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THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

CHAPTER I.

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN

The problem of the children is the problem of the State. As we mould the
children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of
the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our
hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad
government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance
of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future
finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power
and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of
that energy. At the beginning of the century the urban population of the
United States was 3.97 per cent. of the whole, or not quite one in
twenty-five. To-day it is 29.12 per cent., or nearly one in three. In the
lifetime of those who were babies in arms when the first gun was fired
upon Fort Sumter it has all but doubled. A million and a quarter live
to-day in the tenements of the American metropolis. Clearly, there is
reason for the sharp attention given at last to the life and the doings of
the other half, too long unconsidered. Philanthropy we call it sometimes
with patronizing airs. Better call it self-defence.

In New York there is all the more reason because it is the open door
through which pours in a practically unrestricted immigration, unfamiliar
with and unattuned to our institutions; the dumping-ground where it rids
itself of its burden of helplessness and incapacity, leaving the
procession of the strong and the able free to move on. This sediment forms
the body of our poor, the contingent that lives, always from hand to
mouth, with no provision and no means of providing for the morrow. In the
first generation it pre-empts our slums;[1] in the second, its worst
elements, reinforced by the influences that prevail there, develop the
tough, who confronts society with the claim that the world owes him a
living and that he will collect it in his own way. His plan is a practical
application of the spirit of our free institutions as his opportunities
have enabled him to grasp it.

Thus it comes about that here in New York to seek the children of the poor
one must go among those who, if they did not themselves come over the sea,
can rarely count back another generation born on American soil. Not that
there is far to go.