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THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

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THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

BY LILLIAN D. WALD

With Illustrations from Etchings and Drawings by Abraham Phillips and from Photographs

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT. 1915.

BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

November, 1938

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THE COMRADES WHO HAVE BUILT THE HOUSE

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CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT D PARK PRANCH 192 EdST BROADWAY

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PREFACE

MUCH of the material contained in this book has been published in a series of six articles that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly from March to August, 1915. And indeed it was due to the kindly insistence on the part of the editors of that magazine that more perma- nent form should be given to the record of the House on Henry Street that the story was published at all.

During the two decades of the existence of the Settlement there has been a significant awakening on matters of social concern, par- ticularly those affecting the protection of chil- dren throughout society in general; and a new sense of responsibility has been aroused among men and women, but perhaps more distinctively among women, since the period coincides with their freer admission to public and professional life. The Settlement is in itself an expression of this sense of responsi- bility, and under its robf many divergent groups have come together to discuss measures " for the many, mindless , mass that most needs helping/' and often to assert by deed their faith in democracy. 'Some have found in the Settlement an opportunity for self-realization

VI

PREFACE

that in the more fixed and older institutions has not seemed possible.

I cannot acknowledge by name the many individuals who, by gift of money and through understanding and confidence, through work and thought and sharing of the burdens, have helped to build the House on Henry Street. These colleagues have come all through the years that have followed since the little girl led me to her rear tenement home. Though we are working together as comrades for a common cause, I cannot resist this opportunity to express my profound per- sonal gratitude for the precious gifts that have been so abundantly given. The first friends who gave confidence and support to an un- known and unexperimented venture have re- mained staunch and loyal builders of the House. And the younger generation with their gifts have developed the plans of the House and have found inspiration while they have given it.

In the making of the book, much help has come from these same friends, and I should be quite overwhelmed with the debt I owe did I not feel that all of us who have worked together have worked not only for each other but for the cause of human progress; that is the beginning and should be the end of the House on Henry Street.

LILLIAN D. WALD.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PACK

I. THE EAST SIDE Two DECADES AGO ... i

II. ESTABLISHING THE NURSING SERVICE . . 26

III. THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY ... 44

IV. CHILDREN AND PLAY 66

V. EDUCATION AND THE CHILD .... 97

VI. THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 117

VII. CHILDREN WHO WORK 135

VIII. THE NATION'S CHILDREN 152

IX. ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN THE SETTLEMENT . 169

X. YOUTH 189

XI. YOUTH AND TRADES UNIONS .... 201 XII. WEDDINGS AND SOCIAL HALLS , . . .216

XIII. FRIENDS OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM .... 229

XIV. SOCIAL FORCES 249

XV. SOCIAL FORCES, Continued 270

XVI. NEW AMERICANS AND OUR POLICIES . . 286

INDEX 313

FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET ..... Frontispiece

Etching by Abraham Phillips

LILLIAN D. WALD AND MARY M. BREWSTER IN HOSPITAL

UNIFORM, 1893 ........... 6

WITH PRAYER-SHAWL AND PHYLACTERY ...... 22

Etching by Abraham Phillips THE NURSE IN THE TENEMENT ........ 28

A SHORT CUT OVER THE ROOFS OF THE TENEMENTS ... 52 AND THEIR ECSTASY AT THE SIGHT OF A WONDERFUL DOGWOOD

IT HAS BEEN CALLED THE " BUNKER HILL " OF PLAYGROUNDS . 82 THE CHILDREN PLAY ON OUR ROOF ....... 82

THE KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN LEARN THE REALITY OF THE

THINGS THEY SING ABOUT ........ 90

USES OF THE BACK YARD IN ONE OF THE BRANCHES OF THE

HENRY STREET SETTLEMENT ........ 162

HERE AND THERE ARE STILL FOUND REMINDERS OF OLD NEW

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Etching by Abraham Phillips

ESTHER ............. 182

Drawing by Esther J. Peck

THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE ........ 186

Drawing by Abraham Phillips

IN A CLUB-ROOM ........... 192

Drawing by Abraham Phillips

AFTER THE LONG DAY .......... 204

Drawing by Abraham Phillips

AN INCIDENT IN THE HISTORICAL PAGEANT ON HENRY STREET, COMMEMORATING THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SETTLEMENT ........... 214

xi

xii ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

THE OLDER GENERATION 218

Etching by Abraham Phillips

PRINCE KROPOTKIN 234

BABUSCHKA, LITTLE GRANDMOTHER 242

THE SYNAGOGUES ARE EVERYWHERE — IMPOSING OR SHABBY- LOOKING BUILDINGS 254

Etching by Abraham Phillips

A MOTHER IN ISRAEL 268

Etching by Abraham Phillips

THE DRAMATIC CLUB PRESENTED "THE SHEPHERD" . . . 272 A REGION OF OVERCROWDED HOMES 298

AT ELLIS ISLAND THERE is A STREAM OF INFLOWING LIFE . . 308

Photograph by Louis Hines

THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

PROPERTY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

CHAPTER I THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO

A SICK woman in a squalid rear tenement, so wretched and so pitiful that, in all the years since, I have not seen anything more ap- pealing, determined me, within half an hour, to live on the East Side.

I had spent two years in a New York train- ing-school for nurses; strenuous years for an undisciplined, untrained girl, but a wonderful human experience. After graduation, I sup- plemented the theoretical instruction, which was casual and inconsequential in the hospital classes twenty-five years ago, by a period of study at a medical college. It was while at the college that a great opportunity came to me.

I had little more than an inspiration to be of use in some way or somehow, and going to the hospital seemed the readiest means of realizing my desire. While there, the long hours " on duty ' and the exhausting demands

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of the ward work scarcely admitted freedom for keeping informed as to what was happen- ing in the world outside. The nurses had no time for general reading; visits to and from friends were brief; we were out of the current and saw little of life save as it flowed into the hospital wards. It is not strange, therefore, that I should have been ignorant of the various movements which reflected the awakening of the social conscience at the time, or of the birth of the " settlement," which twenty-five years ago was giving form to a social protest in Eng- land and America. Indeed, it was not until the plan of our work on the East Side was well developed that knowledge came to me of other groups of people who, reacting to a humane or an academic appeal, were adopting this mode of expression and calling it a " settlement."

Two decades ago the words " East Side ' called up a vague and alarming picture of something strange and alien: a vast crowded area, a foreign city within our own, for whose conditions we had no concern. Aside from its exploiters, political and economic, few people had any definite knowledge of it, and its lit- erary ' discovery ' had but just begun.

The lower East Side then reflected the popu- lar indifference — it almost seemed contempt — for the living conditions of a huge population.

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 3

And the possibility of improvement seemed, when my inexperience was startled into thought, the more remote because of the dumb acceptance of these conditions by the East Side itself. Like the rest of the world I had known little of it, when friends of a philan- thropic institution asked me to do something for that quarter.

Remembering the families who came to visit patients in the wards, I outlined a course of instruction in home nursing adapted to their needs, and gave it in an old building in Henry Street, then used as a technical school and now part of the settlement. Henry Street then as now was the center of a dense industrial popula- tion.

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From the schoolroom where I had been giv- ing a lesson in bed-making, a little girl led me one drizzling March morning. She had told me of her sick mother, and gathering from her incoherent account that a child had been born, I caught up the paraphernalia of the bed-making lesson and carried it with me.

The child led me over broken roadways, —

there was no asphalt, although its use was well established in other parts of the city, — over dirty mattresses and heaps of refuse, — it was before Colonel Waring had shown the pos- sibility of clean streets even in that quarter, — between tall, reeking houses whose laden fire- escapes, useless for their appointed purpose, bulged with household goods of every descrip- tion. The rain added to the dismal appearance of the streets and to the discomfort of the crowds which thronged them, intensifying the odors

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 5

which assailed me from every side. Through Hester and Division streets we went to the end of Ludlow; past odorous fish-stands, for the streets were a market-place, unregulated, unsu- pervised, unclean; past evil-smelling, uncovered garbage-cans; and — perhaps worst of all, where

so many little children played — past the trucks brought down from more fastidious quarters and stalled on these already overcrowded streets, lending themselves inevitably to many forms of indecency.

The child led me on through a tenement hallway, across a court where open and un- screened closets were promiscuously used by

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men and women, up into a rear tenement, by slimy steps whose accumulated dirt was aug- mented that day by the mud of the streets, and finally into the sickroom.

All the maladjustments of our social and economic relations seemed epitomized in this brief journey and what was found at the end of it. The family to which the child led me was neither criminal nor vicious. Although the husband was a cripple, one of those who stand on street corners exhibiting deformities to enlist compassion, and masking the begging of alms by a pretense at selling; although the family of seven shared their two rooms with boarders, — who were literally boarders, since a piece of timber was placed over the floor for them to sleep on, — and although the sick woman lay on a wretched, unclean bed, soiled with a hemorrhage two days old, they were not degraded human beings, judged by any measure of moral values.

In fact, it was very plain that they were sensitive to their condition, and when, at the end of my ministrations, they kissed my hands (those who have undergone similar experiences will, I am sure, understand), it would have been some solace if by any conviction of the moral unworthiness of the family I could have defended myself as a part of a society which

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permitted such conditions to exist. Indeed, my subsequent acquaintance with them re- vealed the fact that, miserable as their state was, they were not without ideals for the family

life, and for society, of which they were so unloved and unlovely a part.

That morning's experience was a baptism of fire. Deserted were the laboratory and the academic work of the college. I never re- turned to them. On my way from the sick- room to my comfortable student quarters my

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mind was intent on my own responsibility. To my inexperience it seemed certain that con- ditions such as these were allowed because people did not know, and for me there was a challenge to know and to tell. When early morning found me still awake, my naive con- viction remained that, if people knew things, — and " things ' meant everything implied in the condition of this family, — such horrors would cease to exist, and I rejoiced that I had had a training in the care of the sick that in itself would give me an organic relationship to the neighbor- hood in which this awakening had come.

To the first sympathetic friend to whom I poured forth my story, I found myself present- ing a plan which had been developing almost without conscious mental direction on my part. It was doubtless the accumulation of many reflections inspired by acquaintance with the patients in the hospital wards, and now, with the Ludlow Street experience, resistlessly im- pelling me to action.

Within a day or two a comrade from the training-school, Mary Brewster, agreed to share in the venture. We were to live in the neigh- borhood as nurses, identify ourselves with it socially, and, in brief, contribute to it our citi-

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO

zenship. That plan contained in embryo all the extended and diversified social interests of our settlement group to-day.

We set to work immediately to find quarters — no easy task, as we clung to the civilization of a bathroom, and ac- cording to a legend cur- rent at the time there were only two bathrooms in tenement houses below Fourteenth Street. Chance helped us here. A young woman who for years played an important part in the life of many East Side people, overhearing a conversation of mine with a fellow-student,, gave me an introduction to two men who, she said, knew all about the quarter of the city which I wished to enter. I called on them immediately, and their response to my need was as prompt. Without stopping to inquire into my antecedents or motives, or to discourse on the social aspects of the com- munity, of which, I soon learned, they were competent to speak with authority, they set out with me at once, in a pouring rain, to scour the adjacent streets for " To Let ' signs. One which seemed to me worth investigating my

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newly acquired friends discarded with the ex- planation that it was in the " red light ' dis- trict and would not do. Later I was to know much of the unfortunate women who inhabited the quarter, but at the time the term meant nothing to me.

After a long tour one of my guides, as if by inspiration, reminded the other that several young women had taken a house on Rivington Street for something like my purpose, and per- haps I had better live there temporarily and take my time in finding satisfactory quarters. Upon that advice I acted, and within a few days Miss Brewster and I found ourselves guests at the luncheon table of the College Set- tlement on Rivington Street. With ready hos- pitality they took us in, and, during July and August, we were " residents ' in stimulating comradeship with serious women, who were also the fortunate possessors of a saving sense of humor.

Before September of the year 1893 we found a house on Jefferson Street, the only one in which our careful search disclosed the desired bathtub. It had other advantages — the vacant floor at the top (so high that the windows along the entire side wall gave us sun and breeze), and, greatest lure of all, the warm welcome which came to us from the basement,

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 1 1

where we found the janitress ready to answer questions as to terms.

Naturally, objections to two young women living alone in New York under these condi- tions had to be met, and some assurance as to our material comfort was given to anxious, though at heart sympathetic, families by com- promising on good furniture, a Baltimore heater for cheer, and simple but adequate household appurtenances. Painted floors with easily re- moved rugs, windows curtained with spotless but inexpensive scrim, a sitting-room with pic- tures, books, and restful chairs, a tiny bed- room which we two shared, a small dining- room in which the family mahogany did not look out of place, and a kitchen, constituted our home for two full years.

The much-esteemed bathroom, small and dark, was in the hall, and necessitated early rising if we were to have the use of it; for, as we became known, we had many callers anx- ious to see us before we started on our sick rounds. The diminutive closet-space was di- vided to hold the bags and equipment we needed from day to day, and more ample store- closets were given us by the kindly people in the school where I had first given lessons to East Side mothers. Any pride in the sacrifice of material comfort which might have risen

12 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

within us was effectually inhibited by the con- stant reminder that we two young persons occupied exactly the same space as the large families on every floor below us, and to one

of our basement friends at least we were luxurious be- yond the dreams of ordinary folk.

The little lad from the basement was our first in- vited guest. The simple but appetizing dinner my com- rade prepared, while I set the table and placed the flowers. The boy's mother came up later in the evening to find out what we had given him, for Tommie had rushed down with eyes bulg- ing and had reported that " them ladies live like the Queen of England and eat off of solid gold plates/'

We learned the most efficient use of the fire- escape and felt many times blessed because of our easy access to the roof. We also learned the infinite uses to which stairs can be put. Later we achieved " local color ' in our rooms by the addition of interesting pieces of brass and copper purchased from a man on Allen Street whom we and several others had " dis-

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 13

covered/3 His little dark shop under the ele- vated railway was fitfully illuminated by the glowing forge. On our first visit the pro- prietor emerged from a still darker inner room with prayer-shawl and phylactery. He became one of our pleasant acquaintances and lost no occasion of acknowledging what he considered

his debt to the appreciative customers who had helped to make him and his wares known to a wider circle than that of the neighborhood.

The mere fact of living in the tenement brought undreamed-of opportunities for widen- ing our knowledge and extending our human relationships. That we were Americans was wonderful to our fellow-tenants. They were all immigrants — Jews from Russia or Rou- mania. The sole exception was the janitress, Mrs. McRae, who at once dedicated herself and her entire family to the service of the top floor. Dear Mrs. McRae! From her basement home

i4 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

she covered us with her protecting love and was no small influence in holding us to sanity. Humor, astuteness, and sympathy were needed and these she gave in abundance.

It was vouchsafed us to know many fine per- sonalities who influenced and guided us from the first few weeks of residence in the friendly col- lege settlement through the many years that have followed. The two women who stand out with greatest distinction from the first are this pure-souled Scotch-Irish immigrant and Josephine Shaw Lowell. Both, if they were here, would understand the tribute in linking them together. Occasionally Mrs. McRae would feel im- pelled to reprove us for " overdoing ' ourselves, and from our top story we were hard pushed to save visitors from being sent away when she thought we needed to finish a meal or go to bed. Cautious as we were not to make any distinctions in commenting upon the visitors who came to see us, she made her own deduc- tions. At whatever hour we returned, she would be at the door to welcome us and to

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 15

report on the happenings during our absence. "So-and-so was here": shrewd descriptions which often enabled us to identify individuals when names were forgotten. " Lots of visitors to-night," she would report. " Were messages left, or names?' we would naturally inquire. " No, darlints, nothing at all. I know sure they didn't bring you anything."

The key to our apartments, usually left with her, was one day forgotten, and when, upon unlocking the door, we saw a well-known so- ciety woman seated in our little living-room, we were naturally puzzled to know how she had arrived there. Mrs. McRae explained that she had taken her up the fire-escape! — no slight venture and exertion for the inexperi- enced. We suggested that other ways might have been more agreeable and safer. "Whisht," said Mrs. McRae, with a smile and a wink, " it's no harm at all. She'll be havin' lots of talk for her friends on this."

When her roving husband died at home, the funeral arrangements were given a last touch by Mrs. McRae, who placed on the casket his tobacco and pipe and ordered the procession to pass his tenement home twice before driving to the cemetery, " So he'd not think we were not for forgivin' him and hurryin' him away."

Her first love went to my comrade, whose

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beauty and humor and goodness captured her Celtic heart. During our second year in the tenement Miss Brewster was taken seriously ill, and one evening we had at last succeeded in forcing Mrs. McRae to go home and had locked the door. Unknown to us the dear friend remained on the floor outside all through the night, trying to catch the sound of life from the loved one.

Bringing up a large family, with no help from the " old man," and with stern ideals of conduct and integrity, was not easy. Some of her children, endowed with her character, gave her solace, but she was too astute not to estimate each one properly.

When we moved from the tenement to our first house Mrs. McRae and her family gave up the basement rooms, which were rent free be- cause of her janitor service, in order to be near us, and she spread her warmth over the new abode. When, some years later, she was ill and we knew that the end was near, one close to me in my own family claimed my attention. Torn between the two affections, I was loath to leave the city while Mrs. McRae was so ill. She guessed the cause of my perturbed state and advised me to go. " Darlin', you ought to go. You go. I promise not to die until you come back/'

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 17

Letters kept up this assurance and the promise was fulfilled.

Times were hard that year. In the summer the miseries due to unemployment and rising rents and prices began to be apparent, but the pinch came with the cold weather. Perhaps it was an advantage that we were so early exposed to the extraordinary sufferings and the variety of pain and poverty in that winter of 1893-94, memorable because of extreme eco- nomic depression. The impact of strain, physi- cal and emotional, left neither place nor time for self-analysis and consequent self-conscious- ness, so prone to hinder and to dwarf whole- some instincts, and so likely to have proved an impediment to the simple relationship which we established with our neighbors.

It has become almost trite to speak of the kindness of the poor to each other, yet from the beginning of our tenement-house residence we were much touched by manifestations of it. An errand took me to Michael the Scotch-Irish cobbler as the family were sitting down to the noonday meal. There was a stranger with them, whom Michael introduced, explaining when we were out of hearing that he thought I would be interested to meet a man just out

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of Sing Sing prison. I expressed some fear of the danger to his own boys in this association. " We must just chance it," said Michael. " It's no weather for a man like that to be on the streets, when honest fellows can't get work."

When we first met the G family they

were breaking up the furniture to keep from freezing. One of the children had died and had been buried in a public grave. Three times that year did Mrs. G painfully gather to- gether enough money to have the baby disin- terred and fittingly buried in consecrated ground, and each time she gave up her heart's desire in order to relieve the sufferings of the living children of her neighbors.

Another instance of this unfailing goodness of the poor to each other was told by Nellie, who called on us one morning. She was evi- dently embarrassed, and with difficulty related that, hearing of things to be given away at a newspaper office, she had gone there hoping to get something that would do for John when he came out of the hospital. She said, " I drew this and I don't know exactly what it is meant for," and displayed a wadded black satin " dress- shirt protector," in very good condition, and possibly contributed because the season was over! Standing outside the circle of clamor- ous petitioners, Nellie and the woman next her

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 19

had exchanged tales of woe. When she men- tioned her address the new acquaintance sug- gested that she seek us.

Nellie proved to be a near neighbor. There were two children: a nursing baby "none so well/' and a lad. John, her husband, was " for- tunately ' in the hospital with a broken leg, for there were " no jobs around loose anyway." When we called later in the day to see the baby, we found that Nellie was stopping with her cousin, a widower who " held his job down/3 There were also his two children, the widow of a friend " who would have done as much by me/' and the wife and two small children of a total stranger who lived in the rear tenement and were invited in to meals be- cause the father had been seen starting every morning on his hunt for work, and ' it was plain for anyone with eyes to see that he never did get it." So this one man, fortunate in hav- ing work, was taking care of himself and his children, the widow of his friend, Nellie and her children, and was feeding the strangers. Said Nellie: "Sure he's doing that, and why not? He's the only cousin I've got outside of Ireland."

Mrs. S , who called at the settlement a few

days ago, reminded me that it was twenty-one years since our first meeting, and brought

20 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

vividly before me a picture of which she was a part. She was the daughter of a learned rabbi, and her husband, himself a pious man, had great reverence for the traditions of her family. In their extremity they had taken bread from one of the newspaper charities, but it was evi- dently a painful humilia- tion, and before we arrived they had hidden the loaf in the ice-box. My visit was due to a desire to ascertain the condition of the fami- lies who had applied for this dole. Both house and peo- ple were scrupulously clean. It was amazing that under the biting pressure of want and anxiety such standards could be maintained. Yet, though passionately devoted to his family, the husband refused advantageous employment because it necessitated work on the Sabbath. This would have been to them a desecration of something more vital than life itself.

We found that winter, in other instances, that the fangs of the wolf were often decor- ously hidden. In one family of our acquaint- ance the father, a cigarmaker, left the house

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 21

each morning in search of work, only to return at night hungrier and more exhausted by his fruitless exertions. One Sabbath eve I entered his tenement, to find the two rooms scrubbed and cleaned, and the mother and children pre- pared for the holy night. Over a brisk fire fed by bits of wood picked up by the children two covered pots were set, as if a supper were being prepared. But under the lids it was only water that bubbled. The proud mother could not bear to expose her poverty to the gossip of the neighbors, the humiliation being the greater because she was obliged to violate the sacred custom of preparing a ceremonious meal for the united family on Friday night.

If the formalism of our neighbors in re- ligious matters was constantly brought to our attention, instances of their tolerance were also far from rare. A Jewish woman, exhausted by her long day's scrubbing of office floors, walked many extra blocks to beg us to get a priest for her Roman Catholic neighbor whose child was dying. An orthodox Jewish father, who had been goaded to bitterness because his daughter had married an " Irisher ' and thus " insulted his religion/' felt that the young husband and his mother were equally wronged. This man, when I called on a Sabbath evening, took one of the lights from the table to show the way

22 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

down the five flights of dark tenement stairs, and to my protest, — knowing, as I did, that he considered it a sin to handle fire on the Sabbath, — he said: "It is no sin for me to handle a light on the Sabbath to show respect to a friend who has helped to keep a family together/'

There was the story of Mary, eldest daughter, as we supposed, of an orthodox family. When we went to her engagement party we were sur- prised to see that the young man was not of the family faith. The mother told us that Mary, " such a pretty baby/' had been left on their doorstep in earlier and more prosperous days in Austria. The Burgomeister had made proclamation," but no one came to claim her, and the husband and wife, who as yet had no children of their own, decided to keep her. ' God rewarded us and answered our prayers," said Mrs. L , for many children came after- ward; but Mary, blonde and blue-eyed, was always the most cherished, the first-comer who had brought the others. When she was quite a young girl she was taken ill — a cold follow- ing exposure after her first ' grown-up ' party, for which her foster-mother had dressed her with pride. It seemed that nothing could save her, and the foster-mother in her distress thought with pity of the woman who had borne

WITH PRAYEK-SHAWL AND PHYLACTERY

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 23

this sweet child. Surely she must be dead. No living mother could have abandoned so lovely a baby. And if she were dead and in the Chris- tian heaven, she would look in vain there for

her daughter. " So I called the priest and told

him/' said Mrs. L , " and he made a prayer

over Mary, and said, ' Now she is a Krist.' The doctor, we called him too, and he said to get a goat, for the milk would be good for Mary; and she get well, but no so strong, as you see, and that is why she don't go out to work like her brothers and sisters. We lose our money, that's why we come to America, and Mary, now she marry a Krist"

24 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

Gradually there came to our knowledge dif- ficulties and conflicts not peculiar to any one set of people, but intensified in the case of our neighbors by poverty, unfamiliarity with laws and customs, the lack of privacy, and the fre- quent dependence of the elders upon the chil- dren. Workers in philanthropy, clergymen, orthodox rabbis, the unemployed, anxious par- ents, girls in distress, troublesome boys, came as individuals to see us, but no formal organiza- tion of our work was effected till we moved into the house on Henry Street, in 1895.

So precious were the intimate relationships with our neighbors in the tenement that we were reluctant to leave it. My companion's breakdown, the persuasion of friends who had given their support and counsel that there was an obligation upon us to effect some kind of formal organization without further delay, finally prevailed. As usual the neighborhood showed its interest in what we did; and though my comrade and I had carefully selected men from the ranks of the unemployed to move our belongings, when all was accomplished not one of them could be induced to take a penny for the work.

From this first house have since developed the manifold activities in city and country now incorporated as the Henry Street Settlement.

THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 25

I should like to make it clear that from the beginning we were most profoundly moved by the wretched industrial conditions which were constantly forced upon us. In succeeding chap- ters I hope to tell of the constructive pro- grammes that the people themselves have evolved out of their own hard lives, of the ame- liorative measures, ripened out of sympathetic comprehension, and, finally, of the social legis- lation that expresses the new compunction of the community.

CHAPTER II ESTABLISHING THE NURSING SERVICE

WHEN I first entered the training-school my outpourings to the superintendent, — a woman touched with a genius for sympathy, — my youthful heroics, and my vow to " nurse the poor ' were met with what I deemed vague reference to the " Mission." Afterwards when I sought guidance I found that in New York the visiting (or district) nurse was accessible only through sectarian organizations or the free dispensary.

As our plan crystallized my friend and I were certain that a system for nursing the sick in their homes could not be firmly established unless certain fundamental social facts were recognized. We tried to imagine how loved ones for whom we might be solicitous would react were they in the place of the patients whom we hoped to serve. With time, expe- rience, and the stimulus of creative minds our technique and administrative methods have naturally improved, but this test gave us vision

to establish certain principles, whose sound-

26

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 27

ness has been proved during the growth of the service.

We perceived that it was undesirable to con- dition the nurse's service upon the actual or potential connection of the patient with a re- ligious institution or free dispensary, or to have the nurse assigned to the exclusive use of one physician, and we planned to create a service on terms most considerate of the dig- nity and independence of the patients. We felt that the nursing of the sick in their homes should be undertaken seriously and ade- quately; that instruc- tion should be inci- dental and not the pri- mary consideration; that the etiquette, so far as doctor and patient were concerned, should be analogous to the established system of pri- vate nursing; that the nurse should be as ready to respond to calls from the people them- selves as to calls from physicians; that she should accept calls from all physicians, and with no more red-tape or formality than if she were to remain with one patient continuously.

The new basis of the visiting-nurse service which we thus inaugurated reacted almost im- mediately upon the relationship of the nurse

28 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

to the patient, reversing the position the nurse had formerly held. Chagrin at having the neighbors see in her an agent whose presence proclaimed the family's poverty or its failure to give adequate care to its sick member was changed to the gratifying consciousness that her presence, in conjunction with that of the doctor, " private ' or " Lodge," x proclaimed the family's liberality and anxiety to do every- thing possible for the sufferer. For the ex- posure of poverty is a great humiliation to people who are trying to maintain a foothold in society for themselves and their families.

My colleague and I realized that there were large numbers of people who could not, or would not, avail themselves of the hospitals. It was estimated that ninety per cent, of the sick people in cities were sick at home, — an esti- mate which has been corroborated (1913-14) by the investigation of the Committee of In- quiry into the Departments of Health, Char- ities, and Bellevue and Allied Hospitals of New York, — and a humanitarian civilization demanded that something of the nursing care given in hospitals should be accorded to sick people in their homes.

We decided that fees should be charged when

1 The "Lodge " doctor is the physician provided by a mutual benefit society or " Lodge " to attend its members.— THE AUTHOR.

THE NURSE IN THE TENEMENT Ninety per cent, of the sick of the city remain at home

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 29

people could pay. It was interesting to dis- cover that, although nominal in amount com- pared with the cost of the service, these fees represented a much larger proportion of the wage in the case of the ordinary worker who paid for the hourly service than did the fee paid by a man with a salary of $5,000, who engaged the full time of the nurse. Our plan, we reasoned, was analogous to the custom of " private ' hospitals, which give free treatment or charge according to the re- sources of the ward patients. Both private hospitals and vis- iting nursing are thereby lifted out of " char- ity ' as comprehended by the people.

We felt that for economic reasons valuable and expensive hospital space should be saved for those for whom the hospital treatment is necessary; and an obvious social consideration was that many people, particularly women, cannot leave their homes without imperiling, or sometimes destroying, the home itself.

Almost immediately we found patients who needed care, and doctors ready to accept our services with probably the least amount of fric-

30 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

tion possible under the circumstances; for those doctors who had not been internes in the hos- pitals were unfamiliar with the trained nurse, whose work was little known at that time out- side the hospitals and the homes of the well- to-do.

Despite the neighborhood's friendliness, how- ever, we struggled, not only with poverty and disease, but with the traditional fate of the pioneer: in many cases we encountered the in- evitable opposition which the unusual must arouse. It seems almost ungracious to relate some of our first experiences with doctors. No one can give greater tribute than do the nurses of the settlement to the generosity of physicians and surgeons when we recall how often paying patients were set aside for more urgent non- paying ones; the counsel freely given from the highest for the lowliest; the eager readiness to respond. Occasionally sage advice came from a veteran who knew the people well and lamented the economic pressure which at times involved, to their spiritual disaster, doctors as well as patients.

The first day on which we set out to discover the sick who might need a nurse, my comrade found a woman with high temperature in an airless room, more oppressive because of the fetid odor from the bed. Service with one of

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 31

New York's skilled specialists had trained the nurse well and she identified the symptoms im- mediately. Yes, there was a Lodge doctor. — He had left a prescription. — He might come again." With fine diplomacy an excuse was

-m, I.

made to call upon the doctor and to assume that he would accept the nurse's aid. My col- league presented her credentials and offered to accompany him to the case immediately, as she was ' sure conditions must have changed since his last visit or he would doubtless have ordered ' so-and-so, — suggesting the treatment the distinguished specialists were then using. He promised to go, and the nurse waited pa-

32 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

tiently for hours at the woman's bedside. When he arrived he pooh-poohed and said, " Nothing doing." We had ascertained the financial condition of the family from the evi- dence of the empty push-cart and the fact that the fish-peddler was not in the market with his merchandise. Five dollars was loaned that night to purchase stock next day.

My comrade and I decided to visit the patient early the next morning, to mingle judgments on what action could be taken in this serious illness with due respect to established etiquette. When we arrived, the Lodge doctor and a " Pro- fessor ' (a consultant) were in the sickroom, and our five dollars, left for fish, was in their possession. Cigarettes in mouths and hats on heads, they were questioning husband and wife, and only Dickens could have done justice to the scene. We were not too timid to allude to the poverty and the source of the fee, and felt free when we were told to " go ahead and do anything you like." That permission we acted upon instantly and received, over the telephone, authority from the distinguished specialist to get to work. We were prudent enough to report the authority and treatment given, with solemn etiquette, to the physician in attendance, who in turn congratulated us on having helped him to save a life!

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 33

Not all our encounters with this class of practitioner were fruitful of benefit to their patients. Heartbreaking was the tragedy of Samuel, the twenty-one-year-old carpenter, and Ida, his bride. They had been boy and girl sweethearts in Poland, and the coming to America, the preparation of the clean two- roomed home, the expectation of the baby, made a pretty story which should have had happy succeeding chapters, the start was so good. Samuel knocked at our door, incoherent in his fright, but we were fast accustoming our- selves to recognize danger-signals, and I at once followed him to the top floor of his tene- ment.

Plain to see, Ida was dying. The midwife said she had done all she could, but she was obviously frightened. " No one could have done any better," she insisted, " not any doc- tor"; but she had called one and he had left the woman lacerated and agonizing because the expected fee had been paid only in part. It was Samuel's last dollar. The septic woman could only be sent to the city hospital. The ambulance surgeon was persuaded to let the boy husband ride with her, and he remained at the hospital until she and the baby died a few hours later.

Here mv comrade and I came aeainst the

34 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

stone wall of professional etiquette. It seemed as if public sentiment ought to be directed by the doctors themselves against such practices, but although I finally called upon one of the high-minded and distinguished men who had signed the diploma of the offending doctor, I could not get reproof administered, and my ardor for arousing public indignation in the profession was chilled. Later, when I heard protests from employers against insistence by labor organizations on the closed shop, it oc- curred to me that they failed to recognize an- alogies in the professional etiquette which conventional society has long accepted.

However, many friendly strong bonds were made and have been sustained with a large majority of the doctors during all the years of our service. We have mutual ties of per- sonal and community interests, and work to- gether as comrades; the practitioners with high standards for themselves and ideals for their sacred profession comprehend our common cause and strengthen our hands. It is rare now, although at first it was very frequent, that the physician who has called in the nurse for his patient demands her withdrawal when he himself has been dismissed. He has come to see that although the nurse exerts her influ- ence to preserve his prestige, for the patient's

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 35

sake as well as his own, nevertheless, emotional people, unaccustomed to the settled relation of the family doctor, may and often do change physicians from six to ten times in the course of one illness. The nurse, however, may re- main at the bedside throughout all vicissitudes. The most definite protest against the newer relationship came from a woman active in many public movements, who was a stickler for the orthodox method of procuring a visiting nurse only through the doctor. To illustrate the im- portance of freedom for the patients, I cited

the case of the L family. A neighbor had

called for aid. " Some kind of an awful catch- ing sickness on the same floor I live on, to the right, front," she whispered. A worn and hag- gard woman was lifting a heavy boiler filled with 'wash' from the stove when I entered; on the floor in the other room three little chil- dren lay ill with typhoid fever, one of them with meningitis. The feather pillows, most precious possession, had been pawned to pay the doctor. The father dared not leave the shop, for money was needed, and all that he earned was far from enough. The mother, when questioned as to the delay in sending for nursing help, said that the doctor had fright- ened her from doing so by telling her that, if a nurse came, the children would surely be

36 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

sent to the hospital. No disinfectant was found in the house, and the mother declared that no instructions had been given her.

The nurse who took possession of the sick- room refrained from mentioning the hospital; but when the mother saw the skilled ministra- tion, and the tired father, on his return from work, watched the deft feeding of the uncon- scious child, they awoke to their limitations. The poor, unskilled woman, bent with fatigue, then exclaimed, " O God, is that what I should have been doing for my babies?' When the nurse was about to leave them for the night the parents clung to her and asked her if a hos- pital would do as much as she had done. " More, much more, I hope," she said. " I cannot give here what the little ones need." Late at night three carriages started for the children's ward of the hospital; the father, the mother, the nurse, each with a patient across the seat of the carriage.

Said the critic when I had finished my story: " I think the nurse should have asked permis- sion of their doctor before she granted the re- quest of the parents."

All the social agencies combined have not been able to dislodge permanently the quack who preys upon ignorance and superstition. One day a teacher in a nearby school asked us

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 37

to visit a pupil who was highly excited and un- controllable. The mother, when questioned, confessed that she had employed the " witch doctor ' to exorcise the devil, who, he said, had taken possession of the girl. In our efforts to free the girl from this man's control I invoked the aid of the parish priest, suggesting that his powers were being usurped. The County Medical Society finally secured conviction of the " doctor ' on the charge of practicing with- out a license.

In the Italian quarter this species still preys upon the superstitious fears of some of the peo- ple, and the secrecy involved in his " treatment ' makes permanent riddance extremely difficult. The people on the whole, however, give remark- able response to the " American ' custom of employing a regular practitioner and the vis- iting nurse.

In this country, unfortunately, we have little data on morbidity. Statisticians desirous of obtaining figures for study have found inter- esting material in our files, and it has been pos- sible to make comparison of the results of hospital and home treatment. Those who are familiar with the discussion upon papers presented by children's specialists in recent

3 8 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

conferences on the saving of child life have had their attention drawn to the disadvantage of institutional treatment. Discussion of this subject is recent, and the laity do not always know that certain complications incident to the hospital care of children are obviated by keep- ing them at home. Among these are cross- infections, while the high mortality among in- fants in hospitals has long been recognized and deplored as unavoidable.

We soon found that children's diseases, par- ticularly those of brief duration, lent them- selves most advantageously to home treatment. Our records show that in 1914 the Henry Street staff cared for 3,535 cases of pneumonia of all ages, with a mortality rate of 8.05 per cent. For purposes of comparison four large New York hospitals gave us their records of pneumonia during the same period. Their com- bined figures totaled 1,612, with a mortality rate of 31.2 per cent. Among children under two — the age most susceptible to unfortunate termination of this disorder — the mortality rate from pneumonia in one hospital was 51 per cent., and the average of the four was 38 per cent., while among those of a corresponding age cared for by our nurses it was 9.3 per cent.

Doctors and nurses highly trained in hos- pital routine are apt to be hospital propagan-

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 39

dists until they learn by experience that there is justification for the resistance, on the part of mothers, to the removal of their children to in-

UNDER CARE OF HENRY STREET SETTLEMENT NURSES.

3535 CASES.

tmr>r* HOSPITAL CARE. (4 HOSPITALS COMBINED)

1612 CASES.

MORTALITY

MORTALITY 31.2$

stitutions, and that even in homes which, at first glance, it seems impossible to organize in accordance with sickroom standards, the little patients' chances for recovery are better than when sent away. Diseases requiring climatic

40 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

or operative treatment, or peculiar apparatus, must usually be excluded from home care.

In a letter written to a friend more than twenty years ago I find this account of one of our patients:

{ Peter had pneumonia, complicated with whooping-cough. He is a beautiful yellow- haired boy, and even if the hospital could have admitted him, or his mother would have agreed to his removal (which she wouldn't), I should not have liked to send him. The sense of re- sponsibility for the sick child seemed a force that could not be spared for rousing an erring father. He is, apparently, devoted to the child, but had been drinking, and there was not a dollar in the house. The child, desperately ill, clung to him, calling upon him with endearing names. During the illness he worked all day (he is a driver) and sat up all night, and I think he will never forget his shame and re- morse. The doctor had ordered bath treat- ments every two hours. These I gave until eight o'clock and the mother continued them after my last visit, but when the temperature was highest she was worn out, and active night- nursing seemed imperative. This Miss S

willingly undertook — a service more difficult than appears in the mere telling, for the ver-

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 41

min in these old houses are horribly active at night, and this sweet girl ended her first vigil with neck and face inflamed from bites. Yet

Convalescent Home — "The Rest."

the people themselves were clean, and in this were not blameworthy. There is nothing harder to endure than to watch by a night sick- bed in these old, worn houses and see the crawling creatures and the babes so accustomed to them that their sleep is scarcely disturbed. Peter has had a beautiful recovery, rewarding his nurses by a most satisfactory return to a normal state of good health."

The staff, which in the beginning consisted of two nurses, my friend and myself, has been increased until it is now large enough to answer

42 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

calls from the sick anywhere in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and the calls in the year 1913-14 came from nearly 1,100 more patients than the combined total of those treated during the same period in three of the large hospitals in New York — a comparison valuable chiefly as measuring the growing de- mand of the sick for the visiting nurse.

The service, though covering so wide a terri- tory, is capable of control and supervision. The division into districts, with separate staffs for contagious and obstetrical cases, may be com- pared to the hospital division into wards. Like the hospital, it has a system of bedside notes, case records, and an established eti- quette between physicians, nurses, and pa- tients. Those that can best be cared for in the hospitals are sent there, the sifting process being accomplished by the doctors and nurses working together. Approximately ten per cent, of our patients are sent to the hospitals.

Serious nurses are gratified that the former casual and almost sentimental attitude of the public toward them and their work has been replaced by a demand for standards of effi- ciency.

Enthusiasm, health, and uncommon good sense on the part of the nurse are essential, for without the vision of the importance of

ESTABLISHING NURSING SERVICE 43

their task they could not long endure the end- less stair-climbing, the weight of the bag, and the pulls upon their emotions.

There has been an extraordinary develop- ment of the visiting-nurse service throughout the country since we began our rounds, and the practical arguments for sustaining such work would seem irresistible. It requires imagination, however, to visualize the steady, competent, continuous routine so quietly per- formed, unseen by the public, and its financial support is the more precarious because there can be no public reminder of its existence by impressive buildings and monuments of marble.

CHAPTER III THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY

THE work begun from the top floor of the tenement comprised, in simple forms, those varied lines of activity which have since been developed into the many highly specialized branches of public health nursing now covering the United States and engaging thousands of nurses.1

In trying to forestall every obstacle to the establishment of our nursing service on the East Side, it seemed desirable to have some connection with civic authority. Through a mutual friend I met the President of the Board of Health and, I fear rather presumptuously, asked that we be given some insignia. De- sirous of serving his friend and tolerant of my intense earnestness, he sanctioned our wearing a badge which had engraved on its circle, Vis- iting Nurse. Under the Auspices of the Board of Health."

As it transpired, we did not find it necessary

1 " Visiting Nursing in the United States," by Y. G. Waters" (Charities Publication Committee).

44

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 45

or always felicitous to utilize this privilege, but our connection with the Board of Health was not a perfunctory or merely complimentary one. We found from the beginning an inclina- tion on the part of the officials of the depart- ment to treat us more or less like comrades. Every night, during the first summer, I wrote to the physician in charge, reporting the sick babies and de- scribing the unsani- tary conditions Miss Brewster and I found, and we received many encouraging remind- ers that what we were doing was considered helpful.

In the new activity for the promotion of pub- lic health many campaigns have been waged to popularize the study of social diseases. Edu- cation is the watchword, and where emphasis is laid upon the preservation of health rather than upon the treatment of disease, the nurses constitute an important factor. Appreciation of this is recorded by the Commission which drafted the new health law for New York State (1913). "The advent of trained nurs- ing," says its report, " marks not only a new

46 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

era in the treatment of the sick, but a new era in public health administration/3 This Com- mission also created the position of Director of the Division of Public Health Nursing in the state department of health.

I had been downtown only a short time when I met Louis. An open door in a rear tenement revealed a woman standing over a washtub, a fretting baby on her left arm, while with her right she rubbed at the butcher's aprons which she washed for a living.

Louis, she explained, was ; bad/5 He did not ' cure his head," and what would become of him, for they would not take him into the school because of it? Louis, hanging the of- fending head, said he had been to the dis- pensary a good many times. He knew it was awful for a twelve-year-old boy not to know how to read the names of the streets on the lamp-posts, but ' every time I go to school Teacher tells me to go home."

It needed only intelligent application of the dispensary ointments to cure the affected area, and in September I had the joy of securing the boy's admittance to school for the first time in his life. The next day, at the noon recess, he fairly rushed up our five flights of stairs in the

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 47

Jefferson Street tenement to spell the elemen- tary words he had acquired that morning.

It had been hard on Louis to be denied the precious years of school, yet one could sym- pathize with the harassed school teachers. The classes were overcrowded; there were fre- quently as many as sixty pupils in a single room, and often three children on a seat. It was, perhaps, not unnatural that the eczema on Louis's head should have been seized upon as a legitimate excuse for not adding him to the number. Perhaps it was not to be ex- pected that the teacher should feel concern for one small boy whom she might never see again, or should realize that his brief time for education was slipping away and that he must go to work fatally handicapped because of his illiteracy.

The predecessor of our present superin- tendent of schools had apparently given no thought to the social relationship of the school to the pupils. The general public, twenty years ago, had no accurate information concerning the schools, and, indeed, seemed to have little interest in them. We heard of flagrant in- stances of political influence in the selection and promotion of teachers, and later on we had actual knowledge of their humiliation at being forced to obtain through sordid f pull '

48 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

the positions to which they had a legitimate claim. I had myself once been obliged to enter the saloon of N , the alderman of our dis- trict, to obtain the promise of necessary and long-delayed action on his part for the city's acceptance of the gift of a street fountain, which I had been indirectly instrumental in securing for the neighborhood. I had been informed by his friends that without this atten- tion he would not be likely to act.

Louis set me thinking and opened my mind to many things. Miss Brewster and I decided to keep memoranda of the children we encoun- tered who had been excluded from school for medical reasons, and later our enlarged staff of nurses became equally interested in obtain- ing data regarding them. When one of the nurses found a small boy attending school while desquamating from scarlet fever, and, Tom Sawyer-like, pulling off the skin to startle his little classmates, we exhibited him to the President of the Department of Health, and I then learned that the possibility of having physicians inspect the school children was under discussion, and that such evidence of its need as we could produce would be helpful in securing an appropriation for this purpose.

I had come to the conclusion that the nurse would be an essential factor in making effec-

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 49

tive whatever treatment might be suggested for the pupils, and, following an observation of mine to this effect, the president asked me to take part, as nurse, in the medical supervision in the schools. This offer it did not seem wise to accept. We were embarking upon ventures of our own which would require all our facul-

ties and all our strength. It seemed better to be free from connections which would make demand upon our energies for routine work outside the settlement. Moreover, the time did not seem ripe for advocating the introduction of both the doctor and the nurse. The doctor himself, in this capacity, was an innovation. The appointment of a nurse would have been a radical departure.

In 1897 tne Department of Health appointed the first doctors; one hundred and fifty were assigned to the schools for one hour a day at

50 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

a salary of $30 a month. They were expected to examine for contagious diseases and to send out of the classrooms all those who showed suspicious symptoms. It proved to be a per- functory service and only superficially touched the needs of the children.

In 1902, when a reform administration came into power, the medical staff was reduced and the salary increased to $100 a month, while three hours a day were demanded from the doctors. The Health Commissioner of that ad- ministration, an intelligent friend of children, now ordered an examination of all the public school pupils, and New York was horrified to learn of the prevalence of trachoma. Thou- sands of children were sent out of the schools because of this infectious eye trouble, and in our neighborhood we watched many of them, after school hours, playing with the children for whose protection they had been excluded from the classrooms. Few received treatment, and it followed that truancy was encouraged, and, where medical inspection was most thor- ough, the classrooms were depleted.

The President of the Department of Educa- tion and the Health Commissioner sought for guidance in this predicament. Examination by physicians with the object of excluding chil- dren from the classrooms had proved a doubt-

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 51

ful blessing. The time had come when it seemed right to urge the addition of the nurse's service to that of the doctoi. My colleagues and I offered to show that with her assistance few children would lose their valuable school time and that it would be possible to bring under treatment those who needed it. Re- luctant lest the democracy of the school should be invaded by even the most socially minded philanthropy, I exacted a promise from several of the city officials that if the experiment were successful they would use their influence to have the nurse, like the doctor, paid from public funds.

Four schools from which there had been the greatest number of exclusions for medical causes were selected, and an experienced nurse, who possessed tact and initiative, was chosen from the settlement staff to make the demonstration. A routine was devised, and the examining physician sent daily to the nurse all the pupils who were found to be in need of attention, using a code of symbols in order that the children might be spared the chagrin of having diseases due to uncleanliness advertised to their associates.

With the equipment of the settlement bag and, in some of the schools, with no more than the ledge of a window or the corner of a room

52 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

for the nurse's office, the present system of thorough medical inspection in the schools and of home visiting was inaugurated. Many of the children needed only disinfectant treatment of the eyes, collodion applied to ringworm, or instruction as to cleanliness, and such were re- turned at once to the class with a minimum loss of precious school time. Where more serious conditions existed the nurse called at the home, explained to the mother what the doctor advised, and, where there was a family physician, urged that the child should be taken to him. In the families of the poor informa- tion as to dispensaries was given, and where the mother was at work, and there was no one free to take the child to the dispensary, the nurse herself did this. Where children were sent to the nurse because of uncleanliness, the mother was given tactful instruction and, when neces- sary, a practical demonstration on the child himself.

One month's trial proved that, with the ex- ception of the very small proportion of major contagious and infectious diseases, the addition of the nurse to the staff made it possible to reverse the object of medical inspection from excluding the children from school to keeping the children in the classroom and under treat- ment. An enlightened Board of Estimate and

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THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 53

Apportionment voted $30,000 for the employ- ment of trained nurses, the first municipalized school nurses in the world, now a feature of medical school supervision in many communi- ties in this country and in Europe.

The first nurse was placed on the city pay- roll in October, 1902, and this marked the be- ginning of an extraordinary development of the public control of the physical condition of chil- dren. Out of this innovation New York City's Bureau of Child Hygiene has grown.

The Department of Health now employs 650 nurses for its hospital and preventive work. Of this number 374, in the year 1914, were engaged for the Bureau of Child Hygiene.

Poor Louis, who all unconsciously had started the train of incidents that led to this practical reform, has long since moved from his Hester Street home to Kansas, and was able to write us, as he did with enthusiasm, of his identification with the West.

Our first expenditures were for " sputum cups and disinfectants for tuberculosis patients/' The textbooks had said that Jews were prac- tically immune from this disease, and here we found ourselves in a dense colony of the race with signs everywhere of the white plague,

54 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

which we soon thought it fitting to name " tailors' disease/5

Long before the great work was started by the municipality to combat its ravages through education and home visitation, we organized for ourselves a system of care and instruction for patients and their families, and wrote to the institutions that were known to care for tuber- culosis cases for the addresses of discharged patients, that we might call upon them to leave the cups and disinfectants and instruct the fam- ilies.

Since 1904 the anti-tuberculosis movement has been greatly accelerated, and although it is pre-eminently a disease of poverty and can never be successfully combated without dealing with its underlying economic causes — bad housing, bad workshops, undernourishment, and so on — the most immediate attack lies in education in personal hygiene. For this the approach to the families through the nurse and her ability to apply scientific truth to the prob- lems of human living have been found to be invaluable.1

Infant mortality is also a social disease —

1 The National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis in its report for 1915 states that the tuberculosis death rate in the registration area of the United States has declined from 167.7 in 1905 to 127.7 in 1913 per 100,000 population ; a net saving to this country of over 200,000 lives from this one disease.

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 55

f poverty and ignorance, the twin roots from which this evil springs." There is a large measure of preventable ignorance, and in the efforts for the reduction of infant mortality the intelligent reaction of the tenement-house mother has been re- markably evidenced. In the last analysis babies of the poor are kept alive through the intelligence of the mothers. Pasteurized or modified milk in immaculate contain- ers is of limited value if exposed to pollu- tion in the home, or if it is fed improperly and at irregular periods.

The need of giving the mother training seemed so evident that, in the course of lessons given on the East Side antedating our nursing service, I had demonstrated with a primitive sterilizer a simple method of insuring " safe ' milk for babies.

The settlement established a milk station in 1903, when one of its directors began sending milk of high grade from his private dairy. Fol- lowing our principle of building up the homes wherever possible, the modification of the milk

56 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

has always been taught there. The nurses re- port that it is very rare to find a woman who cannot learn the lesson when made to under- stand its importance to her children.

Children under two years who show the greatest need are given the preference in ad- mission to our clinic. Excellent physicians practicing in the neighborhood have contributed their ser-

vices as consultants, and conferences are held regularly. In 1914 the number of infants cared for was 518 and the mortality 1.8 per cent. The pre- vious year, with 400 infants, the mortality was one-half of one per cent.

The Health Commissioner of Rochester, N. Y., a pioneer in his specialty, founded munic- ipal milk stations for that city in 1897. He states that the reduction of infant mortality that followed the establishment of the stations was due, not so much to the milk, but to the education that went out with the milk through the nurse and in the press.

In 1911 New York City authorized the mu- nicipalization of fifteen milk stations, and so

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 57

satisfactory was the result that the next year the appropriation permitted more than the trebling of this number. A nurse is attached to each station to follow into the homes and there lay the foundation, through education, for hygienic living. A marked reduction in infant mortality has been brought about and, moreover, a realization, on the part of the city, of the immeasurable social and economic value of keeping the babies alive.

The Federal Children's Bureau in its first report on the study of infant mortality in the United States showed that, in the city selected for investigation, the infant death rate, in those sections where conditions were worst, was more than five times that in the choice residential sections.

This report constitutes a serious indictment of society, and should goad civic and social conscience to aggressive action. But there are evidences (and, indeed, the existence of the Bureau is one) that the public is beginning to realize the profound importance in our national life of saving the children that are born.

Perhaps nothing indicates more impressively our contempt for alien customs than the gen- eral attitude taken toward the midwife. In

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other lands she holds a place of respect, but in this country there seems to be a general de- termination on the part of physicians and de- partments of health to ignore her existence and leave her free to practice without fit prepa- ration, despite the fact that her services are extensively used in humble homes. In New York City the midwife brings into the world over forty per cent, of all the babies born there, and ninety-eight per cent, of those among the Italians.

We had many experiences with them, begin- ning with poor Ida, the carpenter's wife, and some that had the salt of humor. Before our first year had passed I wrote to the superin- tendent of a large relief society operating in our neighborhood, advising that the society discontinue its employment of midwives as a branch of relief, because of their entire lack of standards and their exemption from restrain- ing influence.

To force attention to the harmful effect of leaving the midwife without training in midwifery and asepsis free to attend wo- men in childbirth, the Union Settlement in 1905 financed an investigation under the auspices of a committee of which I was chair- man.

A trained nurse was selected to inquire into

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and report upon the practice of the midwives. The inquiry disclosed the extent to which habit, tradition, and economic necessity made the midwife practically indispensable, and gave ample proof of the neglect, ignorance, and criminality that prevailed; logical consequences the policy that had been pursued. The

Commissioner of Health and eminent obstet- ricians now co-operated to improve matters, and legislation was secured making it mandatory for the Department of Health to regulate the practice of midwifery. Five years later the first school for midwives in America was es- tablished in connection with Bellevue Hos- pital.

Part of the duty assigned to nurses of the Bureau of Child Hygiene is to inspect the bags

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of the midwives licensed to practice, and to visit the new-born in the campaign to wipe out ophthalmia neonatorum, that tragically fre- quent and preventable cause of blindness among the new-born.

These are a few of the manifestations of the new era in the development of the nurse's work. She is enlisted in the crusade against disease and for the promotion of right living, beginning even before life itself is brought forth, through infancy into school life, on through adolescence, with its appeal to repair the omissions of the past. Her duties take her into factory and workshop, and she has identi- fied herself with the movement against the premature employment of children, and for the protection of men and women who work that they may not risk health and life itself while earning their living. The nurse is being social- ized, made part of a community plan for the communal health. Her contribution to human welfare, unified and harmonized with those powers which aim at care and prevention, rather than at police power and punishment, forms part of the great policy of bringing human beings to a higher level.

With the incorporation of the nurse's service in municipal and state departments for the preservation of health, other agencies, under

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 61

private and semi-public auspices, have ex- panded their functions to the sick.

I had felt that the American Red Cross So- ciety held a unique position among its sister societies of other nations, and that in time it might be an agency that could consciously pro- vide valuable " moral equivalents for war." The whole subject, in these troubled times, is re- vived in my memory, and I find that in 1908 I began to urge that in a country dedicated to peace it would be fitting for the American Red Cross to consecrate its efforts to the upbuild- ing of life and the prevention of disaster, rather than to emphasize its identification with the ravages of war.

The concrete recommendation made was that the Red Cross should develop a system of vis- iting nursing in the vast, neglected country areas. The suggestion has been adopted and an excellent beginning made with a Depart- ment of Town and Country Nursing directed by a special committee. A generous gift started an endowment for its administration. Many communities not in the registered area and remote from the centers of active social propaganda will be given stimulus to organize for nursing service, and from this other medical and social measures will inevitably grow. It requires no far reach of the imagination to vis-

62 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

ualize the time when our country will be dis- tricted from the northernmost to the southern- most point, with the trained graduate nurse en- tering the home wherever there is illness, car- ing for the patient, preaching the gospel of health, and teaching in simplest form the essen- tials of hygiene. Such an organization of na- tional scope, its powers directed toward raising the standard in the homes without sacrifice of independence, is bound to promote the social progress of the nation.

In the year 1909 the Metropolitan Life In- surance Company undertook the nursing of its industrial policyholders — an important event in the annals of visiting nursing. I had suggested the practicality of this to one of the officials of the company, a man of broad experience, and he, immediately responsive, provided op- portunity for me to present to his colleagues evidence of the reduction of mortality, the hastening of convalescence, and the ability to bring to sick people the resources that the com- munity provides for treatment through the in- stitution of visiting nursing.

The company employed our staff to care for its patients, and the experiment has been ex- tended until a nursing service practically covers

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 63

its industrial policyholders in Canada and the United States. The company thereby gave an enormous impetus to education and hygiene in the homes and treatment of the sick on the only basis that makes it possible for persons of small means to receive nursing without charity — namely, through insurance.

The demand for the public health nurse coming from all sides was so great that for a time it could not be ade- quately met. Women of in- itiative and personality with broad education were needed, for much of the work required pioneering zeal. Instructive inspection, on the nurse's part, like other educational work, requires suitable and sound preparation, a superstructure of efficiency upon woman's natural aptitudes.

The Henry Street Settlement and other groups with well-established visiting nursing systems responded to the need by offering op- portunities for post-graduate training and ex- perience in the newly opened field of public health nursing, and sought co-ordination with formal educational institutions for instruction in social theories and pedagogy. In 1910 the

64 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

Department of Nursing and Health was created at Teachers College, Columbia University, em- bracing in its completed form the Department of Hospital Economics established there in 1899 by the efforts of training-school superin- tendents. This department is in affiliation with the settlement. At least four important train- ing-schools for nurses are now working under the direction of universities, and other provi- sion has been made to give education supple- mentary to the hospital training.

Nurses themselves have taken the initiative in securing the means for equipping women in their profession to meet the new requirements. They are providing helpful literature and rind- ing stimulating associations with others en- listed in similar efforts for human welfare. I had the honor to be elected first president of the National Organization for Public Health Nursing. At the conference held in 1913 (less than a year after the formation of the society) an assemblage of women gathered from all parts of the country to seek guidance and in- spiration for this work, and something that was very like religious fervor characterized their meetings.

The need of consecration to the sick and the young that has touched generation after gen- eration with new impulse was manifested in

THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 65

their eagerness to serve the community. From the root of the old gospel another branch has grown, a realization that the call to the nurse is not only for the bedside care of the sick, but to help in seeking out the deep-lying basic causes of illness and misery, that in the future there may be less sickness to nurse and to cure. A pleasant indication that the academic world reached out its fellowship to the nurses in their zeal for public service was given some months later when Mt. Holyoke College, at the commemoration of its seventy-fifth anni- versary, honored me by conferring on me the LL.D. degree.

CHAPTER IV CHILDREN AND PLAY

THE visitor who sees our neighborhood for the first time at the hour when school is dismissed reacts with joy or dismay to the sight, not paralleled in any part of the world, of thou- sands of little ones on a single city block.

Out they pour, the little hyphenated Ameri- cans, more conscious of their patriotism than perhaps any other large group of children that could be found in our land; unaware that to some of us they carry on their shoulders our hopes of a finer, more democratic America, when the worthy things they bring to us shall be recognized, and the good in their old-world traditions and culture shall be mingled with the best that lies within our new-world ideals. Only through knowledge is one forti- fied to resist the onslaught of arguments of the superficial observer who, dismayed by the sight, is conscious only of " hordes ' and " dan- ger to America ' in these little children.

They are irresistible. They open up wide vistas of the many lands from which they

66

CHILDREN AND PLAY

67

come. The multitude passes: swinging walk, lagging step; smiling, serious— just little chil- dren, forever appealing, and these, perhaps,

''

more than others, stir the emotions. ' Crime, ignorance, dirt, anarchy!' Not theirs the fault if any of these be true, although some- times perfectly good children are spoiled, as Jacob Riis, that buoyant lover of them, has said. As a nation we must rise or fall as we serve or fail these future citizens.

68 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

Their appeal suggests that social exclusions and prejudices separate far more effectively than distance and differing language. They bring a hope that a better relationship — even the great brotherhood — is not impossible, and

that through love and understanding we shall come to know the shame of prejudice.

Instinctively the sympathetic observer feels the possibilities of the young life that passes before the settlement doors, and sincerity de- mands that something shall be known of the conditions, economic, political, religious, or, per- chance, of the mere spirit of venture that brought them her^- How often have the con- ventionally educated been driven to the library to obtain that historic perspective of the people

CHILDREN AND PLAY

69

who are in our midst, without which they can- not be understood! What fascinating excur- sions have been made into folklore in the effort to comprehend some strange custom unexpect- edly encountered!

When the anxious friends of the dying Ital- ian brought a chicken to be killed over him, the tenement-house bed became the sacrificial altar of long ago; and when the old, rabbinical- looking grandfather took hairs from the head of the sick child, a bit of his finger-nail, and a garment that had been close to his body, and cast them into the river while he devoutly prayed that the little life might be spared, he declared his faith in the purification of running water.

It is necessary to spend a summer in our neighborhood to realize fully the conditions under which many thousands of children are reared. One night during my first month on the East Side, sleepless because of the heat, I leaned out of the window and looked down on Rivington Street. Life was in full course there. Some of the push-cart venders still sold their wares. Sitting on the curb directly under my

70 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

window, with her feet in the gutter, was a woman, drooping from exhaustion, a baby at her breast. The fire-escapes, considered the most desirable sleeping-places, were crowded with the youngest and the oldest; children were asleep on the sidewalks, on the steps of

the houses and in the empty push-carts; some of the more venturesome men and women with mattress or pillow staggered toward the river- front or the parks. I looked at my watch. It was two o'clock in the morning!

Many times since that summer of 1893 have I seen similar sights, and always I have been impressed with the kindness and patience, some- times the fortitude, of our neighbors, and I

CHILDREN AND PLAY 71

have marveled that out of conditions distress- ing and nerve-destroying as these so many children have emerged into fine manhood and womanhood, and often, because of their early experiences, have become intelligent factors in promoting measures to guard the next genera- tion against conditions which they know to be destructive.

Before I lived in the midst of this dense child population, and while I was still in the hospital, I had been touched by glimpses of the life re- vealed in the games played in the children's ward. Up to that time my knowledge of little ones had been limited to those to whom the people in fairy tales were real, and whose games and stories reflected the protective care of their elders. My own earliest recollections of play had been of story-telling, of housekeeping with all the things in miniature that grown-ups use, and of awed admiration of the big brother who graciously permitted us to witness hair-raising performances in the barn, to which we paid ad- mittance in pins. The children in the hospital ward who were able to be about, usually on crutches or with arms in slings, played ' Ambu- lance ' and the " Gerry Society." The latter game dramatized their conception of the famous Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Chil- dren as an ogre that would catch them. The

72 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

ambulance game was of a child, or a man at work, injured and carried away to the hospital.

Many years' familiarity with the children's attempts to play in the streets has not made me indifferent to its pathos, which is not the less real because the children themselves are unconscious of it. In the midst of the push- cart market, with its noise, confusion, and jost- ling, the checker or crokinole board is precari- ously perched on the top of a hydrant, con- stantly knocked over by the crowd and pa- tiently replaced by the little children. One tear- ful small boy described his morning when he said he had done nothing but play, but first the " cop " had snatched his dice, then his " cat ' (a piece of wood sharpened at both ends), and nobody wanted him to chalk on the sidewalk, and he had been arrested for throwing a ball.

A man since risen to distinction in educa- tional circles, whose childhood was passed in our neighborhood, told me how he and his com- panions had once taken a dressmaker's lay fig- ure. They had no money to spend on the theater and no place to play in but a cellar. They had admired the gaudy posters of a melo- drama in which the hero rescues the lady and carries her over a chasm. Having no lady in their cast, they borrowed the dressmaker's lay figure — without permission. Fortunately, and

CHILDREN AND PLAY 73

accidentally, they escaped detection. It is not difficult to see how the entire course of this boy's career might have been altered if arrest had followed, with its consequent humiliation and degradation. At least, looking back upon it, the young man sees how the incident might have deflected his life.

The instruction in folk-dancing which the children now receive in the public schools and recreation centers has done much to develop a wholesome and delightful form of exercise, and has given picturesqueness to the dancing in the streets. But yesterday I found myself pausing on East Houston Street to watch a group of children assemble at the sound of a familiar dance from a hurdy-gurdy, and looking up I met the sympathetic smile of a teamster who also had stopped. The children, absorbed in their dance, were quite unconscious that con- gested traffic had halted and that busy people had taken a moment from their engrossing problems to be refreshed by the sight of their youth and grace. For that brief instant even the cry of " War Extra ' was unheeded.

Touching as are the little children deprived of opportunity for wholesome play, a deeper compassion stirred our hearts when we began

74 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

to realize the critically tender age at which many of them share the experiences, anxieties, and tragedies of the adult. I cannot efface from my memory the picture of a little eight-year-old girl whom I once found standing on a chair to reach a washtub, trying with her tiny hands to cleanse some bed-linen which would have been a task for an older person. Every few minutes the child got down from her chair to peer into the next room where her mother and the new-born baby lay, all her little mind intent upon giving relief and comfort. She had been alone with her mother when the baby was born and terror was on her face.

I think the memory never left her, but it may be only that her presence called up, even after the lapse of years, a vision of the anxious little face inevitably contrasted in my mind with the picture of irresponsible childhood.

At about the same time we made the acquaint- ance of the K family, through nursing one

of the children. The mother was a large- framed, phlegmatic, seemingly emotionless type, although she did show appreciation of our liking for her children. The father was only occasionally mentioned. We assumed that he was away seeking work, a common explanation then of the absence of the men of the families. One afternoon I stopped at their house to make

CHILDREN AND PLAY 75

arrangements for the children's trip to the coun- try. Early the next morning, awakened by a pounding on the door, I opened it to find little Esther beside herself with excitement, repeating over and over, " My mother she die ! My mother she die!' Following fast, it was not possible to keep pace with her. When, breathless, I en- tered their rooms it was to see the mother's body hanging from a doorway. She had been brooding over a summons to testify in court that morning against her husband, who had been ar- rested for bigamy, and this was her answer to the court and to the other woman.

The frightened little children were scattered among different institutions. From one of these Esther was sent West, to a home that was found for her. Possibly she was so young that the terrible picture faded from her mind. At least there was no mention of it in the first letter which she wrote, announcing that her new home was a farm and that they had ' six cows, eighty chickens, eleven pigs, and a nephew" The nephew Esther eventually mar- ried.

In the first party of children that we sent to the country were three little girls, daughters of a skilled cobbler. The mother, a complaining, exacting invalid, spent a large proportion of her husband's earnings for patent medicines. Annie,

76 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

not quite twelve, was the household drudge, and the coming of the settlement nurse lifted only part of her burden. The new friends, de- termined to get at least two weeks of care-free childhood for the little girls, procured an invi- tation for them, through a Fresh-Air agency, from a farmer in the western part of the state. It was necessary to secure the mother's admis- sion to a hospital during the time the children would be absent from home — not an easy task, as she was not what is termed a " hospital case." When we met the children at the railroad station on their return, their joyousness and bubbling spirits attracted the attention of the on- lookers; but as Annie neared home its responsi- bilities fell like a heavy cloud upon her, and before we reached the tenement she was silent. Her quick eye discerned the absence of the brick which had kept the front hall door open, and in a second she had darted into the yard and replaced it. Before we left, with sleeves rolled up she was beginning to wash the pile of dishes that had accumulated in her absence. Gone was the gayety. The little drudge had resumed her place. Later, when the child swore falsely to her age, and the notary public, upon whose certificate employment papers could at that time be obtained, affixed his signature to her perjury, the position she secured as cash

CHILDREN AND PLAY 77

girl in the basement of a department store was, to her, emancipation from hateful labor and an opportunity for fellowship with children.

Recalling early days, I am constantly re- minded of the sympathy and comprehension of those friends who, though not stimulated as my comrade and I were by constant reminders of the children's needs, from the beginning pro- moted and often anticipated our efforts to pro- vide innocent recreation. We had not thought of the possibility of giving pleasure to large groups of children in picnics and day parties, when a friend, a few days after our arrival in the neighborhood, asked us to celebrate his sis- ter's birthday by giving " fun ' to some of our new acquaintances. I yet remember the thrill I felt when I realized that this gift was not for shoes or practical necessities, but for " just what children anywhere would like."

Two memories of this first party stand out sharply: the songs the children sang, — "She's More to be Pitied than Censured," and " Judge, Forgive Him, Tis His First Offense," — pain- fully revealing a precocious knowledge, and their ecstasy at the sight of a wonderful dogwood tree. Now, when the settlement children go on day parties, they have another repertory, and

78 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

the music they learn in the public schools re- flects the finer thought for the child.

During the two years that Miss Brewster and I lived in the Jefferson Street house we fre- quently made up impromptu parties to visit the distant parks, usually on Sunday afternoons when we were likely to be free. After a while it was not difficult to secure comradeship for

the children from men and women of our ac- quaintance, and the parties were multiplied. In the winter, rumors of " a fine hill all covered with snow ' on Riverside Drive would be a stimulus to secure a sled or improvise a tobog- gan, and we found that, given opportunity and encouragement, the city tenement boys threw themselves readily into venturesome sport.

Happily some of the early prejudice against ball-playing on Sunday has vanished. We were perplexed in those days to explain to the lads why, when they saw the ferries and trains con- vey golfers suitably attired and expensively

AND THEIR ECSTASY AT THE SIGHT OF A WONDERFUL

DOGWOOD TREE

,-m

CHILDREN AND PLAY 79

equipped for a day's sport, their own games should outrage respectable citizens and cause them to be constantly ' chased ' by the police. The saloons could be entered, as everybody knew, and I remember a father, defending his eight-year-old son from an accusation of theft, instancing as proof of the child's trustworthi- ness that " all the Christians on Jackson Street sent him for their beer on Sundays."

In our search for a place where the boys might play undisturbed, one of the settlement residents, a never-failing friend of the young people, invoked the Federal Government itself, and secured for them an unused field on Gov- ernor's Island.

Now, in summer time, many of the organized activities of the settlement are removed from the neighborhood. Early in the season the

hikers ' begin their walks with club leaders. I felt a glow of happiness one Sunday morning when I stood on the steps of our house and watched six different groups of boys set off for the country, with ball and bat and sandwiches, each group led by a young man who had him- self been a member of our early parties and had been first introduced to trees and open spaces, and the more active forms of healthful play by his settlement friends.

The woeful lack of imagination displayed in

8o THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

building a city without recognizing the need of its citizens for recreation through play, music, and art, has been borne in upon us many times. New Yorkers need to be reminded that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was effectually closed to a large proportion of the citizens until, on May 31, 1891, it opened its doors on Sun- days. It is interesting to recall that of the 80,000 signatures to the petition for this privi- lege, 50,000 were of residents of the lower East Side and were presented by the " Working Peo- ple's Petition Committee/3 The report of the Museum trustees following the Sunday open- ing notes that after a little disorder and con- fusion at the start the experiment proved a suc- cess; that the attendance was " respectable, law- abiding, and intelligent/' and that " the labor- ing classes were well represented." They were

CHILDREN AND PLAY 81

also obliged to report, however, that the Sun- day opening had " offended some of the Mu- seum's best friends and supporters," and that it had " resulted in the loss of a bequest of $50,000."

When we left the tenement house we were fortunate to find for sale, on a street that still bore evidences of its bygone social glory, a house which readily lent itself to the restorer's touch. Tradition says that many of these fine old East Side houses were built by cabinet- makers who came over from England during the War of 1812 and remained here as citizens. The generous purchaser allowed us freedom to repair, restore, and alter, as our taste directed. Attractive as we found the house, we were even more excited over the possibilities of the little back yard. Our first organized effort for the neighborhood was to convert this yard and one belonging to an adjacent school, with, later, the yard of a third house rented by one of our resi- dents, into a miniature but very complete play- ground. There was so little precedent to guide us that our resourcefulness was stimulated, and we succeeded in achieving what the President of the National Playground Association has called the " Bunker Hill " of playgrounds.

82 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

Along the borders we planted bright-colored flowers — which were not disturbed by the chil- dren. An old wistaria vine on a trellis covered nearly a third of the playground, and two ailan- thus trees, usually regarded with contempt by tree lovers, were highly cherished by those who otherwise would have lived a treeless life. Win- dow-boxes jutted from the rear windows of the two houses controlled by the settlement, and in one corner, shaded by a striped awning, we put the big sand-pile. Joy-giving " scups ' (the local name for swings) were erected, and some suitable gymnastic apparatus, parallel bars and overhead ladder placed. Baby hammocks were swung, their occupants tenderly cared for by little mothers and little fathers. Manual train- ing was provided by a picturesque sailor from Sailors' Snug Harbor, who, at a stretching frame, taught the making of hammocks.

In the morning under the pergola an informal kindergarten was conducted, and in the after- noon attendants directed play and taught the use of gymnastic apparatus. Later in the day the mothers and older children came, and a little hurdy-gurdy occasionally marked the rhythm of the dance. So interested in the play- ground were the household and their visitors that at odd moments an enthusiast would rush in from other duties and give the hurdy-gurdy

J

>•'•'•'>

IT HAS BEEN CALLED THE "BUNKER HILL" OF PLAYGROUNDS

:*Wp

THE CHILDREN PLAY ON OUR ROOF

CHILDREN AND PLAY 83

an extra turn, to supplement the entertainment. At night the baby hammocks and chairs were stored away and Japanese lanterns illuminated the playground, which then welcomed the young people who, after their day's work, took pleasure in each other's society and in singing familiar songs.

On Saturday afternoons the playground was used almost exclusively by fathers and mothers, but it was a pretty sight at all times, and the value placed upon it by those who used it was far in excess of our own estimate. It was some- thing more than amusement that moved us when a young couple, who had been invited to one of the evening parties, stood at the back door of the settlement house and gazed admir- ingly at the little pleasure place. Gowned in white, we awaited our guests, and as I rose from the bench under the pergola to cross the yard and give them welcome, the young printer said with enthusiasm, " This must be like the scenes of country life in English novels/3

It was a heaven of delight to the children, and ingenuity was displayed by those who sought admittance. The children soon learned that " little mothers ' and their charges had precedence, and there was rivalry as to who should hold the family baby. When (as rarely happened) there was none in the family, a baby

84 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

was borrowed. Six-year-olds, clasping babies of stature almost equal to their own, would stand outside, hoping to attract attention to their special claims. Once, when the play- ground was filled to capacity, and the sidewalk in front of the house was thronged, the Olym- pian at the gate endeavored to make it clear that no more could enter. One persistent small girl stood stolidly and when reminded of the condition said, Yes, teacher, but can't I get in? I ain't got no mother."

There was much illness, unemployment, and consequent suffering the next winter. One day, when I visited a school in the neighborhood, the principal asked the pupils if they knew me. She doubtless anticipated some reference to the material services which the settlement had ren- dered, but the answer to her question was a glad chorus of, " Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'am, she's our scupping teacher." " Teacher ' was a generic term for the residents, and nothing that the set- tlement had contributed to the life of the neigh- borhood impressed the children as had the play- ground. It is worth reminding those who are associated with young people that the power to influence is given to those who play with, rather than to those who only teach, them. Our children on the East Side are not peculiar in this respect. To this day I receive letters from

CHILDREN AND PLAY

men and women who try to recall themselves to my memory by saying that they once played in our back yard.

An organized propaganda for outdoor gym- nasia and playgrounds crystallized in 1898 in the formation of the Outdoor Recreation League,

in which the settlement participated. The tire- less president of the League eventually suc- ceeded in obtaining the use of a large space in our neighborhood, originally purchased by the city, during a brief reform administration, for a park. Some very undesirable tenement houses

86 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

had been destroyed, and when a Tammany ad- ministration returned to power a hot summer was allowed to pass with nothing done to ac- complish the original purpose. Unsightly holes, once cellars, remained to fill with stagnant water, amputated sewer- and gas-pipes were exposed, and among these the children played mimic battles of the Spanish-American War, then in progress.

The accident that the Commissioner of Health, a semi-invalid, felt gratitude to a trained nurse who had cared for him, gave me an opportunity to approach him on the subject. He promised (and he kept his promise) to use his influence to get an appropriation on the score of the menace to the health of the city. The ap- propriation was sufficient to fill in the space and surround it with a fence, and the Outdoor Recre- ation League was able to demonstrate the value of playgrounds. In 1902 the Board of Esti- mate and Apportionment of Mayor Seth Low's reform administration, at its first meeting, ap- propriated money for the equipment and main- tenance of Seward Park, as it was named, — the first municipal playground in New York City. So much interest had been aroused in this phase of city government that two city officials left the board meeting while it was in progress to

CHILDREN AND PLAY 87'

telephone to the settlement that the appropria- tion had been passed.

Many friends of the children combined to urge the use of the public schools as recreation centers, and in the summer of 1898 the first schools were opened for that purpose. Those of us who had practical experience helped to start these by acting as volunteer inspectors. The settlement then felt justified in devoting less effort to its own playground, and deflected some of the energies it required to meet other press- ing needs.

It is a delight to give the children stories from the Bible and the old mythologies, fairy tales, and lives of heroes, and we mark as epochal Maude Adams's inspiration to invite our children and others not likely to have the opportunity to see Peter Pan. She has given joy to thousands, but it is doubtful if she can measure, as we do, the influence of ' the ever- lasting boy." Through him romance has touched these children, and not a few of the letters spontaneously written to Peter Pan from tenement homes have seemed to us not un- worthy of Barrie himself. Protest against leaving the big, familiar farmhouse at one of our country places, when an overflow of visitors

THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

necessitated a division of the little ones at night, was immediately withdrawn when the children were told that the annex, perched on high ground, was a " Wendy House.'3

: ^3& Tvi V* .. •' i ' "I'lff"

The need of care for convalescents was early recognized, and the settlement's first country house was for them. It was opened in 1899, and its maintenance is the generous gift of a young woman, a member of the early group that gathered in the Henry Street house. We soon felt, however, that it was essential that children and young people as well as invalids should have knowledge of life other than that of the crowded tenement and factory; and from the time of the establishment of our first kin- dergarten we longed to have the children know

CHILDREN AND PLAY

89

the reality of the things they sang about, the birds and animals which so often formed the subject of their games. A little girl in one of the parties taken to see Peter Pan turned to her beloved club leader when the crocodile appeared and asked timidly if it was a field-mouse! A recent lesson had been about that " animal." It

seems almost incredible that the description, probably supplemented by a picture, should not have made a more definite impression upon the child's mind; but I am inclined to think that little children can form no accurate conception of unknown objects from pictures or descrip- tion. A neighborhood teacher took her class to the menagerie in Central Park just after a les- son on the cow and its " gifts " — milk, cream, butter. She hoped that the young buffalo's re- semblance to the cow might suggest itself to the children who, of course, had never seen a

90 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

cow. In answer to her question an eager little boy gave testimony to the impression the les- son had made on his mind when he answered, " Yes, ma'am. I know it. It's a butterfly"

We value the " day parties ' for incidental education as well as for the pleasure they afford. Each year as spring approaches a census is taken of the surrounding blocks, that the new arrivals may be included in the excursions. The most treasured invitations for these parties come from friends whose country estates are near enough to offer hospitality, and to whose gardens and stables the children are taken. The larger parties, composed of women and children, usually go to the seashore in chartered cars, and these excursions, purely recreative, compete, and not unsuccessfully, with the clam- bakes and outings of the old-time political leaders.

The beautiful country places presented to the settlement for vacation purposes, and the com- parative readiness with which money for equip- ment and maintenance for non-paying guests has been given, indicates the favor with which this development of neighborhood work is regarded. Opportunities for confidence and mutual understanding, not always possible in the formal relationships of clubs and classes, are afforded by the intimacy of country-house

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CHILDREN AND PLAY 91

parties. The possibility of giving direction at critical periods of character-formation, particu- larly during adolescence, and of discovering clews to deep-lying causes of disturbance, makes the country life a valuable extension of the or- ganized social work of the settlement. " River- holm/' overhanging the Hudson; "Camp Henry/' on a beautiful lake; the " House in the

Woods," " Echo Hill Farm," and a commodious house in New Jersey, lent by friends during the summer months, give us the means whereby some of the plans we cherish may be carried out.

It would be inconsistent with settlement theories if these country places did not express refinement and beauty, — the beauty that belongs to simplicity, — not only in the buildings, but

92 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

also in the service and housekeeping. It has seemed to us, therefore, worth the additional expenditure of effort to have small, distinct household units wherever practicable. People who live in crowded homes, walk on crowded streets, ride on crowded cars, and as children attend crowded classrooms, must inevitably ac-

" House in the Woods."

quire distorted views of life; and the settle- ment is reluctant to add to these the experience of crowded country life. Valuable training in housekeeping is possible in a household even of from fifteen to twenty-five persons, — a small unit according to New York standards, — and tactful direction can often be given toward ac-

CHILDREN AND PLAY

93

quiring those manners generally recognized as " good.53 Many of the children who come to us know only foreign customs and foreign table- manners; and the extreme difficulty of maintain-

ing orderly home life in the tenement makes it important to supplement the home-training or to supply what it can never give. Indeed, we recognize in this desire to protect our chil- dren from being marked as peculiar or alien because of non-essential differences the same reason that urges the careful mother to insist

94 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

on " manners," that her children may not be discredited when they mingle with the fas- tidious.

The ideal of limitation as to numbers cannot always be carried out, and naturally it does not apply to the camp, where a freer and less con- ventional life attracts and satisfies boys and young men.

The older members of the settlement, who are earning money, use the camp and country places as clubs, paying for the privilege and conforming to the regulations which they have had a share in establishing.

Those who have promoted the various Fresh- Air agencies throughout the country may not realize that physical benefit is not all that has

been secured. We are persuaded that oppor- tunity to know life away from the city is in part the explanation of the increasing number

CHILDREN AND PLAY 95

of city boys who elect training in agriculture and forestry. Formerly, when careers were discussed, the future held no happiness unless it promised a profession — law or medicine.

If I appear to lay too much stress upon the importance of play and recreation, it may be well to point out that it is one way of recog- nizing the dignity of the child. The study of juvenile delinquency shows how often the young offender's presence in the courts may be traced to a play-impulse for which there was no safe outlet.

Perhaps nothing more definitely indicates the changed attitude toward children and play than the fact that last summer (1914) the police offi- cers of the precinct called to enlist our co-op- eration in carrying out the orders of the city administration that during certain hours of the day traffic was to be shut off from designated streets, that the children might play there. The visit brought to mind years of painstaking effort to secure the toleration of harmless play, and the hope we had dared to express, despite incredulity on the part of the police, that some day the children might come to regard them as guardians and protectors, rather than as a fear- inspiring and hated force. One captain of the precinct, at least, had proved the practicability of our theory, and when he was transferred we

96 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

lost a valuable co-worker. The Governor of New York, campaigning for re-election in the fall of this year (1914), advocated that public schools should be surrounded by playgrounds at " no matter what cost/3

Tremendous impetus has been given to the playground movement throughout the entire country by individuals and societies organized for the purpose. Wise men and women have expounded the social philosophy of play and recreation, pointing out that these may afford wholesome expression for energies which might otherwise be diverted into channels disastrous to peace and happiness; that clean sport and stimulating competition can replace the gang feud and even modify racial antagonisms. The most satisfactory evidence of this conviction is, of course, the recognition of the child's right to play, as an integral part of his claim upon the state.

.It**1

CHAPTER V EDUCATION AND THE CHILD

PERHAPS nothing makes a profounder impres- sion on the newcomer to our end of the city than the value placed by the Jew upon educa- tion; an overvaluation, one is tempted to think, in view of the sacrifices which are made, par- ticularly for the boys, — though of late years the girls' claims have penetrated even to the Orien- tal home.

One afternoon a group of old-world women sat in the reception-room at the settlement while one of the residents sang and played negro melodies. With the melancholy minor of " Let My People Go," the women began crooning a song that told the story of Cain and Abel. The melody was not identical, but so similar that they thought they recognized the song as their own; and when a discussion arose upon the coincidence that two persecuted peoples should claim this melody, the women, touched by the music, confessed their homesick longing for Russia — for Russia that had dealt so un- kindly with them.

97

98 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

" Rather a stone for a pillow in my own home/' said one woman on whom life had pressed hard. "Would you go back?' she was asked. "Oh, no, no, no!' emphasizing the

words by a swaying of the body and a shaking of the head. " It is not poverty we fear. It is not money we are seeking here. We do not expect things for ourselves. It is the chance for the children, education and freedom for them."

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 99

The passion of the Russian Jews for intel- lectual attainment recalls the spirit of the early New England families and their willingness to forego every comfort that a son might be set apart for the ministry. Here we are often wit- nesses of long-continued deprivation on the part of every member of the family, a willingness to deny themselves everything but the barest necessities of life, that there may be a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher among them. Submission to bad housing, excessive hours, and poor work- ing conditions is defended as of " no matter be- cause the children will have better and can go to school — maybe college." Said a baker who showed the ill-effects of basement and night work and whose three rooms housed a family of ten: "My boy is already in the high school. - If I can't keep on, the Herr Gott will take it up where I leave off/3

A painful instance was that of a woman who came to the settlement one evening. Her son was studying music under one of the most famous masters in Vienna, and she had exiled herself to New York in order to earn more money for him than she could possibly earn at home. Literally, as I afterwards discovered, she spent nothing upon herself. A tenement family gave her lodging (a bed on chairs) and food, in return for scrubbing done after her

ioo THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

day's work in the necktie factory. The Vien- nese master, not knowing his pupil's circum- stances, or, it is possible, not caring, had writ- ten that the young man needed to give a concert, an additional demand which it was utterly impossible for her to meet. She had already given up her home, she had relin- quished her wardrobe, and she had sold her grave for him.

One young lad stands out among the many who came to talk over their desire to go through college. He dreamed of being great and, this period of hardship over, of placing his family in comfort. I felt it right to emphasize his obligation to the family; the father was dead, the mother burdened with anxiety for the nu- merous children. How reluctant I was to do this he could not realize; only fourteen, he had impressed us with his fine courage and intelli- gence, and it was hard to resist the young pleader and to analyze with him the common- place sordid facts. He had planned to work all summer, to work at night, and he was hardly going to eat at all. But his young mind grasped, almost before I had finished, the ethi- cal importance of meeting his nearest duties. He has met the family claims with generosity, and has realized all our expectations for him by acquiring through his own efforts education

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 101

and culture; and he evinces an unusual sense of civic responsibility.

Those who have had for many years continu- ous acquaintance with the neighborhood have countless occasions to rejoice at the good use made of the education so ardently desired, and

102 THE HOUSf ON HENRY STREET

achieved in spite of wnat nave seemed over- whelming odds. New York City is richer for the contributions made to its civic and educa- tional life by th£ young people who grew up in and with the settlements, and who are not infrequently reacty crusaders in social causes. A country gentle-man one day lamented to me that he had failed to keep in touch with what he was pleased to call our humanitarian zeal, and recalled his own early attempt to take an East Side boy t° his estate and employ him. " He could not even learn to harness a horse!' he said, with implied contempt of such unfath- omable inefficiency- Something he said of the lad's characteristics made it possible for me to identify him, and I was able to add to that un- satisfactory first chapter another, which told of the boy's contirluance in school, of his success as a teacher in one of the higher institutions of learning, anc^ °f his remarkable intelligence in certain vexec* industrial problems.

Such achievements are the more remarkable because the restated tenement home, where the family life go£s on in two or three rooms, affords little opportunity for reading or study. A vivid picture °f its limitations was presented by the boy who* sought a quiet corner in a busy settlement. " J can never study at home/' he

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 103

said, " because sister is always using the table to wash the dishes."

Study-rooms were opened in the settlement in 1907, where the boys and girls find, not only a quiet, restful place in which to do their work, but also the needed " coaching." The school work is supplemented by illuminating bulletins on current topics, and the young student is pro- vided with the aid which in other conditions is given by parents or older brothers and sisters. Such study-rooms are now maintained by the Board of Education in numerous schools of the city, — " Thanks to the example set by the set- tlement/' the superintendent of the New York school system reported.

The settlement children are given instruction in the selection of books before they are old enough to take out their cards in the public libraries. Once a week, on Friday afternoon, when there are no lessons to be prepared, our study-room is reserved for these smallest readers. The books are selected with reference to their tastes and attainments, and fairy tales are on the shelves in great numbers. Of course, no settlement could entirely satisfy the insa- tiable desire for these.

One day when the room was being used for study purposes a wee neighbor sauntered in and said to the custodian, " Please, I'd like a fairy

io4 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

tale." Although reminded that these books were not given out excepting on the special day, the child lingered. She saw a boy's re- quest for " The Life of Alexander Hamilton ' and a girl's wish for " The Life of Joan of Arc ' complied with. Evidently there was a way to get one's heart's desire. The child went

A A A A

out, reappeared in a few moments, and with an air of confidence again addressed the librarian, this time with, "Please, I'd like the life of a giant."

It is easy to excite sympathy in our neighbor- hood for people deprived of books and learning. One year I accompanied a party of Northern people to the Southern Educational Conference. We were all much stirred by the appeal of an itinerant Southern minister who told how

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 105

the poor white natives traveled miles over the mountains to hear books read. He pictured vividly the deprivation of his neighbors, who had no access to libraries of any kind. When I returned to the settlement and related the story to the young people in the clubs, without sug- gestion on my part they eagerly voted to send the minister books to form a library; and for two years or more, until the Southerner wrote that he had sufficient for his purpose, the clubs purchased from their several funds one book each month, suited to different ages and tastes, according to their own excellent discrimination.

The first public school established in New York City (Number i) is on Henry Street. Number 2 is a short distance from it, on the same street, and Number 147 is at our corner. Between their sites are several semi-public and private educational institutions, and from School No. i to School No. 147 the distance is not more than three-quarters of a mile.

It is not unnatural, therefore, that the school should loom large in our consciousness of the life of the child. The settlement at no time would, even if it could, usurp the place of school or home. It seeks to work with both or to supplement either. The fact that it is

106 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

flexible and is not committed to any fixed pro- gramme gives opportunity for experimentation not possible in a rigid system, and the results of these experiments must have affected school methods, at least in New York City.

Intelligent social workers seize opportunities for observation, and almost unconsciously de- velop methods to meet needs. They see condi-

tions as they are, and become critical of systems as they act and react upon the child or fail to reach him at all. They reverse the method of the school teacher, who approaches the child with preconceived theories and a determination to work them out. Where the school fails, it appears to the social workers to do so because it makes education a thing apart, — because it separates its work from all that makes up the child's life outside the classroom. Great em- phasis is now laid upon the oversight of the physical condition of children from the time of their birth through school life; but the sugges-

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 107

tion of this extension of socialized parental con- trol did not emanate from those within the school system.

Cooking has been taught in the public schools for many years, and the instruction is of great value to those who are ad- mitted to the classes; but appropriations have never been sufficient to meet all the requirements, and the teaching is given in grades already depleted by the girls who have gone to work, and who will per- haps never again have leisure or inclination to learn how to prepare meals for husband and children, — the most important business in life for most women.

The laboratory method employed in the schools never seemed to us sufficiently related to the home conditions of vast numbers of the city's population; and, therefore, when the set- tlement undertook, according to its theory, to supplement the girls' education, all the essen- tials of our own housekeeping — stove, refrigera- tor, bedrooms, and so on — were utilized. But neither were single bedrooms and rooms set apart for distinct purposes entirely satisfactory

io8 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

in teaching domestic procedure to the average neighbor; and the leader finally developed out of her knowledge of their home conditions the admirable system of " Housekeeping Centers ' now sustained and administered by a commit- tee of men and women on which the settlement has representation.

A flat was rented in a typical Henry Street tenement. Intelligence and taste were exer- cised in equipping it inexpensively and with furniture that required the least possible labor to keep it free from dirt and vermin. Classes were formed to teach housekeeping in its every detail, using nothing which the people them- selves could not procure, — a tiny bathroom, a gas stove, no " model ' tubs, but such as the landlord provided for washing. Cleaning, dis- infecting, actual purchasing of supplies in the shops of the neighborhood, household accounts, nursing, all the elements of homekeeping, were systematically taught. The first winter that the center was opened the entire membership of a class consisted of girls engaged to be married, — clerks, stenographers, teachers; none were prepared and all were eager to have the homes which they were about to establish better or- ganized and more intelligently conducted than those from which they had come. When one young woman announced her betrothal,

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 109

she added, " And I am fully prepared be- cause I have been through the Housekeeping Center."

Other centers have been established by the committee in different parts of the city. Dr. Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools, always sympathetic and ready to fit instruction to the pupils' needs, has encouraged the identification of these housekeeping centers with the schools. Whenever an enterprising principal desires it, the teachers of the nearby housekeeping center are made a part of the school system. Perhaps we may some day see one attached to every public school; and I am inclined to believe that, when institutions of higher learning fully realize that education is preparation for life, they too will wonder if the young women grad- uates of their colleges should not, like our little girl neighbors, be fitted to meet their great home-making responsibilities.

Out of the experience of the originator of the housekeeping centers " Penny Lunches ' for the public schools have been inaugurated, and provide a hot noonday meal for children. The committee now controlling this experiment has inquired into food values, physical effects on children, relation to school attendance, and so on.

The schools in a great city have an additional

no THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

responsibility, as many of the pupils are de- prived of home training because of extreme pov- erty or the absence of the mother at work, and a measure of failure may be traced to an im- perfect realization of the conditions under which pupils live, or to a lack of training on the part of some of the teachers. The Home- and-School Visitor, whose duties are indicated in her title, is charged to bring the two to- gether, that each may help the other; but there are few visitors as yet, and the effect upon the great number of pupils in attendance (over 800,000 in New York) is obviously limited.

We are not always mindful of the fact that children in normal homes get education apart from formal lessons and instruction. Sitting down to a table at definite hours, to eat food properly served, is training, and so is the or- derly organization of the home, of which the child so soon becomes a conscious part. There is direction toward control in the provision for privacy, beginning with the sequestered nursery life. The exchange of letters, which begins with most children at a very early age, the conversation of their elders, familiarity with telegrams and telephones, and with the inci- dents of travel, stimulate their intelligence, re- sourcefulness, and self-reliance.

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD in

Contrast this regulated domestic life with the experience of children — a large number in New York — who may never have been seated around a table in an orderly manner, at a given time, for a family meal. Where the family is large and the rooms small, and those employed return at irregular hours, its mem- bers must be fed at different times. It is not uncommon in a neighborhood such as ours to see the mother lean out of the fourth- or fifth- story window and throw down the bread-and-butter luncheon to the little child waiting on the sidewalk below — sometimes to save him the exertion of climbing the stairs, sometimes because of insufficient time. The children whose mothers work all day and who are locked out during their absence are ex- pected to shift for themselves, and may as often be given too much as too little money to appease their hunger. Having no more dis- cretion in the choice of food than other chil- dren of their age, they become an easy prey for the peddlers of unwholesome foods and can- dies (often with gambling devices attached) who prowl outside the school limits.

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Even those students who are better placed economically, or who have the perseverance to go on into ..the higher schools, may have had no experience but that of a disorganized tene- ment home. Emil was an instance of this. He

supported himself while attending school by teaching immigrants at night. We invited him to a party at one of our country places and in- structed him to call in the morning for his railroad ticket. He failed to appear until long after the appointed hour, not realizing that trains leave on sched- ule time. Apparently he had never consulted a time-table or taken a journey except with a fresh-air party conducted by someone else. Next morning he returned the ticket, and I learned that he had not reached the farm because he did not know the way to it from the station. Somewhat disconcerted to learn that he had taken fruitlessly a trip of some- thing over an hour's duration, I asked why he had not telephoned to the farm for directions. This seventeen-year-old boy, in his third year in the high school, had not thought of a tele-

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 113

phone in the country. Moreover, he had never used one anywhere.

Happily, there is a growing realization among educators of the necessity of relating the school more closely to the children's future, and it is not an accident that one of the widely known authorities on vocational guidance has had long experience in settlements.1

A friend has recently given to me the letters which I wrote regularly to her family during the first two years of my life on the East Side. I had almost forgotten, until these let- ters recalled it to me, how often Miss Brewster and I mourned over the boys and girls who were not in school, and over those who had already gone to work without any education. Almost everyone has had knowledge at some time of the chagrin felt by people who cannot read or write. One intelligent woman of my acquaintance, born in New York State, ingen- iously succeeded for many years in keeping the fact of her illiteracy secret from the people with whom she lived on terms of intimacy, buying the newspaper daily and making a pretense of reading it.

1 " The Vocational Guidance of Youth," by Meyer Bloomfield (Houghton Mifflin Co.).

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We had naively assumed that elementary education was given to all, and were appalled to find entire families unable to read or write, even though some of the children had been born in America. The letters remind me, too, of the efforts we made to get the children we encountered into school, — day school or night school, public or private, — and how many dif- ferent people reacted to our appeals. The De- partment of Health, to facilitate our efforts, supplied us with virus points and authority to vaccinate, since no unvaccinated child could be admitted to school. We gave such publicity as was in our power to the conditions we found, not disdaining to stir emotionally by our ' stories ' when dry and impersonal statistics failed to impress.

Since those days, New York City has estab- lished a school census and has almost perfected a policy whereby all children are brought into school; but throughout the state there are com- munities where the compulsory education law is disregarded. The Federal Census of 1910 shows in this Empire State, in the counties (Franklin and Clinton) inhabited by the native- born, illiteracy far in excess of that in the coun- ties where the foreign-born congregate.

Wonderful advance has been made within two decades in the conception of municipal re-

EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 115

sponsibility for giving schooling to all children. Now the blind, the deaf, the cripples, and the mentally defective are included among those who have the right to education. When in 1893 I climbed the stairs in a Monroe Street tenement in answer to a call to a sick child, I

found Annie F lying on a tumbled bed,

rigid in the braces which encased her from head to feet. All about her white goods were being manufactured, and five machines were whirring in the room. She had been dismissed from the hospital as incurable, and her mother carried her at intervals to an uptown ortho- pedic dispensary. A pitiful, emaciated little creature! The sweatshop was transfigured for Annie when we put pretty white curtains at the window upon which she gazed, hung up a bird-cage, and placed a window-box full of growing plants for her to look at during the long days. Then, realizing that she might live many years and would need, even more than other children, the joys that come from books, we found a young woman who was willing to go to her bedside and teach her.

Nowadays children crippled as Annie was may be taken to school daily, under the super- vision of a qualified nurse, in a van that calls for them and brings them home. One of these schools, established by intelligent philanthro-

n6 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

pists, is on Henry Street; the instructors are en- gaged and paid by the Department of Educa- tion. There are also classes in different sections of the city equipped for the special needs of cripples, to give them industrial training which will provide for their future happiness and eco- nomic independence.

CHAPTER VI THE HANDICAPPED CHILD

EDUCATORS have only recently realized the ex- istence of large numbers of pupils within the schools who are unequal to the routine class- work because of mental defects. It was one of our settlement residents, a teacher in a Henry Street school, who first startled us into serious consideration of these children. In the year 1899 she brought to us from time to time re- ports of a colleague, Elizabeth Farrell, whose attention was fixed upon the " poor things ' unable to keep up with the grade. She had, our resident declared, " ideas ' about them. We sought acquaintance with her, and we felt it a privilege to learn to know the noble enthusiasm of this young woman for those pupils who, to teachers, must always seem the least hopeful.

The Board of Education permitted her to form the first class for ungraded pupils, in School Number i, in 1900, and the settlement gladly helped develop her theory of separate classes and special instruction for the defec- tives, not alone for their sakes, but to relieve the normal classes which their presence re-

"7

n8 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

tarded. We provided equipment not yet on the School Board's requisition list, obtained permis- sion for her to attend children's clinics, secured treatment for the children, and, finally, and not least important, made every effort to interest

members of the School Board and the public generally in this class of children.

The plan included the provision of a luncheon. For this we purchased tables, paper napkins, and dishes. The chil- dren brought from home bread and butter, and a penny for a glass of milk, and an alert principal made practical the cooking lessons given to the older girls in the school by having them prepare the main dish of the pupils' luncheon — incidentally the first to be provided in the grade schools. Occasionally the approval of the families would be expressed in extra do- nations, and in the beginning this sometimes took the form of a bottle of beer. Every day one pupil was permitted to invite an adult member of his family to the luncheon, which led naturally to an exchange of visits between members of the family and the teacher.

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD

119

Among the pupils in this first class was Tony, a Neapolitan, impossible in the grade class be- cause of emotional outbursts called " bad tem- per/' and an incorrigible truant. When defects of vision were corrected the outbursts became less frequent, and manual work disclosed a latent power of application and stimulated a willingness to attend school. Tony is now a bricklayer, a member of the union in good stand- ing, and last spring he and his father bought a house in Brooklyn.

Another was Katie. Spinal meningitis when she was very young had left her with imperfect mental powers. Care- ful examination disclosed impaired control, par- ticularly of the groups of smaller muscles. She has never learned to read, but has developed skill in clay-modeling, and sews and embroiders very well. She makes her clothes and is a cheerful helper to her mother in the work about the house. Last Christmas she sent to the school warm undergarments which she had made, to be given to the children who needed them. Her intelligent father feels that but

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for the discriminating instruction in the un- graded class her powers would have progres- sively deteriorated and Katie " would be in darkness/3

The teacher who thus first fixed our attention upon these defective children has long been a member of the settlement family. She has carried us with her in her zeal for them, and we have come to see that it is because the public conscience has been sluggish that means and methods have not been more speedily de- vised toward an intelligent solution of this serious social problem.

From the small beginnings of the experi- mental class in Henry Street a separate depart- ment in the public schools was created in 1908, and this year (1915) there are 3,000 children throughout the city under the care of specially trained teachers who have liberty to adapt the school work to the children's peculiar needs. All these ungraded classes are under the direc- tion of Miss Farrell.

Looking back upon the struggles to win for- mal recognition of the existence of these chil- dren, who now so much engage the attention of educators and scientists, we realize that our colleague's devotion to them, her power to ex- cite enthusiasm in us, and her understanding of the social implications of their existence, came

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 121

from a deep-lying principle that every human being, even the least lovely, merits respectful consideration of his rights and his personality.

Much is required of the public school teachers, and many of them rise to every demand; but naturally, in so great a number, there are some who do not recognize that theirs is the responsi- bility for discovering the children who are not normal. Harry sits on our doorsteps almost every day, ready to run errands, and harmless as yet. Obviously defective, a " pronounced moron/' he was promoted from class to class, and when one of his settlement friends called upon the teacher to discuss Harry's special needs, the teacher, somewhat contemptuous of our anxiety, observed that " all that Harry needed was a whipping."

From one-half of one per cent, to two per cent, of children of school age are, it is esti- mated, in need of special instruction because of the quality or the imperfect functioning of their mental powers. The public school has the power, and should exercise it, to bring within its walls all the children physically and men- tally competent to attend it. If children are under intelligent observation, departures from the normal can in many instances be recognized in time for training and education according to the particular need. Long-continued observa-

in THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

tion and record of the child are essential to in- telligent treatment of abnormalities concerning"

which there is even now verv little ac-

*

curate information. Cumulative experi- ence and data, such as can be obtained only through the compulsory attend- ance at school of the multitudes of chil- dren of this type, will finally give a basis for scientific and humanitarian ac- tion regarding them. Up to a certain pe- riod the child's help- lessness demands that every oppor- tunity for develop- ment be 2;iven him,

O '

but that is not the whole of society's respon- sibility. The time comes when the child's own interests and those of the community demand the wisest, least selfish, and most statesman- like action. Society must state in definite terms its right to be protected from the hopelessly

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 123

defective and the moral pervert, wherever found. This constitutes the real problem of the abnormal. At the adolescent period those unfit for parenthood should be guarded — girls and boys — and society should be vested with authority and power to accomplish segregation, the conditions of which should attract and not repel.

Because so much needs to be said upon it, if anything is said at all, I am loath to touch upon the one great obstacle to the effective use of all the intelligence and the resources available for the well-being of these children, the most baffling impediment to their and the community's protection, namely, the supreme authority of parenthood, be it never so ineffi- cient, avaricious, or even immoral.

The breaking up of the family because of poverty, through the death or disappearance of the wage-earner, was, until comparatively re- cent years, generally accepted as inevitable.

In the first winter of our residence on the

East Side we took care of Mr. S , who was

in an advanced stage of phthisis; and we daily admired the wonderful ability of his wife, who kept the home dignified while she sewed on wrappers, nursed her husband, and allowed

i24 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

nothing to interfere with the children's daily at- tendance at school. When her husband died it seemed the most natural thing in the world to help her to realize her own wishes and to approve her good judgment in desiring to keep the family together. The orphan asylum would doubtless have taken the children from her, leav- ing her childless as well as widowed, and with no counterbalancing advantage for the children to lighten her double woe. A large-minded lover of children, who gave his money to orphans as well as to orphanages, readily agreed to give the mother a monthly allowance until the eldest son could legally go to work. It was our first " widow's pension."

Our hopes in this particular case have been more than realized. The eldest boy, it is true, has not achieved any notable place in the com- munity; but his sisters are teachers and most desirable elements in the public school system of the city, — living testimony to the worth of the mother's character.

In no instance where we have prevented the disintegration of the family because of poverty have we had reason to regret our decision. Of course, the ability of the mother to maintain a standard in the home and control the children is a necessary qualification in any general recom- mendation for this treatment of the widow and

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD

125

orphan, and competent supervision is essential to insure the maintenance of these conditions.

At the famous White House Conference on Children, held at the invitation of President Roosevelt, there was practical unanimity on the part of the ex- perts who gathered there that institutional life was undesirable and that wherever pos- sible family life should be maintained. Testi- mony as to this came from many sources; and keeping the fam- ily together, or board- ing the orphan with a normal family when adoption could not be arranged, became the dominant note of the conference.

The children, in this as in many other in- stances, led us into searching thought many years ago. Forlorn little Joseph had called upon me with a crumpled note which he reluctantly dragged from a pocket. It was from the ad- mitting agent of an orphanage, explaining that Joseph could not be taken into the institution until his head was "cured"; and it gave some details regarding the family, the worthiness of the mother, and her exceeding poverty. The

126 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

agent hoped that I might relieve her by ex- pediting Joseph's admission.

I tried to make the child's daily visit to me interesting. The treatment was not painful, but the end of each visit — he came with patient reg- ularity every day — left me as dolorous as him- self. One day I tried, by promise of a present or of any treat he fancied, to bring out some expression of youthful spirit — all unavailingly. " But you must wish for something," I urged; " I never knew a boy who didn't." For the first time the silent little lad showed enthusiasm. " I wish you wouldn't cure my head, so I needn't go to the orphan asylum."

Unscrupulous parents, I am well aware, often try to shift the responsibility for their children upon public institutions, but there are many who share Joseph's aversion to the institutional life, and we early recognized that the dislike is based upon a sound instinct and that a poor home might have compensating advantages compared with the well-equipped institution.

There have been great changes in institutional methods since I first had knowledge of them, and much ingenuity has been shown in devising means to encourage the development of individ- uality and initiative among the orphans. The cottage plan has been introduced in some insti- tutions to modify the abnormal life of large

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 127

congregations of children. But at best the life is artificial, and the children lose inestimably through not having day by day the experiences of normal existence. Valuable knowledge is lost because the child does not learn from ex- perience the connection between the cost of ne- cessities and the labor necessary to earn them. It was somewhat pathetic, at another confer- ence on child-saving, to hear one of the speakers explain that he tried to meet this need by hav- ing the examples in arithmetic relate to the cost of food and household expenditures.

The lack of a normal emotional outlet is of consequence, and as a result astute physiog- nomists often recognize what they term the " institution look." Maggie, an intelligent girl, who has since given abundant evidence of spon- taneity and spirit, spent a short time in an ex- cellent orphanage. She told me the other day, and wept as she told it, that she had met no unkindness there, but remembered with horror that when they arose in the morning the ' or- phans ' waited to be told what to do; and that feeling was upon her every hour of the day. In fact, Maggie had stirred me to make arrangements to take her out of the institution because, when I brought her for a visit to the settlement, she stood at the window the entire afternoon, wistfully watching the children play

128 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

in our back yard, and not joining them because no one had told her that she might.

One is reluctant to speak only of the disad- vantages of institutional life, for there are many children rescued from unfortunate family conditions who testify to the good care they received, and who, in after life, look back upon the orphanage as the only home they have known. For some children, doubtless, such care will continue to be necessary, but the conserva- tive and rigid administration can be softened, and the management and their charges delivered out of the rut into which they have fallen, and from the tyranny of rules and customs which have no better warrant than that they have always existed.

Perhaps these illustrations are not too in- significant to record. Happening to pass through a room in an asylum when the dentist was paying his monthly visit, I saw a fine- looking young lad about to have a sound front tooth extracted because he complained of tooth- ache. No provision had been made for any- thing but the extraction of teeth. An offer to have the boy given proper treatment outside the institution was not accepted, but it needed no more than this to insure better dentistry in his case and in the institution in future. The reports stated that corporal punishment was not

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 129

administered. When a little homesick lad dis- played his hands, swollen from paddling, a re- quest for an investigation, and that I be privi- leged to hear the inquiry, put a stop, and I am assured a permanent one, to this form of dis- cipline. These are the more obvious disad- vantages of institutional life for the child. The more subtle and dangerous are the curbing of initiative and the belittling of personality.

An intelligent observer of the effects of insti- tution life on boys, a Roman Catholic priest, established a temporary home in New York to which they could come on their release from the institution until they found employment and suitable places to board. His insight was shown by his provision for the boys during their brief sojourn with him of a formal table service, and weekly dances to which girls whom he knew were invited. As he astutely observed, the boys often went into common society, or society which made no demands, because, from their lack of experience, they felt ill at ease in a circle where any conventions were observed.

Where life goes by rule there is little spon- taneous action or conversation, but the chil- dren occasionally give clews to their passion for personal relationships. In an institution which I knew the children were allowed to write once a month to their friends. More than one chile*

i3o THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

without family ties took that opportunity to write letters to an imaginary mother, to send messages of affection to imaginary brothers and sisters, and to ask for personal gifts. They knew, of course, that the letters would never leave the institution.

An unusual instance of intense longing for family life and the desire to " belong ' to some- one was given by Tillie, who had lived all her life in an orphan asylum. Sometimes she dreamed of her mother, and often asked where she was. When she was ten years old the wife of the superintendent told her that her mother had brought her to the asylum, but that all she could remember about her was that she had red hair. From that day the child's desire to re-establish relations with her mother never flagged. In the files of the asylum a letter was discovered from an overseer of the poor in an upstate town, saying that the woman had wan- dered there. At Tillie's urgent request he was written to again, and after a search on his part it was learned that she had been declared insane and taken to the hospital at Rochester. The very day that Tillie was released from the orphan asylum she secured money for the trip and went to Rochester. The officials of the hos- pital received her kindly and took her into the ward where, although she had no memory of

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 131

having seen her, she identified her mother — doubtless by the color of her hair. The mother, alas, did not recognize her. Two years later the girl revisited the hospital and found her mother enjoying an interval of memory. Tillie told me that she learned ' two important things " — that she had had a brother and my name. How I was connected with the fortunes of the family the poor, bewildered woman could not explain, and I have no recollection of her. Tillie followed these clews, as she has every other. She has learned that the brother was sent West with orphans from an Eastern in- stitution, and that he has joined the army. The devoted girl is making every effort to estab- lish a home to which she can bring the mother and brother, utterly regardless of the burden it will place on her young shoulders.

We must turn to the younger countries for testimony as to the wisdom of the non-institu- tional care of dependent children. In Australia the plan for many years in all the provinces has been to care for them in homes, and in Queensland and New South Wales the laws permit the children to be boarded out to their own mothers. It is encouraging to note the increasing number of responsible people in America who are ready to adopt children. It may not be possible to find a sufficient number

132 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

of suitable homes to provide for all who are dependent; but once the policy of decen- tralization is established, other methods will be evolved to avoid large congregations of boys and girls. Two of my colleagues and I have

found much happi- ness in assuming re- sponsibility for eight children. Quite apart from our own pleasure in taking to ourselves

these ' nieces ' and ' nephews," we be- lieve that we shall be able to demonstrate convincingly the prac^ ticability of establish- ing small groups of children, without ties of their own, as a fam- ily unit. Our children live the year round in our country home, and are identified with the life of the community; and we hope to provide opportunity for the development of their indi- vidual tastes and aptitudes.

Education and the child is a theme of widest social significance. To the age-old appeal that the child's dependence makes upon the affec-

On the Farm.

THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 133

tions has been added a conviction of the neces- sity for a guarded and trained childhood, that better men and women may be developed. It is a modern note in patriotism and civic re- sponsibility, which impels those who are brought in contact with the children of the poor to protect them from premature burdens, to prolong their childhood and the period of growth. Biologists bring suggestive and illumi- nating analogies, but when one has lived many years in a neighborhood such as ours the chil- dren themselves tell the story. We know that physical well-being in later life is largely de- pendent upon early care, that only the excep- tional boys and girls can escape the unwhole- some effects of premature labor, and that lack of training is responsible for the enormous pro- portion of unskilled and unemployable among the workers.

The stronghold of our democracy is the pub- lic school. This conviction lies deep in the hearts of those social enthusiasts who would keep the school free from the demoralization of cant and impure politics, and restore it to the people, a shrine for education, a center for public uses.

The young members of the settlement clubs hear this doctrine preached not infrequently. Last June the City Superintendent, addressing

i34 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

a class graduating from the normal school, made an appeal for idealism in their work. He spoke of the possibilities in their profession for far-reaching social service, and named as one who exemplified his theme the principal of a great city school, once one of our settlement boys.

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CHAPTER VII CHILDREN WHO WORK

BESSIE has had eight " jobs J in six months. Obviously under sixteen, she has had to pro- duce her " working papers ' before she could be taken on. The fact that she has met the requirements necessary to obtain the papers, and that her employer has demanded them, is evidence of the advance made in New York State since we first became acquainted with the children of the poor. Bessie has had to prove by birth certificate or other documentary evi- dence that she is really fourteen, has had to submit to a simple test in English and arith- metic, present proof of at least 130 days' school attendance in the year before leaving, and, after examination by a medical officer, has had to be declared physically fit to enter shop or factory.

No longer could Annie, the cobbler's daugh- ter, by unchallenged perjury obtain the state sanction to her premature employment. Gone are the easy days when Francesca's father, de- fying school mandates, openly offered his little

136 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

ones in the labor market. Yet we are far from satisfied. Bessie, though she meets the require- ments of the law, goes out wholly unprepared for self-support; she is of no industrial value, and is easily demoralized by the conviction of her unimportance to her " boss," certain that her casual employment and dismissal have hardly been noted, save as she herself has been affected by the pay envelope. Her industrial experience is no surprise to her settlement friends, for she is a type of the boys and girls who, twice a year, swarm out of the school and find their way to the Department of Health to obtain working papers. Bessie's father is a phthisis case; her mother, the chief wage-earner, an example of devotion and industry. The girl has been a fairly good student and dutiful in the home, where for several years she has scrubbed the floors and " looked after ' the chil- dren in her mother's absence.

Tommy also appeared at the office with his credentials and successfully passed all the tests, until the scale showed him suspiciously weighty for his appearance. Inquiry as to what bulged one of his pockets disclosed the fact that he had a piece of lead there. He had been told that he probably would not weigh enough to pass the doctor. Talking the matter over with Mrs. Sanderson, I learned that the immediate

CHILDREN WHO WORK 137

reason for taking Tommy out of school was his need of a pair of shoes. The mother was not insensitive to his pinched appearance. A few days later Tommy was taken to visit our children at the farm, and it was pleasant to see that the natural boy had not been crushed. He devoured the most juvenile story-books and was " crazy ' about the sledding. The self- respecting mother was not injured in her pride of independence by a little necessary aid care- fully given; and though I have not seen Tommy recently, I am sure that neither he nor his em- ployer lost anything because of the better physi- cal condition in which he entered work after his happy winter at the farm.

This attempt to cheat the law by the very children for whose protection it was designed, and the occasional disregard of the purposes of the enactments by enforcing officials, suggest Alice's perplexity when she encountered the topsy-turvy Wonderland.

It was about twelve years ago that a group of settlement people in New York gathered to consider the advisability of organizing public sentiment against the exploitation of child workers. The New York Child Labor Com- mittee thereupon came into existence, under the chairmanship of the then head of the Uni- versity Settlement, and that committee has

138 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

since been steadily engaged in advancing stand- ards of conditions under which children may work. Through legislative enactment and pub- licity it has endeavored to form public opinion on those socially constructive principles inher- ent in the conservation of children.

Of necessity child labor laws approach the problem from the negative side of prohibition. To meet the problem positively, the Henry Street Settlement established in 1908 a definite system of " scholarships ' for children from fourteen to sixteen, to give training during what have been termed the " two wasted years ' to as many as its funds permitted.

A committee of administration receives the applications which come from all parts of the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and preference is given to those children of widows or disabled fathers whose need seems greatest. Careful inquiry is made by the capable secre- tary to discover natural inclinations or apti- tudes, and these are used as guides in deter- mining the character of the instruction to be given. Three dollars a week — somewhat less than the sum the children might have been earning — is given weekly for two years, dur- ing which time they are under continual super- vision at home, at school, and through regular visits to the settlement. They are looked after

CHILDREN WHO WORK 139

physically, provided with occasional recreation, and, in the summer time, whenever possible, a vacation in the country. The committee keeps in close touch with the educational agencies throughout the city, gathers knowledge of the trades that give opportunity for advancement, and, to aid teachers, settlement workers, par- ents, and children, publishes from time to time a directory of vocational resources in the city.1

Approval of this endowment for future effi- ciency comes from many sources, but no en- couragement has been greater than the fact that, while the plan was still in its experimental stage, my own first boys' club, the members of which had now grown to manhood, celebrated their fifteenth anniversary by contributing three scholarships; and that the Women's Club, whose members feel most painfully the disadvantage of the small wage of the unskilled, have given from their club treasury or by voluntary assessment for this help to the boys and girls.

The children who show talent and those

1 Because of economic conditions in New York during the winter of 1915 and the compulsory idleness of many unskilled work- ers, the Scholarship Committee of the Henry Street Settlement, among other efforts for relief, rented a loft in a building near a trade school, and thus made it possible for 160 untrained girls to receive technical instruction, the Board of Education providing teachers and equipment. — THE AUTHOR.

1 40 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

whose immaturity or poverty of intellect makes their early venture into the world more pitiful, have equal claim upon these scholar- ships.

Pippa was one of the latter. She was scorned at home for obvious slowness of wit and ' bad eyes"; her mother deplored the fact that there was nothing for her to do but " getta mar- ried/3 Pippa's club leader's reports were equally discouraging, save for the fact that she had shown some dexterity in the sewing class. At the time when she would have begun her patrol of the streets, looking for signs of " Girls Wanted," the offer of a scholarship prevailed with the mother, and she was given one year's further education in a trade school. After a conference between the teachers and her set- tlement friends, sample-mounting was decided upon as best suited to Pippa's capacities. She has done well with the training, and is now looked up to as the one wage-earner in the family who is regularly employed.

One of the accompanying charts compares the wage-earning capacity of the boys and girls who have had the advantage of these scholar- ships with that of an equal number of un- trained young people whose careers are known through their industrial placement by perhaps the most careful juvenile employment agency

CHILDREN WHO WORK

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in the city.1 The deductions that we made from the experience of the Henry Street children were corroborated by an inquiry made by one of our residents into the industrial history of one thousand children who had applied for working papers at the Department of Health. The employment-record chart was compiled from data obtained in that inquiry.

Our connections in the city enable us occa- sionally to coax opportunities for those boys and girls for whom experience in the shop itself would seem best. Jimmy had lost a leg " hook- ing on the truck," and his mother supposed that " such things happen when you have to lock them out all day.'3 In the whittling class the lad showed dexterity with the sloyd knife, and he was thereupon given special privileges in the carpentry and carving classes of the settlement. When he reached working age, one of our friends, a distinguished patron of a high-grade

That the ephemeral character of work available for children of fourteen to sixteen years of age is not peculiar to New York City is shown by the following figures from the report of the Maryland Bu- reau of Statistics for the year 1914. In Maryland, working papers are issued for each separate employment. The number of original applications in one year was 3,580 and the total of subsequent applica- tions, 4,437. Of the 3,580 children 2,006 came back a second time, 1,036 a third time, 561 a fourth, 363, a fifth, 194 a sixth, 116 a seventh, 53 an eighth, 29 a ninth, 18 a tenth, and one child came back for the eighteenth time in a twelvemonth, for working papers. Many of the children told stories of long periods of idle- ness between employments. — THE AUTHOR.

CHILDREN WHO WORK

decorator, induced the latter to give the boy a chance. Misgivings as to the permanency of his tenure of the place were allayed when Jimmy, aglow with enthusiasm over his work, brought a beautifully carved mahogany box and told of the help the skilled men in the shop were giving him. On the whole, he concluded,

POSITIONS HELD	LENGTH OF TIME1N EACH KIND OF WORK
FIRST	3 DAYS	IN FACTORY. SORTING BUTTONS
SECOND	2 MONTHS	RIBBONING CORSET COVERS &• MACHINE WORK ON THEM
THIRD	IWEEK	RIBBONING & BUTTONING CORSET COVERS
FOURTH	TIME UNKNOWN	LADIES* UNDERWEAR
FIFTH	UP TO CHRISTMAS	ERRAND GIRL
SIXTH	2& MONTHS	RIBBONING CORSET COVERS
SEVENTH	TIME UNKNOWN	ERRAND GIRL
EIGHTH	A FEW WEEKS	TRIM, Cur, & EXAMINE MENSTIES
NINTH	A FEWWEEKS	RETURN TO SECOND JOB
TENTH	A FEW WEEKS	HOMEWORK. RIBBONING

The Typical Employment Record of One Child between the Ages

of 14 and 16.

" a fellow with one leg ' had advantages over other cabinetmakers; "he could get into so many more tight places and corners than with two."

Bessie and Jimmy and Pippa and Esther and their little comrades stir us to contribute our human documents to the propaganda instituted in behalf of children. In this, as in other ex- periments at the settlement, we do not believe

144 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

that what we offer is of great consequence un- less the demonstrations we make and the expe- rience we gain are applicable to the problems of the community. On no other single interest do the members of our settlement meet with such unanimity. Years of concern about indi- vidual children might in any case have brought this about, but irresistible has been the influ- ence exercised by Mrs. Florence Kelley, now and for many years a member of the settlement family. She has long consecrated her energies to securing protective legislation throughout the country for children compelled to labor and, with the late Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Ala- bama, suggested the creation of the National Child Labor Committee. In its ten years' exist- ence it has affected legislation in forty-seven states, which have enacted new or improved child labor laws. On this and on the New York State Committee Mrs. Kelley and I have served since their creation.

Though much has been accomplished during this decade, the field is immensely larger than was supposed, and forces inimical to reform, not reckoned with at first, have been encountered. Despite this opposition, however, we believe that the abolition of child labor abuses in America is not very far off.

In Pennsylvania, within a very few years,

CHILDREN WHO WORK 145

insistence upon satisfactory proof of age was strenuously opposed. Officials who should have been working in harmony with the committee persisted in declaring that the parent's affi- davit, long before discarded in New York State, was sufficient evidence, despite the fact that coroners' inquests after mine disasters showed child workers of ten and eleven years. The Southern mill children, the little cranberry- bog workers, the oyster shuckers, and the boys in glass factories and mines have shown that this disregard of children is not peculiar to any one section of the country, though South- ern states have been most tenacious of the exemption of children of " dependent parents ' or " orphans ' from working-paper require- ments.

In the archives at Washington much inter- esting evidence lies buried in the unpublished portions of reports of the federal investigation into the work of women and children. The need of this investigation was originally urged by settlement people. One mill owner greeted the government inspectors most cordially and, to show his patriotism, ordered the flag to be raised above the works. The raising of the flag, as it afterwards transpired, was a signal to the children employed in the mill to go home. In the early days of child labor reform in New

146 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

York the children on Henry Street would sometimes relate vividly their experience of being suddenly whisked out of sight when the approach of the factory inspector was signaled.

It is perhaps unnecessary to mention the obvious fact that the child worker is in com- petition with the adult and drags down his wages. At the Child Labor Conference held in Washington in January, 1915, a manufacturer in the textile industry cited the wages paid to adults in certain operations in the mills as fourteen cents per hour where there were pro- hibitive child labor laws and eleven cents an hour where there were none.

The National Child Labor Committee now asks Congress through a federal bill to out- law interstate traffic in goods produced by the labor of children. Such a law would protect the public-spirited employer who is now obliged to compete in the market with men whose busi- ness methods he condemns.

Sammie and his brother sold papers in front of one of the large hotels every night. The more they shivered with cold, the greater the harvest of pennies. No wonder that the white- faced little boy stayed out long after his cold had become serious. He himself asked for ad

CHILDREN WHO WORK

147

mission to the hospital, and died there before his absence was noted. After his death rela- tives appeared, willing to aid according to their small means, and the relief society increased its stipend to his family. At any time during his life this aid might have been forthcoming, had not the public un- thinkingly made his sacrifice possible by the purchase of his papers.

Opposition to regu- lating and limiting the sale of papers by lit- tle boys on the streets is hard to overcome. A juvenile literature of more than thirty years ago glorified the newsboy and his improbable financial and so- cial achievements, and interest in him was heightened by a series of pictures by a popu- lar painter, wherein ragged youngsters of an extraordinary cleanliness of face were por- trayed as newsboys and bootblacks. In oppo- sition to the charm of this presentation, the practical reformer offers the photographs, taken at midnight, of tiny lads asleep on gratings in front of newspaper offices, waiting for the early

i48 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

editions. He finds in street work the most fruitful source of juvenile delinquency, with newsboys heading the list.

I am aware that at this point numerous readers will recall instances of remarkable achievements by the barefoot boy, the wide- awake young news-seller. We too have known the exceptional lad who has accomplished mar- vels in the teeth of, sometimes because of, great disadvantages; but after twenty years I, for one, have no illusions as to the outcome for the ordinary child.

When the New York Child Labor Commit- tee secured the enactment of a law making it mandatory for the schoolboy who desired to sell papers to obtain the consent of his parents before receiving the permissive badge from the district school superintendent, we sent a visitor from the settlement to the families of one hun- dred who had expressed their intention to se- cure the badge. Of these families over sixty were opposed to the child's selling papers on the street. The boy wanted to " because the other fellows did/' and the parents based their objec- tions, in most cases, on precisely those grounds urged by social workers, — namely, that street work led the boys into bad company, irregular hours, gambling, and " waste of shoe leather." Some asserted that they received no money

CHILDREN WHO WORK 149

from the children from the sale of the papers. On the other hand, a committee of which I was chairman, which made city-wide inquiry into juvenile street work, found instances of well-to-do parents who sent their little children on the streets to sell papers, sometimes in vio- lation of the law.

The three chief obstacles to progress in pro- tection of the children are the material inter- ests of the employers, many of whom still believe that the child is a necessary instrument of profit; a sentimental, unanalytical feeling of kindness to the poor; and the attitude of offi- cials upon whom the enforcement of the law depends, but who are often tempted by appeals to thwart its humane purpose. A truant officer of my acquaintance took upon himself discre- tionary power to condone the absence of a little child from school on the ground that the child was employed and the widowed mother poor. Himself a tender father, cherishing his small son, I asked him if that was what he would have me do in case he died and I found his child at work. Oddly enough, he seemed then to realize for the first time that those who were battling for school attendance for the children of the poor and prevention of their premature employment, even though the widow and child might have to receive financial aid,

1 50 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

were trying to take, in part, the place of the dead father.

To meet cases where enforcement of the new standards of the law involves undeniable hard- ship, another form of so-called " scholarship ' is given by the New York Child Labor Com- mittee. Upon investigation a sum approximat- ing the possible earnings of the child is fur- nished until such time as he or she can legally go to work. An indirect but important result of the giving of these scholarships has been the continuous information obtained regarding enforcement of the school attendance law. In- quiry into the history of candidates disclosed, at first, many cases in which, although the family had been in New York for years, some of the children had never attended school, and perhaps never would have done so had they not been discovered at work illegally. The number of these cases is now diminishing.

Allusion to these two forms of " scholar- ships ' should not be made without mention of one other in the settlement, known as the " Alva Scholarship." The interest on the endowment is used to promote the training of gifted indi- viduals and to commemorate a beloved club leader. The money to establish it was given

CHILDREN WHO WORK 151

by the young woman's associates in the settle- ment, and small sums have been contributed to it by the girls who were members of her own and other clubs.

CHAPTER VIII THE NATION'S CHILDREN

FEW people have any idea of the extent of tenement-house manufactures. There are at present over thirteen thousand houses in Greater New York alone licensed for this pur- pose, and each license may cover from one to forty families. These figures give no complete idea of the work done in tenements. Much of it is carried on in unlicensed houses, and work not yet listed as forbidden is carried home. To supervise this immense field eight inspectors only were assigned in 1913. Changing fashions in dress and the character of certain of the sea- sonal trades make it very difficult for the De- partment of Labor to adjust the license list. This explains, to some extent, the lack of knowledge concerning home work on the part of officials, even when the Department of Labor is efficiently administered. Nevertheless, home work has greatly decreased.

Twenty years ago, when we went from house to house caring for the sick, manufacturing was

carried on in the tenements on a scale that

152

THE NATION'S CHILDREN 153

does not exist to-day. With no little consterna- tion we saw toys and infants' clothing-, and sometimes food itself, made under conditions that would not have been tolerated in factories, even at that time. And the connection of re- mote communities and individuals with the East Side of New York was impressed upon us when we saw a roomful of children's clothing shipped to the Southern trade from a tenement where there were sixteen cases of measles. One of our patients, in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, until our appearance on the scene, sat coughing in her bed, making cigarettes and moistening the paper with her lips. In another tenement in a nearby street we found children ill with scarlet fever. The parents worked as finishers of women's cloaks of good quality, evi- dently meant to be worn by the well-to-do. The garments covered the little patients, and the bed on which they lay was practically used as a work-table. The possibility of infection is perhaps the most obvious disadvantage of home work, and great changes have been wrought since the days when we first knew the sweat- shop; but we are here discussing only its con- nection with the children.

When work is carried on in the home all the members of the family can be and are utilized without regard to age or the restrictions of the

i54 THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET

factory laws. One Thanksgiving Day I carried an offering from prosperous children of my acquaintance to a little child on Water Street whose absence from the kindergarten had been

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reported on account of illness. He had chicken-pox, and I found him, with flushed face, sitting on a little stool, working on knee pants with other members of the family. They in- terrupted their industry long enough to drag the concertina from under the bed and to join in singing Italian songs for my entertainment,

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but the father shrugged his shoulders in dis- sent from my protest against the continuance of the work.

Examination of the school attendance of chil- dren who do home work bears testimony to its relation to truancy. Josephine, eleven years of age, stays out of school to work on finishing; Francesca, aged twelve, to sew buttons on coats; Santa, nine years old, to pick out nut meats; Catherine, eight years old, sews on tags; Tiffy, another eight-year-old, helps her mother finish; Giuseppe, aged ten, is a deft worker on artificial flowers.

It is painful to recall the R family, who

lived in a basement, all of the children engaged in making paper bags which the mother sold to the small dealers. Something, we know not what, impelled one of the five children to come for help to the nurse in the First Aid Room at the settlement. His head showed evidence of neglect, and when our nurse inquired of him how it had escaped the school medical inspection, the fact was disclosed that he had never been in school. Immediate inquiry on our part revealed the basement sweatshop and the fact that none of the children, all of whom had been born in America, had ever been to school. When the mother was questioned, she answered that she did not like to ask for more

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aid than she was already receiving from the relief society, and when we reproved the other children in the tenement for not having drawn our attention to their little neighbors, they an- swered that they themselves had not known

of the existence of the R children because

" they never came out to play." The stupidity of the mother and the circumstances of the family have continually tested the endurance of their well-meaning friends; nevertheless, at this writing the eldest boy is in high school and supporting himself by work outside school hours at a subway news-stand.

What I have written thus far has been in large measure confined to the lower East Side of New York; but it may not be amiss to remind the reader that through the nursing service and other organized work our contact with the tenement home workers extends over the two boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx. The settlement has never made a scientific study of work done in the homes, but our informa- tion regarding it is continuous and current. This cumulative knowledge is probably the more valuable because it is obtained inciden- tally and naturally, and not as the result of a special investigation, which, however fair and impartial, must be somewhat affected by the consciousness of its purpose.

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In 1899 a law was passed in New York State licensing individual workers in the tenements for certain trades. In 1904 this law was super- seded, primarily at the instigation of the settle- ment, by one licensing the entire tenement house, thus making the owner of the house re- sponsible. In 1913 a law recommended by the New York State Factory Investigating Com- mission was passed by the legislature; this law brought under its jurisdiction all articles manu- factured in the tenements, prohibited entirely the home manufacture of food articles, dolls or dolls' clothing, children's or infants' wearing apparel, and forbade the employment of chil- dren under fourteen on any articles made in tenements.

All our experience points to the conclusion that it is impossible to control manufacture in the tenements. Restrictive legislation (such as the law forbidding the employment of children under fourteen) is practically impossible of en- forcement, for it is a delusion to suppose that any human agency can find out what manufac- tures are going on in tenement-house homes. The inspectors become known in the various neighborhoods; and at their approach the word is passed along, and garments on which women are working may be hidden, or the work taken from children's hands. The more painstaking

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and conscientious the attempts at enforcement, the more secretive the workers become, and one is forced to the conclusion that the only practical remedy is to prohibit this parasitic form of industry outright. More of the men in these families would go to work if it were not so easy to employ the women and chil- dren; and many of the women would be able to work regular hours in establishments suit- ably constructed for manufacturing purposes and under state inspection and supervision. During the period of transition, suffering will doubtless come to some families whose poor living has been maintained by this form of industry, and relief measures must carry them over the time of adjustment. Most families working at home are already receiving aid from societies, which thus indirectly help to support the parasitic trade.

In 1913, 4i,507 children of Greater New York secured working papers. But the record for 1914 shows a decrease of about 10,000 in the applications for papers, and consequently so many more children in school, because of the amended statute which raised the minimum edu- cational requirement. A public sentiment which keeps boys and girls longer in school empha-

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sizes the need of more educational facilities adapted to industrial pursuits. The children least promising in book studies may often be- come adepts in manual work, and respond readily to instruction that calls for exercise of the motor energies. The armies of children

who go to work immature, unprepared, unedu- cated in essentials, with no more than a super- ficial precocity, are likely to be thrown upon the scrap-heap of the unskilled early in life, and yet many of these have potentialities of skill and efficiency.

It is not surprising that with increasing knowledge of the children's condition plans for their guidance, training, and reasonable em- ployment should have made advance in the last

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decade. The settlement is now interested in promoting an inquiry for New York City that should lead to the establishment of a juvenile bureau intended to combine vocational guidance and industrial supervision, — a bureau asso- ciated with an educational system and disso- ciated from the free employment exchanges which as yet do not inquire into the character of employment offered.

One outcome of this inquiry has been the for- mation of a society of employers designed to bring about scientific consideration of the present misemployment of children and adults, underemployment, and other wastes of in- dustry.

We believe that continuation schools are nec- essary for all boys and girls engaged in shop or factory work, and that expert vocational guidance and educational direction should be offered those who leave school to become wage- earners. It is inevitable that to people at all socially minded close contact with many chil- dren should exercise the humanities. The stress that we lay on the enforcement of these pro- tective measures comes from a conviction that the children of the poor, more than all others, need to be prepared for the responsibilities of life that so soon come upon them.

The great majority of the boys and girls

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accept passively the conditions of the trade or occupation into which chance and their neces- sities have forced them. The desire for some- thing different seldom becomes articulate or strong enough to impel them to overcome the almost insuperable barriers. Occasionally, how- ever, the spirit of revolt asserts itself. " I work in a sweatshop," said a young girl who brought her drawings to me for criticism, " and it harasses my body and my soul. Perhaps I could earn enough to live on by doing these, and my brother bids me to display them"; and she added, ' I could live on three dollars a week if I were happy." The drawings were promising, and the temperamental young creature, in answer to my questioning, admitted that she had illustrated David Copperfield for pastime and had u given David a weak chin."

The difficulty of proper placement in industry experienced by the ordinary boy and girl is intensified in the case of the colored juveniles. It is now nine years since a woman called at the Henry Street house and almost challenged me to face their problem. She was what is termed a " race woman," and desired to work for her own people. It was not difficult to provide an opening for her. The devoted daughter of a man who had felt friendship for the colored people made it possible for us to

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establish a branch of the settlement on the west side of the city in that section known as San Juan Hill. At " Lincoln House," with the co-operation of representatives of the race and their friends, a programme of social and educational work adapted to the needs of the neighborhood is carried on. To find admirably trained and efficient colored nurses was a com- paratively simple matter; and the response of the colored people themselves in this respect was immediately encouraging. Necessity for patient adherence to the principle of giving opportunity to the most needy children, that they may be better equipped for the future, is emphasized in the case of the colored children in school and when seeking work; but difficul- ties, mountainous in proportion and testing the most buoyant optimism, loom up when social barriers and racial characteristics enter into individual adjustments. The restricted number of occupations open to them discourages ambi- tion and in time reacts unfavorably upon char- acter and ability; and thus we complete the vicious circle of diminishing opportunities and lessening vigor and skill. Colored women are often conspicuously good and tender mothers, and when I have watched large groups of them assembled in their clubrooms, exhibiting their babies with justifiable pride, I have felt a wave

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of unhappiness because of the consciousness of the enormous handicap with which these little ones must face the future.

A distinguished musician told me not long ago that he gave specially of his time and talent to the colored people of New York because of a debt he owed to a gifted colored neighbor. When he was a boy, his attempts to play the violin attracted the man's attention; the latter offered his services as instructor when he learned that the boy could not afford to take lessons. The colored man had great talent and had studied with the best masters in Europe, but when he returned to America he was unable to obtain engagements or procure pupils, and in order to earn his living was obliged to learn to play the guitar. Discouraging as was his experience, there is, I believe, relatively freer opportunity for the exceptionally gifted of the colored race in the arts and professions than for the ordinary young men and women who seek vocational careers.

Experience in Henry Street, and a convic- tion that intelligent interest in the welfare of children was becoming universal, gradually focused my mind on the necessity for a Fed- eral Children's Bureau. Every day brought to

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the settlement, by mail and personal call, — as it must have brought to other people and agencies known to be interested in children, — the most varied inquiries, appeals for help and guidance, reflecting every social aspect of the

question. One well- known judge of a chil- dren's court was obliged to employ a clerical staff at his own expense to reply to such inquiries. Those that came to us we answered as best we might out of our own ex- perience or from frag- mentary and incomplete data. Even the avail- able information on this important subject was nowhere assembled in complete and practical form. The birth rate, preventable blindness, congenital and prevent- able disease, infant mortality, physical degen- eracy, orphanage, desertion, juvenile delin- quency, dangerous occupations and accidents, crimes against children, are questions of enor- mous national importance concerning some of which reliable information was wholly lacking. Toward the close of President Roosevelt's ad-

THE NATION'S CHILDREN 165

ministration a colleague and I called upon him to present my plea for the creation of this bureau. On that day the Secretary of Agricul- ture had gone South to ascertain what danger to the community lurked in the appearance of the boll weevil. This gave point to our argu- ment that nothing that might have happened to the children of the nation could have called forth governmental inquiry.

The Federal Children's Bureau was conceived in the interest of all children; but it was fitting that the National Committee on which I serve, dedicated to working children, should have be- come sponsor for the necessary propaganda for its creation.

It soon became evident that the suggestion was timely. Sympathy and support came from every part of the country, from Maine to Cali- fornia, and from every section of society. The national sense of humor was aroused by the grim fact that whereas the Federal Government concerned itself with the conservation of mate- rial wealth, mines and forests, hogs and lob- sters, and had long since established bureaus to supply information concerning them, citi- zens who desired instruction and guidance for the conservation and protection of the children of the nation had no responsible governmental body to which to appeal.

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Though the suggestion was approved by President Roosevelt and widely supported by press and people, it was not until the close of President Taft's administration that the Federal Children's Bureau became a fact, and

the child with all its needs was brought into the sphere of federal care and solicitude. The appointment of Miss Julia Lathrop, a woman of conspicuous personal fitness and adequate training, to be its first chief was a guarantee of the auspicious beginning of its work. In the brief time of its service it has had con- tinuous evidence that the people of these United States intelligently avail themselves of the op-

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portunity for acquiring better understanding of the great responsibility that is placed upon each generation.

The Federal Children's Bureau would not fulfill the purpose of its originators if its serv- ice were limited to the study and record of the pathological conditions surrounding children. Its greatest work for the na- tion should be, and doubt- ^ less will be, to create standards for the states and municipalities which may turn to it for expert advice and guidance. With the living issues involved it is not likely to become mechanical.

The Children's Bureau is a symbol of the most hopeful aspect of America. Founded in love for children and confidence in the future, its existence is enormously significant. The first time I visited Washington after the estab- lishment of the Bureau I felt a thrill of the new and the hopeful, and I contrasted its bare office with the splendid monuments that had been erected and dedicated to the past. Some day, I thought, a lover of his country, under- standing that the children of to-dav are our

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future, will build a temple to them in the seat

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of the Federal Government. This building will be more beautiful than those inspired by the army and navy, by the exploits of science or commemoration of the dead. As my imagina- tion soared I fairly visualized the Children's Bureau developed, expanded, drawing from all corners of the land eager parents and teachers to learn not only the theory of child culture, but to see demonstrations of the best methods in playgrounds, clinics, classes, clubs, buildings, and equipment. The vision became associated with a memory of the first time I saw the Lucca della Robbias on the outer wall of the Floren- tine asylum and felt the inspiration of linking a great artist with a little waif. But those lovely sculptured babes are swathed. Some day, when the beautiful building of the Fed- eral Children's Bureau is pointed out in Wash- ington, I have it in my heart to believe that the genius who decorates in paint or plastic art will convey the new conception of the child, -free of motion, uplooking, the ward of the nation.

CHAPTER IX

ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN THE SETTLE-

MENT

THE settlement, through its preservation of several of the fine old houses of the neighbor- hood, maintains a curious link with what, in this city of rapid changes, is already a shadowy past. The families of some of the residents once lived nearby, and recall, when they visit us, the schools and churches they attended, their dancing classes, and the homes where they were entertained. One visitor told of the scandal in the best society, more than half a century ago, at the extravagance of a proud father, then an occupant of one of the settlement houses, who gave his young daughter a necklet of pearls on the day of her " coming-out ' party. Old men and women for whom the names of the streets evoke reminiscences de- light to revive the happy memories of their youth and to identify the few buildings, greatly altered as to their uses, that still remain.

Cherry Street and Cherry Hill, a short dis- tance away, call up traditions of a great orchard

to which we owe their names, its beauty in the

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blossoming time, the quaint, clean houses, each in its garden, all the pleasant, comfortable life of a bygone time. There is nothing pleasant or comfortable about Cherry Street to-day. Legends of the daring deeds of the Cherry Hill gang lend a dubious glamour to some parts of it, but for the rest it is dingy and dull.

We met Lena in one of the dull houses where we had been called because of her illness. The family were attractive Russians of the blond type, and the patient herself was very beautiful, her exceeding pallor giving her an almost ethereal look. The rooms were as bare as the traditional poor man's home of the story-books, but the mother had hidden the degradation of the broken couch with a clean linen sheet, relic of her bridal outfit.

After convalescence Lena was glad to accept employment and resume her share of the family burden. One day she rushed in from the tailor's shop during working hours, and, literally upon her knees, begged for other work. She could no longer endure the obscene language of her employer, which she felt was directed especially to her. The story to experienced ears signaled danger, but to extricate her without destruction of the pride which repelled financial aid was not simple. Readjustments had to be made to

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give her a belated training that would fit her for employment outside the ranks of the un- skilled. Fortunately, the parents needed little stimulus to comprehend the humiliation to their daughter, and they readily agreed to the post- ponement of help from her, although they were at a low tide of income.

The very coarseness of this kind of attack upon a girl's sensibilities I have learned in the course of years, makes it easier to combat than the subtle and less tangible suggestions that mislead and then betray. Sometimes these are inherent in the work itself.

A girl leading an immoral life was once sent to me for possible help. She called in the evening, and we sat together on the pleasant back porch adjoining my sitting-room. Here the shrill noises of the street came but faintly, and the quiet and privacy helped to create an atmosphere that led easily to confidence.

It was long past midnight when we sepa- rated. The picture of the wretched home that she had presented, — its congestion, the slovenly housekeeping, the demanding infant, the ill- prepared food snatched from the stove by the members of the family as they returned from work, — I knew it only too well. The girl her- self, refined in speech and pretty, slept in a bed with three others. She had gone to work

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when she was eleven, and later became a dem- onstrator in a department store, where the dis- play of expensive finery on the counters and its easy purchase by luxurious women had evi- dently played a part in her moral deterioration. Her most conscious desire was for silk under- wear; at least it was the only one she seemed able to formulate! And this trivial desire, in- finitely pathetic in its disclosure, told her story. As I stood at the front door after bidding her good-night, and watched her down the street, it did not seem possible that so frail a creature could summon up the heroism necessary to rise above the demoralization of the home to which she was returning and the kind of work open to her.

During that summer she came each day to the settlement for instruction in English, prelim- inary to a training in telegraphy, for which she had expressed a preference. Nothing in her conduct during that time could have been criti- cised, but subsequent chapters in her career have shown that she was unable to overcome the inclinations that were the evil legacy of her mode of life.

The menace to the morals of youth is not confined to the pretty, poor young girl. The lad also is exposed. I could wish there were more sympathy with the very young men who

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at times are trapped into immorality by means not so very different, except in degree, from those that imperil the girl. The careless way in which boys are intrusted with money by employers has tempted many who are not nat- urally thievish. I have known dishonesty of this kind on the part of boys who never in after life repeated the offense.

An instance of grave misbehavior of another character was once brought to me by our own