One of the saddest sights of the slums is to see the thrifty wife of the working man, with her rosy brood of children, used to country air and sunshine, used to space, privacy, good surroundings, cleanliness, quiet, shut up amid the noise and dirt and confusion, in the gloom of the slum.

Albion Fellows Bacon

Categorized in : Children Country Sunshine

If, in all the cities, every house that is past repairing could be pulled down or burned up, how great would be the crash, how heaven-high the conflagration. It would be a veritable crack of Doom and glare of the Judgment.

Albion Fellows Bacon

cities house past

... we can bear with great philosophy the sufferings of others, especially if we do not actually see them.

Albion Fellows Bacon

suffering-of-others philosophical philosophy

...I remembered the rose bush that had reached a thorny branch out through the ragged fence, and caught my dress, detaining me when I would have passed on. And again the symbolism of it all came over me. These memories and visions of the poor--they were the clutch of the thorns. Social workers have all felt it. It holds them to their work, because the thorns curve backward, and one cannot pull away.

Albion Fellows Bacon

curves compassion memories

The daily lesson of slum life, visualised, reiterated, of low standards, vile living, obscenity, profanity, impurity, is bound tobe dwarfing and debasing to the children who are in the midst of it.

Albion Fellows Bacon

midst lessons children

... we see the poor as a mass of shadow, painted in one flat grey wash, at the remote edges of our sunshine.

Albion Fellows Bacon

sunshine shadow poor

... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.

Albion Fellows Bacon

majority mother mind

It hurts me to hear the tone in which the poor are condemned as "shiftless," or "having a pauper spirit," just as it would if a crowd mocked at a child for its weakness, or laughed at a lame man because he could not run, or a blind man because he stumbled.

Albion Fellows Bacon

hurt running children

Several generations of slum environment will produce a slum hered... by Albion Fellows Bacon

Several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity.

Albion Fellows Bacon

produce environment generations