Through the Eye of the Needle | Page 5

That is to say, in
conditions which oblige every man to look out for himself, a man
cannot be a Christian without remorse; he cannot do a generous action
without self-reproach; he cannot be nobly unselfish without the fear of
being a fool. You would think that this predicament must deprave, and
so without doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving. It often has
its effect in character of a rare and pathetic sublimity; and many
Americans take all the cruel risks of doing good, reckless of the evil
that may befall them, and defiant of the upbraidings of their own hearts.
This is something that we Altrurians can scarcely understand: it is like
the munificence of a savage who has killed a deer and shares it with his
starving tribesmen, forgetful of the hungering little ones who wait his
return from the chase with food; for life in plutocratic countries is still a
chase, and the game is wary and sparse, as the terrible average of
failures witnesses.
Of course, I do not mean that Americans may not give at all without
sensible risk, or that giving among them is always followed by a logical
regret; but, as I said, life with them is in no wise logical. They even
applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the
amount given, rather than by the love that goes with the giving. The
widow's mite has little credit with them, but the rich man's million has
an acclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift
is made. It is only the poor in America who do charity as we do, by
giving help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if
they are at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more

money they give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From
time to time some man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them
away, usually to a public institution of some sort, where it will have no
effect with the people who are underpaid for their work or cannot get
work; and then his deed is famed throughout the continent as a thing
really beyond praise. Yet any one who thinks about it must know that
he never earned the millions he kept, or the millions he gave, but
somehow made them from the labor of others; that, with all the wealth
left him, he cannot miss the fortune he lavishes, any more than if the
check which conveyed it were a withered leaf, and not in any wise so
much as an ordinary working-man might feel the bestowal of a
postage-stamp.
But in this study of the plutocratic mind, always so fascinating to me, I
am getting altogether away from what I meant to tell you. I meant to
tell you not how Americans live in the spirit, illogically, blindly, and
blunderingly, but how they live in the body, and more especially how
they house themselves in this city of New York. A great many of them
do not house themselves at all, but that is a class which we cannot now
consider, and I will speak only of those who have some sort of a roof
over their heads.

II
Formerly the New-Yorker lived in one of three different ways: in
private houses, or boarding-houses, or hotels; there were few
restaurants or public tables outside of the hotels, and those who had
lodgings and took their meals at eating-houses were but a small
proportion of the whole number. The old classification still holds in a
measure, but within the last thirty years, or ever since the Civil War,
when the enormous commercial expansion of the country began,
several different ways of living have been opened. The first and most
noticeable of these is housekeeping in flats, or apartments of three or
four rooms or more, on the same floor, as in all the countries of Europe
except England; though the flat is now making itself known in London,
too. Before the war, the New-Yorker who kept house did so in a
separate house, three or four stories in height, with a street door of its
own. Its pattern within was fixed by long usage, and seldom varied;
without, it was of brown-stone before, and brick behind, with an open

space there for drying clothes, which was sometimes gardened or
planted with trees and vines. The rear of the city blocks which these
houses formed was more attractive than the front, as you may still see
in the vast succession of monotonous cross-streets not yet invaded by
poverty or business; and often the perspective of these rears is
picturesque and pleasing. But with the sudden growth of the population
when peace came, and through the