Almost all of this half million people are honest, hard workers. The heads of families are among the first to go to work in the morning and among the last to go to their homes at night. They are those who work for the smallest wages and do the hardest work. They and their families need just as much food to support life as any of the well-to-do portion of the population. But in any large city the necessities of life are costly, and they are particularly so in our largest city. The wages of an ordinary mechanic or workingman will barely pay the rent of the cheapest apartment and buy food for five people. Clothing must be left to chance, luxury must be unthought-of, and the only possible relaxation is that to be found in the streets or at places where entertainment is free.
More heroism is displayed in some of these humble homes than ever was witnessed on any battle-field of which the world has knowledge. The wolf at the door is a thousand times worse foe than the enemy on the frontier. The soldier always has glory to look to in case he dies. The suffering laborer dies, if die he must, in abject misery at the thought of his family’s future. Whatever his health, however numerous his discomforts, however small his pay, he must work and go on working, or his family must starve. He has no friends who are rich or influential; if he had, he would not be a poor working-man; his only friends are those of his own kind, and while almost any of them would in time of necessity share their last loaf with him, there are times when the most friendly of them have no loaf to share. A day or two of sickness of the head of the family imposes a stern chase which lasts long and costs frightfully. The death of a member of their family means absolute ruin. This would seem bad enough, but there is worse behind it. The necessity of sending the remains of the
loved one to the burial ground of the paupers is one of the terrible experiences which are very common in large cities. Some of them cannot afford even the small time necessary to do that much; so, with many tears and prayers, perhaps sometimes with many curses upon the hard luck to which fate or fortune has reduced them, the remains are quietly carried to the river-side at night and there dropped from sight, though not from memory. A few years ago a newspaper attaché, attending one of the large excursions given by charitable persons to children of the poor, overheard a mother and daughter talking about a sick babe which the daughter was to carry on board the boat. The mother could not go. She had to work or the family must starve. She took her child in her arms, again and again kissed it, cried over it, and then began a skilful conversation with her daughter leading up to the possibility and advisability, in case of death during the trip, of dropping the little darling’s remains overboard, saying that the deep, clean sea was a cleaner burial place than the dark ground in the cemetery. The child listened with wondering face and finally agreed with her mother. As for the reporter, he was so horrified that he was utterly unfit for work for a year after, although he imagined himself hardened to scenes of suffering.
The wildest imagination cannot possibly exceed some actual facts of tenement-house life. The story has been told again and again, until there is no novelty in it, of families crowded together so closely that all the decencies of life were forgotten, because it was impossible to observe them, of bad associations formed, of children wilting and weakening unto death because the air they breathed was unfit to support life, of food purchased at cheaper and cheaper prices until that finally used was little better than poison to those who ate it, of poverty induced by payments deferred, of the wretchedness and semi-starvation that exist through some of the long strikes of some of the laboring classes; but none of it fully equals the truth. There are happy, virtuous, well-fed, well-clothed families in tenement houses, and it is probably fair to say that these are perhaps in the majority, but the minority is so numerous that the heart is appalled at contemplating it. Out of their wretched homes these people cannot go. There is no other place for them. While a man and his wife are young and before they have children, they may roam about if they choose as tramps in pleasant summer weather, until some happy chance finds work for one or the other in the rural districts. But once anchored in the city by a family of children, and the opportunities of the laboring man of small income to ever change his condition are almost nothing. Some men say that the influence of religion is declining. The strongest refutation, and an absolute one, of this statement is that the miserable people in large cities do not arise in frenzied mobs and destroy everything which they cannot steal. The long, patient and then despairing struggle against the inevitable is enough to reduce any man to frenzy, were it not, as Longfellow says, that poverty
“Crushes into dumb despair
One-half the human race.”
It nevertheless is true that as large a proportion of these people as of any other class in the city are religious by instinct, training and practice. The churches which they attend are more crowded on Sundays than those of the better classes, and the painter who wishes to find models of patience and resignation and determination can find them better at the doors of these churches than anywhere else in the world.