That was the way we safeguarded that prop under the boy, who is father to the man, and we reaped as our reward crooked citizenship. New York is but the type of the rest of our cities in this as in so much else. We are at last taking the kindergarten seriously; here and there “play-schools” are being opened in the long summer vacations. In New York, we have built half a dozen play-piers out into the river, where the little ones dance to the music of brass bands in the evening. I told you how we put brass bands up on the schoolhouse roofs and invited the neighborhood in. Boston has “play-rooms” for indoor fun in crowded neighborhoods. We shall yet have “play-houses” for the children’s use as well as for the grown folk; but it is still a running fight. Twice in the past year have I been appealed to to help save the kindergarten from ignorant town boards, who could not see what good there was in it that the people should be taxed for its support. The dawn of common sense has set in, but it will be sometime yet to the broad daylight.
There are other props which we have hardly recognized as such. There is the respect for law that means respect for the majesty of the commonwealth, of the state. What have we made of that? Of the compulsory education law, until within the last half dozen years, we made a laughing stock. Of the factory law, said a legislative committee that looked us over, we made a mess of perjury and child labor. The excise law became a vehicle of blackmail and corruption. This is how we tended that prop, forgetting that to bring contempt upon the law is the shortest cut to civic cynicism, which is a death-blow to the republic: it lives but in the people’s hopes and high ideals.
The very enforcement of law has sometimes seemed a travesty: the boy who steals fifty cents is sent to the house of correction; the man who steals a railroad goes free. So the lad, robbed of every chance and with the fact dinned into his ears unceasingly by those who would make capital of his plight, takes to the street and throws stones and mud at the order of society that gave him no show; at the church, with its pride and pomp; at the citizen in a good coat and a silk hat; at the policeman, when his back is turned and he is far enough away; at anything that stands for the order of society in which he was allowed no place.
Need we wonder at it? Need we cavil at this lad who clutches at the very last straw in vain—the father’s help and counsel that means so much to the growing boy? Too often relations between father and son are reversed, and the father must depend on the boy for communication with the strange world around him. He is and remains a stranger, never even learning the language; the boy is born to it and to the new ways that prove a stumbling-block to his father. He, the father, is an Italian, a Greek, a refugee Jew—he is “Dutch.” That sums it all up. He is “Dutch” and he is “slow,” and, in the inevitable conflict between the old and the new, the boy escapes to the street and to the gang.
Come now with me to the reformatory and look at their records. Three-fourths of the young men who land there are “without moral sense” yet “of average mental capacity,” which is to say that they had the common sense to benefit by their opportunities had we put any in their way; but we did not. See how all but eight or nine in a hundred had bad homes, or homes which, at all events, had no influence for good upon their lives. But in this it is emphatically true that that which is not for is against. Unless the home is a saving influence in the lad’s life, the door has been opened for all that is bad and corrupting. More than ninety per cent. were adrift at the age when character is formed. And only one in a hundred escaped bad company![[3]] The street has no other kind of company and the street is the alternative of the home.
[3]. See Year Book of Elmira Reformatory.
There is your heredity made to order for you—to your order—the heredity of the slum; for the heredity, under which we groan, ever ready to give up, to lay the blame on the Almighty for our shortsightedness, our selfishness and love of ease,—this heredity is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, just the sum of the bad environment which it was in our power to mend if we had but minded it while it was time. The hundredth case we can leave to the Lord, who punishes the sins of the fathers upon their children only in them that hate Him. To those who would do His bidding, His work in the world, He is ever ready to show a way out. The way is to keep His commandments, the old, and the new that sums up all the rest. Loving our brother, we shall not have the heart to leave him in the slough; we shall be wanting to fight all the things that drag him down, and so we shall be mending not only his chances in the to-day, but we shall be cutting off the heritage of sin and sorrow and failure that would blight the to-morrow. We shall have lifted the curse that was laid upon man for forgetting his brother—for whoso forgets his brother hateth Him, that is what it means—and shall have helped the kingdom to come upon earth, even as it is in heaven above. By helping men to live the life of men, we shall bring them nearer to Him whose children we are. That is our heredity, the only real one: that we are children of God! With that backing, who can falter? What is there that you and I cannot do? And how dare we refuse to do it?
“Weakness is what ails the young criminal, not wickedness,” say the prison superintendent, the prison chaplain, every one who knows. Lack of character, that is. How could he grow a character in such a setting as his? And for this setting we, not he, are responsible. He could not help himself. Think what it was we wasted! Only the other day the head-worker of one of the social settlements in New York told me of a little Jewish boy in her care, a little chap of eight, whose home is in a tenement where the father works early and late to make ends meet, his darling ambition that his boy shall some day be a rabbi; but the little fellow threw consternation into that household by declaring that he would not be a rabbi when he grew up, and why? “Because,” he told my friend, “I do not believe I could ever think of words beautiful enough to speak to God in.” Out of a slum tenement! How you would cherish it forever if your little one were to lift his soul and yours up to God with such a speech! Diamonds in the dust, truly.
I remember the “Kid” they brought to police headquarters handcuffed to two policemen whom he had tried to kill when they came upon him robbing a store. If ever there was a tough, he was one. And yet when they brought him out from the detective office, where he had had his pedigree taken and been photographed and hung in the Rogues’ Gallery as the first stop on his way to the jail and to the gallows, there was something underneath the hard crust that spoke to me of the image of God in which he was made. Overlaid by the slum, yes! hopelessly, you might have said; but there is no such thing as hopelessness where the spark of His life is. It may be quickened at any moment. It needs only the right thing to strike fire, and that thing is always the same. Love of God? He did not know what it was. He would have spurned you away had you come to him with it on your lips. But when, five minutes later, a cry of horror went up on Broadway where a little toddling baby had strayed out upon the railroad track with a runaway car not ten feet from the child, who crowed with delight at the sound of the bell which the gripman banged, sick with dread, for he was powerless to stay the car—when we stood frozen to stone with the despairing shriek of that mother whom men were holding back while they turned their heads away, with her cries ringing the doom of the child in our ears—when there seemed no help on earth, then it was the “Kid” who tore himself from the grasp of the policemen and sprang upon the car-track, saving the child at the risk of his own life a thousand times over! Thief, tough, indexed and hung in the Rogues’ Gallery; started fair for the jail and the gallows, he did not hesitate. The peril of the innocent child struck the spark, and the image came out which the slum had tried to smother. Plenty there are who, had they seen him, would not have thought it was there; for there are other things beside the slum that bury it deep, too deep for the spark to struggle through: too good a time, over-indulgence, selfishness, for instance. It is not the first time that men have sought the Lord in the high places in vain. The wise men found Him cradled in the stable with the dumb beasts, and they worshiped Him there.
There was Fighting Mary. She earned her name; that tells the story. A pupil on occasion in the Industrial School of the Children’s Aid Society on Seventh Avenue, she had acquired such a reputation as a battler with the gangs of the neighborhood, that it seemed like putting a premium on bad conduct, I suppose, to bid her to the Thanksgiving dinner; but better counsel prevailed, and she was allowed to come. And when she saw the little mince pie at her plate—a whole pie, the first and only one in her desolate life, though nothing was farther from her mind than thoughts of desolation, with several unsettled scores on hand—her whole childish soul went out to it. She caressed it tenderly, felt of it, sniffed its sweet fragrance, and, when every sense was satisfied except the one that the children all about her were gorging, she crammed it, as carefully as she might, all warm and pulpy as it was, into her dress pocket. The boys saw it and, encouraged by the presence of strangers, jeered a little; not very loudly, for they knew the penalty well; but she heard it and, with one of the looks before which the “gang” had quailed before, she said just this: “For mother.”