That was all; but it brought the tears of penitence, of sorrow and of gladness to the eyes of the good women who thought once of shutting her out as quite beyond hope. Before that day’s sun set, they did what they could to undo the wrong by adopting a resolution that has since stood upon the records of all the twenty schools and more of the Children’s Aid Society: that occasions of mince pie shall carry double rations always, one for Mary and one for mother!
These are the children whose backs we have been loading with the heredity of the slum, of ignorance, of homelessness. There came to me the other day a letter asking me to be present at the fiftieth annual meeting of that Children’s Aid Society, which has in all these years been trying to break the bonds of the slum by taking the children from it and planting them out on the Western fields where they may grow in the sunlight. And grow they did; at the meeting to which I was invited, three governors were to be present, two elected by the people in their states and one territorial governor appointed by the president; and all three of them were once bare-legged little raggamuffins taken from the slum of New York!
No hope? No, there will be none for us, unless our eyes are opened speedily; for it does not end here. We can choose whether we will make of the lad in the slum a governor or a thief; and we shall have to foot the bill here, if we choose the bad end. But there is another reckoning coming for smothering God’s image in a human soul. Somebody has got to foot that bill, too, and it will not be the boy. He was the victim.
The boy sees the choice we are making. He sees us building jails when we should have built schools, though the schools are many times cheaper any way one looks at it. If he has heard that I am my brother’s keeper, he must conclude upon the evidence that it means jail-keeper; and, in disgust and derision at our lack of sense, he throws stones and mud. And who shall blame him? Not I. I joined him long ago, only I throw ink; but the idea is the same. The boy has been foully dealt with.
And foolishly! Where it would have been—is—so easy to form character, we have been laboring with such infinite toil to reform it. It would have formed itself had we left the boy the home, for that is where character grows. The loss of it thrust a hundred problems upon us of finding props to take its place. All the labor of forty years has been directed to that end.
The fresh air holidays are one, and how strong a one, how sadly needed, he may know who hears the child cry out upon his first sight of God’s open fields, “How blue the sky is, and how much there is of it!” Not much in his slum alley! “The fresh air holiday,” said a woman doctor who has labored all her life among the poor in my city, “is a strong plaster for our social ills.” And so it is. Some day, I hope to see the touch from my old home, the neighborly Danish touch, added to it for the good of us all. There they exchange; the boys from the city go out to the country to be made over, and the lads from the farms are taken to town by their teachers to see its wonders and to come nearer to the history of their country that is written there. So they feel more like what they are in fact, neighbors who can pull together all the better because they are no longer strangers. They have been introduced to one another. That idea is worth considering. In our great country, we need to pull together in the days that are coming even more than in the past. There is enough to pull us apart.
The boys’ club is another prop. It is the key to the boy that heads off the “gang” and the reformatory that lurks behind it. In the beginning, it grew out of a missionary’s great heart, and wherever there is heart in it one boys’ club is worth a thousand policemen’s clubs in the fight with the slum. The boys were breaking the windows of the mission house in Tompkins’ Square and the police could not drive them off. The missionary’s wife knew a plan, however: she invited them in to have coffee and cakes. That was the gospel in practical form for Tompkins’ Square, and the first boys’ club that grew out of that meeting has to-day an army of members which no building is big enough to house; and Tompkins’ Square, that was once given over to rioting, to “bread or blood” processions, has become orderly and peaceful. The last of the anarchists over there has taken to keeping a beer saloon and accumulating property. We have grafted the boys’ club upon the public school and we never did anything better.
The kindergarten is such a prop, and the cooking class is another—never a stronger in the fight with intemperance, that thrives upon bad cooking at home as upon nothing else. The whole reformed school is building new underpinnings for the lad who has so long been left to himself. We have replaced the three R’s with the three H’s—the head, the heart, and the hand. We are at last teaching the children to think. We are nearly where we can vote six millions of dollars for public schools as readily as for a battleship. When we get to where we can do it without a tremor, we shall be fairly on the home stretch. As yet we shudder at the great sums; but they are the opportunities of our greatness, over which we must learn to rejoice more than over fine ships, mighty railroads, vast wheat-fields, territorial expansion and a full treasury; because, if they are not heeded, these other things are but so many temptations and traps for our stumbling feet.
The social settlement is of all the substitute props the strongest. It takes all the rest into its plan to help; and it goes to the home, which is the kernel of all, and tries to help there with neighborly touch. That is the cure. Greed and selfishness killed the home; human sympathy only can bring it back. “My brother” is the word that has healing for all our social ills. The settlement has been compared to a bridge upon which men go over, not down, from the mansion to the tenement; for a bridge must be level to be good. There was a time when men went down to that work, or shot down their coal and their groceries, as if through a coal chute, in contemptuous settlement of brotherhood arrears. That did not work. The crop we raised from that was hatred and helplessness. But the personal touch can redeem even free soup; and if there is anything more hopeless than that I do not know it. I am told that here in Philadelphia, where it unaccountably survives, it is coupled, after all, with kindly inquiry and personal interest, serves as a means of opening the door merely. It is a bad key; but, if that is the use it is put to, as I am told by a venerable Quaker who confronted me sternly with the question, “Jacob, why did thee say in thy book that in Philadelphia common sense appears to be drowned in soup?”—if that is the way of it, I am willing to condone even free soup, otherwise outlawed as hopeless. It was never the way in my city.
So, whichever way we turn, we come back to the commandment: “My children, love one another.” Doing that, we can leave the results with Him who said it. But we can make them out even now. We can see how things are beginning to tend back towards the home where love grows naturally in the family. The neighborhood idea, that is the heart of the settlement movement, rouses civic pride, rouses ideals that were dead, restores to the neighborhood individuality and to the family dignity. The mothers’ club, what does it mean, what does it discuss, but home-making? The home library brings the visitor to the home, picks it out and gives it separate existence, and ties the children to it with a new loyalty. The boys’ club belongs there in its ultimate development and will yet go there for its meetings, and the girls’ club too. That must be the ultimate aim of the settlement, which is now preparing the ground for it. Everywhere, consciously or unconsciously, the movement is in the air, and growing, to rescue the home from neglect, to put a stop to child labor and to home-work that would exclude the family life; the movement to send mother and children back to the home where they are safe.