Let everybody then make it his duty to appeal to the civic pride of the
women and men of the community. Let the people of the city instruct
its Mayor and City Council, or else themselves elect a man or a woman
to supervise the management and maintenance of a Municipal Emergency
Home of integrity, of resource, a place of sagacious and scientific
training. Then, and not until then, will the women of our cities be
able to shut their doors, the men their pockets, and point with pride
to the Municipal Emergency Home, which in every American city is as
necessary and as fundamental an institution as a hospital itself. In
fact it is a human psychological hospital, an economic betterment
provider, within the gates and welcome arch of every city.
The name of the institution is significant,--_Municipal Emergency
Home_. As the gate of the public system of institutions it should
stand, always open and ready to receive the homeless, wandering
wage-earner who may claim its hospitality. From it, he or she may go
forth to renumerative industry, to economic, social and industrial
betterment which is for the benefit of all humanity.
WHAT A TWENTIETH CENTURY MUNICIPAL EMERGENCY HOME SHOULD BE
In the following pages, the author wishes to give in detail the chief
aims, objects and principles upon which a model Twentieth Century
Municipal Emergency Home should be maintained:
I. It should provide, _free_ under humane and sanitary conditions,
food, lodging and bath, with definite direction for such immediate
relief as is needed for any man or boy, woman or girl, or even
families, stranded in the city where located, as well as for the
convalescent from the hospital. It should be able to give employment
to able-bodied men and boys, women and girls, provide them with the
necessaries of life, and make it possible for them to be economically
independent of the future. This should be _the chief aim, object and
principle_ upon which the maintenance of a model Twentieth Century
Municipal Emergency Home is based.
All consideration of causes, all efforts toward the enforcement of law
or reform in legislation, are secondary to this first duty of providing
a humane clearing-house for a scientific, systematic and intelligent
distribution of the industrial, economic and social human waste, which
gathers and disperses from season to season in the urban centers of
America and tends constantly to fester into idleness, vice and crime.
While the demands of this human clearing-house will be no small charge
upon the respective municipalities, the Municipal Emergency Home
will be primarily an institution of social service, collecting and
regulating the entire human resource of the city for the mutual benefit
of the community or those that serve it and of the individual that is
served.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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