Note Return to text — EDITORIAL NOTES.

Some months ago I wrote of a phase of wretchedness in our great cities, which I designated “Uninvited Poverty.” I confined myself to the examination of those who may be properly designated the helpless victims of adverse fate. There are other phases of misery, however, which result from sin, on the part of the immediate sufferers. In my former paper I spoke of suffering where the wretchedness sprang from sin at the head of the social fountain. But I now wish to notice especially misery, degradation, and moral eclipse, resulting directly from giant evils, which are tolerated in all our large cities, though known to every thoughtful person, from judge to artisan, from clergyman to sexton, from editor to reporter, from wealthy matron to the humble sewing woman. Every earnest thinker knows that there are evils feeding the furnaces of physical, mental, and moral destruction; that there are flourishing nurseries, common schools, and universities of crime, degradation, and death. Yet the great churches slumber on, their melodious chimes call the self-satisfied to cushioned seats where are heard expositions of ancient lore and legends of a vanished past, with incidental and general reference to the conditions of to-day, enabling the children of wealth, who vainly imagine they are the disciples of Jesus, to spend a comfortable hour and perchance contribute to carrying the Gospel to some nature-favored heathen land, never as yet cursed by rum and other evils which flourish with tropical luxuriance in all civilized countries, and which ever follow with blighting, corroding, and life-destroying influence in the wake of our boasted modern civilization. Two great evils confront every thoughtful American citizen to-day. One the oppression of the poor and the unfortunate; the other, the omnipresent cancer spots in metropolitan life, the infection of which is reaching the highest circles of Boulevard society and penetrating the cellars of the tenement houses. Recently a little work has been published which deals chiefly with what we may term the “cancer spots of social life” in one of America’s great cities.[5] It is prepared by an earnest Christian gentleman, who has had a committee of conscientious men and women investigating the actual conditions in the social cellar of Chicago. The author states that his purpose is not to show that Chicago is an exception to the general rule in regard to poverty, crime, or degradation. He merely desires to indicate deplorable facts as they exist in this great city to show how dire destitution is working havoc with the children of men almost under the shadow of the palaces of those who profess to be Christians. He cites as an illustration of the extreme poverty in Chicago the fact that when the compulsory education law went into effect, the inspectors found in the squalid region, a great number of children so destitute, that they were absolutely unfit to attend school; decency forbidding that the sexes in far more than semi-nude condition should mingle in the school-rooms, and although a number of noble-hearted ladies banded together and decently clothed three hundred of these almost naked boys and girls, they were compelled to admit the humiliating fact that they had only reached the outskirts, while the great mass of poverty had not been touched. A faint idea of the extent of poverty in this one city may be gained from the following facts from the record of one of the city police stations.