The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

The saloon became very early in the development of the tenement-house sections the only social center. The result was an increasing of the drink habit and the establishment of political headquarters in saloons. Often the politician in embryo was the saloon-keeper, often the bartender. The social side of life thirty years ago was not a subject for church consideration and study.

The Church ministering to a people having standards of social life established by the churches, the outgrowth of its teachings and creeds, can ignore questions that the Church ministering, or trying to minister, to a people poverty-stricken, overworked, living lives barren of any pleasures but those of the senses, in an environment that of itself would be a deteriorating influence, must meet and answer.

The Church downtown discovered it must work seven days in the week; that its office, its function was secular, as well as religious; that its Sunday work was but one-seventh of its work, and that the six-sevenths must minister to that one. The Church must go out into the highways and hedges, to use a misplaced metaphor for a city street, and win the people. This evolution of conception marks a spiritual Renaissance.

Industrial training was introduced by the churches, the natural result of discovering the ignorance of the women of household arts. Far more valuable than the skill imparted to the children gathered in these classes was the contact with the earnest, refined women and young girls who were the teachers in the now established mission churches. The revelation was mutual. If the tenement-house child gained new ideas of cleanliness, of order, of neatness, of dexterity, of manners, the uptown teacher also gained knowledge of which she stood quite as much in need. When a panting, shining-faced child came to sewing school half to three-quarters of an hour late because she scrubbed the halls and stairs of a three-story tenement house to help her mother, the housekeeper, who paid the whole or part of the rent for the family by this service, the uptown woman of leisure gained a new view of life and its responsibilities. When the mission worker who was giving time and strength and knowledge as the expression of her faith and conscience, found children scarcely more than babies working far beyond their strength in the service of their families, the uptown worker gained a new conception of sacrifice, of poverty, and, what was far more important, a new conception of the causes of ignorance. The uptown woman of leisure saw that often children were sacrificed to greed; forced to become wage-earners by parents anxious to increase their bank accounts.

As time went on, they saw that, whether poverty or greed was responsible for the sacrifice of the children, the protection of the children was the safeguard of the State, of the nation. There came from this, by the process of evolution, the factory laws for the protection of women and children; the compulsory school law. In these latter days this last has been made ridiculous by the failure of the municipality to provide school accommodations for the children of school age, especially the children under fourteen living in the overcrowded sections.

The church workers in the tenement-house sections were able to find means to meet some of the evils of oppression, of poverty, of ignorance. They had concrete facts to present to a semi-indifferent public; but when the social side of the people in the tenements became a problem, especially the social life of the young people, the remedies did not present themselves. The legislation proposed and executed was restrictive, not recreative. It was not the function of the State or the Church to provide social opportunities for uneducated, overworked young people.

The older girls in the Sunday-school classes presented not only all the problems of the little children, but the larger one of social opportunity. The homes were too small, too overcrowded to give social opportunity to the family. Besides, there was that saddest of all features too often found in the home of the working girls—the absence of all sense of personal responsibility on the part of parents for the social life of the children, girls and boys. The children in all but the exceptional home were free to choose friends, free to go and come as suited them. Home was a place in which to eat and to sleep; a place of shelter; a place often entered only when there was no place to go out of working hours.

The problem of providing social opportunity faced the downtown churches. In the very nature of things the social opportunities the Church could offer must be limited; must be of the nature that appealed to the more quiet, the phlegmatic, the element that presented the least factors in the social problem. The parish house, the church house did not exist. All the amusements offered the people must be in a building consecrated to religious life and service. It was a serious question how far the Church was justified in introducing the purely social.

It was natural that the young women brought into touch with the young working girls in the Sunday-school should apprehend the restrictions that life in a tenement imposed on a working girl. Everything in this life tended to make her gregarious. She was born into a house probably overcrowded before she came into it; she slept, ate, lived with crowds. The street, her only playground, was teeming with children like herself. When she worked, she rubbed elbows with the workers on each side of her. She went and came from her work one of a group. The working girl lived free, and pleasure she would have.

The girl of wealth and leisure working in the mission Sunday-school, by her own youth and natural inclinations, could appreciate this side of the working-girl's nature, and with the same clearness of vision see the limitations imposed on the Church in trying to meet the social needs of the people for whom it primarily existed.