How the Other Half Lives: Chapter 23 Summary & Analysis

Riis tells a recent anecdote of a man, poor and hungry, who was in such despair at the sight of carriages rolling up Fifth Avenue, at the contrast between the wealthy shoppers and his children crying for bread, that he jumped into the crowd with a knife and starting slashing about. He was arrested and probably lies forgotten in an asylum today: but the carriages continue to roll by.

Riis says that this man was only resorting to a possibility that many have long feared, that the lower classes will rise up in violence. The only other option, he says, is that of justice. Riis imagines a reasonable-sounding person telling him that the tenements aren’t so bad as he claims, that they don’t look too shabby—some even have brown-stone fronts. This is true, he admits, in some of the newer tenements: but in any case, one must look beneath the surface to truly understand the situation.

Riis says that we are all products of our physical and moral conditions, but that in the case of the tenements this is hardly reassuring. But the “dangerous classes” of New York are dangerous less because of their crimes than because of the “criminal ignorance” of the privileged. A class of whom nothing is expected, he says, will remain ignored as well as impoverished.

Riis recalls an important meeting at Chickering Hall two years ago, where many discussed how to instruct this mass of over a million people in good Christian morals. But at no point, he says, was the question asked how love of God can be inculcated in people who have only witnessed human greed. A minister once asked him if he’s forgetting the inner man in exchange for focusing on people’s material conditions: Riis responded that there’s no inner man to appeal to in the tenements, and that the first action should be to situate someone in a place where he can respect himself.