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Neither were there many of the wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums of English sea-ports, such as in those early days when negro labour was scarce, were sent by ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors of the "white trash."
And so, year after year, the misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the brute a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
Tuskegee does not graduate hoe-hands or plowboys. Agriculture is, of course, fundamental fundamental in recognition of the fact that the Negro population is mainly a farming population, and of the truth that something must be done to stem the swelling tide which each year sweeps thousands of black men and women and children from the sunlit monotony of the plantation to the sunless iniquity of the slums, from a drudgery that is not quite cheerless to a competition that is altogether merciless.
We know that we must kill the slums or see the slums kill efficiency and kill patriotism. "In Germany we hold the capitalist class within strict bounds. We allow no such heaping up of huge fortunes as are common in America through the exploitation of the weak by the strong. We Germans protect the weak and make them stronger, but you English and Americans make them weaker by oppressing them.
The New Day was taking subscriptions for a fund to send sick children and their mothers to the country for a vacation from the dirt and heat of the tenements for Remsen City, proud though it was and boastful of its prosperity, housed most of its inhabitants in slums though of course that low sort of people oughtn't really to be counted except for purposes of swelling census figures and to do all the rough and dirty work necessary to keep civilization going.
Into this tortuous maze her spirit now tried to penetrate, as occasionally, to visit some historic monument, she had plunged into the slums of a medieval town. It was an exercise that brought her nothing but a feeling of bewilderment. Having no sense of locality for this kind of labyrinth, she could only turn round and round confusedly.
Dickens, after a desperately hard struggle in his boyhood, without friends or higher education, comes into manhood cheery, self-confident, energetic, filled with the joy of his work; and in the world, which had at first treated him so harshly, he finds good everywhere, even in the jails and in the slums, simply because he is looking for it.
Many of these have swollen the crowds of the factory towns; others have supplied unskilled labor to the cities; in not a few cases they have gone to their destruction in the slums, where residues of decadent folk finally disappear. The human material that was most susceptible to alcohol has gone into the mills of the gods.
She was learning to think for herself. For the first time, she was facing problems and demanding an answer. Why must there be Grace Irvings in the world? Why must the healthy babies of the obstetric ward go out to the slums and come back, in months or years, crippled for the great fight by the handicap of their environment, rickety, tuberculous, twisted?
To reform is to know something of the conditions which produce the slums it is not to scatter the slum-people broadcast elsewhere in the town; it is not alone to give them baths, playgrounds, circulating libraries of books and pictures, dancing-parties, and social clubs. To reform the slums is to set up a new ideal of God, and of righteous conduct in the heart of the slum-dwellers.
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