The Battle with the Slum quotes

We can do it now. All that is required is that it shall not be left to itself. That is justice to it and to us, since its grievous ailment is that it cannot help itself.

When a man is drowning, the thing to do is to pull him out of the water; afterward there will be time for talking it over.

We got at it the other way in dealing with our social problems. The wise men had their day, and they decided to let bad enough alone;

The slum stands for ignorance, want, unfitness, for mob-rule in the day of wrath. This at one end. At the other, hard-heartedness, indifference, self-seeking, greed. It is human nature.

We are brothers whether we own it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue.

When the slum flourishes unchallenged in the cities, their wharves may, indeed, be busy, their treasure-houses filled,—wealth and want go so together,—but patriotism among their people is dead.

it is not safe.[2] You cannot rob a child of its childhood, of its home, its play, its freedom from toil and care, and expect to appeal to the grown-up voter's manhood.

The children are our to-morrow, and as we mould them to-day so will they deal with us then.

Therefore that is not safe. Unsafest of all is any thing or deed that strikes at the home, for from the people's home proceeds citizen virtue, and nowhere else does it live. The slum is the enemy of the home.

"One of the largest contributors to the hospitals," this repulsive pile had seen the day when men and women sat under its roof and worshipped God.

When the congregation grew rich, it handed over its house to the devil and moved up-town.

That is not putting it too strong. Counting in the front tenements that shut out what little air and sunshine might otherwise have reached the wretched tenants, it had a population of 360 according to the record, and a mortality of 75 per thousand!

In fifty years how will it be? "The offspring of municipal neglect" the Assembly Committee of 1857 called our "tenement-house" system. "Forgetfulness of the poor" was the way a citizens' council put it. It comes to the same thing.

Whether seen from the point of view of the citizen, the philanthropist, or the Christian, the slum is the poorest investment a city can make, and once made it is not easily unmade.

In a Mississippi river town, when pleading for the turning over to the people's use of some vacant land on the river-shore that would make a fine breathing space, I was told that by and by they would consider it.

It failed in the matter of the soil pipe. It does sometimes to this very day. Knocking a man in the head with an axe, or sticking a knife into him, goes against the grain.

Slowly poisoning a hundred so that the pockets of one be made to bulge may not even banish a man from respectable society.

We are a queer lot in some things. However, that is hardly quite fair to society. It is a fact that that part of it which would deserve the respect of its fellow-citizens has got rid of its tenement-house property in recent years.

"Vested rights" rise up and confront you, and no matter how loudly you may protest that no man has the right to kill his neighbor, they are still there. No one will contradict you, but they won't yield—till you make them.

In a hundred ways you are made to feel that vested rights are sacred, if human life is not.

But the glory is that you can make them yield. You couldn't then.

… to the fifteen hundred cases of smallpox ferreted out by its inspectors "in a few days," and sternly reminded the people of Lord Palmerston's advice to those who would stay an epidemic with a national fast, that they had better turn to and clean up.

We pray nowadays with broom in hand, and the prayer tells.

Do not understand me as discouraging the prayer; far from it. But I would lend an edge to it with the broom that cuts. That kind of foolishness we got rid of;

These are facts that mean much or little, according to the way one looks at them. The significant thing is that they are facts, and that, in spite of slipping and sliding, the world moves forward, not backward.

The poor we shall have always with us, but the slum we need not have.

These two do not rightfully belong together. Their present partnership is at once poverty's worst hardship and our worst blunder.[Back to Contents]

There have been decent Tammany mayors, but not for long. There have been attempts to reform the organization from within, but they have been failures.

You cannot reform an "organized appetite" except by reforming it away.

And then there would be nothing left of the organization.

It was early, but the day's chores were evidently done. The tea-kettle sang on the stove, at which a bright-looking girl of twelve, with a pale but cheery face, and sleeves brushed back to the elbows, was busy poking up the fire.

A little boy stood by the window, flattening his nose against the pane, and gazed wistfully up among the chimney pots where a piece of blue sky about as big as the kitchen could be made out.

I remarked to the mother that they were nice rooms.

She knew the month and the exact hour of the day when its rays shone into their home, and just the reach of its slant on the wall. They had lived there six years.

In June the sun was due.

A haunting fear that the baby would ask how long it was till June—it was February then—took possession of me, and I hastened to change the subject. Warsaw was their old home. They kept a little store there, and were young and happy.

in 1900, according to the United States census, the average in the old city was 20.4. It all means that there are so many more and so much bigger tenements, and four families to the floor where there were two before.

Statistics are not my hobby. I like to get their human story out of them.

Anybody who wants them can get the figures in the census books. But as an instance of the unchecked drift—unchecked as yet—look at this record of the Tenth Ward, the "most crowded spot in the world."

We have done as badly in New York.

Social hatefulness is not a good soil for citizenship to grow in, where political equality rules.

Nor is it going to help us any to charge it all to the tenant "who will herd." He herds because he has no other chance; because it puts money into some one's pockets to let him.

"We were going to burn it," said the little woman, whose husband was then in the insane asylum, "and then I couldn't. It looked so kind o' cheery-like there in the corner." My tree had borne the fruit I wished.

It remained for the New York slum landlord to assess the exact value of a ray of sunlight,—upon the tenant, of course.

Here are two back-to-back rear tenements, with dark bedrooms on the south. The flat on the north gives upon a neighbor's yard, and a hole two feet square has been knocked in the wall, letting in air and sunlight;

little enough of the latter, but what there is is carefully computed in the lease. Six dollars for this flat, six and a half for the one with the hole in the wall.

Six dollars a year per ray.

In half a dozen houses in this block have I found the same rate maintained. The modern tenement on the corner goes higher: for four front rooms, "where the sun comes right in your face," seventeen dollars;

The rent for the front flats was twelve dollars; for that in the rear ten dollars. The social distinctions going with the advantage of location were rigidly observed, I suppose.

The three steps across a tenement hall, from the front to "the back," are often a longer road than from Ludlow Street to Fifth Avenue.

They were sweaters' tenements. But I shall keep that end of the story until I come to speak of the tenants. The houses I have in mind now.

London's way with the tenant we adopted at last in New York with the slum landlord. He was "druv into decency." We had to. Moral suasion had been stretched to the limit.

The point had been reached where one knock-down blow outweighed a bushel of arguments.

It was all very well to build model tenements as object lessons to show that the thing could be done; it had become necessary to enforce the lesson by demonstrating that the community had power to destroy houses which were a menace to its life.

Last year only three died, and they were all killed while away from home. So he had good cause of complaint. The rest had none, and having none, they stay, which is no mean blow struck for the home in the battle with the slum.

The home feeling can never grow where people do not stay long enough to feel at home, any more than the plant can which the child is pulling up every two or three days to "see if it has roots."

Half the tenement house population—and I am not sure that I ought not to say the whole of it—is everlastingly on the move. Dr.

It is, after all, a sign that the tenement that smothers individuality left them this useful handle, and if the experience squashed the hopes of some who dreamed of municipal wash-houses on the Glasgow plan, there is nothing to grieve over.

Every peg of personal pride rescued from the tenement is worth a thousand theories for hanging the hope of improvement on.

With $2,300,000 invested by this time, the company has built city homes for 1450 families, and has only made a beginning. All the money that is needed for going on with its work is in sight. Nor are the rich the only investors.

I hate to say that they have broken the peg, for I do not believe it. But it has been hurt without doubt. They longed for the crowds.

The grass and the trees and the birds and the salt breath of the sea did not speak to them in a language they understood.

The brass bands and the hand-organs, the street cries and the rush and roar of the city, had made them forget their childhood's tongue. For the children understood, even in the gutter.

I think not. I believe he is mistaken. And yet I can give no other ground for my belief than my unyielding faith that things will come right yet, if it does take time. They are not right as they are.

Man is not made to be born and to live all his life in a box, packed away with his fellows like so many herring in a barrel.

He is here in this world for something that is not attained in that way; but is, if not attained, at least perceived when the daisies and the robins come in.

The heavy-browed fellow is a thief, who is out recruiting his band which the police have broken up in this or some other city. By and by his victim will have time, behind prison bars, to make out the lie that caught him.

The world owes no man a living except as the price of honest work.

But, wrathful and hungry, he walks easily into the trap.

and I might set over against it the product of sordid and mean environment which one has never far to seek.

Good and evil go together in the tenements as in the fine houses, and the evil sticks out sometimes merely because it lies nearer the surface.

The point is that the good does outweigh the bad, and that the virtues that turn the balance are after all those that make for manhood and good citizenship anywhere;

Jealousy, envy, and meanness wear no fine clothes and masquerade under no smooth speeches in the slums.

Often enough it is the very nakedness of the virtues that makes us stumble in our judgment.

I have in mind the "difficult case" that confronted some philanthropic friends of mine in a rear tenement on Twelfth Street, in the person of an aged widow, quite seventy I should think, who worked uncomplainingly for a sweater all day and far into the …

It is of the first importance, then, that we should have laws deserving of their respect, and that these laws should be enforced, lest they conclude that the whole thing is a sham.

Respect for law is a very powerful bar against the slum.

But what, for instance, must the poor Jew understand, who is permitted to buy a live hen at the market, but neither to kill nor keep it in his tenement, and who on his feast day finds a whole squad of policemen detailed to follow …

My business is with that environment. The man is dead, the boy in jail. But unless I am to be my brother's jail keeper merely, the iron bars do not square the account of Jacob with society.

Society exists for the purpose of securing justice to its members, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

When it fails in this, the item is carried on the ledger with interest and compound interest toward a day of reckoning that comes surely with the paymaster.

it had smothered that in him around which character is built. The more readily did he fall in with the street and its ways. Character implies depth, a soil, and growth.

The street is all surface. Nothing grows there; it hides only a sewer.

It taught him gambling as its first lesson, and stealing as the next. The two are never far apart. From shooting craps behind the "cop's" back to filching from the grocer's stock or plundering a defenceless pedler is only a step.

But a boy who cannot kick a ball around has no chance of growing up a decent and orderly citizen. He must have his childhood, so that he may be fitted to give to the community his manhood.

The average boy is just like a little steam-engine with steam always up. The play is his safety-valve.

With the landlord in the yard and the policeman on the street sitting on his safety-valve and holding it down, he is bound to explode.

As a young man he trains with the gang, because it furnishes the means of gratifying his inordinate vanity; that is the slum's counterfeit of self-esteem. Upon the Jacobs of other days there was a last hold,—the father's authority. Changed conditions have loosened that also.

There is a time in every young man's life when he knows more than his father. It is like the measles or the mumps, and he gets over it, with a little judicious firmness in the hand that guides.

It is the misfortune of the slum boy of to-day that it is really so, and that he knows it. His father is an Italian or a Jew, and cannot even speak the language to which the boy is born.

To that end he organized a gang of admiring but less resourceful comrades.

After all, the planes of fellowship of Poverty Gap and Madison Avenue lie nearer than we often suppose.

I set the incident down in justice to the memory of my friend Mike. If this one went astray with so much to pull him the right way and but the single strand broken, what then of the other?

Neither is it the jail. To put the gang behind iron bars affords passing relief, but it is like treating a symptom without getting at the root of the disease. Prophylactic treatment is clearly indicated.

The boy who flings mud and stones is entering his protest in his own way against the purblind policy that gave him jails for schools and the gutter for a playground; that gave him dummies for laws and the tenement for a home.

He is demanding his rights, of which he has been cheated,—the right to his childhood, the right to know the true dignity of labor that makes a self-respecting manhood. The gang, rightly understood, is our ally, not our enemy.

That is the simple secret of the success of the club, the brigade, in winning back the boy. It is fighting the street with its own weapon.

The gang is the club run wild.

How readily it owns the kinship was never better shown than by the experience of the college settlement girls, when they first went to make friends in the East Side tenements.

I walked home from the office in the early gloaming.

The street wore its normal aspect of mingled dulness and the kind of expectancy that is always waiting to turn any excitement, from a fallen horse to a fire, to instant account.

The early June heat had driven the multitudes from the tenements into the street for a breath of air. The boys of the block were holding a meeting at the hydrant.

It had been such a hard fight, and now at last it was won. To me the whole battle with the slum had summed itself up in the struggle with this dark spot.

The whir of the lawn-mower was as sweet a song in my ear as that which the skylark sang when I was a boy, in Danish fields, and which gray hairs do not make the man forget.

In my delight I walked upon the grass. It seemed as if I should never be satisfied till I had felt the sod under my feet,—sod in the Mulberry Bend!

In the first five months of the present year the Rivington Street baths accommodate 224,876 bathers, of whom 66,256 were women and girls. And this in winter. The free river baths have registered five and six millions of bathers in one brief season.

The "great unwashed" were not so from choice, it would appear.

The river baths were only for summer, and their time is past. As the sewers that empty into the river multiply, it is getting less and less a place fit to bathe in, though the boys find no fault.

No, we are not marking time; we are forging ahead.

Every park, every playground, every bath-house, is a nail in the coffin of the slum, and every big, beautiful schoolhouse, built for the people's use, not merely to lock the children up in during certain hours for which the teachers collect pay, is a pole rammed right through the heart of it so that even its ghost shall never walk again.

For ever so much of it we thank that association of men of splendid courage and public spirit. They fight to win because they believe in the people. They fight with the people and so they are bound to win.

For that is the brotherhood. And now you can see how that is the only thing that really helps.

Charity may corrupt, correction may harden and estrange,—in the family they do neither.

There you can give and take without offence. Children of one Father! Spin all the fine theories you like, build up systems of profound philosophy, of social ethics, of philanthropic endeavor; back to that you get—if you get anywhere at all.

"Everything takes ten years," said Abram S. Hewitt, when, exactly ten years after he had as mayor championed the Small Parks Act, he took his seat as chairman of the Advisory Committee on Small Parks. The ten years had wrought a great change.

It was no longer the slum of to-day, but that of to-morrow, that challenged attention.

The committee took the point of view of the children from the first. It had a large map prepared, showing where in the city there was room to play and where there was none.

That is just a question of effective superintendence, as is true of model tenements, and everything else in this world.

You have got to keep the devil out of everything, yourself included. He will get in if he can, as he got into the Garden of Eden.

The play piers have taken a hold of the people which no crabbed old bachelor can loosen with trumped-up charges.

The band plays on. One after another, tired heads droop upon babes slumbering peacefully at the breast. Ludlow Street—the tenement—are forgotten; eleven o'clock is not yet. Down along the silver gleam of the river a mighty city slumbers.

The great bridge has hung out its string of shining pearls from shore to shore.

"Sweet land of liberty!" Overhead the dark sky, the stars that twinkled their message to the shepherds on Judæan hills, that lighted their sons through ages of slavery, and the flag of freedom borne upon the breeze,—down there the tenement, the—Ah, well!

Police headquarters was right across the way, and kept the reporters awake. From his window the chief looked down the narrow passageway to the bottom of the alley, and the alley looked back at him, nothing daunted.

No man is a hero to his valet, and the chief was not an autocrat to Cat Alley.

It knew all his human weaknesses, could tell when his time was up generally before he could, and winked the other eye with the captains when the newspapers spoke of his having read them a severe lecture on gambling or Sunday beer-selling.

and when we mixed truants and thieves in a jail with entire unconcern.

Indeed, the jail filled the title rôle in the educational cast of that day.

Its inmates were well lodged and cared for, while the sanitary authorities twice condemned the Essex Market school across the way as wholly unfit for children to be in, but failed to catch the ear of the politician who ran things unhindered.

What further indignities there are in store for him, in this day of "frills," there is no telling. The Superintendent of Schools told me only yesterday that he was going to Boston to look into new sources of worriment they have invented there.

The world does move in spite of janitors.

In two short years our school authorities advanced from the cautious proposition that it "was the sense" of the Board of Superintendents that the schoolhouses might well be used in the cause of education as neighborhood centres, etc., (1897), to the flat declaration that "every …

The baby kissed it, and it lay upon more than one wan cheek, and whispered, who knows what thought of hope and courage that were nearly gone.

Even in Hester Street the wild rose from the hedge was not wasted.

The result of it all was wholesome and good, because it was common sense. The way to fight the slum in the children's lives is with sunlight and flowers and play, which their child hearts crave, if their eyes have never seen them.

The result of it all was wholesome and good, because it was common sense.

The way to fight the slum in the children's lives is with sunlight and flowers and play, which their child hearts crave, if their eyes have never seen them.

The teachers reported that the boys were easier to manage, more quiet, and played more fairly than before. The police reports showed that fewer were arrested or run over in the streets than in other years.

There was need of it. It had seemed sometimes as if, in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were in danger of stuffing the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of him.

It is a higher function of the school to teach principles than to impart facts merely.

Teaching the boy municipal politics and a thousand other things to make a good citizen of him, instead of so filling him with love of his country and pride in its traditions that he is bound to take the right stand when the time comes, …

Until that day comes the teachers, as a class apart, will have interests apart, or feel that they have, and will be bound to stand together to defend them; and they will work for pay.

But for the real work of a teacher no one can ever pay her.

The day is coming. The windows of the schoolhouse have been thrown open, and life let in with the sunlight. The time may be not far distant when ours shall be schools "for discovering aptitude," in Professor Felix Adler's wise plan.

The day is coming.

The windows of the schoolhouse have been thrown open, and life let in with the sunlight.

The time may be not far distant when ours shall be schools "for discovering aptitude," in Professor Felix Adler's wise plan. The problem is a vast one, even in its bulk;

And when the little Italian asks, with shining eyes, "Which side were we on?" who can doubt that the lesson has sunk into a heart that will thenceforward beat more loyally for the city of his home?

We have not any too much pride in our city, the best of us, and that is why we let it be run by every scalawag boss who comes along to rob us.

In all the land there is no more historic building than Fraunces' Tavern, where Washington bade good-by to his officers;

There are fifteen clubs for every Winifred Buck that is in sight. From the City History Club, the Charity Organization Society, from everywhere, comes the same complaint.

The hardest thing in the world to give is still one's self.

But it is all the time getting to be easier.

It too has earned a place among the forces that are working out through the new education the brighter day, for it has taught the lesson which all the citizens of a free state need most to learn—respect for law.[Back to Contents]

"Nothing in this world of ours is settled until it is settled right."

From the moment we began the fight for the children's play there was but one ending to that battle;

"They were of little use; too hot in summer and too cold in winter." We were invited to quit our fooling and resume business at the old stand of the three R's, and let it go with that. That was what schools were for.

It takes time, you see, to grow an idea, as to grow a colt or a boy, to its full size.

President Burlingham, who in his day drew the bill that made it lawful to use the schools for neighborhood purposes other than the worship of those same three R's, went around with me one night to see what ailed the children who would not play.

The policeman nodded contentedly: "good business, indeed." This was a kind of roof patrol he could appreciate. Nothing to do; less for to-morrow, for here they were not planning raids on the grocer's stock.

They were happy, and when children are happy, they are safe, and so are the rest of us.

It is the policeman's philosophy, and it is worth taking serious note of.

No use going into that farther. The fact is that we have all been groping. We saw the need and started to fill it, and in the strange surroundings we lost our bearings and the password.

We got to be sociological instead of neighborly. It is not the same thing.

A Cooking Lesson in Vacation School: the Best Temperance Sermon.

Here is the lost password: "neighbor". That is all there is to it.

If a settlement isn't the neighbor of those it would reach, it is nothing at all.

"A place," said the sub-warden of Toynbee Hall in the discussion I spoke of, and set it on even keel in an instant, "a place of good will rather than of good works." That is it.

It is precisely in the sundering of our society into classes that have little in common, that are no longer neighbors, that our peril lives.

A people cannot work together for the good of the state if they are not on speaking terms.

In the gap the slum grows up. That was one reason why I hailed with a shout the proposition of Mr. Schwab, the steel trust millionnaire, to take a regiment of boys down to Staten Island on an excursion every day in summer.

We shall have the assembly halls thrown open, not only for Dr. Leipziger's lectures and Sunday concerts (already one permit has been granted for the latter), but for trades-union meetings, and for political meetings, if I have my way.

Until we consider our politics quite good enough to be made welcome in the school, they won't be good enough for it.

The day we do let them in, the saloon will lose its grip, and not much before.

… and deputizes another to do it for him, whether that other wears the stamp of a Croker or of a Platt,—it matters little which,—we shall have the slum, and be put periodically to the trouble and the shame of draining it in the public sight.

A citizen's duty is one thing that cannot be farmed out safely; and the slum is not limited by the rookeries of Mulberry or Ludlow streets.

It has long roots that feed on the selfishness and dulness of Fifth Avenue quite as greedily as on the squalor of the Sixth Ward. The two are not nearly so far apart as they look.

The old love of fair play had been whittled down by the jack-knife of all-pervading expediency to an anæmic desire to "hold the scales even," which is a favorite modern device of the devil for paralyzing action in men.

You cannot hold the scales even in a moral issue. It inevitably results in the triumph of evil, which asks nothing better than the even chance to which it is not entitled.

When the trouble in the Police Board had reached a point where it seemed impossible not to understand that Roosevelt and his side were fighting a cold and treacherous conspiracy against the cause of good government, we had the spectacle of a Christian Endeavor Society …

Mr. Beecher used to say, when pleading for bright hymn tunes, that he didn't want the devil to have the monopoly of all the good music in the world.

The saloon has had the monopoly up to date of all the cheer in the tenements.

If its owner has made it pan out to his own advantage and the boss's, we at least have no just cause of complaint. We let him have the field all to himself.

I say needed, purposely. There has been a good deal of talk in our day about the saloon as a social necessity. About all there is to that is that the saloon is there, and the necessity too.

Man is a social animal, whether he lives in a tenement or in a palace.

But the palace has resources; the tenement has not. It is a good place to get away from at all times. The saloon is cheery and bright, and never far away. The man craving human companionship finds it there.

We kept it up three years, and then went back to the old style. I should judge that we did it because we were tired of too much virtue. Perhaps we were not built to hold such a lot at once.

Besides, it is much easier to be ruled than to rule.

That fall, after the election, when I was concerned about what would become of my small parks, of the Health Department in which I took such just pride, and of a dozen other things, I received one unvarying reply to my anxious question, or rather …

the cowardly American who "doesn't want to antagonize" anybody; the fool who "washes his hands of politics." These are the real Tammany, the men after the boss's own heart.

For every one whose vote he buys, there are two of these who give him theirs for nothing.

We shall get rid of him when these withdraw their support, when they become citizens of the Patrick Mullen stamp, as faithful at the polling place as he was at the forge; not before.

We shall get rid of him when these withdraw their support, when they become citizens of the Patrick Mullen stamp, as faithful at the polling place as he was at the forge; not before.

There is as much work for reform at the top as at the bottom.

The man in the slum votes according to his light, and the boss holds the candle. But the boss is in no real sense a leader. He follows instead, always as far behind the moral sentiment of the community as he thinks is safe.

The conclusion is irresistible that he thought the bishop either a fool or a politician playing for points. Such a man is not the power he seems.

He is formidable only in proportion to the amount of shaking it takes to rouse the community's conscience.

The boss is like the measles, a distemper of a self-governing people's infancy. When we shall have come of age politically, he will have no terrors for us.

He has heard it said that a community will not be any better than its citizens, and that it will be just as good as they are, and he applies the saying to himself.

He is no worse a boss than the town deserves.

I can conceive of his taking credit to himself as some kind of a moral instrument by which the virtue of the community may be graded, though that is most unlikely. He does not bother himself with the morals of anything.

There is as much work for reform at the top as at the bottom.

The man in the slum votes according to his light, and the boss holds the candle.

But the boss is in no real sense a leader. He follows instead, always as far behind the moral sentiment of the community as he thinks is safe.

The conclusion is irresistible that he thought the bishop either a fool or a politician playing for points. Such a man is not the power he seems. He is formidable only in proportion to the amount of shaking it takes to rouse the community's conscience.

The boss is like the measles, a distemper of a self-governing people's infancy.

When we shall have come of age politically, he will have no terrors for us.

The reformer comes to them from another world to tell them these things, and goes his way. The boss lives among them. He helped John to a job on the pipes in their hard winter, and got Mike on the force.

They know him as a good neighbor, and trust him to their harm.

He drags their standard ever farther down. The question for those who are trying to help them is how to make them transfer their allegiance, and trust their real friends instead.

Odd as it sounds, this is where he has his real hold. I have shown why this is so.

To the poor people of his district the boss is a friend in need.

He is one of them. He does not want to reform them; far from it. No doubt it is very ungrateful of them, but the poor people have no desire to be reformed. They do not think they need to be.

He knows, if he knows anything, that the way to get and keep the children's confidence is to trust them, and let them know that they are trusted. They will almost always come up to the demand thus made upon them.

Preaching to them does little good; preaching at them still less.

Men, whether rich or poor, are much like children. The good in them is just as good, and the bad, in view of their enlarged opportunities for mischief, not so much worse, all considered.

Preaching to them does little good; preaching at them still less. Men, whether rich or poor, are much like children. The good in them is just as good, and the bad, in view of their enlarged opportunities for mischief, not so much worse, all considered.

A vigorous optimism, a stout belief in one's fellow-man, is better equipment in a campaign for civic virtue than stacks of tracts and arguments, economic and moral.

There is good bottom, even in the slum, for that kind of an anchor to get a grip on. Some years ago I went to see a boxing match there had been much talk about.

It ought not be a difficult question to answer. Any teacher could do it.

He knows, if he knows anything, that the way to get and keep the children's confidence is to trust them, and let them know that they are trusted.

They will almost always come up to the demand thus made upon them. Preaching to them does little good; preaching at them still less. Men, whether rich or poor, are much like children.

As to the brutality, they knew that fifty young men are maimed or killed at football to one who fares ill in a boxing match. Would it seem to them common sense, or cant and humbug?

That is what it comes down to in the end: common sense and common honesty.

Common sense to steer us clear of the "sociology" reef that would make our cause ridiculous, on Fifth Avenue and in East Broadway. I have no quarrel with the man who would do things by system and in order;

but the man who would reduce men and women and children to mere items in his infallible system and classify and sub-classify them until they are as dried up as his theories, that man I will fight till I die.

One throb of a human heart is worth a whole book of his stuff.

Common honesty to keep us afloat at all. If we worship as success mere money-getting, closing our eyes to the means, let us at least say it like the man who told me to-day that "after all, one has to admire Bill Devery;

As it is, the enemy sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption of that plan, I would recommend a decree of banishment against photographers, press-clippings men, and the rest of the congratulatory staff.

Why should the fact that a citizen has done a citizen's duty deserve to be celebrated in print and picture, as if something extraordinary had happened?

The smoke of battle had not cleared away after the victory of reform in the fall of 1894, before the citizens' committee and all the little sub-committees rushed pell-mell to the photographer's to get themselves on record as the men who did it.

A saving sense of humor might have avoided some of those pitfalls.

I am seriously of the opinion that a professional humorist ought to be attached to every reform movement, to keep it from making itself ridiculous by either too great solemnity or too much conceit.

As it is, the enemy sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption of that plan, I would recommend a decree of banishment against photographers, press-clippings men, and the rest of the congratulatory staff.

Our faith has felt the new impulse; rather, I should say, it has given it. The social movements, and that which we call politics, are but a reflection of what the people honestly believe, a chart of their aims and aspirations.

Charity in our day no longer means alms, but justice.

The social settlements are substituting vital touch for the machine charity that reaped a crop of hate and beggary. Charity organization—"conscience born of love" some one has well called it—is substituting its methods in high and low places for the senseless old ways.

Its champions are oftener found standing with organized labor for legislation to correct the people's wrongs, and when the two stand together nothing can resist them.

Through its teaching we are learning that our responsibility as citizens for a law does not cease with its enactment, but rather begins there.

We are growing, in other words, to the stature of real citizenship.

But it is easy to find fault, and on that tack we get no farther. Those men did a great work, and they did it well. They built from the bottom and they built the foundation broad and strong.

Good schools, better homes, and a chance for the boy are good bricks to build with in such a structure as we are rearing.

They last. Just now we are laying another course; more than one, I hope. But even if it were different, we need not despair. Let the enemy come back once more, it will not be to stay.

For four years now a joint committee of the State Charities' Aid Association and the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor has taken them off the city's hands and adopted them out, and in every hundred now eighty-nine live and grow up!

After all, not even a Jersey cow can take the place of a mother with a baby.

And we are building a children's court that shall put an end to the other outrage, for boys taken there are let off on probation, to give them the chance under a different teaching from the slum's, which it denied them till now.

Flag-drill in the "King's Garden." The Playground at the Jacob A. Riis House.

We have learned that we cannot pass off checks for human sympathy in settlement of our brotherhood arrears.

The Church, which once stood by indifferent, or uncomprehending, is hastening to enter the life of the people.

The Church was "angling for souls."

But souls in this world live in bodies endowed with reason.

The results of that kind of fishing were empty pews and cold hearts, and the conscience-stricken cry that went up, "What shall we do to lay hold of this great multitude that has slipped from us?"

To-day we see churches of every denomination uniting in a systematic canvass of the city to get at the facts of the people's life of which they had ceased to be a part, pleading for parks, playgrounds, kindergartens, libraries, clubs, and better homes.

There is a new and hearty sound to the word "brother" that is full of hope.

The cry has been answered. The gap in the social body, between rich and poor, is no longer widening. We are certainly coming closer together.

She was a cleaner in an office building; not until all the arrangements had been made did it occur to me to ask where. Then it turned out that she was scrubbing floors in the missionary society's house, right at my friend's door.

They had passed one another every day, each in need of the other, and each as far from the other as if oceans separated them instead of a doorstep four inches wide.

Looking back over the years that lie behind with their work, and forward to those that are coming, I see only cause for hope.

weep when I must, but smile as long as I possibly can." And the tears shone in her gentle old eyes as she said it.

When we have learned to smile and weep with the poor, we shall have mastered our problem.

Then the slum will have lost its grip and the boss his job.

The task that is set it, the problem it has to solve and which it may not shirk, is the problem of civilization, of human progress, of a people's fitness for self-government, that is on trial among us.

We shall solve it by the world-old formula of human sympathy, of humane touch.

Somewhere in these pages I have told of the woman in Chicago who accounted herself the happiest woman alive because she had at last obtained a playground for her poor neighbors' children.