Their appeal suggests that social exclusions and prejudices separate far more effectively than distance and differing language. They bring a hope that a better relationship—even the great brotherhood—is not impossible, and that through love and understanding we shall come to know the shame of prejudice.
Instinctively the sympathetic observer feels the possibilities of the young life that passes before the settlement doors, and sincerity demands that something shall be known of the conditions, economic, political, religious, or, perchance, of the mere spirit of venture that brought them here. How often have the conventionally educated been driven to the library to obtain that historic perspective of the people who are in our midst, without which they cannot be understood! What fascinating excursions have been made into folklore in the effort to comprehend some strange custom unexpectedly encountered!
When the anxious friends of the dying Italian brought a chicken to be killed over him, the tenement-house bed became the sacrificial altar of long ago; and when the old, rabbinical-looking grandfather took hairs from the head of the sick child, a bit of his finger-nail, and a garment that had been close to his body, and cast them into the river while he devoutly prayed that the little life might be spared, he declared his faith in the purification of running water.
It is necessary to spend a summer in our neighborhood to realize fully the conditions under which many thousands of children are reared. One night during my first month on the East Side, sleepless because of the heat, I leaned out of the window and looked down on Rivington Street. Life was in full course there. Some of the push-cart venders still sold their wares. Sitting on the curb directly under my window, with her feet in the gutter, was a woman, drooping from exhaustion, a baby at her breast. The fire-escapes, considered the most desirable sleeping-places, were crowded with the youngest and the oldest; children were asleep on the sidewalks, on the steps of the houses and in the empty push-carts; some of the more venturesome men and women with mattress or pillow staggered toward the riverfront or the parks. I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock in the morning!
Many times since that summer of 1893 have I seen similar sights, and always I have been impressed with the kindness and patience, sometimes the fortitude, of our neighbors, and I have marveled that out of conditions distressing and nerve-destroying as these so many children have emerged into fine manhood and womanhood, and often, because of their early experiences, have become intelligent factors in promoting measures to guard the next generation against conditions which they know to be destructive.
Before I lived in the midst of this dense child population, and while I was still in the hospital, I had been touched by glimpses of the life revealed in the games played in the children’s ward. Up to that time my knowledge of little ones had been limited to those to whom the people in fairy tales were real, and whose games and stories reflected the protective care of their elders. My own earliest recollections of play had been of story-telling, of housekeeping with all the things in miniature that grown-ups use, and of awed admiration of the big brother who graciously permitted us to witness hair-raising performances in the barn, to which we paid admittance in pins. The children in the hospital ward who were able to be about, usually on crutches or with arms in slings, played “Ambulance” and the “Gerry Society.” The latter game dramatized their conception of the famous Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as an ogre that would catch them. The ambulance game was of a child, or a man at work, injured and carried away to the hospital.