Slum

“ If he’s an honest man, he raises his eyes to heaven, and blesses the name of Slum—mark that! You are acquainted with Westminster Abbey, Mrs Jarley?’
‘Yes, surely.’
‘Then upon my soul and honour, ma’am, you’ll find in a certain angle of that dreary pile, called Poets’ Corner, a few smaller names than Slum,’ retorted that gentleman, tapping himself expressively on the forehead to imply that there was some slight quantity of brain behind it. ”

“ The time is at hand when we shall bring to them in their slum the things which we must now bring them to see, and then the slum will be no more. How little we grasp the meaning of it all. In a report of the Commissioner of Education I read the other day that of kindergarten children in an Eastern city who were questioned 63 per cent did not know a robin, and more than half had not seen a dandelion in its yellow glory. ”

“ Writers of all parties and creeds in the Early Victorian days wrote eloquently of the slum dwellings of our great cities. Some of deeper insight than the rest saw that all was not well, even with the rose-covered cottage of the country-side. It is only within our own lifetime that we have begun to learn that it is morally and economically wicked for a nation to own slums. ”

“ And Slum, quiet, unsophisticated Slum, shadier than the shadiest of them all, but a man who took the keenest delight in the humors of life, and who did wrong from an inordinate delight in besting his neighbors. A man to smile at, but to avoid.
These were the men John Tresler, fresh from Harvard and a generous home, found himself associated with while he rested on his way to Mosquito Bend. ”

“ I spoke of the instinct for the crowd in the man as evidence that the slum had got its grip on him. And it is true of the boy. The experience that the helpless poor will not leave their slum when a chance of better things is offered is wearily familiar to most of us. One has to have resources to face the loneliness of the woods and the fields. We have seen what resources the slum has at its command. ”

“ Outsiders—relatives, friends, strangers, even another family—are brought in to share his home. He now lives in a perfect slum. And he pays for that slum about as much as he would for a home in the Bayonne garden apartments. ”

“ The slum work may be divided into three divisions: visitation work, the slum nursery, and the maintenance of the slum post. Wearing a humbler garb, even, than the regular Army uniform, the lassies start out on their daily tours of visitation. They take care of the sick, and at the same time, they clean the home and put everything in order. ”

“ No wonder that he looks prosperous and healthy, though he lives in a dingy slum, and that I look peevish and pale, though I reside on gravel, in an airy neighbourhood. Good Heavens! does he dare to speak of his misfortunes, when he has no calls to make? ”

“ And the tears shone in her gentle old eyes as she said it. When we have learned to smile and weep with the poor, we shall have mastered our problem. Then the slum will have lost its grip and the boss his job. ”

“ They know little or nothing of their history beyond what can be referred to personal recollection."
These, like the slum dwellers of a town, are recruited from outside, they do not constitute a race; they are the dregs of a race—persons who have dropped out of the line of march. ”

“ From the standpoint of simple decency and clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its mean streets, is a slum. Where sights and sounds abound which neither you nor I would care to have our children see and hear is a place where no man's children should live, and see and hear. ”

“ My father was a teacher, and it is because he was a good one and taught me that when growth ceases decay begins, that I am never going to be satisfied, no matter how good the schools get to be. I want them ever closer to the people's life, because upon that does that very life depend. Turn back to what I said about the slum tenant and see what it means: in the slum only 4.97 per cent of native parentage. All but five in a hundred had either come over the sea, or else their parents had. ”

“ Then, the books we read, if they understood them, would often greatly shock the slum-dwellers; the pictures we hang in our parlours would horrify them. Servants do not come from the slums or even from the lowest class ”

“ I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there. ”

“ The responsibility for the slum can be divided between money-grasping property owners and an indifferent puerile civic administration. The immigrant finds the tenements and the slums already established when he arrives and is the victim and not the cause of them. ”

“ But perhaps we had better reserve our pity for the home land. One does not see in the Arab village the ignoble squalor of a town slum, nor the dreary, hopeless poverty, nor the evil look of degraded people, nor the miserable intemperance. ”

“ They know well how they will have to tramp from slum to slum, losing work, and the difficulties which will beset them on this room-hunt. They are thankful to have a roof, even with cracks in it, and they will go on suffering—not in silence, perhaps, but without taking action, because they know if they go further they may fare worse.
The accommodation which these people will put up with is almost incredible. ”

“ Removed from the temptations which surround them in the city, from the depraved examples of slum life which everywhere confront them, they would find in the country the healthy, moral stimulus of contact with the soil. ”

“ They are far removed from the slum where the miserable are massed; but they have created a slum in their own souls. And of the two, the condition of him whose soul is a slum is truly the more grievous. ”

“ The misery which the slow evolution of urban and industrial civilisation has wrought in the crowded areas of our cities is manifest to the least observant eye. The pitiful condition of the man in the slum makes its clamorous appeal to the conscience of the race. ”

“ The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, political freedom, brought on an acute attack which threatened to become fatal. ”

“ It would be a questionable kindness anyway, for the slum dweller would be an unhappy misfit in the country and escape to his crowded alley on the earliest opportunity, like a drunkard to his cups. Sometimes a hard-working city clerk or tradesman hears the call to the country and succeeds in wresting his living from the soil. ”

“ What we must overlook in this characterization are the long miles of slum that stretch in front and behind and on each side of this district—neighbourhoods where, in spite of the redoubtable efforts of settlement workers, block organizers, and neighbourhood associations, there is no permanent institution, other than the public school or the sectarian church, to remind the inhabitants that they have a common life and a common destiny. ”

“ The slum population, however, is not wholly composed of such persons as I have spoken of. Large numbers of honest, temperate, industrious people are forced by poverty, and by the necessity of being near their work, into the dismal fate of living in the slums. ”

“ Ben Wah 444 (p. 001) THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM WHAT THE FIGHT IS ABOUT
The slum is as old as civilization. Civilization implies a race to get ahead. In a race there are usually some who for one cause or another cannot keep up, or are thrust out from among their fellows. They fall behind, and when they have been left far in the rear they lose hope and ambition, and give up. ”

“ They went to the house to which we had been asked to send the photograph, and found it in a slum in Hammersmith—an empty house, once kept by a woman who let lodgings, but then deserted and almost in ruins. ”

“ A slovenly housewife soon gives her cottage the aspect of a slum, and often gets it into such a mess that it can never be made quite nice again without almost rebuilding it; and at one time or another most of the old cottages have suffered in that way. ”

“ For instance, the children of your neighbours are likely to be the playmates of your own children, and the children of degenerate parents in the slum district of your city will possibly be the fellow-citizen partners of your own family. ”

“ Far more hated than the bacon, however, is the “slum,” a word which Pat informs me is derived from the “slumgullion” of the hobo. It is this “slum” that gives the doughboy his horror of anything like soup.
“When I get back to New York,” said a lad to me the other day, “I’m going to go into a real swell hotel and order a big dish o’ slum. Then I’m going to order a regular dinner, beefsteak and oysters and all the fixings, and then I’m going to sit and laugh at the slum.”
Pat came in with a whoop after dinner yesterday. “We had a change today,” he sang out, “they put a pickle in the beans!” ”

“ If you are tired of your slum -garret come and choose one of the flats of five rooms that are to be disposed of, and when you have once moved in you shall stay, never fear. The people are up in arms, and he who would venture to evict you will have to answer to them. ”

“ They are a record of the psychology of wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a description of the state of the slums. They are only a very dark and dreadful description of the state of the slummers. ”

“ Of course it ought not to be that way; these unfortunate persons ought not to have inherited from countless generations of urban ancestors the tastes, feelings and capacities binding them to their mode of life as strongly as the children of prosperity are bound to theirs. The mysterious suasion of their environment ought not to exert its incessant, irresistible pull. The105 call of the slum should sound through their very dreams with a less iron authority. ”

“ The Slum Sisters attached to the Settlement, who are distinct from the Maternity Nurses, visit the very poorest and worst neighbourhoods, for the purpose of helping the sick and afflicted, and incidentally of cleaning their homes. ”

“ For instance, one man may believe in the Over-Sea Colony, but feel no interest in the Inebriates' Home; another, who may not care for emigration, may desire to furnish a Factory or Rescue Home; a third may wish to give us an estate, assist in the Food and Shelter work, or the extension of the Slum Brigade. ”

“ Slumming parties, composed of respectable men and women whose morbid curiosity has been aroused by tales of the inconceivable vices forming the night-life of the demi-monde, are not infrequently found “going down the line” dropping into the houses of prostitution, viewing the bar, the private [Pg 59] rooms, the dance hall, the crap games and the vicious surroundings of the all night pest holes. To slum has, in a measure, become a fashionable fad. ”

“ In the slums, humanity is divorced from Nature under even worse conditions, and becomes wholly decadent. But in slum and in palace alike there is continually a feverish nerve-tension induced by unrest and worry ”

“ Shall not the testimony of a daughter of the slums be heard when the poor are being judged? I was reared in a tenement district of a New England metropolis, where the poor of many nations contended with each other for a scant living; and the only reason I am no longer of the slums is because a hundred heroes and heroines among my neighbors fought for my release. ”

“ Waifs of the City's Slums First among these barriers is the Foundling Asylum. It stands at the very outset of the waste of life that goes on in a population of nearly two millions of people; powerless to prevent it, though it gather in the outcasts by night and by day. ”

“ Women were dragged from their homes by the hundred and never seen again, and the denizens of the slums were informed that the city was now their property and that they might do what they chose with it. ”

“ They cling to their own bits of rooms and to the companionship of the members of their own families, brutal as they often are, and would rather stay and suffer, and die in the midst of all the filth and squalor that surrounds them in their own dens, than go to the big house, which, to them, looks very like a prison.
The sufferings of the wretched occupants of the Slums that we have been describing, when sick and unable to help themselves, makes the organisation of some system of nursing them in their own homes a Christian duty. ”

“ There is, first, the overcrowded dweller in our slums—poor men and women and boys and girls, dwelling as they do nine and ten and even more in a room—that room the only place for them to eat and sleep in. ”

“ Another field that is replete with possibilities is the teeming and kaleidoscopic life of our city slums, which the inexorable law of migration has crowded with strange peoples from the far corners of the earth; peoples who are as yet unassimilated, who still wear their exotic costumes and live their strange, foreign lives in our very midst. ”

“ At times I would wish for a life of poverty in the slums with a mate to living in my refined and elegant surroundings without any opportunity for gratification of this instinct. I found it absolutely necessary to spend one night out of fourteen in the city's slums. ”

“ JIM'S JOTTINGS.
["Do the poor make the slums, or the slums make the poor?"—Henry Lazarus, in "Landlordism."]
Is it the poor wot makes the Slums, or the Slums wot makes the poor?
Well, that's the question, Guv'nor, and I've 'eared it arsked afore,
And the arnser ain't so easy, if you wants to be O.K.
Don't suppose as I can settle it, but I'll have my little say.
My old friend Mister Lazarus, now, he ups and sez, sez he,
The great Ground Landlord is the great prime cause. "Yah! fiddlededee!"
Cries the House-Farmer; "Slums is Slums, acos the Poor is Pigs!" ”