THE DARK SIDE OF CITY LIFE.
In this day and generation the mania for city life is a vast generator of crime and misery. In an article on "The Tenement House Problem," in the New York Independent, Rev. John B. Devins presents the following picture:— "One cannot present the tenement house problem on paper; he cannot draw a picture sufficiently vivid to be lifelike. The camera fails here also; you cannot photograph an odor. The stereopticon tells only half the truth; you cannot flash a dwarfed intellect or a stunted soul upon canvas. To understand very much about the homes of the poor, you must live with the people and live as they live; you must sleep where they sleep, and sleep as they sleep in their poorly ventilated rooms; you must eat what they eat, with quality frequently sacrificed to quantity; you must breathe the foul air which they are obliged to inhale, often through no fault of their own; you must walk through the filthy streets in which they are compelled to spend much of their time, because someone withholds the small parks to which they are entitled; you must read the cheap literature which they read, quality again being a secondary matter; you must climb the steps of the dark and often ill-smelling stairs which lead to their 'room,' or 'room and bedroom,' where frequently five or six persons live, eat, sleep, and die; you must undergo privation as they do—unjustly, it seems to them sometimes, and to others also; you must go to bed hungry and fall asleep from exhaustion after walking for hours looking for work; you must hear the landlord, or, worse, his agent, insisting on the rent already overdue, when you have not a dime in the house; you must meet the insurance agent, whose weekly visits alone seem to stand between you and the potter’s field; you must listen to your children crying for bread when there is not a crust in the cupboard, nor a penny in the purse to supply it; you must watch your wife or child suffer and waste and die, when the prescription lies on the table and you cannot get the medicine for lack of money; you must know something of these everyday experiences of hundreds of families before you can understand very much about the tenement house problem." And one of the prime causes of all this795destitution is suggested in this statement:— "The country is longing for the labor which they can supply but will not. Hundreds of abandoned farms in New England can be purchased for a song. Thousands of families now dependent upon charity could be sent to the country every year, with profit to city and country alike; but very few of them will go. They prefer the bustle of the city's streets to the loneliness of the country road; they choose rather to suffer hardships here to-day, hoping for better things tomorrow, than accept smaller but certain wages there; they dread the cold, bleak days of winter; they know they will be homesick, and generally they are, when they yield to the importunities of friends and make a change, and all too frequently they return to their dingy rooms and dry bread and black coffee." There is ample room and plenty of healthful air in the world for all. The ground, even under its sin-cursed condition, will yield plenty for all. But Satan is working with mighty power to destroy mankind, "because he knoweth that he hath but a short time" (Rev. 12:12), and a most effectual scheme is to instill into the human mind a lusting for city life. Why is it that people who might do fairly well, might have far better health, might do good in many ways, will persist in seeking the city, where there are so many sinful allurements, and so many probabilities of both temporal and spiritual wreckage? It is amazing what plausible pretexts men and women, and especially young people, will conjure up as reasons for moving into town. Most of them would do better, financially and spiritually, to remain in the country, till the soil, and be content with less of the giddy whirl and excitement of the world.