Crimes of Charity

THE NEWEST BORZOI BOOKS
ASPHALT By Orrick Johns BACKWATER By Dorothy Richardson CENTRAL EUROPE By Friedrich Naumann RUSSIA'S MESSAGE By William English Walling THE BOOK OF SELF By James Oppenheim THE BOOK OF CAMPING By A. Hyatt Verrill THE ECHO OF VOICES By Richard Curle MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY By Alexander Kornilov THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING By Alexandre Benois THE JOURNAL OF LEO TOLSTOI (1895-1899) THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP By William H. Davies Preface by Bernard Shaw
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN REED
NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVII
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To my Naomi
There is a literary power which might be called Russian—a style of bald narration which carries absolute conviction of human character, in simple words packed with atmosphere. Only the best writers have it; this book is full of it. I read the manuscript more than a year ago, and I remember it chiefly as a series of vivid pictures—a sort of epic of our City of Dreadful Day. Here we see and smell and hear the East Side; its crowded, gasping filth, the sour stench of its grinding poverty, the cries and groans and lamentations in many alien tongues of the hopeful peoples whose hope is broken in the Promised Land. Pale, undersized, violent children at play in the iron street; the brown, steamy warmth of Jewish coffee-houses on Grand Street; sick tenement rooms quivering and breathless in summer heat—starkly hungry with the December wind cutting through broken windows; poets, musicians, men and women with the blood of heroes and martyrs, babies who might grow up to be the world's great—stunted, weakened, murdered by the unfair struggle for bread. What human stories are in this book! What tremendous dramas of the soul!
It is as if we were under water, looking at the hidden hull of this civilization. Evil growths cling to it—houses of prostitution, sweat-shops which employ the poor in their bitter need at less than living wages, stores that sell them rotten food and shabby clothing at exorbitant prices, horrible rents, and all the tragi-comic manifestations of Organised Charity.