The Doubs is a stream after which one of the Eastern Departments of France is named. Its principal city is BesanÇon, the birthplace of Victor Hugo. Return to text

Note on Picture of Invalid in Chair. The picture given in this issue of this apartment represents the poor invalid placed by some friends on a chair while his bed could be made. Our artist preferred to take it this way, knowing that it would bring out the strong face better than if taken on his pallet on the floor, where for two years he has lain. Through The Arena Relief Fund, we have been enabled to greatly relieve the hard lot of this as well as many other families of unfortunates. Now the invalid is provided with a comfortable bedstead, with a deep, soft mattress, and furnished with many other things which contribute to life’s comfort. When the bed, mattress, and other articles were being brought into this apartment, the tears of gratitude and joy flowed almost in rivers from the eyes of the patient wife, who felt that even in their obscure den some one in the great world yet cared for them.Return to pictureReturn to text

Note on Picture of Constance and Maggie. When Mr. Swaffield first visited this little family he found them in the most abject want; a pot of boiling water, in which the mother was stirring a handful of meal, constituting their only food. Their clothing was thin and worn almost to shreds; their apartment but slightly heated; half of all they could earn, even when all were well and work good, had to go for their rent, leaving only one dollar and twenty-five cents a week to feed and clothe four persons. The day we first called they were poorly clothed, with sorry apologies for dresses and shoes laughing at the toes. In the picture we reproduce, they are neatly dressed and well shod from money contributed by liberal-hearted friends to The Arena Relief Fund.Return to pictureReturn to text

Note on Illustration of Cellarway Leading into Partially Underground Apartment. This passage-way is several steps down from the court or alley-way, and leads to the apartment seen in accompanying picture. There are many of these dark cellarways leading to underground tenements.Return to pictureReturn to textNote on Picture of a Sick Man in Underground Tenement. Leading off the cellar-way shown above, is a tenement shown in this illustration. It consists of one room, over the bed the ceiling slants toward the street, and above the ceiling are the steps leading to the tenements above. In this one room lives the sick man, who for a long time, has been confined to his bed with rheumatism; his wife and a daughter are compelled to occupy the one bed with him, while the small sunless room is their only kitchen, laundry, living room, parlor, and bedroom.Return to pictureReturn to textNote on Portuguese Family, Widow, Two Daughters, and Little Boy. This illustration is a fair type of a number of lodgings. The photograph does not begin to reveal the extent of the wretchedness of the tenement. A little cubby-hole leads off from this room, large enough for a three quarters bed, in which the entire family of four sleep. The girls are remarkably bright and lady-like in their behavior, carrying with them an air of refinement one would not expect to find in such a place. They make their living by sewing; their rent is two dollars a week.Return to pictureReturn to textNote on Widow and Two Children in Underground Tenement. This picture of a squalid underground apartment is typical of numbers of tenements in this part of the city. The widow sews and does any other kind of work she can to meet rent and living expenses; the children sew on pants.Return to pictureReturn to textNote on Picture of Exterior of Tenement House. This picture is from a photograph of one of the many tenements in the North End which front upon blind alleys. The illustration gives the front of the house and the only entrance to it. In this building dwell twenty families. The interior is even more dilapidated and horrible than the entrance. Here children are born, and here characters are moulded; here the fate of future members of the Commonwealth is stamped. Taxes on such a building are relatively low under our present system so the landlord realizes a princely revenue, and while such a condition remains, it is not probable that he will tear down the wretched old and erect a commodious new building, on which he would be compelled to pay double or triple the present taxes, merely for the comfort and moral and physical health of his tenants.Return to pictureReturn to text

Note on Illustration of Underground Tenement with Two Beds. These miserable quarters are four steps down from the street. There are two small rooms, one a shop in which kindling wood is stowed, which is gathered up by the children, split and tied in bundles. The mother also sells peanuts and candy. The back room contains a range and two beds which take almost the entire area of the room. In these two rooms several people sleep. One can readily see how unfortunate such a life is from an ethical, no less than social point of view.Return to pictureReturn to text

Note on Illustration Out of Work. The young man photographed in his dismal lodging is a widower with six small children; he is strictly sober, an American by birth, but parents were Scotch and Irish. Until the illness and death of the wife last summer, everything went reasonably well. The husband and father followed the sea and managed to provide for his family, even saving a little. The wife’s sickness and burial expenses ate up all and more than he had saved, while being left with so many little children and no one to look after them, he found it impossible to engage in sea voyages; he was compelled to seek work which would enable him to be home at night. This winter, work has been very slack; for six weeks he has only been able to obtain employment for a few days; meantime his rent, which is two dollars and a quarter a week, has eaten up almost all the man could earn. Through the aid of the Baptist Bethel Mission and The Arena Relief Fund, this family has been provided with food and clothes.Return to pictureReturn to text

Note on Illustration of Portuguese Widow in Attic. In an attic with slanting roof and skylight window lives a poor widow with her little family of four, a full description of which is given elsewhere. The long-continued sickness of the little child has made the struggle for rent and bread very terrible, and had it not been for assistance rendered at intervals, eviction or starvation, or both, must have resulted. This woman and her children are sober, industrious, and intelligent. Cases like this are by no means rare in this city which claims to be practically free from poverty.Return to pictureReturn to text

The extent and character of this work will be more readily understood by noting the labor accomplished by the Bethel Mission in the North End, which is doing more than any other single organization in that section of the city for the dwellers of the slums. Here under the efficient management of the Rev. Walter Swaffield, assisted by Rev. W. J. English, work is intelligently pushed with untiring zeal, and in a perfectly systematic manner. From a social and humanitarian point of view, their work may be principally summed up in the following classifications: [1.] Looking after the temporal and immediate wants of those who are really suffering. Here cases are quietly and sympathetically investigated. Food is often purchased; the rents are sometimes paid; old clothes are distributed where they are most needed, and in many ways the temporal wants are looked after while kind, friendly visitation of between one and two hundred very needy families comprise a portion of each month’s work. [2]. The sailors’ boarding house. A large, clean, homelike building is fitted up for sailors. Every American vessel that comes into port is visited by a member of the Mission, who invites the sailors to remain at this model home for seamen. In this way hundreds yearly escape the dreadful atmosphere of the wretched sailors’ boarding houses of this part of the city, or, what is still more important, avoid undreamed-of vice, degradation, and disease by going with companions to vile dens of infamy. [3]. Securing comfortable homes and good positions for the young who are thus enabled to rise out of the night and oppression of this terrible existence. This, it is needless to add, is a very difficult task, owing to the fact that society shrinks from its exiles; few persons will give any one a chance who is known to have belonged to the slums. Nevertheless good positions are yearly secured for several of these children of adversity. [4]. The children’s free industrial school in which the young are taught useful trades, occupations, and means of employment. In this training school the little girls are taught to make themselves garments. The material is furnished them free and when they have completed the garment it is given them. [5]. Summer vacations in the country for the little ones are provided for several hundred children; some for a day, some a week, some two weeks as the exigencies of the case require and the limited funds permit. These little oases in the children’s dreary routine life are looked forward to with even greater anticipations of joy than is Christmas in the homes of the rich. I have cited the work of this Mission because I have personally investigated its work, and have seen the immense good that is being done with the very limited funds at the command of the Mission, and also to show by an illustration how much may be accomplished for the immediate relief of the sufferers. A grand palliative work requiring labor and money. It is not enough for those who live in our great cities to contribute to such work, they should visit these quarters and see for themselves. This would change many who to-day are indifferent into active missionaries.Return to text

According to J. R. Dodge, there are five million agricultural laborers in this country whose wages do not average over $194 a year.Return to text

Fifteen to forty per cent. is the usual profit exacted on tenement-house property, according to witnesses before a Senate Committee,—forty per cent. being common. Is not this the plunder of poverty by wealth? Has Ireland anything approaching this or resembling the horrid conditions in New York? “All previous accounts and descriptions” (says Ballington Booth) “became obliterated from my memory by the surprise and horror I experienced when passing through some of the foul haunts and vicious hotbeds which make up the labyrinth of this modern Sodom.” “How powerless” (said Mr. Booth) “are lips to describe or pens to write scenes which baffle description, and which no ink is black enough to show in their true colors.”Return to text

This love of ostentation has much to do with the degradation of India. The silver money which should be in circulation is hoarded up or used for silver ornaments. A wedding in that country is not marked by proper preparation for the duties and expenses of conjugal life, but by a display of jewelry and silver. A thousand rupees’ worth must be furnished by the bride, and two thousand by the bridegroom, if they are able to raise so much, and sometimes they raise it by going in debt beyond their ability to pay. This love of ostentation marks an inferior type of human development.Return to text

These suggestions are not offered in a hostile spirit. The writer fully realizes the large amount of moral sentiment and fervent piety assembled in the Church to uplift society in this country, but he deeply regrets that it is not more enlightened in ethics and in doctrine, and that the Church has never got rid of its ancient taint, mentioned by the Apostle James, that the brethren paid more respect to the man with a gold ring than a man in cheap clothing.Return to text

The salary that was sufficient for the commanding dignity and ability of Washington is not sufficient for the third-rate politician who occupies the White House to-day. The numerous allowances which are added to his $50,000 salary raise it to $114,865. But why should he have any salary at all? Would any man require the bribe of salary to induce him to accept the Presidency? The honor of the office would be more than sufficient pay for the third-rate men that are accidentally chosen to a far higher rank than nature gave them. We have too many ideas and fashions inherited from old-world kingdoms, and the ridiculous rules and etiquette of precedence and punctilio are as carefully enforced in the court circle of Washington as in the old world which still rules our fashions. But far worse than they, we have the criminal ostentation of a funeral for a Congressman, costing from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars, which is simply an unconstitutional and shameful robbery of the people to imitate the style of royalty.Return to text

The writer once started a society upon this principle, to be called the Brotherhood of Justice. Its principle was the abnegation of selfishness by strictly limiting the expenditure of every member to the amount really necessary to his comfort, dedicating the rest to humanity. It did not appear difficult to gather members, and an able apostle of this principle would be a world’s benefactor.Return to text

It is not only in the strong language of many political meetings, conventions, and the independent press, that this danger is recognized, but in that wealthy and conservative body, the United States Senate, it is distinctly recognized and frequently expressed; the language of Senators Ingalls, Stewart, Call, Gorman, Vest, Berry, and others, shows that they are alarmed and would warn their colleagues.

Senator Call, of Florida, said:—“It is well for the people to form some idea of the extent to which the powers of the government are becoming subject to the control of a very small number of people, and the extent to which these powers are becoming absolute, despotic, monarchical, almost as much so as the Czar of Russia.

“The present system places the control of the wealth of this country in the hands of a very small number of persons, an almost infinitesimal portion of the people; gives them money to buy those who represent the people.”

Senator Berry said:—“So much injustice has been done to the people, so many wrongs have been perpetrated in the interests of wealth and capital by the passage of unjust laws, that the people are in open revolt to-day, and they have a right to be; they have determined to have relief, and they are entitled to it.”

Senator Stewart said:—“If there is no reason nor humanity in the possessors of accumulated capital there is power in revolution.”

Senator Gorman, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said:—“We stand to-day, Mr. President, upon a financial volcano. The labor of the country appeals through every channel it can to this administration and this Congress to stay the awful wreck that is threatened.”

The eloquent address of Senator Ingalls presented still more forcibly and fully the evils of plutocracy, which is “threatening the safety if it does not endanger the existence of the republic,” by “the tyranny of combined, concentrated, centralized, and incorporated capital.” “The conscience of the nation is shocked at the injustice of modern society. The moral sentiment of mankind has been aroused at the unequal distribution of wealth, at the unequal diffusion of the burdens, the benefits, and the privileges of society.” “At this time there are many scores of men, of estates, and of corporations, in this country, whose annual income exceeds, and there has been one man whose monthly revenue since that period exceeds the entire accumulations of the wealthiest citizen of the United States at the end of the last century.” “By some means, some device, some machination, some incantation, honest or otherwise, some process that cannot be defined, less than a two-thousandth part of our population have obtained possession and have kept out of the penitentiary, in spite of the means they have adopted to acquire it, of more than one half of the entire accumulated wealth of the country. That is not the worst, Mr. President. It has been chiefly acquired by men who have contributed little to the material welfare of the country, and by processes that I do not care in appropriate terms to describe.” “The people of this country are generous and just, they are jealous also, and when discontent changes to resentment, and resentment passes into exasperation, one volume of a nation’s history is closed and another will be opened.”

This feeling of resentment must arise in a community which is deeply in debt, and is not prospering. The last census shows in Iowa a mortgage indebtedness equivalent to over five hundred dollars upon every head of a family.Return to text

And society is still organized to ensure the perpetuation of this poverty, no matter what the bounties of nature, or what the increase of wealth by art and invention. The army of the dissatisfied, the hungry, and the demoralized, continually grows and becomes more dangerous. The President of the National Home Association at Washington stated a few months since that there were sixty thousand boy tramps in the United States.Return to text

Nob Hill, in San Francisco, is crowned with five huge buildings in imitation of foreign palaces, utterly unfit for private residences, which may possibly sometime be utilized for public purposes. They but illustrate the crazy ostentation of selfish wealth. Can it be possible, as stated by the St. Joseph Herald, that “George Vanderbilt is building a genuine old-fashioned mediÆval baronial castle at Asheville, N. C., at a cost of $10,000,000”?Return to text