Part 6 (1/2)
Barnett made the somewhat startling remark, 'We have nothing nearly so bad as this in Whitechapel.'”
[Ill.u.s.tration: UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS.]
Doesn't it seem a little strange to an outsider that the Board of Health keep on hand, as it were, block after block of tenement houses, where both landlords and tenants deliberately set the law at defiance, which they can show off at call? There could not be a greater folly than to put this question aside as a matter only interesting to those poor people themselves. The slavery of Uncle Tom and his woolly-headed children cursed the plantation house, in the end, as much as it did the cabin. We must look after these people and help them for the sake of others, if not on their own account. Dr. John S. Billings, in an address before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in February of this year, says: ”When diphtheria prevails in a tenement house, many school children are endangered, and the most perfect plumbing in a house affords little protection against the entrance of this disease, if it is prevailing in the vicinity. Typhus and smallpox do not confine their ravages to the vicious and foul, after they have acquired malignancy amongst them. Mingled with those who might not be worth saving, is a much larger number of honest, industrious, and fairly intelligent and energetic poor people who live by days' wages, and are struggling against their surroundings to improve their condition, and especially to give their children a fairer chance in the race for life than they themselves have had. These last are the people whom it is worth while to help for their own sake. You will observe,”
says this cool-headed doctor, ”that I am considering this matter entirely from the money point of view, without reference to religion or morals or altruism. The question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is far more important, I admit; but I confine myself to a lower plane--to the bread-and-b.u.t.ter aspects of munic.i.p.al life. Great numbers of the incompetent, vicious, idle, deformed, or starved-brain cla.s.s have been poured into this country by immigration during the last fifty years, and have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums, alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are from two to three times as great as those of the better cla.s.s of population; one-fourth of their sickness is treated by charities, and one-third of those who die among them are buried at public expense. The districts in which they live require a larger proportion of the work of city officials, inspections, removal of nuisances, police, the courts, etc.; and, on the other hand, they contribute but little to munic.i.p.al or other taxation. All this is well known; but we have not yet arrived at the stage of applying efficient and systematic prevention, which is perfectly possible, and are still pottering with the so-called remedies which are of little use. In these districts the deaths usually outnumber the births, so that if it were not for a continued stream of new recruits this population would diminish. How can accessions be prevented? One way is to get rid of and prevent additions to the kind of dwellings these people seek. Do you say that they must live somewhere, and that there must be such places for such people? I do not think so. It is not necessary that any city should allow the existence of any such houses within its limits; and if their destruction forces some persons into the almshouses, and drives others away, it will be the cheapest and best in the end.”
There are scores, and I think I should be safe to say hundreds, of tenement houses within the city limits of Boston which are unfit to be inhabited, and where the landlords do not pretend to obey the laws of health required by the statutes, and yet the tenants are paying a sufficiently large rent to pay good interest on a clean, healthful tenement. Our modern science and our Christian civilization are alike challenged by this condition of things.
Yet, as you think of the horror of these Boston ”cabins” and their miserable tenants, you will say, ”They are at least free, they cannot be bought and sold like Uncle Tom.” Alas! they are not free. True, no one can take them to an auction-block, but their bondage is none the less real. Into that fearfully neglected Italian tenement house which I have tried to describe in this discourse, the sweater had come, and women were making a fine cla.s.s of knee pants for twenty cents a dozen pairs, which means forty cents a day in wages. These people find it impossible to save. The lower strata of wages in Boston, and in all our large cities, has reached the point where the people who depend on them labor simply to exist. One day's sickness in father or mother or child leaves a gap it takes weeks or months to bridge over again.
[Ill.u.s.tration: TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING.]
Sometimes a Southern Uncle Tom or Aunt Chloe had their son or daughter sold out of their arms, leaving them with broken hearts. But the white slaves of the tenement house sound every deep of human agony. Think what it is to try to raise boys honest, when their playmates are thieves from the cradle! Think of the agony of a mother fighting the wolf of starvation day and night and finding, as, one Boston mother did only a few weeks ago, that the wolf of l.u.s.t had devoured her one ewe lamb before she was yet thirteen years of age! Brothers, it is not yet time for the ”abolitionist” to put aside his tocsin or his sword while so many of our brothers and sisters are living and sighing in their despair:--
”Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel, Forgetting that the world is fair;
Where no babe we cherish lest its soul perish, Where our mirth is crime, our love a snare.”
VIII.
SOCIAL MICROBES IN BOSTON TENEMENT HOUSES, AND HOW TO DESTROY THEM.
”Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.”
--ALFRED TENNYSON: _In Memoriam._
The greatest claim Job ever makes for himself is that in the days of his prosperity, when everybody knew him and was obsequious to him as a rich man, he was not only kind to the poor, but exhibited for them a genuine sympathy which was ill.u.s.trated in his carefully searching out the causes of their troubles.
There is a good deal that pa.s.ses for kindness and sympathy, in these days, that is nothing more than lazy good-nature. Ignorant or indifferent charity is often as mischievous in its results as the wicked greed of the skinflint and the miser. Sympathy, to be worth any thing, must be incarnated, as in Job's case, so that it becomes feet to the lame and eyes to the blind. Frances Power Cobbe declares that the most Christ-like thing she ever heard from human lips, was from the ”Good Earl” of Shaftesbury:--
”The friend of all the friendless 'neath the sun; Whose hand had wiped away a thousand tears; Whose eloquent lips and clear, strong brain have done G.o.d's holy service through his fourscore years.”
When he was speaking to her one day, in his study, of the wrongs of young girls, which he had just been investigating, the tears came to his eyes and his voice trembled. After a pause, he added, ”When I feel how old I am, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong, but I feel I cannot bear to go and leave the world with all the misery in it.”
People who have no genuine sympathy for their fellows, oftentimes grow harder-hearted at a revelation of the miseries of the oppressed, which stirs n.o.bler souls to their profoundest depths and awakens them to all manner of helpful benevolence. There is an old legend of St. Hilary Loricatus, who scourged himself so perpetually that his skin became like the hide of a rhinoceros. So, acquaintance with the sorrows and woes of the poor and unfortunate, acquired out of a morbid curiosity, or a hunger for that kind of emotion experienced by the reader of sensational novels, will result only in marring and hardening us.
Very different is the result of such knowledge when obtained through an earnest sympathy and a holy ambition to a.s.suage the sorrows of the distressed. Sh.e.l.ley never wrote anything more beautiful, perhaps, than this:--
”In sacred Athens, near the fane Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood; Serve not the unknown G.o.d in vain, But pay that broken shrine again, Love for hate, and tears for blood.”
I put this emphasis on the need of searching out the wrongs of the poor, because I am satisfied that one of the greatest factors in the present tenement-house situation is the ignorance and indifference of the people as to the condition of things in the slum tenement house. I am sure that nothing but good can come from an honest attempt to ”let in the light of day upon the landlordism of the slums, as you have let it in upon Mormonism, and other hateful things that prefer darkness rather than light.”
We need to bear in mind constantly, in considering this question, that society is a whole, and that an evil in one cla.s.s of our citizens.h.i.+p cannot help but have its vicious influence, in a greater or less degree, upon every other portion of society. We must also remember that the bad tenement house is the birthplace and cradle, and to a large extent the schoolroom, of mult.i.tudes of boys and girls who are to exert their influence on every phase of our city life in the near future.
Modern scientists have pursued the study of disease microbes with such diligence, that they claim to be able to recognize beyond mistake the germs of certain diseases. They find them in the atmosphere almost everywhere, and they prove that these microbes are real germs of disease, by their experiments with the lower animals.
The soil under our feet is full of these micro-organisms. The smallest quant.i.ty of earth put in water reveals, through the microscope, besides the organic and mineral matter, a ma.s.s of beings more or less complex, moving more or less rapidly. A German author, Mr. Reimers, has calculated that every cubic centimetre of earth may contain several million germs.
[Ill.u.s.tration: EXTERIOR OF A NORTH END TENEMENT HOUSE.]