Later and more scientific investigations have tended to confirm the truth of the rather broad statement made by Buckle in his History of Civilization, that rice and potatoes have done more to establish pauperism than any and all causes besides. A food easily procured, sufficiently palatable to ensure no dissatisfaction, and demanding no ingenuity of preparation, would seem the ideal diet, the promised rest for weary housekeepers and anxious political economists; but the latter class at least have found their work made double and treble by the results of such diet, while social reformers—above all, the advocates of total abstinence—are discovering that till varied and savory food and drink are provided the mass of the people will and must crave the stimulant given by alcoholic drinks.
National dietaries and their results on character and life, fascinating as the investigation is, have no place in the present paper, the design of which is simply to show the existing state of the food-question among the poor. Of these, poor Irish form far the larger proportion, a German or French pauper being almost an anomaly. Thrift seems the birthright of both the French and German peasant, as well as of the middle class, and their careful habits, joined to the better rate of wages in America, soon make them prosperous and well-to-do citizens. It is in the tenement-houses that we must seek for the mass of the poor, and it is in the tenement-houses that we find the causes which, combined, are making of the generation now coming up a terror in the present and a promise of future evil beyond man's power to reckon. They are a class apart, retaining all the most brutal characteristics of the Irish peasant at home, but without the redeeming light-heartedness, the tender impulses and strong affections of that most perplexing people. Sullen, malicious, conscienceless, with no capacity for enjoyment save in drink and the lowest forms of debauchery, they are filling our prisons and reformatories, marching in an ever-increasing army through the quiet country, and making a reign of terror wherever their footsteps are heard. With a little added intelligence they become Socialists, doing their heartiest to ruin the institutions by which they live. The Socialistic leader knows well with what he deals, and can sound every chord of jealousy and suspicion and revenge lying open to his touch. On the rich lies the whole responsibility of want and disease and crime. Equalize property, and these three dark shadows flee fast before the sunshine of prosperity. Character, intelligence, common decencies and common virtues have nothing to do with present conditions, and the ardent leveller of class-distinctions counts as his enemy any one who seeks to give the poor a truer knowledge of how far their earnings may be made to go toward securing better food or less pestilent homes.
Yet foul air and overcrowding would be less fatal in their results were food understood. The well-filled stomach gives strange powers of resistance to the body, and nothing shows this more strongly than the myriad cases of children and infants who are taken from the tenement-houses to the sanitariums at Bath or Rockaway. A week or two of pure air and plenty of milk gives a look almost of health to children who have been brought there often with glazed eyes and pinched, ghastly little faces. Air has meant half, but many mothers have been persuaded to give milk or oatmeal porridge instead of weak tea and bread poisoned with alum, and have found the child's strength become a permanent and not temporary fact.
That these children are alive at all, that fatherhood and motherhood are allowed to be the right of drunkards and criminals of every grade, is a problem whose present solution passes any human power, but which all lovers of their kind must sooner or later face. In the mean time the children are with us, born to inheritances that tax every power good men and women can bring to bear. Hopeless as the outlook often seems, salvation for the future of the masses lies in these children. Not in a teaching which gives them merely the power to grasp at the mass of sensational reading, which fixes every wretched tendency and blights every seed of good, but in a practical training which shall give the boys trades and force their restless hands and mischievous minds to occupations that may ensure an honest living, while the girls find work from which, with few fortunate exceptions, they are still debarred.
The American distaste for domestic service seems to be shared in even greater degree by the children of foreigners born in this country and to a certain extent Americanized. The mothers have usually been servants, and still "go out to days' work," but, no matter how numerous the family, such life for any daughter is despised and discouraged from the beginning. Work in a bag-factory or any one of the thousand, but to the employés profitless, industries of a great city is eagerly sought, and hardships cheerfully endured which if enforced by a mistress would lead to a riot. To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition. To have dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest Fifth Avenue ridiculousness, to flirt with shop-boys as feeble-minded and brainless as themselves, and to marry as quickly as possible, are the aims of all. Then come more wretched, thriftless, ill-managed homes, and their natural results in drunken husbands and vicious children; and so the round goes on, the circle widening year by year till its circumference touches every class in society, and would make our great cities almost what sober country-folk believe them—"seas of iniquity."
Happily, to know an evil is to have taken the first step in its eradication. The work only recently begun—the past five years having seen its growth from a very humble and insignificant beginning to its present promising proportions—holds the solution of at least one equation of the problem. To have made cooking and industrial training the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the poor, and to find one's feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited guide. That cooking-schools and the knowledge of cheap and savory preparation of food must soon have their effect on the percentage of drunkards no one can question; but with them, save indirectly, this present paper does not deal, its object being rather to show what "daily bread" means to the lower classes of New York, the same showing applying with almost equal force to the working poor of any large town throughout the country. Knowledge of this sort must come from patient waiting and watching as one can, rather than from any systematized observation. The poor resent bitterly, and with justice, any apparent interference or spying, and only as one comes to know them well can anything but the most outside details of life be obtained. In the matter of food there is an especial touchiness and testiness, every woman being convinced that to cook well is the birthright of all women. I have found the same conviction as solidly implanted in far higher grades of society, and it may be classed as one of the most firmly-seated of popular delusions that every woman keeps house as instinctively and surely when her time comes as a duck takes to water.
Such was the faith of Norah Boylan, tenant of half the third floor in a tenement-house whose location need not be given a "model tenement-house," six stories high and swarming from basement to attic, forty children making it hideous with the screaming and wrangling of incessant fights, while in and over all rested the penetrating, sickening "tenement-house smell," not to be drowned by steam of washing or scent of food. Norah's tongue was ready with the complaint all tongues made in 1878—hard times; and she faced me now with hands on her hips and a generally belligerent expression: "An' shure, ma'am, you know yourself it's only a dollar a day he's been earnin' this many a day, an' thankful enough to get that, wid Mike overhead wearin' his tongue out wid askin' for work here an' there an' everywhere. An' how'll we live on that, an' the rint due reg'lar, an' the agent poppin' in his ugly face an' off wid the bit o' money, no matter how bare the dish is? Bad cess to him! but I'd like to have him hungered once an' know how it feels. If I hadn't the washin' we'd be on the street this day."
"What do you live on, Norah?"
"Is it 'live'? Thin I could hardly say. It's mate an' petatys an' tea, an' Pat will have his glass. He's sober enough—not like Mike, that's off on his sprees every month; but now we don't be gettin' the same as we used. Pat says there's that cravin' in him that only the whiskey 'll stop. It's tin dollars a month for the rooms, an' that's two an' a half a week steady; an' there's only seven an' a half left for the five mouths that must be fed, an' the fire an' all, for I can't get more'n the four dollars for me washin'. It's the mate you must have to put strength in ye, an' Pat would be havin' it three times a day, an' now it's but once he can; an' that's why he's after the whiskey. The children an' meself has tay, an' it's all that keeps us up."
"How do you cook your meat, Norah?"