The Battle with the Slum - Chapters VI-VII



CHAPTER VI.
THE MILLS HOUSES 
   
SITTING by my window the other day, I saw a boy steering across the street 
for my little lad, who was laying out a base-ball diamond on the lawn. It 
seems that he knew him from school.

   "Hey," he said, as he rounded to at the gate, "we've got yer dad's book 
to home; yer father was a bum onct."

   Proof was immediately forthcoming that whatever the father might have 
been, his son was able to uphold the family pride, and I had my revenge. 
Some day soon now my boy will read his father's story(1) himself, and I 
hope will not be ashamed. They read it in their way in the other boy's 
house, and got out of it that I was a "bum" because once I was on the 
level of the Bowery lodging house. But if he does not stay there, a man 
need not be that; and for that matter, there are plenty who do whom it 
would be a gross injury to call by such a name. There are lonely men, who, 
with no kin of their own, prefer even such society as the cheap lodging 
house has to offer to the desolation of the tenement; and there are plenty 
of young lads from the country, who, waiting in the big city for the 
something that is sure to turn up and open their road to fortune, get 
stranded there. Beginning, perhaps, at the thirty-cent house, they go 
down, down, till they strike the fifteen or the ten cent house, with the 
dirty sheets and the ready club in the watchman's hand. And then some day, 
when the last penny is gone, and the question where the next meal is going 
to come from looms larger than the Philippine policy of the nation, a 
heavy-browed man taps one on the shoulder with an offer of an easy job--
easy and straight enough in the mood the fellow is in just then; for does 
not the world owe him a living? It is one of the devil's most tempting 
baits to a starving man that makes him feel quite a moral hero in taking 
that of which his more successful neighbor has deprived him. 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.

   That was what Inspector Byrnes meant by calling the cheap lodging 
houses nurseries of crime. I have personally, as a police reporter, helped 
trace many foul crimes to these houses where they were hatched. They were 
all robberies to begin with, but three of them ended in murder. Most of my 
readers will remember at least one of them, the Lyman S. Weeks murder in 
Brooklyn, a thoroughly characteristic case of the kind I have described. A 
case they never heard of, because it was nipped in the bud, was typical of 
another kind. Two young Western fellows had come on, on purpose to hold up 
New York, and were practising in their lodging, but not, it seems, with 
much success, for the police pulled them in at their second or third job. 
When searched, a tintype, evidently of Bowery make, was found in the 
pocket of one, showing them at rehearsal. They grinned when asked about 
it. "We done a fellow up easy that way," they said, "and we'd a mind to 
see how it looked." They were lucky in being caught so soon. A little 
while, and the gallows would have claimed them, on the road they were 
travelling.

   I mention this to show the kind of problem we have in our Bowery 
lodging houses, with their army of fifteen or sixteen thousand lodgers, 
hanging on to the ragged edge most of them, and I have only skimmed the 
surface of it at that. The political boss searches the depths of it about 
election time when he needs votes; the sanitary policeman in times of 
epidemic, when small-pox or typhus fever threatens. All other efforts to 
reach it had proved unavailing when D. O. Mills, the banker, built his two 
"Mills Houses," No. 1 in Bleecker Street for the West Side and No. 2 in 
Rivington Street for the homeless of the East Side. They did reach it, by 
a cut'cross lots as it were, by putting the whole thing on a neighborly 
basis. It had been just business before, and, like the keeping of slum 
tenements, a mighty well-paying one. The men who ran it might well have 
given more, but they didn't. It was the same thing over again: let the 
lodgers shift as they could; their landlord lived in style on the avenue. 
What were they to him except the means of keeping it up?

   The Mills Houses do not neglect the business end. Indeed, they insist 
upon it. "No patron," said Mr. Mills at the opening, "will receive more 
than he pays for, unless it be my hearty good-will and good wishes. It is 
true that I have devoted thought, labor, and capital to a very earnest 
effort to help him, but only by enabling him to help himself. In doing the 
work on so large a scale, and in securing the utmost economies in 
purchases and in administration, I hope to give him a larger equivalent 
for his money than has hitherto been possible. He can, without scruple, 
permit me to offer him this advantage; but he will think better of 
himself, and will be a more self-reliant, manly man and a better citizen, 
if he knows that he is honestly paying for that he gets." That had the 
right ring to it, and from the beginning so have the houses had. Big, 
handsome hotels, as fine as any, with wide marble stairs for the dark hole 
through which one dived into the man-traps of old. Mr. Mills gave to the 
lodger a man's chance, if he is poor. His room is small, but the bed for 
which he pays twenty cents is clean and good. Indeed, it is said that the 
spring in it was made by the man who made the springs for the five-dollar 
beds in the Waldorf-Astoria, and that it is just the same. However that 
may be, it is comfortable enough, as comfortable as any need have it in 
Bleecker Street or on Fifth Avenue. The guest at the Mills House has all 
the privileges the other has, except to while away the sunlit hours in his 
bed. Then he is expected to be out hustling. At nine o'clock his door is 
barred against him, and is not again opened until five in the afternoon. 
But there are smoking and writing rooms, and a library for his use; games 
if he chooses, baths when he feels like taking one, and a laundry where he 
may wash his own clothes if he has to save the pennies, as he likely has 
to. It is a good place to do it, too, for he can sleep comfortably and 
have two square meals a day for fifty cents all told. There is a 
restaurant in the basement where his dinner costs him fifteen cents.

   I will not say that the dinner is as savory as the one they would serve 
at Delmonico's, but he comes to it probably with a good deal better 
appetite, and that is the thing after all. I ate with him once, and here 
is the bill of fare of that day. I kept it.

Soup One Meat Dish Two Vegetables 
Dessert
Tea, Coffee or Milk 
15 cents 
 
SOUPS 
Consommé with Noodles Purèe of Tomatoes 

HOT MEATS 
Roast Turkey, Cranberry Sauce 
Roast Beef, Dish Gravy 
Fricasseed Spring Lamb with Mushrooms 

COLD MEAT 
Boiled Fresh Beef Tongue 

FISH 
Fried Smelts, Tartare Sauce 
Boiled Cod, Egg Sauce 

VEGETABLES 
Boiled Sweet Potatoes Mashed Potatoes 
Cauliflower, Hollandaise Sauce Fried Egg Plant 
Celery Salad 

DESSERT 
Plum Pudding, Hard or Lemon Sauce 
Pumpkin Pie Baked Apples 
Tea Coffee Milk 
 
   I will own the turkey seemed to me to taste of codfish and the codfish 
of turkey, as if it were all cooked in one huge dish; but there was enough 
of it, and it was otherwise good. And the fault may have been with my 
palate, probably was. It is getting to be quite the thing for clubs with a 
social inquiry turn to meet and take their dinners at Mills House No. 1 in 
Bleecker Street, so it must be all right. Perhaps I struck the cook's off 
day.(2)

   No.1 is the largest, with rooms for 1554 guests, and usually there are 
1554 there. No.2 in Rivington Street has 600 rooms. Together they are 
capable of housing about twelve per cent of all who nightly seek the cheap 
lodging houses, not counting the Raines law hotels, which are chiefly used 
for purposes of assignation. The Bowery houses have felt the competition, 
and have been compelled to make concessions that profit the lodger. The 
greatest gain to him is the chance of getting away from there. At the 
Mills Houses he is reasonably safe from the hold-up man and the recruiting 
thief. Though the latter often gives the police the Bleecker Street house 
as his permanent address on the principle that makes the impecunious 
seeker of a job conduct his correspondence from the Fifth Avenue Hotel or 
the Savoy, he is rarely found there, and if found, is not kept long. If he 
does get in, he is quiet and harmless because he has to be. Crooks in 
action seek crooked houses kept by crooked men, and they find them along 
the Bowery more readily than anywhere. There are the shows and the resorts 
that draw the young lads, who, away from home, are all too easily drawn, 
to their undoing. The getting them out of their latitude is the greatest 
gain, and this service the Mills House performs, to a salutary extent. The 
more readily since its fame has gone abroad, and the Mills House has 
become a type. There is scarcely a mail now that does not bring me word 
from some city in the West or East that a Mills House has been started 
there in the effort to grapple with the problem of the floating 
population. The fear that their reputation may help increase that problem 
by drawing greater crowds from the country is rather strained, it seems to 
me. The objection would lie against free shelters, but hardly against a 
business concern that simply strives to give the poor lodger his money's 
worth. As to him, the everlasting pessimist predicted, when the Mills 
Houses were opened, that they would have to "make bathing compulsory." The 
lodger has given him the lie; the average has been over 400 bathers per 
day,--one in five,--and the record has passed 1000. No doubt soap may be 
cheap and salvation dear, but on the other hand cleanliness does and must 
ever begin godliness when fighting the slum, and no one who ever took a 
look into one of the old-style lodging houses will doubt that we are 
better off by so much. The Mills houses have paid four, even five, per 
cent on their owner's investment of a million and a half. It follows that 
the business will attract capital, which means that there will be an end 
of the old nuisance. Beyond this, they have borne and will bear 
increasingly a hand in setting with the saloon with which they compete on 
its strong ground--that of social fellowship. It has no rival in the 
Bowery house or in the boarding-house back bedroom. Every philanthropic 
effort to fight it on that ground has drawn renewed courage and hope from 
Mr. Mills's work and success.

   Many years ago a rich merchant planned to do for his working women the 
thing Mr. Mills has done for lonely men. Out on Long Island he built a 
town for his clerks that was to be their very own. But it came out 
differently. The Long Island town became a cathedral city and the home of 
wealth and fashion; his woman's boarding house a great public hotel far 
beyond the reach of those he sought to benefit. The passing years saw his 
great house, its wealth, its very name, vanish as if they had never been, 
and even his bones denied by ghoulish thieves rest in the grave. There is 
no more pathetic page in the history of our city than that which records 
the eclipse of the house of Alexander T. Stewart, merchant prince. I like 
to think of the banker's successful philanthropy as a kind of justice to 
the memory of the dead merchant, more eloquent than marble and brass in 
the empty crypt. Mills House No.1 stands upon the site of Mr. Stewart's 
old home, where he dreamed his barren dream of benevolence to his kind.

   His work lies undone yet. While I am writing this, they are putting the 
roof on a great structure in East Twenty-ninth Street that is to be the 
"Woman's Hotel" of the city and bear the name of Martha Washington. It is 
intended for business and professional women who can pay from seven or 
eight dollars a week up to almost anything for their board and lodging, 
and it is expected to fill so great a need as to be commercially 
profitable at once. That will be well, and we shall all be glad. But who 
will build the Mills House for lonely girls and women who cannot pay seven 
or eight dollars a week, and would not go to the Woman's Hotel if they 
could? The social cleft between Madison Avenue and Bleecker Street is too 
wide to be bridged by the best intentions of a hotel company. I doubt if 
they would know where to go in that strange uptown country. When as an 
immigrant I paid two dollars a day for board that was not worth fifty 
cents, in a Greenwich Street house, I might have lodged in comfort in a 
Broadway hotel for less money, had I only known where. There are hosts of 
half-starved women and girls living in cheerless back rooms,--or, rather, 
they do not live, they exist on weak coffee or tea, laying up an evil day 
for the generation of which they are to be the mothers,--to whom such a 
house would be home, freedom, and life. Ask any working girls' vacation 
society whence the need of their labor early and late, if not to put a 
little life and vigor into those ill-nourished bodies. Ask the priest, or 
any one who knows the temptations of youth, how much that bald and dreary 
life of theirs counts for in the fight he has on hand. Who will build the 
working women's hotel somewhere between Stewart's old store and Twenty-
third Street, east of Broadway, that shall give them their sadly needed 
chance? And while about it, let him add a wing, or build a separate house, 
such as they have in Glasgow, for widows with little children, that shall 
answer another of our perplexing problems,--a house, this latter, with 
nursery, kindergarten, and laundry, where the mother might know her child 
safe while she provided for it with her work. Who will be the D. O. Mills 
of these helpless ones?

   Or is there but one Mills? I have heard it said that he has been 
waiting, asking the same question. Let him wait no longer, then, if he 
would put the finishing touch to a practical philanthropy that will rank 
in days to come with the great benefactions to mankind.

   I have dwelt upon the need of bracing up the home, or finding something 
to replace it as nearly like it as could be, where that had to be done, 
because the home is the key to good citizenship. Unhappily for the great 
cities, there exists in them all a class that has lost the key or thrown 
it away. For this class, New York, until three years ago, had never made 
any provision. The police station lodging rooms, of which I have spoken, 
were not to be dignified by the term. These vile dens, in which the 
homeless of our great city were herded, without pretence of bed, of bath, 
of food, on rude planks, were the most pernicious parody on municipal 
charity, I verily believe, that any civilized community had ever devised. 
To escape physical and moral contagion in these crowds seemed humanly 
impossible. Of the innocently homeless lad they made a tramp by the 
shortest cut. To the old tramp they were indeed ideal provision, for they 
enabled him to spend for drink every cent he could beg or steal. With the 
stale beer dive, the free lunch counter, and the police lodging room at 
hand, his cup of happiness was full. There came an evil day, when the 
stale beer dive shut its doors and the free lunch disappeared for a 
season. The beer pump, which drained the kegs dry and robbed the stale 
beer collector of his ware, drove the dives out of business; the Raines 
law forbade the free lunch. Just at this time Theodore Roosevelt shut the 
police lodging rooms, and the tramp was literally left out in the cold, 
cursing reform and its fruits. It was the climax of a campaign a 
generation old, during which no one had ever been found to say a word in 
defence of these lodging rooms; yet nothing had availed to close them.

   The city took lodgers on an old barge in the East River, that winter 
(1896), and kept a register of them. We learned something from that. Of 
nearly 10,000 lodgers, one-half were under thirty years old and in good 
health--fat, in fact. The doctors reported them "well nourished." Among 
100 whom I watched taking their compulsory bath, one night, only two were 
skinny; the others were stout, well-fed men, abundantly able to do a man's 
work. They all insisted that they were willing, too; but the moment 
inquiries began with a view of setting such to work as really wanted it, 
and sending the rest to the island as vagrants, their number fell off most 
remarkably. From between 400 and 500 who had crowded the barge and the 
pier sheds, the attendance fell on March 16, the day the investigation 
began, to 330, on the second day to 294, and on the third day to 171; by 
March 21 it had been cut down to 121. The problem of the honestly 
homeless, who were without means to pay for a bed even in a ten-cent 
lodging house, and who had a claim upon the city by virtue of residence in 
it, had dwindled to surprisingly small proportions. Of 9386 lodgers, 3622 
were shown to have been here less than sixty days, and 968 more not a 
year. The old mistake, that there is always a given amount of absolutely 
homeless destitution in a city, and that it is to be measured by the 
number of those who apply for free lodging, had been reduced to a 
demonstration. The truth is that the opportunity furnished by the triple 
alliance of stale beer, free lunch, and free lodging at the police station 
was the open door to permanent and hopeless vagrancy. Men, a good bishop 
said, will do what you pay them to do: if to work, they will work; if you 
make it pay them to beg, they will beg; if to maim helpless children makes 
begging pay better, they will do that too. See what it is to encourage 
laziness in man whose salvation is work.

   A city lodging house was established, with decent beds, baths, and 
breakfast, and a system of investigation of the lodger's claim that is yet 
to be developed to useful proportions. The link that is missing is a farm 
school, for the training of young vagrants to habits of industry and 
steady work, as the alternative of the workhouse. Efforts to forge this 
link have failed so far, but in the good time that is coming, when we 
shall have learned the lesson that the unkindest thing that can be done to 
a young tramp is to let him go on tramping, and when magistrates shall 
blush to discharge him on the plea that "it is no crime to be poor in this 
country," they will succeed, and the tramp also we shall then have "druv 
into decency." When I look back now to the time, ten or fifteen years ago, 
when, night after night, with every police station filled, I found the old 
tenements in the "Bend" jammed with a reeking mass of human wrecks that 
huddled in hall and yard, and slept, crouching in shivering files, all the 
way up the stairs to the attic, it does seem as if we had come a good way, 
and as if all the turmoil and the bruises and the fighting had been worth 
while. New York is no longer, at least when Tammany is out, a tramp's 
town. And that is so much gained, to us and to the tramp.

(1. "The Making of an American")

(2. Since reading this proof I have been over and verified my diagnosis. 
The trouble must have been with me. The soup and the mutton and the pie 
had each its proper savor, and the cook is all right. So is the lunch. 
There is no fifty-cent lunch in the city that I know of which is better)



CHAPTER VII.
PIETRO AND THE JEW
   
WE have seen that the problem of the tenement is to make homes for the 
people, out of it if we can, in it if we must. Now about the tenant. How 
much of a problem is he? And how are we to go about solving it?

   The government "slum inquiry," of which I have spoken before, gave us 
some facts about him. In New York it found 62.58 per cent of the 
population of the slum to be foreign-born, whereas for the whole city the 
percentage of foreigners was only 43.23. While the proportion of 
illiteracy in all was only as 7.69 to 100, in the slum it was 46.65 per 
cent. That with nearly twice as many saloons to a given number there 
should be three times as many arrests in the slum as in the city at large 
need not be attributed to nationality, except indirectly in its possible 
responsibility for the saloons. I say "possible" advisably. Anybody, I 
should think, whose misfortune it is to live in the slum might be expected 
to find in the saloon a refuge. I shall not quarrel with the other view of 
it. I am merely stating a personal impression. The fact that concerns us 
here is the great proportion of the foreign-born. Though the inquiry 
covered only a small section of a tenement district, the result may be 
accepted as typical.

   We shall not, then, have to do with an American element in discussing 
this tenant, for even of the "natives" in the census, by far the largest 
share is made up of the children of the immigrant. Indeed, in New York 
only 4.77 per cent of the slum population canvassed were shown to be of 
native parentage. The parents of 95.23 per cent had come over the sea, to 
better themselves, it may be assumed. Let us see what they brought us, and 
what we have given them in return.

   The Italians were in the majority where this census-taker went. They 
were from the south of Italy, avowedly the worst of the Italian 
immigration, which in the eleven years from 1891 to 1902 gave us nearly a 
million of Victor Emmanuel's subjects. The exact number of Italian 
immigrants, as registered by the Emigration Bureau, from July 1, 1891, to 
June 1, 1902, a month short of eleven years, was 944, 345. And they come 
in greater numbers every year. In 1898, 58,613 came over, of whom 36,086 
gave New York as their destination. In 1901 the Italian immigrants 
numbered 138,608, and as I write shiploads with thousands upon thousands 
are afloat, bound for our shores. Yet there is a gleam of promise in the 
showing of last year, for of the 138,608, those who came to stay in New 
York numbered only 67,231. Enough surely, but they were after all only one-
half of the whole against two-thirds in 1898. If this means that they came 
to join friends elsewhere in the country--that other centres of 
immigration have been set up--well and good. There is room for them there. 
Going out to break ground, they give us more than they get. The peril lies 
in their being cooped up in the city.

   Of last year's intake 116,070 came from southern Italy, where they wash 
less, and also plot less against the peace of mankind, than they do in the 
north. Quite a lot were from Sicily, the island of the absentee landlord, 
where peasants die of hunger. I make no apology for quoting here the 
statement of an Italian officer, on duty in the island, to a staff 
correspondent of the Tribuna of Rome, a paper not to be suspected of 
disloyalty to United Italy. I take it from the Evening Post:

   "In the month of July I stopped on a march by a threshing-floor where 
they were measuring grain. When the shares had been divided, the one who 
had cultivated the land received a single tumolo (less than a half 
bushel). The peasant, leaning on his spade, looked at his share as if 
stunned. His wife and their five children were standing by. From the 
painful toil of a year this was what was left to him with which to feed 
his family. The tears rolled silently down his cheeks."

   These things occasionally help one to understand. Over against this 
picture there arises in my memory one from the barge office, where I had 
gone to see an Italian steamer come in. A family sat apart, ordered to 
wait by the inspecting officer; in the group was an old man, worn and 
wrinkled, who viewed the turmoil with the calmness of one having no share 
in it. The younger members formed a sort of bulwark around him.

   "Your father is too old to come in," said the official.

   Two young women and a boy of sixteen rose to their feet at once. "Are 
not we young enough to work for him?" they said. The boy showed his strong 
arms.

   It is charged against this Italian immigrant that he is dirty, and the 
charge is true. He lives in the darkest of slums, and pays rent that ought 
to hire a decent flat. To wash, water is needed; and we have a law which 
orders tenement landlords to put it on every floor, so that their tenants 
may have the chance. And it is not yet half a score years since one of the 
biggest tenement-house landlords in the city, the wealthiest church 
corporation in the land, attacked the constitutionality of this statute 
rather than pay two or three hundred dollars for putting water into two 
old buildings, as the Board of Health had ordered, and so came near 
upsetting the whole structure of tenement-house law upon which our safety 
depends. Talk about the Church and the people; that one thing did more to 
drive them apart than all the ranting of atheists that ever were. 
Yesterday a magazine came in the mail in which I read: "On a certain 
street corner in Chicago stands a handsome church where hundreds of 
worshippers gather every Sabbath morning for prayer and praise. Just a 
little way off, almost within the shadow of its spire, lived, or rather 
herded, in a dark, damp basement, a family of eight--father, mother, and 
six children. For all the influence that the songs or the sermons or the 
prayers had upon them they might have lived there and died like rats in a 
hole. They did not believe in God, nor heaven, nor hell, other than that 
in which they lived. Church-goers were to them a lot of canting hypocrites 
who wrapped their comfortable robes about them and cared nothing for the 
sufferings of others. Hunger and misery were daily realities.

   No, it was not a yellow newspaper. It was a religious publication, and 
it told how a warm human love did find them out, and showed them what the 
Church had failed to do--what God's love is like. And I am not attacking 
the Church either. God forbid! I would help, not hinder it; for I, too, am 
a churchman. Only--well, let it pass. It will not happen again. That same 
year I read in my paper the reply of the priest at the Pro-Cathedral in 
Stanton Street to a crank who scoffed at the kind of "religion" they had 
there: kinder-gartens, nurseries, boys' and girls' clubs, and mothers' 
meetings. "Yes," he wrote, "that is our religion. We believe that a love 
of God that doesn't forthwith run to manifest itself in some loving deed 
to His children is not worth having." That is how I came to be a churchman 
in Bishop Potter's camp. I "joined" then and there.

   Our Italian is ignorant, it is said, and that charge is also true. I 
doubt if one of the family in the barge office could read or write his own 
name. Yet would you fear especial danger to our institutions, to our 
citizenship, from those four? He lives cheaply, crowds, and underbids even 
the Jew in the sweat shop. I can myself testify to the truth of these 
statements. A couple of years ago I was the umpire in a quarrel between 
the Jewish tailors and the factory inspector whom they arraigned before 
the governor on charges of inefficiency. The burden of their grievance was 
that the Italians were underbidding them in their own market, which of 
course the factory inspector could not prevent. Yet, even so, the evidence 
is not that the Italian always gets the best of it. I came across a family 
once working on "knee-pants." "Twelve pants, ten cents," said the tailor, 
when there was work. "Ve work for dem sheenies," he explained.

   "Ven dey has work, ve gets some; ven dey hasn't, ve don't." He was an 
unusually gifted tailor as to English, but apparently not as to business 
capacity. In the Astor tenements, in Elizabeth Street, where we found 
forty-three families living in rooms intended for sixteen, I saw women 
finishing "pants" at thirty cents a day. Some of the garments were of good 
grade, and some of poor; some of them were soldiers' trousers, made for 
the government; but whether they received five, seven, eight, or ten cents 
a pair, it came to thirty cents a day, except in a single instance, in 
which two women, sewing from five in the morning till eleven at night, 
were able, being practised hands, to finish forty-five "pants" at three 
and a half cents a pair, and so made together over a dollar and a half. 
They were content, even happy. I suppose it seemed wealth to them, coming 
from a land where a Parisian investigator of repute found three lire (not 
quite sixty cents) per mouth a girl's wages.

   I remember one of those flats, poor and dingy, yet with signs of the 
instinctive groping toward orderly arrangement which I have observed so 
many times, and take to be evidence that in better surroundings much might 
be made of these people. Clothes were hung to dry on a line strung the 
whole length of the room. Upon couches by the wall some men were snoring. 
They were the boarders. The "man" was out shovelling snow with the 
midnight shift. By a lamp with brown paper shade, over at the window, sat 
two women sewing. One had a baby on her lap. Two sweet little cherubs, 
nearly naked, slept on a pile of unfinished "pants," and smiled in their 
sleep. A girl of six or seven dozed in a child's rocker between the two 
workers, with her head hanging down on one side; the mother propped it up 
with her elbow as she sewed. They were all there, and happy in being 
together even in such a place. On a corner shelf burned a night lamp 
before a print of the Mother of God, flanked by two green bottles, which, 
seen at a certain angle, made quite a festive show.

   Complaint is made that the Italian promotes child labor. His children 
work at home on "pants" and flowers at an hour when they ought to have 
been long in bed. Their sore eyes betray the little flower-makers when 
they come tardily to school. Doubtless there are such cases, and quite too 
many of them; yet, in the very block which I have spoken of, the 
investigation conducted for the Gilder Tenement House Commission by the 
Department of Sociology of Columbia University, under Professor Franklin 
H. Giddings, discovered, of 196 children of school age, only 23 at work or 
at home, and in the next block only 27 out of 215. That was the showing of 
the foreign population all the way through. Of 225 Russian Jewish children 
only 15 were missing from school, and of 354 little Bohemians only 21. The 
overcrowding of the schools and their long waiting lists occasionally 
furnished the explanation why they were not there. Professor Giddings 
reported, after considering all the evidence: "The foreign-born population 
of the city is not, to any great extent, forcing children of legal school 
age into money-earning occupations. On the contrary, this population shows 
a strong desire to have its children acquire the common rudiments of 
education. If the city does not provide liberally and wisely for the 
satisfaction of this desire, the blame for the civic and moral dangers 
that will threaten our community, because of ignorance, vice, and poverty, 
must rest on the whole public, not on our foreign-born residents." And 
Superintendent Maxwell of the Department of Education adds, six years 
later, that with a shortage of 28,000 seats, and worse coming, "it is 
difficult to avoid the conclusion that the insufficiency of school 
accommodation in New York City is a most serious menace to our universal 
welfare."(1) For we have reached the stage again, thanks be to four years 
of Tammany, when, after all the sacrifices of the past, we are once more 
face to face with an army of enforced truants, and all they stand for.

   He is clannish, this Italian; he gambles and uses a knife, though 
rarely on anybody not of his own people; he "takes what he can get," 
wherever anything is free, as who would not, coming to the feast like a 
starved wolf? There was nothing free where he came from. Even the salt was 
taxed past a poor man's getting any of it. Lastly, he buys fraudulent 
naturalization papers, and uses them. I shall plead guilty for him to 
every one of these counts. They are all proven. Gambling is his besetting 
sin. He is sober, industrious, frugal, enduring beyond belief; but he will 
gamble on Sunday and quarrel over his cards, and when he sticks his 
partner in the heat of the quarrel, the partner is not apt to tell. He 
prefers to bide his time. Yet there has lately been evidence once or 
twice, in the surrender of an assassin by his countrymen, that the old 
vendetta is being shelved and a new idea of law and justice is breaking 
through. As to the last charge: our Italian is not dull. With his intense 
admiration for the land where a dollar a day waits upon the man with a 
shovel, he can see no reason why he should not accept the whole "American 
plan" with ready enthusiasm. It is a good plan. To him it sums itself up 
in the statement: a dollar a day for the shovel; two dollars for the 
shovel with a citizen behind it. And he takes the papers and the two 
dollars.

   He came here for a chance to live. Of politics, social ethics, he knows 
nothing. Government in his old home existed only for his oppression. Why 
should he not attach himself with his whole loyal soul to the plan of 
government in his new home that offers to boost him into the place of his 
wildest ambition, a "job on the streets,"--that is, in the Street Cleaning 
Department,--and asks no other return than that he shall vote as directed? 
Vote! Not only he, but his cousins and brothers and uncles will vote as 
they are told, to get Pietro the job he covets. If it pleases the other 
man, what is it to him for whom he votes? He is after the job.

   Here, ready-made to the hand of the politician, is such material as he 
never saw before. For Pietro's loyalty is great. As a police detective, 
one of his own people, once put it to me, "He got a kind of an idea, or an 
old rule: an eye for an eye; do to an-other as you'd be done by; if he 
don't squeal on you, you stick by him, no matter what the consequences." 
This "kind of an idea" is all he has to draw upon for an answer to the 
question if the thing is right. But the question does not arise. Why 
should it? Was he not told by the agitators whom the police jailed at home 
that in a republic all men are made happy by means of the vote? And is 
there not proof of it? It has made him happy, has it not? And the man who 
bought his vote seems to like it. Well, then?

   Very early Pietro discovered that it was every man for himself, in the 
chase of the happiness which this powerful vote had in keeping. He was 
robbed by the padrone--that is, the boss--when he came over, fleeced on 
his steamship fare, made to pay for getting a job, and charged three 
prices for board and lodging and extras while working in the railroad 
gang. The boss had a monopoly, and Pietro was told that it was maintained 
by his "divvying" with some railroad official. Rumor said, a very high-up 
official, and that the railroad was in politics in the city; that is to 
say, dealt in votes. When the job gave out, the boss packed him into the 
tenement he had bought with his profits on the contract; and if Pietro had 
a family, told him to take in lodgers and crowd his flat, as the Elizabeth 
Street tenements were crowded, so as to make out the rent, and to never 
mind the law. The padrone was a politician, and had a pull. He was bigger 
than the law, and it was the votes he traded in that did it all. Now it 
was Pietro's turn. With his vote he could buy what to him seemed wealth; 
two dollars a day. In the muddle of ideas, that was the one which stood 
out clearly. When citizen papers were offered him for $12.50, he bought 
them quickly, and got his job on the street.

   It was the custom of the country. If there was any doubt about it, the 
proof was furnished when Pietro was arrested through the envy and plotting 
of the opposition boss. Distinguished counsel, employed by the machine, 
pleaded his case in court. Pietro felt himself to be quite a personage, 
and he was told that he was safe from harm, though a good deal of dust 
might be kicked up; because, when it came down to that, both the bosses 
were doing the same kind of business. I quote from the report of the State 
Superintendent of Elections of January, 1899: "In nearly every case of 
illegal registration, the defendant was represented by eminent counsel who 
were identified with the Democratic organization, among them being three 
assistants to the corporation counsel. My deputies arrested Rosario 
Calecione and Giuseppe Marrone, both of whom appeared to vote at the fifth 
election district of the Sixth Assembly District; Marrone being the 
Democratic captain of the district, and, it was charged, himself engaged 
in the business of securing fraudulent naturalization papers. In both of 
these cases Farriello had procured the naturalization papers for the men 
for a consideration. They were subsequently indicted. Marrone and 
Calecione were bailed by the Democratic leader of the Sixth Assembly 
District."

   The business, says the state superintendent, is carried on "to an 
enormous extent." It appears, then, that Pietro has already "got on to" 
the American plan as the slum presented it to him, and has in good earnest 
become a problem. I guessed as much from the statement of a Tammany 
politician to me, a year ago, that every Italian voter in his district got 
his "old two" on election day. He ought to know, for he held the purse. 
Suppose, now, we speak our minds as frankly, for once, and put the blame 
where it belongs. Will it be on Pietro? And upon this showing, who ought 
to be excluded, when it comes to that?

   The slum census taker did not cross the Bowery. Had he done so, he 
would have come upon the refugee Jew, the other economic marplot of whom 
complaint is made with reason. If his Nemesis has overtaken him in the 
Italian, certainly he challenged that fate. He did cut wages by his 
coming. He was starving, and he came in shoals. In eighteen years more 
than half a million Jewish immigrants have landed in New York.(2) They had 
to have work and food, and they got both as they could. In the strife they 
developed qualities that were anything but pleasing. They herded like 
cattle. They had been so herded by Christian rulers, a despised and 
persecuted race, through the centuries. Their very coming was to escape 
from their last inhuman captivity in a Christian state. They lied, they 
were greedy, they were charged with bad faith. They brought nothing, 
neither money nor artisan skill,--nothing but their consuming energy, to 
our land, and their one gift was their greatest offence. One might have 
pointed out that they had been trained to lie, for their safety; had been 
forbidden to work at trades, to own land; had been taught for a thousand 
years, with the scourge and the stake, that only gold could buy them 
freedom from torture. But what was the use? The charges were true. The Jew 
was--he still is--a problem of our slum.

   And yet, if ever there was material for citizenship, this Jew is such 
material. Alone of all our immigrants he comes to us without a past. He 
has no country to renounce, no ties to forget. Within him there burns a 
passionate longing for a home to call his, a country which will own him, 
that waits only for the spark of such another love to spring into flame 
which nothing can quench. Waiting for it, all his energies are turned into 
his business. He is not always choice in method; he often offends. He 
crowds to the front in everything, no matter whom he crowds out. The land 
is filled with his clamor. "If the East Side would shut its mouth and the 
West Side get off the saloon corner, we could get somewhere," said a weary 
philanthropist to me the other day, and made me laugh, for I knew what he 
meant. But the Jew heeds it not. He knows what he wants and he gets it. He 
succeeds. He is the yeast of any slum, if given time. If it will not let 
him go, it must rise with him. The charity managers in London said it, 
when we looked through their slums some years ago, "The Jews have 
renovated Whitechapel." I, for one, am a firm believer in this Jew, and in 
his boy. Ignorant they are, but with a thirst for knowledge that surmounts 
any barrier. The boy takes all the prizes in the school. His comrades 
sneer that he will not fight. Neither will he when there is nothing to be 
gained by it. Yet, in defence of his rights, there is in all the world no 
such fighter he. Literally, he will die fighting, by inches, too, from 
starvation. Witness his strikes. I believe that, should the time come when 
the country needs fighting men, the son of the despised immigrant Jew will 
resurrect on American soil, the first that bade him welcome, the old 
Maccabee type, and set an example for all the rest of us to follow.

   This long while he has been in the public eye as the vehicle and 
promoter of sweating, and much severe condemnation has been visited upon 
him with good cause. He had to do something, and he took to the clothes-
maker's trade as that which was most quickly learned. The increasing 
crowds, the tenement, and his grinding poverty made the soil wherein the 
evil grew rank. But the real sweater does not live in Ludlow Street; he 
keeps the stylish shop on Broadway, and he does not always trouble himself 
to find out how his workers fare, much as that may have to do with the 
comfort and security of his customers.

   "We do not have to have a license," said the tenants in one wretched 
flat where a consumptive was sewing on coats almost with his last gasp; 
"we work for a first-class place on Broadway."

   And so they did. Sweating is simply a question of profit to the 
manufacturer. By letting out his work on contract, he can save the expense 
of running his factory and delay longer making his choice of styles. If 
the contractor, in turn, can get along with less shop room by having as 
much of the work as can profitably be so farmed out done in the tenements 
by cheap home labor, he is so much better off. And tenement labor is 
always cheap because of the crowds that clamor for it and must have bread. 
The poor Jew is the victim of the mischief quite as much as he has helped 
it on. Back of the manufacturer and the contractor there is still another 
sweater,--the public. Only by its sufferance of the bargain counter and of 
sweat-shop-made goods has the nuisance existed as long as it has. I am 
glad I have lived to see the day of its passing, for, unless I greatly 
mistake, it is at hand now that the old silent partner is going out of the 
firm.

   I mean the public. We tried it in the old days, but the courts said the 
bill to stop tenement cigar making was unconstitutional. Labor was 
property, and property is inviolable--rightly so until it itself becomes a 
threat to the commonwealth. Child labor is such a threat. It has been 
stopped in the factories, but no one can stop it in the tenement so long 
as families are licensed to work there. The wrecking of the home that is 
inevitable where the home is turned into a shop with thirty cents as a 
woman's wage is that; the overcrowding that goes hand in hand with home-
work is that; the scourge of consumption which doctors and Boards of 
Health wrestle with in vain while dying men and women "sew on coats with 
their last gasp" and sew the death warrant of the buyer into the lining, 
is a threat the gravity of which we have hardly yet made out. Courts and 
constitutions reflect the depth of public sentiment on a moral or 
political issue. We have been doing a deal of dredging since then, and we 
are at it yet. While I am writing a Tuberculosis Committee is at work 
sifting the facts of tenement-house life as they bear on that peril. A 
Child Labor Committee is preparing to attack the slum in its centre, as we 
stopped the advance guard when we made the double-decker unprofitable. The 
factory inspector is gathering statistics of earnings and hours of labor 
in sweat shop and tenement to throw light on the robbery that goes on 
there. When they have told us what they have to tell, it may be that we 
shall be able to say to the manufacturer: "You shall not send out goods to 
be made in sweat shop or tenement. You shall make them in your own shop or 
not at all." He will not be hurt, for all will have to do alike. I am 
rather inclined to think that he will be glad to take that way out of a 
grisly plight.

   For he has seen the signs of a flank movement that goes straight for 
his pocket-book, an organized public sentiment that is getting ready to 
say to him, "We will buy no clothes or wear them, or any other thing 
whatsoever, that is made at the price of the life and hope of other men or 
women." Wherever I went last winter, through the length and breadth of the 
land, women were stirring to organize branches of the Consumers' League. 
True, they were the well-to-do, not yet the majority. But they were the 
very ones who once neither knew nor cared. Now they do both. That is more 
than half the fight. Whatever may be the present results of the agitation, 
in the long run I would rather take my chances with a vigorous Consumers' 
League and not a law in the state to safeguard labor or the community's 
interests, than with the most elaborate code man has yet devised, and the 
bargain counter in full blast, unchallenged, from Monday to Saturday. Laws 
may be evaded, and too often are; tags betraying that goods are "tenement 
made" may be removed, and they make no appeal anyhow to a community deaf 
to the arraignment of the bargain counter. But an instructed public 
sentiment, such as that of which the Consumers' League(3) is the most 
recent expression, makes laws and enforces them too. By its aid we have 
forced the children out of the factories, the sweat shops out of the 
tenements, and shut the door against the stranger there. Only to families 
are licenses granted. By its aid we shall yet drive work out of the home 
altogether; for goods are made to sell, and none will be made which no one 
will buy.

   Organized labor makes its own appeal its own appeal to the same end. 
From this year (1892) on, the United Garment Workers of America resolved 
in national convention to give their stamp to no manufacturer who does not 
have all his work done on his own premises. If they faithfully live up to 
that compact with the public, they will win. Two winters ago I took their 
label, which was supposed to guarantee living wages and clean and healthy 
conditions, from the hip pocket of a pair of trousers which I found a man, 
sick with scarlet fever, using as a pillow in one of the foulest sweater's 
tenements I had ever been in, and carried it to the headquarters of the 
union to show them what a mockery they were making of the mightiest engine 
that had come to their hand. I am glad to believe those days are over for 
good; and when we all believe it their fight will be won. When the union 
label deserves public confidence as a guarantee against such things, it 
will receive it. When I know that insisting on a union plumber for my 
pipes means that the job will be done right, the I will always send for a 
union plumber and have no other. That is the whole story, and on that day 
the label will be mightier than any law, because the latter will be merely 
the effort to express by statute the principle it embodies.

   Stragglers there will always be, I suppose. It was only the other day I 
read in the report of the Consumers' League in my own city that "a 
benevolent institution," when found giving out clothing to be made in 
tenement houses that were not licensed, and taken to task for it, asked 
the agents of the League to "show some way in which the law could be 
evaded"; but it is just as well for that "benevolent institution" that 
name and address were wanting, or it might find its funds running short 
unaccountably. We are waking up. This very licensing of tenement workers 
is proof of it, though it gives one a cold chill to see thirty thousand 
licenses out, with hardly a score of factory inspectors to keep tab on 
them. Roosevelt, as governor, set the pace, going himself among the 
tenements to see how the law was enforced, and how it could be mended. Now 
we have a registry system copied from Massachusetts, where they do these 
things right and most others besides. An index is so arranged by streets 
that when the printed sheet comes every morning from the Bureau of 
Contagious Diseases, with name and house number of every case of small-
pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc. reported during the twenty-four 
hours, a clerk can check one off from the other in half an hour, and 
before noon have every infected flat quarantined. Word is sent to the 
manufacturer to stop sending any more supplies there, and the garments in 
the house are tagged till after disinfection. And by the same means all 
the cards are laid on the table. If a merchant in California or in Florida 
brags that he buys only factory-made goods, the customer can find out 
through the Consumers' League if it is true. If the register shows that 
the manufacturer has filed lists of the tenements where his goods are made 
up, it is not true. All of which helps.

   But Massachusetts is Massachusetts, and New York is New York. A 
tenement-house population of more than two millions of souls makes its own 
problems, and there is no other like it. After all, the chief function of 
the license must, in the end, be to show that it cannot be done so--
safely. Even with the active coöperation of the Board of Health, and with 
the nearly two hundred tenement-house inspectors that are being turned 
loose this summer, full of new zeal and desire to make a record, we shall 
yet be whipping the devil around the stump until the public sentiment 
fostered by the Consumers' League and its allies heads him off on the 
other side. The truth of the matter is that the job is too big for the law 
alone. It needs the gospel to back it up. Together they can do it.
   
(1. Superintendent Maxwell in Municipal Affairs, December, 1900)

(2. According to the register of the United Hebrew Charities, between 
October 1, 1884, and June 1, 1902, the number was 539,067, and it is again 
on the increase. The year 1902 will probably show an increase in this 
class of immigration over 1901 of quite 15,000)

(3. The following is the declaration of principles of the National 
Consumers' League:--
SEC.1. That the interests of the community demand that all workers shall 
receive fair living wages, and that goods shall be produced under sanitary 
conditions.
SEC.2. That the responsibility for some of the worst evils from which 
producers suffer rests with the consumers who seek the cheapest markets 
regardless how cheapness is brought about.
SEC.3. That it is, therefore, the duty of consumers to find out under what 
conditions the articles they purchase are produced and distributed, and 
insist that these conditions shall be wholesome, and consistent with a 
respectable existence on the part of the workers)