The city is the most difficult and perplexing problem of modern times.—Francis Lieber.

We must save the city if we would save the nation. Municipal government and city evangelization together constitute the distinctive problem of the city, for this generation at least.—Josiah Strong.

Talk of Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror.—General Booth.

With the influx of a large foreign population into the great cities, there have come also foreign customs and institutions, laxity and license—those phases of evil which are the most insidious foes of the purity and strength of a people. The slums of our large cities are but the stagnant pools of illiteracy, vice, pauperism, and crime, annually fed by this floodtide of immigration.—R. M. Atchison.

You can kill a man with a tenement as easily as with an ax.—Jacob Riis.

Our foreign colonies are to a large extent in the cities of our own country. To live in one of these foreign communities is actually to live on foreign soil. The thoughts, feelings, and traditions which belong to the mental life of the colony are often entirely alien to an American.—Robert Hunter.

The vastness of the problem of the city slum, and the impossibility, even with unlimited resources of men and money, of permanently raising the standards of living of many of our immigrants as long as they are crowded together, and as long as the stream of newer immigrants pours into these same slums, has naturally forced itself upon the minds of thinking persons.—Robert D. Ward.

I. The Evils of Environment

As is the city, so will the nation be. The tendencies all seem to be toward steady concentration in great centers. The evils of congestion do not deter the thronging multitudes. The attractions of the city are irresistible, even to those who exist in the most wretched conditions. The tenement districts baffle description, yet nothing is more difficult than to get their miserable occupants to leave their fetid and squalid surroundings for the country. To the immigrants the city is a magnet. Here they find colonies of their own people, and prize companionship more than comfort. "Folks is more company than stumps," said an old woman in the slums to Dr. Schauffler. In the great cities the immigrants are massed, and this constitutes a most perplexing problem. If tens of thousands of foreigners could somehow be gotten out of New York, Boston, Chicago, and other cities, and be distributed where they are needed and could find work and homes, immigration would cause far less anxiety. But when the immigrant prefers New York or Chicago, what authority shall remove him to Louisiana or Oklahoma?

The foreigner is in the city; he will chiefly stay there; and the question is what can be done to improve his city environment; for the perils to which we refer are primarily due not to the foreigner himself but to the evil and vice-breeding conditions in which he has to exist. These imperil him and make him a peril in turn. The overcrowded tenements and slums, the infection of long-entrenched corruption, the absence of light, fresh air, and playgrounds for the children, the unsanitary conditions and exorbitant rents, the political heelers teaching civic corruption, the saloons with their attendant temptations to vice and crime, the fraudulent naturalization—these work together upon the immigrant, for his undoing and thus to the detriment of the nation. When we permit such an environment to exist, and practically force the immigrant into it because we do not want him for a next-door neighbor, we can hardly condemn him for forming foreign colonies which maintain foreign customs and are impervious to American influences. It has too long been the common practice to lay everything to the foreigner. Would it not be fairer and more Christian to distribute the blame, and assume that part of it which belongs to us. In the study of the facts contained in this chapter, put yourself persistently in the place of the immigrant, suddenly introduced into the conditions here pictured, and ask yourself what you would probably be and become in like circumstances.

How the other half lives is not the only mystery. How little the so-called upper-ten know how the lower-ninety live. And how little you and I, who are fortunate to count ourselves in the next upper-twenty, perhaps, know how the under-seventy exist and think and do. If only the more fortunate thirty per cent. knew of the exact conditions under which a large proportion of men, women, and children carry on the pitiful struggle for mere existence, there would be an irresistible demand for betterment. Every Christian ought to know the wrongs of our civilization, in order that he may help to right them. This glimpse beneath the surface of the city should stir us out of comfortable complacency and give birth in us to the impulse that leads to settlement and city mission work, and to civic reform movements. The young men and women of America must create a public sentiment that will demolish the slums, and erect in their places model tenements; that will tear down the rookeries, root out the saloons and dens of vice, and provide the children with playgrounds and breathing space. And this work will be directly in the line of Americanizing and evangelizing the immigrants, for they are chiefly the occupants and victims of the tenements and the slums.

New York is a city in America but is hardly an American city. Nor is any other of our great cities, except perhaps Philadelphia. Boston is an Irish city, Chicago is a German-Scandinavian-Polish city, Saint Louis is a German city, and New York is a Hebrew-German-Irish-Italian-Bohemian-Hungarian city—a cosmopolitan race conglomeration. Eighteen languages are spoken in a single block. In Public School No. 29 no less than twenty-six nationalities are represented. This indicates the complicated problem.

New York is the chief Jewish capital. Of the 760,000 Jews on Manhattan, about 450,000 are Russian, and they overcrowd the East Side ghetto. In that quarter the signs are in Hebrew, the streets are markets, the shops are European, the men, women, and children speak in Yiddish, and all faces bear the foreign and Hebrew mark plainly upon them.

Go on a little further and you find that you are in Little Italy, quite distinct from Jewry, but not less foreign. Here the names on the signs are Italian, and the atmosphere is redolent with the fumes of Italy. The hurdy-gurdy vies with the push-cart, the streets are full of children and women, and you are as a stranger in a strange land. You would not be in a more distinctively Italian section if you were by magic transplanted to Naples or Genoa.

Nor is it simply the East Side in lower New York that is so manifestly foreign. Go where you will on Manhattan Island and you will see few names on business signs that do not betray their foreign derivation. Two out of every three persons you meet will be foreign. You will see the Italian gangs cleaning the streets, the Irish will control the motor of your trolley-car and collect your fares, the policeman will be Irish or German, the waiters where you dine will be French or German, Italian or English, the clerks in the vast majority of the shopping places will be foreign, the people you meet will constantly remind you of the rarity of the native American stock. You are ready to believe the statement that there are in New York more persons of German descent than of native descent, and more Germans than in any city of Germany except Berlin. Here are nearly twice as many Irish as in Dublin, about as many Jews as in Warsaw, and more Italians than in Naples or Venice. In government, in sentiment, in practice, as in population (thirty-seven per cent. foreign-born and eighty per cent. of foreign birth or parentage), the metropolis is predominantly foreign, and in elections the foreign vote, shrewdly manipulated for the most part, controls.Other Foreign Cities Nor is this true of New York alone. In thirty-three of our largest cities the foreign population is larger than the native; in Milwaukee and Fall River the foreign percentage rises as high as eighty-five per cent. In all these cities the foreign colonies are as distinct and practically as isolated socially as though they were in Russia or Poland, Italy or Hungary. Foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, these colonies are separated from each other, as well as from the American population, by race, customs, and religion.

To believe that this makes no particular difference so far as the development of our national life is concerned is to shut one's eyes to obvious facts. As such an impartial and intelligent student of our institutions as Mr. James Bryce has pointed out, the conspicuous failure of democracy in America thus far is seen in the bad government of our great cities. And it is in these centers that the mass of the immigrants learn their first and often last lessons of American life.

The strong tendency of immigrants is to settle in or near the ports of entry. Where in the great cities do these newcomers find a dwelling place? What will their first lessons in American life be? If we deal largely with New York, it is simply because here are the typical conditions and here the larger proportion of arrivals. Once admitted at Ellis Island, the alien is free to go where he will; or rather, where he can, for his place of residence is restricted, after all. If he is an Italian, he will naturally and almost of necessity go to one of the Little Italies; if a Jew, to the ghetto of the East Side; if a Bohemian, to Little Bohemia; and so on. In other words, he will go, naturally and almost inevitably, to the colonies which tend to perpetuate race customs and prejudices, and to prevent assimilation. Worse yet, these colonies are in the tenement and slum districts, the last environment of all conceivable in which this raw material of American citizenship should be placed.

II. Tenement-House Life

To those who have not made personal investigation, the present conditions, in spite of laws and efforts to ameliorate the worst evils, are well nigh unbelievable. The cellar population, the blind alley population, the swarming masses in buildings that are little better than rat-traps, the herding of whole families in single rooms, in which the miserable beings sleep, eat, cook, and make clothing for contractors, or cigars that would never go into men's mouths if the men saw where they were made—these things seem almost impossible in a civilized and Christian land. It is horrible to be obliged to think of the human misery and hopelessness and grind to which hundreds of thousands are subjected in the city of New York day in and out, without rest or change. It is no wonder that criminals and degenerates come from these districts; it is a marvel, rather, that so few result, and that so much of human kindness and goodness exists in spite of crushing conditions. There is a bright as well as dark side even to the most disgraceful districts; but there is no denying that the dark vastly predominates, and that the struggle for righteousness is too hard for the average human being. Nearly everything is against the peasant immigrant thrust into the throng which has no welcome for him, no decent room, and yet from which he has little chance to get away. He is commonly cleaner morally when he lands than after six months of the life here. Why should he not be? What has American Christianity done to safeguard or help him?

The existence of the tenement-house evils, it must be borne in mind, is chargeable primarily to the owner and landlord, not to the foreign occupant. The landlords are especially to blame for the ill consequences. The immigrant cannot dictate terms or conditions. He has to go where he can. The prices charged for rent are exorbitant, and should secure decency and healthful quarters. No property is so remunerative. This rent money is literally blood money in thousands of instances, and yet every effort to improve things is bitterly fought. Why should not socialism and anarchism grow in such environment? Of course many of the immigrants are familiar with poor surroundings and do not apparently object to dirt and crowding. But that does not make these conditions less perilous to American life. Self-respect has a hard struggle for survival in these sections, and if the immigrant does not possess or loses that, he is of the undesirable class. Mr. Robert Hunter makes the statement that no other city in the world has so many dark and windowless rooms, or so many persons crowded on the acre, or so many families deprived of light and air as New York. He says there are 360,000 dark rooms in Greater New York. And these are almost entirely occupied by the foreigners. But unsanitary conditions prevail also in all the cities, large and small, and especially in the mine and mill and factory towns, wherever large masses of the poorest workers live.

Concerning possible legislation to correct these city evils of environment, Mr. Sargent says: "So far as the overcrowding in city tenements is concerned, municipal ordinances in our large cities prescribing the amount of space which rapacious landlords should, under penalties sufficiently heavy to enforce obedience, be required to give each tenant, would go far toward attaining the object in view. Whether such a plan could be brought into existence through the efforts of our general government, or whether the Congress could itself legislate directly, upon sanitary and moral grounds, against the notorious practice of housing aliens with less regard for health and comfort than is shown in placing brute animals in pens, the Bureau is unprepared to say.

It is, however, convinced that no feature of the immigration question so insistently demands public attention and effective action. The evil to be removed is one that is steadily and rapidly on the increase, and its removal will strike at the root of fraudulent elections, poverty, disease, and crime in our large cities, and on the other hand largely supply that increasing demand for labor to develop the natural resources of our country."[71]

Not to draw the picture all in the darker shades, let us look at the best type of Italian tenement life. We are not left to guesswork in the matter. Settlement workers and students of social questions are actually living in the tenement and slum sections, so as to know by experience and not hearsay. One of these investigators, Mrs. Lillian W. Betts, author of two enlightening books,[72] has lived for a year in one of the most crowded tenements in one of the most densely populated sections of the Italian quarter. We condense some of her statements, which reveal the foreign life of to-day in New York's Little Italy, with its 400,000 souls.

"A year's residence in an Italian tenement taught me first of all the isolation of a foreign quarter; how completely cut off one may be from everything that makes New York New York. The necessities of life can be bought without leaving the square that is your home. After a little it occasioned no surprise to meet grandparents whose own children were born in New York, who had never crossed to the east side of the Bowery, never seen Broadway, nor ever been south of Houston Street. There was no reason why they should go. Every interest in their life centered within four blocks. I went with a neighbor to Saint Vincent's Hospital, where her husband had been taken. I had to hold her hand in the cars, she was so terrified. She had lived sixteen years in this ward and never been on a street-car before. Of a family of five sons and two daughters, besides the parents, in this country fifteen years, none spoke English but the youngest, born here, and she indifferently. Little Italy was all of America they knew, and of curiosity they had none.

"The house in which we lived was built for twenty-eight families and occupied by fifty-six. One man who had been in the country twenty-eight years could not speak or understand a word of English. Nothing but compulsion made his children use Italian, and the result was pathetic. The eldest child was an enthusiastic American, and the two civilizations were always at war. This boy knew more of American history, its heroes and poetry, than anyone of his age I ever met. This boy had never been five blocks from the house in which we lived. He removed his hat and shoes when he went to bed in winter; in summer he took off his coat. A brother and two sisters shared the folding bed with him. His father hired the three rooms and sublet to a man with a wife and three children. The women quarreled all the time, but worked in the same room, finishing trousers and earning about forty-five cents a day each.

"How do they live? One widow, with three in her own family, took nine men boarders in her three rooms. A nephew and his wife also kept house there, the rent being $18 a month. Another neighbor, whose family consisted of four adults and two children, had seven lodgers or boarders at one time. These men owned mattresses, rolled up by day, spread on the floor at night. One of them had a bride coming from Italy. Two men with their mattresses were ejected and space made for the ornate brass and green bedstead. The wedding was the occasion of great rejoicing. Next day the bride was put to work sewing 'pants.' At the end of a month I found she had not left those rooms from the moment she entered them, and that she worked, Sundays included, fourteen hours a day. She was a mere child, at that. The Italian woman is not a good housekeeper, but she is a homemaker; she does not fret; dirt, disorder, noise, company, never disturb her. She must share everything with those about her. She cooks one meal a day and that at night. Pot or pan may be placed in the middle of the table and each may help himself from it, but the food is what her husband wants.

"Together they will wash the dishes or he will take the baby out. The mother, who has sewed all day, will wash till midnight, while the husband sits dozing, smoking, talking. But he hangs out the clothes. They work together, these Italian husbands and wives. Their wants are the barren necessaries of life; shelter, food, clothing to cover nakedness. The children's clothes are washed when they go to bed. Life is reduced to its lowest terms. They can move as silently as do the Arabs and do so in the night watches. But they are rarely penniless; they have a little fund always in the bank. They put their young children in institutions from weaning-time until they are old enough to work, then bring them home to swell the family income. Recently a father, whose children had thus been cared for by the state, bought a three-story tenement. This is typical thrift. There was never a day when all the children of school age were in school. School was a prison house to most of them. There was not room for them, even if they wanted to go.

"The streets in which the Italians live are the most neglected. It is claimed that cleanliness is impossible where the Italian lives. The truth is that preparation for cleanliness in our foreign colonies is wholly inadequate. The police despise the Italian except for his voting power. He feels the contempt, but with the wisdom of his race he keeps his crimes foreign, and defies this department more successfully than the public generally knows. He is a peaceable citizen in spite of the peculiar race crimes which startle the public. The criminals are as one to a thousand of these people. On Sundays watch these colonies. The streets are literally packed with crowds from house line to house line, as far as the eye can see, but not a policeman in sight, nor occasion for one. Laughter, song, discussion, exchange of epithet, but no disturbance. They mind their own business as no other nation, and carry it to the point of crime when they protect the criminal."[73]

This is testimony directly from life and has especial value. It reveals the difficulties, and at the same time the possibilities, of reaching and Americanizing these immigrants, who are better than their surroundings, and promising if properly cared for.

The impression that steadily deepens with observation and study is that of the evil and degrading surroundings. Not only are there the evil moral influences of overcrowding, but also the contact with elements of population already deteriorated by a generation of tenement house life. The fresh arrivals are thrown into contact with the corrupt remnants of Irish immigration which now make up the beggars, drunkards, thugs, and thieves of those quarters. The results can easily be predicted. The Italian laboring population is temperate when it comes to this country; but under the evil conditions and influences of the tenement district disorderly resorts have been opened, and drinking and other vices are spreading. The Hebrews show tendencies to vices from which formerly they were free. The law does not protect these immigrants, and it is charged that the city permits every kind of inducement for the extension of immorality, drunkenness, and crime. Thus the immigrant is likely to deteriorate and degenerate in the process of Americanization, instead of becoming better in this new world. He has indeed little chance. If he does not become a pauper or criminal or drunkard, it will be because he is superior to his environment.

III. The Sweat-shop Peril

An immigrant peril is the sweat-shop labor which this class performs. "Sweating" is the system of sub-contract wherein the work is let out to contractors to be done in small shops or at home. According to the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, "in practice sweating consists of the farming out by competing manufacturers to competing contractors of the material for garments, which in turn is distributed among competing men and women to be made up." This system is opposed to the factory system, where the manufacturer employs his own workmen, sees the goods made, and knows the conditions. The sweating system is one of the iniquities of commercial greed, and the helpless foreigner of certain classes is its victim. The contractor or sweater in our cities is an organizer and employer of immigrants. His success depends upon getting the cheapest help, and life is of no account to him, nor apparently to the man above him. The clothing may be made in foul and damp and consumption or fever-infested cellars and tenement-styes, by men, women and children sick or uncleanly, but the only care of the sweater is that it be made cheaply and thus his returns be secured. It is a standing reproach to our Christian civilization that the sweating system and the slums are still existing sores in American centers of population. So far the law has been unable to control or check greed, and the plague spots grow worse. Here is a typical case, taken from the report of the Industrial Commission:

"A Polish Jew in Chicago, at a time when very few of the Poles were tailors, opened a shop in a Polish neighborhood. He lost money during the time he was teaching the people the trade, but finally was a gainer. Before he opened the shop he studied the neighborhood; he found the very poorest quarters where most of the immigrant Poles lived. He took no one to work except the newly arrived Polish women and girls. The more helpless and dependent they were, the more sure of getting work from him. In speaking about his plans he said: 'It will take these girls years to learn English and to learn how to go about and find work. In that way I will be able to get their labor very cheap.' His theory turned out to be practical. He has since built several tenement-houses."

The cheap tailor business is divided among the Italians, Russians, Poles, and Swedes, Germans and Bohemians. The women and children are made to work, and hours are not carefully counted. Long work, poor food, poor light, foul air, bad sanitation—all make this kind of life far worse than any life which the immigrants knew in Europe. Better physical starvation there than the mental and spiritual blight of these modern conditions here. That so much of hopeful humanity is found in these unwholesome and congested wards proves the quality worth saving and elevating.

Here is an illustration of the resolute spirit which conditions cannot crush. A young Polish girl was brought by her widowed mother to America, in hope of bettering their condition. The mother died soon afterward, leaving the orphan dependent. Then came the disappointments, one after another, and finally, the almost inevitable result in such cases, the fall into the slums and the sweat-shops. By hard work six days in the week, fourteen or more hours a day, this girl of tender age could make $4 a week! She had to get up at half past five every morning and make herself a cup of coffee, which with a bit of bread and sometimes fruit made her breakfast. Listen to her story:

"The machines go like mad all day, because the faster you work the more money you get. Sometimes in my haste the finger gets caught and the needle goes right through it. We all have accidents like that. Sometimes a finger has to come off.... For the last two winters I have been going to night school. I have learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. I can read quite well in English now, and I look at the newspapers every day. I am going back to night school again this winter. Some of the women in my class are more than forty years of age. Like me, they did not have a chance to learn anything in the old country. It is good to have an education; it makes you feel higher. Ignorant people are all low. People say now that I am clever and fine in conversation. There is a little expense for charity, too. If any worker is injured or sick we all give money to help."[74]

Surely this is good material. A changed and Christian environment would make shining lights out of these poor immigrants, who are kept in the subways of American life, instead of being given a fair chance out in the open air and sunlight of decently paid service.

Practically all of the work in tenements is carried on by foreign-born men and women, and more than that, by the latest arrivals and the lowest conditioned of the foreign-born. Tenement-house legislation has been practically forced upon New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, whose ports of entry receive the first impact of immigration, by two of the races that have been crowding into the cities—the Italian and Hebrew. The Italian woman, working in her close tenement, has by her cheap labor almost driven out all other nationalities from that class of work still done in the home, the hand sewing on coats and trousers. Of the 20,000 licenses granted by the New York factory inspector for "home finishing" in New York City, ninety-five per cent. are held by Italians. This work has to be done because the husband is not making enough to support the family. These men work mostly as street laborers, hucksters, and peddlers. To make both ends meet not only the wife but children have to work.

Here is a typical case of this class of worker and the earnings, from an inspector's note-book: "Antonia Scarafino, 235 Mulberry Street; finisher; gets five cents per pair pants, bastes bottoms, puts linings on; one hour to make; two years at this business; four in this country; married, with baby; sister works with her; can both together make $4 per week; husband peddles fish and makes only $1 to $2 a week; got married here; two rooms, $8.50 rent; kitchen 10 x 12; bedroom 8 x 10; gets all the work she wants. No sunlight falls into her squalid rooms, and there is no stopping, from early morning till late at night."

IV. Three Constant Perils

Illegal and fraudulent naturalization is another evil to which the foreigner in the city becomes a party, although the blame belongs chiefly to the ward politicians who make him a particeps criminis. The recognized managers of the foreign vote of various nationalities—almost always saloonkeepers—hold citizenship cheap, perjury undiscovered as good as truth, and every vote a clear gain for the party and themselves. So the naturalization mills are kept running night and day preceding a national or municipal election. Describing this process, ex-United States Senator Chandler says that in New York during a single month just before election about seven thousand naturalization papers were issued, nearly all by one judge, who examined each applicant and witnesses to his satisfaction, and signed his orders at the rate of two per minute, and as many as 618 in one day. Many classes of frauds were committed. Witnesses were professional perjurers, each swearing in hundreds of cases, testifying to a five years' residence when they had first met the applicants only a few hours before. During the past year some of these professional perjurers and political manipulators were tried and sent to the penitentiary; but the frauds will go on. Here is an illustration:

"Patrick Hefferman, of a given street in New York, was twenty-one years old September 2, 1891, and came to this country August 1, 1888. He was naturalized October 20, 1891. On that day he was introduced by Thomas Keeler to a stranger, who went with him to court and signed a paper; they both went before the judge, who asked the stranger something. Hefferman signed nothing, said nothing, but kissed a book and came out a citizen, having taken no oath except that of renunciation and allegiance."

Thus are the sacred rights of citizenship obtained by thousands upon thousands, not in New York alone, but in all our cities. More than that, fraudulent use is freely made of naturalization papers. The Italian immigrant, for example, finds his vote is wanted, and obtains a false paper. He returns to Italy to spend his earnings, and there is offered a sum of money for the use of his papers. These are given to an emigrant who probably could not pass the examination at Ellis Island, but who as a naturalized citizen, if he is not detected in the fraud, cannot be shut out. Then he sends the papers back to Italy. It is admitted that there is a regular traffic in naturalization papers. In every way the alien is put on the wrong track, and his American experiences are such as would naturally make him lawless and criminal rather than a good citizen. He needs nothing more than protection against corrupting and venal agencies, which find their origin in politics and the saloon.

The foreign element furnishes the saloons with victims. In his graphic book describing tenement life in New York Mr. Riis shows the rapid multiplication of the saloons in the slums where the foreigners are crowded into tenements, nine per cent. more densely packed than the most densely populated districts of London. In the chapter, "The Reign of Rum,"[75] he says:

"'Where God builds a church the devil builds next door a saloon' is an old saying that has lost its point in New York. Either the devil was on the ground first, or he has been doing a good deal more in the way of building. I tried once to find out how the account stood, and counted to 111 Protestant churches, chapels, and places of worship of every kind below Fourteenth Street, 4,065 saloons. The worst half of the tenement population lives down there, and it has to this day the worst half of the saloons. Up town the account stands a little better, but there are easily ten saloons to every church to-day.

"As to the motley character of the tenement population, when I asked the agent of a notorious Fourth Ward alley how many people might be living in it, I was told: One hundred and forty families—one hundred Irish, thirty-eight Italian, and two that spoke the German tongue. Barring the agent herself, there was not a native-born individual in the court. The answer was characteristic of the cosmopolitan character of lower New York, very nearly so of the whole of it, wherever it runs to alleys and courts. One may find for the asking an Italian, German, French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony. The one thing you shall ask for in vain in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community."

The immigrant is nearly always poor, and is thrust into the poverty of the city. We must distinguish between pauperism and poverty. As Mr. Hunter points out, in his stirring chapter on this subject,[76] "pauperism is dependence without shame, poverty is to live miserable we know not why, to have the dread of hunger, to work sore and yet gain nothing." Fear of pauperism, of the necessity of accepting charity, drives the self-respecting poor insane and to suicide. It is to be said that the majority of the immigrants are not paupers, but self-respecting poor. Moreover, the new immigration is not nearly so ready to accept pauperism as are the Irish, who make up the largest percentage of this class, as already shown. But the poor immigrants are compelled, by circumstances, to come in contact with, if not to dwell directly among this pauper element, lost to sense of degradation. The paupers make up the slums. And because the rents are cheaper in the miserable old rookeries that still defy public decency, the Italians especially crowd into these pestilential quarters, which are the hotbeds of disease, physical and moral filth, drunkenness, and crime. Thus pauperism and poverty dwell too closely together.

Upon the unskilled masses the weight of want is constantly pressing. Unemployment, sickness, the least stoppage of the scant income, means distress. It is estimated that in our country not less than 4,000,000 persons are dependents or paupers, and not less than 10,000,000 are in poverty. This means that they cannot earn enough regularly to maintain the standard of life that means the highest efficiency, and that at some time they are liable to need aid. Mr. Riis has shown that about one third of the people of New York City were dependent upon charity at some time during the eight years previous to 1890. The report of the United Hebrew Charities for 1901 shows similar conditions existing among the Jewish population of New York. Pauperism is a peril, and poverty is a source of apathy and despair. The unskilled immigrant tends to increase the poverty by creating a surplus of cheap labor, and also falls under the blight of the evil he increases.

Treating of this subject, the Charities Association of Boston reports that it is hopeless to attempt to relieve pauperism so long as its ranks are increased by the great hosts coming into the country, with only a few dollars to depend upon, and no certain work. The statistics of the public almshouses show that the proportion of foreign-born is greatly in excess of the native-born. The pathetic feature of this condition is that what is wanted is not charity but employment at living wages. Greatly is it to the credit of the immigrants from southeastern Europe that they are eager for work and reluctant to accept charity. The danger is that, if allowed to come and then left without opportunity to work, they will of necessity fall into the careless, shiftless, vicious class, already so large and dangerous.

The immigrants in the city tenements are especially exposed to consumption, that "Great White Plague" which yearly kills its tens of thousands. In New York City alone ten thousand die annually of tuberculosis; and this is the result largely of tenement conditions. Statisticians estimate that the annual money loss in the United States from tuberculosis, counting the cost of nursing, food, medicines, and attendance, as well as the loss of productive labor, is $330,000,000. Mr. Hunter instances a case where an entire family was wiped out by this disease within two years and a half. In spite of his efforts to get the father, who was the first one infected with the disease, to go to a hospital, he refused, saying that as he had to die, he was going to die with his family. The Health Board said it had no authority forcibly to compel the man to go to a hospital; and the result was that the whole family died with him. This plague "is the result of our weakness, our ignorance, our selfishness, and our vices; there is no need of its existence, and it is the duty of the state to stamp it out." That is Mr. Hunter's conclusion, with which we heartily agree.

V. The Cry of the Children

Another peril of the city, and of the entire country as well, that comes through the foreigners is child neglect and labor; which means illiteracy, stunted body and mind, and often wreckage of life. Every foreign neighborhood is full of children, and sad enough is the average child of poverty. What makes the tenement district of the great city so terrible to you as you go into it is the sight of the throngs of children, who know little of home as you know it, have irregular and scanty meals, and surroundings of intemperance, dirt, foul atmosphere and speech, disease and vice. No wonder the police in these districts say that their worst trouble arises from the boys and the gangs of young "toughs." There is every reason for this unwholesome product. Mr. Hunter says there are not less than half a million children in Greater New York whose only playground is the street. Result, the street gang; and this gang is the really vital influence in the life of most boys in the large cities. It is this life, which develops, as Mr. Riis says, "dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, gambling propensities, absence of energy, and carelessness of the happiness of others." The great homeless, yardless tenement, where the children of the immigrants are condemned to live, is the nursery of sickness and crime. The child is left for good influence to the school, the settlement, or the mission. For the enormous amount of juvenile crime in the city, which it requires a special court to deal with, the conditions are more responsible than the children, or even than the parents, who are unable to maintain home life, and who, through the pinch of poverty or the impulse of avarice, give over the education of the children to school or street. Here is a picture of the life on its darker side:

"Crowded in the tenements where the bedrooms are small and often dark, where the living room is also a kitchen, a laundry, and often a garment-making shop, are the growing children whose bodies cry out for exercise and play. They are often an irritant to the busy mother, and likely as not the object of her carping and scolding. The teeming tenements open their doors, and out into the dark passageways and courts, through foul alleys and over broken sidewalks, flow ever renewed streams of playing children. Under the feet of passing horses, under the wheels of passing street-cars, jostled about by the pedestrian, driven on by the policeman, they annoy everyone. They crowd about the music or drunken brawls in the saloons, they play hide-and-seek about the garbage boxes, they shoot 'craps' in the alleys, they seek always and everywhere activity, movement, life."[77]

But worse than this picture is that of childhood in the sweat-shop, the factory, the mine, and other places of employment. Mr. Hunter has written a chapter on "The Child"[78] that should be studied by every lover of humanity. Its facts ring out a clarion call for reform. This touches our subject most closely because, as he says, "These evils of child life are doubly dangerous and serious because the mass of people in poverty in our cities are immigrants. The children of immigrants are a remarkable race of little ones."

Indeed they are, and they give you the bright side of the picture, in spite of all the evil conditions in which they live. The present writer stood recently opposite the entrance to a public school in the congested East Side, where not one of all the thousand or more of scholars was of native stock. As the crowds of little girls poured out at noontime their faces made a fascinating study. The conspicuous thing about them was the smile and fun and brightness. The dress was of every description, and one of the merriest-faced of all had on one shoe and one rubber in place of the second shoe; but from the faces you would never suspect into what kind of places these children were about to go for all they know of home. The hope lies in the children, and the schools are their great blessing and outlet, even if as Mrs. Betts says, many of them of certain classes do not think so. Mr. Hunter says:

"They are to become Americans, and through them, more than through any other agency, their own parents are being led into a knowledge of American ways and customs. All the statistics available prove that vice and crime are far more common among the children of immigrants than among the children of native parentage, and this is due no less to the yardless tenement and street playground than to widespread poverty. In a mass of cases the father and mother both work in that feverish, restless way of the new arrival, ambitious to get ahead. To overcome poverty they must neglect their children. Turned out of the small tenement into the street, the child learns the street. Nothing escapes his sharp eyes, and almost in the briefest conceivable time, he is an American ready to make his way by every known means, good and bad. To the child everything American is good and right. There comes a time when the parents cannot guide him or instruct him; he knows more than they; he looks upon their advice as of no value. If ever there was a self-made man, that man is the son of the immigrant. But the street and the street gang have a great responsibility; they are making the children of a hundred various languages from every part of the world into American citizens."

How long will American Christianity allow this process of degeneracy to go on, before realizing the peril of it, and providing the counteracting agencies of good? That is the question the young people ought to consider and help answer.

But far worse than all else, "the nation is engaged in a traffic for the labor of children." In this country over 1,700,000 children under fifteen are compelled to work in the factories, mines, workshops, and fields. These figures may mean little, for as Margaret McMillan has said, "You cannot put tired eyes, pallid cheeks, and languid little limbs into statistics." But we believe that if our Christian people could be brought for one moment to realize what the inhumanity of this child labor is, there would be such an avalanche of public opinion as would put a stop to it. This evil is a new one in America, begotten of greed for money. This greed is shared jointly by the capitalist employer and the parents, but the greater responsibility rests upon the former, who creates the possibility and fosters the evil.

The immigrants furnish the parents willing to sell their children into child slavery in the factory, or the worse mill or mine—prisons all, and for the innocent. Into these prisons gather "tens of thousands of children, strong and happy, or weak, underfed, and miserable. Stop their play once for all, and put them out to labor for so many cents a day or night, and pace them with a tireless, lifeless piece of mechanism, for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, and you will have a present-day picture of child labor." But there is yet one thing which must be added to the picture. Give the child-slave worker a tenement for a home in the filthy streets of an ordinary factory city, with open spaces covered with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters running sewers, and the air foul with odors and black with factory smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe "back of the yards" in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the picture would be even darker than the one given.

Think of it, young people of Christian America! In the twentieth century, in the country we like to think the most enlightened in the world, after all our boasted advancements in civilization, child slavery—more pitiful in some respects than African slavery ever was—has its grip on the nation's childhood.

The record is amazing to one who has never thought about this subject. Easily a hundred thousand children at work in New York, in all sorts of employments unsuitable and injurious. Try to realize these totals, taken from Mr. Hunter, of children under fifteen, compelled to work in employments generally recognized as injurious: Over 7,000 in this country in laundries; nearly 2,000 in bakeshops; 367 in saloons as bartenders and other ways; over 138,000 at work as waiters and servants in hotels and restaurants, with long hours and conditions morally bad; 42,000 employed as messengers, with work hours often unlimited and temptations leading to immorality and vice; 20,000 in stores; 2,500 on the railroads; over 24,000 in mines and quarries; over 5,000 in glass factories; about 10,000 in sawmills and the wood-working industries; over 7,500 in iron and steel mills; over 11,000 in cigar and tobacco factories; and over 80,000 in the silk and cotton and other textile mills.

Now, all of these industries are physically injurious to childhood. But more than this, schooling has been made impossible, and immorality, disease, and death reap a rich harvest from this seed-sowing. And why are these helpless children thus engaged and enslaved, stunted, crippled, and corrupted, deprived of education and a fair chance in life? Simply because their labor is cheap. Mr. Hunter speaks none too strongly when he calls this "murder, cannibalism, destruction of soul and body." And it is the children of the immigrants who are thus sacrificed to Mammon, the pitiless god of greed. Shall our Christian young people have no voice in righting this wrong? Within a generation they can put an end to it, if they will. Here is home missionary work at hand, calling for highest endeavors.

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER VI

Aim: To See Clearly the Dangers Arising from Congestion of Foreigners in our Cities, and the Best Ways of Guarding against Them

I. Foreigners in Cities.

1. What are the chief causes of the following: (1) the rapid growth of great cities; (2) the existence of slums; (3) the settling of immigrants in colonies?

2. Is your knowledge of the lives of the poor sufficient to move you to work for their redemption? Are any of those persons, about whom we have studied, your neighbors?

3. Is the prevailing tone of New York and other cities American or Foreign? Give illustrations.

4. What is the prevailing tone in city government? Is there any connection between the answers of these last two questions?

II. Tenement-House Evils.

5. Where do most of the foreigners settle first in the United States? Of what races is the mass chiefly composed?

6. Describe the conditions under which they live. Do they find them so or make them so?

7. What remedies can be applied to tenement-house conditions? What do the workers among them think of the needs and prospects?

8. What can be done toward improvement by the family? the school? the city government?

III. Prevalent Abuses.

9. Do the slum conditions tend to contaminate new arrivals? Do they actually deteriorate?

10. What is the worst industrial feature of the tenement-house districts? Describe its workings. Tell of some typical sweat-shop workers.

11. What political evils flourish in the congested districts?

12. What moral and social evils flourish in the congested districts?

IV. Effects upon the Poor and the Children.

13. What relation does immigration hold to pauperism and poverty? To conditions of health?

14. Name some of the principal authorities for the preceding answers? How would you answer those who disputed their statements?

15. Can you give any facts as to child labor? What do you think of the policy of employing children?

16. * Does this chapter convince you that Christians have a duty in these matters, and if so, what is it?

References for Advanced Study.—Chapter VI

I. New York Slums and Foreign Quarters.

Study especially the Ghetto, Little Italy, Little Hungary, et al. and find out whether similar conditions exist in cities of your section.

For New York, consult
University Settlement Studies, Vol. I, Nos. 3 and 4.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, X, XII.
For Chicago, consult
Hull House Papers.
For Boston, consult
Wood: Americans in Process, III, IV.

II. Measures for Relief of Slum Population.

Riis: The Battle With the Slum, V-XV.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, VI, VII, XXIV.

III. Connection between a Dense Foreign Population and Corruption in Politics.

Wood: Americans in Process, VI.

IV. Checks Put upon Industrial Oppression and Poverty.

Riis: The Peril and the Preservation of the Home.

V. Problems of Poverty and Childhood as Affected by Immigration.

Hunter: Poverty, I, V, VI.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, XV, XVII, XXI.

---

"To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely," said Burke. If there is to be patriotism, it must be a matter of pride to say, "Americanus sum"—I am an American.—Professor Mayo-Smith.

---