The Battle with the Slum - Chapters XV-XVII



CHAPTER XV.
"NEIGHBOR" THE PASSWORD 
   
TRULY, we live in a wonderful time. Here have I been trying to bring up to 
date this account of the battle with the slum, and in the doing of it have 
been compelled, not once, but half a dozen times, to go back and wipe out 
what I had written because it no longer applied. The ink was not dry on 
the page that pleaded for the helpless ones who have to leave the hospital 
before they are fit to take up their battle with the world, so as to make 
room for others in instant need--one of the saddest of sights that has 
wrung the heart of the philanthropist these many years--when I read in my 
paper of the four million dollar gift to build a convalescents' home at 
once. I would rather be in that man's shoes than be the Czar of all the 
Russias. I would rather be blessed by the grateful heart of man or woman, 
who but just now was without hope, than have all the diamonds in the 
Kimberley mines. Yes, ours is the greatest of all times. Since I started 
putting these pages in shape for the printer, the Child Labor Committee 
and the Tuberculosis Committee have been formed to put up bars against the 
slum where it roamed unrestrained; the Tenement House Department has been 
organized and got under way, and the knell of the double-decker and the 
twenty-five-foot lot has been sounded. Two hundred tenements are going up 
to-day under the new law, that are in all respects model buildings, as 
good as the City and Suburban Home Company's houses, though built for 
revenue only. All over the greater city the libraries are rising which, 
when Mr. Carnegie's munificent plan has been worked out to the full, are 
to make, with the noble central edifice in Bryant Park, the greatest free 
library system of any day, with a princely fortune to back it.(1) New 
bridges are spanning our rivers, tunnels are being bored, engineers are 
blasting a way for the city out of its bonds on crowded Manhattan, 
devotion and high principle rule once more at the City Hall, Cuba is free, 
Tammany is out; the boy is coming into his rights; the toughs of Hell's 
Kitchen have taken to farming on the site of Stryker's Lane, demolished 
and gone.

   And here upon my table lies a letter from the head-worker of the 
University Settlement, which the postman brought half an hour ago, that 
lets more daylight in, it seems to me, than all the rest. He has been 
thinking, he writes, of how to yoke the public school and the social 
settlement together, and the conviction that comes to everybody who thinks 
to solve problems, has come to him, too, that the way to do a thing is to 
do it. So he proposes, since they need another house over at the West Side 
branch, to acquire it by annexing the public school and turning "all the 
force and power that is in the branch into the bare walls of the school, 
there to develop a social spirit and an enthusiasm" among young and old 
that shall make of the school truly the neighborhood house and soul. And 
he asks us all to fall in.

   I say it lets daylight in, because we have all felt for some time that 
something like this was bound to come, only how was not clear yet. Here is 
this immense need of a tenement house population of more than two million 
souls: something to take the place, as far as anything can, of the home 
that isn't there, a place to meet other than the saloon; a place for the 
young to do their courting--there is no room for it in the tenement, and 
the street is not the place for it, yet it has got to be done; a place to 
make their elders feel that they are men and women, something else than 
mere rent-paying units. Why, it was this very need that gave birth to the 
social settlement among us, and we see now that with the old machinery it 
does not supply it and never can. "I can reach the people of just about 
two blocks about me here," said this same head worker of the same 
settlement to me an evening or two ago, "and that is all." But there are 
hundreds of blocks filled with hungry minds and souls. A hundred 
settlements would be needed where there is one.

   The churches could not meet the need. They ought to and some day they 
will, when we build the church downtown and the mission uptown. But now 
they can't. There are not enough of them, for one thing. They do try; for 
only the other day, when I went to tell the Methodist ministers of it, and 
of how they ought to back up the effort to have the public school thrown 
open on Sundays for concerts, lectures, and the like, after the first 
shock of surprise they pulled themselves together manfully and said that 
they would do it. They saw with me that it is a question, not of damaging 
the Lord's Day, but of wresting it from the devil, who has had it all this 
while over there on the East Side, and on the West Side too. All along the 
swarming streets with no church in sight, but a saloon on every corner, 
stand the big schoolhouses with their spacious halls, empty and silent and 
grim, waiting to have the soul breathed into them that alone can make 
their teaching effective for good citizenship. They belong to the people. 
Why should they not be used by the people Sunday and weekday and day and 
night, for whatever will serve their ends--if the janitor has a fit?

   Now here come the social settlements with their plan of doing it. What 
claim have they to stand in the gap?

   This one, that they are there now, though they do not fill it. The gap 
has been too much for them. They need the help of those they came to 
succor quite as much as they need them. I have no desire to find fault 
with any one who wants to help his neighbor. God forbid! I am not even a 
settlement worker. But when I read, as I did yesterday, a summing up of 
the meaning of settlements by three or four residents in such houses, and 
see education, reform politics, local improvements, legislation, 
characterized as the aim and objects of settlement work, I am afraid 
somebody is on the wrong track. Those things are good, provided they 
spring naturally from the intellectual life that moves in and about the 
settlement house; indeed, unless they do, something has quite decidedly 
miscarried there. But they are not the object. When I pick up a report of 
one settlement and another, and find them filled with little essays on the 
people and their ways and manners, as if the settlement were some kind of 
a laboratory where they prepare human specimens for inspection and 
classification,--stick them on pins like bugs and hold them up and twirl 
them so as to let us have a good look,--then I know that somebody has 
wandered away off, and that he knows he has, for all he is making a brave 
show trying to persuade himself and us that it was worth the money. No use 
going into that farther. The fact is that we have all been groping. We saw 
the need and started to fill it, and in the strange surroundings we lost 
our bearings and the password. We got to be sociological instead of 
neighborly. It is not the same thing.

   Here is the lost password: "neighbor." That is all there is to it. If a 
settlement isn't the neighbor of those it would reach, it is nothing at 
all. "A place," said the sub-warden of Toynbee Hall in the discussion I 
spoke of, and set it on even keel in an instant, "a place of good will 
rather than of good works." That is it. We had become strangers, had 
drifted apart, and the settlement came to introduce us to one another 
again, as it were, to remind us that we were neighbors. And because that 
was the one thing above all that was wanted, it became an instant success 
where it was not converted into a social experiment station; and even that 
could not kill it. If any one doubts that I have the right password, let 
him look for the proof in the organization this past month of a new 
"coöperative social settlement," to be carried on "in conjunction and 
association with the people in the neighborhood." Not a new idea at all, 
only a fresh grip taken on the old one. It is sound enough and strong 
enough to set itself right if we will only let it. Only last week Dr. 
Elliot of the Hudson Guild over in West Twenty-sixth Street told me of his 
boys' and their fathers' subscribing their savings with the hope of owning 
the guild house themselves. They had never let go their grip on the idea 
over there. They are of Felix Adler's flock.

   But take now the elements as we have them: this great and terrible 
longing for neighborliness where the home feeling is gone with the home; 
the five hundred school buildings in the metropolis that have already 
successfully been put to neighborhood use. It was nothing else that Dr. 
Leipziger did when he began his evening lectures in the schools to grown 
audiences a dozen years ago, and proudly pointed to a record of twenty-two 
thousand in attendance for the season. Last winter nearly a million 
workingmen and their wives attended over three thousand lectures.(2) Dr. 
Leipziger is now the strong advocate of opening the schools on the 
Sabbath, as a kind of Sunday opening we can all join in. Of course, he is; 
he has seen what it means. These factors, the need, the means, and then 
the settlement that is there to put the two together, as its own great 
opportunity--has it not a good claim?

   Experimenting with the school? Well, what of it? They can stand it. 
What else have we been doing the last half-dozen years or more, and what 
splendid results have we not to show for it? It is the spirit that calls 
every innovation frills, and boasts that we have got the finest schools in 
the world which blocks the way to progress. It cropped out at a meeting of 
settlement workers and schoolmen that had for its purpose a better 
understanding. In the meeting one gray-haired teacher arose and said that 
the schools as they are were good enough for his father, and therefore 
they were good enough for him. That teacher's place is on the shelf that 
has been provided now for those who have done good work in a day that is 
past. "Vaudeville," sneered the last Tammany mayor, when the East Side 
asked for a playground for the children. "Vaudeville for the masses killed 
Rome." The masses responded by killing him politically. My father was a 
teacher, and it is because he was a good one and taught me that when 
growth ceases decay begins, that I am never going to be satisfied, no 
matter how good the schools get to be. I want them ever closer to the 
people's life, because upon that does that very life depend. Turn back to 
what I said about the slum tenant and see what it means: in the slum only 
4.97 per cent of native parentage. All but five in a hundred had either 
come over the sea, or else their parents had. Nearly half (46.65) were 
ignorant, illiterate; for the whole city the percentage of illiteracy was 
only 7.69. Turn to the reformatory showing: of ten thousand and odd 
prisoners 66.55 utterly illiterate, or able to read and write only with 
difficulty. Do you see how the whole battle with the slum is fought out in 
and around the public school? For in ignorance selfishness finds its 
opportunity, and the two together make the slum.

   The mere teaching is only a part of it. The school itself is a bigger--
the meeting there of rich and poor. Out of the public school comes, must 
come if we are to last, the real democracy that has our hope in keeping. I 
wish it were in my power to compel every father to send his boy to the 
public school; I would do it, and so perchance bring the school up to the 
top notch where it was lacking. The President of the United States today 
sets a splendid example to us all in letting his boys mingle with those 
who are to be their fellow-citizens by and by. It is precisely in the 
sundering of our society into classes that have little in common, that are 
no longer neighbors, that our peril lives. A people cannot work together 
for the good of the state if they are not on speaking terms. In the gap 
the slum grows up. That was one reason why I hailed with a shout the 
proposition of Mr. Schwab, the steel trust millionnaire, to take a 
regiment of boys down to Staten Island on an excursion every day in 
summer. Let me see, I haven't told about that, I think. He had bought a 
large property down there, all beach and lake and field and woodland, and 
proposed to build a steamer with room for a thousand or two, and then take 
them down with a band of music on board, and give them a swim, a romp, and 
a jolly good time. As soon as he spoke to me about it, I said: Yes! and 
hitch it to the public school somehow; make it part of the curriculum. No 
more nature study out of a barrel! Take the whole school, teachers and 
all, and let them do their own gathering of specimens. So the children 
shall be under efficient control, and so the tired teacher shall get a 
chance too. But more than all, so it may befall that the boys themselves 
shall come to know one another better and that more of them shall get 
together; for what boy does not want a jolly good romp, and why should he 
not be Mr. Schwab's guest for the day, if he does count his dollars by 
millions?

   The working plan the Board of Education can be trusted to provide. I 
think it will do it gladly, once it understands. Indeed, why should it 
not? No one thinks of surrendering the schools, but simply of enlisting 
the young enthusiasm that is looking for employment, and of a way of 
turning it to use, while the board is constantly calling for just that 
priceless personal element which money cannot buy and without which the 
schools will never reach their highest development. Precedents there are 
in plenty. If not, we can make them. New York is the metropolis. In Toledo 
the Park Commissioners take the public school boys sleigh-riding in 
winter. Our Park Commissioner is ploughing up land for them to learn 
farming and gardening. It is all experimenting, and let us be glad we have 
got to that, if we do blunder once and again. The laboratory study, the 
bug business, we shall get rid of, and we shall get rid of some 
antediluvian ways that hamper our educational development yet. We shall 
find a way to make the schools centres of distribution in our library 
system as its projectors have hoped. Just now it cannot be done, because 
it takes about a year for a book to pass the ten or twelve different kinds 
of censorship our sectarian zeal has erected about the school. We shall 
have the assembly halls thrown open, not only for Dr. Leipziger's lectures 
and Sunday concerts (already one permit has been granted for the latter), 
but for trades-union meetings, and for political meetings, if I have my 
way. Until we consider our politics quite good enough to be made welcome 
in the school, they won't be good enough for it. The day we do let them 
in, the saloon will lose its grip, and not much before. When the fathers 
and mothers meet under the school roof as in their neighborhood house, and 
the children have their games, their clubs, and their dances there--when 
the school, in short, takes the place in the life of the people in the 
crowded quarters which the saloon now monopolizes, there will no longer be 
a saloon question in politics; and that day the slum is beaten.

   Very likely I shall not find many to agree with me on this question of 
political meetings. Nonpartisan let them be then. So we shall more readily 
find our way out of the delusion that national politics have any place in 
municipal elections or affairs, a notion that has delayed the day of 
decency too long. We shall grow, along with the schools, and by and by our 
party politics will be clean enough to sit in the school seats too. And 
oh! by the way, as to those seats, is there any special virtue in the 
"deadline" of straight rows that have come down to us from the time of the 
Egyptians or farther back still? No, I would not lay impious hand on any 
hallowed tradition, educational or otherwise. But is it that? And why is 
it? It would be so much easier to make the school the people's hall and 
the boys' club, if those seats could be moved around in human fashion; 
they might come naturally into human shape in the doing of it. But, as I 
said, I wouldn't for the world--not for the world. Only, why is the 
deadline hallowed?

   I am willing to leave it to the Board. We are singularly fortunate in 
having just now a mayor who will listen, a Board of Education that will 
act, and a superintendent of school buildings who can and will build 
schools to meet neighborhood needs--if we will make them plain. The last 
time I dropped into his office I found him busy, between tiffs with 
contractors, sketching an underground story for the schoolhouse, like the 
great hall of the Cooper Institute, that should at the same time serve the 
purpose of an assembly hall, and put the roof garden one story nearer the 
street. That was his answer to the cry of elevators. "We do not need 
municipal boys' club houses," said Mayor Low in vetoing the bill to build 
them last winter, "we have the schools." True! Then let us have them used, 
and if the classroom is not the best kind of place for them, the 
experience of the settlements will show us what kind is. They carry on no 
end of such clubs. And let the Board of Education trustily leave the rest 
to Superintendent Snyder, who knows. Isn't enough to make a man believe 
the millennium has come, to find that there is at last some one who knows? 
Not necessarily all at once.

   In a copy of Charities which just now came in (did I not say that it 
goes that way all the time?) I read that the Chicago Small Parks 
Commission has recommended nine neighborhood parks at a cost of a million 
dollars,--wise City of the Winds! we waited till we had to pay a million 
for each park,--but that the playgrounds had been left to the Board of 
Education, which body was "not certain whether school funds may be spent 
for playgrounds apart from buildings." However, they are going to provide 
seventy-five school yards big enough to romp in, and the other trouble 
will be got over. In Boston they are planning neighborhood entertainment 
as a proper function of the school. Here we shall find for both school and 
settlement their proper places with one swoop. The kindergarten, manual 
training, and the cooking school, all experiments in their day, cried out 
as fads by some, have brought common sense in their train. When it rules 
the public school in our cities--I said it before--we can put off our 
armor; the battle with the slum will be over.

(1. The Astor, Lenox, and Tilden foundations represent a total of some 
seven millions of dollars. The great central library, erected by the city, 
is to cost five millions, and the fifty branches for which the city gives 
the sites and Andrew Carnegie the buildings, 5,200,000. The city's 
contribution for maintenance will be over half a million yearly)

(2. The first year's record was 186 lectures and 22,149 hearers. Last 
winter (1901–1902) there were 3172 lectures in over 100 places, and the 
total attendance was 928,251. This winter there will be 115 centres. It is 
satisfactory to know that churches and church houses fall in with the plan 
more and more where there are no schools to serve as halls)



CHAPTER XVI.
REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH 
   
I HAVE sketched in outline the gains achieved in the metropolis since its 
conscience awoke. Now, in closing this account, I am reminded of the story 
of an old Irishman who died here a couple of years ago. Patrick Mullen was 
an honest blacksmith. He made guns for a living. He made them so well that 
one with his name on it was worth a good deal more than the market price 
of guns. Other makers went to him with offers of money for the use of his 
stamp; but they never went twice. When sometimes a gun of very superior 
make was brought to him to finish, he would stamp it P. Mullen, never 
Patrick Mullen. Only to that which he himself had wrought did he give his 
honest name without reserve. When he died, judges and bishops and other 
great men crowded to his modest home by the East River, and wrote letters 
to the newspapers telling how proud they had been to call him friend. Yet 
he was, and remained to the end, plain Patrick Mullen, blacksmith and gun-
maker.

   In his life he supplied the answer to the sigh of dreamers in all days: 
when will the millennium come? It will come when every man is a Patrick 
Mullen at his own trade; not merely a P. Mullen, but a Patrick Mullen. The 
millennium of municipal politics, when there shall be no slum to fight, 
will come when every citizen does his whole duty as a citizen, not before. 
As long as he "despises politics," and deputizes another to do it for him, 
whether that other wears the stamp of a Croker or of a Platt,--it matters 
little which,--we shall have the slum, and be put periodically to the 
trouble and the shame of draining it in the public sight. A citizen's duty 
is one thing that cannot be farmed out safely; and the slum is not limited 
by the rookeries of Mulberry or Ludlow streets. It has long roots that 
feed on the selfishness and dulness of Fifth Avenue quite as greedily as 
on the squalor of the Sixth Ward. The two are not nearly so far apart as 
they look.

   I am not saying this because it is anything new, but because we have 
had, within the memory of us all, an illustration of its truth in 
municipal politics. Waring and Roosevelt were the Patrick Mullens of the 
reform administration which Tammany replaced with her insolent platform, 
"To hell with reform!" It was not an ideal administration, but it can be 
said of it, at least, that it was up to the times it served. It made 
compromises with spoils politics, and they were wretched failures. It took 
Waring and Roosevelt on the other plan, on which they insisted, of 
divorcing politics from the public business, and they let in more light 
than even my small parks over on the East Side. For they showed us where 
we stood and what was the matter with us. We believed in Waring when he 
demonstrated the success of his plan for cleaning the streets; not before. 
When Roosevelt announced his programme, of enforcing the excise law 
because it was law, a howl arose that would have frightened a less 
resolute man from his purpose. But he went right on doing the duty he was 
sworn to do. And when, at the end of three months of clamor and abuse, we 
saw the spectacle of the saloon keepers formally resolving to help the 
police instead of hindering them; of the prison ward in Bellevue Hospital 
standing empty for three days at a time, an astonishing and unprecedented 
thing, which the warden could only attribute to the "prompt closing of the 
saloon at one A.M."; and of the police force recovering its lost self-
respect,--we had found out more and greater things than whether the excise 
law was a good or a bad law. We understood what Roosevelt meant when he 
insisted upon the "primary virtues" of honesty and courage in the conduct 
of public business. For the want of them in us, half the laws that touched 
our daily lives had became dead letters or vehicles of blackmail and 
oppression. It was worth something to have that lesson taught us in that 
way; to find out that simple, straightforward, honest dealing as between 
man and man is after all effective in politics as in gun-making. Perhaps 
we have not mastered the lesson yet. But we have not discharged the 
teacher, either.

   Courage, indeed! There were times during that stormy spell when it 
seemed as if we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby as a people. All 
the outcry against the programme of order did not come from the lawless 
and the disorderly, by any means. Ordinarily decent, conservative citizens 
joined in counselling moderation and virtual compromise with the law-
breakers--it was nothing else--to "avoid trouble." The old love of fair 
play had been whittled down by the jack-knife of all-pervading expediency 
to an anæmic desire to "hold the scales even," which is a favorite modern 
device of the devil for paralyzing action in men. You cannot hold the 
scales even in a moral issue. It inevitably results in the triumph of 
evil, which asks nothing better than the even chance to which it is not 
entitled. When the trouble in the Police Board had reached a point where 
it seemed impossible not to understand that Roosevelt and his side were 
fighting a cold and treacherous conspiracy against the cause of good 
government, we had the spectacle of a Christian Endeavor Society inviting 
the man who had hatched the plot, the bitter and relentless enemy whom the 
mayor had summoned to resign, and afterward did his best to remove as a 
fatal obstacle to reform,--inviting this man to come before it and speak 
of Christian citizenship! It was a sight to make the bosses hug themselves 
with glee. For Christian citizenship is their nightmare, and nothing is so 
cheering to them as evidence that those who profess it have no sense.

   Apart from the moral bearings of it, what this question of enforcement 
of law means in the life of the poor was illustrated by testimony given 
before the Police Board under oath. A captain was on trial for allowing 
the policy swindle to go unchecked in his precinct. Policy is a kind of 
penny lottery, with alleged daily drawings which never take place. The 
whole thing is a pestilent fraud, which is allowed to exist only because 
it pays heavy blackmail to the police and the politicians. Expert 
witnesses testified that eight policy shops in the Twenty-first Ward, 
which they had visited, did a business averaging about thirty-two dollars 
a day each. The Twenty-first is a poor Irish tenement ward. The policy 
sharks were getting two hundred and fifty dollars or more a day of the 
hard-earned wages of those poor people, in sums of from one and two cents 
to a quarter, without making any return for it. The thing would seem 
incredible were it not too sadly familiar. The saloon keeper got his share 
of what was left, and rewarded his customer by posing as the "friend of 
the poor man" whenever his business was under scrutiny; I have yet in my 
office the record of a single week during the hottest of the fight between 
Roosevelt and the saloons, as showing of what kind that friendship is. It 
embraces the destruction of eight homes by the demon of drunkenness; the 
suicide of four wives, the murder of two others by drunken husbands, the 
killing of a policeman in the street, and the torture of an aged woman by 
her rascal son, who "used to be a good boy till he took to liquor, when he 
became a perfect devil." In that rôle he finally beat her to death for 
giving shelter to some evicted fellow-tenants who else would have had to 
sleep in the street. Nice friendly turn, wasn't it?

   And yet there was something to be said for the saloon keeper. He gave 
the man the refuge from his tenement which he needed. I say needed, 
purposely. There has been a good deal of talk in our day about the saloon 
as a social necessity. About all there is to that is that the saloon is 
there, and the necessity too. Man is a social animal, whether he lives in 
a tenement or in a palace. But the palace has resources; the tenement has 
not. It is a good place to get away from at all times. The saloon is 
cheery and bright, and never far away. The man craving human companionship 
finds it there. He finds, too, in the saloon keeper one who understands 
his wants much better than the reformer who talks civil service in the 
meetings. "Civil service" to him and his kind means yet a contrivance for 
keeping them out of a job. The saloon keeper knows the boss, if he is not 
himself the boss or his lieutenant, and can steer him to the man who will 
spend all day at the City Hall, if need be, to get a job for a friend, and 
all night pulling wires to keep him in it, if trouble is brewing. Mr. 
Beecher used to say, when pleading for bright hymn tunes, that he didn't 
want the devil to have the monopoly of all the good music in the world. 
The saloon has had the monopoly up to date of all the cheer in the 
tenements. If its owner has made it pan out to his own advantage and the 
boss's, we at least have no just cause of complaint. We let him have the 
field all to himself.

   It is good to know that the day is coming when he will have a rival. 
Model saloons may never be more than a dream in New York, but even now the 
first of a number of "social halls" is being planned by Miss Lillian Wald 
of the Nurses' Settlement and her co-workers that shall give the East Side 
the chance to eat and dance and make merry without the stigma of the bar 
upon it all. The first of the buildings will be opened within a year.

   As to this boss, of whom we hear so much, what manner of man is he? 
That depends on how you look at him. I have one in mind, a district boss, 
whom you would accept instantly as a type if I were to mention his name, 
which I shall not do for a reason which I fear will shock you: he and I 
are friends. In his private capacity I have real regard for him. As a 
politician and a boss I have none at all. I am aware that this is taking 
low ground in a discussion of this kind, but perhaps the reader will 
better understand the relations of his "district" to him, if I let him 
into mine. There is no political bond between us, of either district or 
party, just the reverse. It is purely personal. He was once a police 
justice,--at that time he kept a saloon,--and I have known few with more 
common sense, which happens to be the one quality especially needed in 
that office. Up to the point where politics came in I could depend upon 
him entirely. At that point he let me know bluntly that he was in the 
habit of running his district to suit himself. The way he did it brought 
him under the just accusation of being guilty of every kind of rascality 
known to politics. When next our paths would cross each other, it would 
very likely be on some errand of mercy, to which his feet were always 
swift. I recall the distress of a dear and gentle lady at whose table I 
once took his part. She could not believe that there was any good in him; 
what he did must be done for effect. Some time after that she wrote, 
asking me to look after an East Side family that was in great trouble. It 
was during the severe cold spell of the winter of 1898, and there was need 
of haste. I went over at once; but although I had lost no time, I found my 
friend the boss ahead of me. It was a real pleasure to me to be able to 
report to my correspondent that he had seen to their comfort, and to add 
that it was unpolitical charity altogether. The family was that of a 
Jewish widow with a lot of little children. He is a Roman Catholic. There 
was not even a potential vote in the house, the children being all girls. 
They were not in his district, to boot, and as for effect, he was rather 
shamefaced at my catching him at it. I do not believe that a soul has ever 
heard of the case from him to this day.

   My friend is a Tammany boss, and I shall not be accused of partiality 
for him on that account. During that same cold spell a politician of the 
other camp came into my office and gave me a hundred dollars to spend as I 
saw fit among the poor. His district was miles up-town, and he was most 
unwilling to disclose his identify, stipulating in the end that no one but 
I should know where the money came from. He was not seeking notoriety. The 
plight of the suffering had appealed to him, and he wanted to help where 
he could, that was all.

   Now, I have not the least desire to glorify the boss in this. He is not 
glorious to me. He is simply human. Often enough he is a coarse and brutal 
fellow, in his morals as in his politics. Again, he may have some very 
engaging personal traits at bind his friends to him with the closest of 
ties. The poor man sees the friend, the charity, the answer that is able 
and ready to help him in need; is it any wonder that he overlooks the 
source of this power, this plenty,--that he forgets the robbery in the 
robber who is "good to the poor"? Anyhow, if anybody got robbed, it was 
"the rich." With the present ethical standards of the slum, it is easy to 
construct a scheme of social justice out of it that is very comforting all 
round, even to the boss himself, though he is in need of no sympathy or 
excuse. "Politics," he will tell me in his philosophic moods, "is a game 
for profit. The city foots the bills." Patriotism means to him working for 
the ticket that shall bring more profit.

   "I regard," he says, lighting his cigar, "a repeater as a shade off a 
murderer, but you are obliged to admit that in my trade he is a necessary 
evil." I am not obliged to do anything of the kind, but I can understand 
his way of looking at it. He simply has no political conscience. He has 
gratitude, loyalty to a friend,--that is part of his stock in trade,--
fighting blood, plenty of it, all the good qualities of the savage; 
nothing more. And a savage he is, politically, with no soul above the 
dross. He would not rob a neighbor for the world; but he will steal from 
the city--though he does not call it by that name--without a tremor, and 
count it a good mark. When I tell him that, he waves his hand toward Wall 
Street as representative of the business community and toward the office 
of his neighbor, the padrone, as representative of the railroads, and says 
with a laugh, "Don't they all do it?"

   The boss believes in himself. It is one of his strong points. And he 
has experience to back him. In the fall of 1894 we shook off boss rule in 
New York, and set up housekeeping for ourselves. We kept it up three 
years, and then went back to the old style. I should judge that we did it 
because we were tired of too much virtue. Perhaps we were not built to 
hold such a lot at once. Besides, it is much easier to be ruled than to 
rule. That fall, after the election, when I was concerned about what would 
become of my small parks, of the Health Department in which I took such 
just pride, and of a dozen other things, I received one unvarying reply to 
my anxious question, or rather two. If it was the Health Department, I was 
told: "Go to Platt. He is the only man who can do it. He is a sensible 
man, and will see that it is protected." If small parks, it was: "Go to 
Croker. He will not allow the work to be stopped." A playgrounds bill was 
to be presented in the legislature, and everybody advised: "Go to Platt. 
He won't object, it is popular." And so on. My advisers were not 
politicians. They were business men, but recently honestly interested in 
reform. I was talking one day, with a gentleman of very wide reputation as 
a philanthropist, about the unhappy lot of the old fire-engine horses,--
which, after lives of toil that deserve a better fate, are sold for a song 
to drag out a weary existence hauling some huckster's cart around,--and 
wishing that they might be pensioned off to live out their years on a 
farm, with enough to eat and a chance to roll in the grass. He was much 
interested, and promptly gave me this advice: "I tell you what you do. You 
go and see Croker. He likes horses." No wonder the boss believes in 
himself. He would be less than human if he did not. And he is very human.

   I had voted on the day of the Greater New York election,--the Tammany 
election, as we learned to call it afterward,--in my home out in the 
Borough of Queens, and went over to the depot to catch the train for the 
city. On the platform were half a dozen of my neighbors, all business men, 
all "friends of reform." Some of them were just down from breakfast. One I 
remember as introducing a resolution, in a meeting we had held, about the 
discourtesy of local politicians. He looked surprised when reminded that 
it was election day. "Why, is it today?" he said. "They didn't send any 
carriage," said another regretfully. "I don't see what's the use," said 
the third; "the roads are just as bad as when we began talking about it." 
(We had been trying to mend them.) The fourth yawned and said: "I don't 
care. I have my business to attend to." And they took the train, which 
meant that they lost their votes. The Tammany captain was busy hauling his 
voters by the cartload to the polling place. Over there stood a reform 
candidate who had been defeated in the primary, and puffed out his chest. 
"The politicians are afraid of me," he said. They slapped him on the back, 
as they went by, and told him that he was a devil of a fellow.

   So Tammany came back. And four long years we swore at it. But I am 
afraid we swore at the wrong fellow. The real Tammany is not the 
conscienceless rascal that plunders our treasury and fattens on our 
substance. That one is a mere counterfeit. It is the voter who waits for a 
carriage to take him to the polls; the man who "doesn't see what's the 
use"; the business man who says "business is business," and has no time to 
waste on voting; the citizen who "will wait to see how the cat jumps, 
because he doesn't want to throw his vote away"; the cowardly American who 
"doesn't want to antagonize" anybody; the fool who "washes his hands of 
politics." These are the real Tammany, the men after the boss's own heart. 
For every one whose vote he buys, there are two of these who give him 
theirs for nothing. We shall get rid of him when these withdraw their 
support, when they become citizens of the Patrick Mullen stamp, as 
faithful at the polling place as he was at the forge; not before.

   There is as much work for reform at the top as at the bottom. The man 
in the slum votes according to his light, and the boss holds the candle. 
But the boss is in no real sense a leader. He follows instead, always as 
far behind the moral sentiment of the community as he thinks is safe. He 
has heard it said that a community will not be any better than its 
citizens, and that it will be just as good as they are, and he applies the 
saying to himself. He is no worse a boss than the town deserves. I can 
conceive of his taking credit to himself as some kind of a moral 
instrument by which the virtue of the community may be graded, though that 
is most unlikely. He does not bother himself with the morals of anything. 
But right here is his Achilles heel. The man has no conscience. He cannot 
tell the signs of it in others. It always comes upon him unawares. Reform 
to him simply means the "outs" fighting to get in. The real thing he will 
always underestimate. Witness Richard Croker in the last election offering 
Bishop Potter, after his crushing letter to the mayor, to join him in 
purifying the city, and, when politely refused, setting up an "inquiry" of 
his own. The conclusion is irresistible that he thought the bishop either 
a fool or a politician playing for points. Such a man is not the power he 
seems. He is formidable only in proportion to the amount of shaking it 
takes to rouse the community's conscience.

   The boss is like the measles, a distemper of a self-governing people's 
infancy. When we shall have come of age politically, he will have no 
terrors for us. Meanwhile, being charged with the business of governing, 
which we left to him because we were too busy making money, he follows the 
track laid out for him, and makes the business pan out all that is in it. 
He fights when we want to discharge him. Of course he does; no man likes 
to give up a good job. He will fight or bargain, as he sees his way clear. 
He will give us small parks, play piers, new schools, anything we ask, to 
keep his place, while trying to find out "the price" of this conscience 
which he does not understand. Even to the half of his kingdom he will 
give, to be "in" on the new deal. He has done it before, and there is no 
reason that he can see why it should not be done again. And he will appeal 
to the people whom he is plundering to trust him because they know him.

   Odd as it sounds, this is where he has his real hold. I have shown why 
this is so. To the poor people of his district the boss is a friend in 
need. He is one of them. He does not want to reform them; far from it. No 
doubt it is very ungrateful of them, but the poor people have no desire to 
be reformed. They do not think they need to be. They consider their moral 
standards quite as high as those of the rich, and resent being told that 
they are mistaken. The reformer comes to them from another world to tell 
them these things, and goes his way. The boss lives among them. He helped 
John to a job on the pipes in their hard winter, and got Mike on the 
force. They know him as a good neighbor, and trust him to their harm. He 
drags their standard ever farther down. The question for those who are 
trying to help them is how to make them transfer their allegiance, and 
trust their real friends instead.

   It ought not be a difficult question to answer. Any teacher could do 
it. He knows, if he knows anything, that the way to get and keep the 
children's confidence is to trust them, and let them know that they are 
trusted. They will almost always come up to the demand thus made upon 
them. Preaching to them does little good; preaching at them still less. 
Men, whether rich or poor, are much like children. The good in them is 
just as good, and the bad, in view of their enlarged opportunities for 
mischief, not so much worse, all considered. A vigorous optimism, a stout 
belief in one's fellowman, is better equipment in a campaign for civic 
virtue than stacks of tracts and arguments, economic and moral. There is 
good bottom, even in the slum, for that kind of an anchor to get a grip 
on. Some years ago I went to see a boxing match there had been much talk 
about. The hall was jammed with a rough and noisy crowd, hotly intent upon 
its favorite. His opponent, who hailed, I think, from somewhere in 
Delaware, was greeted with hostile demonstrations as a "foreigner." But as 
the battle wore on, and he was seen to be fair and manly, while the New 
Yorker struck one foul blow after another, the attitude of the crowd 
changed rapidly from enthusiastic approval of the favorite to scorn and 
contempt; and in the last round, when he knocked the Delawarean over with 
a foul blow, the audience rose in a body and yelled to have the fight 
given to the "foreigner," until my blood tingled with pride. For the 
decision would leave it practically without a cent. It had staked all it 
had on the New Yorker. "He is a good man," I heard on all sides, while the 
once favorite sneaked away without a friend. "Good" meant fair and manly 
to that crowd. I thought, as I went to the office the next morning, that 
it ought to be easy to appeal to such a people with measures that were 
fair and just, if we could only get on common ground. But the only hint I 
got from my reform paper was an editorial denunciation of the brutality of 
boxing, on the same page that had an enthusiastic review of the college 
football season. I do not suppose it did any harm, for the paper was 
probably not read by one of the men it had set out to reform. But suppose 
it had been, how much would it have appealed to them? Exactly the 
qualities of robust manliness which football is supposed to encourage in 
college students had been evoked by the trial of strength and skill which 
they had witnessed. As to the brutality, they knew that fifty young men 
are maimed or killed at football to one who fares ill in a boxing match. 
Would it seem to them common sense, or cant and humbug?

   That is what it comes down to in the end: common sense and common 
honesty. Common sense to steer us clear of the "sociology" reef that would 
make our cause ridiculous, on Fifth Avenue and in East Broadway. I have no 
quarrel with the man who would do things by system and in order; but the 
man who would reduce men and women and children to mere items in his 
infallible system and classify and sub-classify them until they are as 
dried up as his theories, that man I will fight till I die. One throb of a 
human heart is worth a whole book of his stuff. Common honesty to keep us 
afloat at all. If we worship as success mere money-getting, closing our 
eyes to the means, let us at least say it like the man who told me to-day 
that "after all, one has to admire Bill Devery; he's got the dough." 
Devery was Tammany's police chief. The man is entitled to his opinion, but 
if it gets hitched to the reform cart by mistake, the load is going to be 
spilled. It has been, more than once.

   A saving sense of humor might have avoided some of those pitfalls. I am 
seriously of the opinion that a professional humorist ought to be attached 
to every reform movement, to keep it from making itself ridiculous by 
either too great solemnity or too much conceit. As it is, the enemy 
sometimes employs him with effect. Failing the adoption of that plan, I 
would recommend a decree of banishment against photographers, press-
clippings men, and the rest of the congratulatory staff. Why should the 
fact that a citizen has done a citizen's duty deserve to be celebrated in 
print and picture, as if something extraordinary had happened? The smoke 
of battle had not cleared away after the victory of reform in the fall of 
1894, before the citizens' committee and all the little sub-committees 
rushed pell-mell to the photographer's to get themselves on record as the 
men who did it. The spectacle might have inspired in the humorist the 
advice to get two sets made, while they were about it, one to serve by and 
by as an exhibit of the men who didn't; and, as the event proved, he would 
have been right.

   But it is easy to find fault, and on that tack we get no farther. Those 
men did a great work, and they did it well. They built from the bottom and 
they built the foundation broad and strong. Good schools, better homes, 
and a chance for the boy are good bricks to build with in such a structure 
as we are rearing. They last. Just now we are laying another course; more 
than one, I hope. But even if it were different, we need not despair. Let 
the enemy come back once more, it will not be to stay. It may be that, 
like Moses and his followers, we of the present day shall see the promised 
land only from afar and with the eye of faith, because of our sins; that 
to a younger and sturdier to-morrow it shall be given to blaze the path of 
civic righteousness that was our dream. I like to think that it is so, and 
that that is the meaning of the coming of men like Roosevelt and Waring at 
this timé with their simple appeal to the reason of honest men. Unless I 
greatly err in reading the signs of the times, it is indeed so, and the 
day of the boss and of the slum is drawing to an end. Our faith has felt 
the new impulse; rather, I should say, it has given it. The social 
movements, and that which we call politics, are but a reflection of what 
the people honestly believe, a chart of their aims and aspirations. 
Charity in our day no longer means alms, but justice. The social 
settlements are substituting vital touch for the machine charity that 
reaped a crop of hate and beggary. Charity organization--"conscience born 
of love" some one has well called it--is substituting its methods in high 
and low places for the senseless old ways. Its champions are oftener found 
standing with organized labor for legislation to correct the people's 
wrongs, and when the two stand together nothing can resist them. Through 
its teaching we are learning that our responsibility as citizens for a law 
does not cease with its enactment, but rather begins there. We are 
growing, in other words, to the stature of real citizenship. We are 
emerging from the kind of barbarism that dragged children to the jail and 
thrust them in among hardened criminals there, and that sat by helpless 
and saw the foundlings die in the infant hospital at the rate--really 
there was no rate; they practically all died, every one that was not 
immediately removed to a home and a mother. For four years now a joint 
committee of the State Charities' Aid Association and the Association for 
Improving the Condition of the Poor has taken them off the city's hands 
and adopted them out, and in every hundred now eighty-nine live and grow 
up! After all, not even a Jersey cow can take the place of a mother with a 
baby. And we are building a children's court that shall put an end to the 
other outrage, for boys taken there are let off on probation, to give them 
the chance under a different teaching from the slum's, which it denied 
them till now.

   We have learned that we cannot pass off checks for human sympathy in 
settlement of our brotherhood arrears. The Church, which once stood by 
indifferent, or uncomprehending, is hastening to enter the life of the 
people. I have told of how, in the memory of men yet living, one church, 
moving uptown away from the crowd, left its old Mulberry Street home to be 
converted into tenements that justly earned the name of "dens of death" in 
the Health Department's records, while another became the foulest lodging 
house in an unclean city, and of how it was a church corporation that 
owned the worst underground dive down-town in those bad old days, and 
turned a deaf ear to all remonstrances. The Church was "angling for 
souls." But soul in this world live in bodies endowed with reason. The 
results of that kind of fishing were empty pews and cold hearts, and the 
conscience-stricken cry that went up, "What shall we do to lay hold of 
this great multitude that has slipped from us?"

   The years have passed and brought the answer. To-day we see churches of 
every denomination uniting in a systematic canvass of the city to get at 
the facts of the people's life of which they had ceased to be a part, 
pleading for parks, playgrounds, kindergartens, libraries, clubs, and 
better homes. There is a new and hearty sound to the word "brother" that 
is full of hope. The cry has been answered. The gap in the social body, 
between rich and poor, is no longer widening. We are certainly coming 
closer together. A dozen years ago, when the King's Daughters lighted a 
Christmas tree in Gotham Court, the children ran screaming from Santa 
Claus as from a "bogey man." Here lately the boys in the Hebrew 
Institute's schools nearly broke the bank laying in supplies to do him 
honor. I do not mean that the Jews are deserting to join the Christian 
Church. They are doing that which is better,--they are embracing its 
spirit; and they and we are the better for it.

   "The more I know of the Other Half," writes a friend to me, "the more I 
feel the great gulf that is fixed between us, and the more profoundly I 
grieve that this is the best that Christian civilization has as yet been 
able to do toward a true social system." Let my friend take heart. She 
herself has been busy in my sight all these years binding up the wounds. 
If that be the most a Christian civilization has been able to do for the 
neighbor till now, who shall say that it is not also the greatest? "This 
do and thou shalt live," said the Lord of him who showed mercy. That was 
the mark of the brotherhood. No, the gulf is not widening. It is only that 
we have taken soundings and know it, and in the doing of it we have come 
to know one another. The rest we may confidently leave with Him who knows 
it all.

   God knows we waited long enough; and how close we were to one another 
all the while without knowing it! Two or three years ago at Christmas a 
clergyman, who lives out of town and has a houseful of children, asked me 
if I could not find for them a poor family in the city with children of 
about the same ages, whom they might visit and befriend. He worked every 
day in the office of a foreign mission in Fifth Avenue, and knew little of 
the life that moved about him in the city. I picked out a Hungarian widow 
in an East Side tenement, whose brave struggle to keep her little flock 
together had enlisted my sympathy and strong admiration. She was a cleaner 
in an office building; not until all the arrangements had been made did it 
occur to me to ask where. Then it turned out that she was scrubbing floors 
in the missionary society's house, right at my friend's door. They had 
passed one another every day, each in need of the other, and each as far 
from the other as if oceans separated them instead of a doorstep four 
inches wide.

   Looking back over the years that lie behind with their work, and 
forward to those that are coming, I see only cause for hope. As I write 
these last lines in a far-distant land, in the city of my birth, the 
children are playing under my window, and calling to one another with glad 
cries in my sweet mother-tongue, even as we did in the long ago. Life and 
the world are before them, bright with the promise of morning. So to me 
seem the skies at home. Not lightly do I say it, for I have known the toil 
of rough-hewing it on the pioneer line that turns men's hair gray; but I 
have seen also the reward of the toil. New York is the youngest of the 
world's great cities, barely yet out of knickerbockers. It may be that our 
century will yet see it as the greatest of them all. The task that is set 
it, the problem it has to solve and which it may not shirk, is the problem 
of civilization, of human progress, of a people's fitness for self-
government, that is on trial among us. We shall solve it by the world-old 
formula of human sympathy, of humane touch. Somewhere in these pages I 
have told of the woman in Chicago who accounted herself the happiest woman 
alive because she had at last obtained a playground for her poor 
neighbors' children. "I have lived here for years," she said to me, "and 
struggled with principalities and powers, and have made up my mind that 
the most and the best I can do is to live right here with my people and 
smile with them,--keep smiling; weep when I must, but smile as long as I 
possibly can." And the tears shone in her gentle old eyes as she said it. 
When we have learned to smile and weep with the poor, we shall have 
mastered our problem. Then the slum will have lost its grip and the boss 
his job.

   Until then, while they are in possession, our business is to hold taut 
and take in slack right along, never letting go for a moment.

   And now, having shown you the dark side of the city, which, after all, 
I love, with its great memories, its high courage, and its bright skies, 
as I love the little Danish town where my cradle stood, let me, before I 
close this account of the struggle with evil, show you also its good heart 
by telling you "the unnecessary story of Mrs. Ben Wah and her parrot." 
Perchance it may help you to grasp better the meaning of the Battle with 
the Slum. It is for such as she and for such as "Jim," whose story I told 
before, that we are fighting.



CHAPTER XVII.
THE UNNECESSARY STORY OF MRS. BEN WAH AND HER PARROT 
   
MRS. BEN WAH was dying. Word came up from the district office of the 
Charity Organization Society to tell me of it. Would I come and see her 
before I went away? Mrs. Ben Wah was an old charge of mine, the French 
Canadian widow of an Iroquois Indian, whom, years before, I had unearthed 
in a Hudson Street tenement. I was just then making ready for a voyage 
across the ocean to the old home to see my own mother, and the thought of 
the aged woman who laid away her children long ago by the cold camp-fires 
of her tribe in Canadian forests was a call not to be resisted. I went at 
once.

   The signs of illness were there in a notice tacked up on the wall, 
warning everybody to keep away when her attic should be still, until her 
friends could come from the charity office. It was a notion she had, Mrs. 
McCutcheon, the district visitor, explained, that would not let her rest 
till her "paper" was made out. For her, born in the wilderness, death had 
no such terror as prying eyes.

   "Them police fellows," she said, with the least touch of resentment in 
her gentle voice, "they might take my things and sell them to buy cigars 
to smoke." I suspect it was the cigar that grated harshly. It was ever to 
her a vulgar slur on her beloved pipe. In truth, the mere idea of Mrs. Ben 
Wah smoking a cigar rouses in me impatient resentment. Without her pipe 
she was not herself. I see her yet, stuffing it with approving forefinger, 
on the Christmas day when I had found her with tobacco pouch empty, and 
pocket to boot, and nodding the quaint comment from her corner, "It's no 
disgrace to be poor, but it's sometimes very inconvenient."

   There was something in the little attic room that spoke of the coming 
change louder than the warning paper. A half-finished mat, with its bundle 
of rags put carefully aside; the thirsty potato-vine on the fire-escape, 
which reached appealingly from its soap-box toward the window, as if in 
wondering search for the hands that had tended it so faithfully,--bore 
silent testimony that Mrs. Ben Wah's work-day was over at last. It had 
been a long day--how long no one may ever know. "The winter of the big
snow," or "the year when deer was scarce" on the Gatineau, is not as good 
a guide to time-reckoning in the towns as in the woods, and Mrs. Ben Wah 
knew no other. Her thoughts dwelt among the memories of the past as she 
sat slowly nodding her turbaned head, idle for once. The very head-dress, 
arranged and smoothed with unusual care, was "notice," proceeding from a 
primitive human impulse. Before the great mystery she "was ashamed and 
covered her head."

   The charity visitor told me what I had half guessed. Beyond the fact 
that she was tired and had made up her mind to die, nothing ailed Mrs. Ben 
Wah. But at her age, the doctor had said, it was enough; she would have 
her way. In faith, she was failing day by day. All that could be done was 
to make her last days as easy as might be. I talked to her of my travels, 
of the great salt water upon which I should journey many days; but her 
thoughts were in the lonely woods, and she did not understand. I told her 
of beautiful France, the language of which she spoke with a singularly 
sweet accent, and asked her if there was not something I might bring back 
to her to make her happy. As I talked-on, a reminiscent smile came into 
her eyes and lingered there. It was evidently something that pleased her. 
By slow degrees we dragged the bashful confession out of her that there 
was yet one wish she had in this life.

   Once upon a time, long, long ago, when, as a young woman, she had gone 
about peddling beads, she had seen a bird, such a splendid bird, big and 
green and beautiful, with a red turban, and that could talk. Talk! As she 
recalled the glorious apparition, she became quite her old self again, and 
reached for her neglected pipe with trembling hands. If she could ever see 
that bird again--but she guessed it was long since gone. She was a young 
woman then, and now she was old, so old. She settled back in her chair, 
and let the half-lighted pipe go out.

   "Poor old soul!" said Mrs. McCutcheon, patting the wrinkled hand in her 
lap. Her lips framed the word "parrot" across the room to me, and I nodded 
back. When we went out together it was settled between us that Mrs. Ben 
Wah was to be doctored according to her own prescription, if it broke the 
rules of every school of medicine.

   I went straight back to the office and wrote in my newspaper that Mrs. 
Ben Wah was sick and needed a parrot, a green one with a red tuft, and 
that she must have it right away. I told of her lonely life, and of how, 
on a Christmas Eve, years ago, I had first met her at the door of the 
Charity Organization Society, laboring up the stairs with a big bundle 
done up in blue cheese-cloth, which she left in the office with the 
message that it was for those who were poorer than she. They were opening 
it when I came in. It contained a lot of little garments of blanket stuff, 
as they used to make them for the pappooses among her people in the far 
North. It was the very next day that I found her in her attic, penniless 
and without even the comfort of her pipe. Like the widow of old, she had 
cast her mite into the treasury, even all she had.

   All this I told in my paper, and how she whose whole life had been 
kindness to others was now in need--in need of a companion to share her 
lonely life, of something with a voice, which would not come in and go 
away again, and leave her. And I begged that any one who had a green 
parrot with a red tuft would send it in at once.

   New York is a good town to live in. It has a heart. It no sooner knew 
that Mrs. Ben Wah wanted a parrot than it hustled about to supply one at 
once. The morning mail brought stacks of letters, with offers of money to 
buy a parrot. They came from lawyers, business men, and bank presidents, 
men who pore over dry ledgers and drive sharp bargains on 'Change, and are 
never supposed to give a thought to lonely widows pining away in poor 
attics. While they were being sorted, a poor little tramp song-bird flew 
in through the open window of the Charities Building in great haste, 
apparently in search of Mrs. McCutcheon's room. Its feathers were ruffled 
and its bangs awry, as if it had not had time to make its morning toilet, 
it had come in such haste to see if it would do. Though it could not talk, 
it might at least sing to the sick old woman--sing of the silent forests 
with the silver lakes deep in their bosom, where the young bucks trailed 
the moose and the panther, and where she listened at the lodge door for 
their coming; and the song might bring back the smile to her wan lips. But 
though it was nearly green and had a tousled top, it was not a parrot, and 
it would not do. The young women who write in the big books in the office 
caught it and put it in a cage to sing to them instead. In the midst of 
the commotion came the parrot itself, big and green, in a "stunning" cage. 
It was an amiable bird, despite its splendid get-up, and cocked its 
crimson head one side to have it scratched through the bars, and held up 
one claw, as if to shake hands.

   How to get it to Mrs. Ben Wah's without the shock killing her was the 
problem that next presented itself. Mrs. McCutcheon solved it by doing the 
cage up carefully in newspapers and taking it along herself. All the way 
down the bird passed muffled comments on the Metropolitan Railway service 
and on its captivity, to the considerable embarrassment of its keeper; but 
they reached the Beach Street tenement and Mrs. Ben Wah's attic at last. 
There Mrs. McCutcheon stowed it carefully away in a corner, while she 
busied herself about her aged friend.

   She was working slowly down through an address which she had designed 
to break the thing gently and by degrees, when the parrot, extending a 
feeler on its own hook, said "K-r-r-a-a!" behind its paper screen.

   Mrs. Ben Wah sat up straight and looked fixedly at the corner. Seeing 
the big bundle there, she went over and peered into it. She caught a quick 
breath and stared, wide-eyed.

   "Where you get that bird?" she demanded of Mrs. McCutcheon, faintly.

   "Oh, that is Mr. Riis's bird," said that lady, sparring for time; "a 
friend gave it to him--"

   "Where you take him?" Mrs. Ben Wah gasped, her hand pressed against her 
feeble old heart.

   Her friend saw, and gave right up.

   "I am not going to take it anywhere," she said. "I brought it for you. 
This is to be its home, and you are to be its mother, grandma, and its 
friend. You are to be always together from now on--always, and have a good 
time." With that she tore the paper from the cage.

   The parrot, after all, made the speech of the occasion. He considered 
the garret; the potato-field on the fire-escape, through which the 
sunlight came in, making a cheerful streak on the floor; Mrs. Ben Wah and 
her turban; and his late carrier: then he climbed upon his stick, turned a 
somersault, and said, "Here we are," or words to that effect. There-upon 
he held his head over to be scratched by Mrs. Ben Wah in token of a 
compact of friendship then and there made.

   Joy, after all, does not kill. Mrs. Ben Wah wept long and silently, 
big, happy tears of gratitude. Then she wiped them away, and went about 
her household cares as of old. The prescription had worked. The next day 
the "notice" vanished from the wall of the room, where there were now two 
voices for one.

   I came back from Europe to find my old friend with a lighter step and a 
lighter heart than in many a day. The parrot had learned to speak Canadian 
French to the extent of demanding his crackers and water in the lingo of 
the habitant. Whether he will yet stretch his linguistic acquirements to 
the learning of Iroquois I shall not say. It is at least possible. The two 
are inseparable. The last time I went to see them, no one answered my 
knock on the door-jamb. I raised the curtain that serves for a door, and 
looked in. Mrs. Ben Wah was asleep upon the bed. Perched upon her shoulder 
was the parrot, no longer constrained by the bars of a cage, with his head 
tucked snugly in her neck, asleep too. So I left them, and so I like to 
remember them always, comrades true.

   It happened that when I was in Chicago last spring I told their story 
to a friend, a woman. "Oh, write it!" she said. "You must!" And when I 
asked why, she replied, with feminine logic: "Because it is so 
unnecessary. The barrel of flour doesn't stick out all over it."

   Now I have done as she bade me. Perhaps she was right. Women know these 
things best. Like my own city, they have hearts, and will understand the 
unnecessary story of Mrs. Ben Wah and her parrot.