The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

At the level where charity and dependence are large factors in the home life, the relation of parents to children is changed by their presence. Art has given Charity the figure of a noble, benign woman, in the ample folds of whose garments children are protected. Too often in life she wears a short skirt, to make speed possible, suggesting in movements and voice the need of nervines, when she does not seem to have taken the bandage from the eyes of Justice for her own use, while neglecting to borrow her scales. Where Charity is the welcome guest, instinct is greater than intelligence in the parental relation. The home tie is slight; children become shrewdly self-dependent, physical hardships are more easily borne, and life is often a mere matter of shelter and food; the animal alone is kept alive. This represents a social level as remote from that of the independent wage-earner as is represented between the home's standards and requirements of a family living on fifteen hundred dollars a year and that of a family living on fifteen thousand dollars a year.

We use the word poor so carelessly that there is confusion where absolute misapprehension has not developed as to the character of the largest, most receptive, most responsive and most responsible class of citizens of New York. Politically they have been neglected, until the Citizens' Union gave them a formative part in political decisions. Here and there a score or more independent working men would be found in political organizations, because of an active political conscience, always hoping for better days, when the city would be given its imperative rights without regard to the State or national political complications. It was a hopeless fight, and has sent into the erratic political parties the majority of the independent working men now in them. The schemes of the politicians disgusted them, and new principals seemed to be the only hope for the clean-minded mind who did its own thinking.

The great mass of these independent, self-respecting, intelligent working-men voters were hunted for at election, but were not counted worthy to take a place in the councils of the politically active because they were feared. The Citizens' Union recognized their value and power, and they have come into their own as citizens. No greater service have the Settlements done the city than discovering this unused element in political power and centering it where it is recognized as the saving power in municipal government. These men stand at the head of the homes that reveal love—tender, protecting inspiring love—serving in unspoken unselfishness to the largest degree.

Thousands of mothers can testify to the cheerful sharing by fathers in the household burdens after a day of hard work; of cheerful going without necessities on the part of a father to give more than necessities to the children. Thousands of husbands and fathers will note the unselfishness and wisdom of a mother in caring for and enlarging the opportunities for the children, who are the common objects of love and ambition, and the confidence and love of the husband grows with the years. To the observer there is at the same time no more inspiring and depressing revelation than the parental love which asks nothing for itself, but all that life can give for the children, the visible expression of their mutual love. Often there is no thought given to a future of possible dependence. Wages do not make possible the care of the children at the standards of the parents, the buying of an environment that the experience of intelligent parents demands for them, and a bank account. The last is desirable, the first demand imperative. Faith is the anchor kept to be thrown out when the life currents are running toward the rocks of want and dependence. Nothing is kept back for personal use by these fathers and mothers. Sometimes this very unselfishness, when unregulated by wisdom, leaves them lonely and forsaken in old age. Those to whom they have given their lives have by the gift been placed in social positions that seemingly bar out the parents who made achievement possible. Even in the loneliness of old age the parents rejoice at the success and forget and forgive the separation. The end for which they worked has been attained, their children are successful, and they still count themselves nothing compared with their children.

It is the independent wage-earners who make the largest contributions to our wealth, commercial greatness, national prestige; yet the world, counting wealth by dollars, classifies these as poor. They are as far removed from the incapable, the degraded, the vicious, the dependent, the ignorant—who provide the themes for books—as far removed from the worthless, the deficient, the mentally, morally weak, so familiar to the people of wealth who give money or time, or both, to lessen their miseries, as they are in standard and ambition from the people counted wealthy. The cost of floor space on which to make a home may make them neighbors of the people who are the problems of a great city; they may live in regions that are the laboratory of the student of social and political conditions, but they live behind closed doors, bring up their children, so far as they can, uncontaminated by neighborhood evils, and overcome their environment to a surprising degree. There is no word to distinguish them from those who make capital of their poverty, and the world loses much because of the lack of a term that would express the class who are the hope of this nation, whose children are the promise of its established greatness.

The very limitations that small incomes impose on husbands and wives, strangers to social ambitions, bring into the relation an independence and camaraderie that possibilities of wealth would bar out. When a father and mother have one object in life, their children, they have no personal ambitions; their minds run in the same groove; they live of necessity a unit. When the aim is to give their children a better education than they had; to place them on a firmer foundation in the wage-earning world than the one on which the father and mother started; to save the children from the contaminating world as they had to meet it, there of necessity is a welded interest that bars out a world of distractions. The world in which such fathers and mothers live may seem narrow, but the smallness of the world makes the companionship the closer. As one gets into the inner circle of these homes, the small part that wealth plays in happiness is realized, and the comprehension of what constitutes essentials is gained. The man who knows the measure of his wage-earning power does not waste his nerve and vitality to earn more; the family grow to have fixed habits of expenditure, and content is attained that the social strugglers never know. The victim of nervous prostration is not found in the working-man's world; the fixed rate of wages relieves the nerves, but exercises the muscles and the balance of health is kept. The exceptions to this happy attainment are those whose mental or moral natures have not been adjusted to the happy, even life of the skilled, sober, industrious, thrifty working-man's family in New York.

The world of wealth would find itself rejected if it brought with it into the wage-earning world its moral standards, the rules of conduct are so simple in this world, the standards so elemental. An aldermanic candidate who in his own world is not counted ignorant, during the campaign of 1901 conceived the idea, which he had never held before, though this was the fourth time he had appealed to the suffrages of the people, that the women were a factor in political success. He decided to call on the wives, mothers and sisters of the voters in his district. It would be interesting to know his conclusions after his experience. He must have gained wisdom by his experiment, and heard some unwelcome truths. He announced to one of his hostesses that he thought if he called and showed himself they might see in him something that would persuade them that their husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons ought to vote for him. It would have been interesting to have seen his face when more than one hostess assured him that, having seen him, she felt bound to urge her husband to vote for the other candidate. Or when he was told by others that he must understand how certain he was of defeat, or he would not appeal to women. Still more interesting it would have been to see him when an outraged wife let down the flood-gates of her wrath because she blamed him for the periodic lapses from industry and sobriety of which her husband was guilty. The better class of voters of this candidate's party resented angrily the man calling on their wives. The root cause of the indignation of the men and women it was found was that this man dared to call when the husbands were not at home. In the world of work there is no place for social life in the day-time, and it argues ill for those who indulge in it. The Metropolitan Opera House in the evening would so shock the working man and his wife that they would never recover respect for those who frequent it. A high-necked lace dress with a low lining, worn in the evening by one from the other world to an East Side party, brought out this comment: "Oh! yes, she's all right. They all do it, the women; but isn't it awful?"

The moral standards for men and women in the world of work are the same. The immoral man is despised and avoided by the women. A woman who should maintain the smallest degree of friendship or acquaintance with a man known to be immoral would be avoided by her neighbors; she would be made to realize at once the cause of her offending.

A silly, pretty little woman, whose husband at times was cruel and brutal, ran away from him with another man. No one in the neighborhood could remember when such a thing had happened before, and the neighborhood resented it as a disgrace. The husband's brutality was well known; he was despised and ignored by the better element of men in the neighborhood. Had the wife gone alone, she would have had the support of a respectable minority, but now the husband was the object of deep sympathy. When the wife was found, and declared she would gladly starve with the partner of her disgrace—and there was a fair prospect at the time that she would—"than have the best in the land with my husband; he has kicked me out for the last time," she was cast out of the books of remembrance in that neighborhood. "She married him for better or worse," was the measure of a wife's duty among these wives and mothers.

The admiration of the explorer into this world of work and homes grows with the years for the people who make it, as indignation grows at the misunderstanding of its limitations, its possibilities, its beauty and greatness. For Matthew Arnold gave the true definition of greatness when he said it was the obstacles overcome, not his attainments, that made a man great. The explorer makes many discoveries—some that stimulate and surprise, some that puzzle and depress. The silence of love in this world is a revelation. Whether the terms of endearment are not in the language of this world, or whether the want of leisure and privacy stifle them, it is difficult to decide. Perhaps it is that the language of love is learned in a mother's arms; that when her service to her child must be physical, when it is but one of a thousand things demanding her care and thought—when her muscles must serve unceasingly—she has no time to express the love that strengthens them by words. It may be that the language of love does not grow within crowded walls, and that it is forced to express itself in service.