Better days came for her and her mother, for the ladies took them up and cared for them. They were made happy and I ought to have been, but I was not. Let me confess it right here and have done with it. I am no scrapper; I have too much else to do to go around picking quarrels with everybody. I try hard to do as the Apostle says: “live peaceably with all men as far as in me lies”; but how can it lie very far in anybody with that kind of a pawnbroker in the landscape? I own that the notion of having one little round with that man, just one little one, has charms that I cannot get around.
SHANTY DWELLINGS IN A TENEMENT YARD From “The Battle with the Slum.” Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
To this tenement (see illustration facing page 100) my business as a police reporter led me. A home had been murdered there: a drunken husband had killed his wife. I know it is a common belief that drunkenness accounts for pretty nearly all the poverty there is. I do not find it so. It did in this case and there are enough such and to spare; but I think the verdict of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, once upon a time, came nearer the truth, namely, that forty per cent. of the helpless poverty was due to drunkenness, or the drunkenness due to the poverty. I forget the exact way they put it, but that was the sense of it, and it was good sense. Suppose you had to live in such a place as this! (See illustration facing page 102.) Do you think human life would seem especially precious or sacred, and don’t you think you would run to the saloon as, by comparison, far the more decent and human spot in that place? I know I would; and I think that one of our worst offenses against the brother is, after letting him be robbed of his home to leave him at the mercy of the saloon as the one place of human companionship for him, the one humanly decent spot in all his environment. I said “letting him be robbed.” There lies on my table a report of the Health Department of the year 1869, and it opens at the page upon which is recorded the result of a tour of the Sanitary Committee through the tenement-house districts that year. They found that the landlords kept those houses “as a business and generally as a speculation. He was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent. and frequently exceeded thirty—the complaint was universal among the tenants that _they were entirely uncared for_—the agent’s instructions were simple but emphatic: collect the rents in advance, or, failing, eject the occupant.” You see the scheme of the robbery. It is plain enough.