Do you know that article of discretion in Philadelphia? In my town, it has built up tenement blocks almost solid, ninety-three per cent. covered with brick and mortar; it has penned tenants in burning tenements with stairs of wood that should have been fireproof; it has filled the pockets of the builder and wrung the heart of the tenant, until, in despair, he refused to believe in either God or man. That is what “discretion” has come to with us. Oh! for red blood in the veins of Christians, for a muscular faith that, rather than stand by and see such things done, will fight till—till some one dies. That is the kind of faith that moves the world, mountains and all, and fills the churches! Not sermons, but service! So we win victories that tell.
Now do you wonder that the common people, so deserted by their best friend, took the first proffered hand held out to help? To this multitude, toiling for their daily bread until it fills the landscape to the exclusion of all else, until time and chance are lost to them to lift up their heads and get the wider view—to them, disheartened and sore, comes the boss with his self-seeking and says: “I am your friend.” And he proves it: he gets Pat a job, gets Jim on the force, looks after John who broke his leg and gets him into the hospital that was full; attends to Dan when he gets into trouble with the police. What more natural than that they should give him their votes and their support? The more powerful he, the better able to help. Anyway, is he not their friend? Observe, that it all proceeds on the neighborly principle, debased to suit the slum; but it is still the idea of the neighbor: binding up the wounds, taking the man who has fallen among thieves to the inn and leaving money to have him tended. They knew the plan better than did we, they whom we deserted, churchmen and Christians though we were.
What if the boss robs the city! The poor man, going home to his tenement, overhears the well-dressed citizen comment upon it with qualified displeasure: “Say what you will, he may be a great rascal, but he gets there, you’ll own. And he’s got the dough.” It is every one for himself in his sight. Is it hard to understand that he, too, falls in with the scheme?
At the Old Five Points
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.
And now, that I have put the blame where it belongs, let us turn and look at the other side of it, at the day of awakening. It was a long day, for our sleep had been deep, and it was not easy to stay awake long at a time for a considerable period after we had tumbled out. The Five Points first aroused us. The slum there had got to the point where it was no longer to be borne. Dickens’s pen had pricked us, and the warnings of Charles Loring Brace and his contemporaries began to make us listen. There followed the period of good intentions, but little sense, that gave us Gotham Court and the Big Flat. They were built as model tenements—heaven save the mark! by men who meant well and did badly. They are the kind to keep your eye on. The Big Flat became a thieves’ runway, because, unconsciously, the builders had furnished the chance by making it reach through the block, opening upon both streets, in a neighborhood where such a convenience to a man fleeing from the police was a regular windfall. Before its final destruction, it achieved the reputation of being the worst tenement in New York. Gotham Court was a close second. In some other important respects that concerned the home life of the people, it was easily first. A sanitary official counted 146 cases of sickness among its thousand tenants in 1862, among them all kinds of infectious disease, from measles to smallpox. It harbored one of the most notorious gangs that ever made lower New York unsafe. Time after time, before it was torn down, less than half a dozen years ago, it was posted as hopeless and fit for nothing else. Yet it was built as a model tenement by a Quaker of good intentions. He certainly did his part in the paving of that infernal door-yard that is said to be laid with good intentions not backed by good sense or hard work.
The “Old Church Tenements”
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.
This Quaker had a brother who also built houses for the poor, and, it is recorded, meant well, too; but the milk of human kindness was soured in him when his neighbor, the alderman, knocked him down in a quarrel over the dividing line between their lots. It was against the Quaker’s principles to fight, but he found a way of paying off his enemy that is a whole volume of commentaries on graceless human nature: he built a tenement upon his own lot right on the line and with a big dead wall so close to his neighbor’s windows that his tenants could get neither sun nor air. They lived in darkness ever after. The fact that, for want of access, his house was useless and stood idle for years, did not stay his revenge. That old Quaker was a hater from way back. His “wall of wrath,” as I used to call it, killed more innocent babes and cursed more lives than any other work of man I ever heard of. One wonders what that man’s dreams were at night. The mere thought of it used to give me the shivers, and I never slept so sweetly as the night when I had seen that wall laid low by wreckers whom I had set on.
Yet it did not die in its sins. I like to think of that. Before the end came to Gotham Court, we had grown a real conscience. The canker that had crept in and was eating out the home and the heart of the people was arraigned in the churches, as it should have been a long while before—not in this church or in that church, but in the churches. Christian men took hold of the Court and did the most and the best with it that could be done,—which makes me think that only yesterday I had a letter from the son of one of those two brothers, young Bayard Cutting, pleading for support for the work of Bishop Brent out in the Philippines; and it was as I would have expected. You see, as I said, it is all one thing. These men are among the strongest of the backers of the movement to provide homes for the poor of New York, and have been for years; and for that very reason they are the natural supporters of such a work as that which the good Bishop is doing on that far foreign shore.