Who is Your Neighbor?

Mr. Jacob A. Riis, whom President Roosevelt once declared to be the most useful citizen in New York City, tells an interesting story concerning his work among the poor in New York. A while ago he went to visit a friend in a suburban town. On the evening of his arrival, as they sat at his table, the host looked around at his flock of five healthy children and said: “I wish you could find for me in the city some poor family—if possible, a widow with children about the age of these—who would be ours to work and advise with and to help over the rough places when they came along. Then each of mine could have his own friend, and he could get more out of it than he would give, I know. Here they are shut off, as you see, from that. All the neighbors are well-to-do.” Mr. Riis promised to try, for he knew the man was right. They were sadly handicapped. The best in them was being starved by the ultra-respectability of their surroundings. So one day he found in a tenement-house on the East Side a brave little woman who was making a noble fight to keep her flock together. The oldest boy was about old enough to go into an office, and his face fairly shone with delight at the prospect that he was soon to “help mamma.” She was a custodian, she told Mr. Riis, and worked in a public building a couple of miles away, on the west side of town. Mr. Riis started for his office to telephone to his friend that he had found what he wanted. On the way it struck him that he had forgotten to ask where the widow scrubbed and he went back to find out. “Once or twice,” says Mr. Riis, “in my life it has been given to me to see, as it were, the veil rent asunder and the hand of the Almighty working in my sight. This was one of those times. I shall not soon get over the thrill that went through me when I learned that she worked in the Mission Building, at my friend’s very door. Just the thickness of it, two inches of wood, separated the two, each in need of the other, and asking vainly, as the years went by, ‘Where is the neighbor who will give me a hand?’”