UNDER-GROUND TENEMENT WITH TWO BEDS ([SEE NOTE]).
In another similar cellar or burrow[5] we found a mother and seven boys and girls, some of them quite large, all sleeping in two medium-sized beds in one room; this room is also their kitchen. The other room is a storehouse for kindling wood the children gather and sell, a little store and living room combined. Their rent is two dollars a week. The cellar was damp and cold; the air stifling. Nothing can be imagined more favorable to contagion both physical and moral than such dens as these. Ethical exaltation or spiritual growth is impossible with such environment. It is not strange that the slums breed criminals, which require vast sums yearly to punish after evil has been accomplished; but to me it is an ever-increasing source of wonder that society should be so short-sighted and neglectful of the condition of its exiles, when an outlay of a much smaller sum would ensure a prevention of a large proportion of the crime that emenates from the slums; while at the same time it would mean a new world of life, happiness, and measureless possibilities for the thousands who now exist in hopeless gloom.
OUT OF WORK ([SEE NOTE]).
In a small room fronting an interior court we found a man[6] whose face bore the stamp of that “hope long deferred which maketh the heart sick.” He is, I am informed, a strictly temperate, honest, and industrious workman. Up to the time of his wife’s illness and death, which occurred last summer, the family lived in a reasonably comfortable manner, as the husband found no difficulty in securing work on the sea. When the wife died, however, circumstances changed. She left six little children, one almost an infant. The father could not go to sea, leaving his little flock without a protector, to fall the victims of starvation, and since then he has worked whenever he could get employment loading vessels, or at anything he could find. For the past six weeks he has been practically without work, and the numerous family of little ones have suffered for life’s necessities. His rent is two dollars and a quarter a week.
PORTUGUESE WIDOW IN ATTIC ([SEE NOTE]).
In the attic in another tenement we found a widow[7] weeping and working by the side of a little cradle where lay a sick child, whose large luminous eyes shone with almost phosphorescent brilliancy from great cavernous sockets, as they wandered from one to another, with a wistful, soul-querying gaze. Its forehead was large and prominent, so much so that looking at the upper part of the head one would little imagine how terrible the emaciation of the body, which was little more than skin and bones, speaking more eloquently than words of the ravages of slow starvation and wasting disease. The immediate cause of the poor woman’s tears was explained to us in broken English, substantially as follows: She had just returned from the dispensary where she had been unsuccessful in her effort to have a physician visit her child, owing to her inability to pay the quarter of a dollar demanded for the visit. After describing as best she could the condition of the invalid, the doctor had given her two bottles of medicine and a prescription blank on which he had written directions for her to get a truss that would cost her two dollars and a half at the drug store. She had explained to the physician that owing to the illness of her child she had fallen a week and a half in arrears in rent; that the agent for the tenement had notified her that if one week’s rent was not paid on Saturday she would be evicted, which meant death to her child, so she could not buy the truss. To which the doctor replied, “You must get the truss and put it on before giving anything from either bottle, or the medicine will kill your child.” “If I give the medicine,” she repeated showing us the bottles, “before I put the truss on, he says it will kill my child,” and the tears ran swiftly down her sad but intelligent face. The child was so emaciated that the support would inevitably have produced terrible sores in a short time. I am satisfied that had the physician seen its condition, he would not have had a heart to order it.
I thought as I studied the anxious and sorrowful countenance of that mother, how hard, indeed, is the lot of the very poor. They have to buy coal by the basketful and pay almost double price, likewise food and all life’s necessities. They are compelled to live in frightful disease-fostering quarters, and pay exorbitant rents for the accommodations they receive. When sick they are not always free from imposition, even when they receive aid in the name of charity, and sometimes theology under the cloak of religion oppresses them. This last thought had been suggested by seeing in our rounds some half-starved women dropping pennies into the hands of Sisters of Charity, who were even here in the midst of terrible want, exacting from the starving money for a church whose coffers groan with wealth. O religion, ineffably radiant and exalting in thy pure influence, how thou art often debased by thy professed followers! How much injustice is meted out to the very poor, and how many crimes are still committed under thy cloak and in thy holy name! Even this poor widow had bitterly suffered through priests who belong to a great communion, claiming to follow Him who cried, “Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” as will be seen by the following, related to me by Rev. Walter Swaffield, who was personally cognizant of the facts. The husband of this widow was out of work for a time; being too ill to engage in steady work, he found it impossible to pay the required ten cents for seats in the church to which he belonged, and was consequently excluded from his sitting. Shortly after he fell sick, his wife sought the priest, imploring him to administer the sacrament, and later extreme unction, which he positively refused, leaving the poor man to die without the consolation of the Church he had from infancy been taught to love and revere.
It is not strange that many in this world of misery become embittered against society; that they sometimes learn to hate all who live in comfort, and who represent the established order of things, and from the rank of the patient, uncomplaining struggler descend to a lower zone, where the moral nature is eclipsed by degradation and crime, and life takes on a deeper shade of horror. This class of people exist on the brink of a precipice. Socially, they may be likened to the physical condition of Victor Hugo’s Claude Frollo after Quasimodo had hurled him from the tower of Notre Dame. You remember the sickening sensation produced by that wonderful piece of descriptive work, depicting the false priest hanging to the eaves, vainly striving to ascend, feeling the leaden gutter to which he was holding slowly giving away. His hands send momentary messages to the brain, warning it that endurance is almost exhausted. Below he sees the sharp formidable spires of Saint-Jean-de-Ronde, and immediately under him, two hundred feet from where he hangs, are the hard pavement, where men appear like pigmies. Above stands the avenging hunchback ready to hurl him back if he succeed in climbing over the eaves. So these poor people have ever below them starvation, eviction, and sickness. Above stands Quasimodo in the form of a three-headed monster: a soulless landlord, the slave master who pays only starvation wages, and disease, the natural complement of the wretched squalor permitted by the one, and the slow starvation necessarily incident to the prices paid by the other. Their lot is even more terrible when it is remembered that their fall carries with it the fate of their loved ones. In addition to the multitude who are condemned to suffer through uninvited poverty, with no hopeful outlook before them, there is another class who are constantly on the brink of real distress, and who are liable at any time, to suffer bitterly because they are proud-spirited and will almost starve to death before they ask for aid. Space prevents me from citing more than one illustration of this character. In an apartment house we found an American woman with a babe two weeks old and a little girl. The place was scrupulously clean, something very rare in this zone of life. The woman, of course, was weak from illness and, as yet, unable to take in any work to speak of. Her husband has been out of employment for a few weeks, but had just shipped on board a sailing vessel for a cruise of several months. The woman did not intimate that they were in great need, as she hoped to soon be enabled to make some money, and the portion of her husband’s wages she was allowed to draw, paid the rent. A week ago, however, the little girl came to the Bethel Mission asking for a loaf of bread. “We have had nothing to eat since Monday morning,” she said, “and the little baby cries all the time because mamma can give it no milk.” It was Wednesday evening when the child visited the Mission. An investigation substantiated the truth of the child’s words. The mother, too proud to beg, struggled with fate, hoping and praying to be able to succeed without asking for aid, but seeing her babe starving to death, she yielded. This case finds many counterparts where a little aid bridges over a period of frightful want, after which the unfortunate are able, in a measure, to take care of themselves.