Municipal Lodging House, New York City
Favorite Corner, Female Dormitory
Only the real inmates, and not the casual visitors, can know the “Helping Hand” for what it is in practice. Morally, it is a breeder of crime, and not an aid in any way to the recovery of self-respect. The only commendable feature about it is the Labor Bureau run in connection,—an adjunct that every Municipal Emergency Home should have.
Such a Bureau is proof that the cry of men not wanting to work is a false cry. I wish those who pay heed to it could have seen the object lesson that morning when those hundreds of middle aged men, young men and boys, almost tumbled over one another in their eagerness to reach the window and get the jobs of carpet-sweeping, dish-washing, store-clerking, stenography, and other kinds of work that were being given out.
Can such a rich city as Kansas City afford with impunity to neglect its duty to its “hewers of wood and drawers of water?”
CHAPTER IX
The New England “Conscience”
“See to it only that thyself is here,— and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”—Emerson.