I knew a young lady who got a job as investigator—a nice young, sentimental girl. After a few months' work she was the terror of the poor and the pet of the Manager. She had reduced by half the list in her district. From a hundred applications she investigated not ten got relief. She would visit them day and night to find a reason why they should be cut off. The neighbours for ten blocks around would know that Mrs. So and So had applied to the institution. And when one day I told her she was not fit for such a position because she had no heart, and advised her to get a job at something else, she showed me her right hand. She had lost her fingers in an accident at an embroidery machine and she had to make a living!
Another young woman, who was engaged to marry a friend of mine and who got the position through me, lost the affection of her fiancé.
"She has entirely changed in the last few months," he told me. "She is suspicious, hard, cold and cynical. Her face has changed, she never laughs, never smiles."
Poor chap! He did not know the cause. I did.
The work, the surroundings, the system of organised charity, unfits them for anything, and among all the crimes of charity the one that stands out pre-eminently is that it ruins the lives of all the men and women who work in it. Only a God and an angel could remain good. But the gods are in the heavens and the angels are crucified.
THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
No district of any big city in the world has such a desolate miserable look as the "charity blocks" in New York. They are grouped a little everywhere. For this, New York is like the body of Job, with sores and wounds all over.
Around all the gas houses near the river, north, south, east and west, take any of the gay streets of the metropolis. Forty-second Street, Thirty-fourth Street, Twenty-third and Fourteenth Streets. With what dirt and misery they start on the west, how they get brighter and gayer towards the middle, on Seventh Avenue, how they reach the climax at Fifth Avenue, and how the Third Avenue elevated in the east and Ninth Avenue elevated in the west cuts off the ugly part of the city, like the butcher who trims around the meat. The cheap tallow for the poor and the centre piece for the rich, and all comes from one and the same animal. Just as the meat, in proportion to its nutrition, costs the poor dearer than the rich, so do the apartments of the poor cost more than the Fifth Avenue houses, taking into consideration the comfort of the latter. As a matter of fact it is well known that Cherry, Henry, Monroe and Hester Street properties are more profitable, proportionately to the money invested, than Fifth Avenue apartments. No vacant house is to be seen around the celebrated "lung blocks." The terrible stench coming from across the river, where the garbage of the city is dumped, has killed the sense of smell of the poor wretches living there. They wonder at you when you keep handkerchief to your nose while passing. It is an ordeal to pass along Avenue A between Twenty-fifth and Thirty-fourth Streets. The poisonous gas combines with the stench of the slaughter house, and the piled up garbage in the river. Still the streets are full of children, playing, and God only knows why the poor have so many children.