Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Social settlements
The use of money in such families is for show. It would be counted
extravagant to buy a book, or a ticket to an oratorio or a concert to hear
the best music. It would in such a family be counted useless to train the
younger children to wage-earning by education. The heads of the family will
be hospitable where it counts as showing how much more they have than the
others in their world. They receive from their world what snobbishness
receives everywhere. Snobbishness, on the whole, is not common even where
the income would remove the family from a tenement-house environment. The
uncertainty of work, and the absolute dependence of the worker on wages,
make snobbishness dangerous; that often proves a boomerang their
observation shows.
[Illustration: A CORNER IN OLD GREENWICH.]
The spirit of helpfulness may not find so free a field of operations when
wages are two dollars and a half and over a day, but it is in readiness.
Sickness in a neighbor's family will show that it has not been lost because
of prosperity, but it is less lavish; there is dawning consciousness that
self-preservation is the first law of nature; that home has the first right
to strength and thought; that only the surplus is available for the world
of friends. The same thriftlessness which makes a family accept charity
without question is the cause of their generosity. As the sense of
responsibility develops, the observer discovers a reserve in the giving of
either their money or their strength to those about them; kindness abounds,
but generosity is regulated as one goes up the scale in the world of
wage-earners. Not only that, but in the direst need the needy, as one goes
up the scale, regulate the degree of freedom given the closest friends. It
often borders on the tragic, the suffering borne in silence, and revealed
often when the time for help is passed.
This division of the people into rich and poor without gradations and
without a comprehension of the standards and needs that make new worlds up
and down the scale, has had a serious effect on the home life, the church
life of the people, the political life of the people. The churches have
driven out the very people in the tenement-house regions who needed them
and whom they needed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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