I saw the humiliating tears and flushed faces of those who for the first time were forced to beg. It was exactly like those of my associates who for the first time had been thrust into prison. It needed but a glance to tell me whether they had received “charity” before, for there is always the spirit of being hardened to the “disgrace,” just as there is in the manner in which the prisoner treats the situation if he has previously “done time.”

Little children it is said will tell the truth when men and women lie. I saw the father and mother, with the hope of making an impressive plea, lest they fail to obtain the needed food and fuel, prevaricate in replying to my many questions, or perhaps remain non-committal, but often the little child at hand, conscious of the practiced deceit of the parent, would speak the truth. Then would follow the austere look of reproof from the parent or a sudden banishing from the room. The cheerless house, the starving home was sowing the seed of crime. I was a destroying angel. I was blackmailing my helpless victims into dishonesty just as the plain-clothes man or uniformed police blackmail the poor white slave of the Red-light District and the homeless, out-of-work man of the street.

In my daily investigations I saw the dipsomaniac pleading for help, yet this city offered no asylum for such as he except the city and county jail. I saw the poor tubercular victim clinging to the thread of life, dying from malnutrition, who, perhaps, could have gained his health under different circumstances. I saw hundreds of strong, hardy men demanding, by the divine right of living, the necessities of life. I saw the mother suffering from privation, who saw no future, and was without hope, whose soul and body throbbed with the life of the unborn babe, whose demand was greater than the single life of man,—the demand for the divine right of motherhood. And again I saw a vision,—a general view of the private and public institutions, both benevolent and correctional, which were in the city and which were crowded to overflowing because of poverty. Then came my fatal vision,—my visit to the Poor Farm.

The greatest city of the State is usually the fountain head, the output camp for the entire State. When the unfortunate become homeless, helpless and needy, they drift to the capital. The burden of the indigent of the entire State is thus put upon that particular city and county. I saw a great number turned away from the Poor House door because of its already congested condition, who were then obliged to exploit the community in other ways for the right of existence. I saw in the tubercular ward twenty-five men in all stages of the disease, and yet, not one a native of the State. Some had been in the State only three weeks. They represented every part of our country. There was absolutely no provision made by this city, county, or State for the indigent, tubercular woman or girl. I had already heard continually in the homes of the needy the appealing cry of the poor who suffer and wait, hoping against hope for life and health, asking in one mighty, smothered sob for a National Tubercular Sanitarium, an institution which every State west of the Mississippi River should have.

In the blind ward of this traditional place for those who have missed their aim (pioneers many of them, who hewed the logs and held the plow and blazed the trails from ’59 to ’85), I saw twenty blind, thirteen of whom were rendered blind by mine accidents, looking forward in the darkness, ever in the darkness, for a home that has not the stigma of charity, the infamy of a Poor House. Looking forward for the home which is theirs by inheritance, and every one a native of the State to which Winfield Scott Stratton, the multi-millionaire mining-man and philanthropist, left ten million dollars to build and support ten years ago! He left it in the hands of three exceedingly wealthy trusted friends to carry out his wishes who dwell and live in palaces amidst beautiful surroundings, and as yet no home has been built, and meanwhile the burying-ground of that final retreat, the Poor House, becomes ever increasingly dotted with the new-made graves. Monies belonging to these helpless, pioneer citizens who earned it by the right of enduring hardships and toil, money belonging to the hard-working people of the State, and to men still in the harness, this money is denied while the people at large are overburdened with taxation for the support of monarchical, handed-down institutions,—a burden from which they can get no relief. This vision of truth thrown upon the canvas of progress and humanity is forcibly applicable to every Western State, in its appeal for an intelligent and humane conservation of its citizens and most particularly the wage-earning citizen. And although these few pages can only hint at the truth revealed, they speak for National governmental action in placing our people on the lands and the erection of national institutions for our sufferers of the white plague. For co-operative industries of equity by and for the people; for governmental ownership of all public utilities and State institutions for our unfortunate, looking toward the dawn of that glad, new day the light which is beginning to glow through the press of this country. In Denver and many of the other Western cities there is a movement for a better and a greater West. Already in the new vision for the State of Colorado they have taken the citizen from behind stone walls and iron bars. The cities are creating municipal labor for the temporarily out-of-work man, which hand in hand with Municipal Emergency Homes is just to tide over the rough place. Imperfect and incomplete as its experimental beginning may be, who can deny the awakening of a perfect aim toward a perfect end? There is no wall of prejudice or selfishness, of ambition or unnatural greed, which can be built that will overcome these arguments. These needs must be met and shall be. No government can stand that is not founded on God’s governing laws of humanity.