"Poverty and even neglect there may be, but nothing inhuman like that."
But in the face of all assertions to the contrary, worse neglect and cruelty than those given in the illustration do exist in all the large cities of England and the United States, which are within the field of our personal observation, unnoticed, because they are commonplace, unchampioned because they are too near home.
Fortunately, indeed, this seeming indifference is not evidence of hopeless moral turpitude in the nation or in the race, as would seem to be the cowardice and selfishness displayed at the Charity Bazaar fire in Paris, or the beastly inhumanity and unchivalry let loose among the animals who beat back women and children from chances of escape on board the ill-fated La Bourgogne, but it arises from false conceptions of the responsibilities of individuals toward the correction of unwholesome civic conditions, and from the false and pernicious assumption that there must always and everywhere be a certain amount of unredeemable depravity in every generation and in every community.
In England there is in vogue an expression, attributed, we believe, to the founder of the Salvation Army, to the effect that there must always be a class of criminals, wantons and loafers in every community, and which has been classified as "The hopelessly submerged ten per cent. stratum of society." We repeat this statement because of the enormity of the evil that lurks in the assumption of the condemnation.
Nothing could be more of an obstruction to progress than to condemn ten per cent., or any percentage, of the people to such an assumption. In the first place, it is a lie, and proven to be a lie by the contemporaneous history of communities no better equipped for ideal citizenship than the Anglo-Saxon, but better protected by systems of social quarantine. Although such may always have been the case in the common experience of English and American cities, it has no more reason to be assumed, as an hypothesis, than that all mankind is and must be totally depraved. It can be only the assumption of ignorance when we know that it is possible to create a social atmosphere elsewhere wherein none of the people need be depraved, and wherein there are none who are vicious, as is largely the case in practically all the German cities that we have studied, and as is general in the Empire of Japan.
Blinded by this assumption of necessary depravity, persons who are full of altruistic impulses may overlook men, women, and even children, wallowing in moral conditions more noisome than the stench of the Chicago River, in the belief that they are of the "Have-to-bes"—of the "Hopelessly condemned ten per cent. stratum of society."
We have interpolated this explanation and excuse in order to show that the presence of unwholesome civic conditions may not be due to hopeless moral blindness, but to a traditional astigmatism, caused by hypotheses that are now out of date, and which belong to periods of an uncivilized past.