Friendly Visiting among the Poor Part 2

[1] "Rich and Poor," p. 211.

[2] pp. 141 _sq_.

[3] "Charities Record," Baltimore, Vol. I, No. 6.

[4] "Rich and Poor," pp. 138 _sq_.

[5] pp. 242 _sq_.

[6] See Warner's "American Charities," pp. 177 _sq_.

[7] George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda."

[8] pp. 22 _sq_.

[9] "Charities Review," Vol. II, p. 54.

[10] p. 11.

[11] Thirteenth Report of Boston a.s.sociated Charities, p. 42.

[12] See "Charities Review," Vol. VI, pp. 402 _sq_.

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CHAPTER III

THE BREADWINNER AT HOME

We have considered the breadwinner as worker, neighbor, and citizen; we now turn to the breadwinner as husband and father. It has been said that the home is not only the true unit of society, but that it is the charitable unit as well, and that when we deal with anything less than a whole family, we deal with fractions. Much of our charitable work is still fractional. It not infrequently happens, for instance, that the members of one poor family will come in contact with dozens of charitable people representing many forms of charitable activity, and that none of these will ever have considered the family as a whole.

The Sunday-school teacher, the kindergartner, the day nursery manager, the fresh air charity agent, the district nurse, the obstetric nurse, the church almoner, the {45} city missionary, the relief agent, the head of the mothers' meeting, the guild teacher, the manager of the boys' brigade or girls' friendly,--all these will have touched the family at some point, but will never have taken the trouble to make a picture of the family life as a whole, and of the effect of their charity upon it. They may have a.s.sumed important responsibilities now and again, home responsibilities that belonged primarily to members of the family, and helped to hold the family together; but the chances are that they will none of them have worked continuously or thoroughly enough to learn from their blunders or to repair their mistakes.

I have mentioned home responsibilities. Let us consider, for a moment, what these are. They have an old-fas.h.i.+oned and conservative sound, but the fundamental facts of life are old-fas.h.i.+oned. The man is still the head of the normal family, and, as the head, still owes his best endeavor to secure for the other members of the family the means of subsistence. The wife's part in the family is to transform the means provided into a home. The children, {46} for their part, should be teachable and obedient; and, as their own strength waxes and their parents' wanes, they should stand ready to provide for father and mother both the means of subsistence and the home environment. These are the prosaic but fundamental elements of home life, and, when they are lacking, neither the marriage ceremony, nor the sanctions of law and custom, can prevent the home from becoming a sham home, a breeding place of sin and social disorder.

It is my misfortune that, in attempting to meet the needs of those who visit the poor, I must dwell more upon the difficulties than upon the encouragements of such work. There are many poor homes where every essential element of home life exists. The home may be of the humblest sort,--it may be in one room,--but, to the best of his ability, the man is struggling to provide for his family; the woman is striving to make the little shelter homelike; and the children are learning that, out of the simplest elements, a certain measure of peace, orderliness and growth may be won. The home relation is right, and, though sickness, {47} industrial depression, accident, or some other of the misfortunes that a.s.sail us from without may have made charitable relief necessary for a long time, the elements of successful charitable aid are there, because the home life _works_ with the visitor to win back health and independence.

There is a deep satisfaction in protecting such families from the careless, patronizing charity of the thoughtless almsgiver, whose unsteady hand would give them a feast to-day and a famine to-morrow.

There is deep satisfaction in cooperating with such families to conquer difficulties. There is a deeper satisfaction, however, in turning a sham home into a real one; in teaching the slatternly, irresponsible mother the pleasure of a cleanly, well-ordered home; in helping a man who has lost his sense of responsibility toward wife and children to regain it. Even at the risk of drawing a too gloomy picture, I dwell in this chapter, therefore, upon the husband and father who is either lazy or drunken or both.

The married vagabond has many {48} characteristics of the single vagabond or tramp, though he is usually less enterprising. His is a type peculiar to our large cities, where political, industrial, and charitable conditions have helped to make him what he is. There is a sense in which he is not responsible for his faults; but there is a sense in which we are none of us responsible for ours, and when we are once permanently committed to this view of ourselves, there is no health in us. To treat the married vagabond as not responsible, is only to increase his irresponsibility.

"One man I know who has done hardly a stroke of work for years," says Mrs. Bosanquet; "during his wife's periodical confinements he goes off on the tramp, leaving her to take her chance of charity coming to the rescue, and returns when she can get to work again. I have known fathers who would send their hungry children to beg food from their neighbors, and then take it to eat themselves; and one I have known who would stop his children in the street and take their shoes from their feet to p.a.w.n for drink. The negative att.i.tude of a man to his own family is {49} an impossible one; if responsibility disappears, it will be replaced by brutality." [1]

And again, from the same book: "Take a case which is constantly recurring. A man has let himself drift into bad ways: he neglects his work, spends his money for drink, cares less and less about his family; the children become more and more neglected and starved. At last some charitable agency steps in. 'The man is hopeless,' it says, 'there is no question of relieving him of responsibility, for he has already lost all sense of that, and matters cannot be made worse by our interference. The children must not be allowed to suffer for their father's sins; we will feed and clothe and educate them, and so give them a chance of doing better than their parents.' All very well, if this were the only family; and we should all rush joyfully to the work of rescuing the little ones. But next door on either side are men with the same downward path so easy before them, and to a large extent restrained from entering upon it by the thought, 'What will become of the children?' This restraining {50} influence will break down much more rapidly for the knowledge that Smith's children are better cared for since he gave up the battle, and so the mischief spreads down the street like an epidemic." [2]

The method to be followed in dealing with the family of the married vagabond must depend upon circ.u.mstances, but it will usually be necessary to let him find out what the charitable community expects of him, and this he will hardly do unless the charitable withhold all aid except in the form of work. A visitor will not succeed in bringing this about until he has taken the trouble to find out what sources of relief are open to the family, and has persuaded each source to withhold relief. Visitors often hesitate to urge this radical measure, fearing that it will bring suffering upon the wife and children; but the plain fact is that the family of a lazy man must suffer, that no amount of material relief can prevent their suffering.

On this disputed point I venture to quote what I have written elsewhere: "Let us {51} consider the chances that a married vagabond's children have of escaping suffering in a large city. . . . They are born into a world where the father is inconsiderate and abusive of the mother; where cleanliness, fresh air, and good food are not a.s.sured to them; where all the economic laws of the civilized world seem topsy-turvy; where things sometimes come miraculously, without any return for them in labor, and where they sometimes do not come at all.

They are born, moreover, with diseased bodies, often with the taint of alcoholism in their veins; too often with some other inherited malady, such as epilepsy or unsound mind, as a direct result of parental excesses. How can we say that we 'do not let children suffer,' so long as alms keeps together thousands of these so-called homes in our large cities, and, worst of all, so long as into these homes thousands of helpless, unfortunate babies are born every year? If I were one of these same little ones, and could see what the charitable people were about, I should feel inclined to say: 'Ladies and gentlemen, you have supplied the doctor, and the nurse, {52} and the fuel, and the sick diet; doubtless you mean it kindly, but I have been a.s.sisted into a world where you don't intend to give me a fair chance. You know that my father won't work for me, that my mother has no time to care for me, and that my brothers and sisters must fare worse than ever, now that there's one more mouth to feed. Moreover, my nerves are none of the strongest, and my body none of the stoutest. Unless you intend to do a great deal more for me, I'm sorry you didn't do less. Frankly, I don't thank you.'" [3]

Often when a man finds that charitable people are quite in earnest, that they really intend to place upon his shoulders the responsibility of his own family, he will bestir himself and go to work. He is not likely to stay and let his family starve. In fact, I have often found that the withholding of relief from the family of the married vagabond has the immediate effect of improving the material condition of the family--the man has either found work or left home. This method of being charitable requires courage, but if {53} people would only see how wretchedness is perpetuated by the temporizing method, it would require courage to give small doles.

In many states there are laws for the punishment of the man that will not support his family. Some of these enactments are of very little use, but several of the New England states have effective laws.[4]

When a complete cutting off of charitable supplies fails to bring a man to some sense of his duty, the visitor should try to have him punished by the courts. The evidence of one who has faithfully visited a family for a long time is very valuable in such cases, though conviction is often difficult to secure for lack of the wife's testimony. If the married vagabond that has been punished is still incurably lazy and irresponsible, the visitor should not allow his desire to reform the man to stand in the way of the best interests of the children, born and unborn. The wife's duty to her husband is a very sacred one, But so is her duty to her children. When {54} all other measures fail, the home should be broken up.

Only those who have had wide charitable experience will be likely to consider this separation of man and wife justifiable. Says Mrs.

Josephine Shaw Lowell: "I have not the slightest doubt that it is a _wrong_; and a great wrong, to give help to the family of a drunkard or an immoral man who will not support them. Unless the woman will remove her children from his influence, it should be understood that no public or private charity, and no charitable individual, has the right to help perpetuate and maintain such families as are brought forth by drunkards and vicious men and women." [5]

It is unnecessary to say that the advocates of separation as a last resort do not approve of divorce, which would only multiply sham homes.

They recognize in certain cases "the sad fact of incurability," and are prepared to take courageous measures in order that the innocent may not suffer with the guilty.[6]

{55}

The following history of a Baltimore married vagabond will ill.u.s.trate the need of separation in certain cases: Several years ago the Baltimore Charity Organization Society made the acquaintance of the family of a good-looking German shoemaker, who had married a plain, hard-working woman some years his senior. Soon after their marriage he began to neglect his work, and, depending more and more on his wife's exertions for his support, he took to drink. Child-bearing often incapacitated the wife for work, and church and charitable friends aided at such times. When the sixth child was a year old, he deserted his family for a while, but came back again, after having been in jail for disorderly conduct. The Charity Organization Society, seeing no chance of reforming the man, suggested that his wife leave him, but the German pastor strongly objected to any separation of man and wife, and nothing was done. A discouraging aspect of the situation was that the man taught his children to deceive the hard-working mother. When the seventh baby was born, and charity had supplied a registered nurse, baby linen, {56} a doctor, fuel, and food, it was discovered that the man had sold the fuel supplied by the relief society, and had gone on a spree. He was a good workman, and could always have work when sober, but even when at work he neglected to provide properly for his family.

Stung at last into active resistance, his wife had him arrested for non-support. While the man awaited trial, the Charity Organization Society removed his family, found work for the wife where she could keep three of her children, placed one with a relative, and two others temporarily in inst.i.tutions. When he was released, he had no family to attract charitable aid, and was thrown, for the first time in many years, entirely upon his own resources.

Many good people may think that to deprive a man of family ties is to hasten his downfall; but what downfall could be more complete than the downfall of the man who not only permits his wife to support him, but abuses her and his children? In making this no longer possible we are sometimes doing the one thing that can be done to save him from {57} spreading the contagion of his brutality, and so a.s.suming a still heavier burden of sin.

There are many charitable visitors to whom the very thought of strong drink is so offensive, to whom everything connected with the saloon seems so brutal and degraded, that they are unable to make allowance for national, neighborhood, and family traditions in judging a man's habits. It sometimes happens that a whole family are condemned as "frauds" because they drink beer for dinner, or because the man of the house has been seen to enter a saloon. On no subject, perhaps, are charity workers so divided as on the question of how best to deal with the drink evil. Here, if anywhere, fanaticism is excusable, perhaps; but here, as everywhere, the friendly visitor must be on guard against personal prejudice and a hasty jumping at conclusions. "At night all cats are gray," says the old proverb, and it is only the benighted social reformer that thinks of all who drink as drunkards, and of all places where liquor is sold as dens of vice. The saloon is still the workingman's {58} club, and, until some satisfactory subst.i.tute is found for it, all our denunciations will fail to banish it. It is none the less true that, of all personal habits, the drink habit stands next to licentiousness as a cause of poverty and degeneration.

"The problem of intemperance meets us in less than half the families that we know," says the Secretary of the Boston a.s.sociated Charities, "but it is that half which gives us the most concern. There are many ways of dealing with the drunkards and with their families, and the remedy must be separately chosen for each case. Some of our friends are impatient with all these partial remedies and will use none of them, waiting until they can sweep out of the State the alcohol which seems to them the whole cause of the trouble. But if it were all taken away to-morrow, I feel sure we should find this also only a partial remedy, and that the same want of self-control which makes men and women drunkards would drive some of them to-morrow to other and perhaps worse stimulants. So, while I hope and believe that slowly and steadily the sentiment of individuals {59} is growing toward total abstinence, and that in the course of years, generations, perhaps, it will become the law of the State, I believe in working man to man and woman to woman in building up and strengthening character as the chief safeguard against so great an evil." [7]

The first thing, in dealing with an individual case of drunkenness, is to find out its history. Is it the cause of poverty and misfortune, or have poverty and misfortune caused it? Is there an inherited tendency to drink, or did the habit originate in some other bad personal habit?

Is bad health the cause? Has unhealthy or dangerous employment anything to do with it? Is bad home cooking one of the causes? Some one has said that the best temperance lecturer is the properly filled dinner-pail. Worry from lack of work, and the need of some warm stimulant after exposure, are frequent causes; and they are both removable with friendly help. A man who is honestly trying to break himself of the drink habit {60} deserves all the patience, sympathy, and resourcefulness at our command.

When a man is sensitive and proud, the visitor can often be most helpful by simply showing his sympathy. "A travelling salesman who became addicted to drink lost a good situation through this habit. He had a wife and seven children, all the children being too young to earn anything. The wife was very brave and supported the family as long as she was able. When the case came to the Charity Organization Society the rent was in arrears and the landlord threatening. We sent a gentleman as our friendly visitor in the case, and after great persistence and repeated failures he succeeded in keeping the head of the family sober for a few days. The man was proud, and much hurt at having to accept charity, but his family was suffering, and there was no alternative. The aid was provided in so delicate a manner that the man's heart was touched, and he became very grateful to the visitor for his unflagging and kindly interest. They spent their evenings together frequently. The man began to drink less, at last stopped altogether, and {61} now has secured permanent work and is doing well." [8]

There is diversity of opinion as to the value of pledges. It would seem unwise, however, when a man has broken a pledge, to encourage him to renew it. Let him try a promise to himself, and prove that he can be a man without artificial props.

In more stubborn cases the law must be invoked. Sometimes it is well to try several remedies at once, asking the police to threaten arrest, following this up at once with an invitation to join some temperance society (preferably one connected with the man's church), and trying at the same time to subst.i.tute some new interest. Milder measures failing, it will sometimes be necessary to cut off all supplies of relief, and, this again failing, to take steps to protect wife and children from the brutalizing influence of the man by breaking up the home.

There are many causes of the drink evil, as I have tried to show, but, after every allowance has been made, the chief cause will often be found in the selfishness of the human heart. {62} There are men who do not care to be cured of drunkenness, who feel no shame for the misery and degradation brought upon their families. Here again the "sad fact of incurability" must be recognized. It is folly to let such men discover that, through our charitable interest in their families, we will either directly or indirectly pay their whiskey bills, or will a.s.sume the burdens that they deliberately s.h.i.+rk. A Committee on Intemperance, reporting to the Ward VIII. Conference of the Boston a.s.sociated Charities in 1886, called attention to this aspect of the question. "The committee, however, say that, in their opinion, the question of moral responsibility on the part of the intemperate, and also, in its degree, on the part of those who, by gifts or other aid, make intemperance easy, is too much lost sight of; and they believe that the refusal of all aid to the families of drunkards, outside the almshouse, unless in exceptional cases, would bring about a better state of opinion and a juster sense of responsibility. The committee add that it will be almost impossible to make kind-hearted people believe this, since they are more moved {63} by the sight of present suffering than by the hope of future permanent improvement, to secure which some measure of present suffering may be necessary." [9]

Collateral Readings: "An Adventure in Philanthropy," Edwin C. Martin in "Scribner's," Vol. XI, pp. 230 _sq_. "Charity and Home Making," the present writer in "Charities Review," Vol. VI, No. 2. "Married Vagabonds," the same, in Proceedings of Twenty-second National Conference of Charities, pp. 514 _sq_. "Drunkards' Families," Rev. W.

F. Sloc.u.m in Proceedings of Fifteenth National Conference of Charities, pp. 131 _sq_. "The Social Value of the Saloon," E. C. Moore in "American Journal of Sociology," Vol. III, No. 1. "Subst.i.tutes for the Saloon," F. G. Peabody in "Forum" for July, 1896. "Law and Drink,"

Frederick H. Wines in "Charities Review," Vol. VII, Nos. 3 and 4.

[1] "Rich and Poor," p. 105.

[2] pp. 72 _sq_.