These are but two incidents showing how badly this city needs a Municipal Emergency Home. There are two-score others that sadden me as I think of them. What a beautiful thing it would be for San Antonio to be one of the first cities in the South to build a home!
Leaving San Antonio on my way to Dallas, I stopped for a short time in Austin where the Texas Legislature was in session.
During my investigations I have never seen a public notice, in the press or elsewhere, guiding a destitute person to the Associated Charities or publicly offering aid, until I came to Austin. Here I saw just one such notice. It was not at the depot nor at any employment office nor at the emergency hospital, nor at the prison door. It was plastered up in the office of a first-class hotel which at that time was headquarters for the assembled lawmakers of the State of Texas. Well, perhaps, that body of estimable gentlemen did need a little charity.
The spirit of power, energy and enterprise has been breathed into the city of Dallas, with all its youth, strength and progress. There is not an old-fashioned thing about her. She fairly flows with the present. The things most in evidence in this city are new thoughts, new ways, new things. Realizing the spirit of the era, her badge of honor, her insignia should be “Just Now,” covering two meanings. Just (in the spirit of justice) “disposed to render to each man his due”; Now, “in the least possible time.”
When I told the people of Dallas that their beautiful public library of fifteen thousand volumes could afford to have on file for public use only one daily paper and that I had seen a dozen men and boys waiting their turn to read the “want ads”; that the Salvation Army had turned many back into the street because they had no money; that a private employment office was robbing men and boys; that I had found a sixteen-year-old, starving boy in the city forced to beg or steal, who declared that the Associated Charities of New York had shipped seventeen of them from the Orphan Asylums through to Dallas and turned them adrift in the western country and that the Salvation Army absolutely refused to give them aid; of a mother with five little children, one a babe in arms, who spent thirty-six hours in a vacant, old storeroom which was absolutely barren, while the husband looked for work; of the suffering of the many toilers in Dallas walking the streets all night, seeking shelter under death-dealing conditions, and that none of these seemed to know that there was in existence such a thing as organized charity in Dallas, and that many of them, even had they known it, would have taken the chances of starvation rather than to have asked alms, no matter how kindly disposed Dallas charity organizations might be toward them,—they listened with deep interest.
Houston, San Antonio and Dallas received my counsel, not in the spirit of criticism, but as a message holding a great truth, a message containing facts which must be regarded in acts that will reward themselves twofold in the still newer Houston, San Antonio and Dallas,—cities which every day are stirring into new industrial activity the northern hills of the “Lone Star” State.
CHAPTER XXX
Milwaukee—Will the Philosophy of Socialism End Poverty?
“Politics rests on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity.”—Emerson.