White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor Part 7

"Half of the trouble is caused by the wilful cruelty, but half by the thoughtlessness, of the landlords. A wise writer has said recently: 'Often you don't need to say to a man, "_Why_ do you do so?" If you can show him _what_ he is doing, it is often enough to rouse him to reform.' I have faith enough in human nature to believe that if we could organize a procession of landlords and compel them to walk through the tenement districts, they would begin the reform themselves."

Let me relate to you a very interesting experiment that has indeed long since pa.s.sed the era of experiment. In 1879 Mrs. Alice N. Lincoln and a young lady friend were so wrought upon by the filth and misery which they saw in certain tenement houses visited by them, in connection with the a.s.sociated Charities, that they determined to do something to better the condition of these poor people. They hired a large house on the corner of Chardon and Merrimac Streets. It contained twenty-seven tenements, and the rent agreed upon with the owner was one thousand dollars a year, though since the first year they have paid twelve hundred. The house had the worst possible reputation morally, and had been under the ban of the police for a long time.

It was, at the time they took it, half empty, because of the degraded character of the occupants. Its entries and corridors were blackened with smoke, and dingy and uninviting. The sinks were in dark corners, and were foul and disease-breeding. The stairways were innocent of water or broom, and throughout the entire house, from top to bottom, ceilings, walls, stairways--everything was dirty and neglected. It was surely not an attractive task to attempt to bring cleanliness and order out of such chaos, but these resolute young reformers deliberately set themselves to perform the seemingly impossible. The interior was painted, improved means of lighting and ventilating the sinks were ordered, and wood and coal closets arranged for each tenement on its own landing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "GOOD LUCK" TENEMENT HOUSE.]

Previously the tenants had to keep their fuel in the cellar. The mouldy wall-paper was removed from the entries, and a fresh surface of plastering was put on. A few of the worst tenants had to be removed, but the majority, pleased with the new administration of things, were willing to accept its rules and remain. Tenants were soon found for every room; and this house, which had been regarded as very unhealthy, and had been a regular hive for fevers under the old _regime_ of carelessness and greed, that did not care how dirty the tenants were so long as they paid their rent, under the new rule of cleanliness became so healthy that disease was almost unknown, and was, and is to this day, known by the tenants and the neighborhood generally as the "Good Luck House." The ladies collected their own rents, and kept everything well under their own supervision. A close account was kept of all receipts and expenditures, and at the end of the first year the balance of cash in hand was $111.67, or more than eleven per cent on the investment. The second year it was still more profitable, the net sum at the end of the year being $157.47. Mrs. Lincoln still carries on the administration of the "Good Luck House," and no queen was ever treated with more genuine respect than she is there. She is regarded as a most practical sort of patron saint to the inst.i.tution. Yet there is no element of charity suggested in her dealings with her tenants. It is simply Christian justice. She seeks with great care to help them retain their self-respect, and treats them as fully her equal in personal responsibility. The rent is required to be paid regularly. One rigid rule enforced upon all tenants is cleanliness. She pays for the weekly scrubbing of the halls and stairways, but the tenants are required to sweep them every day, in turn. The sinks and drains are kept clean. All this has a marvellous effect on the home habits of the inmates; and I have seen as clean and tidy rooms in the "Good Luck" tenement house as I have seen anywhere, and that, too, on days when they were caught unawares, it not being the regular rent day, when they expect the landlady. All above six per cent has been put in the bank as an emergency fund, and, from time to time, the tenants have been permitted to share some unexpected pleasure from this. Once a splendid entertainment was given the tenants, in a public hall, with stereopticon views; at another time, it took a more material method of expression, and a good blanket, a pitcher and basin for each family, came out of this fund. In every way the tenants are made to know that their interests are in perfect harmony with those of the landlady. To encourage them to use more room, where they are able to pay for it, a discount is made on each additional room taken, and ten cents a week is deducted for payment in advance. A majority of them avail themselves of this privilege.

If he who makes a tree to grow where none grew before, is a public benefactor, surely she who has made it possible for many family-trees to grow and thrive, yielding their fragrance and their fruit in a pure home and social life, is a benefactress in the highest sense.

Let us encourage on every side the transformation of filthy, neglected tenements into "Good Luck" houses.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SAND GARDEN.]

A little wise thoughtfulness may vastly improve the childhood of the slums. Boys' clubs and girls' clubs are steps in the right direction.

They awaken an interest in innocent games, afford a glimpse of beautiful pictures, and give zest to the intellectual appet.i.te for fresh, wholesome books. The "sand garden" is also a happy thought.

Think of thousands of children reared in the narrowest, filthiest quarters, who have never had a chance to make even a mud-pie out in the pure air of heaven. It may seem a small thing to some, but it is a tragedy to me. When I remember my own happy childhood over in the Oregon woods, where I ran as free and untrammelled as a young colt in the pasture, and made mud-pies beside the brook that had its home in a great bubbling spring on the hillside, breathing the air fragrant with the perfume of wild lilies, while robins and bobolinks and meadow larks sported and sang without fear, on every side--when I contrast a childhood like that with the child-life in the Boston slums, I am heart-broken. There is nothing so sad as this "murder of the innocents"

that is going on in all our great cities. Marianne Farningham sings their dirge:--

"Such sights there are in the great sin-soiled city, As might compel an angel into pity; But none more sad in all the world of care, Than a young child driven to black despair!"

Surely, trumpet blast never called men and women to a holier crusade than this rescue of the lost childhood of the slums.

IX.

OLD WORLD TIDES IN BOSTON.

"There is a poor blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel, Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, And shake the pillars of this Commonweal, Till the vast temple of our liberties A shapeless ma.s.s of wreck and rubbish lies."

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: _The Warning_.

Travellers tell us that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the suns.h.i.+ne and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result of some strange convulsion of the earth, the coast-line has sunk down and down, until the incoming tide of the salt sea has swept over it, and schools of porpoises and fishes swim among the branches of old forest trees that in the former time were accustomed to the chatter of squirrels and songs of birds.

Any one studying the older and more historic sections of Boston will see many relics of a past civilization by which he will be impressed in very much the same way as is the sailor who looks on the remains of an ancient forest in the ocean's bed. Standing in the North End, in front of the "Copp's Hill Burying-ground," and looking up at the tower of Christ Church where the famous signal lanterns were hung, one can almost hear the old church appropriating the words of the poet:--

"By time's highway--a milestone gray-- I watch the world march by; An endless stream of moving men Rolls on beneath mine eye.

Still, still they go; where, none can know; And when one wave is gone, Another and another yet Come ever surging on."

It seems strange indeed to go up and down some of these old historic streets, and yet never in the course of one's walk hear spoken the language of the country. In the course of my investigations during the past few months, I have found it impossible to do anything practical without an interpreter, sometimes in one language, and again in another. Often in entering an old rear tenement house, where filth and misery held riot, I have been astonished at the splendidly carved ornaments over the doorways, and the still-to-be-traced carving on the bal.u.s.trade. Once these old rear tenements were the abodes of Boston's wealthiest and most cultivated citizens; but the Old World tide has come in, and house after house, block after block, and street upon street, have been overwhelmed by the waves of people who speak other languages, and whose habits of life are more foreign than their speech.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHRIST CHURCH TOWER.]

I have no sympathy with those people who are crying out against all foreigners, yet it seems to me that no serious student of the signs of the times can take other than a sober view of the submerging tide of foreign immigration which has come into this country, of which the North End of Boston is a suggestive ill.u.s.tration. The consideration which causes the most sober thought among earnest men to-day, is the entirely different cla.s.s of immigration coming to us now from that of former times. In the earlier days of American history it was the intelligent, self-reliant part of the European communities who dared the expense and hards.h.i.+p of the long sea voyage by a sailing-vessel, and faced the exigencies of the New World. The immigrants of those days were mostly farmers and skilled mechanics, who brought with them the habit and prestige of success. But under the new order of things, with the great steam ferries which make a pa.s.sage to America only a brief holiday trip of a week, with reduced rates, and controlled by companies who scour every European city, by aid of their agents, to gather in their human cargoes from the poorest and most ignorant of all the labor cla.s.ses, it becomes a very different question.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE CUNARDER.]

The motives that impel people to this country now, are very different from what they used to be. The San Francisco _Alta_ well says: "The time was when the majority of foreign immigrants came because of an intelligent devotion to free government. Ninety-nine per cent of them were free from merely material motives. They were not urged by starvation, they did not come in the squalid steerage, they did not, on landing, feel compelled to invent servile occupations, before unknown in this country, merely to get the crusts and sc.r.a.ps that would keep them alive. Their motive was intellectual more than material. Their descendants are found in every State, of good report, foremost among the fibres that make up American character. Their blood may have been in the beginning English, Irish, Scotch, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Scandinavian, or Slav. No matter: they are now Americans, because the expatriation of their ancestors was real, and not unreal.

Its motive was ethical, and not material. At present ninety-nine per cent of all immigrants come for material reasons only. Their decision to migrate to the United States is not for lack of liberty, but for lack of bread. The purpose is animal entirely. Every old emigrant from any country in Europe knows this to be so. The Italian who genuinely expatriated himself, who believed in Joseph Mazzini, and sought liberty for its own sake, finds no fraternity in the Italian immigration that has poured upon us since the suppression of the murder guilds of Sicily, and the decline of the industry of a.s.sa.s.sination in that country."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE WAY TO THE RABBI.]

I think it is indeed one of the hopeful features of the situation that nearly all our adopted citizens, who are themselves thoroughly Americanized, share strongly in this view. Indeed, many of them seem to realize the danger more keenly than do the native-born citizens. I was very much interested, at the New England Chautauqua the other day, to hear Mr. John M. Langston, the colored orator of Virginia, read a letter from a leading Hebrew of Was.h.i.+ngton City, in which he reminded Mr. Langston that he had often pleaded the cause of the Negro, and appealed to him in turn to plead the cause of the Hebrew, by arousing public sentiment against the too rapid influx of Russian Jews.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pa.s.sING THE QUARANTINE DOCTOR.]

The swift incoming of these Old World tides has very close relation to the wages of laboring people. Large numbers of the alien laborers who are coming now, are little better than "slaves of contractors, steams.h.i.+p lines, and the professional European jobbers in pauper labor.

The large proportion of those engaged in our mines and on public works have been secured through these sources, either in direct defiance of our laws or by the evasion of the laws. They come in direct compet.i.tion with the native-born and the worthy foreign immigrant, who comes here for the purpose of applying for citizens.h.i.+p and securing a home. They not only come into compet.i.tion with every worthy cla.s.s of laborers, but they are, for the most part, too ignorant to comprehend American inst.i.tutions, and have no broader idea of liberty than to insist that it includes license. At every point of contact with our labor system, they debase it."

An ill.u.s.tration of this cla.s.s of labor may be found in the fact that a year or two ago forty-seven alien miners employed in phosphate mines near Waterboro, S.C., were imprisoned because they refused to fulfil the contract under which they had been employed. Their story was that they had been met at Castle Garden by labor agents who induced them to sign a paper which they did not understand, but which proved to be a contract to work for one and two dollars a week in the phosphate mines, and board themselves. When they learned, on their first payday, of the trick which had been played upon them, they revolted. A few days in jail, however, induced them to return to work on the old terms.

The Chicago _America_, commenting on the incident, says this picture is a startling contrast to the prate of demagogues concerning the dignity of American labor. While they scheme to get the votes of intelligent workingmen, labor in many parts of this country is being enslaved by means of the hordes of foreigners who are imported in violation of law and right. Mr. Powderly tells, in the _North American Review_, of a visit which he paid to a mining-camp to investigate the condition of the men who were imported to take the places of American workmen who had demanded higher wages for labor done. These men lived in huge barracks. Their dining-room, smoking-room, sitting-room, kitchen, and bedchamber were one. There were five rows of bunks, three deep, each one thirty inches in width and seventy-eight inches long--the first bunk eighteen inches from the floor, the next, supported by rough hemlock posts, but two feet above it, and a third two feet above the second one. Each bunk was filled with straw, and covered with coa.r.s.e coffee-sack material for bed-clothing. Two rows of hemlock boards, each one twenty feet in length by three feet in width, const.i.tuted the tables. The men came in from the mines while he was present, and, before was.h.i.+ng face or hands, sat down to their supper of salt pork, meal, and water. One hundred and five men lived in a building one hundred and sixty feet in length by thirty feet in width. He found no one to answer him in the English tongue. When it was bedtime they lay down without divesting themselves of a single article of clothing; some of them took off their shoes, but the majority did not even do that.

These men took the places of American workmen who were receiving from two dollars to two dollars and a half per day. The compensation allowed them was but seventy-five cents a day, and board. As a careful investigation proved that fifteen and three-eighths cents would provide the food furnished each man, the outlay was but ninety and three-eighths cents a day. It is getting to be quite a common custom on railroads and in mines and other places where this cla.s.s of laborers are employed, to attach to the waistband of each man a leather strap fastened to a large bra.s.s check, similar to a baggage check. Every check bears a number, and the man who carries it, or to whom it is fastened, is known by the number on his check. Mr. Powderly grimly comments: "Fancy the future of the American laborer, whose name is forgotten, and whose only means of identification rests with a bra.s.s check, which may be subst.i.tuted for another while he sleeps." If this is not white slavery, what is it?

These Old World tides have also close relation to the health of our cities. Large numbers of these people have been accustomed to live in crowded quarters, on insufficient food, and without any regard for cleanliness, in their native country. They come here, bringing all their filthy habits, bred in them sometimes for generations. I have no doubt that some of my critics tell the truth when they say that the squalid tenements occupied by the Russian Jews and Italians in Boston are better than the homes whence they came. So far as these foreigners themselves are concerned, even these wretched conditions are perhaps an upward step in evolution. But if we are going to have Naples in Boston, we must expect to have Neapolitan cholera epidemics as well.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SURGICAL THEOLOGY.]

These Old World tides have also a very close relation to the morals of our people. An overwhelming majority of all the criminals who figure in our police courts, and are supported in our jails and penitentiaries, were born abroad. This is very easy to understand when one investigates a little the methods used to encourage emigration to this country. The investigation made by the Ford Congressional committee revealed the enormous extent to which steams.h.i.+p companies are drumming Europe for human freight, to be dumped on our sh.o.r.es. "To those unscrupulous 'fishers of men' everything that walks or crawls is acceptable.

Quant.i.ty, not quality, is the desideratum. The worse the specimen, the more effective, usually, is the emigration prize offered, and the less the opposition interposed by government officials. In a word, a drag-net has been thrown over nearly the entire European continent, with the result of having recently collected for s.h.i.+pment to this country a cla.s.s of humanity, which, wherever it may be, is a menace to good order and a tax upon the police and charity departments of the country."

One who speaks with the highest authority on questions of political economy puts the immigration problem in a strong light when he says: "We are now draining off great stagnant pools of population which no current of intellectual or moral activity has stirred for ages.

Thousands and hundreds of thousands of those who represent the very lowest stage of degradation to which human beings can be reduced by hopelessness, hunger, squalor, and superst.i.tion, are found among the new citizens whom the last decade has brought into the Republic." It is known beyond doubt that prisoners' aid societies in various European countries have been steadily s.h.i.+pping convicts to the United States.

Neither has it been an uncommon thing for criminals to be let off by the courts, on condition of their emigrating to America. It is folly for us to expect to take this great criminal cla.s.s, who were born to crime in the purlieus of European cities, who have been thieves from their cradles, and who come to us fresh from jails and prisons, and change them into useful citizens. They will not only continue to be criminals themselves, but they will spread their vile and wicked contagion wherever they go. There is not a single cause of reform or progress in this country that is not constantly discouraged and postponed by these Old World tides of ignorance and vice.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BUILDING USED BY THE BRITISH AS A HOSPITAL.]

There can be no doubt that there is a rising tide of public sentiment in this country in favor of a careful and wise examination of every emigrant who offers himself as a candidate for American citizens.h.i.+p in the future. I think, in view of the fact that we are getting a very large and increasing proportion of our immigration from Southern Europe, which is the most illiterate portion of the Old World--in Southern Italy, for instance, seventy-nine out of every one hundred are illiterate--there ought to be an educational test. There is certainly no wisdom in our adding hundreds of thousands a year to the number of illiterates already here, who are unable to read the Declaration of Independence, and have not the faintest conception of the principles of our Const.i.tution. The examination of emigrants ought to be on the other side of the water. We have had many recent ill.u.s.trations in Boston of the manifest hards.h.i.+ps experienced under the present arrangement. Every person intending to emigrate to America ought to be required to give notice of that desire through the nearest American Consul, and furnish a clean bill of health, both moral and physical; and no one should be permitted to sail without a certificate of such investigation and satisfactory finding. This would not shut out any one who would be of value to American inst.i.tutions, but it would require European countries to care for the criminals and paupers which their own social system has bred.

But what shall we do with these mult.i.tudes of foreigners who are already living in our midst? In the first place, we must cease to regard them as foreigners or aliens, and set to work with a definite purpose to Americanize them as quickly as possible. We must not, for a moment, be satisfied to let them herd together in the filth and squalor to which they may have been accustomed at home. We cannot afford to hand them over to the greedy tyranny of the sweater. Nothing will help us more than the abolition of the neglected tenement house, and the provision for a healthier, cleaner shelter for the people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VICTORIA SQUARE.]

Some of our public-spirited men of wealth cannot do better than to look in this direction as a field in which to make their mark upon the uplift of their race and their time. There is a far greater demand for this cla.s.s of benevolent investments than there is for added colleges or universities. If some of the vile and unhealthy tenements that have been described recently, not only by myself but by the reporters and the daily press, could be replaced by such buildings as the Victoria Square building in Liverpool, it would be a great public benefaction.

On the former site of Victoria Square were miserable tenement houses.

To-day a magnificent structure stands there, built around a hollow square, the larger portion of which is given up for a healthful play-ground for the children. "The halls and stairways of the building are broad, light, and airy; the ventilation and sanitary arrangements, perfect. The apartments are divided into one, two, and three rooms each. No room is smaller than thirteen by eight feet six inches; most of them are twelve by thirteen feet four inches.

"All the ceilings are nine feet high. A superintendent looks after the building. The tenants are expected to be orderly, and keep their apartments clean. The roomy character of halls and chambers may be inferred from the fact that there are only two hundred and seventy-five apartments in the entire building. The returns on the total expenditure on the building, which was three hundred and thirty-eight thousand eight hundred dollars, it is estimated will be at least four and a half per cent." The rents will seem miraculous to those of you who have been following the prices given in this series of discourses. In this beautiful Victoria Square dwelling, with its large, shrub-encircled play-ground for children attached, light, airy, three-room tenements are furnished for one dollar and forty-four cents per week. For those containing two large rooms one dollar and eight cents a week is charged; while the one-room quarters are let at fifty-four cents a week.

Who among our rich men will lead off in some grand crusade of this sort? Another thing we want to do to Americanize these people, is to furnish them employment under conditions consistent with health, intelligence, and morality. Instead of the crowded sweat-shop, the moral atmosphere of which is as filthy as the physical, we must have factories conducted in the spirit of Christian civilization.