Pietro and his Father
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
These are ours to care for. The tramp, the lazy man, is entitled only to be locked up. Only the other day, I was invited to come to Boston and join in a discussion of the tramp problem before a distinguished body there; and I refused. I do not think there is a tramp problem which hard labor behind strong bars cannot solve. It is just a question of human laziness. Save the young, and lock up the old man who will not work. A fellow whom I found sitting in a Baxter Street yard, smoking his pipe contentedly, gave me points on that. (See illustration facing page [104].) He was willing to be photographed for ten cents; but, before I could train my camera on him, his mind had evolved possibilities not to be neglected. He was smoking a clay pipe that had, perhaps, cost a cent, but I suppose it was an effort to hold it between his teeth while I made ready, for he made a demand for twenty-five cents if he was to be photographed in character, pipe and all.
In that yard were habitations built of old boards and discarded roof tin, in which lived men, women and children that had been crowded out of the tenements. (See illustration facing page [104].) The rent collector did not miss them, however. They paid regularly for their piggeries. I feel almost like apologizing to the pig; no pig would have been content to live in such a place without a loud outcry.
Though the flats in the tenements were not much better. How strong do you think the home feeling can be in a place where the family tea kettle does weekly duty on Mondays as a wash-boiler? That was a condition I actually found there. (See illustration facing page [106].) Think of the attraction such a place must have for father and the boys when they come home from work in the evening! We shall cry out against the saloon in vain until we give them something better. And a better substitute for the saloon was never offered than in that old legislative committee’s prescription: “To prevent drunkenness give every man a clean and comfortable home.”
Sister Irene and Her Little Ones
They are worth it, too. Pietro and his father may be ignorant, may be Italians (see illustration facing page [108]); but they are here by our permission, dead set on becoming American citizens, and tremendously impressed with the privileges of that citizenship. So anxious are they to become citizens that, if they can get there by a shorter cut than the law allows, you need not wonder at their taking the chance. The slum teaches them nothing that discovers a moral offense in that. But not even the slum can wipe out in me the memory of little Pietro, who sat writing and writing with his maimed hand, trying to learn the letters of the alphabet and how to put them together in words, so that he might be the link of communication between his people and the old home in Italy. He was a poor little maimed boy with a sober face, and it wrings my heart now, the recollection of the look he gave me when I plumped out: “Pietro, do you ever laugh?”
“I did wonst,” he said.
The sweaters’ fruitful soil is here: poverty, over-time and under-pay, all the conditions that go to make child labor and to break up the home. But these also are our own, if they came from a foreign land. The Chinaman we have banished because he would not make his home with us, but remained ever a stranger. That was the reason, and it was a good reason. But what sense is there in refusing one immigrant entry because he will not accept an American home, and giving to the one who will accept it the slum tenement—to his undoing and to ours?
