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THERE is another line not always so readily drawn in the tenements, yet the real boundary line of the Other Half: the one that defines the "flat." The law does not draw it at all, accounting all flats tenements without distinction. The health officer draws it from observation, lumping all those which in his judgment have nothing, or not enough, to give them claim upon the name, with the common herd, and his way is, perhaps, on the whole, the surest and best. The outside of the building gives no valuable clew. Brass and brownstone go well sometimes with dense crowds and dark and dingy rooms; but the first attempt to enter helps draw the line with tolerable distinctness. A locked door is a strong point in favor of the
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flat. It argues that the first step has been taken to secure privacy, the absence of which is the chief curse of the tenement. Behind a locked door the hoodlum is not at home, unless there be a jailor in place of a janitor to guard it. Not that the janitor and the door-bell are infallible. There may be a tenement behind a closed door; but never a "flat" without it. The hall that is a highway for all the world by night and by day is the tenement's proper badge. The Other Half ever receives with open doors. With this introduction we shall not seek
it long anywhere in the city. Below Houston Street the
door-bell in our age is as extinct as the dodo. East
of Second Avenue, and west of Ninth Avenue as far up
as the Park, it is practically an unknown institution.
The nearer the river and the great workshops the more
numerous the tenements. The kind of work carried on
in any locality to a large extent determines their character.
Skilled and well-paid labor puts its stamp on a tenement
even in spite of the open door, and usually soon supplies
the missing bell. Gas-houses, slaughter-houses and the
docks, that attract the roughest crowds and support
the vilest saloons, invariably form slum-centres. The
city is full of such above the line of Fourteenth Street,
that is erroneously supposed by some to fence off the
good from the bad, separate the chaff from the wheat.
There is nothing below that line that can outdo in wickedness
Hell's Kitchen, in the region of three-cent whiskey,
or its counterpoise at the other end of Thirty-ninth
Street, on the East River, the home of the infamous
Rag Gang. Cherry Street is not "tougher" than
Battle Row in East Sixty-third Street, or "the
village" at Twenty-ninth Street and First Avenue,
where stores of broken bricks, ammunition for the nightly
conflicts with the police, are part of the regulation
outfit of every tenement. The Mulberry Street Bend is
scarce dirtier than Little Italy in Harlem. Even across
the Harlem River, Frog Hollow challenges the admiration
of the earlier slums for the boldness and pernicious
activity of its home gang. There are enough of these
sore spots. We shall yet have occasion to look into
the social conditions of some of them; were I to draw
a picture of them here as they are, the subject, I fear,
would outgrow alike the limits of this book and the
reader's patience. |
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It is true that they tell only one side of
the story; that there is another to tell. A
story of thousands of devoted lives, laboring
earnestly to make the most of their scant opportunities
for good; of heroic men and women striving patiently
against fearful odds and by their very courage
coming off victors in the battle with the tenement;
of womanhood pure and undefiled. That it should
blossom in such an atmosphere is one of the
unfathomable mysteries of life. And yet it is
not an uncommon thing to find sweet and innocent
girls, singularly untouched by the evil around
them, true wives and faithful mothers, literally
"like jewels in a swine's snout,"
in the worst of the infamous barracks. It is
the experience of all who have intelligently
observed this side of life in a great city,
not to be explained--unless on the theory of
my friend, the priest in the Mulberry Street
Bend, that inherent purity revolts instinctively
from the naked brutality of vice as seen in
the slums--but to be thankfully accepted as
the one gleam of hope in an otherwise hopeless
desert.
But the relief is not great. In the dull content
of life bred on the tenement-house dead level
there is little to |
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redeem it, or to calm apprehension
for a society that has nothing better to offer
its toilers; while the patient efforts of the
lives finally attuned to it to render the situation
tolerable, and the very success of these efforts,
serve only to bring out in stronger contrast
the general gloom of the picture by showing
how much farther they might have gone with half
a chance.
Go into any of the "respectable" tenement
neighborhoods--the fact that there are not more
than two saloons on the corner, nor over three
or four in the block will serve as a fair guide--where
live the great body of hard-working Irish and
German immigrants and their descendants, who accept
naturally the conditions of tenement life, because
for them there is nothing else in New York; be
with and among its people until you understand
their ways, their aims, and the quality of their
ambitions, and unless you can content yourself
with the scriptural promise that the poor we shall
have always with us, or with the menagerie view
that, if fed, they have no cause of complaint,
you shall come away agreeing with me that, humanly
speaking, life there does not seem worth the living.
Take at random one of these uptown tenement blocks,
not of the worst nor yet of the most prosperous
kind, within hail of what the newspapers would
call a "fine residential section." These houses were built since the last cholera
scare made people willing to listen to reason. The block
is not like the one over on the East Side in which I
actually lost my way once. There were thirty or forty
rear houses in the heart of it, three or four on every
lot, set at all sorts of angles, with odd, winding passages,
or no passage at all, only "runways" for the
thieves and toughs of the neighborhood. These yards
are clear. There is air there, and it is about all there
is. The view between brick walls outside is that of
a stony street; inside, of rows of unpainted board fences,
a bewildering maze of clothes-posts and lines; underfoot,
a desert of brown, hard-baked soil from which every
blade of grass, every stray weed, every speck of green,
has been trodden out, as must inevitably be every gentle
thought and aspiration above the mere wants of the body
in those whose moral natures such home surroundings
are to nourish. In self-defence, you know, all life
eventually accommodates itself to its environment, and
human life is no exception. Within the house there is
nothing to supply the want thus left unsatisfied. Tenement-houses
have no aesthetic resources. If any are to be brought
to bear on them, they must come from the outside. There
is the common hall with doors opening softly on every
landing as the strange step is heard on the stairs,
the air-shaft that seems always so busy letting out
foul stenches from below that it has no time to earn
its name by bringing down fresh air, the squeaking pumps
that hold no water, and the rent that is never less
than one week's wages out of the four, quite as often half of the family earnings.
Why complete the sketch? It is drearily familiar already.
Such as it is, it is the frame in which are set days,
weeks, months, and years of unceasing toil, just able
to fill the mouth and clothe the back. Such as it is,
it is the world, and all of it, to which these weary
workers return nightly to feed heart and brain after
wearing out the body at the bench, or in the shop. To
it come the young with their restless yearnings, perhaps
to pass on the threshold one of the daughters of sin,
driven to the tenement by the police when they raided
her den, sallying forth in silks and fine attire after
her day of idleness. These in their coarse garments--girls
with the love of youth for beautiful things, with this
hard life before them--who shall save them from the
tempter? Down in the street the saloon, always bright
and gay, gathering to itself all the cheer of the block,
beckons the boys. In many such blocks the census-taker
found two thousand men, women, and children, and over,
who called them home. |
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The picture is faithful
enough to stand for its class wherever along both
rivers the Irish brogue is heard. As already said,
the Celt falls most readily victim to tenement
influences since shanty-town and its original
free-soilers have become things of the past. If
he be thrifty and shrewd his progress thenceforward
is along the plane of the tenement, on which he
soon assumes to manage without improving things.
The German has an advantage over his Celtic neighbor
in his strong love for flowers, which not all
the tenements on the East Side have power to smother.
His garden goes with him wherever he goes. Not
that it represents any high moral principle in
the man; rather perhaps the capacity for it. He
turns his saloon into a shrubbery as soon as his
back-yard. But wherever he puts it in a tenement
block it does the work of a dozen police clubs.
In proportion as it spreads the neighborhood takes
on a more orderly character. As the green dies
out of the landscape and |
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increases in political
importance, the police find more to do. Where
it disappears altogether from sight, lapsing into
a mere sentiment, police-beats are shortened and the force patrols double at night. Neither the
man nor the sentiment is wholly responsible for
this. It is the tenement unadorned that is. The
changing of Tompkins Square from a sand lot into
a beautiful park put an end for good and all to
the Bread and Blood riots of which it used to
be the scene, and transformed a nest of dangerous
agitators into a harmless, beer-craving band of
Anarchists. They have scarcely been heard of since.
Opponents of the small parks system as a means of relieving
the congested population of tenement districts, please
take note.
With the first hot nights in June police despatches,
that record the killing of men and women by rolling
off roofs and window-sills while asleep, announce that
the time of greatest suffering among the poor is at
hand. It is in hot weather, when life indoors is well-nigh
unbearable with cooking, sleeping, and working, all
crowded into the small rooms together, that the tenement
expands, reckless of all restraint. Then a strange and
picturesque life moves upon the flat roofs. In the day
and early evening mothers air their babies there, the
boys fly their kites from the house-tops, undismayed
by police regulations, and the young men and girls court
and pass the growler. In the stifling July nights, when
the big barracks are like fiery furnaces, their very
walls giving out absorbed heat, men and women lie in
restless, sweltering rows, panting for air and sleep.
Then every truck in the street, every crowded fire-escape,
becomes a bedroom, infinitely preferable to any the
house affords. A cooling shower on such a night is hailed
as a heaven-sent blessing in a hundred thousand homes. |
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Life in the tenements
in July and August spells death to an army of
little ones whom the doctor's skill is powerless
to save. When the white badge of mourning flutters
from every second door, sleepless mothers walk
the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying
to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the
sick baby. There is no sadder sight than this
patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless
odds. Fifty "summer doctors," especially
trained to this work, are then sent into the tenements
by the Board of Health, with free advice and medicine
for the poor. Devoted women follow in their track
with care and nursing for the sick. Fresh-air
excursions run daily out of New York on land and
water; but despite all efforts the grave-diggers
in Calvary work over-time, and little coffins
are stacked mountains high on the deck of the
Charity Commissioners' boat when it makes its
semi-weekly trips to the city cemetery. Under
the most favorable circumstances, an epidemic,
which the well-to-do can afford to |
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make light
of as a thing to be got over or avoided by reasonable
care, is excessively fatal among the children
of the poor, by reason of the practical impossibility
of isolating the patient in a tenement. The measles,
ordinarily a harmless disease, furnishes a familiar
example. Tread it ever so lightly on the avenues,
in the tenements it kills right and left. Such
an epidemic ravaged three crowded blocks in Elizabeth
Street on the heels of the grippe last winter,
and, when it had spent its fury, the death-maps
in the Bureau of Vital Statistics looked as
if a black hand had been laid across those blocks, over-shadowing
in part the contiguous tenements in Mott Street, and
with the thumb covering a particularly packed settlement
of half a dozen houses in Mulberry Street. The track
of the epidemic through these teeming barracks was as
clearly defined as the track of a tornado through a
forest district. There were houses in which as many
as eight little children had died in five months. The
records showed that respiratory diseases, the common
heritage of the grippe and the measles, had caused death
in most cases, discovering the trouble to be, next to
the inability to check the contagion in those crowds,
in the poverty of the parents and the wretched home
conditions that made proper care of the sick impossible.
The fact was emphasized by the occurrence here and there
of a few isolated deaths from diphtheria and scarlet
fever. In the case of these diseases, considered more
dangerous to the public health, the health officers
exercised summary powers of removal to the hospital
where proper treatment could be had, and the result
was a low death-rate. These were tenements of the tall,
modern type. A little more than a year ago, when a census
was made of the tenements and compared with the mortality
tables, no little surprise and congratulation was caused |
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by the discovery that as the buildings grew
taller the death-rate fell. The reason is plain,
though the reverse had been expected by most
people. The biggest tenements have been built
in the last ten years of sanitary reform rule,
and have been brought, in all but the crowding,
under its laws. The old houses that from private
dwellings were made into tenements, or were
run up to house the biggest crowds in defiance
of every moral and physical law, can be improved
by no device short of demolition. They will
ever remain the worst.
That ignorance plays its part, as well as poverty
and bad hygienic surroundings, in the sacrifice
of life is of course inevitable. They go usually
hand in hand. A message came one day last spring
summoning me to a Mott Street tenement in which
lay a child dying from some unknown disease.
With the "charity doctor" I found
the patient on the top floor, stretched upon
two chairs in a dreadfully stifling room. She
was gasping in the agony of peritonitis that
had already written its death-sentence on her
wan and pinched face. The whole family, father, |
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mother, and four ragged children, sat around
looking on with the stony resignation of helpless
despair that had long since given up the fight
against fate as useless. A glance around the
wretched room left no doubt as to the cause
of the child's condition. "Improper nourishment,"
said the doctor, which, translated to suit the
place, meant starvation. The father's hands
were crippled from lead poisoning. He had not
been able to work for a year. A contagious disease
of the eyes, too long neglected, had made the
mother and one of the boys nearly blind. The
children cried with hunger. They had not broken
their fast that day, and it was then near noon.
For months the family had subsisted on two dollars
a week from the priest, and a few loaves and
a piece of corned beef which the sisters sent
them on Saturday. The doctor gave direction
for the treatment of the child, knowing that
it was possible only to alleviate its sufferings
until death should end them, and left some money
for food for the rest. An hour later, when I
returned, I found them feeding the dying child
with ginger ale, bought for two cents a bottle
at the pedlar's cart down the street. A pitying
neighbor had proposed it as the one thing she
could think of as likely to make the child forget
its misery. There was enough in the bottle to
go round to the rest of the family. In fact,
the wake had already begun; before night it
was under way in dead earnest. |
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Every once in a while
a case of downright starvation gets into the newspapers
and makes a sensation. But this is the exception.
Were the whole truth known, it would come home
to the community with a shock that would rouse
it to a more serious effort than the spasmodic
undoing of its purse-strings. I am satisfied from
my own observation that hundreds of men, women,
and children are every day slowly starving to
death in the tenements with my medical friend's
complaint of "improper nourishment."
Within a single week I have had this year three
cases of insanity, provoked directly by poverty
and want. One was that of a mother who in the
middle of the night got up to murder her child,
who was crying for food; another was the case
of an Elizabeth Street truck-driver whom the newspapers
never heard of. With a family to provide for,
he had been unable to work for many months. There
was neither food, nor a scrap of anything upon
which money could be raised, left in the house;
his mind gave way under the combined physical
and mental suffering. In the third case I was
just in time with the police to prevent the madman
from murdering his whole family. He had the |
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sharpened
hatchet in his pocket when we seized him. He was
an Irish laborer, and had been working in the
sewers until the poisonous gases destroyed his
health. Then he was laid off, and scarcely anything
had been coming in all winter but the oldest child's
earnings as cash-girl in a store, $2.50 a week.
There were seven children to provide for, and
the rent of the Mulberry Street attic in which
the family lived was $10 a month. They had borrowed as long as anybody had a cent to lend. When at
last the man got an odd job that would just buy
the children bread, the week's wages only served
to measure the depth of their misery. "It
came in so on the tail-end of everything,"
said his wife in telling the story, with unconscious
eloquence. The outlook worried him through sleepless
nights until it destroyed his reason. In his madness
he had only one conscious thought: that the town
should not take the children. "Better that I take care
of them myself," he repeated to himself as he ground
the axe to an edge. Help came in abundance from many
almost as poor is they when the desperate straits of
the family became known through his arrest. The readiness
of the poor to share what little they have with those
who have even less is one of the few moral virtues of
the tenements. Their enormous crowds touch elbow in
a closeness of sympathy that is scarcely to be understood
out of them, and has no parallel except among the unfortunate
women whom the world scorns as outcasts. There is very
little professed sentiment about it to draw a sentimental
tear from the eye of romantic philanthropy. The hard
fact is that the instinct of self-preservation impels
them to make common cause against the common misery. |
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No doubt intemperance
bears a large share of the blame for it; judging
from the stand-point of the policeman perhaps
the greater share. Two such entries as I read
in the police returns on successive days last
March, of mothers in West Side tenements, who,
in their drunken sleep, lay upon and killed their
infants, go far to support such a position. And
they are far from uncommon. But my experience
has shown me another view of it, a view which
the last report of the Society for Improving the
Condition of the Poor seems more than half inclined
to adopt in allotting to "intemperance the
cause of distress, or distress the cause of intemperance,"
forty per cent. of the cases it is called upon
to deal with. Even if it were all true, I should
still load over upon the tenement the heaviest
responsibility. A single factor, the scandalous
scarcity of water in the hot summer when the thirst
of the million tenants must be |
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quenched, if not
in that in something else, has in the past years
more than all other causes encouraged drunkenness
among the poor. But to my mind there is a closer
connection between the wages of the tenements
and the vices-and improvidence of those who dwell
in them than, with the guilt of the tenement upon
our heads, we are willing to admit even to ourselves.
Weak tea with a dry crust is not a diet to nurse
moral strength. Yet how much better might the
fare be expected to be in the family of this "widow
with seven children, very energetic and prudent"--I
quote again from the report of the Society for
the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor
--whose "eldest girl was employed as a learner
in a tailor's shop at small wages, and one boy had a
place as 'cash' in a store. There were two other little
boys who sold papers and sometimes earned one dollar.
The mother finishes pantaloons and can do three pairs
in n day, thus earning thirty-nine cents. Here is a
family of eight persons with rent to pay and an income
of less than six dollars a week."
And yet she was better off in point of pay than this
Sixth Street mother, who "had just brought home
four pairs of pants to finish, at seven cents a pair.
She was required to put the canvas in the bottom, basting
and sewing three times around; to put the linings in
the waistbands; to tack three pockets, three corners
to each; to put on two stays and eight buttons, and
make six buttonholes; to put the buckle on the back
strap and sew on the ticket, all for seven cents."
Better off than the "churchgoing mother of six
children," and with a husband sick to death, who
to support the family- made shirts, averaging an income
of one dollar and twenty cents a week, while her oldest
girl, aged thirteen, was "employed down-town cutting
out Hamburg edgings at one dollar and a half a week--two
and a half cents per hour for ten hours of steady labor--making
the total income of the family two dollars and seventy
cents per week." Than the Harlem woman, who was
"making a-brave effort to support a sick husband
and two children by taking in washing at thirty-five
cents for the lot of fourteen large pieces, finding
coal, soap, starch, and bluing herself, rather than
depend on charity in any form." Specimen wages
of the tenements these, seemingly inconsistent with
the charge of improvidence. |
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But the connection on second thought is not
obscure. There is nothing in the prospect of
a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessaries
of life, to encourage looking ahead, everything
to discourage the effort. Improvidence and wastefulness
are natural results. The instalment plan secures
to the tenant who lives from hand to mouth his
few comforts; the evil day of reckoning is put
off till a tomorrow that may never come. When
it does come, with failure to pay and the loss
of hard-earned dollars, it simply adds another
hardship to a life measured from the cradle
by such incidents. The children soon catch the
spirit of this sort of thing. I remember once
calling at the home of a poor washer-woman,
living in an East Side tenement, and finding
the door locked. Some children in the hallway
stopped their play and eyed me attentively while
I knocked. The biggest girl volunteered the
information that Mrs. Smith was out; but while
I was thinking of how I was to get a message
to her, the |
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child put a question of her own:
"Are you the spring man or the clock man?"
When I assured her that I was neither one nor
the other, but had brought work for her mother,
Mrs. Smith, who had been hiding from the instalment
collector, speedily appeared.
Perhaps of all the disheartening experiences
of those who have devoted lives of unselfish
thought and effort, and their number is not
so small as often supposed, to the lifting of
this great load, the indifference of those they would
help is the most puzzling. They will not be helped.
Dragged by main force out of their misery, they slip
back again on the first opportunity, seemingly content
only in the old rut. The explanation was supplied by
two women of my acquaintance in an Elizabeth Street
tenement, whom the city missionaries had taken from
their wretched hovel and provided with work and a decent
home somewhere in New Jersey. In three weeks they were
back, saying that they preferred their dark rear room
to the stumps out in the country. But to me the oldest,
the mother, who had struggled along with her daughter
making cloaks at half a dollar apiece, twelve long years
since the daughter's husband was killed in a street
accident and the city took the children, made the bitter
confession: "We do get so kind o' downhearted living
this way, that we have to be where something is going
on, or we just can't stand it." And there was sadder
pathos to me in her words than in the whole long story
of their struggle with poverty; for unconsciously she
voiced the sufferings of thousands, misjudged by a happier
world, deemed vicious because they are human and unfortunate. |
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It is a popular delusion,
encouraged by all sorts of exaggerated stories
when nothing more exciting demands public attention,
that there are more evictions in the tenements
of New York every year "than in all Ireland."
I am not sure that it is doing much for the tenant
to upset this fallacy. To my mind, to be put out
of a tenement would be the height of good luck.
The fact is, however, that evictions are not nearly
as common in New York as supposed. The reason
is that in the civil courts, the judges of which
are elected in their districts, the tenant-voter
has solid ground to stand upon at last. The law
that takes his side to start with is usually twisted
to the utmost to give him time and save him expense.
In the busiest East Side court, that has been
very appropriately dubbed the "Poor Man's
Court," fully five thousand dispossess warrants
are issued in a year, but probably not fifty evictions
take place in the district. The landlord has only
one vote, while there may be forty voters hiring
his rooms in the house, all |
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of which the judge
takes into careful account as elements that have
a direct bearing on the case. And so they have--
on his case. There are sad cases, just as there
are " rounders" who prefer to be moved
at the landlord s expense and save the rent, but
the former at least are unusual enough to attract
more than their share of attention. If his very
poverty compels the tenant to live at a rate if
not in a style that would beggar a Vanderbilt,
paying four prices for everything he needs, from
his rent and coal down to the smallest item in
his housekeeping account, fashion, no less inexorable
in the tenements than on
the avenue, exacts of him that |
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he must die in
a style that is finally and utterly ruinous. The
habit of expensive funerals--I know of no better
classification for it than along with the opium
habit and similar grievous plagues of mankind--is
a distinctively Irish inheritance, but it has
taken root among all classes of tenement dwellers,
curiously enough most firmly among the Italians,
who have taken amazingly to the funeral coach,
perhaps because it furnishes the one opportunity
of their lives for a really grand turn-out with
a free ride thrown in. It is not at all uncommon
to find the hoards of a whole lifetime of hard
work and self-denial squandered on the empty show
of a ludicrous funeral parade and a display of
flowers that ill comports with the humble life
it is supposed to exalt. It is easier to understand
the wake as a sort of consolation cup for the
survivors for whom there is--as one of them, doubtless
a heathenish pessimist, put it to me once--"no
such luck." The press and the pulpit have
denounced the wasteful practice that often entails |
|
bitter want upon the relatives of the one buried
with such pomp, but with little or no apparent
result. Rather, the undertaker's business prospers
more than ever in the tenements since the genius
of politics has seen its way clear to make capital
out of the dead voter as well as of the living,
by making him the means of a useful "show
of strength" and count of noses. |
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One free excursion
awaits young and old whom bitter poverty has denied
the poor privilege of the choice of the home in
death they were denied in life, the ride up the
Sound to the Potter's Field, charitably styled
the City Cemetery. But even there they do not
escape their fate. In the common trench of the
Poor Burying Ground they lie packed three stories
deep, shoulder to shoulder, crowded in death as
they were in life, to "save space; "
for even on that desert island the ground is not
for the exclusive possession of those who cannot
afford to pay for it. There is an odd coincidence
in this, that year by year the lives that are
begun in the gutter, the little nameless waifs
whom the police pick up and the city adopts as
its wards, are balanced by the even more forlorn
lives that are ended in the river. I do not know
how or why it happens, or that it is more than
a mere coincidence. But there it is. Year by year
the balance is struck--a few more, a few less--substantially
the same when the record is closed. |
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Go to Chapter
15 |
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[1] Suspicions of murder, in the
case of a woman who was found dead, covered with bruises,
after a day's running fight with her husband, in which
the beer-jug had been the bone of contention, brought
me to this house, a ramshackle tenement on the tail-end
of a lot over near the North River docks. The family
in the picture lived above the rooms where the dead
woman lay on a bed of straw, overrun by rats, and
had been uninterested witnesses of the affray that
was an everyday occurrence in the house. A patched
and shaky stairway led up to their one bare and miserable
room, in comparison with which a whitewashed prison-cell
seemed a real palace. A heap of old rags, in which
the baby slept serenely, served as the common sleeping-bunk
of father, mother, and children--two bright and pretty
girls, singularly out of keeping in their clean, if
coarse, dresses, with their surroundings. The father,
a slow-going, honest English coal-heaver, earned on
the average fire dollars a week, "when work was
fairly brisk," at the docks. But there were long
seasons when it was very "slack," he said,
doubtfully. Yet the prospect did not seem to discourage
them. The mother, a pleasant-faced woman, was cheerful,
even light-hearted. Her smile seemed the most sadly
hopeless of all in the utter wretchedness of the place,
cheery though it was meant to be and really was. It
seemed doomed to certain disappointment--the one thing
there that was yet to know a greater depth of misery. |
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