I wish I had time to tell you the whole story of what we have learned as to that in these last ten years, but it is too long. Let it be enough to say that, wherever we have destroyed the slum that killed the home and given the children a chance, there order has moved in where violence and gang rule were before, and the police are having a vacation. We are extending that program of ours right and left. Seven years ago we had not one school playground in New York; now we have a law which says that never another public school shall be built without an outdoor playground for the children. And we have been building more than three-score new and splendid schools since then. Some of these schools have the playgrounds on the street, and some on the roof, and in the latter, last year, Mayor Low’s Board of Education put brass bands in the summer evenings during the long vacation, and invited in the neighborhood. If you have any doubts about the millennium’s coming nearer, you should have been there then. It seemed to me when I saw three thousand children dancing to the tune of “Sunday Afternoon” on top of the school that had been used so long as a kind of jail in which to lock them up for the convenience of some one who wanted to get rid of them—it seemed to me then, as if we had put on seven league boots in the race to distance the slum and the janitor. Both of them lost their grip on those children then and there, and for all time; though the janitor strove hard against fate. He tried to drive them away with a club when we were not looking; and when he was caught at that, he reported that those roof playgrounds were no good: they were too hot in summer and too cold in winter. So, it would appear, is most of the rest of the earth.
However, his day is past and the children’s is coming. The school of the new day is “built beautiful,” quite like a palace, and our women hang the walls of the class-rooms with handsome pictures that open windows for the souls of the little ones, who sit and look on. There are still some growlers who think that the money put into handsome stone and wrought iron and polished wood is wasted. They are wrong; we never made a better investment, unless it be in the playgrounds which are part of those schools. All these things help to restore ideals. What is the matter with the slum is that it lacks ideals. Where they are made to grow, there comes the irresistible demand for the home that is the essence of good, and then we are on the home stretch.
In the Public School of To-day
Our vacation schools gather in the boys, to teach them sloyd and how to handle useful tools (see illustration facing page [150]), and the girls to teach them cooking; and, on alternate days, the men and boys and the women and girls are taught swimming at our public baths. Over on the West-side, where one of our neighborhood parks is being laid out, the Park Department even went into teaching the young lads truck-farming last summer. From that sort of school no one “plays hookey.” We shall shortly have no truant question at all, or, if we do, we shall be in a position to deal with it easily, for there need be no quibbling about the proper disposal of the lad who deserts the school of the new dispensation.
I once found a little fellow picking bones and rags under an ash dump, the only home he knew being a vile shed under that pile of rubbish. That dump was in the identical spot where now one of our new recreation piers extends into the North River. If he had been left there, to grow up as he could—and he could neither read nor write—he would have grown naturally into the tough who says that the world owes him a living, which he is bound to collect as easily as he can, especially without any work. It is a lie; the world owes no man a living. It is like a bank upon which you draw according to the amount of work you put into it and no more. But the boy was not left there, and, as I said, the dump that cursed his life has been replaced by a park and a play-pier. The band comes there in the evening and the crowds from the tenements, young and old; and, on the long summer days in the vacation season, the kindergartner comes and gathers her class, and there in the open they study with one another the first lessons of the new political science that shall draw us closer together and restore to us the neighborly feeling, and the lost home with it.
When we build our altar on that ground, we shall hear no more of empty churches. The life has come back. How great was the yearning for it, none of us may ever know. The other day, a little lad, watching the lighted Christmas tree in a settlement in my city, whispered anxiously to the head-worker when the distribution of presents began: “Shall we not worship the tree?” No, but we shall worship together, they and we, God in the hearts that were at last opened to let them in—to let the lost neighbor in—in His name.
Saluting the Flag
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Here they come, an army with banners to help us win the fight for the home! They are the children of the very poor, sometimes too ragged to attend the public school, and sometimes kept out because they do not know our language. They are the children of foreigners who brought them here that they might live in a free land, at once the only and the greatest heritage they could leave them. If you doubt that they are on our side in the fight, go and hear them salute the flag in the morning (see illustration facing page [152]), promising “our hearts, our heads and our hands to our country—one country, one language, one flag!” And never doubt or distrust them again, for to do so is to distrust God, whose children they are, even if we rejected them, and to reject the republic which is to be His means of bringing us together again.