'The daily distribution of flowers in a big, beautiful building freed from debt" 



WHAT A DANDELION DID FOR CITY CHILDREN 



By JACOB RIIS 

 Photographs by Leonard Barron and C. E. Batcheller 



IT WAS while I was traveling in the far 

 West last winter that my mail from 

 home brought me the most astonishing thing 

 I ever heard of. It was a bitter cry from a 

 friend who loves flowers so much that he can 

 think of nothing finer to give anybody, and 

 of all times in the joyous Christmas season. 

 And with this thought in his heart he had 

 gone among the poor to make them happy. 

 But on the way he had fallen among Philis- 

 tines. Not of the poor — not they; never! 

 " On the way" I said. People he met there, 

 who said they knew the poor and their ways 

 and their longings — and, let us be charitable, 

 perhaps they thought they did — had told 

 him that there was no interest in flowers, that 

 it was only sentimental mush and that they 

 couldn't trace any benefit from it; that our 

 methods of flower-giving go back to the Mid- 

 dle Ages like so many other charitable ideas 

 which tend to pauperize people instead of 

 making them independent; and that in the hos- 

 pitals, flowers were a nuisance because their 

 fragrance makes the patients sick, and it was 

 too much bother for the nurses to water them. 



All this they told him, these people who 

 were traveling on the way to the poor and 

 never got there — I mean to their hearts and 

 into the homes where they were themselves. 

 They might have got to their houses and 

 looked upon them and reasoned in their 

 hard mathematical heads that cabbage was 

 the only green thing that fitted properly into 

 a tenement, when it went with corn-beef — 

 not too much of either, for fear the largesse 

 pauperize the people. A dollar a week for 

 groceries was about right. Oh, yes! there 

 are some such, though how they came to be 

 turned loose in the highway that leads to the 

 tenements I cannot imagine. They cannot 

 trace any benefit from anything that is beauti- 

 ful or sweet or ennobling, not any. They 

 never make out to the end of their days that 

 souls live in the bodies of those they would 

 help, souls just like their own except that 

 they have not lost, in all the squalid darkness 

 of their surroundings, the craving for the 

 beautiful. People are they for whom the 

 splendid enthusiasms of the Middle Ages, of 

 the Crusades, of their Peter the Hermits 



230 



spell nothing but folly and failure. How 

 should the fragrance of a flower at a dying; 

 man's bed, with the whisper of things they 

 don't hear, or if they did couldn't under- 

 stand, be anything but a nuisance, or the joy 

 of tending it in love mean aught but trouble,, 

 and therefore economic loss ? What a nation 

 of fools must seem to them the simple hearty 

 folk of my childhood! home in far-off Den- 

 mark, who at Christmas in snow and slush 

 and cold, tramp to the cemeteries with 

 blossoms and wreaths for their loved dead 

 — worse: who on the Holy Eve set out in the- 

 farmyard a sheaf of rye on a stake so that the 

 birds of heaven may not hunger when all', 

 the world is glad. Waste, waste! rye and 

 bother wasted — on sparrows. 



So my friend had come back dispirited 

 and it all crept into his letter to me. I wrote 

 back to him to believe not one word of the 

 libel, for never on any account anywhere is 

 the man to be trusted who can see no beauty 

 and no use in a flower. Also, I added that 

 when I came East I would tell him a story 

 that would set him right, which is what I ami 



