THE LOST WAIF

It was our first night in an American city after the breaking out of war between Spain and the United States.

The States had undertaken the war for the purpose of freeing Cubans from cruelties perpetrated by Spanish officials, and it was currently reported that the government was spending more than a million of dollars daily to accomplish the rescue. There was no doubt in the minds of the American people of the justice of the American cause and no one regretted the cost. Seven hundred and fifty thousand men had volunteered to serve in the army or navy and Congress voted money as freely as it was asked.

Let these facts stand as a background for our story.

Coming from Europe, as we had done, between two Wednesdays, without passing through New York City, our first impressions of a wildly enthusiastic patriotism, as manifested by the advertising class, were gained in Chicago, and were especially striking by contrast with the quiet of the lands we so recently had left. We had been studying social questions in Germany, Holland and England during the past year, and were therefore more observant of varied expressions and contrasts in social life.

In the evening we strolled on the streets in company of a friend from New Orleans, who was the first to greet us on arrival, to see the wonderful window illuminations and color displays that made the pavements at night brighter than day. Crowds of men, women and children, representing every stratum of society, promenaded past these shows or lingered before them. Behind great panes of plate glass were groups of ghastly wax figures representing naval engagements or camps of starving Cuban reconcentrados. The favorite mottoes displayed were "Suffering Cuba Must Be Free," and "Remember the Maine." In drinking places there was added to the last motto, "Down with Spain."

The show windows were continuous for many blocks and each shopman tried to eclipse the displays of his neighbors by the novelty, brilliancy or sensationalism of his own. Every known electrical device was used in the effects and nothing that we had ever seen abroad—in the Orient or in Europe—approached the wonder of these advertising conceits. They were more marvelous than anything Madame Toussaud ever designed. They formed a veritable Patrio-Commercial-Midway-Plaisance and continued to attract a street-full of people until long after midnight. Our New Orleans friend declared that "they had done more to excite popular sympathy for the Cuban cause than the jaundiced newspapers themselves."

At several points we met companies of Salvation Army men and women on street duty. The old army under the command of General Booth and the new American division under the Ballington-Booths were both in the field. They were waging quite a different kind of warfare, but with an enthusiasm not to be outdone by the newer cause. With drum, tambourines, singing and prayers they tried to draw an audience from the stream of the promenade to listen to appeals in behalf of starving women and children reconcentradoed in alleys, areas and cellars within a quarter of a mile of the scene of all this patriotic extravagance. The appeals of the Salvation soldiers were earnest and pathetic, but their cause was no novelty and had lost its effect by a monotony of iteration and reiteration, and the victims of abuse and neglect that the army sought to rescue were too near to the feet of the crowd to be seen and pitied. A few small coins, principally from visiting countrymen, were collected, but scarcely enough, it seemed, to support the commissariat of the army itself. The protests of the speakers corroborated this seeming. Here were exhibited, side by side, expressions of far-away charity and near-to neglect of it; an incomprehensible inconsistency; a contrast, indeed!

But this is not the contrast royal of our story, which furnishes us with our text. We were yet to witness an evidence of barbaric neglect such as the bull ring does not engender and that even the cruelty of the Dark Ages did not equal.

Our party had drifted with the crowd until nearly midnight, when we turned toward Michigan Boulevard and the lake for quiet and fresh air. We were full of the idea that Cuba would be made free, and proud of America for realizing her destiny of being the pioneer in the vanguard of progress toward universal freedom; but we were soon to be called back to facts, and home realities, by a revelation of cruelest neglect that must continue to haunt us until the possibility of such neglect has ceased to exist. Under the shadow of the portal of the Pullman Building, which serves as general offices of the Pullman's Palace Car Company, we met an adventure that showed an appalling contrast to the patriotic enthusiasm that blared in the thoroughfares we had just quitted. We were arrested by the plaintive voice of a child in the toils of a six-foot policeman.

"Please, mister," wailed the child, "lemme go. I didn't swipe none ov dem cakes; 'twas me brudder and de odder kids dat swiped 'em; I ain't done nothin', and I won't do nothin' no more if you'll only let me slide; I won't never come out annudder night—honest I won't—if you'll let me go. Me brudder an' de udder kids'll go home widout me an' I don't know de way. Please, mister cop, lemme go; please! please!!—"

The child could not have been more than four years of age, but his small vocabulary was as full of the slang of the slums as it was deficient in the terms of childhood and innocence. The policeman was kindly disposed, but felt compelled to administer some sort of correction, and this is how he did it: His reproof was well meant, but oh! how evil was it in its suggestions to a soul just receiving its first impressions of life, and of the world, out of which to build a character.

"What's the use of your lyin' to me, yer little monkey? You know you're a thief and the kid of thieves. The gang you trains wid is the toughest in town. Every mother's brat of you'll deckerate a halter one of those days—sooner or later anyhow, an' probably sooner. You're born to it an' can't help it, I s'pose, but if I catches yer 'round here again I'll thump yer on the head wid my club and you'll find that'll hurt wurser'n a lickin'.—Where does yer live, anyhow?"

The child answered, giving an indefinite address on the West Side that was undoubtedly false, as charged by the officer, but which was as glibly given as a parrot's favorite phrase.

"Oh! I knows you're a-lyin,' but I knows yer gang just the same; it's the rottenist in the city and turns out more thieves and murderers than all the rest of town put together. Well! yer h'aint got much show to be different; and, (turning to us, who had stopped to listen)—I don't s'pose the kid's ter blame for doin' what all the people he knows does all the time and thinks it's workin.' I s'pose his father and mother sends him out to steal; that is, if he's got a father—which 'aint likely. There's a gang of about fifty of 'em that works my beat and durin' these excitin' times when there's big crowds on the streets and plenty of hayseeds in town they give a pile of trouble. They hangs around and swipes anything they can get hold of. The little rascals knows that we 'aint got no place to jug 'em 'cept in the regler coolers and as there 'aint no more'n enough room in them for the big crooks we has to let 'em go, and the little cusses knows that as well as we does. They knows a trick or two besides; fer instance, they rushes a fruit stand or a bakery in a gang, carryin' the babies along wid 'em. The big fellers—the biggest of 'em 'aint more 'n about ten—is all as spry as cats and darts in and collars the plunder and then out again into the crowd in a jiffy, leavin' the babies to be scooped by the shop people and turned over to us. This satisfies the shop people all right and the real thieves escapes. We take the little cusses in charge an' have to do something wid 'em, so we takes 'em round a corner, lectures 'em and lets 'em go. That's all we can do an' as the kids knows it, it's a part of their game."

Turning again to the boy, who all the time had been begging to be allowed to go, the officer said, "Who's them kids on the other side of the street—your brudders, is they? Well, you tell 'em when you sees 'em that if I ever catches 'em on my beat again I'll brudder them so 't they won't ferget it. I'll learn 'em to dance the shuffle as a defi' to me. An' if you git into my hands again I'll cut your ears off close ter yer head, and I'll sew yer mouth up so's yer can't eat no cakes, an' then I guess yer won't want ter steal' em. Now git! yer little bastard, and ter hell wid you!"

The baby "crook," scampered across the street to where his companions were waiting for him. All the boys put their thumbs to their noses in the direction of the officer, screamed a derisive yell, and disappeared around the corner to "work some other beat" or seek some further amusing adventure.

The policeman was in a communicative mood and answered our questions as freely and as frankly as they were asked. There seemed to be no secrecy about the lapses of the law. He told us of "panel saloons" not three blocks from the Auditorium, where drugged whiskey could be had for a wink—the wink of a wanton or a confederate of the house—where "greenies" were "run up against" every sort of a "skin game," sometimes ending with choking and robbery, when they would be "thrown out" on the street, too sick to protest, or too ashamed to complain.

We were shown several great fronts of brick or stone, surrounding the Pullman Building, labeled "hotels," but wherein no registers are kept, as required by law, and where the only credential of respectability called for is, "Room rent in advance." Couples entered and left these "hotels" in an almost unbroken procession. But of these things and sand-bagging and burglary and other crime that is rampant in many large cities our story does not concern itself. Most of these expressions of unwholesome conditions are the result of just such neglect of children as that revealed to us by the incident of the little waif we had just seen reËngulfed by a tide of criminal suggestion, more putrid, malarious and hopeless than the ooze of the Chicago River.

We were so much interested in the revelation, as it progressed, that we did not grasp the immediate situation of the child, and develop the personal sympathy the case deserved until the little fellow had gone beyond recall. But, as soon as we began to think about it in the quiet of the deserted boulevard, we were seized with a frantic desire to rescue the tiny victim of evil chance, and make it possible, at least, for him to choose between the good and the bad, a privilege boasted by our cant as the birthright of all Americans, but entirely denied to this helpless and hopeless stranger among us.

The more we thought, the more the desire yearned within us, until it was a constant menace to our peace of mind. The face of the child had been but faintly visible in the frowning shadow of the great arch where we encountered him, and he had given a "fake" address. He was as unidentifiable as would be a shot escaping back into a bag of its fellows. The simile of the pellet of shot occurred to us again and again, and finally suggested a scheme of redemption to include our waif. The only way to be sure of getting the lost shot was by bagging all of the shot. The only way to rescue our waif was to furnish facilities for rescuing all waifs in need of intelligent care. The idea then seemed colossal, but our focalized anxiety to save the baby was equally strong; but, how could it be accomplished? That was the important question. We told the incident of the adventure to our Chicago friends, as we met them, and wrote about it to distant friends asking for help, for encouragement, at least, that it might be done.

Sympathy was not denied our waif in any instance, but substantial hope came quickest from the practical kindergartners. They assured us that it would not be a difficult matter to encompass the entire field of need with complete and adequate care, if only there were combined effort. They said that the kindergarten had won its way to approval by parents of both the poor and the rich by the beautiful results it had achieved in character-building; that practically all children were susceptible of being trained into good citizens if cared for during the period of present neglect—from dawning perceptions until seven to ten years—and that until the money-earning age no opposition on the part of careless or depraved parents was encountered. The kindergarten had proved its value and it was only a matter of furnishing the facilities required to rescue the present and all future generations from the possibility of such neglect as had excited our sympathy.

We then remembered the example of the kindergarten system of the city of Rotterdam, in Holland, that we had examined at the invitation of the President of the Board of Education of that city. Protection was practically assured to all children by a cordon of thirty large character-building schools, which they also call by the name of kindergarten, where not only habit-forming instruction, but milk and cakes necessary to supplement any lack of nourishment at home, were supplied freely at a cost of only eighteen cents per week for each child to the treasury of the school fund.

An interesting feature of the Rotterdam example is that if parents prefer not to have their children receive free nourishment they are privileged to pay the cost to the teacher in charge of each school, to be refunded to the city. Nine-tenths of the parents voluntarily make the payment rather than be considered too poor or too indifferent to do so.

We remembered the example of thirty-four States of the United States in passing child-saving laws, leading naturally to child-protection, and also the experience of the New Orleans combined associations in establishing, within a year, five free kindergartens in conjunction with the Charity Organization Society, and the unanimous support that their plans of reform had received at the hands of both municipal councillors and a constitutional convention. Why might not all cities be as progressive as the Dutch city across the ocean, and why might not all municipal councillors and the state legislators emulate the example of the most progressive, when character of Apprentice Citizen was at stake? Why might not the people who accomplished the World's Columbian Exposition, the World's Parliament of Religions, and who spend eight millions of money annually—forty dollars for each pupil—on higher education, set the world a new example, by establishing such perfect social quarantine that no child could suffer the neglect that is a present reproach to civilization?

We learned, in our inquiry as to conditions prevailing in Chicago, that many kindergartens were already in existence, under the support of both the Board of Education and that of missions and private individuals, and also that the several College Settlements and Social Settlements in slums that we visited were attempting to accomplish the redemption and care of the young, but the efforts were only partial and the progress was slow. They might not, and probably would not, reach our lost waif and hundreds of his kind. How would it be possible to draw a net around all of them so as to include this and every last one of them? How could a perfect quarantine be established so that the wall of protection should be complete? These seemed to be the questions of burning importance. A desire to excite coÖperation for the purpose of answering these questions affirmatively and quickly so as to reach our waif and the last of the others is the inspiring motive of this appeal and argument.