The Battle with the Slum - Chapters VIII-IX



CHAPTER VIII.
ON WHOM SHALL WE SHUT THE DOOR? 
   
THE Jew and the Italian have filled the landscape so far, because, as a 
matter of fact, that is what they do. Yesterday it was the Irishman and 
the Bohemian. To-morrow it may be the Greek, who already undersells the 
Italian from his pushcart in the Fourth Ward, and the Syrian, who can give 
Greek, Italian, and Jew points at a trade. The rebellious Slovak holds his 
own corner in our industrial system, though never for long. He yearns ever 
for the mountain sides of his own Hungary. He remembers, where the Jew 
tries only to forget. From Dalmatia comes a new emigration, and there are 
signs that the whole Balkan peninsula has caught the fever and is waiting 
only for cheap transportation to be established on the Danube to the Black 
Sea, when there is no telling what will be heading our way. I sometimes 
wonder what thoughts come to the eagle that perches over the great stone 
gateway on Ellis Island, as he watches the procession that files through 
it into the United States day after day, and never ends. He looks out of 
his grave, unblinking eye at the motley crowd, but gives no sign. Does he 
ask: "Where are the Pilgrim Fathers, the brave Huguenots, the patient 
Puritans, the sturdy priests, and the others that came for conscience' 
sake to build upon this continent a home for freedom? And these, why do 
they come with their strange tongues--for gold?" True, eagle! but look to 
the roster of those who fought and died for the freedom those pioneers 
planted, who watered the tree with their life blood, and see how many you 
find inscribed there who came through that gate. Go to the public school 
and hear their children speak the tongue that is sweet to your ear; hear 
their young voices as they salute the flag that is theirs:

   "We give our heads and our hearts to our country. One country, one 
language, one flag!"

   Fear not, eagle! While that gate is open let no one bar the one you 
guard. While the flag flies over the public school, keep it aloft over 
Ellis Island and have no misgivings. The school has the answer to your 
riddle.

   About once a week I am asked: Would I shut out any, and whom and how 
and why? Sometimes, looking at it from the point of view of the tenement 
and the sweat shop,--that is to say, the city,--I think I would. And were 
that all, I certainly should. But then, there comes up the recollection of 
a picture of the city of Prague that hangs in a Bohemian friend's parlor, 
here in New York. I stood looking at it one day, and noticed in the 
foreground cannon that pointed in over the city. I spoke of it, 
unthinking, and said to my host that they should be trained, if against an 
enemy, the other way. The man's eye flashed fire. "Ha!" he cried, "here, 
yes!" When I think of that, I do not want to shut the door.

   Again, there occurs to me an experience the police had a few years ago 
in Mulberry Street. They were looking for a murderer, and came upon a nest 
of Italian thugs who lived by blackmailing their countrymen. They were 
curious about them, and sent their names to Naples with a request for 
information. There came back such a record as none of the detectives had 
ever seen or heard of before. All of them were notorious criminals, who 
had been charged with every conceivable crime, from burglary to kidnapping 
and "maiming," and some not to be conceived of by the American mind. Five 
of them together had been sixty-three times in jail, and one no less than 
twenty-one times. Yet, though they were all "under special surveillance," 
they had come here without let or hindrance within a year. When I recall 
that, I want to shut the door quick. I sent the exhibit to Washington at 
the time.

   But then, again, when I think of Mrs. Michelangelo, in her poor 
mourning for one child run over and killed, wiping her tears away and 
going bravely to work to keep the home together for the other five until 
the oldest shall be old enough to take her father's place; and when, as 
now, there strays into my hand the letter from my good friend, the "woman 
doctor" in the slum, in which she wrote, when her father lay dead: "The 
little scamps of the street have been positively pathetic; they have made 
such shy, boyish attempts at friendliness; one little chap offered to let 
me hold his to while it was spinning, in token of affection,"--when I read 
that, I have not the heart to shut anybody out.

   Except, of course, the unfit, the criminal, and the pauper, cast off by 
their own, and the man brought over here merely to put money into the 
pockets of the steamship agent, the padrone, and the mine owner. We have 
laws to bar these out. Suppose we begin by being honest with ourselves and 
the immigrant, and respecting our own laws. The door that is to be shut is 
over yonder, at the port where they take ship. There is where the scrutiny 
is to be made, to be effective. When the door has been shut and locked 
against the man who left his country for his country's good, whether by 
its "assistance" or not, and when trafficking in the immigrant for private 
profit has been stopped, then, perhaps, we shall be better able to decide 
what degree of ignorance in him constitutes unfitness for citizenship and 
cause for shutting him out. Perchance then, also, we shall hear less of 
the cant about his being a peril to the republic. Doubtless ignorance is a 
peril, but the selfishness that trades upon ignorance is a much greater. 
He came to us without a country, ready to adopt such a standard of 
patriotism as he found, at its face value, and we gave him the rear 
tenement and slum politics. If he accepted the standard, whose fault was 
it? His being in such a hurry to vote that he could not wait till the law 
made him a citizen was no worse, to my mind, than the treachery of the 
"upper class" native, who refuses to go to the polls for fear he may rub 
up against him there. This last let us settle with first, and see what 
remains of our problem. We can approach it honestly, then, at all events.

   I came into town on the Pennsylvania Railroad the other day just when 
the emigrant lighter had tied up at the wharf to discharge its west-bound 
cargo. For a full hour I stood watching the stream of them, thousands upon 
thousands, carrying knapsacks and trunks, odd in speech and ways, but all 
of them with hopeful faces set toward the great country where they were to 
win their own way. So they answered the query of the eagle at the island 
gate. Scarce an hour within the gate, they were no longer a problem. The 
country needs these men of strong arms and strong courage. It is in the 
city the shoe pinches. What can we do to relieve it?

   Much could be done with effective inspection on the other side, to 
discourage the blind immigration that stops short in the city's slums. 
They come to better themselves, and it is largely a question of making it 
clear to them that they do not better themselves and make us to be worse 
off by staying there, whereas their going farther would benefit both. But 
I repeat that that lever must be applied over there, to move this load. 
Once they are here, we might have a land and labor bureau that would take 
in the whole country, and serve as a great directory and distributing 
agency, instead of leaving it to private initiative to take up the 
crowds,--something much more comprehensive than anything now existing. 
There would still be a surplus; but at least it would be less by so many 
as we sent away. And in the nature of things the congestion would be 
lessened as more went out. Immigrants go where they have friends, and if 
those friends lived in Michigan we should not be troubled with them long 
in New York. If the immigration came all from one country, we should, 
because of that, have no problem at all, or not much of one at all events, 
except perhaps in the Jews, who have lived in Ghettos since time out of 
mind. The others would speedily be found making only a way station of New 
York. It is the constant kaleidoscopic change I spoke of that brings us 
hordes every few years who have to breaks entirely new ground. It seems to 
have been always so. Forty years after the settlement of Manhattan Island, 
says Theodore Roosevelt in his history of New York, eighteen different 
languages and dialects were spoken in its streets, though the future 
metropolis was then but a small village. "No sooner," says he, "has one 
set of varying elements been fused together, than another stream has been 
poured into the crucible." What was true of New York two hundred years ago 
is true to-day of the country of which it is the gateway.

   In dealing with the surplus that remains, we shall have to rely first 
and foremost on the public school. Of that I shall speak hereafter. It can 
do more and better work than it is doing, for the old as for the young, 
when it becomes the real neighborhood centre, especially in the slums. The 
flag flies over it, that is one thing, and not such a little thing as some 
imagine. I think we are beginning to see it, with our Flag Day and our 
putting it out when we never thought of it five or six years ago. And by 
the way, when last I was in Denmark, my native land, I noticed they had a 
way of flying the flag on Sunday,--whether in honor of the day, or because 
they loved it, or because they felt the need of flying it in the face of 
their big and greedy German neighbor, I shall not say. But it was all 
right. Why can we not do the same? It would not hurt the flag, and it 
would not hurt the day. They would both be better for it--we would all be. 
You cannot have too much of the flag in the right way, and there would be 
nothing wrong about that. Just go into one of the Children's Aid Society's 
ragged schools, where the children are practically all from abroad, and 
see how they take to it. Watch an Italian parade, in which it is always 
borne side by side with the standard of United Italy, and if you had any 
doubts about what it stands for you will change your mind quickly. The 
sight of it is worth a whole course in the school, for education in 
citizenship.

   And then it looks fine in the landscape always. It always makes me 
think there that I added to the red and white of my fathers' flag only the 
blue of heaven, where wrongs are righted, and I feel better for it. Why 
should it not have the same effect on others? I know it has.

   The school might be made the means, as the house to which all the life 
of the neighborhood turned, of enrolling the immigrants in the perilous 
years when they are not yet citizens. I know what they mean; I have gone 
through them, seen most of the mischief they hold for the unattached. That 
is the mischief, that they are unattached. A way must be found of claiming 
them, if they are not to be lost to the cause of good citizenship where 
they might so easily have been saved. I spoke of it in "The Making of an 
American." They want to belong, they are waiting to be claimed by some 
one, and the some one that comes is Tammany with its slum politics. The 
mere enrolling of them, with leave to march behind a band of music, 
suffices with the young. They belong then. The old are used to enrolment. 
Where they came from they were enrolled in the church, in the army, by the 
official vaccinator, by the tax-collector--oh, yes, the tax-collector--and 
here, set all of a sudden adrift, it seems like a piece of home to have 
some one come along and claim them, write them down, and tell them that 
they are to do so and so. Childish, is it? Not at all. It is just human 
nature, the kind we are working with.

   The mere fact that the schoolhouse is there, inviting them in, is 
something. When it comes to seek them out, to invite them to their own 
hall for discussion, for play, it will be a good deal, particularly if the 
women go along. And the enrolment of the schoolhouse could be counted as 
being for decency.

   It makes all the difference what the start is like. "Excellency," wrote 
an Italian to his consul in New York, "I arrived from Italy last week. As 
soon as I landed a policeman clubbed me. I am going to write to Victor 
Emmanuel how things are done here. Viva 1' Italia! Abbasso 1' America!" I 
should not be surprised to find that man plotting anarchy in Paterson as 
soon as he got his bearings, and neither need you be.

   There is still another alternative to either keeping them out or 
keeping them in the city, namely, to ship them away after they have 
reached the slum and been stranded there, individually or in squads. The 
latter way was tried when the great Jewish immigration first poured in, in 
the early eighties. Five colonies of refugee Jews were started in southern 
New Jersey, but they failed. The soil was sandy and poor, and the work 
unfamiliar. Thrown upon his own resources, in a strange and unfriendly 
neighborhood, the man grew discouraged and gave up in despair. The 
colonies were in a state of collapse when the New York managers of the 
Baron de Hirsch Fund took them under the arms and gave them a start on a 
new plan. They themselves had located a partly industrial, partly farming, 
community in the neighborhood. They persuaded several large clothing 
contractors to move their plants out to the villages, where they would be 
assured of steady hands, with much less chance of disturbing strikes; 
while on the other hand their workers would have steadier work and could 
never starve in dull seasons, for they could work their farms and gardens. 
And, indeed, a perfect frenzy for spading and hoeing seized them when the 
crops appeared, with promise of unlimited potatoes for the digging of 
them. The experiment is still in progress. It is an experiment, because as 
yet the Hirsch Fund millions back the colonies up, and there is no passing 
of reasonable judgment upon them till they have stood alone awhile. To all 
appearances they are prospering, Woodbine, the Hirsch colony, especially 
so, with its agricultural school that has set out upon the mission of 
turning the Jew back to the soil from which he has been barred so long. 
Its pupils came out of the sweat shops and the tenement barracks of the 
Ghetto, and a likelier lot it would not be easy to find. One can but wish 
that the hopes of their friends may be realized in fullest measure. They 
have put their hands to a task that seems like turning back the finger of 
time, and snags of various kinds beset their way.

   I remember the President of the Board coming into my office one day 
with despair written all over him: of a hundred families, carefully picked 
to go into the country where homes and work awaited them, when it came to 
the actual departure only seven wanted to go. It was the old story of 
objection to "the society of the stump." The wanted the crowds, the bands, 
the kosher butcher shops, the fake auction stores, and the synagogues they 
were used to. They have learned a lesson from that in the Jersey colonies, 
and are building entertainment halls for the social life that is to keep 
them together. Only a year or so ago an attempt at home-building, much 
nearer New York, at New Orange, just over the hills in Jersey, came to an 
abrupt end. It left out the farming end, aiming merely at the removal of 
needle workers from the city with their factory. A building was put up for 
a large New York tailoring firm, and it moved over bodily with its men--
that is, with such as were willing to go. Work was plentiful in the city, 
and they were not all ready to surrender the tenement for the sake of a 
home upon the land, though a very attractive little cottage awaited them 
on singularly easy terms. However that was almost got over when the firm 
suddenly threw up the contract. It proved to be costlier for them to 
manufacture away from the city, and they could not complete.

   If there is yet an element of doubt about the Jew as a colonist, there 
is none about his ability to make ends meet as an individual farmer, given 
a fair chance. More than a thousand such are now scattered through the New 
England states and the dairy counties of New York. The Jewish Agricultural 
Aid Societies of New York and Chicago gave them their start, and report 
decided progress. The farmers are paying their debts and laying away 
money. As a dairy farmer or poultry raiser the Jew has more of an 
immediate commercial grip on the situation and works with more courage 
than if he has to wait for long, uncertain crops. In Sullivan and Ulster 
counties, New York, a hundred Jewish farmers keep summer boarders besides, 
and are on the highroad to success. Very recently the New York society has 
broken new paths upon an individual "removal plan," started by the B'nai 
B'rith in 1900. Agents are sent throughout the country to make 
arrangements with Jewish communities for the reception of workers from the 
Ghetto; and so successful have been these efforts that at this writing 
some five thousand have been moved singly and scattered over the country 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific--that is, in not yet three years since 
the beginning. They are carefully looked after, and the reports show that 
over eighty per cent of all do well in their new surroundings. This result 
has been wrought at a per capita expense of twelve dollars, not a very 
great sum for such a work.

   In its bold outline the movement contemplates nothing less than the 
draining of the Ghetto by the indirect process of which I spoke. "The 
importance of it," says the Removal Committee in its report for 1901, "is 
found, not in the numbers removed, but in the inauguration of the 
movement, which should and must be greatly extended, and which is declared 
to be of far-reaching significance. The experience of past years has 
proven that almost every family removed becomes a centre around which 
immediately and with ever increasing force others congregate. The 
committee in charge of the Russian immigration in 1890, 1891, etc., has 
evidence that cities and towns, to which but a very small number of newly 
arrived immigrants were sent, have become the centres of large Russia-
Jewish communities. No argument is needed to emphasize this statement."

   It is pleasing to be told that the office of the Removal Committee has 
been besieged by eager applicants from the beginning. So light is breaking 
also in that dark corner.

   There is enough of it everywhere, if one will only look away from the 
slum to those it holds fast. "The people are all right," was the unvarying 
report of the early Tenement House Committees, "if we only give them half 
a chance." When the country was in the throes of the silver campaign, the 
newspapers told the story of an old laborer who went to the sub-treasury 
and demanded to see the "boss." He undid the strings of an old leathern 
purse with fumbling fingers, and counted out more than two hundred dollars 
in gold eagles, the hoard of a lifetime of toil and self-denial. They were 
for the government, he said. He had not the head to understand all the 
talk that was going on, but he gathered from what he heard that the 
government was in trouble, and that somehow it was about not having gold 
enough. So he had brought what he had. He owed it all to the country, and 
now that she needed it he had come to give it back.

   The man was an Irishman. Very likely he was enrolled in Tammany and 
voted its ticket. I remember a tenement at the bottom of a back alley, 
over on the East Side, where I once went visiting with the pastor of a 
mission chapel. Up in the attic there was a family of father and daughter 
in two rooms that had been made out of one by dividing off the deep dormer 
window. It was midwinter, and they had no fire. He was a pedler, but the 
snow had stalled his push-cart, and robbed them of their only other source 
of income, a lodger who hired cot room in the attic for a few cents a 
night. The daughter was not able to work. But she said, cheerfully, that 
they were "getting along." When it came out that she had not tasted solid 
food for many days, was starving in fact,--indeed, she died within a year, 
of the slow starvation of the tenements that parades in the mortality 
returns under a variety of scientific names which all mean the same 
thing,--she met her pastor's gentle chiding with the excuse: "Oh, your 
church has many that are poorer than I. I don't want to take your money."

   These were Germans, ordinarily held to be close-fisted; but I found 
that in their dire distress they had taken in a poor old man who was past 
working, and kept him all winter, sharing with him what they had. He was 
none of theirs; they hardly even knew him, as it appeared. It was enough 
that he was "poorer than they," and lonely and hungry and cold.

   It was over here that the children of Mr. Elsing's Sunday-school gave 
out of the depth of their poverty fifty-four dollars in pennies to be hung 
on the Christmas tree as their offering to the persecuted Armenians. One 
of their teachers told me of a Bohemian family that let the holiday dinner 
she brought them stand and wait, while they sent out to bid to the feast 
four little ragamuffins of the neighborhood who else would have gone 
hungry. And here it was in "the hard winter" when no one had work, that 
the nurse from the Henry Street settlement found her cobbler patient 
entertaining a lodger, with barely bread in the house for himself and his 
boy. He introduced the stranger with some embarrassment, and when they 
were alone, excused himself for doing it. The man was just from prison--a 
man with "a history."

   "But," said the nurse, doubtfully, "is it a good thing for your boy to 
have that man in the house?"

   There was a passing glimpse of uneasiness in the cobbler's glance, but 
it went as quickly as it had come. He laid his hand upon the nurse's. 
"This," he said, "ain't no winter to let a fellow from Sing Sing be on the 
street."

   I might keep on, and fill many pages with instances of such kind, which 
simply go to prove that our poor human nature is at least as robust on 
Avenue A as up on Fifth Avenue, if it has half a chance, and often enough 
with no chance at all; and I might set over against it the product of 
sordid and mean environment which one has never far to seek. Good and evil 
go together in the tenements as in the fine houses, and the evil sticks 
out sometimes merely because it lies nearer the surface. The point is that 
the good does outweigh the bad, and that the virtues that turn the balance 
are after all those that make for manhood and good citizenship anywhere; 
while the faults are oftenest the accidents of ignorance and lack of 
training, which it is the business of society to correct. I recall my 
discouragement when I looked over the examination papers of a batch of 
candidates for police appointment,--young men largely the product of our 
public schools in this city and elsewhere,--and read in them that five of 
the original New England states were "England, Ireland, Scotland, Belfast, 
and Cork"; that the Fire Department ruled New York in the absence of the 
mayor,--I have sometimes wished it did, and that he would stay away 
awhile, while they turned the hose on at the City Hall to make a clean job 
of i,--and that Lincoln was murdered by Ballington Booth. But we shall 
agree, no doubt, that the indictment of those papers was not of the men 
who wrote them, but of the school that stuffed its pupils with useless 
trash, and did not teach them to think. Neither have I forgotten that it 
was one of these very men who, having failed and afterward got a job as a 
bridge policeman, on his first pay day went straight from his post, half 
frozen as he was, to the settlement worker who had befriended him and his 
sick father, and gave him five dollars for "some one who was poorer than 
they." Poorer than they! What worker among the poor has not heard it? It 
is the charity of the tenement that covers a multitude of sins. There were 
thirteen in this policeman's family, and his wages were the biggest item 
of income in the house.

   Jealousy, envy, and meanness wear no fine clothes and masquerade under 
no smooth speeches in the slums. Often enough it is the very nakedness of 
the virtues that makes us stumble in our judgment. I have in mind the 
"difficult case" that confronted some philanthropic friends of mine in a 
rear tenement on Twelfth Street, in the person of an aged widow, quite 
seventy I should think, who worked uncomplainingly for a sweater all day 
and far into the night, pinching and saving and stinting herself, with 
black break and chickory coffee as her only fare, in order that she might 
carry her pitiful earnings to her big, lazy lout of a son in Brooklyn. He 
never worked. My friends' difficulty was a very real one, for absolutely 
every attempt to relieve the widow was wrecked upon her mother heart. It 
all went over the river. Yet would you have had her different?

   Sometimes it is only the unfamiliar setting that shocks. When an East 
Side midnight burglar, discovered and pursued, killed a tenant who blocked 
his way of escape, not long ago, his "girl" gave him up to the police. But 
it was not because he had taken human life. "He was good to me," she 
explained to the captain whom she told where to find him, "but since he 
robbed the church I had no use for him." He had stolen, it seems, the 
communion service in a Staten Island church. The thoughtless laughed. But 
in her ignorant way she was only trying to apply the ethical standards she 
knew. Our servant, pondering if the fortune she was told is "real good" at 
fifteen cents, when it should have cost her twenty-five by right, only she 
told the fortune-teller she had only fifteen, and lied in telling, is 
doing the same after her fashion. Stunted, bemuddled, as their standards 
were, I think I should prefer to take my chances with either rather than 
with the woman of wealth and luxury who gave a Christmas party to her lap-
dog, as on the whole the sounder and by far the more hopeful.

   All of which is merely saying that the country is all right, and the 
people are to be trusted with the old faith in spite of the slum. And it 
is true, if we remember to put it that way,-- in spite of the slum. There 
is nothing in the slum to warrant that faith save human nature as yet 
uncorrupted. How long it is to remain so is altogether a question of the 
sacrifices we are willing to make in our fight with the slum. As yet, we 
are told by the officials having to do with the enforcement of the health 
ordinances, which come closer to the life of the individual than any other 
kind, that the poor in the tenements are "more amenable to the law than 
the better class." It is of the first importance, then, that we should 
have laws deserving of their respect, and that these laws should be 
enforced, lest they conclude that the whole thing is a sham. Respect for 
law is a very powerful bar against the slum. But what, for instance, must 
the poor Jew understand, who is permitted to buy a live hen at the market, 
but neither to kill nor keep it in his tenement, and who on his feast day 
finds a whole squad of policemen detailed to follow him around and see 
that he does not do any of the things with his fowl for which he must have 
bought it? Or the day laborer, who drinks his beer in a "Raines law
hotel," where brick sandwiches, consisting of two pieces of bread with a 
brick between, are set out on the counter, in derision of the state law 
which forbids the serving of drinks without "meals"?(1) The Stanton Street 
saloon keeper who did that was solemnly acquitted by a jury. Or the boy, 
who may buy fireworks on the Fourth of July, but not set them off? These 
are only ridiculous instances of an abuse that pervades our community life 
to an extent which constitutes one of its gravest perils. Insincerity of 
that kind is not lost on our fellow-citizen by adoption, who is only 
anxious to fall in with the ways of the country; and especially is it not 
lost on his boy.

   We shall see how it affects him. He is the one for whom we are waging 
the battle with the slum. He is the to-morrow that sits to-day drinking in 
the lesson of the prosperity of the big boss who declared with pride upon 
the witness stand that he rules New York, that judges pay him tribute, and 
that only when he says so a thing "goes"; and that he is "working for his 
own pocket all the time just the same as everybody else." He sees 
corporations pay blackmail and rob the people in return, quite according 
to the schedule of Hester Street. Only there it is the police who charge 
the pedler twenty cents, while here it is the politicians taking toll of 
the franchises, twenty per cent. Wall Street is not ordinarily reckoned in 
the slum, because of certain physical advantages; but, upon the evidence 
of the day, I think we shall have to conclude that the advantage ends 
there. The boy who is learning such lessons,-- how is it with him?

   The president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children 
says that children's crime is increasing, and he ought to know. The 
managers of the Children's Aid Society, after nearly fifty years of 
wrestling with the slum for the boy, in which they have lately seemed to 
get the upper hand, said recently, that on the East Side children are 
growing up in certain districts "entirely neglected," and that the number 
of such children "increases beyond the power of philanthropic and 
religious bodies to cope properly with their needs." In the Tompkins 
Square Lodging House the evening classes were thinning out, and the keeper 
wailed, "Those with whom we have dealt of late have not been inclined to 
accept this privilege; how to make night school attractive to shiftless, 
indifferent street boys is a difficult problem to solve."

   Perhaps it was only that he had lost the key. Across the square, the 
Boys' Club of St. Mark's Place, that began with a handful, count seven 
thousand members to-day, and is building a house of its own. The school 
census man announces that no boy in that old stronghold of the "bread or 
blood" brigade need henceforth loiter in the street because of there not 
being room in the public school, and the brigade has disbanded for want of 
recruits. The factory is being more and more firmly shut against the boy, 
and the bars let down at the playground. From Tompkins Square, 
nevertheless, came Jacob Beresheim, whose story let me stop here to tell 
you.

(1. The following is from the New York Herald of April 8, 1902: One of the 
strangest sandwich complications so far recorded occurred in a saloon in 
Columbia Street, Brooklyn, on Sunday. A boy rushed into the Amity Street 
police station at noon, declaring that two men in the saloon were killing 
each other. Two policemen ran to the place, and found the bartender and a 
customer pummelling each other on the floor. When the men had been 
separated the police learned that the trouble had arisen from the attempt 
of the customer to eat the sandwich which had been served with his drink. 
The barkeeper objected, and, finding remonstrance in vain, resorted to 
physical force to rescue the sandwich from the clutches of the hungry 
stranger. The police restored the sandwich to the bartender and made no 
arrests)



CHAPTER IX.
THE GENESIS OF THE GANG 
   
JACOB BERESHEIM was fifteen when he was charged with murder. It is now 
more than six years ago, but the touch of his hand is cold upon mine, with 
mortal fear, as I write. Every few minutes, during our long talk on the 
night of his arrest and confession, he would spring to his feet, and, 
clutching my arm as a drowning man catches at a rope, demand with shaking 
voice, "Will they give me the chair?" The assurance that boys were not 
executed quieted him only for the moment. Then the dread and the horror 
were upon him again.

   Of his crime the less said the better. It was the climax of a career of 
depravity that differed from other such chiefly in the opportunities 
afforded by an environment which led up to and helped shape it. My 
business is with that environment. The man is dead, the boy in jail. But 
unless I am to be my brother's jail keeper merely, the iron bars do not 
square the account of Jacob with society. Society exists for the purpose 
of securing justice to its members, appearances to the contrary 
notwithstanding. When it fails in this, the item is carried on the ledger 
with interest and compound interest toward a day of reckoning that comes 
surely with the paymaster. We have heard the chink of his coin on the 
counter, these days, in the unblushing revelations before legislative 
investigating committees of degraded citizenship, of the murder of the 
civic conscience, and in the applause that hailed them from the unthinking 
crowd. And we have begun to understand that these are the interest on 
Jacob's account, older, much older, than himself. He is just an item 
carried on the ledger. But with that knowledge the account is at last in 
the way of getting squared. Let us see how it stands.

   We shall take Jacob as a type of the street boy on the East Side, where 
he belonged. What does not apply to him in the review applies to his 
class. But there was very little of it indeed that he missed or that 
missed him.

   He was born in a tenement in that section where the Gilder Tenement 
House Commission found 324,000 persons living out of sight and reach of a 
green spot of any kind, and where sometimes the buildings--front, middle, 
and rear--took up ninety-three per cent of all the space in the block. 
Such a home as he had was there, and of the things that belonged to it he 
was the heir. The sunlight was not among them. It "never entered" there. 
Darkness and discouragement did, and dirt. Later on, when he took to the 
dirt as his natural weapon in his battles with society, it was said of him 
that it was the only friend that stuck to him, and it was true. Very early 
the tenement gave him up to the street. The thing he took with him as the 
one legacy of home was the instinct for the crowd, which meant that the 
tenement had wrought its worst mischief upon him; it had smothered that in 
him around which character is built. The more readily did he fall in with 
the street and its ways. Character implies depth, a soil, and growth. The 
street is all surface. Nothing grows there; it hides only a sewer.

   It taught him gambling as its first lesson, and stealing as the next. 
The two are never far apart. From shooting craps behind the "cop's" back 
to filching from the grocer's stock or plundering a defenceless pedler is 
only a step. There is in both the spice of law-breaking that appeals to 
the shallow ambition of the street as heroic. At the very time when the 
adventurous spirit is growing in the boy, and his games are all of daring, 
of chasing and being chased, the policeman looms up to take a hand, and is 
hailed with joyful awe. Occasionally the raids have a comic tinge. A 
German grocer wandered into police headquarters with an appeal for 
protection against the boys.

   "Vat means dot 'cheese it'?" he asked, rubbing his bald head in 
helpless bewilderment. "Efery dime dey says 'cheese it,' somedings vas 
gone."

   To the lawlessness of the street the home opposes no obstacle, as we 
have seen. Within the memory of most of us the school did not. It might 
have more to offer even now. But we have gone such a long way since the 
day I am thinking of that I am not going to find fault. I used to think 
that some of them needed to be made over, until they were fit to turn out 
whole, sound boys, instead of queer manikins stuffed with information for 
which they have no use, and which is none of their business anyhow. It 
seemed to me, sometimes, when watching the process of cramming the school 
course with the sum of human knowledge and conceit, as if it all meant 
that we distrusted Nature's way of growing a man from a boy, and had set 
out to show her a shorter cut. A common result was the kind of mental 
befogment that had Abraham Lincoln murdered by Ballington Booth, and a 
superficiality, a hopeless slurring of tasks, that hitched perfectly with 
the spirit of the street, and left nothing to be explained in the verdict 
of the reformatory, "No moral sense." There was no moral sense to be got 
out of the thing, for there was little sense of any kind in it. The boy 
was not given a chance to be honest with himself by thinking a thing 
through; he came naturally to accept as his mental horizon the headlines 
in his penny paper and the literature of the Dare-Devil-Dan-the-Death-
Dealing-Monster-of-Dakota order, which comprise the ordinary æsthetic 
equipment of the slum. The mystery of his further development into the 
tough need not perplex anybody.

   But Jacob Beresheim had not even the benefit of such schooling as there 
was to be had. He did not go to school, and nobody cared. There was indeed 
a law directing that every child should go, and a corps of truant officers 
to catch him if he did not; but the law had been a dead letter for a 
quarter of a century. There was no census to tell which children ought to 
be in school, and no place but a jail to put those in who shirked. Jacob 
was allowed to drift. From the time he was twelve till he was fifteen, he 
told me, he might have gone to school three weeks,-- no more.

   Church and Sunday-school missed him. I was going to say that they 
passed by on the other side, remembering the migration of the churches up-
town as the wealthy moved out of and the poor into the region south of 
Fourteenth Street. But that would hardly be fair. They moved after their 
congregations; but they left nothing behind. In the twenty years that 
followed the war, while enough to people a large city moved in down-town, 
the number of churches there was reduced from 141 to 127. Fourteen 
Protestant churches moved out. Only two Roman Catholic churches and a 
synagogue moved in. I am not aware that there has been any large increase 
of churches in the district since, but we have seen that the crowding has 
not slackened pace. Jacob had no trouble in escaping the Sunday-school, as 
he had escaped the public school. His tribe will have none until the 
responsibility incurred in the severance of Church and State sits less 
lightly on a Christian community, and the Church, from a mob, shall have 
become an army, with von Moltke's plan of campaign, "March apart, fight 
together." The Christian Church is not alone in its failure. The Jew's boy 
is breaking away from safe moorings rather faster than his brother of the 
new dispensation. The Church looks on, but it has no cause for 
congratulation. He is getting nothing in place of that which he lost, and 
the result is bad. There is no occasion for profound theories about it. 
The facts are plain enough. The new freedom has something to do with it; 
but neglect to look after the young has quite as much. Apart from its 
religious aspect, seen from the angle of the community's interest wholly, 
the matter is of the gravest import.

   What the boy's play has to do with building character in him Froebel 
has told us. Through it, he showed us, the child "first perceives moral 
relations," and he made that the basis of the kindergarten and all common-
sense education. That prop was knocked out. New York never had a 
children's playground till within the last three years. Truly it seemed, 
as Abram S. Hewitt said, as if in the early plan of our city the children 
had not been thought of at all. Such moral relations as Jacob was able to 
make out ran parallel with the gutter always, and counter to law and order 
as represented by the policeman and the landlord. The landlord had his 
windows to mind, and the policeman his lamps and the city ordinances which 
prohibit even kite-flying below Fourteenth Street where the crowds are. 
The ball had no chance at all. We have seen in New York a boy shot down by 
a policeman for the heinous offence of playing football in the street on 
Thanksgiving Day. But a boy who cannot kick a ball around has no chance of 
growing up a decent and orderly citizen. He must have his childhood, so 
that he may be fitted to give to the community his manhood. The average 
boy is just like a little steam-engine with steam always up. The play is 
his safety-valve. With the landlord in the yard and the policeman on the 
street sitting on his safety-valve and holding it down, he is bound to 
explode. When he does, when he throws mud and stones, and shows us the 
side of him which the gutter developed, we are shocked, and marvel much 
what our boys are coming to, as if we had any right to expect better 
treatment of them. I doubt if Jacob, in the whole course of his wizened 
little life, had ever a hand in an honest game that was not haunted by the 
spectre of the avenging policeman. That he was not "doing anything" was no 
defence. The mere claim was proof that he was up to mischief of some sort. 
Besides, the policeman was usually right. Play in such a setting becomes a 
direct incentive to mischief in a healthy boy. Jacob was a healthy enough 
little animal.

   Such fun as he had he got out of law-breaking in a small way. In this 
he was merely following the ruling fashion. Laws were apparently made for 
no other purpose that he could see. Such a view as he enjoyed of their 
makers and executors at election seasons inspired him with seasonable 
enthusiasm, but hardly with awe. A slogan, now, like that raised by 
Tammany's late candidate for district attorney, 1--"To hell with reform!"--
was something he could grasp. Of what reform meant he had only the vaguest 
notion, but this thing had the right ring to it. Roosevelt preaching 
enforcement of law was from the first a "lobster" to him, not to be taken 
seriously. It is not among the least of the merits of the man that, by his 
sturdy personality, as well as by his un-yielding persistence, he won the 
boy over to the passive admission that there might be something in it. It 
had not been his experience.

   There was the law which sternly commanded him to go to school, and 
which he laughed at every day. Then there was the law to prevent child 
labor. It cost twenty-five cents for a false age certificate to break 
that, and Jacob, if he thought of it at all, probably thought of perjury 
as rather an expensive thing. A quarter was a good deal to pay for the 
right to lock a child up in a factory, when he ought to have been at play. 
The excise law was everybody's game. The sign that hung in every saloon, 
saying that nothing was sold there to minors, never yet barred out his 
"growler" when he had the price. There was another such sign in the 
tobacco shop, forbidding the sale of cigarettes to boys of his age. Jacob 
thought that when he had the money he smoked as many as fifteen packs a 
day, and he laughed when he told me. He laughed, too, when he remembered 
how the boys of the East Side took to carrying balls of cord in their 
pockets, on the wave of the Lexow reform, on purpose to measure the 
distance from the school door to the nearest saloon. They had been told 
that it should be two hundred feet, according to law. There were schools 
that had as many as a dozen within the tabooed limits. It was in the 
papers how, when the highest courts said that the law was good, the saloon 
keepers attacked the schools as a nuisance and detrimental to property. In 
a general way Jacob sided with the saloon keeper; not because he had any 
opinion about it, but because it seemed natural. Such opinions as he 
ordinarily had he got from that quarter.

   When, later on, he came to be tried, his counsel said to me, "He is an 
amazing liar." No, hardly amazing. It would have been amazing if he had 
been anything else. Lying and mockery were all around him, and he adjusted 
himself to the things that were. He lied in self-defence.

   Jacob's story ends here, as far as he is personally concerned. The 
story of the gang begins. So trained for the responsibility of 
citizenship, robbed of home and of childhood, with every prop knocked from 
under him, all the elements that make for strength and character trodden 
out in the making of the boy, all the high ambition of youth caricatured 
by the slum and become base passions,-- so equipped he comes to the 
business of life. As a "kid" he hunted with the pack in the street. As a 
young man he trains with the gang, because it furnishes the means of 
gratifying his inordinate vanity; that is the slum's counterfeit of self-
esteem. Upon the Jacobs of other days there was a last hold,-- the 
father's authority. Changed conditions have loosened that also. There is a 
time in every young man's life when he knows more than his father. It is 
like the measles or the mumps, and he gets over it, with a little 
judicious firmness in the hand that guides. It is the misfortune of the 
slum boy of to-day that it is really so, and that he knows it. His father 
is an Italian or a Jew, and cannot even speak the language to which the 
boy is born. He has to depend on him in much, in the new order of things. 
The old man is "slo," he is "Dutch." He may be an Irishman with some 
advantages; he is still a "foreigner." He loses his grip on the boy.

   Ethical standards of which he has no conception clash. Watch the 
meeting of two currents in river or bay, and see the line of drift that 
tells of the struggle. So in the city's life strive the currents of the 
old and the new, and in the churning the boy goes adrift. The last hold 
upon him is gone. That is why the gang appears in the second generation, 
the first born upon the soil,--a fighting gang if the Irishman is there 
with his ready fist, a thievish gang if it is the East Side Jew,--and 
disappears in the third. The second boy's father is not "slow." He has had 
experience. He was clubbed into decency in his own day, and the night 
stick wore off the glamour of the thing. His grip on the boy is good, and 
it holds.

   It depends now upon chance what is to become of the lad. But the slum 
has stacked the cards against him. There arises in the lawless crowd a 
leader, who rules with his stronger fists or his readier wit. Around him 
the gang crystallizes, and what he is it becomes. He may be a thief, like 
David Meyer, a report of whose doings I have before me. He was just a 
bully, and, being the biggest in his gang, made the others steal for him 
and surrender the "swag," or take a licking. But that was unusual. 
Ordinarily the risk and the "swag" are distributed on more democratic 
principles. Or he may be of the temper of Mike of Poverty Gap, who was 
hanged for murder at nineteen. While he sat in his cell at police head-
quarters, he told with grim humor of the raids of his gang on Saturday 
nights when they stocked up at "the club." They used to "hook" a butcher's 
cart or other light wagon, wherever found, and drive like mad up and down 
the avenue, stopping at saloon or grocery to throw in what they wanted. 
His job was to sit at the tail of the cart with a six-shooter and pop at 
any chance pursuer. He chuckled at the recollection of how men fell over 
one another to get out of his way. "It was great to see them run," he 
said. Mike was a tough, but with a better chance he might have been a 
hero. The thought came to him, too, when it was all over and the end in 
sight. He put it all in one sober, retrospective sigh, that had in it no 
craven shirking of the responsibility which was properly his: "I never had 
no bringing up."

   There was a meeting some time after his death to boom a scheme for 
"getting the boys off the street," and I happened to speak of Mike's case. 
In the audience was a gentleman of means and position, and his daughter, 
who manifested great interest and joined heartily in the proposed 
movement. A week later, I was thunderstruck at reading of the arrest of my 
sympathetic friend's son for train-wrecking up the state. The fellow was 
of the same age as Mike. It appeared that he was supposed to be attending 
school, but had been reading dime novels instead, until he arrived at the 
point where he "had to kill some one before the end of the month." To that 
end he organized a gang of admiring but less resourceful comrades. After 
all, the planes of fellowship of Poverty Gap and Madison Avenue lie nearer 
than we often suppose. I set the incident down in justice to the memory of 
my friend Mike. If this one went astray with so much to pull him the right 
way and but the single strand broken, what then of the other?

   Mike's was the day of Irish heroics. Since their scene was shifted from 
the East Side, there has come over there an epidemic of child crime of 
meaner sort, but following the same principle of gang organization. It is 
difficult to ascertain the exact extent of it, because of the well-meant 
but, I am inclined to think, mistaken effort on the part of the children's 
societies to suppress the record of it for the sake of the boy. Enough 
testimony comes from the police and the courts, however, to make it clear 
that thieving is largely on the increase crease among the East Side boys. 
And it is amazing at what an early age it begins. When, in the fight for a 
truant school, I had occasion to gather statistics upon this subject, to 
meet the sneer of the educational authorities that the "crimes" of street 
boys compassed at worst the theft of a top or a marble, I found among 278 
prisoners, of whom I had kept the run for ten months, two boys, of four 
and eight years respectively, arrested for breaking into a grocery, not to 
get candy or prunes, but to rob the till. The little one was useful to 
"crawl through a small hole." There were "burglars" of six and seven 
years; and five in a bunch, the whole gang apparently, at the age of 
eight. "Wild" boys began to appear in court at that age. At eleven, I had 
seven thieves, two of whom had a record on the police blotter, and an 
"habitual liar"; at twelve, I had four burglars, three ordinary thieves, 
two arrested for drunkenness, three for assault, and three incendiaries; 
at thirteen, five burglars, one with a "record," as many thieves, one 
"drunk," five charged with assault and one with forgery; at fourteen, 
eleven thieves and house-breakers, six highway robbers,-- the gang on its 
unlucky day, perhaps,--and ten arrested for fighting, not counting one who 
had assaulted a police-man, in a state of drunken frenzy. One of the gangs 
made a specialty of stealing baby carriages, when they were left 
unattended in front of stores. They "drapped the kids in the hallway" and 
"sneaked" the carriages. And so on. The recital was not a pleasant one, 
but it was effective. We got our truant school, and one way that led to 
the jail was blocked.

   It may be that the leader is neither thief nor thug, but ambitious. In 
that case the gang is headed for politics by the shortest route. Likewise, 
sometimes, when he is both. In either case it carries the situation by 
assault. When the gang wants a thing, the easiest way seems to it always 
to take it. There was an explosion in a Fifth Street tenement, one 
winter's night, that threw twenty families into a wild panic, and injured 
two of the tenants badly. There was much mystery about it, until it came 
out that the housekeeper had had a "run in" with the gang in the block. It 
wanted club room in the house, and she would not let it in. Beaten, it 
avenged itself in characteristic fashion by leaving a package of gunpowder 
on the stairs, where she would be sure to find it when she went the rounds 
with her candle to close up. That was a gang of the kind I have reference 
to, headed straight for Albany. And what is more, it will get there, 
unless things change greatly. The gunpowder was just a "bluff" to frighten 
the house-keeper, an instalment of the kind of politics it meant to play 
when it got its chance.

   There was "nothing against" this gang except a probable row with the 
saloon keeper, since it applied elsewhere for house room. Not every gang 
has a police record of theft and "slugging" beyond the early encounters of 
the street. "Our honorable leader" is not always the captain of a band of 
cut-throats. He is the honorary president of the "social club" that bears 
his name, and he counts for something in the ward. But the ethical 
standards do not differ. "Do others, or they will do you," felicitously 
adapted from Holy Writ for the use of the slum, and the classic war-cry, 
"To the victor the spoils," made over locally to read, "I am not in 
politics for my health," still interpret the creed of the political as of 
the "slugging" gang. They draw their inspiration from the same source. Of 
what gang politics mean every large city in our country has had its 
experience. New York is no exception. History on the subject is being made 
yet, in sight of us all.

   Our business with the gang, however, is in the making of it. Take now 
the showing of the reformatory, 2 to which I have before made reference, 
and see what light it throws upon the matter:77.80 per cent of prisoners 
with no moral sense, or next to none, yet more than that proportion 
possessed of "good natural mental capacity," which is to say that they had 
the means of absorbing it from their environment, if there had been any to 
absorb. Bad homes sent half (47.79) of all prisoners there; bad company 
97.60 per cent. The reformatory repeats the prison chaplain's verdict, 
"weakness, not wickedness," in its own way: "Malevolence does not 
characterize the criminal, but aversion to continuous labor." If "the 
street" had been written across it in capital letters, it could not have 
been made plainer. Less than 15 per cent of the prisoners came from good 
homes, and one in sixty-six (1.51) had kept good company; evidently he was 
not of the mentally capable. They will tell you at the prison that, under 
its discipline, eighty odd per cent are set upon their feet and make a 
fresh start. With due allowance for a friendly critic, there is still room 
for the three-fourths labelled normal, of "natural mental capacity." They 
came to their own with half a chance, even the chance of a prison. The 
Children's Aid Society will give you still better news of the boys rescued 
from the slum before it had branded them for its own. Scarce five per cent 
are lost, though they leave such a black mark that they make trouble for 
all the good boys that are sent out from New York. Better than these was 
the kindergarten record in San Francisco. New York has no monopoly of the 
slum. Of nine thousand children from the slummiest quarters of that city 
who had gone through the Golden Gate Association's kindergartens, just one 
was found to have got into jail. The merchants who looked coldly on the 
experiment before, brought their gold to pay for keeping it up. They were 
hard-headed men of business, and the demonstration that schools were 
better than jails any day appealed to them as eminently sane and practical.

   And well it might. The gang is a distemper of the slum that writes upon 
the generation it plagues the receipt for its own corrective. It is not 
the night stick, though in the acute stage that is not to be dispensed 
with. Neither is it the jail. To put the gang behind iron bars affords 
passing relief, but it is like treating a symptom without getting at the 
root of the disease. Prophylactic treatment is clearly indicated. The boy 
who flings mud and stones is entering his protest in his own way against 
the purblind policy that gave him jails for schools and the gutter for a 
playground; that gave him dummies for laws and the tenement for a home. He 
is demanding his rights, of which he has been cheated,--the right to his 
childhood, the right to know the true dignity of labor that makes a self-
respecting manhood. The gang, rightly understood, is our ally, not our 
enemy. Like any ailment of the body, it is a friend come to tell us of 
something that has gone amiss. The thing for us to do is to find out what 
it is, and set it right.

   That is the story of the gang. That we have read and grasped its lesson 
at last, many things bear witness. Here is the League for Political 
Education providing a playground for the children up on the West Side, 
near the model tenements which I described. Just so! With a decent home 
and a chance for the boy to grow into a healthy man, his political 
education can proceed without much further hindrance. Now let the League 
for Political Education trade off the policeman's club for a boys' club, 
and it may consider its course fairly organized.

   I spoke of the instinct for the crowd in the man as evidence that the 
slum had got its grip on him. And it is true of the boy. The experience 
that the helpless poor will not leave their slum when a chance of better 
things is offered is wearily familiar to most of us. One has to have 
resources to face the loneliness of the woods and the fields. We have seen 
what resources the slum has at its command. In the boy it laid hold of the 
instinct for organization, the desire to fall in and march in line that 
belongs to all boys, and is not here, as abroad, cloyed with military 
service in the young years,--and anyhow is stronger in the American boy 
than in his European brother,--and perverted it to its own use. That is 
the simple secret of the success of the club, the brigade, in winning back 
the boy. It is fighting the street with its own weapon. The gang is the 
club run wild.

   How readily it owns the kinship was never better shown than by the 
experience of the college settlement girls, when they first went to make 
friends in the East Side tenements. I have told it before, but it will 
bear telling again, for it holds the key to the whole business. They 
gathered in the drift, all the little embryo gangs that were tuning up in 
the district, and made them into clubs,--Young Heroes, Knights of the 
Round Table, and such like; all except one, the oldest, that had begun to 
make a name for itself with the police. That one held aloof, observing 
coldly what went on, to make sure it was "straight." They let it be, 
keeping the while an anxious eye upon it; until one day there came a 
delegation with this olive branch: "If you will let us in, we will change 
and have your kind of a gang." Needless to say it was let in. And within a 
year, when, through a false rumor that the concern was moving away, there 
was a run on the settlement's penny provident bank, the converted gang 
proved itself its stanchest friend by doing actually what John Halifax did 
in Miss Mulock's story: it brought all the pennies it could raise in the 
neighborhood by hook or by crook and deposited them as fast as the regular 
patrons--the gang had not yet risen to the dignity of a bank account--drew 
them out, until the run ceased. This same gang which, the year before, was 
training for trouble with the police!

   The cry, "Get the boys off the street," that has been raised in our 
cities, as the real gravity of the situation has been made clear, has led 
to the adoption of curfew ordinances in many places. Any attempt to fit 
such a scheme to metropolitan life would result only in adding one more 
dead-letter law, more dangerous than all the rest, to those we have. New 
York is New York, and one look at the crowds in the streets and the 
tenements will convince anybody. Besides, the curfew rings at nine 
o'clock. The dangerous hours, when the gang is made, are from seven to 
nine, between supper and bedtime. This is the gap the club fills out. The 
boys take to the street because the home has nothing to keep them there. 
To lock them up in the house would only make them hate it more. The club 
follows the line of least resistance. It has only to keep also on the line 
of common sense. It must be a real club, not a reformatory. Its proper 
function is to head off the jail. The gang must not run it. But rather 
that than have it help train up a band of wretched young cads. The signs 
are not hard to make out. When a boy has had his head swelled by his 
importance as a member of the Junior Street-cleaning Band to the point of 
reproving his mother for throwing a banana peel in the street, the thing 
to be done is to take him out and spank him, if it is reverting to "the 
savagery" of the street. Better a savage than a cad. The boys have the 
making of both in them. Their vanity furnishes abundant material for the 
cad, but only when unduly pampered. Left to itself, the gang can be 
trusted not to develop that kink.

   It comes down in the end to the personal influence that is always most 
potent in dealing with these problems. We had a gang start up once when my 
boys were of that age, out in the village on Long Island where we lived. 
It had its head-quarters in our barn, where it planned divers raids that 
aimed at killing the cat and other like out-rages; the central fact being 
that the boys had an air rifle, with which it was necessary to murder 
something. My wife discovered the conspiracy, and, with woman's wit, 
defeated it by joining the gang. She "gave in wood" to the election bon-
fires, and pulled the safety valve upon all the other plots by entering 
into the true spirit of them,--which was adventure rather than mischief,--
and so keeping them within safe lines. She was elected an honorary member, 
and became the counsellor of the gang in all its little scrapes. I can yet 
see her dear brow wrinkled in the study of some knotty gang problem, which 
we discussed when the boys had been long asleep. They did not dream of it, 
and the village never knew what small tragedies it escaped, nor who it was 
that so skilfully averted them.

   It is always the women who do those things. They are the law and the 
gospel to the boy, both in one. It is the mother heart, I suppose, and 
there is nothing better in a all the world. I am reminded of the 
conversion of "the Kid" by one who was in a very real sense the mother of 
a social settlement up-town, in the latitude of Battle Row. The Kid was 
driftwood. He had been cast off by a drunken father and mother, and was 
living on what he could scrape out of ash barrels, and an occasional dime 
for kindling-wood which he sold from a wheel-barrow, when the gang found 
and adopted him. My friend adopted the gang in her turn, and civilized it 
by slow stages. Easter Sunday came, when she was to redeem her promise to 
take the boys to witness the services in a neighboring church, where the 
liturgy was especially impressive. It found the larger part of the gang at 
her door,--a minority, it was announced, were out stealing potatoes, hence 
were excusable,--in a state of high indignation.

   "The Kid's been cussin' awful," explained the leader. The Kid showed in 
the turbulent distance, red-eyed and raging.

   "But why?" asked my friend, in amazement.

   "'Cause he can't go to church!"

   It appeared that the gang had shut him out, with a sense of what was 
due to the occasion, because of his rags. Restored to grace, and choking 
down reminiscent sobs, the Kid sat through the Easter service, surrounded 
by the twenty-seven "proper" members of the gang. Civilization had 
achieved a victory, and no doubt my friend remembered it in her prayers 
with thanksgiving. The manner was of less account. Battle Row has its own 
ways, even in its acceptance of means of grace.

   I walked home from the office in the early gloaming. The street wore 
its normal aspect of mingled dulness and the kind of expectancy that is 
always waiting to turn any excitement, from a fallen horse to a fire, to 
instant account. The early June heat had driven the multitudes from the 
tenements into the street for a breath of air. The boys of the block were 
holding a meeting at the hydrant. In some way they had turned the water 
on, and were splashing in it with bare feet, revelling in the sense that 
they were doing something that "went against" their enemy, the policeman. 
Upon the quiet of the evening broke a bugle note and the tramp of many 
feet keeping time. A military band came around the corner, stepping 
briskly to the tune of "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Their white duck 
trousers glimmered in the twilight, as the hundred legs moved as one. 
Stoops and hydrant were deserted with a rush. The gang fell in with joyous 
shouts. The young fellow linked arms with his sweetheart and fell in too. 
The tired mother hurried with the baby carriage to catch up. The butcher 
came, hot and wiping his hands on his apron, to the door to see them pass.

   "Yes," said my companion, guessing my thoughts,--we had been speaking 
of the boys,--"but look at the other side. There is the military spirit. 
Do you not fear danger from it in this country?"

   No, my anxious friend, I do not. Let them march; and if with a gun, 
better still. Often enough it is the choice of the gun on the shoulder, 
or, by and by, the stripes on the back in the lockstep gang.