ARTICLE BY JACOB RIIS

The article by Jacob Riis entitled "Men or Money--Which?", published below, is the first of a series written for the Intercollegiate Civic League by men of both political parties who are prominent in both parties and wish to draw the attention of college men to the necessity of having more educated men in politics. This League, which has solicited these articles and forwarded them to a number of college papers for publication, is composed of 15 non-partisan college clubs, devoted to an interest in public affairs. The CRIMSON has obtained the article through the Harvard Political Club.

Mr. Riis, the writer of this article, is a well-known journalist and author, the instigator of many reforms in New York in tenement house and school administrations, and an ardent supporter of movements for securing small parks and playgrounds. Among his books are "The Making of an American," "How the Other Half Lives," "The Children of the Poor," "The Battle of the Slum," "Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen."

"Men or Money--Which?"*

Riding in a railroad car, the other day, with a Western man, a stranger, our talk strayed to the one absorbing topic: New York--its size, its wealth, its tunnels, its crowds.

"Um," said he, chewing meditatively on a tooth-pick, "there's a town! Think of the millions, the millions, made and spent there; the millions!" And in saying it he reproduced, without knowing it, the point in view of all of us.

The trouble with New York, the trouble with practically all of the cities of our land, of which it is the type, is that all, alas, we who live there have thought of them in terms of money, never of men. And as we sowed, so have we reaped. Creat markets, great money centres, our cities have become little else. Even the amusements that are there are just a way of making money, or of spending it. Naturally, their politics have fallen under the same head. Graft is not a product but a corrupter of politics. And as to the source and fountain head of civic virtue, or the lack of it--the people! Homes, which should make the real city--let the last Tenement House Commission speak:

"They live there," it said in its report to the legislature, speaking of the two millions of toilers in our tenements, "in an environment that makes all for unrighteousness," and so tends to corrupt the youth, the citizenship of the tomorrow.

We reaped as we sowed. Twenty-five years ago, Jules Simon, addressing his countrymen, described the crop with great exactness: "Where the home is smothered in a nation, there go with it family, manhood, citizenship, patriotism." New York was long ago, with far too much truth, called "the homeless city."

There had been, half a century before, an earlier Tenement House Commission, appointed by the Senate of the State, to see what ailed New York. It came back to Albany and recommended, as a means of abolishing drunkenness, "furnishing to each man a clean and comfortable home. I suppose they laughed at that, called it paternal government, and, put in that bald shape, it looked like it. There were fifteen thousand tenements in New York at that early day. Today there are eighty thousand and their united influence goes toward the destruction of the home. The discovery, on this side of the Atlantic, that this is nothing less than treason, dates back to the last cholera epidemic, in 1866.

In dread of that New York organized a Board of Health that set about teaching the new world the a, b, c of sanitation. Pigs were banished from streets and cellars, and that first year 40,000 windows were cut to let light into 40,000 tenement bedrooms that were dark and unventilated. Forty years we have wrestled with the powers of darkness and at last the law forbids the building of a tenement with a dark and airless room in it. The day is coming when it will forbid a man to own one. Meanwhile the sanitarians are trying to make it unprofitable to the owner.

To get so far has taken forty years of unceasing fighting, of patient waiting, of striving to mould public opinion, without which we cannot get anywhere, or, if we do, find ourselves stuck, side-tracked and helpless before we know it. It is going to take us twenty years more to get where we cannot slide back. Every winter the forces of selfish greed that care nothing for the neighbor, nothing for the state, and in their utter short-sightedness and folly cannot grasp the meaning of the President's constant warning that "we go up or down together," can see only their own immediate profit, marshal their forces at Albany to make a breach in the tenement house law, now here, now there, anything to let their avarice in. Every winter they have to be fought and public opinion held up to its responsibility. A single year of inattention, of over-confidence, and we should have ten years' work to do over again.

And there is enough that is yet undone. The last census of the tenements in New York showed that there were in them yet 350,000 and over of the dark rooms the Board of Health deemed fatal in 1866. Since then we have found the bacillus of tuberculosis and the fight with the White Plague has been taken up all over the land. In New York City we have every year 8000 deaths from tuberculosis and there are always 20,000 persons dying from the scourge. Is it any wonder, when laboratory experiments have shown that, whereas a ray, of direct sunlight kills the germ at once, in a dark tenement room or hallway it may live two years, or three?

These are the facts, as everyone knows who reads. New York City has, roughly speaking, half the voters in the Empire State. This is their home environment. Physically and morally, it "makes all for unrighteousness." Is it a square deal for the republic? One young man, just out of college, answered that question for himself, upon the evidence before him, along in the eighties, and straightway started an investigation of slavery in the tenement cigar-making industry. The action he brought about was labeled unconstitutional then--if I remember right--the fashion in labels has changed since under compulsion of accumulated evidence--but he learned something he has never forgotten. He is the same man who sits today in the White House demanding a fair chance for all the people, rich or poor, that the Republic may have a fair chance. Without that, it cannot have it. For, as I said, New York is but the type of all the growing cities in the land. It sets the fashion. Whatever we do there, the others will do.

We hear much of the slum. The slum is just a question of the per cent. you will take. If 5 per cent. there is no slum problem; if 25, it looms large. It pays to build bad tenements that wreck the home. That is the reason of the fight. As I said, it is just a question of greed and of the cold indifference that asks "Am I my brother's keeper?" In that war the generation that is coming has to take sides. Which side are you on?

The young men of today have got to fight it to a finish. New York will be, every growing city in the land--and more and more ours is getting to be a land of cities--will be what the young men of today make up their minds they shall be. And those twenty years--will tell the story of whether we shall last as a people, or not. Noblesse oblige! To those who have had the advantage of a college education falls the duty of leadership. Which way?

All modern experience, all human instinct, goes to support the belief that the cure for other things than drunkenness lies in giving every man a chance of a decent and comfortable home, that at all events without that chance he will not be content and cannot be counted upon as a good citizen. What choice shall we make then? How shall we rate our fellow-citizens of tomorrow--in terms of money, or of men? If the former, perhaps you will make money. If the latter, without fail you will make men. Which?

*Copyrighted by the Intercollegiate Civic League, 1907