How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
"Where do you go to church, my boy?"
"We don't have no clothes to go to church." And indeed his appearance,
as he was, in the door of any New York church would have caused a
sensation.
"Well, where do you go to school, then?"
"I don't go to school," with a snort of contempt.
"Where do you buy your bread?"
"We don't buy no bread; we buy beer," said the boy, and it was
eventually the saloon that led the police as a landmark to his "home."
It was worthy of the boy. As he had said, his only bed was a heap
of dirty straw on the floor, his daily diet a crust in the morning,
nothing else.
Into the rooms of the Children's Aid Society were led two little girls
whose father had "busted up the house" and put them on the street after
their mother died. Another, who was turned out by her step-mother
"because she had five of her own and could not afford to keep her,"
could not remember ever having been in church or Sunday-school, and
only knew the name of Jesus through hearing people swear by it. She had
no idea what they meant. These were specimens of the overflow from the
tenements of our home-heathen that are growing up in New York's streets
to-day, while tender-hearted men and women are busying themselves with
the socks and the hereafter of well-fed little Hottentots thousands of
miles away. According to Canon Taylor, of York, one hundred and nine
missionaries in the four fields of Persia, Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt
spent one year and sixty thousand dollars in converting one little
heathen girl. If there is nothing the matter with those missionaries,
they might come to New York with a good deal better prospect of success.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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