The use of money in such families is for show. It would be counted extravagant to buy a book, or a ticket to an oratorio or a concert to hear the best music. It would in such a family be counted useless to train the younger children to wage-earning by education. The heads of the family will be hospitable where it counts as showing how much more they have than the others in their world. They receive from their world what snobbishness receives everywhere. Snobbishness, on the whole, is not common even where the income would remove the family from a tenement-house environment. The uncertainty of work, and the absolute dependence of the worker on wages, make snobbishness dangerous; that often proves a boomerang their observation shows.
A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.
The spirit of helpfulness may not find so free a field of operations when wages are two dollars and a half and over a day, but it is in readiness. Sickness in a neighbor's family will show that it has not been lost because of prosperity, but it is less lavish; there is dawning consciousness that self-preservation is the first law of nature; that home has the first right to strength and thought; that only the surplus is available for the world of friends. The same thriftlessness which makes a family accept charity without question is the cause of their generosity. As the sense of responsibility develops, the observer discovers a reserve in the giving of either their money or their strength to those about them; kindness abounds, but generosity is regulated as one goes up the scale in the world of wage-earners. Not only that, but in the direst need the needy, as one goes up the scale, regulate the degree of freedom given the closest friends. It often borders on the tragic, the suffering borne in silence, and revealed often when the time for help is passed.
This division of the people into rich and poor without gradations and without a comprehension of the standards and needs that make new worlds up and down the scale, has had a serious effect on the home life, the church life of the people, the political life of the people. The churches have driven out the very people in the tenement-house regions who needed them and whom they needed.
Corrupt administration has imposed burdens on the homes which for a time the voters in turn felt powerless to lift. The independent wage-earner found his hope of political recognition in allegiance to the political machines. The leaders, his inferiors often mentally, and still more surely morally, were at least approachable and familiar, and the man who made his own life found too often that only in the political circle of interest was he the equal of those who led. Here there was no manner that expressed condescension or superiority. His own language was spoken; he was at home. That these men allowed themselves to be used was the natural result of the habit of indifference to the real issues in a municipal campaign so common in New York. When the burdens of a corrupt administration pressed on the homes; when the leaders for righteous government acknowledged by appealing to the makers of this country, the plain people, that they were an integral part of the city's government, they responded, and by their response overthrew the corrupt government that the indifference of all classes had helped to make powerful.
The century opens well. Capitalist and wage-earner sit at the same board, having equal voice in the plans for redeeming the city from partisan machine control.
As one thinks of the change, one sees that the evils that disgraced New York were due to the indifference of the millionaires and the honest working men. It is the response of the political conscience of both to the need of the city that has been its redemption; its only sure protection is the activity of that conscience three hundred and sixty-five days of each year in all the years to come.