"Broke," The Man Without the Dime

by Edwin A. Brown

USE OF APPROPRIATION.

The people of our cities may expect, and should forcibly demand from its public officials, that the money expended in municipal “charities” should be well adapted, elastic in its application, based upon wise, scientific conclusions, and on a thorough exhaustive experimentation.

It is safe to say that New York stands in the front rank as the worst governed city in America. But when such a city creates an appropriation from its public treasury for the maintenance and management of a Municipal Emergency Home, there can be no reason to doubt the wisdom or the success of the experimentation of municipal charities. In fact, we ought not to speak of municipal charity, but rather to say that the city appropriates such money from tax-payers as has been earned by those who are temporarily destitute,—that those housed in such municipal institutions are but receiving assistance as an interest on their past earnings. A Municipal Emergency Home should not be considered as a charitable institution, but as an institution offering the right to every toiler to receive the hospitality of his fellowmen in time of need.

CO-OPERATION OF THE PUBLIC.

If the so-called influential and responsible people of every city would use half the effort they now use in subscribing, managing and advertising private charitable institutions to create a public sentiment so that the city would establish a Municipal Emergency Home with the most modern features, and if they then would continue in an advisory and co-operative relation to it, the writer does not hesitate to express his belief that the advantages, every time, would be on the side of a Municipal Emergency Home or, as a matter of fact, on any other so-called charitable institution managed by the community itself as a governmental function and in a co-operative capacity.

The destitute man or woman who is compelled to apply for temporary relief at a Municipal Emergency Home comes immediately into the care of the city and may be turned at once to the protective treatment of which many stand in need.

RELATION TO THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT.

It is well to bear in mind the fact that a scientifically managed Municipal Emergency Home not only raises the standard of other lodging houses in the city, but to make its influence most effective, the co-operation of the Health Department is absolutely necessary. In fact, the most humane, the most scientific and in all respects the most desirable way to manage a Municipal Emergency Home is through the direct management and supervision of the city Health Department,—never under that of the Police Department. The institution deals with human beings who are out of adjustment to the community. The homeless, wandering citizen should not be considered as a derelict, a human monster, a criminal, a vagrant and what not, to be hounded to death by the brutal police system.

PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS AND THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT.

All religious, charitable and private lodging houses also should be under a rigid inspection of the Health Department of the city, lest they may become dangerous competitors to a Municipal Emergency Home by undoing the work accomplished by this exemplary institution. Because they can be maintained at a low standard of cleanliness and order, they are sought by the tired, weary, homeless workingman, that is,—when he has the money! No city should ever countenance an uninspected sheltering place where human beings are forced to congregate, where those harbored, in many instances, communicate disease to the country boy, seeking a job, and teach him lessons in mendicancy, vice and crime.