POVERTY AND CHARITY IN SAN FRANCISCO. I. "No one who observes the modern American world can doubt that there is money enough, unselfishness enough, effort enough, honestly consecrated to the warfare against evil. But as Evangeline and her lover, each seeking the other with fervent devotion, met and passed unknowingly on the bosom of the Great River, so the need and the remedy constantly fail of connection, through the illguided zeal of the ministering hand." The quotation is from a paper read two or three years ago before the New York Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, by Mrs. Helen Hiscock Backus, one of the earlier graduates of Vassar College, now president of the general organization of college-bred women of which this New York association is a branch. The organization is made up of women holding degrees from Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Oberlin Colleges, Boston, Cornell, Michigan, and California Universities, and half a dozen more colleges of equal or nearly equal rank; and the president of this same New York branch is the young astronomer who took last year with special honor a doctor's degree, the first degree Columbia ever gave a woman Miss Winifred Edgerton, now Mrs. Merrill. In the paper I have quoted, Mrs. Backus is pointing out the place of these college women in philanthropic work. She deprecates their taking hold at once as "workers" on this or that charity; seeing that there is already more default of knowledge than of zeal in beneficence, she holds it peculiarly the province of college women to know,- to familiarize themselves first, that is, with the questions raised by foul streets and tenements and city misgovernment, bad feeding and inherited alcoholism, misuse of schools, worship of wealth and display, which underlie questions of relieving the resultant miseries; and then, after com ing to a fuller understanding of the ills there are needing their help, and the means possible to help them, they may see where and how to take hold. The advice is of wider application. For others besides college women the first need is to know, before they can lend a hand intelligently in beneficent work. For others besides those seeking to lend a hand, the first need is to know, for in all matters of social importance there is need of a correct public opinion in the many that are not doing the actual work, to back up the few that are doing it. And one who is ignorant of what is affecting the lives of other classes in his own community is pretty certain to do worse than leave unbacked the efforts to help them; he is pretty certain to be heedlessly doing something that seriously hinders. Doubtless this knowledge of what need and what means of relief exist in one's own community, is pretty sorely wanting everywhere; doubtless everywhere most of those who are working in charities have been drawn into the service of this or that one without much deliberate choice, and know little about the other things they might be doing instead, or might be utilizing for the aid of their own work; while the general public is impartially ignorant of them all. But I think that there is less knowledge and interest about its own poverty and relief in San Francisco than in other communities; for elsewhere there are books, and pamphlets, and magazine articles, and sermons, and addresses easily to be found, keeping people informed of what is the condition of the poor in their midst, what means of relief are in operation, and what others are needed, and urging the far more important means of prevention. It is easier for a San Franciscan to get good general information about poverty and help in London, Boston, New York, or Baltimore, than to get the like knowledge about San Francisco. The shelves of any large library or the pages of any reference index will confirm this. No doubt it is largely because the poverty of San Francisco is not very great or distressing, that it does not get studied, and talked and written about as much as that of other cities. We have to admit that people are sentimental, and take more interest in a good, thorough, picturesque case of destitution than in a dozen milder cases. Very horrible slums, mothers and babies starving upon a heap of straw, haggard seamstresses in garrets, make a dramatic appeal to imaginations that are apathetic to sufferings less ghastly, though perhaps greater. And again, the accomplished fact of misery to be relieved is comprehended by a simpler order of minds, and therefore by a far greater number of minds, - than the danger of misery to be averted. It is perfectly well known to thoughtful people, that there are in active operation in every city many forces producing want faster than charity can relieve it; yet it is nowhere possible to get anything like the amount of work and money for prevention as for relief. Nor is this because people are indifferent to the idea of so improving society as to prevent poverty, instead of mending it once made; on the contrary, the hearing that all forms of socialism get, and the sympathy with labor unions, show that the idea has taken a deep root, and is fast displacing the old church idea of the poor as a fixed class, whose divinely appointed lot is perpetually to receive alms, which the rich are perpetually to bestow. But when people once begin to think of the causes of poverty and to wonder if it cannot be prevented beforehand, they are pretty sure to desire some beautiful, complete, swift-acting plan: Utopias and milleniums fascinate the imagination far more than toilsome, inch-byinch improvements of drainage, and public schools, and city governments, and license laws, and training of neglected children, and the like. And they not only fascinate the imagination more; they tax the mind and judgment less. The more prosaic and unambitious methods of prevention call first for an amount of study that few will give, of investigation that requires an expert, before one even knows what is the best thing to do, and then a weary amount of work before he gets it done. Still again, the prevention of the ills of poverty and vice generally means a conflict with some one's interests, often backed by money and political power; while no one has the least objection to having the wrecks he has made picked up and mended by soft-hearted ladies. As a consequence, out of many people who are more or less moved with the idea. of preventing poverty and raising the condition of the unfortunate, most will go no farther than to some Utopia. "Looking Backward" is far easier reading than Mr. Dugdale's "The Jukes," or Mr. McCullough's "The Tribe of Ishmael," and how infinitely much more it promises! If Mr. Bellamy were to lecture in San Francisco, how much larger audiences he would get than the experts of the Charity Conference did! But it is exactly in these difficult directions, of seeking out and attacking the roots of crime and misery, that the most valuable literature of charities is produced: and for the reason that to get far in them requires not only kindness, zeal, and administrative ability, but something of the quality and training of the scholar, and by a process of natural selection those who do get far in them are likely to be writers of important sociological studies. We have not yet produced a group of this sort in California. The local branch of the College Alum- will take hold of one finds half a dozen næ Association, moved by Mrs. Backus's more pulled out of the pile with it. Is paper, tried last year to inform itself of it a question of sick babies? one is conthe conditions of charity in our own fronted with the impossibility of doing community. We found the inquiry not much for them till sanitary reform has at all simple. There was one who knew taken hold of the drainage; till physical all about the kindergartens, and another education has taught their mothers somewho knew all about the Society of St. thing of decent care; till temperance Vincent de Paul, and another who knew reform has saved the fathers' earnings all about the Aid Societies. There were for proper food, and clothes, and lodging; a number of excellent reports, that gave till a better heredity has rectified their a very clear idea of the condition and antecedents for generations back. And aims each of some one charity. But there there is much in all this that seems to were no generalizations, no statistics, no be met by no established charity, nor connecting links. The Associated Char- by any new one that could be devised. ities had not yet brought about as much Outside of a few fixed methods of reco-operation as now exists; so far as the lief, one is baffled by a sense of distance societies affiliated therein are concerned, and separation from the people he would it would now be possible to find a center help, sees no place where he can get hold where reports could be procured, and of them and know their needs. Nor is managers communicated with, and out- this only the result of inexperience; I line information obtained. The list judge that even an experienced person, in the directories was then the only as soon as he steps outside the lines of guide, and remains so as to all the organ- established institutions, finds the same. izations not yet affiliated with the Asso- difficulty in getting hold of the poor. ciated Charities. We did not get any Mrs. Helen Campbell, in "Prisoners of very deep or exhaustive knowledge of Poverty," speaks of the years of persistour subject; but the reports presented ent effort by which she edged, step by in the alumnæ association are perhaps step, as opportunity opened, into a the only place in which the facts they knowledge of the lives of the working record can be found all together, and girls of New York. may therefore be worth producing in substance here. Probably the inexperienced everywhere, even in a community where benevolent work is far more completely organized and discussed then here, are a good deal baffled and confused in beginning any such inquiry. The list of topics runs vaguely in their heads:child-saving, manual training, physical education, heredity, the temperance question, the tenement house question, hospitals, cooking schools, sanitary reforms, the growth of cities, co-operation and profit-sharing, child-labor, factory and poor laws, socialism, the care of the insane, the feeble-minded, the blind and deaf, penology,- each topic running into the others, so that whoever It lessens the confusion somewhat to discriminate at the outset between the poor who have in some way come under the charge of the more fortunate-asked for aid, or fallen into the hands of the law and those who still stand toward wouldbe helpers in the position of any other strangers who may be in trouble, but whom it is not easy to approach. That is, no one must confuse the poor as a whole with what students of charity call "the dependent and delinquent classes, into which, indeed, a rich man may fall by crime or mental defect, though they are chiefly made up from the poor. It is for these classes that most of what is properly called charity exists, as well as the whole equipment of penology. But as long as the most destitute and invertebrate poor man, trembling on the verge of dependence, does not fall over it, he remains in the class far more difficult to reach, of those who may need help yet are objects neither of charity nor of authority; in the same class with all, whether poor or not, that are so far exposed to dangers and ills as to have a. claim on their fellow-beings for aid and sympathy. Kindergartens, free lectures and reading rooms, women's unions and Christian Associations, Toynbee Halls and coffee-houses, offer this sort of aid, — not, strictly speaking, charities, but only benevolent helps. And far beyond what any benevolent institutions can do for people who are neither dependents nor delinquents, extend complex questions of the cause and prevention of most of the evils that exist in society, a field for reforms rather than for charities. So that at the outset the student of society, desiring to know before he tries to do, may find that his interest is rather with reforms than with chariities, and perhaps outside the range of any organized benevolences whatever. But even within the lines of what is strictly charity, it is impossible to go far without reference to the wider questions of cause and prevention. For most charities should not only relieve present suffering, but also guard against future evil, as our Boys' and Girls' Aid Society aims not only to rescue little ones from neglect and abuse for their own sakes, but also to bring them up to decent lives for society's sake. And lately what is called "the new charity" tells us that almost no charity can exist to itself alone; that almost no recipient of help is so cut off from affecting society in any way that his needs alone must be considered in helping him; the giver of alms must become also a student of social questions, or run the risk of bringing about indirect consequences that he by no means reackoned on. Now of this "new charity" we are as yet only beginning to hear in San Fran cisco. It is pretty well understood already that its keynote is the protest against indiscriminate almsgiving. Scarcely any one is ignorant that to the doles of the medieval Church and the English poor-laws is now credited in a large part the growth of a great destitute class, weak in energy and capability, dragging upon the skirts of modern civilization, and producing, by heredity, deterioration of the human race, just as we are flattering ourselves it is progressing phenomenally, "changed from glory into glory." But this general impression that "indiscriminate giving" is bad, is a different thing from the clear and practical conviction on this point that the "new charity" expresses. The phrase is on the lips of most givers here; but the fact that a number of San Francisco charities, especially the church ones, still hold aloof from the Associated Charities, shows that they have no very potent sense of the dangers of alms, or the need of co-operation to avert them. It is, indeed, necessary not merely to be told the conclusion of charity experts about this matter of giving, in order to catch their conviction about it. One has to review in some degree the data. on which their conviction is based; to know the history of the English poor laws, of Chalmers's Edinburgh experiment of diminishing poverty in his parish by stopping public alms; of the strict systems of the Continent, and their effect in lessening pauperism. One has to read the strong statements of the experts to realize the emphasis of their assertion on this point. As I have said, there is almost no literature of the sort here; for these generalizations we must go to the charity officials of Eastern cities. Let me give some idea of what the force of these expressions is : Fortunately for England, a spirit of independence still remains among the peasantry. The poor laws are thoroughly calculated to eradicate this spirit. They have succeeded in part . . . Even when they have the opportunity of saving, they seldom exercise it; but all that they earn beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house. The poor laws may therefore be said to diminish both the power and the will to save among the common people, and thus weaken one of the strongest incentives to sobriety and industry.1 England was brought nearer to the brink of ruin by the old poor law than she ever was by a hostile army.2 The parish actually supports and pays for the drunken excesses of the laborers. The character and habits of the laborers have... been completely changed. Industry fails, moral character is annihilated, and the poor man of twenty years ago, who tried to earn his money and was thankful for it, is now converted into an insolent, discontented, surly, thoughtless pauper, who talks of right and income, and who will soon fight for these supposed rights and income.3 Able-bodied men prefer a small sum in idleness to a larger sum in wages, attended with the condition of earning those wages by labor. We have in one place a young man saying: "I have 3s 6d a week from the parish. I do no work. I would rather have my 35 6d without working than toil to get 10s or 12s a week." . . . But are these people only idle? . . . These persons are making the parish pay 3s 6d a week out of the honest laborer's hard earnings, to maintain the constant promoters of crime, the greatest workers of mischief in the country. ... Again: All shame of begging is utterly banished. Nay, instances are to be found of the shame being turned the other way; and the solitary exception to the rule of parish relief under which a whole hamlet lived "being shamed out of her singularity and forced by her neighbors to take the dole like themselves." 4 Pauperism is a disease far more baneful and fatal in its tendency than we are apt to realize, and is fastened upon the community much more seriously and dangerously than we know. Mr. R. L. Dugdale of New York has carried with great pains and accuracy his study of hereditary pauand gives perism through six generations . . as the scientific conclusion therefrom that pauperism involves greater incapacity to sustain social relations than crime. That is, the condition of physical and mental inaptitude that is found in the sixth generation of the pauper is lower than that found in the sixth generation of the criminal 8 These are a few from a multitude of expressions with which a very slight reading will overwhelm one. I have somewhat digressed to quote, because it is the only way to give any idea of the insistence with which the point is made. By far the most demoralizing influence of our time To return to San Francisco conditions: and country is poor law outdoor relief.5 I have spoken of the poverty in San Francisco as much less than in other large cities. We made a good deal of effort to get at some clear knowledge as to how far true this very general impression is. It might be supposed that any intelligent citizen could tell whether 6 Mrs. Lowell: "Public Relief and Private Charity." 7 Chas. W. Smiley, Address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 8 Mr. Slocum, in a tract of the Baltimore Charity Organization Society. |