In our last talk, I brought you to the point, the turning point, where our conscience awoke in the defense of the imperiled home in the metropolis. We had had one or two false starts before we finally got there; as, for instance, when a cholera invasion was threatened just after the war. It was that which brought the Council of Hygiene into existence. There was the human disposition to lie down under the “visitation of God” and groan, which simply means that we are all as lazy as circumstances will let us be. For utter uselessness, commend me to the man who sits and prays to the Lord to avert the mischief and never lends a hand himself. I used to laugh at an old deacon out in my town on Long Island, who had borne a masterful hand in dealing with the law-breakers there in the early days, and who when he got excited over the recollection of the wickedness of the past said, “but then me and the Lord we took hold;” but the good deacon was all right on the record. He did his part, stoutly maintaining that it was the Lord’s work. I would rather have one such around than a thousand of the other kind. The Council of Hygiene told these people bluntly that just then was a time to pray, broom in hand; and the cholera danger was met.

The real awakening came a quarter of a century ago, when the churches came to the rescue in a body. Out of that movement grew the first genuine model tenement building company and the plan of “philanthropy and five per cent.”—that plan which must ever be the way out. In the business of building homes for your brother there must be no taint of the alms-giving that is miscalled charity, more is the pity. It must be an honest business between man and man, if it is to succeed. Out of that movement came our Octavia Hill, Miss Ellen Collins, who planted homes, in the true sense of the word, in the very slum of slums, down in Water Street, where the word home had not been heard for so long that the children had fairly forgotten it—planted them, too, right in the very devil’s preserves, and beat him out of sight—brothel, dance-hall, dive, and all—single-minded and whole-hearted little woman that she is! “An outlay of thought,” she told the Tenement House Committee of 1894, “pays better than an outlay of money.” She gave her thought freely, and her heart into the bargain; and when, the other day, the longing for rest came to her and she thought of letting some one else take her place, there came a deputation from Water Street, from that benighted neighborhood that was, and begged her to stay, which was a whole volume of cheer on our way; for it showed that hearts throbbed there in response and that Water Street had a soul, the slum to the contrary notwithstanding. A deputation that recalled that other one, of which Colonel Kilbourne told at the National Conference of Employer and Employee, held last fall in Minneapolis. The Colonel is the manager of a company “between which and its employees no disagreement of any kind has ever arisen.” It was in the dark days of the panic of 1893 that a deputation of workmen, with serious looks on their faces, filed into Colonel Kilbourne’s office and asked to have a word with him. And this was their errand, as put by the spokesman:

“We know that times are bad. We know that your warehouses are filling up with goods which you cannot sell, and that you cannot get your pay for the goods you have sold. And yet you keep us at work. We do not know what your circumstances are, but you have stood by us and we have come to stand by you. Some of us have been here a few years, some of us many. We have had good pay; we have been able to save up some money, and here it is. It is all yours to do with as you please, if you need it in the business.”

Who, brethren, gave you and me the right to sit in judgment on these, or to despair of them? When you hear men prate wisely about “the poor coming up to their opportunities,” ask Miss Collins what she thinks about it and hear what she will say. The Water Street houses had been a veritable hell before she took hold there. The dark halls were a favorite hiding-place for criminals when chased by the police. It used to be said that if a thief once got into the hallways of these buildings there was no use of further effort to catch him. The buildings were unspeakably filthy. The saloon on the ground floor had finally been closed after one of the bloody fights that were the rule of the neighborhood. Yet practically the same tenants are there to-day and have been these twenty years. It was the landlord who was changed and furnished opportunities for the tenants to come up to. Miss Collins brought back the home, and her houses became good and decent; the whole neighborhood took a turn for the better, tried to come up to the ideal that she set before it. Miss Collins came out of that awakening, and she is a mile-post forever on the road out of the slum.

St. George’s came out of it, with broken towers it is true, but with that which is better than spires pointing skyward: the out-and-out declaration that they might stay broken forever while there were men and women to be saved. “All the money we can gather, for flesh and blood; not a dollar, for brick and mortar!” Out of it came that call for men and women that has stirred our city and the whole country from end to end and has given us in New York forty social settlements where then there was not one.

The movements for better schools, for neighborhood service, for decent tenements, for playgrounds for the children, are ripples of that great awakening. New York became a harder town to die in and a better town to live in. We hear no more of fashionable women giving Christmas parties to their lap dogs; and the day is at hand when no tenement mother shall need to bemoan the birth of a daughter because of the perils and the shame that await her. That was the cry that came to us from that East-side a year ago; and that was why we fought to win; for it was that or perish. Out of that awakening came the new day that reckons with the tenants as “souls,” and which in a score of years has wrought a change with us, in spite of the odds we are battling against, that caused an eastern newspaper to say truly the other day that “New York is teaching her sister cities by her old tenements how not to build, and by her new how to build.” It all began there, the fight for the people’s homes; and now let us look and see how the battle goes to-day.

Here let me show you a tenement house block on the East-side to-day, typical of a hundred such and more. (See illustration facing page 126.) There were two thousand seven hundred and eighty-one persons living in it when a census was made of it two years ago, four hundred and sixty-six of them babies in arms. There were four hundred and forty-one dark rooms with no windows at all and six hundred and thirty-five rooms that opened upon the air-shaft. An army of mendicants was marching forth from that block: in five years six hundred and sixty different families in it had applied for public relief. In that time it had harbored thirty-two reported cases of tuberculosis and probably at least three times as many more in all stages that were not reported. The year before, the Health Department had recorded thirteen cases of diphtheria there. However, the rent roll was all right, it amounted to $113,964 a year.

I tell you these things that you may understand the setting of the home in the greatest of American cities. Two millions of people in New York live in such tenements. Do you see those narrow slits in the roof? They are the air-shafts, two feet four inches wide, sixty or seventy feet deep, through which light and air are supposed, in the landlord’s theory, to come down to the tenants. We have just upset that theory and forbidden those double-deckers with that kind of air-shaft. There are to be courts, hereafter, so that the tenant may have light enough within the house, to make out his neighbor. You will look in vain for a yard for the children to play in, and I was going to say you will look in vain for a bath-tub in that block, but I was wrong there. There is one and I will show it to you. It is remarkable enough to make a note of.

It is upon such tenements as these that the sweat-shop got its grip, that grip which we have been trying with such effort to shake off, for the protection of home and of childhood. Directly across the street from there, I found a sick man using for his pillow a bundle of half-finished trousers that were being made in the flat. The man had scarlet fever. The label on the trousers showed that they came from the shop of a Broadway clothier, upon whose counters, but for our coming, they would have been displayed without warning that the death warrant of the purchaser or of some little child in his family was basted in the lining. We are brothers, whether we own it or not, we of the avenue and they of the alley.

Here hangs the bath-tub I spoke of. (See illustration facing page 128.) The landlord did not provide it; it was brought in by a tenant with ambitions, an immigrant, who thought to find here the equality of man with man, of which he had heard. He found the air-shaft in the slum tenement. Suppose now he grows political ideals to correspond with it; who is to blame?

It was in one of the after swells of the great awakening that a man stood up in a meeting of church people of all denominations, gathered to find an answer to the question how to bring those multitudes back to the old altars, and cried: “How shall these people understand the love of God you speak of, when all about them they see only the greed of man?” He was a builder, a Christian builder, and he forthwith set about erecting in Brooklyn a row of tenements such as a Christian man could build with a clear conscience. The Riverside tenements stand there to-day unrivaled. (See illustration facing page 130.) It is much better to live on the yard there than in front, because you have a garden and you have flowers and even a band-stand where the band plays sometimes at the landlord’s expense. The tenants are happy and contented. So is the landlord. He told me himself that he has had six and six and a half and even as high as seven per cent. on his investment, and he said with scorn that the talk about the tenants “coming up to their opportunities” was the veriest humbug. “They are there now,” he said, “a long way ahead of the landlord.” Seven per cent. is good interest on any investment. It almost looks, does it not, as if it were a question then whether a man will take seven per cent. in providing for his brother and save his soul, or twenty-five per cent. and lose it? It is odd that there should be people willing to make the latter bargain; but, since there are such, you might almost say that our fight with the slum is a kind of missionary effort to compel them to take seven per cent. and save their souls in spite of themselves.

Alfred T. White’s tenants have homes: he has made it possible for them. Humble homes to be sure, but furniture and show do not make the home of which I am thinking, the home that is the prop of the Republic. Look, now, upon this flat in an East-side block and tell me if you think that that is a proper setting for American citizenship. (See illustration facing.) That is one of the piggeries I have spoken of, and there are too many of them. Thirteen persons slept in that room where the law allowed only three. In that neighborhood I counted forty-three families in a tenement where the original builder had made room for seventeen. Do you think that is safe? And what must be the effect upon the growing generation of such an environment as that?

One day I found two boys in a back yard—for a wonder there was a back yard—practicing their writing lesson on the fence, and this is what they wrote: “Keep off the grass.” I was thinking the other day when I read about Pompeii and Martinique that who knows but that some time this boasted civilization of ours may be engulfed in such a catastrophe. Then, perhaps a couple of thousand years hence, when the scientific men of that day are digging down to our buried city, they will come upon one of those signs and fetch it up; and they will put their heads together and consult and expound, and then they will turn to the waiting world and announce that “the men of that day worshipped grass”; and they will not be so far out of the way, either. I have seen, in my day, the grass held to be tremendously sacred, while no one cared about the boy. A little more of that, and the slum will have set a stamp upon those children which it will be hard work to wipe out.

As yet you can do it with soap and water and patience. Take them out into the open, set them among the daisies, and see the change. When they return, it is as if windows had been opened for their souls, through which they could look out and see God. They could not before. That is the offense of the slum which kills the home, that it will not let either the one Who is in it or the one who built it see God. Windows for their souls! No need of wondering at that if you saw the window giving upon the dark air-shaft through which those children looked out all the days of their lives when they were at home! When I stood there with that harassed mother, I asked thoughtlessly if the five children I saw about me were all she had. She reddened a little and there was a sob in her voice as she said: “Yes, all but Mary; she doesn’t like to sleep home.” Mary was seventeen. You would not have wondered that she did not like to “sleep home” if you had been there. What does that tell us of one of the horrid problems with which we have to do in our cities? It all comes to the wreck of the home.

Poverty Gap was one of the black spots that stand out as I look back over twenty-five years of wrestling with the slum. I have seldom seen a more hopeless place. It was there that “the gang” murdered the one “good boy” there was in the block, for the offense of earning an honest living. Yet the hope there was in it all, was with these very children. There came a kindergarten that way and opened our eyes. That is one of the functions of the kindergarten, you know. It is the great miracle-worker of our day; it has power to move mountains of indifference, of sloth and wretchedness, of human inefficiency and despair, for it is backed by the eternal forces of faith and hope and love, however much they may look to you or to me like soap and water and toilsome effort. The kindergarten came that way and, when we saw the Gap through its eyes, we were ashamed and set about tearing it down. It was then that an inspiration came to a good woman who had happened upon a pile of sand in the neighborhood. She had it brought in and put upon the site of the old Gap, with wheelbarrows and pails and shovels for the boys and swings for the girls, and the children on the West-side got their first playground. “The gang” went out of business that summer and the Gap that had been violent became orderly.

Its steam had been penned up before and that is bad. What would you think of a yard as wide as an ordinary bedroom, with signs in it forbidding the boys to play ball there and giving warning that “all boys caught in this yard will be delt with accordin’ to law”? I can show you such yards, and wherever they are, gang violence breaks out, for the street is the only alternative. There are no homes in such slums as those.

I went up the dark stairs in one of those tenements and there I trod upon a baby. It is the regular means of introduction to a tenement house baby in the old dark houses, but I never have been able to get used to it. I went off and got my camera and photographed that baby standing with its back against the public sink in a pool of filth that overflowed on the floor. I do not marvel much at the showing of the Gilder Tenement House Committee that one in five of the children in the rear tenements into which the sunlight never comes was killed by the house. It seemed strange, rather, that any survived. But they do, and as soon as they are able, they take to the street, which is thenceforward their training ground.

Some years ago, the Gerry Society picked up two boys that “lived nowhere,” so they said. (See illustration facing page 136.) They were brothers with a drunken father and no mother. Some one was curious enough to try to find out their moral and religious status. The older of the two had heard of the Lord’s Prayer as something that it was lucky to say over at night before one went to sleep, so as to have good luck the next day pitching pennies; his younger brother knew the name of the Saviour as something to swear by. These were our home heathen, growing up in the Christian city of New York. That is one way of looking at it. There is another for which we have to wait only a few years: then these lads come to the polls with their ballots, and there develops the citizen equality over which their father puzzled in his air-shaft. Ask yourself the question again, is it safe?

These boys belong to the street and they learn its lessons: gambling, pilfering, and by and by robbery. A little further along on the road they are traveling are the Rogues’ Gallery and the jail. At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen they are thieves, little and big, house-breakers, and highway robbers. One year when I kept a census of the child criminals I had to deal with in Mulberry Street, I found them beginning their careers at four and six years. The very little ones were useful to their elders to “crawl through a hole” into the place that was to be robbed.

Was that good sense? No, it was not. That came later when a man came into Mulberry Street, where “the gang” was beginning to make serious trouble, and wanted to know if the boys would join a club he was forming. Would they join, those boys? They fell over one another to get there. The whole block joined with a rush. That was the good sense of the new day that lets the boys in, instead of forever warning them off from everything and everywhere. His club was a marching club (see illustration facing page 138) and with their wooden guns on their shoulders, that man could lead those boys where and how far he chose; they would go with him wherever he went. Just remember that it is one of two things, a gun on the shoulder or stripes on the back, where the home interposes no barrier. It is because of the killing off of that home that our jails are filled with young men from the big cities.

From alleys where “the sunlight never enters” comes that growing procession that fills our prisons; where the sunlight does not enter, deeds of darkness naturally belong. When at last we fully understood this, we began to tear down the worst of the rookeries that had murdered the home. Nearly the worst of them all was the Mott Street barracks. There were some six hundred Italians living in that row when it was at its worst, and it was one of the few places I have known in which the rent actually rose as you went up-stairs. There was a little sunlight up there, but only darkness and dirt down below. The yard between the front and rear tenement—think of calling such a crack a yard—was five feet, ten inches wide. I remember that well. Theodore Roosevelt held one end of the tape line when we measured it, and I the other. By the time we had got up indignation enough to settle with the barracks, he had come into the municipal government of our city and made things go. The showing upon which we arraigned the barracks was, that during a season when we watched it, one-third of the babies there had died, killed by the house. So we tore down the rear tenements, and when we did we found that the mortgage on the property, with its awful baby death rate, was held by a cemetery corporation!

To me the barracks seemed as nearly hell on earth as could be; but let me give you a glimpse of the veritable hell here below. Whatever you may think of the one hereafter, you need not doubt its existence here. One night, when I went through one of the worst dives I ever knew, my camera caught and held this scene that I set before you. (See illustration facing page 140.) When I look upon that unhappy girl’s face, I think that the grace of God can reach that “lost woman” in her sins; but what about the man who made a profit on the slum that gave her up to the street? She did not sleep home, that was where the mischief began. What about us who let that slum grow unchallenged, and who took from those in it, with the home on earth the hope of heaven? We need the grace of God, if any one does. That is our fight—for the home in which the girl may sleep securely, in which she will want to stay; thank God! we are winning it at last.

For see: these tenements have homes in them. (See illustration facing page 142.) They were built by the City and Suburban Homes Company with money subscribed by Christian men and women. Foremost among them all that good woman to whom we owe so much in this new day of ours, the wife of Bishop Potter. They are called the Alfred Corning Clark Buildings, and stand in West 68th and 69th Streets, in that neighborhood where the “social ideals minted themselves upon the lives of the people at the rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.” The plan of the City and Suburban Homes Company is that of philanthropy and five per cent. They limit their income to five per cent., and have so far received four. Their tenants are happy, as well they may be, and the owners have good cause to be the same. They have done us a very notable service in their work; since those houses were built, others have been added and provision made for some fifteen or sixteen hundred families. Four per cent. on such an investment is enough to settle it in the sight of us all that real homes can be provided for the multitude even on Manhattan Island, and therefore must be; also, that the slum landlord must stop building houses that kill his tenants; that murder is murder, whether it is done with an axe or with a house.

I should like to tell you of that godless municipal “charity” which herded old thieves and old tramps and young homeless lads, who were adrift in the great city, in those vile dens called police station lodging rooms, and of the war upon it that was won at last; but I have written so much and so often about it, and about my own experience in one of those dens, where I was beaten and robbed, and where my little dog was killed, when I was a homeless boy myself, and I have not the time to repeat it. You have fought that same fight in Philadelphia and won it, too. Our battle went dead against us, until that man with honest purpose came among us and set things right. I shall never forget the night he and I spent in touring the police stations together until we brought up in the Church Street station, where the thing happened of which I have just spoken. Standing there, I told him my story and he cried angrily, “Did they do that to you? I’ll smash them to-morrow.” And he did. And so that foul disgrace came to an end. Thank God for Theodore Roosevelt!

There remained the awful nuisance of the cheap lodging houses in the Bowery, where thieves recruit their broken-up gangs among the young men who are stranded there, coming from everywhere out in the country. They have a standing army of lodgers, from thirteen to sixteen thousand homeless men and lads; and we knew not what to do with them, until there arose among us a philanthropist who gave of his fortune to solve this problem also. He gave a million or more, and gave so wisely that his work, the great Mills houses, have become one of the real benefactions of to-day. There are two of them and they shelter a constant population of twenty-six hundred lodgers. They are so well managed that they return a profit, even a very good profit, upon the investment. So they are free from the taint of alms-giving and the man who lives in them can and does keep his self-respect. Mr. D. O. Mills deserves a place among the real benefactors of our day.

I am to speak to you next of the to-morrow. Here it sits in a wagon, two of the children of the poor whose only playground is their father’s truck. (See illustration facing page 144.) “Was” I should have said. I took their picture before the day of Colonel Waring, and when they stepped out of the truck they landed in a street where the mud was over half a foot in depth. You never saw anything like it, and pray that you never may. We solaced ourselves with the belief in those days that no one could clean our streets, that it was an impossible job. That was the day of the man who “can’t,” or rather who won’t. When one of the other kind came with his broom, he gave the children their first playground, though it was not a good one, and his broom swept some of the cobwebs out of our heads at the same time. “A man instead of a voter behind every broom,” that was his watch-word, and it cleaned our streets and cleaned our politics for a season. Just remember it; it applies to other kinds of dirt than that which lies in the street.

The children got a playground, but not the kind they needed. We had to put our hands deep into our pockets to give them that. Over on that East-side, where three hundred and twenty-four thousand persons were penned up upon seven hundred and eleven acres of land, out of reach and out of sight of a green spot, we tore down block after block of old buildings, paying a million dollars for each block, and making the best bargain of our lives in doing it. It was marvelous how long it took us to see that this was good sense, and we were not alone in that, either. A year ago, when I spoke in this city about children and their rights, I was shown a square that had been laid out as a playground for the little ones, but that was wholly neglected and gone to wreck. That was not good sense. I looked for better among the people of Philadelphia where Benjamin Franklin lived; and I expect to find it, too.

The Mulberry Bend we laid by the heels; that was the worst pigsty of all, and here again let me hark back to the murder I have spoken of so often. I do not believe that there was a week in all the twenty years I had to do with the den, as a police reporter, in which I was not called to record there a stabbing or shooting affair, some act of violence. It is now five years since the Bend became a park (see illustration facing page 146), and the police reporter has not had business there once during that time; not once has a shot been fired or a knife been drawn. That is what it means to let the sunlight in and give the boys their rights in a slum like that!

Of this boy of the slum we shall speak together further. He is just what you let him be: good, if you give him the chance; bad, if you will have none of him. Take the home out of his life, and you handicap him forever and mortgage your own future with the heaviest of mortgages. It is since that understanding began to dawn upon us that we have seized playgrounds right and left, wherever we had the chance. I have in mind one which we got away from a corporation on the West-side—it goes a little hard with me to own that it was a church corporation, because by that time the church ought to have had better sense. It was an old burial ground where some of the old-time New Yorkers lay who, in their day, neglected their boys and gave us the heritage of the slum. I hope that they have seen their mistake: I am sure they have, and that their ears are rejoiced by the patter of little children’s feet where once there was the silence; for they are echoing the better to-morrow, those little feet.

I wish I had time to tell you the whole story of what we have learned as to that in these last ten years, but it is too long. Let it be enough to say that, wherever we have destroyed the slum that killed the home and given the children a chance, there order has moved in where violence and gang rule were before, and the police are having a vacation. We are extending that program of ours right and left. Seven years ago we had not one school playground in New York; now we have a law which says that never another public school shall be built without an outdoor playground for the children. And we have been building more than three-score new and splendid schools since then. Some of these schools have the playgrounds on the street, and some on the roof, and in the latter, last year, Mayor Low’s Board of Education put brass bands in the summer evenings during the long vacation, and invited in the neighborhood. If you have any doubts about the millennium’s coming nearer, you should have been there then. It seemed to me when I saw three thousand children dancing to the tune of “Sunday Afternoon” on top of the school that had been used so long as a kind of jail in which to lock them up for the convenience of some one who wanted to get rid of them—it seemed to me then, as if we had put on seven league boots in the race to distance the slum and the janitor. Both of them lost their grip on those children then and there, and for all time; though the janitor strove hard against fate. He tried to drive them away with a club when we were not looking; and when he was caught at that, he reported that those roof playgrounds were no good: they were too hot in summer and too cold in winter. So, it would appear, is most of the rest of the earth.

However, his day is past and the children’s is coming. The school of the new day is “built beautiful,” quite like a palace, and our women hang the walls of the class-rooms with handsome pictures that open windows for the souls of the little ones, who sit and look on. There are still some growlers who think that the money put into handsome stone and wrought iron and polished wood is wasted. They are wrong; we never made a better investment, unless it be in the playgrounds which are part of those schools. All these things help to restore ideals. What is the matter with the slum is that it lacks ideals. Where they are made to grow, there comes the irresistible demand for the home that is the essence of good, and then we are on the home stretch.

Our vacation schools gather in the boys, to teach them sloyd and how to handle useful tools (see illustration facing page 150), and the girls to teach them cooking; and, on alternate days, the men and boys and the women and girls are taught swimming at our public baths. Over on the West-side, where one of our neighborhood parks is being laid out, the Park Department even went into teaching the young lads truck-farming last summer. From that sort of school no one “plays hookey.” We shall shortly have no truant question at all, or, if we do, we shall be in a position to deal with it easily, for there need be no quibbling about the proper disposal of the lad who deserts the school of the new dispensation.

I once found a little fellow picking bones and rags under an ash dump, the only home he knew being a vile shed under that pile of rubbish. That dump was in the identical spot where now one of our new recreation piers extends into the North River. If he had been left there, to grow up as he could—and he could neither read nor write—he would have grown naturally into the tough who says that the world owes him a living, which he is bound to collect as easily as he can, especially without any work. It is a lie; the world owes no man a living. It is like a bank upon which you draw according to the amount of work you put into it and no more. But the boy was not left there, and, as I said, the dump that cursed his life has been replaced by a park and a play-pier. The band comes there in the evening and the crowds from the tenements, young and old; and, on the long summer days in the vacation season, the kindergartner comes and gathers her class, and there in the open they study with one another the first lessons of the new political science that shall draw us closer together and restore to us the neighborly feeling, and the lost home with it.

When we build our altar on that ground, we shall hear no more of empty churches. The life has come back. How great was the yearning for it, none of us may ever know. The other day, a little lad, watching the lighted Christmas tree in a settlement in my city, whispered anxiously to the head-worker when the distribution of presents began: “Shall we not worship the tree?” No, but we shall worship together, they and we, God in the hearts that were at last opened to let them in—to let the lost neighbor in—in His name.

Here they come, an army with banners to help us win the fight for the home! They are the children of the very poor, sometimes too ragged to attend the public school, and sometimes kept out because they do not know our language. They are the children of foreigners who brought them here that they might live in a free land, at once the only and the greatest heritage they could leave them. If you doubt that they are on our side in the fight, go and hear them salute the flag in the morning (see illustration facing page 152), promising “our hearts, our heads and our hands to our country—one country, one language, one flag!” And never doubt or distrust them again, for to do so is to distrust God, whose children they are, even if we rejected them, and to reject the republic which is to be His means of bringing us together again.