The united American : a magazine of good citizenchip., July 01, 1923, Page 8, Image 8

8
THE WESTERN AMERICAN
JULY, 1923
Charitable Towards Others While Neglecting Our Own
A MERICANS anxious that America retain her
championship title as the world’s greatest sym­
pathizer, are spending much time worrying over the
fate of the people in foreign countries where war and
fighting, in the language of Octavus Cohen’s Tempus
Todd, “is the fondest thing they are of.” While they
give and collect money for the care of the sufferers in
Europe, laudable enough in itself, the truth is that a
large number of them are rather indifferent and un­
sympathetic when the fate of hapless beings within
our domestic realm is brought to their attention.
There is no question that there are millions of well-
meaning Americans who would gladly support a
movement to open wide our doors any day and make
of America an asylum for the world’s war scarred
millions who would take their hatred and national dif­
ferences with them, the conquerors and the conqured
alike, ready to take up the cudgel against one an­
other and give the old habits free reigns after a spell
of recuperation. With natures and habits unchanged
these scarred individuals and nations appealing to
Uncle Sam for succor are somewhat analogous to
some scarred individuals here at home, who weary of
their self-inflicted wounds, during a recent flurry of
local sympathy capitalized in a restitution asylum up
the Columbia highway trail, sought and found revi­
talization at public expense, only to obey the old habit
via the route of the primrose path, where human pas­
sions are unrestrained, ere they with healed wounds
had stepped beyond the neutrality zone of the
asylum.
At public expense we erect penitentiaries and jails
for adult offenders; detention homes and reforma­
tories for erring women and youths, and insane asy­
lums for feeble-minded, but we refuse to provide
homes and institutions at public expense for the care
of our own innocent children left without protection
and answer their pitiful cries for help by turning them
over to semi-subsidized private institutions, trusting
the judgment of their keepers to care for these future
citizens, boys and girls, on whose very start in life
depends so muth of our future well-being as a nation.
No more attention is given the call for help coming
from those who have become crippled and maimed in
the maelstrom of life or who have found themselves
unable to save enough out of their meager earnings
to take them safely through the declining years.
While we seem to have unlimited confidence in our­
selves to provide homes of restitution and care for
the people of foreign countries, we seem to be sorely
lacking in this respect when the case is domestic in
scope.
A prominent statesman stopped the other day at a
reform school in our environs and observing a crippled
boy with a sad face, he called the little fellow and
sympathetically asked: “What did you do that they
sent you here ?” With tears welling from his eyes the
little mite answered: “Nothing. They just sent me
here because they said they had no other place where
I could be taken care of.”
No state institution in a great American common-
wealth to send a homeless little American boy ?
No place for him except in a reform school, where
the incorrigible boys and girls go ?
Is there only one alternative for the homeless child
in an American commonwealth—to be “farmed” out to
some semi-subsidized private institution ?
Our propensity for foreign sympathy may be Very
becoming in the proper setting of news and editorial
columns of papers, magazines and books, but if we
lost our title as the world’s champion sympathizer in
lieu of concentrating our sympathetic faculties to
setting up remedial public institutions at home, we
should in a short time be a much healthier nation with
a growing vigor possessing potentialities for an effec­
tive cure of many of our political and social ills.
If it is wise as well as expedient to protect society
against criminals by confining them in public institu­
tions of punishment and correction, it is equally wise
and expedient to care for homeless children in state
institutions corresponding to such requirements, in
order to save them for society and to protect them
against the unscrupulous who gain their recruits from
the ranks of the weak and those “who have no place
to go.”
Our altruistic obligations as Americans are obvious­
ly neglected. Every man, woman and child, native
born or foreign born, properly a member of the Amer­
ican family of one hundred and ten millions, is en­
titled to an equal share of the care and consideration
extended any other American, according to his re­
quirements and needs.
A little more constructive and altruistic sentiment
backed by codoperative and coordinated efforts at
home, throughout our country, with less scattered
sympathies, will adjust our domestic friction, relieve
the strain we are under and help to make national
unity among our people a less difficult thing to attain.
Human worth and values are not wrapped up in one
race, one religion nor one place of birth.
These qualities are fairly distributed and are re­
markably similar in quality and expression wherever
we find them. In America we are so constituted that j
we possess almost an over abundance of these quali­
ties hidden away in our reservoir of human mixtures.
Some day when we become weary of our hypocracy
we will turn to this reservoir for renewed national
vitality life and strength.
It is a perfectly noble thing for Americans to do to
salvage from the European wreckage the emaciated
children of impoverished combatants, but why not put
this charitable spirit, in part, to work at the same task
here at home, where we have plenty of undemurished,
underfed and insufficiently clad children of both na­
tive and foreign parentage.
Meanwhile thousands upon thousands of mentally
and physically war scarred sufferers from the old
world are finding their way to America and are being
admitted under our percentage immigration plan.
Collectively they constitute a formidable contin­
gent of the population of our country, yet, there is
very little concern manifest among Americans for the |