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
that simple, straightforward, honest dealing as between man and man is
after all effective in politics as in gun-making. Perhaps we have not
mastered the lesson yet. But we have not discharged the teacher, either.
Courage, indeed! There were times during that stormy spell when it
seemed as if we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby as a people. All
the outcry against the programme of order did not come from the lawless
and the disorderly, by any means. Ordinarily decent, conservative
citizens joined in counselling moderation and virtual compromise with
the lawbreakers--it was nothing else--to "avoid trouble." The old love
of fair play had been whittled down by the jack-knife of all-pervading
expediency to an anaemic desire to "hold the scales even," which is a
favorite modern device of the devil for paralyzing action in men. You
cannot hold the scales even in a moral issue. It inevitably results in
the triumph of evil, which asks nothing better than the even chance to
which it is not entitled. When the trouble in the Police Board had
reached a point where it seemed impossible not to understand that
Roosevelt and his side were fighting a cold and treacherous conspiracy
against the cause of good government, we had the spectacle of a
Christian Endeavor Society inviting the man who had hatched the plot,
the bitter and relentless enemy whom the mayor had summoned to resign,
and afterward did his best to remove as a fatal obstacle to
reform,--inviting this man to come before it and speak of Christian
citizenship! It was a sight to make the bosses hug themselves with glee.
For Christian citizenship is their nightmare, and nothing is so cheering
to them as evidence that those who profess it have no sense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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