In France, many years ago, a voice was raised in warning: “Kill the home and you destroy family, manhood, patriotism.” The warning was vain, and the home-loving Germans won easily over the people in whose language there is not even a word to describe What we express in the word “home.”
How much of the strength of the old New England home went into the making of our Republic you know as well as I. It is that thought which makes me pause when I remember that in their day one in twenty-five of the people lived in cities, whereas now the showing is one in three, with all of the influences of the city seeming to push against the chief prop of the State, the home. Is it not the chief prop? Imagine a nation of homeless men, a nation deserving the epithet, “the homeless people”; what would it have to preserve, what to fight for? And however given to peace we all may be, in the last analysis the test of a nation’s fitness to live is that it will fight for its life. No! wipe out the home and the whole structure totters and falls. Even if it hang together yet a while, it is not worth preserving, not worth fighting for.
If we had any doubt about it, we have had some information upon the subject given us in recent years, in my state and in yours. It was here in your city that the Children’s Aid Society demonstrated, in a way that did us all good through and through, that the old plan of bringing up children in squads, which had been tried until it sickened them and us, was bad, and that placing them out in families made all the difference in the world. We knew it before, but we needed to be told it in just that way. We had the experience over again in New York; they had it in Boston; they have had it everywhere. But very lately we have had a piece of testimony to that effect that ought to settle the matter. It was an old scandal in our city that practically all the babies in the Foundling Hospital died there; none lived to grow up. I say scandal, not in the sense that any one was to blame. They tried hard enough. Men are not monsters to see a defenseless baby die without trying to help it. In the worst Tammany days, we had herds of Jersey cows on Randall’s Island, kept expressly for those waifs. Everything was done that pity and experience could suggest, but nothing availed. The babies died, and there was no help for it. Until four years ago, when a joint committee of the State Charities’ Aid Association and the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, took them off the hands of the city authorities and put them in homes. The first year after that the mortality among them fell to a little over fifty per cent., the second year it was just beyond thirty per cent. and the fourth, which was last year, it had fallen to ten and seven-tenths per cent., a figure quite below the mortality among all the children under two years of age in the whole city. And the experience in Brooklyn was just the same.
What did it mean? It meant this, and nothing less, that these children had come at last to their rights; that every baby is entitled to one pair of mother’s arms around its neck; that its God-given right is a home,—a home; and that, when man robs it of that right, it will not stay. And small blame to it! It shows that even foundling babies have good sense. They stayed, these, in such numbers—their death rate fell below the ordinary death rate of all the children of their age—because they were picked homes they were put into. It meant, friends, that God puts a little child in a home because He wants it to grow up with that as its most precious heritage, its spark of heaven that ever beckons it to its true home beyond. It means that you cannot herd human beings in battalions and expect them to develop the qualities of individuality, of character, that make citizenship upon which to build the Republic that shall be the hope of to-morrow as well as the shelter of to-day. We tried that with the “communities” that wiped out the family and substituted the barrack for the home. But happily they wiped out themselves. No, brethren, upon the home rests our moral character; our civic and political liberties are grounded there; virtue, manhood, citizenship grow there. We forget it to our peril. For American citizenship in the long run, will be, must be, what the American home is.
And this home, how does it look to me? The ideal, always in my mind, is that of a man with his feet upon the soil and his children growing up there. So, it seems to me, we should have responsible citizenship by the surest road. But that ideal is unattainable in our cities. We must find another there. And I ask, as the minimum standard, less than which I will not take, isolation enough in the teeming crowds to secure the privacy without which individuality cannot grow and character is fearfully handicapped. I ask light and air, at least as plentiful and as good as they have it in the great cattle barns I have seen in my own old home, where their cows are their most precious possession, because through them the people make their living. I ask an environment in which a man may think himself a respectable citizen, an environment that has no suggestion of the pigsty. You have no business to try to persuade an American citizen that that is his place. It is treason against the republic. I ask, above all, the mother who makes the home; I want the mother. Without her, home is but an empty name.
What, then, of the barrack that destroys privacy, whose crowds make life loathsome, whose restricted and narrow quarters compel the use of the family room only for eating and sleeping; not the latter even when the summer heats come and the people, to live, must sleep on the roof or out on the fire-escape? What of those things which send the children to the street, there to grow such character as they can; that smother in them even the instinct for the open, for the fields and the woods that is like the last open window for the soul; rob them of those resources of mind and heart that make them respond quickly to the robin’s and the daisy’s appeal and make them at home in God’s nature; that give them the gutter for a playground, and the saloon, as they grow, for their natural meeting-place,—their only one, indeed; for it is only just beginning to dawn upon us that in neglecting that function of the public school, we have been guilty of a fearful and wicked waste.
What of these; and what of the need—the need of making the rent—that sends the mother to the factory, leaving perhaps the little ones behind, locked in as the only alternative of the street? Locked in and left to the chance, the awful chance, of a fire in that tenement with the children helpless to get out and no one knowing of their plight. I say it with a shudder, for I have had to record as a reporter too many—oh! God! too many by far—of these things which wring the heart of a man. What of the grinding need that sends the mother to the shop and so knocks the big and the strong prop from under the home?
Or, perhaps, the children go along. Then there is no home; for I do not call the cheerless room to which they return for their evening meal, tired and worn and spiritless, to sleep but not to play—I do not call that home.
We know the curse of child labor. We know it to our sorrow and loss. Experience has taught us that it is loss, all loss, ever tending downward; that, however we figure it, the result is always the same: where men alone work, they earn the support of the family; where men and women work, they together earn the support, with nothing to spare; and where men, women and children work, they do that and no more; so that nothing is gained and everything is lost. Child-life and citizenship are lost; for the children of to-day are the men of to-morrow. We know it to our cost, and you have the lesson before you, though you do not seem to have learned it. When you do, you will find the cost appalling.
What else was the meaning of the testimony given before the Coal Strike Commission, that moved its members to tears and anger by turns? And why in the twelfth census has Pennsylvania fallen from the sixteenth to the twentieth place on the list of states that send their children to school? It is true that there has been no absolute retrogression, for while in 1890 there were over two per cent. of your children between the ages of ten and fourteen years who could neither read nor write, in 1900 the illiterates numbered barely over one in a hundred. But that one is one too many, and why is he there? Because, according to the showing of the factory inspectors—and the factory inspectors are always optimists—there were thirty-five thousand of your children at work, who should have been in school, not counting the breaker-boys in your mines. As to them, the coal operators owned up to thirty thousand being in the mines who never should have been there.