Jacob A. Riis 1849–1914. The Battle with the Slum. 1902.
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| vital touch for the machine charity that reaped a crop of hate and beggary. Charity organization—“conscience born of love” some one has well called it—is substituting its methods in high and low places for the senseless old ways. Its champions are oftener found standing with organized labor for legislation to correct the people’s wrongs, and when the two stand together nothing can resist them. Through its teaching we are learning that our responsibility as citizens for a law does not cease with its enactment, but rather begins there. We are growing, in other words, to the stature of real citizenship. We are emerging from the kind of barbarism that dragged children to the jail and thrust them in among hardened criminals there, and that sat by helpless and saw the foundlings die in the infant hospital at the rate—really there was no rate; they practically all died, every one that was not immediately removed to a home and a mother. For four years now a joint committee of the State Charities’ Aid Association and the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor has taken them off the city’s hands and adopted them out, and in every hundred now eighty-nine live and grow up! After all, not even a Jersey cow can take the place of a mother with a baby. And we are building a children’s court that shall put an end to the other outrage, for boys taken there are let off on probation, |