"Slum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unrestrained rhythms, and their direct appeal to sex. These rag-time melodies, coming straight from the jungles of Africa through the negro, call to impulses in man that are stifled in big cities, in factory and slum and the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... addressed the students of Yale University on the subject of city mission work and, as a result of that address, had been invited to make some investigations and outline a plan for city mission work for the students. I spent ten days in the slum region there, making a report and recommendations. On these the students began the work anew. I was asked at that time to attach myself to the university as leader and instructor in city missions, but work in New York seemed more important ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... was usually in every pocket save her own. She had neither kith nor kin, nor friends, nor even acquaintances; but, being something of a miser, scraped and screwed to amass money she had no need for, and dwelt in a wretched little apartment in a back slum, whence she daily issued to ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... a devoted creature but colourless, whom she could be said rather to suffer gladly than enjoy, and her interests, were divided between the little slum church she lived near in London, her friends at Cloom, and the rare visits of Lissa, of whom she was very fond, and who sometimes went and poured out to her enthusiasms about Futurist paintings, which Judy, who had remained true to the early ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... it was universally believed that the slum dwellers of London were mainly recruited by rural immigrants, and this error—disproved several years later by the painstaking statistical investigations of Mr. (now Sir) H. Llewelyn Smith—vitiates much of the reasoning of ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Right" is heard, "all over the place," as light sleepers and studious dwellers in quiet streets are too well aware. Why should it not be enlisted in the service of Apollo and Momus as well as of the Back Slum Bacchus? As thus:— ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... not mount Gtterdmmerung in a village schoolhouse. But Life does not fit the splendour of the setting to the grandeur of the struggle. In bleak farm cottages, in dull dwellings in city blocks, in slum tenements, the greatest of life's tragedies and comedies are enacted—love, hate, avarice, jealousy, revenge, birth, death—the most terrific passions known to human nature are fully presented, without the slightest care for appropriate scenery from the Master of the show. Thus our poet leads ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... the owners of slum property, all the grasping shipowners, all those who batten and fatten on other people's welfare in a most favourable light. We have been thinking them almost criminals when they were in reality public benefactors. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... the Kralahome, whose shy, inquisitive smile was more and more provoking. In a few sharp words I told him, through the interpreter, what I thought of the lodging provided for me, and that nothing should induce me to live in such a slum. To which, with cool, deliberate audacity, he replied that nothing prevented me from living where I was. I started from the low seat I had taken (in order to converse with him at my ease, he sitting on the floor), and not without difficulty found voice to say that neither his palace ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... finding themselves suddenly dropped into the midst of those wood-covered crags and clean-cut ravines, the boulder-strewn, grassless land, would have dreamed that they were within half-a-dozen miles of the fertile prairie-lands of Canada. It was like a slum hidden away in the heart of a fashionable city. The country round the mysterious Lake of the Woods is something utterly apart from the rest of the Canadian world, and partakes much of the nature of the Badlands of Dakota. It is tucked away in the extreme south-eastern corner of Manitoba, ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... little lands they come, From barren country-side and deathly slum, From bleakest wastes, from lands of aching drouth, From grape-hung valleys of the smiling South, From chains and prisons, ay, from horrid fear, (Mark you the furtive eye, the listening ear!) And all amazed and silent, scared ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... what my notion of Heaven is? It would be to go off alone, with one suit of clothes in a handbag, oh, and fifty or a hundred dollars in my pocket—I wouldn't mind that; I don't want to be a tramp—to some mining town, or mill town, or slum, where I could start a general practise; where the things I'd get would be accident cases, confinement cases; real things, urgent things, that night and day are all alike to. I'd like to start again ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... had moved out of the slums, or that the family had progressed sufficiently to find better quarters. Everywhere the children from these fearful homes seemed to have been dowered with promise, and as Burns had suggested, the sole comfort and hope for the future lay in the fact that the New York slum is a one-generation slum. ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... it would be only to put himself under harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some fly; she figured him living by the labor of his hands in some city slum, the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in the house of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half proudly, and wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare say he calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is this: that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating as divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if you mention poverty ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... was due in the bar-room at eight o'clock in the morning; the bar-room was in a slum in the Bowery; and he had only been able to keep himself in health by getting up at five o'clock and going for long walks ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... more modern amusements, German opera and Italian opera and the theatre and subscription concerts. Then we have balls nearly every night in the season and dinner-parties and luncheons and lectures and musical parties, and we study a good deal and 'slum' a little. Last winter I belonged to a Greek class and a fencing class, and a quartette club, and two private dancing classes, and a girls' working club, and an amateur theatrical society. We gave two private concerts for charities, you know, and acted the Antigone for the ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... heard much more about the exploits of this champion bird-destroyer of the village from (strange to say) a bird-catcher by trade, a man of a rather low type of countenance, and who lived, when at home, in a London slum. On the common where he spread his nets he had found, he told me, about thirty nests containing eggs or fledglings; but this boy had gone over the ground after him, and not many of the nests had escaped his ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... theme of the tale being the outrages inflicted upon American citizens by VILLA, and what seemed then the bewildering delay of Washington over the vindication of the flag. The "Alley" of its unfortunate name is the slum in Kansas City where Dave, stranded on his way westward, met the girl to whom the laws of fiction were inevitably to join him. I fancy that one of Mr. CULLEY'S difficulties may have lain in the fact that, when the tale, following Dave, had finally shaken itself ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... marked. There was no cheating him of his due. "Slum" was his sobriquet by the courtesy of prairie custom. "Ranks" was purely a paternal heirloom and of no consequence ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... steadily below the spot where the ribs part, and where—a doctor informs me—a nerve-center, known as the solar plexus, is situated. He revolved, too, with considerable agility, round his opponent, and gradually drew the battle nearer and nearer to the side lane outside. He knew enough of slum-chivalry by now to be aware that if a sympathizer, or sycophant, of the young man happened to be present, he himself would quite possibly (if the friend happened to possess sufficient courage) suddenly collapse from a disabling ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... of penalties may greatly be diminished by the amelioration of the organism of society. There is the born criminal, as there is the born inmate of an asylum for the insane. But there is also the manufactured criminal; the product of the slum, the victim of ignorance, the prey of the walking-delegate, the sufferer from over-work and undernourishment, the inhabitant of the filthy and overcrowded tenement, the man robbed of his self-respect, who has no share in the sweetness and light of civilization. A society that first manufactures ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... procedure was followed at noon when slum was served. Night mess in England invariably was cheese and tea and jam, which was always good as far as it went. The entire 311th regiment was served from one kitchen. It was good fortune that the ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen. Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have: ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... mean that we have always lived and shall always live. Some people think that dreadful. They think it is taking liberties with them. If they are rich and comfortable and dignified, they cannot bear to think that they may have to begin again, perhaps as a baby in a slum—or they grow tired, and think they want rest; but we can't rest—we must live again, we must be back at work; and of course the real hope in it all is that, when we do anything to make the world happier, it is our own future that we are working ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... politician's job so profitable in our large cities, and that of the patriot and the housekeeper so wearisome. We all know the process. The immigrant has no patent on it. It afflicts the native, too, when he goes to a town where he is not known. In the slum it reaches its climax in the second generation, and makes of the Irishman's and the Italian's boys the "toughs" who fight the battles of Hell's Kitchen and Frog Hollow. It simply means that we are ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... edged away toward the gate, looking to see the crazy beast loose, and charging us. To add to her attractions, the board had fallen partly off, and only covered one eye, giving her the look of a crazy old woman in a Sydney slum. Meanwhile, the calf stood looking on, a little perplexed, and seemed to be saying: "Well, now, is this life? It doesn't seem as if it was all it was cracked up to be. And this is my mamma? What a very ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stinking doors where women stood to scold And drunken waits at Christmas with their horn Droning the news, in snow, that Christ was born; And windy gas lamps and the wet roads shining And that old carol of the midnight whining, And that old room above the noisy slum Where there was wine and fire and talk with some Under strange pictures of the wakened soul To whom this earth was ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... returned Miss Gibbs, marshalling her flock to the gate of exit. Drawn up outside the station were six large hay wagons, and on one of these hung a placard: "Marlowe Grange." Miss Gibbs made for it immediately, turning out some struggling slum children who had already climbed in and taken temporary possession, and stowed ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... go out and fly it on a vacant lot in the rear of our lodgings, accompanied by a large portion of the unoccupied population of Manchester. The kite broke its string one day, and I saw it descend over the roofs of a remote slum region towards the south, and I never recaptured it. But my chief energies were devoted to acquiring the art of fencing with the small-sword from one Corporal Blair, of the Fourth Dragoon Guards—a regiment which had distinguished itself in the Crimean ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... exists almost under the very eaves of the roofs which shelter them a vast and pitiful group of friendless children,—the deserted babe, the "little mother," the boys and girls running wild on side streets in every village in our land and in every slum in the cities, the factory child, the shop girl who has no home. Let us remember that a goodly percentage of those at work have homes and that they are engaged in a stimulating, if hard, effort to "help," that they have the steadying ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed its morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going through a criminal slum, "I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals." But here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums. Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway engineers and philanthropists—two dingy classes of men united by their common ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... decency, and home life become more difficult and, for many, impossible. The residents gradually group themselves in districts corresponding to their economic incomes, and the poorer parts of the population become tenement dwellers in the neighborhood of factories or become segregated in "slum" districts of unsanitary ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... been effusively praised. There is nothing in those Commandments to restrain the sweater, the rack-renter, the jerry-builder, the slum landlord, the usurer, the liar, the libertine, the gambler, the drunkard, the wife-beater, the slave-owner, the religious persecutor, the maker of wheat and cotton rings, the fox-hunter, the bird-slayer, the ill-user of ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... at a recruiting station far down-town in a crowded tenement district, and tired as she was, she took a bus and went down at seven o'clock. She was uneasy and nervous. She had not spoken in the evening before, and in all her sheltered life she had never seen the milling of a night crowd in a slum district. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sanctification by supernatural authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr. Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the State to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is entirely to the best interests of the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... movements had been overcome, off they started to their beloved slum, Emilia looking as if she were setting forth for Elysium, and they were seen no more, even when five o'clock tea was spread, and Anna making it for her Uncle Lance and his wife, who had just returned, full ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ear or holiday, a slum, A man gone bald, or drunk, a coin's design— Should things like these across your paper come, Conclude the Silly Season will ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... you think that crazy nut has pulled off now? Wants me to go to church with him! Of all things! And down in some queer slum place, too! If I get into a scrape you'll have to promise to help me out, or mamma'll never let me free from a chaperon again. And I had to make Artley Guelpin, and Turner Bailey sore, too, by telling them ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... earlier imagining. The changes, even on the material side, have not been all gain. There is many a case of reckless waste of resources to lament, many an instance of half-developed opportunity and even of slipping backwards. With the millionaire came the slum, and the advantages of great corporations were often balanced by the 'frenzied finance' and the unhealthy political influence of those in control. Yet, on the whole, progress, especially in the last twenty years, has been ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... learn that as the down noon express was leaving H—— yesterday a lady! (God save the mark) attempted to force herself into the already full palatial car. Conductor Slum, who is too old a bird to be caught with chaff, courteously informed her that the car was full, and when she insisted on remaining, he persuaded her to go into the car where she belonged. Thereupon ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... Warren herself. Now the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the British public itself. You may remember that when you produced my first play, Widowers' Houses, exactly the same misunderstanding arose. When the virtuous young gentleman rose up in wrath against the slum landlord, the slum landlord very effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... falling, with awful smashes of the crockery they carried, in the deep, slippery, scarce passable mire of the first slants into the valley. Duck Square had witnessed the slow declension of these roads into mere streets, and slum streets at that, and the death of all mules, and the disappearance of all coaches and all neighing and prancing and whipcracking romance; while Trafalgar Road, simply because it was straight and broad and easily graded, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... morning sky bends or the stars cluster is sanctuary enough," she said; "a slum at noonday is as holy for us as daisied fields; the Name of the Lord walks with us. The Army is His Army, He is Lord of ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... one of sympathy with the police of Washington for their noble efforts to break up the Woman's Parade, and after their almost Herculaneum labor to teach wimmen her proper place, and all the help they got from the hoodlum and slum elements, they had failed in a measure, and the wimmen, though stunned, insulted, spit on, struck, broken boneded, maimed, and tore to pieces, had succeeded ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... hardly to be feared, for as in this gang's case, they invariably have their headquarters in the building above a slum saloon, whose proprietor would and could not be in business very long unless he knew how to protect his lodgers against police interference, as a gang's quarters needed to be raided only one time, and ever after all plingers in the land would give this unsafe "dump," ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... furnishes a much more crucial test, as it is carried out upon wild animals under the unfavorable conditions of captivity in a strange climate, like our slum-dwellers from sunny Italy, and comes home to us more closely in many respects, inasmuch as it is concerned with our nearest animal relatives on the biological side—monkeys and ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Made reeling dreadnought's grave; Cathedral, castle, gallery, smoking fell 'Neath bomb and shell; In deathlike trance Lay industry, finance; Two thousand years' Bequest, achievement, saving, disappears In blood and tears, In widowed woe That slum and palace equal know, In civilization's suicide,— What served thereby, what satisfied? For justice, freedom, ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... because it is connected with geographical conditions. Use on the other hand the instrument of civilization, without sentencing any one, and brigandage and robbery will disappear before its light. And if human beings in large industrial centers are herded together in tenements and slum hotels, how can a humane judge aggravate the penalties against sexual crimes? How can the sense of shame develop among people, when young and old of both sexes are crowded together in the same bed, in the same corrupted and corrupting environment, ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... seven dreary months, in that dismal slum-grown town, we learnt all the tricks of barrack-life. We knew how to "come the old soldier"; we knew how and when to "wangle out" of doing this or that fatigue; we practised the ancient art of "going sick" when we knew a long route march was ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... been largely spent in the slum district of a crowded city, and the change to the freedom of the Oro fields and woods was almost too much for the orphans. After school hours they all, with one consent, went mad, and ranged far and wide over hill and dale, until Granny Long's old hands grew weary readjusting the ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... view the ethical justification for the war on the slum becomes: (a) to make possible for the slum-dweller the better performance of his various duties as parent, worker, citizen; (b) to drive home to all concerned the meaning of interdependence; (c) to clarify for all ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... to-day in the city slum and the home of wealth and pride Who'll have one home when the storm is come, and fight for it side by side, Who'll hold the cliffs 'gainst the armoured hells that batter a coastal town, Or grimly die in a hail of shells when ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... brother had his points, but they were few, the chief one being that he was fairly good at games, which, after all, is but a negative quality. But the younger, who was as useless as he was generally officious, was entirely devoid of any redeeming feature. His ways were the ways of a slum child playing in the gutter, and his sense of humour was limited to shouting rude remarks after other people, knocking off hats, and then running away. His language was foul enough to disgust even a ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... minority; whereas in churches, schools and all organizations working for the uplift of humanity, women are a majority. In all American states and countries that have adopted equal suffrage the vote of the disreputable woman is practically negligible, the slum wards of cities invariably having the lightest woman vote and the respectable residence wards the heaviest. Woman suffrage would increase the number of native born voters as for every 100 foreign white women immigrants coming ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for commands sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... splendour, but existence in it was picturesque, varied, exciting, full of accidents, as existence is apt to be in residences that cost their occupiers an average of three shillings a week. Some persons referred to the quarter as a slum, and ironically insisted on its adjacency to the Wesleyan chapel, as though that was the Wesleyan chapel's fault. Such people did not understand life ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... say to them simply: "It is a real Revolution this time, comrades, and no mistake about it. Come to such a place this evening; all the neighbourhood will be there; we are going to redistribute the dwelling-houses. If you are tired of your slum-garret, come and choose one of the flats of five rooms that are to be disposed of, and when you have once moved in you shall stay, never fear. The people are up in arms, and he who would venture to evict you will have ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... is a noisy thoroughfare cut through a South End slum, in every essential the same as Wheeler Street. Turn down any street in the slums, at random, and call it by whatever name you please, you will observe there the same fashions of life, death, and endurance. Every one of those streets is ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... act as librarian for an evening at a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books, she sympathetically alluded to as a "slum." ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... built, narrow streets trickled down to the walls, and here was the Seven Dials, the Whitechapel, the very worst corner of Beorminster. The Beorminster police declared that this network of lanes and alleys and malodorous cul-de-sacs was as dangerous a neighbourhood as any London slum, and they were particularly emphatic in denouncing the public-house known as The Derby Winner, and kept by a certain William Mosk, who was a sporting scoundrel and a horsey scamp. This ill-famed hostel ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... once that Mrs. Clemm found him. She had sought him diligently in what would to-day be known as the slum districts of the city, descending the scale of respectability lower and lower until she thought she had reached the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarter beyond the bridge. It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after the outdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty. Kellow kicked out a chair for me and drew up one for himself on the ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... gather. It was perfectly still; the wide quadrangle of dusky houses showed lights in none of the windows, where the shutters and blinds were closed; the pavements were a vacant expanse, and, putting aside two small children from a neighbouring slum, who, attracted by symptoms of abnormal animation in the interior, poked their faces between the rusty rails of the enclosure, the most vivid object within sight was the big red ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... smell in the narrow slum were worse than usual. A hot Saturday night in midsummer is a bad time in the slums, and worse in the slum public-houses. It was so on the night I speak of. In and out of the suffocating bar the dirty stream of humanity came and went. ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... more serious in my life, father," replied his son. "But in order to arrest your attention I have to be theatrical. Now if you will really believe what I am going to say I will drop play-acting. I have, as I tell you, been down into our slum districts, I have been among the slum workers, means have been offered me for studying these problems at first hand, and I am prepared,—from this week on when Parliament rises, and the metropolis empties itself of pleasure, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... been right; within the year, Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been born—the plainest kind of symbolic suicide: Let's not have any more Abner Longmans Brauns born down here. It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Joan's agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer twenty years too late. Since I'm ...
— One-Shot • James Benjamin Blish
... Chicago, we were not just sure what God wanted us to do. The first winter I helped hold meetings for homeless men in the slum district. As a class, these people were so deep in sin that it was hard to reach them. A few, however, did get a real experience of salvation; but it was difficult for them to keep saved, and when they would give up, they would not stop until they had gone into the grossest ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... Chicago slum in 1884. Her mother, half French and half German, was endowed with cruelty truly international. Her father was a drunken machinist of German extraction, generally out of a job. Both the parents beat the little girl, the mother ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... frontage; and when it walks out of doors it does not walk in rags. But you only have to look at the pinched faces of the children in the poorer quarters of any city to know that it is there. They are tidier and cleaner than English slum children, but they make you wish just as ardently that you were the Pied Piper and could pipe them all with you to a land of plenty. It would require more experience and wider facts than I possess to compare the condition of the poor ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... and arrange to turn over their rations so that they would be cooked by the housewife and eaten with the luxurious accompaniment of chair and table. The diplomat would invite a few friends to enjoy with him the welcome change from the "slum" ladled out of the caldrons of the battery rolling kitchen. I had always supposed that I had in my battery a large number of men who could speak German—a glance over the pay-roll would certainly leave that impression—but when I came to test it out, I found that I had but four men who ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... intellect and character to look beyond immediate needs. The type of business leadership which took millions out of filthy factory towns, wore out women and took the youth out of children, cleared twelve per cent from slum tenements, kept men and women from marriage by underpayment, and kept the cradle empty by high prices and fear of the future—this type of leadership is antiquated. It belongs to a pre-Christian and pagan age. It is only a ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... have intimated, in spite of the Honourable George's affiliations with the slum-characters of what I may call Red Gap's East End, he had not yet publicly identified himself with the Klondike woman and her Bohemian set, in consequence of which—let him dine and wine a Spilmer as he would—there was yet hope that he would not alienate himself ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... "forms" many a time, among the printers, from 10 P.M. until 3 A.M., walking home with the milk-carts in the lead-blue morning; sitting in the outer office of one of the greatest city editors for three of these years; studying every "first night," every picturesque slum, every visiting or indigenous notoriety at close range—to catalogue a life like this, add that it was the life of a handsome, well-dressed, high-spirited girl, and pretend that it was an existence unqualified by male adjectives, would ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... with a sick kid in it. But you ought to have seen him go for the bread and tincture of formaldehyde. Half-starved, I guess. Then she prayed some. Don't get stuck up, tenner. We one-spots hear ten prayers, where you hear one. She said something about 'who giveth to the poor.' Oh, let's cut out the slum talk. I'm certainly tired of the company that keeps me. I wish I was big enough to move in society with ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... of Philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum, and his first writing was for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. He is purely Irish in blood, and is of very respectable ancestry, his maternal grandfather and godfather having been James Gibbons, the Irish poet and patriot, and president ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... curiously Eastern, captured by a Nautch girl whom they had come to know in Paris. For a time they were Japanese, when the Criterion opened its doors to a passionate doll from Yokohama, who became their bosom friend. Italy touched them with the lovely hands of La Divina Carlotta, our lady of tears from a slum of Naples. The Sicilians turned them to fire and the Swedish singers to snow. At this moment Margot was inclined to be classic, caught by a plastic poseuse from Athens, who, attired solely in gold-leaf, was giving exhibitions at the Hippodrome to the despair ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... him up. "It won't happen so much among our boys. The slum districts will get most of it. Some of those suckers would do almost anything to get ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... now—did you twig how he queered the coves out of seven bob for what was not worth thrums.{1} The Yelper{2} did his duty well, and finger'd the white wool{3} in good style. I'm d———d if he was not up to slum, and he whiddied their wattles with the velvet, and floored ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... found it out," returned Clytie, making a sudden veer. "Is he suffering for lack of fresh air and pure water? And does he have to pay an extra price for sunlight? And must he herd in a filthy slum full of awful plumbing and crowded by more awful neighbours? Does he have to put up with municipal neglect and corruption, and worry along on make-believe milk and doctored bread and adulterated medicines, and endure long hours in unsanitary places under a tyrannical foreman and in ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... friend, Mr. F.O. WARD, visited him, and, to amuse him, related some of his adventures in the low parts of the metropolis in his capacity as a sanitary commissioner. "Pray desist," said Hood; "your anecdote gives me the back-slum-bago." The proximity of death could no more deprive poor Artemus of his power to jest than it could Thomas Hood. When nothing else was left him to joke upon, when he could no longer seek fun in the city streets, or visit ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... wage must choose a tuberculosis incubator for a home. Ireland is a one-room-home country. In the great "rural slum" districts, the one-room cabin prevails. Country slums exist where homes cannot be supported by the land they are built on—they occur, for instance, in the rocky fields of Galway and Donegal and in the stripped bog lands of Sligo. Galway and Donegal cabins are made of stones wrested from the ground; ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... come from the gloom of the slum Is charmed by the magic of dazzle and hum; He feasts his big eyes on the cakes and the pies, And they seem to grow green and protrude with surprise At the goodies they vend and the toys without end— And it's oh! if he had but a penny to spend! But alas, he must gaze ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... then mostly either mist or cloud. The name "fog," at any rate in towns, carries with it the idea of a hideous, greasy compound, consisting of smoke and mist and sulphur and filth, as unlike the mists on a Highland mountain as a country meadow is unlike a city slum. Nevertheless, the finest cloud or mist that ever existed consists simply of little globules of water suspended in air, and thus for our present purpose differs in no important respect from fog, dust, and smoke. A cloud or mist is, in fact, fine ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... them off by forcing them to work under conditions in which the sacrifice of human life was held subordinate to the gathering of profits, or by forcing them to work or live in disease-breeding places. [Footnote: The slum population of the United States increased rapidly. "According to the best estimates," stated the "Seventh Special Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Labor—The Slums of Great Cities, 1894," "the total slum population of Baltimore is ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... with her grace; and glad I for one shall be when I see the barouche waiting for her at Victoria, with Whippup and his powdered head on the box. I don't mind that young chauffeur with one leg lost in the war, but I don't like that wicked-looking red vermilion motor-car of her grace's, though the slum-folks do, and you should hear them cheer, Miss Jill, when it ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... walked in at the head of a score of ragamuffins he had gathered up along the wharves. The divine fire seems to have been working in him; he was finding words with which to express himself, and burning for a wider field. So he rented a room in the slum districts which had been used as a saloon and opened a Sunday school there. It was an immense success, soon outgrew the little room, and was removed to a large hall, where, every Sunday, a thousand boys and girls attended. For six years, Moody conducted ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... was discovered by his waking. Marie was taken in and presented. She looked stupefied. Certainly the Americans were a marvelous people—to have taken into their house and their hearts this strange child—if he were strange. Marie's suspicious little slum mind was ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... all upon the bodies of air-raid victims: a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby—all belonging to the thick central mass of the proletariat, for a West End slum had received a bomb full in the face—and Lady Queenie Paulle. The policemen were stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid; the majority of the witnesses were stolid, and in particular the representatives of various philanthropic ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... at reveille, He puts his elbow on his knee; His head upon his hand; And tho' he's slept ten hours or more, His back is weak, his feet are sore, And he can hardly stand. And, as he goes to get his chow, He says, "By Gosh!—I don't see how A soldier lives so long. The spuds is rotten and the slum Is always worse than on the bum. The coffee is too strong. That cow was killed ten years before They organized this bloomin' war; These flapjacks taste like wood." And so he growls through all the day, And fills his comrades with dismay; They'd kill him ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... seemed heavier than ever with foul tobacco smoke. The man at the piano still thrashed out his unmelodious chords. Some women in a corner were pretending to dance. One or two of them looked curiously at Fischer, but he passed out, unchallenged. Even the air of the slum outside seemed pure and fresh after the heated den he had left. He reached the corner of the street in safety and stepped quickly into his car. He threw both windows wide open and murmured an order to the ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ecclesiastical. He had two other titles. He was a Prince of the Udeschini by accident of birth. But his third title was perhaps his most curious. It had been conferred upon him informally by the populace of the Roman slum in which his titular church, St. Mary of the Lilies, was situated: the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... house—it was probably in a slum, certainly in a mean street—one stepped direct from the pavement into a small kitchen, where an elderly man sat smoking a long clay pipe. A covered stairway rose mysteriously from one side of this apartment into the two bedrooms above. A door ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... had not forgotten it, or the circumstance that the afternoon was exceedingly hot, and that the mission church, which was situated in an outlying slum, was made of corrugated tin. The palace garden would have been infinitely preferable, and he knew that had he accepted sugarless tea without a murmur, his chaplain would have sweltered in his place. As it was, he submitted meekly, ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... coal-merchants, reappeared as the stenographer of the Police Court, and finally edged his way into the power-house of the Apex Water-Works. He boarded with old Mrs. Flynn, down in North Fifth Street, on the edge of the red-light slum, he never went to church or attended lectures, or showed any desire to improve or refine himself; but he managed to get himself invited to all the picnics and lodge sociables, and at a supper of the Phi Upsilon Society, to which he had contrived to affiliate himself, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... us glance for a moment at the poems in prose and verse of Mr. James Oppenheim, a young man for whom a metropolis is almost completely epitomized by the riveting-machine, the sweat-shop, and the slum. There we discover that this poet's vision has pierced straight through the city's veneer of ugly commonplace to the beauty shimmering beneath. In his eyes the sinewy, heroic forms of the builders, clinging high on their frail scaffoldings ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Chesilstowe cottage already," he said, "when that happened. It was last December. I had taken a room in London, a large unfurnished room in a big ill-managed lodging-house in a slum near Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of the appliances I had bought with his money; the work was going on steadily, successfully, drawing near an end. I was like a man emerging from a ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... walking on Lembarene Island, have I seen a lady stand in the street and let her husband, who had taken shelter inside the house, know what she thought of him, in a way that reminded me of some London slum scenes. When the husband loses his temper, as he surely does sooner or later, being a man, he whacks his wife—or wives, if they have been at him in a body. He may whack with impunity so long as he does not draw blood; if he does, be it never so little, his wife is off to her relations, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand to the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... within the rubric of the tears drawn by mere contemplation of visual beauty. The Morris, as I saw it, was curious, antique, racy, what you will: not beautiful. Nor was there any obvious pathos in it. Often, in London, passing through some slum where a tune was being ground from an organ, I have paused to watch the little girls dancing. In the swaying dances of these wan, dishevelled, dim little girls I have discerned authentic beauty, and have wondered where they had learned the grace of their movements, and where the certainty with ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... officer, she hastened home, placed the bread and meat on a table, and fell dead of exhaustion. Dr. Barnardo was sent for, and beside the dead body of the mother he was surprised, as well he might be, to find five well-fed, chubby children. The poor, slum mother had literally starved herself to death that her children might live! Truly, as Coleridge says, "A mother is the holiest thing alive;" and God never intended that the almshouse or the orphan asylum should be the only refuge held open for a mother who is able and willing ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... side of the street there runs a stream of water of exquisite clearness. There is very little crowding in the way of house-building. Each house in the city is surrounded by a green lawn, a garden and an orchard, so that poverty and squalor of the slum type is practically unknown. The communistic idea of homes in common, which has received so much attention of late years, was not adopted by the founders of this city, who, however, took excellent precautions to stamp out loafing, begging and other ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... was all character-sketching, mainly Scotch; the day before that it was all problem-solving, chiefly religious; yesterday it was all adventure-seeking, called historical because it seems highly improbable; and to-day it is a mixture of automobile-journeys and slum-life. It looks to me as if there must be somebody always ready to read some kind of fiction, but ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... objectionable, as he can be entertaining when he chooses, but I can't imagine why she should take up her abode here. It is not a question of charity.' Here she noticed my entrance, but calmly went on talking to Constance as if I were not there. 'Let her take herself off to some nursing Sisterhood or slum work in the East of London. I hate a half-and-half kind of person. If they are too good to live our life and mingle in our society, let them take up a religious vocation, instead of being a perpetual source of annoyance and aggravation to those ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... their forests; William Allen White to describe certain aspects of his favourite Kansas; E.L. Godkin to review the dangers and the hopes of American democracy; Jacob Rues to tell about the Battle with the Slum; and W.G. Frost to reveal for the first time the archaic civilization of the Kentucky mountaineers. The latter article illustrated Page's genius at rewriting titles. Mr. Frost's theme was that these Kentucky mountaineers were really Elizabethan survivals; that their dialect, their ballads, ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick |
