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THE reader who has followed with me the fate of the Other Half thus far, may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight years 135,595 families in New York were registered as asking or receiving charity. Perhaps, however, the intelligence will rouse him that for five years past one person in every ten who died in this city was buried in the Potter's Field. These facts tell a terrible story. The first means that in a population of a million and a half, very nearly, if not quite, half a million persons were driven, or chose, to beg for food, or to accept it in charity at some period of the eight years, if not during the whole of it. There is no mistake about these figures. They are drawn from the records of the Charity Organization Society, and represent the time during which it has been in existence. It is not
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even pretended that the record is complete. To be well within the limits, the Society's statisticians allow only three and a half to the family, instead of the four and a half that are accepted as the standard of calculations which deal with New York's population as a whole. They estimate upon the basis of their everyday experience that, allowing for those who have died, moved away, or become for the time being at least self-supporting, eighty-five per cent. of the registry
are still within, or lingering upon, the borders of
dependence. Precisely how the case stands with this
great horde of the indigent is shown by a classification
of 5,169 cases that were investigated by the Society
in one year. This was the way it turned out: 327 worthy
of continuous relief, or 6.4 per cent.; 1,269 worthy
of temporary relief, or 24.4 per cent.; 2,698 in need
of work, rather than relief, or 52.2 per cent.; 875
unworthy of relief, or 17 per cent.
That is, nearly six and a half per cent. of all were
utterly helpless--orphans, cripples, or the very aged;
nearly one-fourth needed just a lift to start them
on the road of independence, or of permanent pauperism,
according to the wisdom with which the lever was applied.
More than half were destitute because they had no
work and were unable to find any, and one-sixth were
frauds, professional beggars, training their children
to follow in their footsteps--a veritable "tribe
of Ishmael," tightening its grip on society as
the years pass, until society shall summon up pluck
to say with Paul, "if any man will not work neither
shall he eat," and stick to it. It is worthy
of note that almost precisely the same results followed
a similar investigation in Boston. There were a few
more helpless cases of the sort true charity accounts
it a gain to care for, but the proportion of a given
lot that was crippled for want of work, or unworthy,
was exactly the same as in this city. The bankrupt
in hope, in courage, in purse, and in purpose, are
not peculiar to New York. They are found the world
over, but we have our full share. If further proof
were wanted, it is found in the prevalence of pauper
burials. The Potter's Field. stands ever for utter,
hopeless surrender. The last the poor will let go,
however miserable their lot in life, is the hope of
a decent burial. But for the five years ending with
1888 the average of burials in the Potter's Field
has been 10.03 per cent. of all. In 1889 it was 9.64.
In that year the proportion to the total mortality
of those who died in hospitals, institutions, and
in the Almshouse was as 1 in 5.
The 135,595 families inhabited no fewer than 31,000
different tenements. I say tenements advisedly, though
the society calls them buildings, because at least
ninety-nine per cent. were found in the big barracks,
the rest in shanties scattered here and there, and
now and then a fraud or an exceptional case of distress
in a dwelling-house of better class. Here, undoubtedly,
allowance must be made for the constant moving about
of those who live on charity, which enables one active
beggar to blacklist a dozen houses in the year. Still
the great mass of the tenements are shown to be harboring
alms-seekers. They might almost as safely harbor the
small-pox. That scourge is not more contagious than
the alms-seeker's complaint. There are houses that
have been corrupted through and through by this pestilence,
until their very atmosphere breathes beggary. More
than a hundred and twenty pauper families have been
reported from time to time as living in one such tenement. |
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The truth is that pauperism
grows in the tenements as naturally as weeds in
a garden lot. A moral distemper, like crime, it
finds there its most fertile soil. All the surroundings
of tenement-house life favor its growth, and where
once it has taken root it is harder to dislodge
than the most virulent of physical diseases. The
thief is infinitely easier to deal with than the
pauper, because the very fact of his being a thief
presupposes some bottom to the man. Granted that
it is bad, there is still something, a possible
handle by which to catch him. To the pauper there
is none. He is as hopeless as his own poverty.
I speak of the pauper, not of the
honestly poor. There is a sharp line between the
two; but athwart it stands the tenement, all the
time blurring and blotting it out. "It all
comes down to character in the end," was
the verdict of a philanthropist whose life has
been spent wrestling with this weary problem.
And so it comes down to the tenement, the destroyer
of individuality and character everywhere. "In
nine years," said a wise and charitable physician,
sadly, to me, "I have known of but a single
case of permanent improvement in a poor tenement
family." I have known of some, whose experience,
extending over an even longer stretch, was little
better. The beggar follows the "tough's"
rule of life that the world owes him a living,
but his scheme of collecting it stops short of
violence. Be |
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has not the pluck to rob even a drunken
man. His highest flights take in at most an unguarded
clothes-line, or a little child sent to buy bread
or beer with the pennies he clutches tightly as
he skips along. Even then he prefers to attain
his end by stratagem rather than by force, though
occasionally, when the coast is clear, he rises
to the height of the bully. The ways he finds
of "collecting" under the cloak of undeserved
poverty are numberless, and often reflect credit
on the man's ingenuity, if not on the man himself.
I remember the shock with which my first experience
with his kind--her kind, rather, in this case:
the beggar was a woman--came home to me. On. my
way to and from the office I had been giving charity
regularly, as I fondly believed, to an old woman
who sat in Chatham Square with a baby done up
in a bundle of rags, moaning piteously in sunshine
and rain, "Please, help the poor." It
was the baby I pitied and thought I was doing
my little to help, until one night I was just
in time to rescue it from rolling out of her
lap, and found the bundle I had been wasting my pennies
upon just rags and nothing more, and the old hag dead
drunk. Since then I have encountered bogus babies, borrowed
babies, and drugged babies in the streets, and fought
shy of them all. Most of them, I am glad to say, have
been banished from the street since; but they are still
occasionally to be found. It was only last winter that
the officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children arrested an Italian woman who was begging
along Madison Avenue with a poor little wreck of a girl,
whose rags and pinched face were calculated to tug hard
at the purse-strings of a miser. Over five dollars in
nickles and pennies were taken from the woman's pockets,
and when her story of poverty and hunger was investigated
at the family's home in a Baxter Street tenement, bank-books
turned up that showed the Masonis to be regular pauper
capitalists, able to draw their check for three thousand
dollars, had they been so disposed. The woman was fined
$250, a worse punishment undoubtedly than to have sent
her to prison for the rest of her natural life. Her
class has, unhappily, representatives in New York that
have not yet been brought to grief.
Nothing short of making street begging a crime has availed
to clear our city of this pest to an appreciable extent.
By how much of an effort this result has been accomplished
may be gleaned from the fact that the Charity Organization
Society alone, in five years, caused the taking up of
2,594 street beggars, and the arrest and conviction
of 1,474 persistent offenders. Last year it dealt with
612 perambulating mendicants. The police report only
19 arrests for begging during the year 1889, but the
real facts of the case are found under the heading "vagrancy."
In all, 2,633 persons were charged with this offence,
947 of them women. A goodly proportion of these latter
came from the low groggeries of the Tenth Ward, where
a peculiar variety of the female tramp-beggar is at
home, the "scrub." The scrub is one degree
perhaps above the average pauper in this, that she is
willing to work at least one day in the week, generally
the Jewish Sabbath. The orthodox Jew can do no work
of any sort from Friday evening till sunset on Saturday,
and this interim the scrub fills out in Ludlow Street.
The pittance she receives for this vicarious sacrifice
of herself upon the altar of the ancient faith buys
her rum for at least two days of the week at one of
the neighborhood "morgues." She lives through
the other four by begging. There are distilleries in
Jewtown, or just across its borders, that depend almost
wholly on her custom. Recently, when one in Hester Street
was raided because the neighbors had complained of the
boisterous hilarity of the hags over their beer, thirty
two aged "scrubs" were marched off to the
station-house. |
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It is curious to find
preconceived notions quite upset in a review of
the nationalities that go to make up this squad
of street beggars. The Irish head the list with
fifteen per cent., and the native American is
only a little way behind with twelve per cent.,
while the Italian, who in his own country turns
beggary into a fine art, has less than two per
cent. Eight per cent. were Germans. The relative
prevalence of the races in our population does
not account for this showing. Various causes operate,
no doubt, to produce it. Chief among them is,
I think, the tenement itself. It has no power
to corrupt the Italian, who comes here in almost
every instance to work--no beggar would ever emigrate
from anywhere unless forced to do so. He is distinctly
on its lowest level from the start. With the Irishman
the case is different. The tenement, especially
its lowest type, appears to possess a peculiar
affinity for the worse nature of |
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the Celt, to
whose best and strongest instincts it does violence, and soonest and
most thoroughly corrupts him. The "native"
twelve per cent. represent the result of this
process, the hereditary beggar of the second
or third generation in the slums. The blind beggar alone is winked at in
New York's streets, because the authorities do not know
what else to do with him. There is no provision for
him anywhere after he is old enough to strike out for
himself. The annual pittance of thirty or forty dollars
which he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord
in good humor; for the rest his misfortune and his thin
disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must
provide. Until the city affords him some systematic
way of earning his living by work (as Philadelphia has
done, for instance) to banish him from the street would
be tantamount to sentencing him to death by starvation.
So he possesses it in peace, that is, if he is blind
in good earnest, and begs without "encumbrance."
Professional mendicancy does not hesitate to make use
of the greatest of human afflictions as a pretence for
enlisting the sympathy upon which it thrives. Many New
Yorkers will remember the French schoolmaster who was
"blinded by a shell at the siege of Paris,"
but miraculously recovered his sight when arrested and
deprived of his children by the officers of Mr. Gerry's
society. When last heard of he kept a "museum"
in Hartford, and acted the overseer with financial success.
His sign with its pitiful tale, that was a familiar
sight in our streets for years and earned for him the
capital upon which he started his business, might have
found a place among the curiosities exhibited there,
had it not been kept in a different sort of museum here
as a memento of his rascality. There was another of
his tribe, a woman, who begged for years with a deformed
child in her arms, which she was found to have hired
at an almshouse in Genoa for fifteen francs a month.
It was a good investment, for she proved to be possessed
of a comfortable fortune. Some time before that, the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, that
found her out, had broken up the dreadful padrone system,
a real slave trade in Italian children, who were bought
of poor parents across the sea and made to beg their
way on foot through France to the port whence they were
shipped to this city, to be beaten and starved here
by their cruel masters and sent out to beg, often after
merciless mutilation to make them "take" better
with a pitying public. |
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But, after all, the tenement offers a better
chance of fraud on impulsive but thoughtless
charity, than all the wretchedness of the street,
and with fewer risks. To the tender-hearted
and unwary it is, in itself, the strongest plea
for help. When such a cry goes up as was heard
recently from a Mott Street den, where the family
of a "sick" husband, a despairing
mother, and half a dozen children in rags and
dirt were destitute of the "first necessities
of life," it is not to be wondered at that
a stream of gold comes pouring in to relieve.
It happens too often, as in that case, that
a little critical inquiry or reference to the
"black list" of the Charity Organization
Society, justly dreaded only by the frauds,
discovers the "sickness" to stand
for laziness, and the destitution to be the
family's stock in trade; and the community receives
a shock that for once is downright wholesome,
if it imposes a check on an undiscriminating
charity that is worse than none at all. The
case referred to furnished an apt illustration
of how thoroughly |
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corrupting pauperism is in
such a setting. The tenement woke up early to
the gold mine that was being worked under its
roof, and before the day was three hours old
the stream of callers who responded to the newspaper
appeal found the alley blocked by a couple of
"toughs," who exacted toll of a silver
quarter from each tearful sympathizer with the
misery in the attic.
A volume might be written about the tricks
of the professional beggar, and the uses to
which he turns the tenement in his trade. The
Boston "widow" whose husband turned
up alive and well after she had buried him
seventeen times with tears and lamentation, and
made the public pay for the weekly funerals, is
not without representatives in New York. The "gentleman
tramp" is a familiar type from our streets,
and the "once respectable Methodist"
who patronized all the revivals in town with his
profitable story of repentance, only to fall from
grace into the saloon door nearest the church
after the service was over, merely transferred
the scene of his operations from the tenement
to the church as the proper setting for his specialty.
There is enough of real suffering in the homes
of the poor to make one wish that there were some
effective way of enforcing Paul's plan of starving
the drones into the paths of self-support: no
work, nothing to eat. The message came from one
of the Health Department's summer doctors, last
July, to the King's Daughters' Tenement-house
Committee, that a family with a sick child was
absolutely famishing in an uptown tenement. The
address was not given. The doctor had forgotten
to write it down, and before he could be found and a |
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visitor sent to the house the baby was dead,
and the mother had gone mad. The nurse found the
father, who was an honest laborer long out of
work, packing the little corpse in an orange-box
partly filled with straw, that he might take it
to the Morgue for pauper burial. There was absolutely not a crust to eat in the house, and the other
children were crying for food. The great immediate
need in that case, as in more than half of all
according to the record, was work and living wages.
Alms do not meet the emergency at all. They frequently
aggravate it, degrading and pauperizing where
true help should aim at raising the sufferer to
self-respect and self-dependence. The experience
of the Charity Organization Society in raising,
in eight tears, 4,500 families out of the rut
of pauperism into proud, if modest, independence,
without alms, but by a system of "friendly
visitation," and the work of the Society
for Improving the Condition of the Poor and kindred
organizations along the same line, shows what
can be done by well-directed effort. |
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It is estimated that
New York spends in public and private charity
every year a round $8,000,000. A small part of
this sum intelligently invested in a great labor
bureau, that would bring the seeker of work and
the one with work to give together under auspices
offering some degree of mutual security, would
certainly repay the amount of the investment in
the saving of much capital now worse than wasted,
and would be prolific of the best results. The
ultimate and greatest need, however, the real
remedy, is to remove the cause--the tenement that
was built for "a class of whom nothing was
expected," and which has come fully up to
the expectation. Tenement-house reform holds the
key to the problem of pauperism in the city. We
can never get rid of either the tenement or the
pauper. The two will always exist together in
New York. But by reforming the one, we can do
more toward exterminating the other than can be
done by all other means together that have yet
been invented, or ever will be. |
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Go to Chapter
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