Love, the Law of Life

Although the world is very large, it would be an astonishing thing if there could be found, in Japan, or China, or in Western countries, a slum which did not boast of its gamblers. Even in Chicago, the individual who has the most influence in the slums is not Miss

Addams but the slum boss, the head of the bullies. These plundering groups approve of the capitalistic order, and they steal from both the rich and the poor; and they are kept, in this capitalistic age, because even such mad dogs as they are at times a necessity. If we make a thorough investigation of any slum, we discover that the character bankrupts are quite prosperous, and that the good working folk are kept gasping under their oppression. The gamblers, of course, prosper, and then there are the groups allied with secret prostitution, the blackmailers, and the gobetweens in clandestine love affairs.

The less corrupt groups in the slums are the unskilled workers. The rope and rag pickers, the rat catchers, the funeral porters, the candy venders, and the drain cleaners are among the better groups. Then follow the eggars and the crippled and disabled. The fact that in the slum of about 2,000 tenements where I lived there were nearly 800 deformed people indicates how many of these unfortunates are leading sad lives at the very bottom of society.

Thinking of these conditions I can but doubt if character bankrupts can ever improve their lot in the world, even though a régime of socialism were achieved. Some say it were better if such people could all be killed off. It were easy to let these people die, but to help them scientifically and make friends of them, from the motive of human love, is not altogether an unworthy effort. I consider that these people, these dregs of society, are absolutely different in nature from genuine laborers. For the latter it is unnecessary to carry on neighborhood improvement movements. It is sufficient to permit them to have good labor unions. They elevate their own position by class struggle. But for people who through their own physical, mental, or spiritual incapacities are unable to ascend toward emancipation, neighborhood movements are indispensable.

In betterment work there are inexpressible hardships to be endured. It is not a work which can be accomplished by mere money. If it were, then the wealthy could do it. But this work is beyond the power of property: it may be done only by the } contact of character. Men and women of social power must needs make the great sacrifice of going | and living among those who are social castaways. /

I say it is a sacrifice, for they must suffer constantly from threats, misunderstandings, poverty, and hardships. | | Conspicuous movements such as socialism attract the attention of society forthwith, but the work of nursing sick folk fails to draw people’s notice. Folk who are ill require nursing, and for folk who are socially ill a similar service of nursing is needful. These folk do not have the health that the laboring classes have. They are the portion of society that is eternally ailing. It were no trouble at all to kill them. Indeed, killing off all those ill with contagious diseases and all the discharged convicts would relieve the world of much vexation. But just as we have hospitals in which the effort is made to repair broken bodies and lead them back to a relatively better course of life, so must we have a concern toward folk who are socially ill.

At least it is necessary to make the effort to arrest the social malady while it is light, so that the contagion may not spread. I believe that in this endeavor relief systems will inevitably be required, even if a socialistic age be ushered in. An insurance system is a form of relief, though it goes under a different name. But the bringing into the slums of these relief measures through education forms what is called neighborhood work.

The fundamental spirit of settlement work is kindss to neighbors. It is just helping a man as a eighbor because he is in trouble right beside you. Settlement work by no means requires the construc- ‘tion of elaborate buildings. It is quite enough if men

} and women who prefer plain living go into the slum

| tenements and cheerfully dwell there. Sometimes, to

| advertise the work, people will build a large establish-

' ment, but that is not the true spirit of the settlement. It is quite sufficient if you, even though naked, show kindness to your neighbors.

This spirit is not one that makes a fuss over religion or doctrine or belief or philosophy. It is not even a method of evangelism. It is simply being kind to one’s neighbors. It means becoming a nurse to the child ‘cast away in the alley, teaching reading to the old man who is ashamed to go to a night school, becoming a sewing teacher, an adviser in personal matters, a friend to folk who lack the comforts of life. It may not be easy work, but neither is it to be done through unreasonable hardship. One has to travel with little baggage, but must keep on going, unremittingly.

Mr. Catchpool, the assistant director of Toynbee Hall, says that recently there have been formed nine unions of unskilled workers at Toynbee Hall. In studying the slum district from this center the need for these unions came to be felt, and this development followed, in which were grouped together all the women who were doing piece work. This is an ideal form of neighborhood work.

If one attempts settlement work on too elaborate a scale, one must yield to capitalism, and settlement work degenerated by capitalism is futile. Since in this work the methods that are kindest toward the neighbors must be adopted, it must, if labor unions prove necessary, start such movements against capitalism. Therefore, neighborhood work cannot be oppressed by capitalism. In this work there is no call to do anything violent. All that is necessary is to work hard with a free spirit. |

When I asked Miss Addams for reports of her work, she replied that there were none. “I don’t make reports,” she said, “‘because the work is my own.”

My neighborhood movement is my own humble work—my own and the sacrificial service of a few who have been sympathetic. Penniless as I was, I could not dream of attempting anything on the scale of Hull House. I do not believe that work such as that at Hull House can be done by everyone; but the humble sort of work that I am doing can be done by all. If one does have some money, let one do various things as long as the funds hold out. When there are no funds, then work barehanded. With this feeling I worked fourteen years in the slums, and today I still hold it unchanged.

I would have women especially understand this neighborhood work, for they are by nature fitted for it. One reason for the success of Miss Addams’ work is that it is carried on by a woman. The work of Miss Wald in Henry Street, New York, in organizing the Volunteer Nurses Association and carrying on her neighborhood work, is held in high respect by all. ai believe that in neighborhood betterment work the one best fitted is the possessor of a refined nature, of delicate feeling, such as women usually have. If a person_wishes to live in the slum tenements with a

| purpose such as I ‘T had, he a or she can begin the work \ at_any_ time,. _without_1 the, slightest. _anxiety about " finances. My belief is that if college graduates will \ thus actually practice codperative life with the women jand the young people of the submerged tenth, entering bet the life of love, social conditions will undoubtedly

I held certain ideas regarding the training of children before spending years in the slums teaching children, but when, in the ninth year after our wedding, our first boy was born, I was forced to consider very carefully what policy should be adopted in educating our child. If we had not been working in the slums, there would have been no occasion for us to worry thus about our boy’s training; but since we were living there and wished to continue working for the slum folk, the coming of the child was for us a very serious affair. From the time that my wife became pregnant I suffered anxiety, for all the while disorderly drunken people were about us and rogues would come in to threaten us. Knowing as I did the high mortality of infants in the slums, I felt that it would be absolutely impossible for us to raise our child in the slums. I had investigated the mortality of infants in our neighborhood and was astonished to discover that of 62 born in one year 45 had died. How could we expect to raise our boy in a slum where the infant mortality was so high?

The mortality of infants in Japan has increased with the growth in the number of laborers in the cities. I recollect that in the year 1913 the mortality of infants was 151 per thousand. As compared with the rate for the whole country the mortality in the slums was four times as high. Therefore I felt that raising children in the slums amounted to murdering more than half of them within the first year. My first undertaking, then, was to find in the vicinity of the slum a house suitable for the child and his mother.

In reality it is quite to be expected that children cannot be brought up in the slums, for we adults were constantly troubled with skin diseases, and my wife and I both were afflicted continually with trachoma. As for other contagious diseases, during the thirteen and a half years that we lived here, our slum was thrice stricken with the plague, five times with cholera, twice with dysentery, thrice with smallpox, and every year without exception with typhus. The conditions were extremely dangerous. In particular, at the time of the smallpox epidemic of 1917, ours was the only house that escaped, there being deaths in every other house. Every day from our slum seventeen on an average were taken to the quarantine hospital. When the influenza epidemic occurred, people died in practically every house, and in our home my wife and I were the only ones left alive. From the summer of 1920 to the end of the following year we had to send six typhus patients from our home to the quarantine hospital.

Fighting against these diseases in the slums was inevitably hard work, but in the slums particularly there is always the danger of contracting tuberculosis when one becomes a bit exhausted. Practically every exhausted person, if allowed to continue so, develops advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. I had nursed scores of these people, and I did not have the heart to raise our boy in the slums. However, since I could not live far away from the slum, we decided upon living with my mother on the street facing the slum.

The children of the slums are for the reasons that I have stated absolutely to be pitied. It is strange that they grow up atall. In particular, think of the babies that are carried strapped to the backs of their mothers who must go out to work all day, with no time allowed for changing the babies more than once or twice. How sore and blistered their skin becomes from being kept tied soaking wet on their mothers’ backs. There are nurseries in the slums, to be sure, but they are extremely poor, and can accommodate but few. The consequence is that many children are practically left alone in the alleys. When they become big enough to walk about, they shortly, from lack of sleep, become completely changed in disposition.

I can make the positive statement that ninety-nine of every hundred children in the slums suffer from nervous exhaustion, the reason being that every one of for this condition are the cooplike houses, the lack of bedding, the incessant biting of bedbugs, fleas, and lice, and the absence of means of relief from the heat of summer and the cold of winter. If I say no more than this, the reader will merely think that these are the conditions to be expected in the slums, but let one actually live in the slums and one will inescapably come to feel what fearful enemies to humanity all these conditions are.

Take the pest of bedbugs alone: Mr. K. Hashimoto, the principal of the Reigan Primary School, in Fukagawa, Tokyo, in his report, A Study of the Special Teaching of Children in the Doss Houses, writes that of 49 children investigated, 39 were unable to sleep in the summer because of bedbugs; and he gives a table of the number of bedbugs killed each night in the houses, ranging from 14 in five houses ‘up to 90 in one house, twelve of the houses reporting more than 40 each night, showing what cruel suffering the children are forced to endure. From my own experience, there are no homes in the slums where less than 45 bedbugs are killed nightly. Every summer we slept in a kind of hammock, but even then my wife suffered from nervous exhaustion throughout the summer. As for the slum children, this loss of sleep utterly changes their natures. Add to this the malnutrition and the shocking environment of the slums, and it will be seen how absolutely impossible it is to look for good children to come from the slums. In the earnest hope of providing for these children just a little chance for sleep and health and consolation, we have struggled and collected a limited equipment.