The Battle with the SlumRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Battle with the Slum
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
Church and Sunday-school missed him. I was going to say that they passed
by on the other side, remembering the migration of the churches up-town
as the wealthy moved out of and the poor into the region south of
Fourteenth Street. But that would hardly be fair. They moved after their
congregations; but they left nothing behind. In the twenty years that
followed the war, while enough to people a large city moved in
down-town, the number of churches there was reduced from 141 to 127.
Fourteen Protestant churches moved out. Only two Roman Catholic churches
and a synagogue moved in. I am not aware that there has been any large
increase of churches in the district since, but we have seen that the
crowding has not slackened pace. Jacob had no trouble in escaping the
Sunday-school, as he had escaped the public school. His tribe will have
none until the responsibility incurred in the severance of Church and
State sits less lightly on a Christian community, and the Church, from a
mob, shall have become an army, with von Moltke's plan of campaign,
"March apart, fight together." The Christian Church is not alone in its
failure. The Jew's boy is breaking away from safe moorings rather faster
than his brother of the new dispensation. The Church looks on, but it
has no cause for congratulation. He is getting nothing in place of that
which he lost, and the result is bad. There is no occasion for profound
theories about it. The facts are plain enough. The new freedom has
something to do with it; but neglect to look after the young has quite
as much. Apart from its religious aspect, seen from the angle of the
community's interest wholly, the matter is of the gravest import.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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