The city is a good friend to the poor. It gives them day nurseries for their babies, kindergartens for their little children, schools for their boys and girls, playgrounds, swimming-pools, recreation piers, reading-rooms, libraries, churches, clubs, hospitals, cheap amusements, open-air concerts, employment agencies, the companionship of their kind, and the chance of a friend at need. In return, the poor love the city, and cling to it with reasonable but somewhat stifling affection. They know that the hardest thing in life is to be isolated,—'unrelated,' to use Carlyle's apt word; and they escape this fate by eschewing the much-lauded fields and farms. They know also that in the country they must stand or fall by their own unaided efforts, they must learn the hard lesson of self-reliance. Many of them propose to live, as did the astute author of Piers Plowman, 'in the town, and on the town as well.' Moreover, pleasure means as much to them as it does to the rest of us. We hardly needed Mr. Chesterton to tell us that a visit to a corner saloon may be just as exciting an event to a tenement-house dweller, as a dinner at a gold-and-marble hotel is to the average middle-class citizen; and that the tenement-house dweller may be just as moderate in his potations:—
Merrily taking twopenny rum, and cheese with a pocket knife.
Poverty, we are assured, is an 'error,' like ill-health and crime. It is an anachronism in civilization, a stain upon a wisely governed land. But into our country which, after a human fashion, is both wise and foolish, pours the poverty of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with but a few dollars between them and want; with scant equipment, physical or mental, for the struggle of life; with an inheritance of feebleness from ill-nourished generations before them,—this is the problem which the United States faces courageously, and solves as best she can. What she cannot do is miraculously to convert poverty into plenty,—certainly not before the next year doubles, and the third year trebles the miracle-seeking multitude. She cannot properly house or profitably employ a million of immigrants before the next million is clamoring at her doors. Nor is she even given a fair chance to accomplish her giant task. The demagogues who are employed in the congenial sport of railroad baiting, and who are enjoying beyond measure the fun of chivying business interests into dusty corners, are the ones to lift up their voices in shrill appeal for the army of the unemployed. They refuse to connect one phenomenon with the other. The notion that crippling industries will benefit the industrious is not so new as it seems. Æsop must have had a clear insight into its workings when he wrote the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg.
The City of New York expends, according to a recent report of the Hospital Investigating Committee, more than a million of dollars a year for the care of sick, defective, and otherwise helpless aliens. It expended in 1913 nearly four hundred thousand dollars for the care of aliens who had been in this country less than five years. This is the record of our greatest city, the one in which the astute immigrant takes up his abode. The education she gives her little foreign-born children comprises for the most part manual and vocational training, clinics for the defective, schools for the incorrigible, free or cost-price lunches, doctoring, dentistry, the care of trained nurses, and a score of similar attentions unknown to an earlier generation, undreamed of in the countries whence these children come. In return for such fostering care, New York is held up to execration because she has the money to pay the taxes which are expended in this fashion, because she lays the golden egg which benefits the poor of twenty nations. Her unemployed (reinforced hugely from less favored communities) riot in her streets and churches, and agitators curse her for a thing of evil, a city of palaces and slums, corroded with the
| Shame of lives that lie |
| Couched in ease, while down the streets |
| Pain and want go by. |
The only people who take short views of life are the poor, the poor whose daily wage is spent on their daily needs. Clerks and bookkeepers and small tradesmen (toilers upon whose struggle for decency and independence nobody ever wastes a word of sympathy) may fret over the uncertainty of their future, the narrow margin which lies between them and want. But the workman and his family have a courage of their own, the courage of the soldier who does not spend the night before battle calculating his chances of a gun-shot wound, or of a legless future. It is exasperating to hear a teamster's wife cheerfully announce the coming of her tenth baby; but the calmness with which she faces the situation has in it something human and elemental. It is exasperating to see the teamster risk illness and loss of work (he might at least pull off his wet clothes when he gets home); but he tells you he has not gone to his grave with a cold yet, and this careless confidence saves him as much as it costs. I read recently an economist's sorrowful complaint that families, in need of the necessities of life, go to moving-picture shows; that women, with their husbands' scanty earnings in their hands, take their children to these blithesome entertainments instead of buying the Sunday dinner. It sounds like the citizens who buy motor cars instead of paying off the mortgages on their homes, and it is an error of judgment which the working man is little likely to condone; but that the pleasure-seeking impulse—which social workers assign exclusively to the spirit of youth—should mutiny in a matron's bones suggests survivals of cheerfulness, high lights amid the gloom.
The deprecation of earthly anxiety taught by the Gospels, the precedence given to the poor by the New Testament, the value placed upon voluntary poverty by the Christian Church,—these things have for nineteen hundred years helped in the moulding of men. There still remain some leaven of courage, some savor of philosophy, some echoes of ancient wisdom (heard oftenest from uneducated men), some laughter loud and careless as the laughter of the Middle Ages, some slow sense of justice, not easy to pervert. These qualities are perhaps as helpful as the 'divine discontent' fostered by enthusiasts for sorrow, the cowardice bred by insistence upon trouble and anxiety, the rancor engendered by invectives against earth and heaven. No lot is bettered by having its hardships emphasized. No man is helped by the drowning of his courage, the destruction of his good-will, the paralyzing grip of
| Envy with squinting eyes, |
| Sick of a strange disease, his neighbor's health. |
