230. Midnight Exploration

Midnight Exploration

Fifth Night

Pro_10:15 : ’93The destruction of the poor is their poverty.’94

On an island nine miles long by two and a half wide stands the largest city on this continent’97a city mightiest for virtue and for vice. Before I get through with this series of Sabbath morning discourses I intend to show you the mid-noon of its magnificent progress and philanthropy, as well as the midnight of its crime and sin. Twice in every twenty-four hours our City Hall and old Trinity clocks strike twelve’97once while business and art are in full blast, and once while iniquity is doing its uttermost. Both stories must be told. It is pleasanter to put on a plaster than to thrust in a probe; but it is absurd to propose remedies for disease until we have taken a diagnosis of that disease. The patient may squirm and cringe and fight back and resist; but the surgeon must go on.

I unroll the scroll of new revelations. With city missionary, and the police of New York and Brooklyn, I have seen some things that I have not yet stated in this series of discourses on the night-side of city life. The night of which I speak now is darker than any other. No glittering chandelier, no blazing mirror adorns it. It is the long, deep exhaustive night of city pauperism. ’93We will not want a carriage tonight,’94 said the detectives. ’93A carriage would hinder us in our work; a carriage going through the streets where we are going would only bring out the people to see what was the matter.’94 So, on foot we went up the dark lanes of poverty. Everything revolting to eye and ear and nostril. Population unwashed, uncombed. Rooms unventilated. Three midnights overlapping each other’97midnight of the natural world, midnight of crime, midnight of pauperism, Stairs oozing with filth. The inmates have traveled nine-tenths of the journey to their final doom. They started in some unhappy home of the city or of the country. They plunged into the shambles of death within ten minutes’92 walk of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, and then came on gradually down until they have arrived at the Fourth Ward. When they move out of the Fourth Ward they will move into Bellevue Hospital; when they move out of Bellevue Hospital they will move to Blackwell’92s Island; when they move from Blackwell’92s Island they will move to the Potter’92s Field; when they move from the Potter’92s Field they will move into the darkness beyond the grave! Bellevue Hospital and Blackwell’92s Island take care of eighteen thousand patients in one year.

As we passed on, the rain pattering on the street and dripping around the doorways made the night more dismal. I said: ’93Now let the police go ahead,’94 and they flashed their light, and there were fourteen persons trying to sleep, or sleeping, in one room. Some on a bundle of straw; more with nothing under them and nothing over them. ’93Oh!’94 you say, ’93this is exceptional.’94 It is not. Thousands lodge in that way. One hundred and seventy thousand families living in tenement houses, in more or less inconvenience, more or less squalor. Half a million people in New York city’97five hundred thousand people living in tenement houses’97multitudes of these people dying by inches. Of the twenty-four thousand that die yearly in New York, fourteen thousand die in tenement-houses. No lungs that God ever made could for a long while stand the atmosphere we breathed for a little while. In the Fourth Ward seventeen thousand people within the space of thirty acres. You say: ’93Why not clear them out? Why not, as in Liverpool, where twenty thousand of these people were cleared out of the city, and the city saved from a moral pestilence, and the people themselves from being victimized?’94 There will be no reformation for these cities until the tenement-house system is entirely broken up. The city authorities will have to buy farms, and will have to put these people on those farms, and compel them to work. By the strong arm of the law, by the police lantern conjoined with Christian charity, these places must be exposed and must be uprooted. Those places in London which have become historical for crowded populations’97St. Giles, Whitechapel, Holborn, the Strand’97have their match at last in the Sixth Ward, Eleventh Ward, Fourteenth Ward, Seventeenth Ward of New York. No purification for our cities until each family shall have something of the privacy and seclusion of a home circle. As long as they herd like beasts, they will be beasts.

Hark! What is that heavy thud on the wet pavement? Why, that is a drunkard who has fallen, his head striking against the street’97striking very hard. The police try to lift him up. Ring the call for the city ambulance. No. Only an outcast, only a tatterdemalion’97a heap of sores and rags. But look again. Perhaps he has some marks of manhood on his face; perhaps he may have been made in the image of God; perhaps he has a soul which will live after the dripping heavens of this dismal night have been rolled together as a scroll; perhaps he may have been died for, by a King; perhaps he may yet be a conqueror charioted in the splendors of heavenly welcome. But we must pass on. We cross the street, and there, the rain beating in his face, lies a man entirely unconscious. I wonder where he came from. I wonder if any one is waiting for him. I wonder if he was ever rocked in a Christian cradle. I wonder if that gashed and bloated forehead was ever kissed by a fond mother’92s lips. I wonder if he is stranded for eternity. But we cannot stop.

We passed on down, the air loaded with blasphemies and obscenities, until I heard something that astounded me more than all. I said: ’93What is that?’94 It was a loud, enthusiastic Christian song, rolling out on the stormy air. I went up to the window and looked in. There was a room filled with all sorts of people, some standing, some kneeling, some sitting, some singing, some praying, some shaking hands as if to give encouragement, some wringing their hands as though over a wasted life. What was this? Oh! it was Jerry McAuley’92s glorious Christian mission. There he stood, himself snatched from death, snatching others from death. That scene paid for all the nausea and fatigue of the midnight exploration. Our tears fell with the rain’97tears of sympathy for a good man’92s work; tears of gratitude to God that one lifeboat had been launched on that wild sea of sin and death; tears of hope that there might be lifeboats enough to take off all the wrecked; and, that, after a while, the Church of God, rousing from its fastidiousness, might lay hold with both hands of this work, which must be done if our cities are not to go down in darkness and fire and blood.

This cluster of cities have more difficulty than any other cities in all the land. You must understand that within the last twenty-eight years five million of foreign population have arrived at our port. The most of those who had capital and means passed on to the greater openings at the West. Many, however, stayed and have become our best citizens, and best members of our churches; but we know also that, tarrying within our borders, there has been a vast criminal population ready to be manipulated by the demagogue, ready to hatch out all kinds of criminal desperation. The vagrancy and the beggary of our cities, augmented by contribution from the very worst populations of London and Edinburgh and Glasgow and Berlin and Belfast and Dublin and Cork. We had enough vagabondage and enough turpitude in our American cities before this importation of sin was dumped at Castle Garden. Oh! this pauperism, when will it ever be alleviated? How much we saw! How much we could not see! How much none but the eye of Almighty God will ever see!

Flash the lantern of the police around to that station-house. There they come up, the poor creatures, tipping their torn hats, saying: ’93Night’92s lodging, sir?’94 And then they are waived away into the dormitories. One hundred and forty thousand such lodgers in the city of New York every year. The atmosphere unbearable. What pathos in the fact that many families turned out-of-doors because they cannot pay their rent, come in here for shelter, and after struggling for decency, and struggling for a good name, are flung into this loathsome pool. The respectable and the reprobate. Innocent childhood and vicious old age. The Lord’92s poor and Satan’92s desperadoes. There is no report of almshouse and missionary that will ever tell the story of New York and Brooklyn pauperism. It will take a larger book, a book with more ponderous lids, a book made of paper other than that of earthly manufacture. The book of God’92s remembrance! But I must go on with the fact that the story of Brooklyn and New York pauperism needs to be written in ink, black, blue and red’97blue for the stripes, red for the blood, black for the infamy. In this cluster of cities twenty thousand people supported by the bureau for the outdoor sick; twenty thousand people taken care of by the city hospitals; seventy thousand provided for by private charity; eighty thousand taken care of by the reformatory institutions and prisons. Hear it, ye churches, and pour out your benefaction. Hear it, you ministers of religion, and utter words of sympathy for the suffering, and thunders of indignation against the cause of all this wretchedness. Hear it, mayoralties and judicial bench, and constabularies. Unless we wake up, the Lord will scourge us as the yellow fever never scourged New Orleans, as the plague never smote London, as the earthquake never shook Caracas, as the fire never overwhelmed Sodom. I wish I could throw a bombshell of arousal into every city hall, meeting-house and cathedral on the continent. The factories at Fall River and at Lowell sometimes stop for lack of demand, and for lack of workmen, but this million-roomed factory of sin and death never stops, never slackens a band, never arrests a spindle. The great wheel of that factory keeps on turning, not by such floods as those of the Merrimac or the Connecticut, but crimson floods rushing forth from the groggeries and the wine-cellars and the drinking saloons of the land, and the faster the floods rush the faster the wheel turns; and the band of that wheel is woven from broken heart-strings, and every time the wheel turns, from the mouth of the mill come forth bankrupt estates, squalor, vagrancy, crime, sin, woe’97individual woe, municipal woe, national woe’97and the creaking and the rumbling of the wheels are the shrieks and the groans of men and women lost for two worlds, and the cry is: ’93Bring on more fortunes, more homes, more States, more cities, to make up the awful grist of this stupendous mill.’94

’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93the wretchedness and the sin of the city will go out from lack of material, after a while.’94 No, it will not. The police lantern flashes in another direction. Here come fifteen thousand shoeless, hatless, homeless children of the street, in this cluster of cities. They are the recruiting corps of this great army of wretchedness and crime that are dropping down into the Morgue, the East River, the Potter’92s Field, the Prison. A philanthropist has estimated that if these children were placed in one line, in double-file, three feet apart, they would make a procession eleven miles long. Oh! what a pale coughing, hunger-bitten, sin-cursed, ophthalmic throng’97the tigers, the adders, the scorpions ready to bite and sting society, which they take to be their natural enemy. Howard Mission has saved many. Children’92s Aid Society has saved many. Industrial schools have saved many. One of these societies transported thirty thousand children from the streets of our cities, to farms at the West, by a stratagem of charity, turning them from vagrancy into useful citizenship; and out of twenty-one thousand children thus transported from the cities to farms, only twelve turned out badly. But still the recruiting corps of sin and wretchedness marches on.

There is the regiment of boot-blacks. They seem jolly, but they have more sorrows than many an old man has had. All kinds of temptation. Working on, making two or three dollars a week. At fifteen years of age, sixty years old in sin. Pitching pennies at the street corners. Smoking fragments of castaway cigars. Tempted by the gamblers. Destroyed by the top gallery in the low playhouse. Blacking shoes their regular business. Between times blackening their morals. ’93Shine your boots, sir?’94 they call out with merry voices, but there is a tremor in their accentuation. Who cares for them? You put your foot thoughtlessly on their stand, and you whistled or smoked, when God knows you might have given them one kind word. They never had one. Who ever prayed for a bootblack? Who, finding the wind blowing under the short jacket, or reddening his bare neck, ever gave him some garment to make him warm? Who, when he is wronged out of his five cents, demands justice for him? God have mercy on the bootblacks.

The newsboys, another regiment’97the smartest boys in all the city. At work at four o’92clock in the morning. At half-past three, by abnormal vigilance, awake themselves, or pulled at by rough hands. In the dawn of the day standing before the folding-rooms of the great newspapers; taking the cold, damp sheets over their arms, and against their chests already shivering with the cold. Around the bleak ferries, and up and down the streets on the cold days, singing as merrily as though it were a Christmas carol; making half a cent on each paper, some of them working fourteen hours for fifty cents! Nine thousand of these newsboys applied for aid at the Newsboys’92 Lodging House on Park place, New York, in one year. About one thousand of them laid up in the savings bank connected with that institution an aggregate of three thousand dollars. But still this great army marches on, hungry, cold, sick, toward an early grave or a quick prison.

I tell you there is nothing that so moves my compassion as on a cold winter morning to see one of these newsboys with only one-quarter the clothes on him he should have on, newspapers on his arm that he cannot sell, face or hands bleeding from a fall, or rubbing his knee to relieve it from having been hit on the side of a car, as some ’93gentleman,’94 with furs around his neck and gauntlets lined with lamb’92s wool, shoved him off, saying: ’93You miserable rat!’94 Yet hawking the papers through the streets, papers full of railroad accidents and factory explosions and steamers foundering at sea in the last storm, yet saying nothing about that which is to him worse than all the other calamities and all the other disasters, the calamity that he was ever born at all. Flash the police lantern around, and let us see these poor lads huddled up under the stairway. Look at them! Now for a little while they are unconscious of all their pains and aches, and of the storm and darkness, once in awhile struggling in their dreams as though some one were trying to take the papers away from them. Standing there I wondered if it would be right to wish that they might never wake up. God pity them! There are other regiments in this reserve corps’97the regiment of rag-pickers, regiments of match-sellers, regiments of juvenile vagrants. Oh! if these lads are not saved, what is to become of our cities?

I said to the detective: ’93I have had enough of this tonight; let us go.’94 But by that time I had lost the points of the compass, for we had gone down stairways and up stairways, and wandered down through this street and that street; and all I knew was that I was bounded on the north by want, and on the south by squalor, and on the east by crime, and on the west by despair. The fact was that everything had opened before us; for these detectives pretended to be searching for a thief, and they took me along as the man who had lost the property! The stratagem was theirs, not mine. But I thought, coming home that rainy night, I wished I could make pass before my congregation, as in a panorama, all that scene of suffering, that I might stir their pity and arouse their beneficence, and make them the everlasting friends of city evangelization. ’93Why,’94 you say, ’93I had no idea things were so bad. Why, I get in my carriage at Forty-fifth street and I ride clear down to my banking-house in Wall street, and I don’92t see anything.’94 No, you do not want to see! The King and the Parliament of England did not know that there were thirty-six barrels of gunpowder rolled into the vaults under the Parliament House. They did not know Guy Fawkes had his touchwood and matches all ready’97ready to dash the Government of England into atoms. The conspiracy was revealed, however. I tell you I have explored the vaults of city life, and I am here this morning to tell you that there are deathful and explosive influences under all our cities, ready to destroy us with a great moral convulsion.

Some men say: ’93I do not see anything of this, and I am not interested in it.’94 You ought to be. You remind me of a man who has been shipwrecked with a thousand others. He happens to get up on the shore, and the others are all down in the surf. He goes up in a fisherman’92s cabin, and sits down to warm himself. The fisherman says: ’93Oh! this will not do. Come out and help me to get these others out of the surf.’94 ’93Oh, no!’94 says the man; ’93it is my business now to warm myself.’94 ’93But,’94 says the fisherman, ’93these men are dying; are you not going to give them help?’94 ’93Oh, no! I have got ashore myself, and I must warm myself!’94 That is what people are doing in the church today. A great multitude are out in the surf of sin and death, going down forever; but men sit by the fire of the church, warming their Christian graces, warming their faith, warming their hope for heaven, and I say: ’93Come out, and work today for Christ.’94 ’93Oh, no,’94 they say; ’93my sublime duty is to warm myself!’94 Such men as that will not come within ten thousand miles of heaven! Help foreign missions. Those of my own blood are toiling in foreign lands with Christ’92s Word. Send a million dollars for the salvation of the heathen’97that is right’97but look after the heathen also around the mouths of the Hudson and East rivers. Send missionaries if you will to China, it is your duty as Christians; but neglect not that other duty, just as imperative, to send missionaries through Houston Street, Mercer Street, Greene Street, Navy Street, Fulton Street, and all around Brooklyn Atlantic Docks. Help these cities here that want hats, want clothes, want shoes, want fire, want medicine, want instruction, want the Gospel, want Christ.

I must adjourn to another Sabbath morning much of what I have to say in regard to this city midnight exploration, and also the proposing of remedies; for I am not the man to stand here Sabbath by Sabbath talking of ills when I have no panacea. There is an almighty rescue for the city, and in due time I will speak of these things.

You have often seen a magic lantern. You have seen the room darkened, and then the magic lantern throwing a picture on the canvas. Well, this morning I wish I could darken these three great emblazoned windows, and have all the doors darkened, and then I could bring out two magic lanterns’97the magic lantern of the home and the magic lantern of the police.

Here is the magic lantern of the home. Look now upon the canvas. Mother putting the little children to bed, trying to hush the frisky and giggling group for the evening prayer; their foreheads against the counterpane, they are trying to say their evening prayer; their tongue is so crooked that none but God and the mother can understand it. Then the children are lifted into bed, and they are covered up to the chin. Then the mother gives them a warm good-night kiss, and leaves them to the guardian angels that spread wings of canopy over the trundle-bed.

Magic lantern of the police. Look now on the canvas. A boy kenneled for the night underneath the stairway in a hall through which the wind sweeps, or lying on the cold ground. He had no parents whom he can remember. He was pitched into the world by a merciless incognito. He does not go to bed; he has no bed. His cold fingers thrust through his matted hair his only pillow. He did not sup last night; he will not breakfast to-morrow. An outcast; a ragamuffin. He did not say his prayers when he retired; he knows no prayer; he never heard the name of God or Christ, except as something to swear by. The wings over him, not the wings of angels, but the dark, bat-like wings of penury and want.

Magic lantern of the home. Look now on the canvas. Family gathered around the argand burner. Father, feet on ottoman, mother sewing a picturesque pattern. Two children pretending to study, but chiefly watching other children who are in unrestrained romp, so many balls of fun and frolic in full bounce from room to room. Background of pictures and upholstery and musical instruments, from which jeweled fingers sweep ’93Home, Sweet Home.’94

Magic lantern of the police. Look now on the canvas. A group intoxicated and wrangling, cursing God, cursing each other; the past all shame, the future all suffering. Children fleeing from the missile flung by a father’92s hand. Fragments of a chair propped against the wall. Fragments of a pitcher standing on the mantel. A pile of refuse brought in from some kitchen, torn by the human swine plunging into the trough.

Magic lantern of the home. Look now on the canvas. A Christian daughter has just died. Carriages rolling up to the door in sympathy. Flowers in crowns and anchors and harps covering the beautiful casket, the silver plate marked, ’93aged 18.’94 Funeral services intoned amid the richly-appareled and gold-braceleted. Long procession going out this way to unparalleled Greenwood, to the beautiful family plot where the sculptor will raise the monument of burnished Aberdeen with the inscription: ’93She is not dead, but sleepeth.’94 Oh! blessed is that home which has a consecrated Christian daughter, whether on earth or in heaven.

Magic lantern of the police. Look now on the canvas. A poor waif of the street has just expired. Did she have any doctor? No. Did she have any medicine? No. Did she have any hands to close her eyes and fold her arms in death? No. Are there no garments in the house fit to wrap her in for the tomb? None. Those worn-out shoes will not do for these feet in their last journey. Where are all the good Christians? Oh! some of them are rocking-chaired, in morning gowns, in tears over Bulwer-Lytton’92s account of the last days of Pompeii; they are so sorry for that girl that got petrified! Come, call in the coroner; call in the charity commissioner. The carpenter unrolls the measuring-tape, and decides she will need a box five and a half feet long. Two men lift her into the box, lift the box into the wagon, and it starts for the Potter’92s Field. The excavation is not large enough for the box, and the men are in a hurry, and one of them gets on the lid and cranches it down to its place in the ground. Stop! Wait for the city missionary until he can come and read a chapter, or say, ’93Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’94 ’93No,’94 say the men of the spade, ’93we have three or four more cases just like this to bury before night.’94 ’93Well,’94 I say, ’93how, then, is the grave to be filled up?’94 Christ suggests a way. Perhaps it had better be filled up with stones. ’93Let those who are without sin come and cast a stone at her,’94 until the excavation is filled. Then the wagon rolls off, and I see a form coming slowly across the Potter’92s Field. He walks painfully, as if his feet hurt. He comes to that grave, and there he stands all day and all night, and I come out and I accost him, and I say: ’93Who art thou?’94 And he says: ’93I am the Christ of Mary Magdalene!’94 And then I thought that perhaps there might have been a dying prayer, and that there might have been penitential tears, and around that miserable spot at last there may be more resurrection pomp than when Queen Elizabeth gets out of her mausoleum in Westminster Abbey.

But I must close the two lanterns.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage