communities, or, that relation is not understood, because housing is not understood. So let us begin with definitions.

Bad Housing Creates Need of Social Work

Housing means shelter, dwelling places, homes. You speak of housing workmen, just as you speak of housing machinery, only the first is not generally done as carefully as the latter. The term properly refers to every place of habitation, whether it be a dwelling house, hotel or sanitarium. The housing problem is the problem of providing fit and adequate dwelling places for every person in a community. People can be housed—they are housed—in shacks, in stables, in lodging houses, in tenement barracks, in derailed cars, in old hotels, in garrets, in cellars, in styes, in compartment houses. None of these places are fit for homes. They are called homes, but they are not. So we lump them in housing. But they come under bad housing. The home, or the house that is safe, sanitary, convenient, comfortable, a fit place to rear a family, comes under good housing. That belongs to the upper story of social work. The foundation and the first story of social work must begin with those conditions of the unfit, unsafe home—bad housing, slums—that devastate and ruin human lives. These are the conditions that pile up social wreckage faster than churches can evangelize, faster than schools can educate, faster than doctors can cure, than stretcher bearers—I mean you—can bear them off the field.

I speak from fifteen years' experience as a social worker, and ten years' experience as a housing reformer, for I came into housing reform through the doors of social work. I had labored for child welfare, for working girls, for social uplift and civic betterment, for public health, had worked against vice, against tuberculosis, tried to relieve the sufferings of the poor and the aged. I found that all I could do gave only temporary relief, only partial improvement; that until we could get people who needed cures, families that needed to be reinstated, into more sanitary houses and more favorable environment, we might give them a lift, but we could not keep them up. We must recognize that all social workers meet cases that seem hopelessly wrecked, especially among the older ones, or that are so mentally defective that they have nothing to build on. But there is no case so bad that bad surroundings will not make it worse. And though an improved environment may seem to offer no hope of betterment, it will at least lessen their misery, when they are taken out of damp, dark rooms. It will lessen their chance of disease, and the chance of giving contagions to others. It will lessen congestion and reduce the moral menace to other families.

Now, as I said, it is bad housing—slums—that I must talk about mostly. It is to the slums, or near-slums, that you generally go to find your patients. It is there the police are oftenest called, where the patrol wagon and ambulance make most trips; where quarantines are oftenest necessary. If it were not for slums, a lot of social workers would lose their jobs; the police force, the fire department and the health department could all be cut down. Fire insurance would be cheaper, in many districts, and so would life insurance. You know, doubtless, that life insurance companies will not give premiums in the worst slum districts. I might go a little further and say that if it were not for houses we would not have some of our diseases. Before houses, there was no tuberculosis, probably no pneumonia. Both are house diseases. You find them worst where you find most dark rooms and congestion.

The Typical Bad House

Doubtless I am talking to people from big cities, little cities, towns and villages, so I must be explicit in speaking of slums. I mean the worst old houses in your community, whether you have 2,000,000 or 200—the houses where you keep your poor. Shut your eyes and think of the places where your poor live. I have visited the slums of many states, in cities, villages, or country places. I can see now the place that is before your mental vision. It is a rickety old house. If any of you keep your poor in nice new houses, please stand up, and let us get the name of the place.

The house you are thinking of is one of the oldest houses in the town. Ten to one it was the home of an early settler, perhaps once a mansion. Now it is tumbledown, rotting, weather-beaten, gray. It stands flat on the ground.. Other houses have crowded up against it, perhaps business houses, so that it is dark and gloomy. It has several families in it, from two to a dozen or more. They are weather-beaten and gray, too. They look like members of the same family, in a way, slip-shod, sallow, sullen, unsmiling. Dirty babies are crawling down dirty stairs, dirty children playing in the dirty yard. There is a gray washing hanging in the yard. There are blackened, rotting sheds in the yard, perhaps an old, uncovered cistern. The yard is damp with dishwater and suds. It has no grass, maybe tall weeds. Garbage is piled on the ash heap and flies are everywhere.

If the house is in a village, it may have only one or two families. If it is in a city, you are thinking of an old hotel, or a row of tenements, perhaps a Ghetto, where shops below have a display of fish, or old clothes, or junk, or shabby groceries; where old crones with shawls over their heads, draggled skirts and slippers down at the heel, sit at the door, with one eye on the customers, the other on a baby in the gutter or the boys fighting in the street. You have a mental vision of the dark, narrow, dirty stairs, mounting up to dark, narrow, dirty rooms; of filth and odors everywhere—of congested, swarming life. No matter whether you live in city or country, you see, in your mind's picture, the bent, hollow-chested consumptive, you hear the rattling cough; you see the sick baby, the pale, weary mother.

The Toll of Diseases

Tuberculosis is the one unfailing spectre that every one of you encounters, whether you come from back woods slums or big city slums. We find country houses with a record for wiping out two, four, even six families by tuberculosis, in succession, as they move in. These are houses that are infected, that could not be disinfected by fumes, by soap, lye or paint, because the crevices are too wide, because the walls are so rough, and the plastering is so broken. It is not possible to escape getting tuberculosis if one moves into such a house, once the disease gets a hold in it. Everything about the house favors the disease, when it is low, damp, musty, dark and gloomy. If the patient is sent away in time, and cured, he takes it again when he comes back. It is a case of house.

Every social worker knows what tuberculosis means, in multiplying cost and effort, in leaving dependent orphans and widows, in bankrupting the family by the long illness. I need not dwell on that. In the city tuberculosis is increased by congestion. Houses built in crowded rows have dark inside sleeping rooms, dark halls, gloomy yards, if any. I need not do more than mention what the dark room means to tuberculosis. In the city humanity is more condensed. I need not tell you what congestion means to tuberculosis. I may have to explain, however, that congestion must be counted as a housing evil, because it means inadequate housing facilities and overbuilt lots.

So much for tuberculosis. If I stopped here I would feel that the relation of housing to social work had been established. But there are other house diseases—pneumonia, which congestion, with the consequent foul, vitiated air, makes so much more fatal, "Colds," with their long train of evils, resulting from dampness, sudden chill from draughts, lowered vitality, bad air; inflammation of the respiratory organs, tonsilitis, rheumatism, heart troubles—the long-linked chain is found in all of these dark, damp, unventilated, overcrowded houses. Added to these are the filth diseases, spread by contact, like eruptive diseases; or typhoid, disseminated in sewage-polluted water or filthy milk. These are all increased by congestion.

How much do they all add to the burden of the social worker? I have the word of more than one visiting nurse that her efforts were useless in many cases, so long as the family lived in the unsanitary houses where they were always sick, and could not get well. All social workers know of cases that have improved in health when moved to sanitary quarters, until the bread winner has been able to go back to work and the family was no longer dependent.

Crime and Mental Defectiveness

I have said that before houses certain diseases did not exist. Have you ever thought that even our crimes have changed? Before we had large cities, crimes were mostly due to too high spirits and the overabundant vitality of outdoor people. Read the old sagas—read the stories of early Saxon or Britain fights and robberies. I appeal to those who have charge of our reformatories to know if crimes now are not mostly due to diseased bodies or brains, or to defective mentality; to minds over-clouded by brooding among shadows; or due to lowered resistance, to low vitality, and the stimulants craved as an offset to low vitality; to the over-close contact forced by congested living, and the nervous irritability due to the foregoing conditions.

In our conferences on mental hygiene we have discussed the relation of housing to insanity and feeble-mindedness. It was agreed by various experts that congestion and dark rooms made every menace of the feeble-minded, and every danger to the feeble-minded, greater. It was also agreed that many a mental breakdown was hastened by the breakdown in health due to unsanitary living conditions; and that depression, lowered vitality and irritability, due to house gloom, to noise, to lack of privacy and the general wretchedness of slum living, accelerated many a mental wreck. Put a strong, normal person into a slum, and he will have a fight to keep his physical and mental poise. Put a sickly, subnormal person into the slums, and he is overwhelmed. As social workers find so much of their work among the mentally subnormal, I feel this is in place. Of course, heredity gives us the mental defective. Environment makes the very worst out of him, and of his children.

Vice and the Degradation of Family Life

Vice also meets the social worker. All I have to say about the relation of bad housing to vice is that the dark room is the mother of shame; that dark rooms and halls offer temptation to both vice and crime. That congestion also makes vice almost inevitable, and that vice is found in connection with congestion and the dark room. The common use of every convenience by both sexes, young and old, promotes vice. Promiscuous living promotes vice. I need not cite examples. You know them. You know that the child of the slums lives in a school of vice. As a corroboration of the effect of environment, I have had old houses pointed out to me by officers in different cities. They would say, "Before we cleaned these places up, we had arrests every few days. Now we have no trouble. The people seem to have more self respect."

This seems to be the keynote of the effect of the slums on family life. The social worker knows the necessity of maintaining or awakening self respect in the family he is endeavoring to reinstate. In the slums there is everything to degrade, everything to suggest and foster evil. The housekeeper feels that there is "no use" to try to keep her rooms clean, when no one is responsible for the hall, stairs or yard, when dirt is tracked in on her freshly scrubbed floor, and when soot pours in through the loose window frames. The more thrifty who move into an old tenement soon succumb to the shiftless, easy-going habits of the older tenants. What, indeed, is the use, when the job is hopeless, to try to make a slum look homelike? I need not go into the details of sights, odors, inconveniences that every one of you recall. When you went to wait on the sick mother, you had to go downstairs for water to wash the baby, go across the hall to get something to wash it in, and go upstairs to heat the water. You had to close the windows to keep out smells and flies, you had to put a chair against the door to keep out the fighting boys. When you found her husband had deserted her, you wondered how he had slept in that stuffy room so long, when a hobo life beckoned him to sweet air and the greenwood tree for shelter. When the pretty daughter went wrong, you remembered that she would never bring her "gentlemen friends" up those greasy stairs, to the room where the washtub and the coal pile jostled the beds, and the family circle had to stand up and lock arms. When the little boy got into the juvenile court, you didn't wonder why he stayed out as long as he could keep awake, before creeping into the stifling room and falling on his pallet. And the children, the little ones! You hear such words on their baby lips, you see such a knowing look in their baby eyes, that you long to gather them up in your arms and fly with them to a daisy pasture, where they can run and play in wind and sun, and grow up strong—and innocent! It is child welfare that has been the strong passion that has kept me at housing reform, because in ever city I visit I see the little old people of the tenements, weazened, pallid, sickly, stunted in soul and body, growing up to a hopeless life, following in the steps of their parents, unless a miracle lifts them out and away from it.

This is what I want to impress on social workers everywhere. Whatever home means to us, it means to others, for human nature is the same, and physical nature is the same, and mental laws are unvarying. If it is necessary for us to have peace, quiet, rest, sunshine and air, a cheerful environment, elevating surroundings, it is necessary for all other human beings. If we were wet, cold, hungry, wretched, shut into a dark room, amid noise and confusion, we would have a struggle to keep well, and to keep up our home life and atmosphere for the rest of the family. That thousands of children are growing up in styes that can not possibly be made homelike or cheerful, that can never have hallowed associations, is, it seems to me, a grave menace that social workers should consider.

A Call to Reform

Let us remember, then, that a dark room is not fit for a home. A cellar is not fit for a home. A stable is not fit for a home.

A house crowded with vicious people is not fit for a home. A fire trap is not fit for a home.