CONTENTS:

PREFACE
INTRODUCTION. WHAT THE FIGHT IS ABOUT
CHAPTER I. BATTLING AGAINST HEAVY ODDS 
CHAPTER II. THE OUTWORKS OF THE SLUM TAKEN 
CHAPTER III. THE DEVIL'S MONEY 
CHAPTER IV. THE BLIGHT OF THE DOUBLE-DECKER 
CHAPTER V. "DRUV INTO DECENCY" 
CHAPTER VI. THE MILLS HOUSES 
CHAPTER VII. PIETRO AND THE JEW 
CHAPTER VIII. ON WHOM SHALL WE SHUT THE DOOR? 
CHAPTER IX. THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 
CHAPTER X. JIM 
CHAPTER XI. LETTING IN THE LIGHT 
CHAPTER XII. THE PASSING OF CAT ALLEY 
CHAPTER XIII. JUSTICE TO THE BOY 
CHAPTER XIV. THE BAND BEGINS TO PLAY 
CHAPTER XV. "NEIGHBOR" THE PASSWORD 
CHAPTER XVI. REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 
CHAPTER XVII. THE UNNECESSARY STORY OF MRS. BEN WAH AND HER PARROT 



PREFACE  
  
THREE years ago I published under the title "A Ten Years' War" a series of 
papers intended to account for the battle with the slum since I wrote "How 
the Other Half Lives." A good many things can happen in three years. So 
many things have happened in these three, the fighting has been so general 
all along the line and has so held public attention, that this seems the 
proper time to pass it all in review once more. That I have tried to do in 
this book, retaining all that still applied of the old volume and adding 
as much more. The "stories" were printed in the Century Magazine. They are 
fact, not fiction. If the latter, they would have no place here.

   "The Battle with the Slum" is properly the sequel to "How the Other 
Half Lives," and tells how far we have come and how. "With his usual 
hopefulness," I read in the annals of the American Academy of Political 
and Social Science of my book three years ago, "the author is still 
looking forward to better things in the future." I was not deceived then. 
Not in the thirty years before did we advance as in these three, though 
Tammany blocked the way most of the time. It is great to have lived in a 
day that sees such things done.

J. A. R.  
RICHMOND HILL,  
August 27, 1902.  



INTRODUCTION. WHAT THE FIGHT IS ABOUT 
  
THE slum is as old as civilization. Civilization implies a race to get 
ahead. In a race there are usually some who for one cause or another 
cannot keep up, or are thrust out from among their fellows. They fall 
behind, and when they have been left far in the rear they lose hope and 
ambition, and give up. Thenceforward, if left to their own resources, they 
are the victims, not the masters, of their environment; and it is a bad 
master. They drag one another always farther down. The bad environment 
becomes the heredity of the next generation. Then, given the crowd, you 
have the slum ready-made.

   The battle with the slum began the day civilization recognized in it 
her enemy. It was a losing fight until conscience joined forces with fear 
and self-interest against it. When common sense and the golden rule obtain 
among men as a rule of practice, it will be over. The two have not always 
been classed together, but here they are plainly seen to belong together. 
Justice to the individual is accepted in theory as the only safe 
groundwork of the commonwealth. When it is practised in dealing with the 
slum, there will shortly be no slum. We need not wait for the millennium, 
to get rid of it. 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; that it was unsafe to interfere with "causes that operate 
sociologically," as one survivor of these unfittest put it to me. It was a 
piece of scientific humbug that cost the age which listened to it dear. 
"Causes that operate sociologically" are the opportunity of the political 
and every other kind of scamp who trades upon the depravity and 
helplessness of the slum, and the refuge of the pessimist who is useless 
in the fight against them. We have not done yet paying the bills he ran up 
for us. Some time since we turned to, to pull the drowning man out, and it 
was time. A little while longer, and we should hardly have escaped being 
dragged down with him.

   The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes 
which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, political freedom, 
brought on an acute attack which put that very freedom in jeopardy. Too 
many of us had supposed that, built as our commonwealth was on universal 
suffrage, it would be proof against the complaints that harassed older 
states; but in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that. 
Having solemnly resolved that all men are created equal and have certain 
inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness, we shut our eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was as 
if a man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to bed with 
him, expecting it to cure him. The formula was all right, but merely 
repeating it worked no cure. When, after a hundred years, we opened our 
eyes, it was upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the working-
woman in our cities; upon "knee pants" at forty cents a dozen for the 
making; upon the Potter's Field taking tithe of our city life, ten per 
cent each year for the trench, truly the Lost Tenth of the slum. Our 
country had grown great and rich; through our ports was poured food for 
the millions of Europe. But in the back streets multitudes huddled in 
ignorance and want. The foreign oppressor had been vanquished, the fetters 
stricken from the black man at home; but his white brother, in his bitter 
plight, sent up a cry of distress that had in it a distinct note of 
menace. Political freedom we had won; but the problem of helpless poverty, 
grown vast with the added offscourings of the Old World, mocked us, 
unsolved. Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently its stamp upon the 
government of our cities, and it became the scandal and the peril of our 
political system.

   So the battle began. Three times since the war that absorbed the 
nation's energies and attention had the slum confronted us in New York 
with its challenge. In the darkest days of the great struggle it was the 
treacherous mob;(1) later on, the threat of the cholera, which found swine 
foraging in the streets as the only scavengers, and a swarming host, but 
little above the hog in its appetites and in the quality of the shelter 
afforded it, peopling the back alleys. Still later, the mob, caught 
looting the city's treasury with its idol, the thief Tweed, at its head, 
drunk with power and plunder, had insolently defied the outraged community 
to do its worst. There were meetings and protests. The rascals were turned 
out for a season; the arch-chief died in jail. I see him now, going 
through the gloomy portals of the Tombs, whither, as a newspaper reporter, 
I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high as ever. I asked myself 
more than once, at the time when the vile prison was torn down, whether 
the comic clamor to have the ugly old gates preserved and set up in 
Central Park had anything to do with the memory of the "martyred" thief, 
or whether it was in joyful celebration of the fact that others had 
escaped. His name is even now one to conjure with in the Sixth Ward. He 
never "squealed," and he was "so good to the poor"--evidence that the slum 
is not laid by the heels by merely destroying Five Points and the Mulberry 
Bend. There are other fights to be fought in that war, other victories to 
be won, and it is slow work. It was nearly ten years after the Great 
Robbery before decency got a good upper grip. That was when the civic 
conscience awoke in 1879.

   And after all that, the Lexow disclosures of inconceivable rottenness 
of a Tammany police; the woe unto you! of Christian priests calling vainly 
upon the chief of the city "to save its children from a living hell," and 
the contemptuous reply on the witness-stand of the head of the party of 
organized robbery, at the door of which it was all laid, that he was "in 
politics, working for his own pocket all the time, same as you and 
everybody else!"

   Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle has got to be 
fought, and fought out. For it is one thing or the other: either we wipe 
out the slum, or it wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It 
cannot be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and surrender means the end 
of government by the people.

   If any one believes this to be needless alarm, let him think a moment. 
Government by the people must ever rest upon the people's ability to 
govern themselves, upon their intelligence and public spirit. 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.

   As long ago as the very beginning of our republic, its founders saw 
that the cities were danger-spots in their plan. In them was the peril of 
democratic government. At that time, scarce one in twenty-five of the 
people in the United States lived in a city. Now it is one in three. And 
to the selfishness of the trader has been added the threat of the slum. 
Ask yourself then how long before it would make an end of us, if let alone.

   Put it this way: you cannot let men live like pigs when you need their 
votes as freemen; 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. Because 
of it the chief city of our land came long ago to be called "The Homeless 
City." When this people comes to be truly called a nation without homes 
there will no longer be any nation.

   Hence, I say, in the battle with the slum we win or we perish. There is 
no middle way. We shall win, for we are not letting things be the way our 
fathers did. But it will be a running fight, and it is not going to be won 
in two years, or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep on 
fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment that waits upon 
the third and the fourth generation of those who forget the brotherhood. 
As a man does in dealing with his brother so it is the way of God that his 
children shall reap, that through toil and tears we may make out the 
lesson which sums up all the commandments and alone can make the earth fit 
for the kingdom that is to come.

(1. The draft riots of 1863)

(2. "The experiment has been long tried on a large scale, with a dreadful 
success, affording the demonstration that if, from early infancy, you 
allow human beings to live like brutes, you can degrade them down to their 
level, leaving them scarcely more intellect, and no feelings and 
affections proper to human hearts."--Report on the Health of British Towns)