IV
OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW
IV
OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW
In concluding these lectures, I wish first of all to extend to Philadelphia my hearty thanks for the ready and patient hearing she has given to this fight for the American home, upon which all depends. The great audiences that have attended, whether in church or hall, are in themselves the best guarantee that the fight will be won, that the to-morrow is safe. There is needed only the strong and informed public opinion that sees clearly the peril, to set a barrier against the inroads of the slum. Without that we fight in vain. If Philadelphia or Boston or Connecticut were to be deaf to the evils of sweating, we should be powerless against them in New York, or vice versa. If, on the other hand, public opinion from the Mississippi to the Hudson condemns tenement-made goods, their market will be gone and our fight won. The protest of Oshkosh against the home conditions that degrade manhood and womanhood in New York is registered at Albany in a hundred echoes from my own state and makes our annual struggle with the selfish interests, that for profit seek to sacrifice the home, so much easier. We shall win, I know it; for, in my own time, I have seen this protest against the abandonment of the brother swell from scattered voices here and there to an angry chorus, that first shamed decent men, who did not know, out of the owning of slum tenements, and afterwards drove Christian men, who did know and who cared, too, into it with the result that we have seen. We shall win the fight—indeed! I have spoken to little purpose if you do not see with me that we must win the fight for the people’s homes, if we would live as a nation.
And now this to-morrow! Let me bring you face to face with it as it confronted me one day, years ago, in East 16th Street directly opposite St. George’s Church. It stood there in the person of a ragamuffin, typical, in his rags and dirt, of his kind and quite in the character; for he was engaged in slinging mud. He dug it out of the gutter by the fistful and distributed it impartially all over the church across the way. Why the church, I wondered as I watched him. He, the boy, had no stouter friend than its stalwart rector. Why then throw mud at his church? I went up to ask and for once he was taken unawares. I was upon him before he saw me and put my hand upon his shoulder! and that moment I knew what I wanted to know, what ailed the lad. The years that have passed have added many details to the record of his case, but nothing of the first importance. It was all clear to me that instant; for he turned like a hunted wild beast, his fistful of mud gripped tight, to confront the enemy—it could be nothing else. In all his dreary little life no hand had ever been laid upon his shoulder in kindness. That was the story. That is the story too often yet. Every man’s hand raised against him, his was raised against the world that would have none of him. It was self-defense. I saw it and was dumb.
Presently I remembered that I had started to interview him, and asked questions. He did not answer them, but his looks were more eloquent than words; and, at the hard places, another street Arab, a degree less dirty and less spiteful than he, ventured responses that let in the light. Read and write he could not, never went to school. I stared at that; visions of truant officers, of compulsory education laws, rose up before me. I little knew then the true condition of things—it was years after that that our first school census showed us fifty thousand children in the street who should have been on the school-benches, but were shut out for lack of room. What did he know? Nothing. But, said I impatiently, what can he do, what does he do?
“He?” said the other boy with a contempt for my lack of understanding, which he made no effort to conceal, “He throws stones!” And mud. That was all, all we had taught him in his apprenticeship of the street, his preparation for the citizenship that was to come. That was our end of the story.
We have been busy since making inquiries concerning this lad who is our to-morrow. We have been at work among the underpinnings to see how fared the props upon which we build character, citizenship—the same thing in the end. When the test comes, they are convertible terms. And the props were not there—they were gone! What had become of them? I have shown you how beset is the home whence came the boy who throws the mud. There is no stronger prop under the character that forms in the growing boy than his home. The tenement is a destroyer of home and of character, of the individuality that makes character tell. A homeless city—a city without civic pride, without citizen virtue, a despoiler of children, a destroyer of the to-morrow.