Is it not the old, old story of human selfishness that tries ever to get the easy end at the expense of the toiling brother? The woman who shuts her eyes to the fact that “women’s wages have no lowest limit, since the paths of shame are always open to them,”[[1]] and joins in the rush at the bargain counter, the pennies she saves literally, literally the life-drops of her sister, body and soul! the selfish man who says: “What is it to me?” the labor leader who, for personal gain, sacrifices his cause, which is the cause of human progress, “the effort of men, being men, to live like men”—these are they who are selling the American home in our cities into slavery. If anything could make me believe in purgatory, it is the existence of their kind. We all need making over, but they seem to need purging by fire to turn the demon of selfishness out of them, that the spirit of brotherhood may enter. I do not know—I am not a prophet—but I think I can make out that we are on the eve of great social changes, for which our democracy was meant to prepare us, but for which it finds us even now unfit. And all because of that one thing, the great obstacle!
[1]. Report of Working Women’s Society in New York City.
The blindness of them, not to see it! Whichever way we turn, where the selfishness crops out that is where the mistake is made that forfeits public sympathy, while it holds up the cause of human progress. Capital earns its fair reward. Promptly it seeks to crush out its neighbor—calls it protecting its own interests, as though we were so many beasts of prey whose appetites were the one thing we had in common; proclaims from the house-tops the age-old doctrine of privilege—God-given privilege!—from which the world has been trying for centuries to get away; calls the President of the United States, when he tries to make peace, a tinkering politician; and sits in the high seat of the constitution, as if it were made for the protection of property only and had nothing whatever to do with the people! I yield to no man in my respect for the constitution of our land. It is so great and so real that I object to having it worked up into either a sceptre to coerce men, or a fetish to cajole them, as much as I object to having the Bible used that way. I take the constitution to be a human document, the record of action taken by wise and patriotic men to meet emergencies that arose in their day. Unless we are to assume that wisdom died with them; that human experience was completed and bound in volumes to file away on dusty shelves, with nothing more ever to happen that requires judgment or action; or unless we are to confess ourselves unable to take such action when the time comes, we shall be wise to drop the fetish business and to deal with the constitution as men capable of defending their lives and their liberties, including the right to work, and the right not to be frozen to death at the dictation of a half dozen coal kings, upon any plane upon which those liberties may be attacked. This intense regard for the constitution, that is wont to develop in men and newspapers in exact ratio as their love of the brother dies, always suggests to me the fatal ritualism that is akin to the letter that killeth. Something has to make up for that which has been lost; but nothing ever can.
The wrongs of wealth! We all know them. “It is the denial of them,” said Theodore Roosevelt to me the other day, “that has confronted the world with the challenge that ‘property is theft.’” And he was right. But capital has no monopoly of wrong. Labor organizes its multitudes and instantly raises a club to keep out the man who does not think as the next man does, with violence if he will not go willingly. The shallow self-seeking of its advocates, the ignorant blundering of their followers, is often enough to make one sick at heart. We have to look beyond them to the real claims of the cause of labor to having served the world by making homes out of hovels, by making free men out of slaves, by giving back to man his self-respect. We have to take the long-range view to forget the immediate injury and put things right. Organized labor, with all its mistakes, has put us heavily into its debt, for it is true that “only a self-respecting people can remain a free people.” Wrongs there are on both sides. If capital sought but its just reward, it would find it compatible with giving labor its fair share. If labor thought of the rights of the employer with its own; if the fight were ever for the good of the race as it was meant to be; if the union label always guaranteed honest work, a living wage, no sweat-shop or child labor, a clean shop and a fair observance of the factory laws, its cause would be irresistible.
That is it. You know it and I know it. The right, when it appears stripped of all self-seeking, is irresistible. Hence our fight is never hopeless or vain.
The employer who says that he will not treat with his men, that they must obey or get out, forfeits public sympathy and loses his case in our day. The self-seeking union that betrays its cause has no standing in the court of public opinion. It means that appeal can be made to the good in men, can be made with more success than ever. I am warned to beware of a false optimism that digs pitfalls for our feet by making us think there is nothing more to mend. I know that danger; but that the warning should be uttered is in itself the greatest endorsement of my faith in the better day that is dawning. There was little enough to tie that faith to in the days when I wrote “How the Other Half Lives”; but there is enough now for us all to see, and I, in turn, warn him who will not see it, against the pessimism that is both false and disabling. No, thank God, you can at last make your appeal to the consciences of men, and that is why I make it here. I want the church to back it. It is from that quarter that I expect the strong blows to be struck for the home, the blows that will tell. “All the conditions which surround childhood, youth and womanhood” in the crowded tenements of New York City, of the metropolis, “make for unrighteousness.” Is not the call to the Church of God?
Yes! and it has heard the call and is heeding it. I have before me the record of the social activities of one church, St. George’s, of which my friend, Dr. Rainsford, whom you know, is the rector. The year books of Grace Church, of St. Bartholomew’s, of Calvary, of scores of churches in New York, would have like stories to tell. This grocery department, this sewing school, this employment society, these helping hands, kindergartens, cooking schools and mothers’ clubs—they all mean one thing, the determination to reclaim the home that is in peril; they mean that the men and women struggling there shall have backing; that they shall not be permitted “to be content” as they are, for when a man lies down under the slum he is lost. It means that war is declared against the slum, and is to be fought to the bitter end. The Church is coming to the rescue, and I am glad to bear witness that mine is in the van in generous rivalry with its neighbors.
Shall I tell you how I came to be an Episcopalian? I had long been tempted by my friendship for the rector whose church I attended in my own town, though I was not a member of his flock. I had been a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Congregationalist in my day; I would be a Roman Catholic rather than be nothing at all, though that would go hard with me. Denominational fetters ever sat lightly upon me, perhaps too lightly. So that I marched under the flag, I cared less what regimental badge I wore. But one day, I read in my newspaper a growl from the East-side about Bishop Potter’s Mission, the Pro-cathedral in Stanton Street. “Their services,” wrote the man who did me this favor, “are of the kindergarten class: clubs, gymnastics, mothers’ meetings, girls’ dress-making classes—and they call that religion!” Ah! I thought, is that what they are doing over there? and I waited for the answer that was not long in coming.
“Yes,” wrote the priest in charge, “we call it that; and, furthermore, it is our belief that a love of God that does not forthwith seek to run itself into some kindly deed to man is not worth having.” That was their creed—I called it ever after “the Bishop’s creed,”—and I told Bishop Potter then and there that if that was the creed of his church I would join, and I did.
I shall have occasion to show you how the church missed its great opportunity once; how it slept through its chance in the days that are gone, and in its sleep did grievous wrong to the people’s homes, which it ought to have defended. Those are of the sins of the past, and they have to be atoned for; but, please God, we shall not sin thus again. The home that is in peril shall appeal, does appeal to-day to the Christian conscience—appeals from the rule of gold to the golden rule, from the rule of might to that of right; and no longer does it appeal in vain. There was a time, even in my memory, when it was said with more show of reason than I care to think of, that the greatest church corporation in the land was the worst tenement-house landlord in New York City. But to-day our appeal is to the churches. They aroused our consciences to action twenty years ago; they and the Christian men and women who sit in them head every movement in our great city towards the redemption of the home; they led in the fights for reform, for decent living conditions for the people, that wrested victory from the slum twice in the last half dozen years. You all remember those fights and the share that this same Pro-cathedral with the Bishop’s creed bore in the last one.