When I was preparing these lectures, it happened that I went out of town and, returning, crossed the river to New York in the morning before sunrise. I stood at the bow of the ferry-boat and looked at the city, lying wrapped in gloom, indistinguishable except for a light in some big building, itself unseen, piercing it here and there. But, over and beyond the gloom, the ruddy glow of the morning that was breaking grew steadily as I looked. I knew that soon it would be bright daylight. As I stood and watched it and as one after another the outlines of the old landmarks came out and took shape, I thought that so, at last, the dawn is breaking upon us in this fight for the home upon which all hinges. It is no longer an uphill fight all the time.
The other day, I spoke of discouragements that beset the way. They are there in plenty, but there has come into the fight a new note, that was missing before. We know now what the fight means. From other quarters, too, help is coming. Let me sound this note of hope right here; there is enough of the gloom. The critics of my books complain that I am unsystematic, that I “put things in” as I think of them. Perhaps so. I find it somehow easier to put them in when I think of them than when I don’t think of them. Even while I am about to show you how deep we fell, let me remember the forces that are coming to help us out. I think that not only have we turned upon our track and seen the necessity of making the most of this city civilization with its unsolved problems, which is the order of the day; but I believe that we have reached the divide, the point where the population shall be turned back to the soil which it has been deserting.
Many things seem to me to tend that way. The isolation of the farm is disappearing. The telephone; the free rural delivery of mails, which brings good roads, daily newspapers and the bicycle; the concentration of rural schools; a better grasp of the obstacles in the way of keeping the boy on the farm—these at one end. At the other, the harnessing of new forces capable of transmitting power away from the centres of steam energy, and the scattering of the congested populations to the suburbs; means of transportation that we knew not of a dozen years ago. It seems as if the very century, the stamp of which is combination, concentration, so far as we are yet able to make it out, might have in store for us as its big surprise the reversal of the process that characterized its predecessor and bred our perplexities: the drift of the population everywhere to the cities. So that when it seemed in extremest peril, the rescue of the home may be made easier than we thought. I would that in this I might be a true prophet! We can face the other problems of our day with confidence, if the home be safe; for there we have backing.
And now let me take you to my own city, to the metropolis, as typical of most of the large cities of our country. We struggle with the same evils in Boston, in Chicago, in New York, in Buffalo, in St. Louis, in Washington. It was only the other day that I looked upon some alleys in the national capital, under the very shadow of the big gray dome, in which the crowding was as vile and as wicked as it ever was in the one-room houses of Glasgow. Though you boast of less crowding upon the land here in Philadelphia, yet we have the testimony of your public-spirited men and women that the sanitary condition of your alleys is far from good. That means darkness and dirt. In other words, you are no stranger to the pigsty of which I spoke as being the enemy of the home and of American citizenship. How came it about? What brought us to the brink, where, looking over, we see “all the conditions” under which the people live “making for unrighteousness”?
I said it before; but let the public records speak. In 1865, the Council of Hygiene, pointing to the tenement slum, said, “Its evils and the perils that surround it are the necessary result of a forgetfulness of the poor.” “Evils,” was putting it mildly. They came in the last analysis to murder, child murder. The undertaker and the slum landlord divided the profits between them. “Not intemperance, ignorance or destitution alone causes the increase of crime,” was the report of a committee come down from Albany in the fifties to see what was the matter with New York; “together they, with municipal and popular neglect, find their soil in the tenements and thrive and develop virulence.” The remedy, as the committee saw it, was to “furnish every man with a clean and comfortable home.”
Tell me, what think you of “homes” where men and women “crowded beneath moldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars”? I quote that from a report of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, one of the most conservative and one of the wisest of our public charities, which, with unerring instinct, saw that the way to improve the condition, the morals, of the people was to give them decent homes. What do you think of cellar “homes” in which the children had to stay in bed till the tide fell; of homes where children died, “smothered by the foul air of an un-ventilated room,” a windowless room[[2]] which the light of day never entered! That was the burden of a death certificate registered in the Health Department in those old, indifferent days. What think you of a city one-quarter of whose children never grew up to lisp the sacred name of mother, one-third of whose babies never reached their third year, and one-half never manhood or womanhood! That was the record; and, when decency came, the death rate came down with it. Child murder ceased to be the fashion. In thirty-five years, the mortality in my city, while the population grew and grew, was reduced one-half. I mean, of course, the percentage of deaths upon the population. In the last dozen years, reform has saved enough lives in New York City alone annually to people a city of no mean proportions.
[2]. Since these lectures were delivered the struggle to preserve the tenement-house law has developed the fact that after thirty-seven years there are still over 300,000 windowless, dark rooms in the tenements of the Greater New York!
I must refer those who wish to get at the statistical facts to the reports of the successive Tenement House Commissions, or to my own record of the “Battle with the Slum,” in which I have tried to gather them all. Only let me mention here that the death rate of New York came down from 26.32 per 1,000 inhabitants, in 1887, to 19.53 in 1897. It had been known to run as high as 45 in 1,000 in bad seasons of the bad past; and in individual instances much higher than that.
What think you of “homes,” a hundred under one roof—a hundred families, mind you, not a hundred tenants—under the roof of a barrack stamped officially by the Health Board as a “den of death”? I will tell you what that Senate Investigation Committee of 1857 thought of them: “The conclusion forced itself upon the reflections of all that certain conditions and associations of life and habitation are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals.” Aye, they were. In that Sixth Ward slum grew up the Five Points. Out of it came the pigsty voters that voted Tweed and his thieves into possession of the city government, and the treasure, for which we had paid such a price, out of the pockets of the taxpayers, while the thieves mocked us and demanded what we were going to do about it. We had made money our idol, and it put its foot upon our necks and trod hard.
For that was it. The only question that had been asked till then was: What would they bring, those tenements? The tenant must “pay the rent or get out.” Indifference—popular neglect—that was the time for pulling it mildly; for men of standing, of influence in the community, drew the pay that was the price of selling the brother into slavery. Listen to this from the report of the Council of Hygiene: “Some of them,” meaning the owners of slum tenements, “are persons of the highest character, but they fail to appreciate the responsibility that rests upon them.” They did. They failed so signally that, when called to account by the health inspectors in the years that followed, they “urged the filthy habits of their tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property.” You will hear that plea, if you listen long enough and closely enough, even in our day. And whenever you hear it, stop right there and think who is to blame for the cultivation of those habits. The health inspector of whom I spoke had no doubts upon the subject. The owners, he said, are entirely to blame. A pigsty, in time, will make a pig even of man who is made in the image of God. You can degrade him to that level if you try hard enough and are willing to pay the price.