Scores of such scenes are witnessed daily in the floating hospital of St. John’s Guild, the great marine cradle that goes down the Bay every week-day, save Saturday, in July and August, with hundreds upon hundreds of wailing babies and their mothers. Twice a week it is the west-siders’ turn; on three days it gathers its cargo along the East River, where crowds with yellow tickets stand anxiously awaiting its arrival. The floating hospital carries its own staff of physicians, including a member of the Health Department’s corps of tenement doctors, who is on the lookout for chance contagion. The summer corps is appointed by the Health Board upon the approach of hot weather and begins a systematic canvass of the tenements immediately after the Fourth of July, followed by the King’s Daughters’ nurses, who take up the doctor’s work where he had to leave it. With his prescription pad he carries a bunch of tickets for the Floating Hospital, and the tickets usually give out first. Any illness that is not contagious is the baby’s best plea for admission. It never pleads in vain, unless it be well and happy, and even then it is allowed to go along, if there is no other way for the mother to get off with its sick sister. For those who need more than one day’s outing, the Guild maintains a Seaside hospital, three hours’ sail down the Bay, on Staten Island, where mother and child may remain without a cent of charge until the rest, the fresh air, and the romp on the beach have given the baby back health and strength. Opposite the hospital, but out at sea where the breeze has free play over the crowded decks, the great hospital barge anchors every day while the hungry hosts are fed and the children given a salt-water bath on board.
FLOATING HOSPITAL—ST. JOHN’S GUILD.
St. John’s Guild is not, as some have supposed from its name, a denominational charity. It is absolutely neutral in matters of sect and religion, leaving the Church to take care of the soul while it heals the body of the child. It is so with the Bartholdi Crèche on Randall’s Island, in the shadow of the city’s Foundling Hospital, that ferries children over the river for a romp on the smooth, green lawns, on presentation of a ticket with the suggestive caution printed on the back that “all persons behaving rudely or taking liberties will be sent back by the first boat.” “The Little Mothers” Aid Society follows the same plan in reaching out for the little home worker whose work never ends, the girl upon whom falls the burden and responsibility of caring for the perennial baby when scarcely more than a baby herself, often even the cooking and all the rest of the housework so that the mother may have her own hands free to help earn the family living. These little slaves the Society drums up, “hires” the baby attended in a nursery if need be, and carries the little mother off for a day in the woods up at Pelham Bay Park where the Park Commissioners have set a house on the beach apart for their use in the summer months. There was much opposition to this plan at first among the East Side Jews, whose children needed the outing more sorely than any other class; but when a few of the more venturesome had come back well-fed, in clean clothes, whereas they went out in rags, and reported that they had escaped baptism, the sentiment of Ludlow Street underwent a change, and so persistent were the raids made upon the Society’s chaperones after that that they had to take another route for awhile, lest their resources should be swamped in a single trip. The United Hebrew Charities, like many other relief societies with a special field, provide semi-weekly excursions for the poorest of their own people, and maintain a sea-side sanitarium for the sick children.
There is no lack of fresh air charities nowadays. Their number is increasing year by year and so is their helpfulness, though it has come to a pass where it is necessary to exercise some care to prevent them from lapping over, as Sunday School Christmas-trees have been known to do, and opening the way for mischief. There can be no doubt that their civilizing influence is great. It could hardly be otherwise, with the same lessons of cleanliness and decency enforced year after year. The testimony is that there is an improvement; the children come better “groomed” for inspection. The lesson has reached the mother and the home. The subtler lesson of the flowers, the fields, the sky, and the sea, and of the kindness that asked no reward, has not been lost either. One very striking fact this charity has brought out that is most hopeful. It emphasizes the difference I pointed out between the material we have here to work upon in these children and that which is the despair of philanthropists abroad, in England for instance. We are told of children there who, coming from their alleys into the field, “are able to feel no touch of kinship between themselves and Mother Nature”[19] when brought into her very presence. Not so with ours. They may “guess” that the sea is salt because it is full of codfish; may insist that the potatoes are home-made “cause I seen the garding;” both of which were actual opinions expressed by the Bath Beach summer boarders; but the interest, the sympathy, the hearty appreciation of it, is there always, the most encouraging symptom of all. Down in the worst little ruffian’s soul there is, after all, a tender spot not yet pre-empted by the slum. And Mother Nature touches it at once. They are chums on the minute.