They failed to appreciate their responsibility, those men of the highest character. They did not fail to collect the rents that sometimes went as high as forty per cent. upon the value of their property. No, but let us give them their due-an agent collected the rents, they did not. They traveled abroad; perhaps they never saw the dens upon the proceeds of which they lived at their ease. Do you see what I am driving at? Do you see how it all, here as everywhere, is just a question of gold that will buy ease for ourselves! For gold we sold the black man into slavery, and for gold we let his white brother perish in his slum. We were in a hurry to get rich and we forgot all else besides; forgot the brotherhood in our worship of the golden calf. Men have done it in all times, and the slum is as old as is organized society. “The destruction of the poor is their poverty.” Whatever else was the matter with those houses, they paid.
I will tell you one thing that was the matter with that slum where the home had ceased to be sacred, where the family ideal was tortured to death and character smothered, where children were damned rather than born into the world until the very shock of the discovery that one in five was killed by the worst of the dens came almost as a relief. When the Church finally roused itself to the doing of its duty it put a long-belated finger upon the sore spot of it all:
“In this ward,” said the Federation of Churches after a house-to-house canvass, “the churches, clubs, schools, educational and helpful agencies of every kind make a front of 756 running feet on the street, while the saloons, put side by side, stretch themselves over nearly a mile; so that ideals of citizenship are minting themselves upon the minds of the people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.” The devil had it in that ward, seven to one. Out of such an environment comes the Lost Tenth, the helpless and the hopeless, that levy tribute on our strength and our life. Comptroller Coler showed that eleven and one-half per cent. of all the money raised by taxation in New York went to support poverty and, largely, pauperism, with the burden all the time increasing. The poverty maps at our Tenement House Exhibition showed few enough tenements that were free from the taint of alms-seeking, but some from which, in five years, seventy-five different families had asked public relief. That is one thing that is the matter with the slum—it makes its own heredity. The sum of the bad environment of to-day and of yesterday becomes the heredity of to-morrow, becomes the citizenship of to-morrow. The lowered vitality, the poor workmanship, the inefficiency, the loss of hope—they all enter in and make an endless chain upon which the curse of the slum is handed down through the generations. Our task is to break that chain, unless we want it to break us. We accepted the legacy in the charter of a people’s rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and we must find the way to secure them, or accept the alternative. Freedom means justice to the people or it means nothing; and justice, like true charity, must begin at home—with the home.
We have made that out in our day; and we say rightly that the housing question holds the key to most of the civic problems that beset us. It does; but at bottom it is because it is a much bigger question than of citizenship, even. It is a moral question—not a question of “morals,” merely, which is akin to manners, though on that score we have made headway since “men of the highest character” have abandoned the owning of slum tenements for profit—but the moral question whether I shall love my neighbor or kill him; whether I shall stand idly by and see my brother’s soul stunted, smothered in the slum of my making, of my tacit consent at any rate, or put in all upon rescuing him. Brethren, we shall never rescue our city, you will never rescue yours, until we understand that that is what it all harks back to, that all these things mean one and the same thing: that I am my brother’s keeper for good or for evil. No man liveth unto himself alone. A moral, a profoundly religious question bound up inseparably with our faith, if by it we mean something which is alive; and it is only the living faith here that has claim upon life in the hereafter. No man who, unmoved, sees his brother perish on earth, need expect a welcoming hand to be reached out to him from the skies, if I read my Bible aright.
It is hard to understand the attitude of the church, through all those weary years, towards the people it was meant to shepherd, except upon the assumption, which was a fact, that it, too, had been seized and carried away by the prevailing craze, taking the thing for the soul of the thing. Handsome church edifices went up, with brown stone and marble and carvings without stint, further and further from the people’s homes; though not always as the record shows. In the rear of Trinity Church and “overlooked by the stained-glass windows of that beautiful edifice,” the legislative committee, of which I spoke, pointed, with a scorn it hardly made an attempt to conceal, to a tenement containing fourteen families in which “filth and want of ventilation were enough to infect the very walls with disease.” As a matter of fact, two epidemics of yellow fever and of cholera had started in that row. But whether the churches were near or far, the people kept aloof from them. That is not hard to understand, when I recall the dive in William Street, with two stories of vileness underground, that was known in the Health Department to belong to a New Jersey church corporation! The profits were the devil’s wages and they went to pay for what some Christians called God’s work! I suppose they persuaded themselves—men can persuade themselves to almost anything if they want to—that that was the reason they were not willing to give them up, and they fought stubbornly the efforts of the authorities to break up the dive where unspeakable debauchery held high carnival most of the day and all of the night. It is not hard to understand, when there comes to mind the congregation of Christians that moved up-town from Mulberry Street and sold their old house of worship to speculating builders, who converted it into a rear tenement, put a brick building in front and into these barracks piled a hundred families, a total of three hundred and sixty persons. What kind of home altars were there, think you? That was at the Five Points where the dives were particularly vile, but I will warrant that there was nothing in the saloon in the front basement one-half as bad as in the flats in the rear, where men and women had once sat and worshiped their God, to whose service they had dedicated that house.
In 1868, the death rate in the “Old Church Tenements,” as they were called until for very shame we destroyed them, was seventy-five per thousand, counting only those who died in the houses, not those whose end came in the hospitals to which those tenements were “among the largest contributors.”
Hard to understand that men fell away from the church? They must have thought that the Lord had forgotten them; but it was only the men who professed His name that had forgotten. He remembered. The day will come, I hope,—I think it is on the way now,—when we shall be permitted to forget the greatest wrong of all; that it was a church corporation, the strongest and wealthiest, and alas! our own, that, for its temporal advantage and to save a paltry few hundred dollars, took up the cudgel for the enemy we were battling with and all but succeeded in upsetting the whole structure of tenement-house law we had built up with such weary toil in our effort to help the man to a level where he might own himself a man. You know the story of that and how bitterly it has rankled these many years. The church corporation was a tenement-house owner, one of the largest, if not, indeed the largest in the city, and its buildings were old and bad. It suited its purposes to let them be bad, because they were down-town where the land was rapidly getting valuable for warehouse purposes, and the tenements were all to be torn down by and by. And so it was that it achieved the reputation of being the worst of landlords, hardly a name to attract the people to its pews. We had got to the point in our fight where we had made good the claim of the tenant to at least a full supply of water in his house, though light and air were yet denied him by the builder, when that church corporation chose to contest the law ordering it to supply water in its houses, and won, for the time being, on the plea that the law was arbitrary and autocratic. They are all autocratic, the laws that are made for the protection of the poor man; they have to be while the purpose to hinder rather than help lives in his brother. We trembled on the edge of a general collapse of all our remedial laws, until the court of last resort decided that any such claim was contrary to public policy and therefore inadmissible.
It was not long after that, that a distinguished body of churchmen in my city invited me to speak to them of slum evils. And I showed them pictures of the little children from the gutter, until at last some unthinking brother made the comment: “Oh, well, they wouldn’t wash, if you gave them the chance.” Perhaps you can imagine the result. I would not have missed that opportunity for a good deal.
I am not telling you these things to rake up forgotten sins; I am trying to show you whence came the deadly apathy that was to blame for our plight. Our conscience was asleep and the Church that should have kept it awake slept, too. We cannot afford to forget it yet, for that conscience of ours is none too robust, or else it is singularly drowsy in spells. I am thinking of the time, only a little while ago, when Theodore Roosevelt was Police Commissioner in New York, and of his astonished look when churchmen, citizens from whom he should have expected support, and did expect it, for his appeal was to them direct, came to him daily to plead for “discretion” in the enforcement of the laws he was sworn to carry out. Not all of them did this—he had many strong backers among the clergy and lay-brethren—but too many. You should have been with me in those days and you would have understood what that fight was. The saloon was the enemy, and, in a single week during that struggle, it wrecked eight homes by tragedies, with which I, as a police reporter, was called to deal. I am not speaking now of the numberless tragedies that drag their slow lengths through the years, but of those that reached the acute stage in my sight that week. Four desperate wives were driven to suicide and two were murdered by drunken husbands. One aged woman was beaten to death by her beastly son when she refused him money to continue his debauch. And a policeman was killed in the street by drunken marauders. That was the showing; and it was for discretion in dealing with that enemy those people strove, calling the President of the Police Board “hasty.” They were “men of the highest character, but they failed to appreciate the responsibility” which that character imposed upon them.
They called Roosevelt hasty. It was time that some one got up some speed in New York. More than a hundred years ago (to be exact, in 1797) the legislature of New York prohibited soap factories on Manhattan Island, south of Grand Street, in the interest of the public good. Within seven weeks after the order was issued, the same legislature amended its act, giving the Health Board discretion in the premises; and the biggest soap factory in the land is below Grand Street to-day. The power of soap is great.