CROWDING TOWARD THE CENTERS.
By S.
The last decade has witnessed a wonderful increase in the growing tendency to crowd into the great cities. The ratio of this increase has gone up by leaps and bounds. As these multitudes have crowded in, the multitudes already in have been crowded down, and the condition of the urban middle and poorer classes has become more difficult or more desperate, according to the relative condition which they had previously occupied. The sad part of it is that this migration toward the centers grows in volume as the conditions become more harrowing. This “submerged” class, composed of those who are apparently hopelessly down, has grown to such an extent that it is a real menace to the existence of municipal government. With no employment in sight, hundreds of these drift into the criminal classes, and become food for law courts and prisons. Just recently London had opportunity to view what ought to be in Christian lands of plenty a most unique procession. It was poverty on parade. Day after day thousands of the unemployed marched the streets in solemn procession, carrying contribution boxes to receive alms from those who had to give. Regarding this demonstration of the unemployed the London Spectator says:— “The processions of the unemployed bid fair to become a regular incident in our street life. They go on day after day,—orderly, on good terms with the police, and not in the least anxious to provoke a breach of the peace. Apparently they never have anything to do, or if they have, it is of that convenient order which can always be put off to some future season. Ordinarily they are composed of that hopeless type which has so long lost the will to work that it has by degrees lost the power also. Here and there again, are some of a lower class still,—men who have ceased to pay any minute attention to the dividing line between poverty and crime.”
The Spectator voices an obvious truth when it remarks that while “these processions may be harmless in themselves, they are not harmless in their consequences.” This banding together of the worthy unemployed and the professional unemployed for the systematic collection of alms has a debasing effect upon all participants. The association itself is bad; the habit of the public solicitation of charity is demoralizing, and the temptation to many to “get a living” by a process easier than toil is a strong one, and one to which many of them will yield. It is a step downward, and leads to other downward steps. It is a result of the flowing of the tide of humanity toward the crowded centers of population. It is a result, but it is also a condition which has its own results—demoralization, depravity, crime. If there were a prospect of a turn in the tide we might have hope of better temporal conditions in the future, but there is no indication of such a turn. On the other hand the conditions which have made possible London’s “poverty parade” are rapidly developing in all other countries, and their results are already seen in the constant increase in all classes of crime. The exposures of crimes committed by men charged with the control of large cities, men who should be examples of uprightness before their fellow-men, show the utter hopelessness of any permanent municipal reform. With criminals in the highest offices of trust and responsibility in the gift of a city, there is little positive influence for good outflowing to those in humbler positions. And these conditions should make the child of God awake to his responsibility as an ambassador of heaven in the midst of these powers of darkness. S.