"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

Still the misery goes on. It increases. The tenement-house population grows larger and larger every year. The accommodations become smaller because the tendency of the rents of such property is steadily upward. There is no way of escape. Little by little the parents of the family of young children prevail upon themselves to allow children to help support the family. There is no cruelty about it in the intention of the parents. The children have little enough to interest them. Their parents are too busy to talk with them or answer any of their questions. During the day the children are in the way, and to the father and mother comes the suggestion that if the entire family were at work together there might be a closer family life. The children are quite willing to take part in whatever their parents are doing. Indeed, it is hard to keep them from doing so. So the transition for children from utter indolence to child labor is very short and easy.

There are a great many businesses in a large city in which children may help their parents. Among these, the most prominent probably will be found among the clothing manufacturers and the makers of that much-abused article, the tenement-house cigar. It isn’t necessary for the reader to be frightened at the idea that cigars are made in tenement-houses, because a respectable man or woman with their children are less likely to have any habits or surroundings which will make the tobacco leaf deleterious than the workman in any famous factory in Havana. There are diseases among the operatives in Cuban cigar factories of which the less said the better. Whatever other ailments there may be in tenement-house life, these particular diseases are not to be found there. Nevertheless the idea of a man and woman and several children working ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day in a room ten feet square with a lot of decaying vegetable matter—which is exactly what leaf tobacco in the course of manufacture really is—to pollute the atmosphere about them, is not a pleasant thing. Tobacco has powerful medicinal qualities, most of which are of a poisonous nature. A small amount of nicotine, the essential principle of tobacco, has been powerfully effective either as a narcotic, or stimulant, or a germicide. The effect upon persons who handle it incessantly during a full half of every day can consequently be imagined. Every one in the room becomes irritable unless the food supply is abundant and carefully selected; every one finally becomes extremely nervous. Men and women do not well endure the life of tobacco manufacturers. To children the constant handling of the leaf is frequently poisonous. Nevertheless, a certain amount of money ought to be earned every day by the family; the father and mother are not able to do it; the children help; the family earnings are as much for the child’s sake as for the parents, and so the work goes on.

In the manufacture of clothing the details, so far as they affect human life, are not so injurious. But one commercial result is always perceptible in a short time. Those operatives who can avail themselves of child labor are enabled to underbid their associates, who are also their competitors. Consequently it is a very short time before the income of the family is no larger than it already had been, while the number of persons occupied in earning it has doubled and perhaps trebled.

Just think a moment what all this really implies. A number of people are excluded from all possibility of exercise or recreation and exciting themselves to the utmost to accomplish a given amount of work in a specified time. Children are quicker than grown people to respond to any exciting influence, and the most enthusiastic workers in tenement-house rooms will always be found to be the children. Sometimes this amuses the parents, occasionally it interests them, but more often it is extremely pathetic. To see a child at an early age absorbed in the details of the battle of life would horrify any one of us, yet 100,000 children of this kind can be found in the city of New York, and a large number of them can be found in any one of forty or fifty specified blocks.

There is only one end to this sort of thing. Persistent stimulation and entire lack of recreation or exercise must have a debasing and dangerous effect upon any physique. Much more must this be the case regarding children. Boys and girls are not driven to work as they were in England forty or fifty years ago. They are not flogged if they do not accomplish a certain amount of work in a given time, as they used to be under the good old English customs. But they are just as thoroughly destroyed, physically and mentally, as if they were under taskmasters who were not their own parents.

Children in the country frequently work very hard. A farmer’s life is hard at best, and between necessity and sympathy his children early learn to take part in their father’s endeavors. They rise early in the morning and work perhaps quite late in the night, but they are in pure air even while they are at work. They have an abundance of food and they always see something before them, just as their parents do. Perhaps it is that there is a war abroad and the price of wheat will probably go up a few cents a bushel. Or a railroad is coming in the vicinity of the farm, and acres which have been devoted to common crops and pasture are expected suddenly to attain to the dignity of town lots. There are evening festivities in which all the children take part, and there is also the great and comforting and uplifting American sentiment that each one of them is as good as any one of their richest neighbors, and the fact that they may live in a poorly-built house and not wear quite as good clothes on Sunday as some of their associates can always be overlooked in view of the possibilities of the near future. But before the children of the poor in the large cities there is no prospect whatever of advancement or pleasure or recreation. The old dull grind goes on day by day. While every one is well and every one is at work, the family probably has enough to eat and has a roof over its head; and to that extent it can congratulate itself, for some of their acquaintances and neighbors are not so well off. But the first day that sickness comes into the family the entire aspect of things changes. The work must go on or there will be nothing to live on at the end of the week. The invalid may be put to bed in one of the little closets which are dignified by the name of rooms, but the adult members of the family must continue to work, and so must all who are old enough to assist. If there is a sewing-machine in the room it must go on clicking, no matter if some member of the family is dying. There is no lack of sympathy, no lack of affection, no lack of longing; but all these put together do not take the place of proper medical attendance, pure air and good food. If in any single town of the United States the death rate were as large as it is in the city of New York, the best citizens would pack up their things and run away, no matter at what cost. But New York can lose thirty or forty of every thousand of its inhabitants every year, and the only comment of those who know best about it is that it is a mercy of heaven that the loss is no greater.

The customary way of city people, in avoiding responsibility and deep thought on this subject, consists in saying that the people who live in this way are of low organizations any way, and that they can exist and flourish and grow fat amid surroundings which would kill any decent person. There is some truth in this so far as certain low organizations are concerned. Unfortunately, however, there is no race, sex, nationality or creed among the very poor in the large city. All of them are people who either were born very poor or who, having been reduced to poverty, are endeavoring to make the best of their lot. There are Americans of good name and good family now serving in the commoner mechanical capacities in the city of New York, and only a little while ago it was discovered that the wife of a gallant Major-General, who served the United States faithfully during the late unpleasantness, was “living out” as a domestic servant. It is not a result of poverty, misfortune, sickness or anything of the kind. All those horrors are the results, first of all, of city life, of living where no one knows his own neighbors and where the person who falls into embarrassments or is overwhelmed by misfortune has no one to whom to turn, and takes to anything at short notice and in utter desperation, to keep the wolf from the door.

Cities should be suppressed, but that is impossible. They should be properly policed by persons competent to discover and report those most in need of assistance; but that also seems impossible. The only chance left seems to be that the larger the city the greater shall be the missionary work done in it by all denominations. When Jesus was alive and was anxious to secure the attention of the people, he did not bemoan their sad condition, but on one occasion, when some thousands of them followed him, he himself supplied them with food. The servant is not greater than the master, and religious people, regardless of differences of creed, can find no better work in large cities than to search out the needy and endeavor to lift their feet out of the mire and put them in a dry place, to quote from the inspired psalmist in one of his most eloquent passages.

One good and pressing reason—though a selfish one—for closer and more sympathetic attention to the poor of large cities, is that the great mass of criminals come from the poorer classes, and that when criminals are once made it is hard to unmake them. The famous Inspector Byrne, of New York, the man most feared by wrongdoers everywhere, spends annually a great deal of his hard-earned money in trying to persuade criminals not to drop back into their old ways, but he believes that he only retards their return to crime—not that he effects any reformations. The following words from a man of his stern experience and sympathetic nature are terrible in their warning against neglect of the class from which most criminals spring:

“My personal opinion is that it is utterly impossible to reform criminals. There are certain fancy measures pursued in this city for the reformation of criminals, but they are all bosh; they do not reform the outlaws. To some extent such efforts are made for the purpose of public notoriety. I know people in this city who claim that they want to reform thieves. They get hold of notorious scoundrels when they come out of state-prison, and so long as the thief is a good ‘star-actor,’ and goes from place to place and tells all sorts of things that are villanous and bad about himself (no matter whether they be lies or the truth), he is lauded around by these people as a great attraction. The moment he discontinues that kind of performance they throw him out in the street because he is of no use to them; he doesn’t ‘draw.’