Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/207

 SOME SOCIAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS 193

sleeping on a floor promiscuously with men and paying dearly for the shelter, is without a respectable place to lay her head. In only a bare half dozen houses of various philanthropic associa- tions is the neediest claimant received the tobacco stripper, the slop-shop victim, the wage-earner in obnoxious and repulsive callings. Perhaps she does not apply. At all events she is not there.

New York alone, it is asserted, has twenty thousand vagrant children without parents, instruction or steady occupation, dodg- ing about alleys and sleeping in hall-ways and ash-barrels. Though lofty asylums rear handsome fronts, girl-beggars dog the footsteps of the citizen and the jails harbor boys detained with criminals, until it seems that neither private benevolence nor state care adequately provides for helpless youth. Everywhere, too, roam hordes of unemployed, many of them decent men who claim that there is no work for them ; and because of this invol- untary idleness their wives must wrest bread from the factories, their sons and daughters must grow up ignorant, if not vicious, in those very cities where millions flow for institutions of learning and reform. The ill-paid tenement seamstress or shop girl, haunting the streets for warmth or excitement, and gliding to ruin in concert halls, is but the natural product of a poor home, over-supply of unskilled labor, and killing competition. Mean- while vast remedial forces for readjusting and improving social conditions beat almost ineffectively the empty air.

What signify these sharp contrasts so many mortals needing to be cared for, taught, uplifted, so many activities eager to pro- tect, to elevate, to inspire, yet the chasm between unbridged ? Why do the means fail frequently to reach the end ? What resistance renders the current of benevolence and Christian effort not always a source of power and light, banishing destitution and ignorance, but as often a deadly stroke to self-respect?

Not wholly with our economic system lies the fault. Other influences cause even those institutions to languish which are conceived in the unction of the highest devotion to humanity We need to cultivate a new ethical sense and more imagination.