Konrad Bercovici

“ When the father comes home drunk they envy him and will soon imitate him. They help the burglars hide, and chase the pickpocket over the roofs, together with the detectives, giving advice in turn to the hunted how to escape and to the policeman how to catch him; rejoicing when the bad one has escaped and booing him along the street when he is handcuffed. And every year their domain extends a little further until it approaches the rich. A block from Riverside drive and two from Fifth Avenue—extending continually, like a cankerous wound. ”

“ I finally stammered out, while I took out my notebook.
No answer.
"Are you Mrs. S.?" I repeated again, as I regained my composure.
"Don't take away my children, Mister. Don't take away my children," the poor mother yelled and growing hysterical she repeated this terrible cry in heartrending tones, tearing her hair. "Don't take them away."
The poor tots came out from under the table. Quickly she pushed them back, and continued to cry at the top of her voice the same sentence: "Don't take away my children. They are mine, mine. My God, they are mine." ”

“ Pale, undersized, violent children at play in the iron street; the brown, steamy warmth of Jewish coffee-houses on Grand Street; sick tenement rooms quivering and breathless in summer heat—starkly hungry with the December wind cutting through broken windows; poets, musicians, men and women with the blood of heroes and martyrs, babies who might grow up to be the world's great—stunted, weakened, murdered by the unfair struggle for bread. ”

“ Evil growths cling to it—houses of prostitution, sweat-shops which employ the poor in their bitter need at less than living wages, stores that sell them rotten food and shabby clothing at exorbitant prices, horrible rents, and all the tragi-comic manifestations of Organised Charity.
Every person of intelligence and humanity who has seen the workings of Organised Charity, knows what a deadening and life-sapping thing it is, how unnecessarily cruel, how uncomprehending. ”

“ But giving to the organised charities is worse than stealing the last crust of bread from the lost in the desert. Man's pride, his sense of shame is his last property, the only one he has that might help him in his struggle when he is down. Organised charity robs him of this last thing, robs him and his wife and his children and children's children. ”

“ The indignities to which the poor are subjected in the offices of charity and by the employés of these organisations are of such a nature that it is my honest belief that criminals get more consideration in the police station, before the judge or in prison. After all, what are the poor guilty of? Is poverty a crime? Is it not the inevitable result of the present organisation of society? Is it possible that in the present industrial system there should be no poor and no helpless human beings? ”

“ They are the greatest sufferers. Under the cloak of charity men and women are tortured. Each piece of bread is scalded with tears and pains, and if another Napoleon should arise there is a job waiting for him—to burn down the modern Inquisition, destroy the torture chamber, abolish the "Question," the "Test," to save the poor from organised charity. ”

“ They are the offspring of degenerates—of the poor."
In all the world, in all the charitable institutions, poverty is a crime. Thus are the children, the orphans, treated like little would-be criminals and every move is regarded with suspicion. Not half of the money given for their food is spent on food and not a half that is given for their clothing is spent for them. The whole institution is a shame and the man who thought he was performing a good deed when he left a bequest to shelter the children of the poor is cursed instead of being blessed. ”

“ If it had not been only yesterday that she seemed so determined not to part with them I would think that prospective matrimony is the cause of her change of heart. The Little God is a mean fellow, and with his dart often poisons a heart; especially a mother's. But after all I know this is not the reason. The woman is too hungry to think of love. Nature is on her guard. She does not want hungry beings to procreate. What is more certain is that she can't stand hunger, can't see her children hungry, and has probably made up her mind that the children's health, life, is worth her unhappiness. ”

“ Another man told me that he did not think the sun ever rose since he was in the institution. By the thousands and thousands, these, our fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers, whose blood flows in our veins, whose toil we still enjoy, the makers of houses and bridges and machines—they all rot in some prison—a Home—under the pretence of humanity and pity. We don't want them to beg on the street, is the general excuse. ”

“ Early in the morning she will return to the children and buy bread and milk with the price of a night's degradation. How that brute tore the shawl from her face! "Show your sweet face, madame. If you are ashamed to show yourself there is no need to come here at all." When a young woman has lost her shame why should she beg? It's midnight now. I can't sleep. Where is she now? Where are they all? All those organised charity has driven to the street. ”

“ The whole world calls home the place where one lives. For the poor, the old ones who cannot work any longer, "the Home" is the place where they die. It's the place that stamps them, brands them as eternal paupers. ”

“ The neighbours help her out, but they are all poor people. I am sure that the chairman will not allow her any pension. She will have to give her children to the orphan home. I even tried to convince her that it is the best she could do. But she cried so much!
It is terrible. No escape. However, I make my report; it will not help her in the way she wants. She has antagonised the chairman and he is not a forgiving man. And to think that he represents Christ on earth! He is Charity! I know that he is one of the worst employers. He crushes every strike with an iron fist. ”

“ On the way Cram expounded a new theory: The charities to buy an island somewhere and send all the applicants there—women and children separated from men—all to live in one huge building—a big home for the poor. It would cost less, he figured.
"But they would not go—they would not go, the scoundrels!" he lamented. "We are too easy on them. We are really doing bad work. We are encouraging paupers, our rule should be: don't give a cent until the applicant has no other alternative, 'charity or suicide.' But we are all weaklings, sentimental trash!" ”

“ The law, the police, the church are the accomplices of charity. And how could it be otherwise, considering those who give, how they give, and the terrible doctrine of "the deserving poor"? There is nothing of Christ the compassionate in the immense business of Organised Charity; its object is to get efficient results—and that means, in practise, to just keep alive vast numbers of servile, broken-spirited people. ”

“ Once you depend upon charity all privacy is gone. The sanctity of the home is destroyed. It is as though the family were living in some one else's—in the charities'—home. The investigator comes into the house unannounced any time of the day or night, questions anybody she finds in the house, criticises the meals, the curtains; goes around to the grocery, to the neighbours, looking for a "clue" that will give to the institution the right to cease helping the particular "case," to "cut her" as they say. ”

“ Among her shoes, her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but an accumulation of sights—endless sights—is a great city? or for what else is it desirable?) was there not room for one Lusus (not Naturae, indeed, but Accidentium?) What if in forty-and-two-years' going about the man had scraped together enough to give a portion to his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds—whom had he injured?—whom had he imposed upon? The contributors had enjoyed their sight for their pennies. ”

“ Was the one hundred and thirty-five dollars enough for her to support her children? And I imagined them all starved and sick, dying in hospitals. All through my fault. I should have known that they would not reform their investigating system because of my report. How I hated myself. How I hated the whole world. At night when I went home I was ashamed to kiss my children, for I had committed a crime. As I thought of the inscriptions on the doors: "For the poor of the land shall never cease;" ”

“ No vacant house is to be seen around the celebrated "lung blocks." The terrible stench coming from across the river, where the garbage of the city is dumped, has killed the sense of smell of the poor wretches living there. They wonder at you when you keep handkerchief to your nose while passing. It is an ordeal to pass along Avenue A between Twenty-fifth and Thirty-fourth Streets. The poisonous gas combines with the stench of the slaughter house, and the piled up garbage in the river. Still the streets are full of children, playing, and God only knows why the poor have so many children. ”

“ And does the manufacturer think of that? And does the milkman, a devout church-goer, who baptises his milk, think of the children he is killing, of the future generations he is crippling? And does the canner think of that when he allows rotten meat to go into his cans? No. They are all making a living and do not believe that animals should be killed for food.
I knew a young lady who got a job as investigator—a nice young, sentimental girl. After a few months' work she was the terror of the poor and the pet of the Manager. ”

“ An applicant does not want to get out of the investigator's room. She yells, cries and screams. "I want to see the Manager—I want to see the Manager—I have been put out of my rooms—my children are on the streets." The investigator, Mrs. B., uses force, but the woman holds on at the door. "I want to see the Manager. You can't torture me that way. I want to see the Manager." She screams yet louder. The janitor is called and he does his duty. Takes hold of the woman and puts her out. The woman screams in the street. ”

“ But when the Manager calls them into his office and proves to them that they have been lied to and deceived; that the pauper is a habitual liar; that you cannot believe a single word they say; when he tells them [Pg 146] that if they do not prove more adroit the next time their position is not suited to them, then they look at the poor with other eyes. He or she is no more a subject for pity, a wreck that has to be pulled ashore. It is bread and butter for herself. If she allows herself to be deceived by an applicant she endangers her own position. ”

“ Such is the dread of the "investigator," and almost all the applicants are women, and all the investigators are women—mothers—sisters, sweethearts—but their trade has hardened them so much that judging by their actions one would think them wild beasts. And still the Managers think that they are "too tender hearted." It is the whole system of organised charity that is criminal—debasing both the giver and he that receives, and this is not meant for the charities of this country alone. It is meant for the charities of the whole world over.
"He who giveth to the poor," is no more. ”

“ Like patriotism, charity is respectable, an institution of the rich and great—like the high tariff, the open shop, Wall street, and Trinity Church. White slavery recruits itself from charity, industry grows bloated with it, landlords live off it ”

“ The professional pauper. These professional paupers have a regular system of obtaining money. They know the names and locations of all charitable institutions, know what to say to one and what to another—bribe the janitor and silence the grocer and butcher. Borrow children from neighbours so as to make the family appear bigger, and sell to others, novices, their knowledge, or work on the basis of percentage. And for all this only Charity, criminal, organised Charity, is to blame. ”

“ It seems that in his daily morning walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus that sat begging alms by the wayside in the borough. The good old beggar recognised his daily benefactor by the voice only, and when he died left all the amassings of his alms (that had been half a century, perhaps, in the accumulating) to his old bank friend. Was this a story to purse up people's hearts and pennies against giving an alms to the blind? ”

“ You are giving to charity; a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand dollars a year. Why not give it to organised charity and then send all the deserving to us? Not a cent is given before a thorough investigation is made by people trained to do the work and who know how. Contribute a regular sum yearly to organised charity. It will save you the annoyance of the outstretched hand and at the same time you will feel that you have done your duty towards the poor of the land. ”