The boys’ club is another prop. It is the key to the boy that heads off the “gang” and the reformatory that lurks behind it. In the beginning, it grew out of a missionary’s great heart, and wherever there is heart in it one boys’ club is worth a thousand policemen’s clubs in the fight with the slum. The boys were breaking the windows of the mission house in Tompkins’ Square and the police could not drive them off. The missionary’s wife knew a plan, however: she invited them in to have coffee and cakes. That was the gospel in practical form for Tompkins’ Square, and the first boys’ club that grew out of that meeting has to-day an army of members which no building is big enough to house; and Tompkins’ Square, that was once given over to rioting, to “bread or blood” processions, has become orderly and peaceful. The last of the anarchists over there has taken to keeping a beer saloon and accumulating property. We have grafted the boys’ club upon the public school and we never did anything better.
The kindergarten is such a prop, and the cooking class is another—never a stronger in the fight with intemperance, that thrives upon bad cooking at home as upon nothing else. The whole reformed school is building new underpinnings for the lad who has so long been left to himself. We have replaced the three R’s with the three H’s—the head, the heart, and the hand. We are at last teaching the children to think. We are nearly where we can vote six millions of dollars for public schools as readily as for a battleship. When we get to where we can do it without a tremor, we shall be fairly on the home stretch. As yet we shudder at the great sums; but they are the opportunities of our greatness, over which we must learn to rejoice more than over fine ships, mighty railroads, vast wheat-fields, territorial expansion and a full treasury; because, if they are not heeded, these other things are but so many temptations and traps for our stumbling feet.
The social settlement is of all the substitute props the strongest. It takes all the rest into its plan to help; and it goes to the home, which is the kernel of all, and tries to help there with neighborly touch. That is the cure. Greed and selfishness killed the home; human sympathy only can bring it back. “My brother” is the word that has healing for all our social ills. The settlement has been compared to a bridge upon which men go over, not down, from the mansion to the tenement; for a bridge must be level to be good. There was a time when men went down to that work, or shot down their coal and their groceries, as if through a coal chute, in contemptuous settlement of brotherhood arrears. That did not work. The crop we raised from that was hatred and helplessness. But the personal touch can redeem even free soup; and if there is anything more hopeless than that I do not know it. I am told that here in Philadelphia, where it unaccountably survives, it is coupled, after all, with kindly inquiry and personal interest, serves as a means of opening the door merely. It is a bad key; but, if that is the use it is put to, as I am told by a venerable Quaker who confronted me sternly with the question, “Jacob, why did thee say in thy book that in Philadelphia common sense appears to be drowned in soup?”—if that is the way of it, I am willing to condone even free soup, otherwise outlawed as hopeless. It was never the way in my city.