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WHERE God builds a church the devil builds next door--a saloon, is an old saying that has lost its point in New York. Either the devil was on the ground first, or he has been doing a good deal more in the way of building. I tried once to find out how the account stood, and counted to 111 Protestant churches, chapels, and places of worship of every kind below Fourteenth Street, 4,065 saloons. The worst half of the tenement population lives down there, and it has to this day the worst half of the saloons. Uptown the account stands a little better, but there are easily ten saloons to every church to-day. I am afraid,
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too, that the congregations are larger by a good deal; certainly the attendance is steadier and the contributions more liberal the week round, Sunday included. Turn and twist it as we may, over against every bulwark for decency and morality which society erects, the saloon projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the lives of the poor. Nowhere is its mark so broad or so black.
To their misery it sticketh closer than a brother, persuading
them that within its doors only is refuge, relief. It
has the best of the argument, too, for it is true, worse
pity, that in many a tenement-house block the saloon
is the one bright and cheery and humanly decent spot
to be found. It is a sorry admission to make, that to
bring the rest of the neighborhood up to the level of
the saloon would be one way of squelching it; but it
is so. Wherever the tenements thicken, it multiplies.
Upon the direst poverty of their crowds it grows fat
and prosperous, levying upon it a tax heavier than all
the rest of its grievous burdens combined. It is not
yet two years since the Excise Board made the rule that
no three corners of any street-crossing, not already
so occupied, should thenceforward be licensed for rum-selling.
And the tardy prohibition was intended for the tenement
districts. Nowhere else is there need of it. One may
walk many miles through the homes of the poor searching
vainly for an open reading-room, a cheerful coffee-house,
a decent club that is not a cloak for the traffic in
rum. The dramshop yawns at every step, the poor man's
club, his forum and his haven of rest when weary and
disgusted with the crowding, the quarrelling, and the
wretchedness at home. With the poison dealt out there
he takes his politics, in quality not far apart. As
the source, so the stream. The rumshop turns the political
crank in New York. The natural yield is rum politics.
Of what that means, successive Boards of Aldermen, composed
in a measure, if not of a majority, of dive-keepers,
have given New York a taste. The disgrace of the infamous
"Boodle Board" will be remembered until some
corruption even fouler crops out and throws it into
the shade. |
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What relation the saloon
bears to the crowds, let me illustrate by a comparison.
Below Fourteenth Street were, when the Health
Department took its first accurate census of the
tenements a year and a half ago, 13,220 of the
39,390 buildings classed as such in the whole
city. Of the eleven hundred thousand tenants,
not quite half a million, embracing a host of
more than sixty-three thousand children under
five years of age, lived below that line. Below
it, also, were 234 of the cheap lodging-houses
accounted for by the police last year, with a
total of four millions and a half of lodgers for
the twelvemonth, 59 of the city's 110 pawnshops,
and 4,065 of its 7,884 saloons. The four most
densely peopled precincts, the Fourth, Sixth,
Tenth, and Eleventh, supported together in round
numbers twelve hundred saloons, and their returns
showed twenty-seven per cent. of the whole number
of arrests for |
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the year. The Eleventh Precinct,
that has the greatest and the poorest crowds of
all--it is the Tenth Ward--and harbored one-third
of the army of homeless lodgers and fourteen per
cent. of all the prisoners of the year, kept 485 saloons going in 1889. It is not on record that
one of them all failed for want of support. A
number of them, on the contrary, had brought their
owners wealth and prominence. From their bars
these eminent citizens stepped proudly into the
councils of the city and the State. The very floor of one of the bar-rooms,
in a neighborhood that lately resounded with the cry
for bread of starving workmen, is paved with silver
dollars!
East Side poverty is not alone in thus rewarding
the tyrants that sweeten its cup of bitterness with
their treacherous poison. The Fourth Ward points with
pride to the honorable record of the conductors of
its "Tub of Blood," and a dozen bar-rooms
with less startling titles; the West Side to the wealth
and "social" standing of the owners of such
resorts as the "Witches' Broth" and the
"Plug Eat" in the region of Hell's Kitchen
three-cent whiskey, names ominous of the concoctions
brewed there and of their fatally generous measure.
Another ward, that boasts some of the best residences
and the bluest blood on Manhattan Island, honors with
political leadership in the ruling party the proprietor
of one of the most disreputable Black-and-Tan dives
and dancing-hells to be found anywhere. Criminals
and policemen alike do him homage. The list might
be strung out to make texts for sermons with a stronger
home flavor than many that are preached in our pulpits
on Sunday. But I have not set out to write the political
history of New York. Besides, the list would not be
complete. Secret dives are skulking in the slums and
out of them, that are not labelled respectable by
a Board of Excise and support no "family entrance."
Their business, like that of the stale-beer dives,
is done through a side-door the week through. No one
knows the number of unlicensed saloons in the city.
Those who have made the matter a study estimate it
at a thousand, more or less. The police make occasional
schedules of a few and report them to headquarters.
Perhaps there is a farce in the police court, and
there the matter ends. Rum and "influence"
are synonymous terms. The interests of the one rarely
suffer for the want of attention from the other.
With the exception of these free lances that treat
the law openly with contempt, the saloons all hang
out a sign announcing in fat type that no beer or
liquor is sold to children. In the down-town "morgues"
that make the lowest degradation of tramp-humanity
pan out a paying interest, as in the "reputable
resorts" uptown where Inspector Byrnes's men
spot their worthier quarry elbowing citizens whom
the idea of associating with a burglar would give
a shock they would not get over for a week, this sign
is seen conspicuously displayed. Though apparently
it means submission to a beneficent law, in reality
the sign is a heartless, cruel joke. I doubt if one
child in a thousand, who brings his growler to be
filled at the average New York bar, is sent away empty-handed,
if able to pay for what he wants. I once followed
a little boy, who shivered in bare feet on a cold
November night so that he seemed in danger of smashing
his pitcher on the icy pavement, into a Mulberry Street
saloon where just such a sign hung on the wall, and
forbade the barkeeper to serve the boy. The man was
as astonished at my interference as if I had told
him to shut up his shop and go home, which in fact
I might have done with as good a right, for it was
after 1 A.M., the legal closing hour. He was mighty
indignant too, and told me roughly to go away and
mind my business, while he filled the pitcher. The
law prohibiting the selling of beer to minors is about
as much respected in the tenement-house districts
as the ordinance against swearing. Newspaper readers will recall the story, told little more than a year
ago, of a boy who after carrying beer a whole day
for a shopful of men over on the East Side, where
his father worked, crept into the cellar to sleep
off the effects of his own share in the rioting. It
was Saturday evening. Sunday his parents sought him
high and low; but it was not until Monday morning,
when the shop was opened, that he was found, killed
and half-eaten by the rats that overran the place. |
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All the evil the saloon
does in breeding poverty and in corrupting politics;
all the suffering it brings into the lives of
its thousands of innocent victims, the wives and
children of drunkards it sends forth to curse
the community; its fostering of crime and its
shielding of criminals--it is all as nothing to
this, its worst offence. In its affinity for the
thief there is at least this compensation that,
as it makes, it also unmakes him. It starts him
on his career only to trip him up and betray him
into the hands of the law, when the rum he exchanged
for his honesty has stolen his brains as well.
For the corruption of the child there is no restitution.
None is possible. It saps the very vitals of society;
undermines its strongest defences, and delivers
them over to the enemy. Fostered and filled by
the saloon, the "growler" looms up in
the New York street boy's life, baffling the most
persistent efforts to reclaim him. There is no
escape from |
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it; no hope for the boy, once its
blighting grip is upon him. Thenceforward the
logic of the slums, that the world which gave
him poverty and ignorance for his portion "owes
him a living," is his creed, and the career
of the "tough" lies open before him,
a beaten track to be blindly followed to a bad
end in the wake of the growler. |
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Go to Chapter 19 |
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