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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Children of the Poor, by Jacob A. Riis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Children of the Poor
+
+Author: Jacob A. Riis
+
+Release Date: May 30, 2010 [EBook #32609]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
+
+
+  BY
+  JACOB A. RIIS
+  AUTHOR OF "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES"
+
+
+  _ILLUSTRATED_
+
+
+  NEW YORK
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+  1908
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+To my little ones, who, as I lay down my pen, come rushing in from the
+autumn fields, their hands filled with flowers "for the poor children," I
+inscribe this book. May the love that shines in their eager eyes never
+grow cold within them; then they shall yet grow up to give a helping hand
+in working out this problem which so plagues the world to-day. As to their
+father's share, it has been a very small and simple one, and now it is
+done. Other hands may carry forward the work. My aim has been to gather
+the facts for them to build upon. I said it in "How the Other Half Lives,"
+and now, in sending this volume to the printer, I can add nothing. The two
+books are one. Each supplements the other. Ours is an age of facts. It
+wants facts, not theories, and facts I have endeavored to set down in
+these pages. The reader may differ with me as to the application of them.
+He may be right and I wrong. But we shall not quarrel as to the facts
+themselves, I think. A false prophet in our day could do less harm than a
+careless reporter. That name I hope I shall not deserve.
+
+To lay aside a work that has been so long a part of one's life, is like
+losing a friend. But for the one lost I have gained many. They have been
+much to me. The friendship and counsel of Dr. Roger S. Tracy, of the
+Bureau of Vital Statistics, have lightened my labors as nothing else
+could save the presence and the sympathy of the best and dearest friend of
+all, my wife. To Major Willard Bullard, the most efficient chief of the
+Sanitary Police; Rabbi Adolph M. Radin; Mr. A. S. Solomons, of the Baron
+de Hirsch Relief Committee; Dr. Annie Sturges Daniel; Mr. L. W. Holste, of
+the Children's Aid Society; Colonel George T. Balch, of the Board of
+Education; Mr. A. S. Fairchild, and to Dr. Max L. Margolis, my thanks are
+due and here given. Jew and Gentile, we have sought the truth together.
+Our reward must be in the consciousness that we have sought it faithfully
+and according to our light.
+
+J. A. R.
+
+RICHMOND HILL, LONG ISLAND,
+
+October 1, 1892.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                   PAGE
+
+  CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN,             1
+
+
+  CHAPTER II. THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN,             10
+
+
+  CHAPTER III. IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL,     35
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV. TONY AND HIS TRIBE,                    58
+
+
+  CHAPTER V. THE STORY OF KID MCDUFF'S GIRL,         87
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI. THE LITTLE TOILERS,                    92
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII. THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS,          118
+
+
+  CHAPTER VIII. WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD,     129
+
+
+  CHAPTER IX. LITTLE MARY ELLEN'S LEGACY,           142
+
+
+  CHAPTER X. THE STORY OF THE FRESH AIR FUND,       153
+
+
+  CHAPTER XI. THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES,      174
+
+
+  CHAPTER XII. THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS,              187
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIII. THE BOYS' CLUBS,                    215
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIV. THE OUTCAST AND THE HOMELESS,        245
+
+
+  CHAPTER XV. PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM,       277
+
+
+  CHAPTER XVI. THE VERDICT OF THE POTTERS FIELD,    286
+
+
+  REGISTER OF CHILDREN'S CHARITIES,                 291
+
+
+
+
+LISTS OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  Saluting the Flag,                                    _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+  The Mott Street Barracks,                                         16
+
+  An Italian Home under a Dump,                                     25
+
+  A Child of the Dump,                                              28
+
+  Pietro Learning to Make an Englis' Letter,                        32
+
+  "Slept in the Cellar Four Years,"                                 41
+
+  A Synagogue School in a Hester Street Tenement,                   46
+
+  The Backstairs to Learning,                                       48
+
+  Class of Melammedim Learning English,                             50
+
+  "I Scrubs."--Katie who Keeps House in West Forty-ninth Street,    61
+
+  Present Tenants of John Ericsson's Old House, now the Beach
+  Street Industrial School,                                         73
+
+  Their Playground a Truck,                                         86
+
+  Shine, Sir?                                                      100
+
+  Little Susie at her Work,                                        110
+
+  Minding the Baby,                                                114
+
+  "Shooting Craps" in the Hall of the Newsboys' Lodging House,     122
+
+  Case No. 25,745 on the Society's Blotter, Before and After,      146
+
+  Club Used for Beating a Child,                                   152
+
+  Summer Boarders from Mott Street,                                158
+
+  Making for the "Big Water,"                                      167
+
+  Floating Hospital--St. John's Guild,                             169
+
+  Playing at Housekeeping,                                         177
+
+  Poverty Gappers Playing Coney Island,                            183
+
+  Poverty Gap Transformed--the Spot where Young Healey was
+  murdered is now a Playground,                                    185
+
+  The Late Charles Loring Brace, Founder of the Children's
+  Aid Society,                                                     188
+
+  The First Patriotic Election in the Beach Street Industrial
+  School--Parlor in John Ericsson's Old House,                     201
+
+  The Board of Election Inspectors in the Beach Street School,     207
+
+  The Plumbing Shop in the New York Trade Schools,                 212
+
+  A Boys' Club Reading room,                                       222
+
+  The Carpenter Shop in the Avenue C Working Boys' Club,           226
+
+  Type-setting at the Avenue C Working Boys' Club,                 231
+
+  A Bout with the Gloves in the Boys' Club of Calvary Parish,      235
+
+  Lining up for the Gymnasium,                                     240
+
+  A Snug Corner on a Cold Night,                                   246
+
+  2 A.M. in the Delivery-room in the "Sun" Office,                 261
+
+  Buffalo,                                                         264
+
+  Night School in the West Side Lodging-house.--Edward, the
+  Little Pedlar, Caught Napping,                                   265
+
+  The "Soup-House Gang," Class in History in the Duane Street
+  Newsboy's Lodging-house,                                         269
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN
+
+
+The problem of the children is the problem of the State. As we mould the
+children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of
+the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our
+hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad
+government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance
+of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future
+finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power
+and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of
+that energy. At the beginning of the century the urban population of the
+United States was 3.97 per cent. of the whole, or not quite one in
+twenty-five. To-day it is 29.12 per cent., or nearly one in three. In the
+lifetime of those who were babies in arms when the first gun was fired
+upon Fort Sumter it has all but doubled. A million and a quarter live
+to-day in the tenements of the American metropolis. Clearly, there is
+reason for the sharp attention given at last to the life and the doings of
+the other half, too long unconsidered. Philanthropy we call it sometimes
+with patronizing airs. Better call it self-defence.
+
+In New York there is all the more reason because it is the open door
+through which pours in a practically unrestricted immigration, unfamiliar
+with and unattuned to our institutions; the dumping-ground where it rids
+itself of its burden of helplessness and incapacity, leaving the
+procession of the strong and the able free to move on. This sediment forms
+the body of our poor, the contingent that lives, always from hand to
+mouth, with no provision and no means of providing for the morrow. In the
+first generation it pre-empts our slums;[1] in the second, its worst
+elements, reinforced by the influences that prevail there, develop the
+tough, who confronts society with the claim that the world owes him a
+living and that he will collect it in his own way. His plan is a practical
+application of the spirit of our free institutions as his opportunities
+have enabled him to grasp it.
+
+Thus it comes about that here in New York to seek the children of the poor
+one must go among those who, if they did not themselves come over the sea,
+can rarely count back another generation born on American soil. Not that
+there is far to go. Any tenement district will furnish its own tribe, or
+medley of many tribes. Nor is it by any means certain that the children
+when found will own their alien descent. Indeed, as a preliminary to
+gaining their confidence, to hint at such a thing would be a bad blunder.
+The ragged Avenue B boy, whose father at his age had barely heard, in his
+corner of the Fatherland, of America as a place where the streets were
+paved with nuggets of gold and roast pigeons flew into mouths opening wide
+with wonder, would, it is safe to bet, be as prompt to resent the
+insinuation that he was a "Dutchman," as would the little "Mick" the
+Teuton's sore taunt. Even the son of the immigrant Jew in his virtual
+isolation strains impatiently at the fetters of race and faith, while the
+Italian takes abuse philosophically only when in the minority and bides
+his time until he too shall be able to prove his title by calling those
+who came after him names. However, to quarrel with the one or the other on
+that ground would be useless. It is the logic of the lad's evolution, the
+way of patriotism in the slums. His sincerity need not be questioned.
+
+Many other things about him may be, and justly are, but not that. It is
+perfectly transparent. His badness is as spontaneous as his goodness, and
+for the moment all there is of the child. Whichever streak happens to
+prevail, it is in full possession; if the bad is on top more frequently
+than the other, it is his misfortune rather than his design. He is as
+ready to give his only cent to a hungrier boy than he if it is settled
+that he can "lick" him, and that he is therefore not a rival, as he is to
+join him in torturing an unoffending cat for the common cheer. The penny
+and the cat, the charity and the cruelty, are both pregnant facts in the
+life that surrounds him, and of which he is to be the coming exponent. In
+after years, when he is arrested by the officers of the Society for the
+Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for beating his horse, the episode adds
+but to his confusion of mind in which a single impression stands out clear
+and lasting, viz., that somehow he got the worst of it as usual. But for
+the punishment, the whole proceeding must seem ludicrous to him. As it is
+he submits without comprehending. _He_ had to take the hard knocks always;
+why should not his horse?
+
+In other words, the child is a creature of environment, of opportunity, as
+children are everywhere. And the environment here has been bad, as it was
+and is in the lands across the sea that sent him to us. Our slums have
+fairly rivalled, and in some respects outdone, the older ones after which
+they patterned. Still, there is a difference, the difference between the
+old slum and the new. The hopelessness, the sullen submission of life in
+East London as we have seen it portrayed, has no counterpart here; neither
+has the child born in the gutter and predestined by the order of society,
+from which there is no appeal, to die there. We have our Lost Tenth to
+fill the trench in the Potter's Field; quite as many wrecks at the finish,
+perhaps, but the start seems fairer in the promise. Even on the slums the
+doctrine of liberty has set its stamp. To be sure, for the want of the
+schooling to decipher it properly, they spell it license there, and the
+slip makes trouble. The tough and his scheme of levying tribute are the
+result. But the police settle that with him, and when it comes to a
+choice, the tough is to be preferred to the born pauper any day. The one
+has the making of something in him, unpromising as he looks; seen in a
+certain light he may even be considered a hopeful symptom. The other is
+just so much dead loss. The tough is not born: he is made. The
+all-important point is the one at which the manufacture can be stopped.
+
+So rapid and great are the changes in American cities, that no slum has
+yet had a chance here to grow old enough to distil its deadliest poison.
+New York has been no exception. But we cannot always go at so fast a
+pace. There is evidence enough in the crystallization of the varying
+elements of the population along certain lines, no longer as uncertain as
+they were, that we are slowing up already. Any observer of the poor in
+this city is familiar with the appearance among them of that most
+distressing and most dangerous symptom, the home-feeling for the slum that
+opposes all efforts at betterment with dull indifference. Pauperism seems
+to have grown faster of late than even the efforts put forth to check it.
+We have witnessed this past winter a dozen times the spectacle of beggars
+extorting money by threats or violence without the excuse which a season
+of exceptional distress or hardship might have furnished. Further, the
+raid in the last Legislature upon the structure of law built up in a
+generation to regulate and keep the tenements within safe limits, shows
+that fresh danger threatens in the alliance of the slum with politics.
+Only the strongest public sentiment, kept always up to the point of prompt
+action, avails to ward off this peril. But public sentiment soon wearies
+of such watch-duty, as instanced on this occasion, when several bills
+radically remodelling the tenement-house law and repealing some of its
+most beneficent provisions, had passed both houses and were in the hands
+of the Governor before a voice was raised against them, or anyone beside
+the politicians and their backers seemed even to have heard of them. And
+this hardly five years after a special commission of distinguished
+citizens had sat an entire winter under authority of the State considering
+the tenement-house problem, and as the result of its labors had secured as
+vital the enactment of the very law against which the raid seemed to be
+chiefly directed!
+
+The tenement and the saloon, with the street that does not always divide
+them, form the environment that is to make or unmake the child. The
+influence of each of the three is bad. Together they have power to
+overcome the strongest resistance. But the child born under their evil
+spell has none such to offer. The testimony of all to whom has fallen the
+task of undoing as much of the harm done by them as may be, from the
+priest of the parish school to the chaplain of the penitentiary, agrees
+upon this point, that even the tough, with all his desperation, is weak
+rather than vicious. He promises well, he even means well; he is as
+downright sincere in his repentance as he was in his wrong-doing; but it
+doesn't prevent him from doing the very same evil deed over again the
+minute he is rid of restraint. He would rather be a saint than a sinner;
+but somehow he doesn't keep in the _rôle_ of saint, while the police help
+perpetuate the memory of his wickedness. After all, he is not so very
+different from the rest of us. Perhaps that, with a remorseful review of
+the chances he has had, may help to make a fellow-feeling for him in us.
+
+That is what he needs. The facts clearly indicate that from the
+environment little improvement in the child is to be expected. There has
+been progress in the way of building the tenements of late years, but they
+swarm with greater crowds than ever--good reason why they challenge the
+pernicious activity of the politician; and the old rookeries disappear
+slowly. In the relation of the saloon to the child there has been no
+visible improvement, and the street is still his refuge. It is, then, his
+opportunities outside that must be improved if relief is to come. We have
+the choice of hailing him man and brother or of being slugged and robbed
+by him. It ought not to be a hard choice, despite the tatters and the
+dirt, for which our past neglect is in great part to blame. Plenty of
+evidence will be found in these pages to show that it has been made in the
+right spirit already, and that it has proved a wise choice. No investment
+gives a better return to-day on the capital put out than work among the
+children of the poor.
+
+A single fact will show what is meant by that. Within the lifetime of the
+Children's Aid Society, in the thirty years between 1860 and 1890, while
+the population of this city was doubled, the commitments of girls and
+women for vagrancy fell off from 5,880 to 1,980, while the commitments of
+girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890 from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500.[2]
+Stealing and vagrancy among boys has decreased too; if not so fast, yet at
+a gratifying rate.
+
+Enough has been written and said about the children of the poor and their
+sufferings to make many a bigger book than this. From some of it one might
+almost be led to believe that one-half of the children are worked like
+slaves from toddling infancy, while the other half wander homeless and
+helpless about the streets. Their miseries are great enough without
+inventing any that do not exist. There is no such host of child outcasts
+in New York as that. Thanks to the unwearied efforts of the children's
+societies in the last generation, what there is is decreasing, if
+anything. As for the little toilers, they will receive attention further
+on. There are enough of them, but as a whole they are anything but a
+repining lot. They suffer less, to their own knowledge, from their
+wretched life than the community suffers for letting them live it, though
+it, too, sees the truth but in glimpses. If the question were put to a
+vote of the children to-morrow, whether they would take the old life with
+its drawbacks, its occasional starvation, and its everyday kicks and hard
+knocks; or the good clothes, the plentiful grub, and warm bed, with all
+the restraints of civilized society and the "Sunday-school racket" of the
+other boy thrown in, I have as little doubt that the street would carry
+the day by a practically unanimous vote as I have that there are people
+still to be found--too many of them--who would indorse the choice with a
+sigh of relief and dismiss the subject, if it could be dismissed that way;
+which, happily, it cannot.
+
+The immediate duty which the community has to perform for its own
+protection is to school the children first of all into good Americans, and
+next into useful citizens. As a community it has not attended to this duty
+as it should; but private effort has stepped in and is making up for its
+neglect with encouraging success. The outlook that was gloomy from the
+point of view of the tenement, brightens when seen from this angle,
+however toilsome the road yet ahead. The inpouring of alien races no
+longer darkens it. The problems that seemed so perplexing in the light of
+freshly-formed prejudices against this or that immigrant, yield to this
+simple solution that discovers all alarm to have been groundless.
+Yesterday it was the swarthy Italian, to-day the Russian Jew, that excited
+our distrust. To-morrow it may be the Arab or the Greek. All alike they
+have taken, or are taking, their places in the ranks of our social
+phalanx, pushing upward from the bottom with steady effort, as I believe
+they will continue to do unless failure to provide them with proper homes
+arrests the process. And in the general advance the children, thus firmly
+grasped, are seen to be a powerful moving force. The one immigrant who
+does not keep step, who, having fallen out of the ranks, has been ordered
+to the rear, is the Chinaman, who brought neither wife nor children to
+push him ahead. He left them behind that he might not become an American,
+and by the standard he himself set up he has been judged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN
+
+
+Who and where are the slum children of New York to-day? That depends on
+what is understood by the term. The moralist might seek them in Hell's
+Kitchen, in Battle Row, and in the tenements, east and west, where the
+descendants of the poorest Irish immigrants live. They are the ones, as I
+have before tried to show, upon whom the tenement and the saloon set their
+stamp soonest and deepest. The observer of physical facts merely would
+doubtless pick out the Italian ragamuffins first, and from his standpoint
+he would be right. Irish poverty is not picturesque in the New World,
+whatever it may have been in the Old. Italian poverty is. The worst old
+rookeries fall everywhere in this city to the share of the immigrants from
+Southern Italy, who are content to occupy them, partly, perhaps, because
+they are no worse than the hovels they left behind, but mainly because
+they are tricked or bullied into putting up with them by their smarter
+countrymen who turn their helplessness and ignorance to good account.
+Wherever the invasion of some old home section by the tide of business has
+left ramshackle tenements falling into hopeless decay, as in the old
+"Africa," in the Bend, and in many other places in the down-town wards,
+the Italian sweater landlord is ready with his offer of a lease to bridge
+over the interregnum, a lease that takes no account of repairs or of the
+improvements the owner sought to avoid. The crowds to make it profitable
+to him are never wanting. The bait he holds out is a job at the ash-dump
+with which he connects at the other end of the line. The house, the job,
+and the man as he comes to them fit in well together, and the
+copartnership has given the Italian a character which, I am satisfied from
+close observation of him, he does not wholly deserve. At all events, his
+wife does not. Dirty as _he_ seems and is in the old rags that harmonize
+so well with his surroundings, there is that about her which suggests not
+only the capacity for better things, but a willingness to be clean and to
+look decent, if cause can be shown. It may be a bright kerchief, a bit of
+old-fashioned jewelry, or the neatly smoothed and braided hair of the
+wrinkled old hag who presides over the stale bread counter. Even in the
+worst dens occupied by these people, provided that they had not occupied
+them too long, I have found this trait crop out in the careful scrubbing
+of some piece of oil-cloth rescued from the dump and laid as a mat in
+front of the family bed; or in a bit of fringe on the sheet or quilt,
+ragged and black with age though it was, that showed what a fruitful soil
+proper training and decent housing would have found there.
+
+I have in mind one Italian "flat" among many, a half underground hole in a
+South Fifth Avenue yard, reached by odd passage-ways through a tumbledown
+tenement that was always full of bad smells and scooting rats. Across the
+foul and slippery yard, down three steps made of charred timbers from some
+worse wreck, was this "flat," where five children slept with their elders.
+How many of those there were I never knew. There were three big family
+beds, and they nearly filled the room, leaving only patches of the mud
+floor visible. The walls were absolutely black with age and smoke. The
+plaster had fallen off in patches and there was green mould on the
+ceiling. And yet, with it all, with the swarm of squirming youngsters that
+were as black as the floor they rolled upon, there was evidence of a
+desperate, if hopeless, groping after order, even neatness. The beds were
+made up as nicely as they could be with the old quilts and pieces of
+carpet that served for covering. In Poverty Gap, where an Italian would be
+stoned as likely as not, there would have been a heap of dirty straw
+instead of beds, and the artistic arrangement of tallow-dips stuck in the
+necks of bottles about the newspaper cut of a saint on the corner shelf
+would have been missing altogether, fervent though the personal regard
+might be of Poverty Gap for the saint. The bottles would have been the
+only part of the exhibition sure to be seen there.
+
+I am satisfied that this instinct inhabits not only the more aristocratic
+Genoese, but his fellow countryman from the southern hills as well, little
+as they resemble each other or agree in most things. But the Neapolitan
+especially does not often get a chance to prove it. He is so altogether
+uninviting an object when he presents himself, fresh from the steamer,
+that he falls naturally the victim of the slum tenement, which in his keep
+becomes, despite the vigilance of the sanitary police, easily enough the
+convenient depot and half-way house between the garbage-dump and the
+bone-factory. Starting thus below the bottom, as it were, he has an
+up-hill journey before him if he is to work out of the slums, and the
+promise, to put it mildly, is not good. He does it all the same, or, if
+not he, his boy. It is not an Italian sediment that breeds the tough.
+Parental authority has a strong enough grip on the lad in Mulberry Street
+to make him work, and that is his salvation. "In seventeen years," said
+the teacher of the oldest Italian ragged school in the city that, day and
+night, takes in quite six hundred, "I have seen my boys work up into
+decent mechanics and useful citizens almost to a man, and of my girls only
+two I know of have gone astray." I had observed the process often enough
+myself to know that she was right. It is to be remembered, furthermore,
+that her school is in the very heart of the Five Points district, and
+takes in always the worst and the dirtiest crowds of children.
+
+Within a year there has been, through some caprice of immigration, a
+distinct descent in the quality of the children, viewed from even the
+standard of cleanliness that prevails at the Five Points. Perhaps the
+exodus from Italy has worked farther south, where there seems to be an
+unusual supply of mud. Perhaps the rivalry of steamship lines has brought
+it about. At any rate, the testimony is positive that the children that
+came to the schools after last vacation, and have kept coming since, were
+the worst seen here since the influx began. I have watched with
+satisfaction, since this became apparent, some of the bad old tenements,
+which the newcomers always sought in droves, disappear to make room for
+great factory buildings. But there are enough left. The cleaning out of a
+Mulberry Street block left one lop-sided old rear tenement that had long
+since been shut in on three sides by buildings four stories higher than
+itself, and forgotten by all the world save the miserable wretches who
+burrowed in that dark and dismal pit at the bottom of a narrow alley. Now,
+when the fourth structure goes up against its very windows, it will stand
+there in the heart of the block, a survival of the unfittest, that, in all
+its disheartening dreariness, bears testimony, nevertheless, to the
+beneficent activity of the best Board of Health New York has ever had--the
+onward sweep of business. It will wipe that last remnant out also, even
+if the law lack the power to reach it.
+
+Shoals of Italian children lived in that rookery, and in those the workmen
+tore down, in the actual physical atmosphere of the dump. Not a gun-shot
+away there is a block of tenements, known as the Mott Street Barracks, in
+which still greater shoals are--I was going to say housed, but that would
+have been a mistake. Happily they are that very rarely, except when they
+are asleep, and not then if they can help it. Out on the street they may
+be found tumbling in the dirt, or up on the roof lying stark-naked,
+blinking in the sun--content with life as they find it. If they are not a
+very cleanly crew, they are at least as clean as the frame they are set
+in, though it must be allowed that something has been done of late years
+to redeem the buildings from the reproach of a bad past. The combination
+of a Jew for a landlord and a saloon-keeper--Italian, of course--for a
+lessee, was not propitious; but the buildings happen to be directly under
+the windows of the Health Board, and something, I suppose, was due to
+appearances. The authorities did all that could be done, short of tearing
+down the tenement, but though comparatively clean, and not nearly as
+crowded as it was, it is still the old slum. It is an instructive instance
+of what can and cannot be done with the tenements into which we invite
+these dirty strangers to teach them American ways and the self-respect of
+future citizens and voters. There are five buildings--that is, five front
+and four rear houses, the latter a story higher than those on the street;
+that is because the rear houses were built last, to "accommodate" this
+very Italian immigration that could be made to pay for anything. Chiefly
+Irish had lived there before, but they moved out then. There were 360
+tenants in the Barracks when the police census was taken in 1888, and 40
+of them were babies. How many were romping children I do not know. The
+"yard" they had to play in is just 5 feet 10 inches wide, and a dozen
+steps below the street-level. The closets of all the buildings are in the
+cellar of the rear houses and open upon this "yard," where it is always
+dark and damp as in a dungeon. Its foul stenches reach even the top floor,
+but so also does the sun at mid-day, and that is a luxury that counts as
+an extra in the contract with the landlord. The rent is nearly one-half
+higher near the top than it is on the street-level. Nine dollars above,
+six and a half below, for one room with windows, two without, and with
+barely space for a bed in each. But water-pipes have been put in lately,
+under orders from the Health Department, and the rents have doubtless been
+raised. "No windows" means no ventilation. The rear building backs up
+against the tenement on the next street; a space a foot wide separates
+them, but an attempt to ventilate the bed-rooms by windows on that was a
+failure.
+
+When the health officers got through with the Barracks in time for the
+police census of 1891, the 360 tenants had been whittled down to 238, of
+whom 47 were babies under five years. Persistent effort had succeeded in
+establishing a standard of cleanliness that was a very great improvement
+upon the condition prevailing in 1888. But still, as I have said, the slum
+remained and will remain as long as that rear tenement stands. In the four
+years fifty-one funerals had gone out from the Barracks. The white hearse
+alone had made thirty-five trips carrying baby coffins. This was the way
+the two standards showed up in the death returns at the Bureau of Vital
+Statistics: in 1888 the adult death-rate, in a population of 320 over five
+years old, was 15.62 per 1,000; the baby death-rate, 325.00 per 1,000,
+or nearly one-third in a total of 40. As a matter of fact 13 of the 40 had
+died that year. The adult death-rate for the entire tenement population of
+more than a million souls was that year 12.81, and the baby death-rate
+88.38. Last year, in 1891, the case stood thus: Total population, 238,
+including 47 babies. Adult death-rate per 1,000, 20.94; child death-rate
+(under five years) per 1,000, 106.38. General adult death-rate for 1891 in
+the tenements, 14.25; general child death-rate for 1891 in the tenements,
+86.67. It should be added that the reduced baby death-rate of the
+Barracks, high as it was, was probably much lower than it can be
+successfully maintained. The year before, in 1890, when practically the
+same improved conditions prevailed, it was twice as high. Twice as many
+babies died.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS.]
+
+
+I have referred to some of the typical Italian tenements at some length to
+illustrate the conditions under which their children grow up and absorb
+the impressions that are to shape their lives as men and women. Is it to
+be marvelled at, if the first impression of them is sometimes not
+favorable? I recall, not without amusement, one of the early experiences
+of a committee with which I was trying to relieve some of the child misery
+in the East Side tenements by providing an outing for the very poorest of
+the little ones, who might otherwise have been overlooked. In our anxiety
+to make our little charges as presentable as possible, it seems we had
+succeeded so well as to arouse a suspicion in our friends at the other end
+of the line that something was wrong, either with us or with the poor of
+which the patrician youngsters in new frocks and with clean faces, that
+came to them, were representatives. They wrote to us that they were in the
+field for the "slum children," and slum children they wanted. It happened
+that their letter came just as we had before us two little lads from the
+Mulberry Street Bend, ragged, dirty, unkempt, and altogether a sight to
+see. Our wardrobe was running low, and we were at our wits' end how to
+make these come up to our standard. We sat looking at each other after we
+had heard the letter read, all thinking the same thing, until the most
+courageous said it: "Send them as they are." Well, we did, and waited
+rather breathlessly for the verdict. It came, with the children, in a note
+by return train, that said: "Not _that_ kind, please!" And after that we
+were allowed to have things our own way.
+
+The two little fellows were Italians. In justice to our frightened
+friends, it should be said that it was not their nationality, but their
+rags, to which they objected; but not very many seasons have passed since
+the crowding of the black-eyed brigade of "guinnies," as they were
+contemptuously dubbed, in ever-increasing numbers, into the ragged schools
+and the kindergartens, was watched with regret and alarm by the teachers,
+as by many others who had no better cause. The event proved that the
+children were the real teachers. They had a more valuable lesson to impart
+than they came to learn, and it has been a salutary one. To-day they are
+gladly welcomed. Their sunny temper, which no hovel is dreary enough, no
+hardship has power to cloud, has made them universal favorites, and the
+discovery has been made by their teachers that as the crowds pressed
+harder their school-rooms have marvellously expanded, until they embrace
+within their walls an unsuspected multitude, even many a slum tenement
+itself, cellar, "stoop," attic, and all. Every lesson of cleanliness, of
+order, and of English taught at the school is reflected into some wretched
+home, and rehearsed there as far as the limited opportunities will allow.
+No demonstration with soap and water upon a dirty little face but widens
+the sphere of these chief promoters of education in the slums. "By 'm by,"
+said poor crippled Pietro to me, with a sober look, as he labored away on
+his writing lesson, holding down the paper with his maimed hand, "I learn
+t' make an Englis' letter; maybe my fadder he learn too." I had my doubts
+of the father. He sat watching Pietro with a pride in the achievement that
+was clearly proportionate to the struggle it cost, and mirrored in his own
+face every grimace and contortion the progress of education caused the
+boy. "Si! si!" he nodded, eagerly. "Pietro he good a boy; make Englis',
+Englis'!" and he made a flourish with his clay-pipe, as if he too were
+making the English letter that was the object of their common veneration.
+
+Perhaps it is as much his growing and well-founded distrust of the
+middle-man, whose unresisting victim he has heretofore been, and his need
+of some other joint to connect him with the English-speaking world that
+surrounds him, as any personal interest in book-learning, that impels the
+illiterate Italian to bring his boy to school early and see that he
+attends it. Greed has something to do with it too. In their anxiety to lay
+hold of the child, the charity schools have fallen into a way of bidding
+for him with clothes, shoes, and other bait that is never lost on Mulberry
+Street. Even sectarian scruples yield to such an argument, and the
+parochial school, where they get nothing but on the contrary are expected
+to contribute, gets left.
+
+In a few charity schools where the children are boarded they have
+discovered this, and frown upon Italian children unless there is the best
+of evidence that the father is really unable to pay for their keep and
+not simply unwilling. But whatever his motive, the effect is to
+demonstrate in a striking way the truth of the observation that real
+reform of poverty and ignorance must begin with the children. In his case,
+at all events, the seed thus sown bears some fruit in the present as well
+as in the coming generation of toilers. The little ones, with their new
+standards and new ambitions, become in a very real sense missionaries of
+the slums, whose work of regeneration begins with their parents. They are
+continually fetched away from school by the mother or father to act as
+interpreters or go-betweens in all the affairs of daily life, to be
+conscientiously returned within the hour stipulated by the teacher, who
+offers no objection to this sort of interruption, knowing it to be the
+best condition of her own success. One cannot help the hope that the
+office of trust with which the children are thus invested may, in some
+measure, help to mitigate their home-hardships. From their birth they have
+little else, though Italian parents are rarely cruel in the sense of
+abusing their offspring.
+
+It is the home itself that constitutes their chief hardship. It is only
+when his years offer the boy an opportunity of escape to the street, that
+a ray of sunlight falls into his life. In his backyard or in his alley it
+seldom finds him out. Thenceforward most of his time is spent there, until
+the school and the shop claim him, but not in idleness. His mother toiled,
+while she bore him at her breast, under burdens heavy enough to break a
+man's back. She lets him out of her arms only to share her labor. How well
+he does it anyone may see for himself by watching the children that swarm
+where an old house is being torn down, lugging upon their heads loads of
+kindling wood twice their own size and sometimes larger than that. They
+come, as crows scenting carrion, from every side at the first blow of the
+axe. Their odd old-mannish or old-womanish appearance, due more to their
+grotesque rags than to anything in the children themselves, betrays their
+race even without their chatter. Be there ever so many children of other
+nationalities nearer by--the wood-gatherers are nearly all Italians. There
+are still a lot of girls among them who drag as big loads as their
+brothers, but since the sewing machine found its way, with the sweater's
+mortgage, into the Italian slums also, little Antonia has been robbed to a
+large extent even of this poor freedom, and has taken her place among the
+wage-earners when not on the school-bench. Once taken, the place is hers
+to keep for good. Sickness, unless it be mortal, is no excuse from the
+drudgery of the tenement. When, recently, one little Italian girl, hardly
+yet in her teens, stayed away from her class in the Mott Street Industrial
+School so long that her teacher went to her home to look her up, she found
+the child in a high fever, in bed, sewing on coats, with swollen eyes,
+though barely able to sit up.
+
+But neither poverty nor hard knocks has power to discourage the child of
+Italy. His nickname he pockets with a grin that has in it no thought of
+the dagger and the revenge that come to solace his after years. Only the
+prospect of immediate punishment eclipses his spirits for the moment.
+While the teacher of the sick little girl was telling me her pitiful story
+in the Mott Street school, a characteristic group appeared on the
+stairway. Three little Italian culprits in the grasp of Nellie, the tall
+and slender Irish girl who was the mentor of her class for the day. They
+had been arrested "fur fightin'" she briefly explained as she dragged them
+by the collar toward the principal, who just then appeared to inquire the
+cause of the rumpus, and thrust them forward to receive sentence. The
+three, none of whom was over eight years old, evidently felt that they
+were in the power of an enemy from whom no mercy was to be expected, and
+made no appeal for any. One scowled defiance. He was evidently the injured
+party.
+
+"He hit-a me a clip on de jaw," he said in his defence, in the dialect of
+Mott Street with a slight touch of "the Bend." The aggressor, a heavy
+browed little ruffian, hung back with a dreary howl, knuckling his eyes
+with a pair of fists that were nearly black. The third and youngest was in
+a state of bewilderment that was most ludicrous. He only knew that he had
+received a kick on the back and had struck out in self-defence, when he
+was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty--school had only
+just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection--that he
+was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two
+were led away to the principal's desk. All three went out howling.
+
+I said that the Italians do not often abuse their children downright. The
+padrone has had his day; the last was convicted seven years ago, and an
+end has been put to the business of selling children into a slavery that
+meant outrage, starvation, and death; but poverty and ignorance are
+fearful allies in the homes of the poor against defenceless childhood,
+even without the child-beating fiend. Two cases which I encountered in the
+East Side tenements, in the summer of 1891, show how the combination works
+at its worst. Without a doubt they are typical of very many, though I hope
+that few come quite up to their standard. The one was the case of little
+Carmen, who last March died in the New York Hospital, where she had lain
+five long months, the special care of the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children. One of the summer corps doctors found her in a Mott
+Street tenement, within stone-throw of the Health Department office,
+suffering from a wasting disease that could only be combated by the most
+careful nursing. He put her case into the hands of the King's Daughters'
+Committee that followed in the steps of the doctor, and it was then that I
+saw her. She lay in a little back room, up two flights and giving upon a
+narrow yard where it was always twilight. The room was filthy and close,
+and entirely devoid of furniture, with the exception of a rickety stool, a
+slop pail, and a rusty old stove, one end of which was propped up with
+bricks. Carmen's bed was a board laid across the top of a barrel and a
+trunk set on end. I could not describe, if I would, the condition of the
+child when she was raised from the mess of straw and rags in which she
+lay. The sight unnerved even the nurse, who had seen little else than such
+scenes all summer. Loathsome bedsores had attacked the wasted little body,
+and in truth Carmen was more dead than alive. But when, shocked and
+disgusted, we made preparations for her removal with all speed to the
+hospital, the parents objected and refused to let us take her away. They
+had to be taken into court and forced to surrender the child under warrant
+of law, though it was clearly the little sufferer's only chance for life,
+and only the slenderest of chances at that.
+
+Carmen was the victim of the stubborn ignorance that dreads the hospital
+and the doctor above the discomfort of the dirt and darkness and suffering
+that are its every-day attendants. Her parents were no worse than the
+Monroe Street mother who refused to let the health officer vaccinate her
+baby, because her crippled boy, with one leg an inch shorter than the
+other, had "caught it"--the lame leg, that is to say--from his
+vaccination. She knew it was so, and with ignorance of that stamp there is
+no other argument than force. But another element entered into the case of
+a sick Essex Street baby. The tenement would not let it recover from a bad
+attack of scarlet fever, and the parents would not let it be taken to the
+country or to the sea-shore, despite all efforts and entreaties. When
+their motive came out at last, it proved to be a mercenary one. They were
+behind with the rent, and as long as they had a sick child in the house
+the landlord could not put them out. Sick, the baby was to them a source
+of income, at all events a bar to expense, and in that way so much
+capital. Well, or away, it would put them at the mercy of the
+rent-collector at once. So they chose to let it suffer. The parents were
+Jews, a fact that emphasizes the share borne by desperate poverty in the
+transaction, for the family tie is notoriously strong among their people.
+
+No doubt Mott Street echoed with the blare of brass bands when poor little
+Carmen was carried from her bed of long suffering to her grave in Calvary.
+Scarce a day passes now in these tenements that does not see some little
+child, not rarely a new-born babe, carried to the grave in solemn state,
+preceded by a band playing mournful dirges and followed by a host with
+trailing banners, from some wretched home that barely sheltered it alive.
+No suspicion of the ludicrous incongruity of the show disturbs the
+paraders. It seems as if, but one remove from the dump, an insane passion
+for pomp and display, perhaps a natural reaction from the ash-barrel, lies
+in wait for this Italian, to which he falls a helpless victim. Not content
+with his own national and religious holidays and those he finds awaiting
+him here, he has invented or introduced a system of his own, a sort of
+communal celebration of proprietary saints, as it were, that has taken
+Mulberry Street by storm. As I understand it, the townsmen of some Italian
+village, when there is a sufficient number of them within reach, club
+together to celebrate its patron saint, and hire a band and set up a
+gorgeous altar in a convenient back yard. The fire-escapes overlooking it
+are draped with flags and transformed into reserved-seat galleries with
+the taste these people display under the most adverse circumstances.
+Crowds come and go, parading at intervals in gorgeous uniforms around the
+block. Admission is by the saloon-door, which nearly always holds the key
+to the situation, the saloonist who prompts the sudden attack of devotion
+being frequently a namesake of the saint and willing to go shares on the
+principle that he takes the profit and the saint the glory.
+
+
+[Illustration: AN ITALIAN HOME UNDER A DUMP.]
+
+
+The partnership lasts as long as there is any profit in it, sometimes the
+better part of the week, during which time all work stops. If the feast
+panned out well, the next block is liable to be the scene of a rival
+celebration before the first is fairly ended. As the supply of Italian
+villages represented in New York is practically as inexhaustible as that
+of the saloons, there is no reason why Mulberry Street may not become a
+perennial picnic ground long before the scheme to make a park of one end
+of it gets under way. From the standpoint of the children there can be no
+objection to this, but from that of the police there is. They found
+themselves called upon to interfere in such a four days' celebration of
+St. Rocco last year, when his votaries strung cannon fire-crackers along
+the street the whole length of the block and set them all off at once. It
+was at just such a feast, in honor of the same saint, that a dozen
+Italians were killed a week later at Newark in the explosion of their
+fireworks.
+
+It goes without saying that the children enter into this sort of thing
+with all the enthusiasm of their little souls. The politician watches it
+attentively, alert for some handle to catch his new allies by and effect
+their "organization." If it is a new experience for him to find the saloon
+put to such use, he betrays no surprise. It is his vantage ground, and
+whether it serve as the political bait for the Irishman, or as the
+religious initiative of the Italian, is of less account than that its
+patrons, young and old, in the end fall into his trap. Conclusive proof
+that the Italian has been led into camp came to me on last St. Patrick's
+Day through the assurance of a certain popular clergyman, that he had
+observed, on a walk through the city, a number of hand-organs draped in
+green, evidently for the occasion.
+
+This dump of which I have spoken as furnishing the background of the
+social life of Mulberry Street, has lately challenged attention as a slum
+annex to the Bend, with fresh horrors in store for defenceless childhood.
+To satisfy myself upon this point I made a personal inspection of the
+dumps along both rivers last winter and found the Italian crews at work
+there making their home in every instance among the refuse they picked
+from the scows. The dumps are wooden bridges raised above the level of the
+piers upon which they are built to allow the discharge of the carts
+directly into the scows moored under them. Under each bridge a cabin had
+been built of old boards, oil-cloth, and the like, that had found its way
+down on the carts; an old milk-can had been made into a fireplace without
+the ceremony of providing stove-pipe or draught, and here, flanked by
+mountains of refuse, slept the crews of from half a dozen to three times
+that number of men, secure from the police, who had grown tired of driving
+them from dump to dump and had finally let them alone. There were women at
+some of them, and at four dumps, three on the North River and one on the
+East Side, I found boys who ought to have been at school, picking bones
+and sorting rags. They said that they slept there, and as the men did, why
+should they not? It was their home. They were children of the dump,
+literally. All of them except one were Italians. That one was a little
+homeless Jew who had drifted down at first to pick cinders. Now that his
+mother was dead and his father in a hospital, he had become a sort of
+fixture there, it seemed, having made the acquaintance of the other lads.
+
+
+[Illustration: A CHILD OF THE DUMP.]
+
+
+Two boys whom I found at the West Nineteenth Street dumps sorting bones
+were as bright lads as I had seen anywhere. One was nine years old and
+the other twelve. Filthy and ragged, they fitted well into their
+environment--even the pig I had encountered at one of the East River dumps
+was much the more respectable, as to appearance, of the lot--but were
+entirely undaunted by it. They scarcely remembered anything but the dump.
+Neither could read, of course. Further down the river I came upon one
+seemingly not over fifteen, who assured me that he was twenty-one. I
+thought it possible when I took a closer look at him. The dump had stunted
+him. He did not even know what a letter was. He had been there five years,
+and garbage limited his mental as well as his physical horizon.
+
+Enough has been said to show that the lot of the poor child of the
+Mulberry Street Bend, or of Little Italy, is not a happy one, courageously
+and uncomplainingly, even joyously, though it be borne. The stories of two
+little lads from the region of Crosby Street always stand to me as typical
+of their kind. One I knew all about from personal observation and
+acquaintance; the other I give as I have it from his teachers in the Mott
+Street Industrial School, where he was a pupil in spells. It was the death
+of little Giuseppe that brought me to his home, a dismal den in a rear
+tenement down a dark and forbidding alley. I have seldom seen a worse
+place. There was no trace there of a striving for better things--the
+tenement had stamped that out--nothing but darkness and filth and misery.
+From this hole Giuseppe had come to the school a mass of rags, but with
+that jovial gleam in his brown eyes that made him an instant favorite with
+the teachers as well as with the boys. One of them especially, little
+Mike, became attached to him, and a year after his cruel death shed tears
+yet, when reminded of it. Giuseppe had not been long at the school when
+he was sent to an Elizabeth Street tenement for a little absentee. He
+brought her, shivering in even worse rags than his own; it was a cold
+winter day.
+
+"This girl is very poor," he said, presenting her to the teacher, with a
+pitying look. It was only then that he learned that she had no mother. His
+own had often stood between the harsh father and him when he came home
+with unsold evening papers. Giuseppe fished his only penny out of his
+pocket--his capital for the afternoon's trade. "I would like to give her
+that," he said. After that he brought her pennies regularly from his day's
+sale, and took many a thrashing for it. He undertook the general
+supervision of the child's education, and saw to it that she came to
+school every day. Giuseppe was twelve years old.
+
+There came an evening when business had been very bad, so bad that he
+thought a bed in the street healthier for him than the Crosby Street
+alley. With three other lads in similar straits he crawled into the iron
+chute that ventilated the basement of the Post-office on the Mail Street
+side and snuggled down on the grating. They were all asleep, when fire
+broke out in the cellar. The three climbed out, but Giuseppe, whose feet
+were wrapped in a mail-bag, was too late. He was burned to death.
+
+The little girl still goes to the Mott Street school. She is too young to
+understand, and marvels why Giuseppe comes no more with his pennies. Mike
+cries for his friend. When, some months ago, I found myself in the Crosby
+Street alley, and went up to talk to Giuseppe's parents, they would answer
+no questions before I had replied to one of theirs. It was thus
+interpreted to me by a girl from the basement, who had come in out of
+curiosity:
+
+"Are youse goin' to give us any money?" Poor Giuseppe!
+
+My other little friend was Pietro, of whom I spoke before. Perhaps of all
+the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the
+course of years--and they are many and sad, most of them--none comes
+nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than his,
+exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I
+met him first in the Mulberry Street police-station, where he was
+interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd
+from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his
+rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, he seemed to fit
+in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of
+the police-station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but
+for his maimed hand and his oddly grave yet eager face, which no smile
+ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I
+afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son
+of a laborer, not "borned here" as the rest of his sisters and brothers.
+There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it:
+"2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 modder," subsisting on an unsteady
+maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking always the earnings of one
+week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a
+dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that until
+very recently preserved to Jersey Street the memory of its former bad
+eminence as among the worst of the city's slums. Pietro had gone to the
+Sisters' school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his
+off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his
+education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his
+graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earners, that were sadly in
+need of recruiting. A steady job of "shinin'" was found for him in an
+Eighth Ward saloon, and that afternoon, just before Christmas, he came
+home from school and putting his books away on the shelf for the next in
+order to use, ran across Broadway full of joyous anticipation of his new
+dignity in an independent job. He did not see the street-car until it was
+fairly upon him, and then it was too late. They thought he was killed, but
+he was only crippled for life. When, after many months, he came out of the
+hospital, where the company had paid his board and posed as doing a
+generous thing, his bright smile was gone; his "shining" was at an end,
+and with it his career as it had been marked out for him. He must needs
+take up something new, and he was bending all his energies, when I met
+him, toward learning to make the "Englis' letter" with a degree of
+proficiency that would justify the hope of his doing something somewhere
+at sometime to make up for what he had lost. It was a far-off possibility
+yet. With the same end in view, probably, he was taking nightly
+writing-lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating
+schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony, peddling education
+cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with
+the prospect. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him,
+now let him alone. "When they see this," he said, holding up his scarred
+and misshapen arm, "they don't strike me no more." Then there was his
+fourteen months old baby brother who was beginning to walk, and could
+almost "make a letter." Pietro was much concerned about his education,
+anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. "I take him to
+school sometime," he said, piloting him across the floor and talking
+softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave,
+unchanging face.
+
+
+[Illustration: PIETRO LEARNING TO MAKE AN ENGLIS' LETTER.]
+
+
+"Pietro," I said, with a sudden yearning to know, "did you ever laugh?"
+
+The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look.
+
+"I did wonst," he said, quietly, and went on his way. And I would gladly
+have forgotten that I ever asked the question; even as Pietro had
+forgotten his laugh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL
+
+
+If the sightseer finds less to engage his interest in Jewtown than in the
+Bend, outside of the clamoring crowds in the Chasir--the Pig-market--he
+will discover enough to enlist his sympathies, provided he did not leave
+them behind when he crossed the Bowery. The loss is his own then. There is
+that in the desolation of child-life in those teeming hives to make the
+shrivelled heart ache with compassion for its kind and throb with a new
+life of pain, enough to dispel some prejudices that are as old as our
+faith, and sometimes, I fear, a good deal stronger. The Russian exile adds
+to the offence of being an alien and a disturber of economic balances the
+worse one of being a Jew. Let those who cannot forgive this damaging fact
+possess their souls in patience. There is some evidence that the welcome
+he has received in those East Side tenements has done more than centuries
+of persecution could toward making him forget it himself.
+
+The Italian who comes here gravitates naturally to the oldest and most
+dilapidated tenements in search of cheap rents, which he doesn't find. The
+Jew has another plan, characteristic of the man. He seeks out the biggest
+ones and makes the rent come within his means by taking in boarders,
+"sweating" his flat to the point of police intervention. That that point
+is a long way beyond human decency, let alone comfort, an instance from
+Ludlow Street, that came to my notice while writing this, quite clearly
+demonstrates. The offender was a tailor, who lived with his wife, two
+children, and two boarders in two rooms on the top floor. [It is always
+the top floor; in fifteen years of active service as a police reporter I
+have had to climb to the top floor five times for every one my business
+was further down, irrespective of where the tenement was or what kind of
+people lived in it. Crime, suicide, and police business generally seem to
+bear the same relation to the stairs in a tenement that they bear to
+poverty itself. The more stairs the more trouble. The deepest poverty is
+at home in the attic.] But this tailor; with his immediate household,
+including the boarders, he occupied the larger of the two rooms. The
+other, a bedroom eight feet square, he sublet to a second tailor and his
+wife; which couple, following his example as their opportunities allowed,
+divided the bedroom in two by hanging a curtain in the middle, took
+one-half for themselves and let the other half to still another tailor
+with a wife and child. A midnight inspection by the sanitary police was
+followed by the arrest of the housekeeper and the original tailor, and
+they were fined or warned in the police-court, I forget which. It doesn't
+much matter. That the real point was missed was shown by the appearance of
+the owner of the house, a woman, at Sanitary Headquarters, on the day
+following, with the charge against the policeman that he was robbing her
+of her tenants.
+
+The story of inhuman packing of human swarms, of bitter poverty, of
+landlord greed, of sweater slavery, of darkness and squalor and misery,
+which these tenements have to tell, is equalled, I suppose, nowhere in a
+civilized land. Despite the prevalence of the boarder, who is usually a
+married man, come over alone the better to be able to prepare the way for
+the family, the census[3] shows that fifty-four per cent. of the entire
+population of immigrant Jews were children, or under age. Every steamer
+has added to their number since, and judging from the sights one sees
+daily in the office of the United Hebrew Charities, and from the general
+appearance of Ludlow Street, the proportion of children has suffered no
+decrease. Let the reader who would know for himself what they are like,
+and what their chances are, take that street some evening from Hester
+Street down and observe what he sees going on there. Not that it is the
+only place where he can find them. The census I spoke of embraced
+forty-five streets in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards. But at
+that end of Ludlow Street the tenements are taller and the crowds always
+denser than anywhere else. Let him watch the little pedlars hawking their
+shoe-strings, their matches, and their penny paper-pads, with the restless
+energy that seems so strangely out of proportion to the reward it reaps;
+the half-grown children staggering under heavy bundles of clothes from the
+sweater's shop; the ragamuffins at their fretful play, play yet,
+discouraged though it be by the nasty surroundings--thank goodness, every
+year brings its Passover with the scrubbing brigade to Ludlow Street, and
+the dirt is shifted from the houses to the streets once anyhow; if it does
+find its way back, something may be lost on the way--the crowding, the
+pushing for elbow-room, the wails of bruised babies that keep falling
+down-stairs, or rolling off the stoop, and the raids of angry mothers
+swooping down upon their offspring and distributing thumps right and left
+to pay for the bruises, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Whose
+eye, whose tooth, is of less account in Jewtown than that the capital put
+out bears lawful interest in kind. What kind of interest may society some
+day expect to reap from Ghettos like these, where even the sunny temper of
+childhood is soured by want and woe, or smothered in filth? It is a long
+time since I have heard a good honest laugh, a child's gleeful shout, in
+Ludlow Street. Angry cries, jeers, enough. They are as much part of the
+place as the dirty pavements; but joyous, honest laughs, like soap and
+water, are at a premium there.
+
+But children laugh because they are happy. They are not happy in Ludlow
+Street. Nobody is except the landlord. Why should they be? Born to toil
+and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late. There
+is even less time than there is room for play in Jewtown, good reason why
+the quality of the play is poor. There is work for the weakest hands, a
+step for the smallest feet in the vast tread-mill of these East Side
+homes. A thing is worth there what it will bring. All other
+considerations, ambitions, desires, yield to that. Education pays as an
+investment, and therefore the child is sent to school. The moment his
+immediate value as a worker overbalances the gain in prospect by keeping
+him at his books, he goes to the shop. The testimony of Jewish observers,
+who have had quite unusual opportunities for judging, is that the average
+age at which these children leave school for good is rather below twelve
+than beyond it, by which time their work at home, helping their parents,
+has qualified them to earn wages that will more than pay for their keep.
+They are certainly on the safe side in their reckoning, if the children
+are not. The legal age for shop employment is fourteen. On my visits among
+the homes, workshops, and evening schools of Jewtown, I was always struck
+by the number of diminutive wage-earners who were invariably "just
+fourteen." It was clearly not the child which the tenement had dwarfed in
+their case, but the memory or the moral sense of the parents.
+
+If, indeed, the shop were an exchange for the home; if the child quit the
+one upon entering the other, there might be little objection to make; but
+too often they are two names for the same thing; where they are not, the
+shop is probably preferable, bad as that may be. When, in the midnight
+hour, the noise of the sewing-machine was stilled at last, I have gone the
+rounds of Ludlow and Hester and Essex Streets among the poorest of the
+Russian Jews, with the sanitary police, and counted often four, five, and
+even six of the little ones in a single bed, sometimes a shake-down on the
+hard floor, often a pile of half-finished clothing brought home from the
+sweater, in the stuffy rooms of their tenements. In one I visited very
+lately, the only bed was occupied by the entire family lying lengthwise
+and crosswise, literally in layers, three children at the feet, all except
+a boy of ten or twelve, for whom there was no room. He slept with his
+clothes on to keep him warm, in a pile of rags just inside the door. It
+seemed to me impossible that families of children could be raised at all
+in such dens as I had my daily and nightly walks in. And yet the vital
+statistics and all close observation agree in allotting to these Jews even
+an unusual degree of good health. The records of the Sanitary Bureau show
+that while the Italians have the highest death-rate, the mortality in the
+lower part of the Tenth Ward, of which Ludlow Street is the heart and
+type, is the lowest in the city. Even the baby death-rate is very low. But
+for the fact that the ravages of diphtheria, croup, and measles run up the
+record in the houses occupied entirely by tailors--in other words, in the
+sweater district, where contagion always runs riot[4]--the Tenth Ward
+would seem to be the healthiest spot in the city, as well as the dirtiest
+and the most crowded. The temperate habits of the Jew and his freedom from
+enfeebling vices generally must account for this, along with his
+marvellous vitality. I cannot now recall ever having known a Jewish
+drunkard. On the other hand, I have never come across a Prohibitionist
+among them. The absence of the one renders the other superfluous.
+
+It was only last winter I had occasion to visit repeatedly a double
+tenement at the lower end of Ludlow Street, which the police census showed
+to contain 297 tenants, 45 of whom were under five years of age, not
+counting 3 pedlars who slept in the mouldy cellar, where the water was
+ankle deep on the mud floor. The feeblest ray of daylight never found its
+way down there, the hatches having been carefully covered with rags and
+matting; but freshets often did. Sometimes the water rose to the height of
+a foot, and never quite soaked away in the dryest season. It was an awful
+place, and by the light of my candle the three, with their unkempt beards
+and hair and sallow faces, looked more like hideous ghosts than living
+men. Yet they had slept there among and upon decaying fruit and wreckage
+of all sorts from the tenement for over three years, according to their
+own and the housekeeper's statements. There had been four. One was then in
+the hospital, but not because of any ill effect the cellar had had upon
+him. He had been run over in the street and was making the most of his
+vacation, charging it up to the owner of the wagon, whom he was getting
+ready to sue for breaking his leg. Up-stairs, especially in the rear
+tenement, I found the scene from the cellar repeated with variations. In
+one room a family of seven, including the oldest daughter, a young woman
+of eighteen, and her brother, a year older than she, slept in a common bed
+made on the floor of the kitchen, and manifested scarcely any concern at
+our appearance. A complaint to the Board of Health resulted in an
+overhauling that showed the tenement to be unusually bad even for that bad
+spot; but when we came to look up its record, from the standpoint of the
+vital statistics, we discovered that not only had there not been a single
+death in the house during the whole year, but on the third floor lived a
+woman over a hundred years old, who had been there a long time. I was
+never more surprised in my life, and while we laughed at it, I confess it
+came nearer to upsetting my faith in the value of statistics than anything
+I had seen till then. And yet I had met with similar experiences, if not
+quite so striking, often enough to convince me that poverty and want beget
+their own power to resist the evil influences of their worst surroundings.
+I was at a loss how to put this plainly to the good people who often asked
+wonderingly why the children of the poor one saw in the street seemed
+generally such a thriving lot, until a slip of Mrs. Partington's
+discriminating tongue did it for me: "Manured to the soil." That is it. In
+so far as it does not merely seem so--one does not see the sick and
+suffering--that puts it right.
+
+
+[Illustration: "SLEPT IN THAT CELLAR FOUR YEARS."]
+
+
+Whatever the effect upon the physical health of the children, it cannot be
+otherwise, of course, than that such conditions should corrupt their
+morals. I have the authority of a distinguished rabbi, whose field and
+daily walk are among the poorest of his people, to support me in the
+statement that the moral tone of the young girls is distinctly lower than
+it was. The entire absence of privacy in their homes and the foul contact
+of the sweaters' shops, where men and women work side by side from morning
+till night, scarcely half clad in the hot summer weather, does for the
+girls what the street completes in the boy. But for the patriarchal family
+life of the Jew that is his strongest virtue, their ruin would long since
+have been complete. It is that which pilots him safely through shoals upon
+which the Gentile would have been inevitably wrecked. It is that which
+keeps the almshouse from casting its shadow over Ludlow Street to add to
+its gloom. It is the one quality which redeems, and on the Sabbath eve
+when he gathers his household about his board, scant though the fare be,
+dignifies the darkest slum of Jewtown.
+
+How strong is this attachment to home and kindred that makes the Jew cling
+to the humblest hearth and gather his children and his children's children
+about it, though grinding poverty leave them only a bare crust to share, I
+saw in the case of little Jette Brodsky, who strayed away from her own
+door, looking for her papa. They were strangers and ignorant and poor, so
+that weeks went by before they could make their loss known and get a
+hearing, and meanwhile Jette, who had been picked up and taken to Police
+Headquarters, had been hidden away in an asylum, given another name when
+nobody came to claim her, and had been quite forgotten. But in the two
+years that passed before she was found at last, her empty chair stood ever
+by her father's, at the family board, and no Sabbath eve but heard his
+prayer for the restoration of their lost one. It happened once that I
+came in on a Friday evening at the breaking of bread, just as the four
+candles upon the table had been lit with the Sabbath blessing upon the
+home and all it sheltered. Their light fell on little else than empty
+plates and anxious faces; but in the patriarchal host who arose and bade
+the guest welcome with a dignity a king might have envied I recognized
+with difficulty the humble pedlar I had known only from the street and
+from the police office, where he hardly ventured beyond the door.
+
+But the tenement that has power to turn purest gold to dross digs a pit
+for the Jew even through this virtue that has been his shield against its
+power for evil. In its atmosphere it turns too often to a curse by helping
+to crowd his lodgings, already overflowing, beyond the point of official
+forbearance. Then follow orders to "reduce" the number of tenants that
+mean increased rent, which the family cannot pay, or the breaking up of
+the home. An appeal to avert such a calamity came to the Board of Health
+recently from one of the refugee tenements. The tenant was a man with a
+houseful of children, too full for the official scale as applied to the
+flat, and his plea was backed by the influence of his only friend in
+need--the family undertaker. There was something so cruelly suggestive in
+the idea that the laugh it raised died without an echo.
+
+The census of the sweaters' district gave a total of 23,405 children under
+six years, and 21,285 between six and fourteen, in a population of
+something over a hundred and eleven thousand Russian, Polish, and
+Roumanian Jews in the three wards mentioned; 15,567 are set down as
+"children over fourteen." According to the record, scarce one-third of the
+heads of families had become naturalized citizens, though the average of
+their stay in the United States was between nine and ten years. The very
+language of our country was to them a strange tongue, understood and
+spoken by only 15,837 of the fifty thousand and odd adults enumerated.
+Seven thousand of the rest spoke only German, five thousand Russian, and
+over twenty-one thousand, could only make themselves understood to each
+other, never to the world around them, in the strange jargon that passes
+for Hebrew on the East Side, but is really a mixture of a dozen known
+dialects and tongues and of some that were never known or heard anywhere
+else. In the census it is down as just what it is--jargon, and nothing
+else.
+
+Here, then, are conditions as unfavorable to the satisfactory, even safe,
+development of child life in the chief American city as could well be
+imagined; more unfavorable even than with the Bohemians, who have at least
+their faith in common with us, if safety lies in the merging through the
+rising generation of the discordant elements into a common harmony. A
+community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing
+interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in
+tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief
+from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness
+fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. Clearly, if ever there
+was need of moulding any material for the citizenship that awaits it, it
+is with this; and if ever trouble might be expected to beset the effort,
+it might be looked for here. But it is not so. The record shows that of
+the sixty thousand children, including the fifteen thousand young men and
+women over fourteen who earn a large share of the money that pays for rent
+and food, and the twenty-three thousand toddlers under six years, fully
+one-third go to school. Deducting the two extremes, little more than a
+thousand children of between six and fourteen years, that is, of school
+age, were put down as receiving no instruction at the time the census was
+taken; but it is not at all likely that this condition was permanent in
+the case of the greater number of these. The poorest Hebrew knows--the
+poorer he is, the better he knows it--that knowledge is power, and power
+as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long is
+what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day
+and night schools are crowded by his children, who are everywhere forging
+ahead of their Christian school-fellows, taking more than their share of
+prizes and promotions. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark
+back yard, has its school and its school-master with his scourge to
+intercept those who might otherwise escape. In the census there are put
+down 251 Jewish teachers as living in these tenements, a large number of
+whom conduct such schools, so that, as the children form always more than
+one-half of the population in the Jewish quarter, the evidence is after
+all that even here, with the tremendous inpour of a destitute, ignorant
+people, and with the undoubted employment of child labor on a large scale,
+the cause of progress along the safe line is holding its own.
+
+
+[Illustration: A SYNAGOGUE SCHOOL IN A HESTER STREET TENEMENT.]
+
+
+[Illustration: THE BACKSTAIRS TO LEARNING. (Entrance to a Talmud School in
+Hester Street.)]
+
+
+It is true that these tenement schools that absorb several thousand
+children are not what they might be from a sanitary point of view. It is
+also true that heretofore nothing but Hebrew and the Talmud have been
+taught there. But to the one evil the health authorities have recently
+been aroused; of the other, the wise and patriotic men who are managing
+the Baron de Hirsch charity are making a useful handle by gathering the
+teachers in and setting them to learn English. Their new knowledge will
+soon be reflected in their teaching, and the Hebrew schools become primary
+classes in the system of public education. The school in a Hester Street
+tenement that is shown in the picture is a fair specimen of its kind--by
+no means one of the worst--and so is the back yard behind it, that serves
+as the children's play-ground, with its dirty mud-puddles, its
+slop-barrels and broken flags, and its foul tenement-house surroundings.
+Both fall in well with the home-lives and environment of the unhappy
+little wretches whose daily horizon they limit. They get there the first
+instruction they receive in the only tongues with which the teachers are
+familiar, Hebrew and the Jargon, in the only studies which they are
+competent to teach, the Talmud and the Prophets. Until they are six years
+old they are under the "Melammed's" rod all day; after that only in the
+interval between public school and supper. It is practically the only
+religious instruction the poorest Jewish children receive, but it is
+claimed by some of their rabbis that they had better have none at all. The
+daily transition, they say, from the bright and, by comparison,
+ćsthetically beautiful public school-room to these dark and inhospitable
+dens, with which the faith that has brought so many miseries upon their
+race comes to be inseparably associated in the child's mind as he grows
+up, tends to reflections that breed indifference, if not infidelity, in
+the young. It would not be strange if this were so. If the schools,
+through this process, also help pave the way for the acceptance of the
+Messiah heretofore rejected, which I greatly doubt, it may be said to be
+the only instance in which the East Side tenement has done its tenants a
+good Christian turn.
+
+There is no more remarkable class in any school than that of these
+Melammedim,[5] that may be seen in session any week day forenoon, save on
+Saturday, of course, in the Hebrew Institute in East Broadway. Old bearded
+men struggling through the intricacies of the first reader, "a cow, a
+cat," and all the rest of childish learning, with a rapt attention and a
+concentration of energy as if they were devoting themselves to the most
+heroic of tasks, which, indeed, they are, for the good that may come of it
+cannot easily be overestimated. As an educational measure it may be said
+to be getting down to first principles with a vengeance. When the reader
+has been mastered, brief courses in the history of the United States, the
+Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution follow. The test of
+proficiency in the pupil is his ability to translate the books of the Old
+Testament, with which he is familiar, of course, from Hebrew into English,
+and _vice versa_. The Melammed is rarely a dull scholar. No one knows
+better than he, to whom it has come only in the evening of his hard life,
+the value of the boon that is offered him. One of the odd group that was
+deep in the lesson of the day had five children at home, whom he had
+struggled to bring up on an income of ten dollars a week. The oldest, a
+bright boy who had graduated with honor, despite the patch on his
+trousers, from the public school, was ambitious to go to college, and the
+father had saved and pinched in a thousand ways to gratify his desire.
+One of the managers of the Institute who knew how the family were starving
+on half rations, had offered the father, a short time before, to get the
+boy employment in a store at three dollars a week. It was a tremendous
+temptation, for the money was badly needed at home. But the old man put it
+resolutely away from him. "No," he said, "I must send him to college. He
+shall have the chance that was denied his father." And he was as good as
+his word. And so was the lad, a worthy son of a worthy father. When I met
+him he had already proved himself a long way the best student in his
+class.
+
+
+[Illustration: CLASS OF MELAMMEDIM LEARNING ENGLISH.]
+
+
+In other class-rooms in the great building, which is devoted entirely to
+the cause of Americanizing the young Russian immigrants, hundreds of
+children get daily their first lessons in English and in patriotism in
+simultaneous doses. The two are inseparable in the beneficent plan of
+their instructors. Their effort is to lay hold of the children of the
+new-comers at once; tender years are no barrier. For the toddlers there
+are kindergarten classes, with play the street has had no chance to soil.
+And while playing they learn to speak the strange new tongue and to love
+the pretty flag with the stars that is everywhere in sight. The night
+school gathers in as many as can be corralled of those who are big enough,
+if not old enough, to work. The ease and rapidity with which they learn is
+equalled only by their good behavior and close attention while in school.
+There is no whispering and no rioting at these desks, no trial of strength
+with the teacher, as in the Italian ragged schools, where the question who
+is boss has always to be settled before the business of the school can
+proceed. These children come to learn. Even from the Christian schools in
+the district that gather in their share comes the same testimony. All the
+disturbance they report was made by their elders, outside the school, in
+the street. In the Hebrew Institute the average of absence for all causes
+was, during the first year, less than eight per cent. of the registered
+attendance, and in nearly every case sickness furnished a valid excuse. In
+a year and a half the principal had only been called upon three times to
+reprove an obstreperous pupil, in a total of 1,500. While I was visiting
+one of the day classes a little girl who had come from Moscow only two
+months before presented herself with her green vaccination card from the
+steamer. She understood already perfectly the questions put to her and was
+able to answer most of them in English. Boys of eight and nine years who
+had come over as many months before, knowing only the jargon of their
+native village, read to me whole pages from the reader with almost perfect
+accent, and did sums on the blackboard that would have done credit to the
+average boy of twelve in our public schools. Figuring is always their
+strong point. They would not be Jews if it was not.
+
+In the evening classes the girls of "fourteen" flourished, as everywhere
+in Jewtown. There were many who were much older, and some who were a long
+way yet from that safe goal. One sober-faced little girl, who wore a medal
+for faithful attendance and who could not have been much over ten, if as
+old as that, said that she "went out dressmaking" and so helped her
+mother. Another, who was even smaller and had been here just three weeks,
+yet understood what was said to her, explained in broken German that she
+was learning to work at "Blumen" in a Grand Street shop, and would soon be
+able to earn wages that would help support the family of four children, of
+whom she was the oldest. The girl who sat in the seat with her was from a
+Hester Street tenement. Her clothes showed that she was very poor. She
+read very fluently on demand a story about a big dog that tried to run
+away, or something, "when he had a chance." When she came to translate
+what she had read into German, which many of the Russian children
+understand, she got along until she reached the word "chance." There she
+stopped, bewildered. It was the one idea of which her brief life had no
+embodiment, the thing it had altogether missed.
+
+The Declaration of Independence half the children knew by heart before
+they had gone over it twice. To help them along it is printed in the
+school-books with a Hebrew translation and another in Jargon, a
+"Jewish-German," in parallel columns and the explanatory notes in Hebrew.
+The Constitution of the United States is treated in the same manner, but
+it is too hard, or too wearisome, for the children. They "hate" it, says
+the teacher, while the Declaration of Independence takes their fancy at
+sight. They understand it in their own practical way, and the spirit of
+the immortal document suffers no loss from the annotations of Ludlow
+Street, if its dignity is sometimes slightly rumpled.
+
+"When," said the teacher to one of the pupils, a little working-girl from
+an Essex Street sweater's shop, "the Americans could no longer put up with
+the abuse of the English who governed the colonies, what occurred then?"
+
+"A strike!" responded the girl, promptly. She had found it here on coming
+and evidently thought it a national institution upon which the whole
+scheme of our government was founded.
+
+
+[Illustration: DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
+
+  A DECLARATION BY THE REPRESENTATIVES
+  OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN
+  CONGRESS ASSEMBLED.
+
+               ENGLISH.                                 HEBREW.
+
+  When, in the course of human events,
+  it becomes necessary for one people
+  to dissolve the political bands which
+  have connected them with another,
+  and to assume, among the powers of the
+  earth, the separate and equal station
+  to which the laws of nature and of
+  nature's God entitle them, a decent
+  respect to the opinions of mankind
+  requires that they should declare the
+  causes which impel them to the
+  separation.
+
+  We hold these truths to be
+  self-evident--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their
+  Creator with certain inalienable
+  rights; that among these are life,
+  liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
+  That, to secure these rights,
+  governments are instituted among men,
+  deriving their just powers from the
+  consent of the governed; that,
+  whenever any form of government
+  becomes destructive of these ends, it
+  is the right of the]
+
+[Illustration: JEWISH-GERMAN. Notes. HEBREW.]
+
+
+It was curious to find the low voices of the children, particularly the
+girls, an impediment to instruction in this school. They could sometimes
+hardly be heard for the noise in the street, when the heat made it
+necessary to have the windows open. But shrillness is not characteristic
+even of the Pig-market when it is noisiest and most crowded. Some of the
+children had sweet singing voices. One especially, a boy with straight red
+hair and a freckled face, chanted in a plaintive minor key the One Hundred
+and Thirtieth Psalm, "Out of the depths" etc., and the harsh gutturals of
+the Hebrew became sweet harmony until the sad strain brought tears to our
+eyes.
+
+The dirt of Ludlow Street is all-pervading and the children do not escape
+it. Rather, it seems to have a special affinity for them, or they for the
+dirt. The duty of imparting the fundamental lesson of cleanliness devolves
+upon a special school officer, a matron, who makes the round of the
+classes every morning with her alphabet: a cake of soap, a sponge, and a
+pitcher of water, and picks out those who need to be washed. One little
+fellow expressed his disapproval of this programme in the first English
+composition he wrote, as follows:
+
+
+[Illustration: (Handwriting)
+
+Indians.
+
+Indians do not want to wash because they like not water. I wish I was a
+Indian.]
+
+
+Despite this hint, the lesson is enforced upon the children, but there is
+no evidence that it bears fruit in their homes to any noticeable extent,
+as is the case with the Italians I spoke of. The homes are too hopeless,
+the grind too unceasing. The managers know it and have little hope of the
+older immigrants. It is toward getting hold of their children that they
+bend every effort, and with a success that shows how easily these children
+can be moulded for good or for bad. Nor do they let go their grasp of them
+until the job is finished. The United Hebrew Charities maintain
+trade-schools for those who show aptness for such work, and a very
+creditable showing they make. The public school receives all those who
+graduate from what might be called the American primary in East Broadway.
+
+The smoky torches on many hucksters' carts threw their uncertain yellow
+light over Hester Street as I watched the children troop homeward from
+school one night. Eight little pedlers hawking their wares had stopped
+under the lamp on the corner to bargain with each other for want of cash
+customers. They were engaged in a desperate but vain attempt to cheat one
+of their number who was deaf and dumb. I bought a quire of note-paper of
+the mute for a cent and instantly the whole crew beset me in a fierce
+rivalry, to which I put a hasty end by buying out the little mute's poor
+stock--ten cents covered it all--and after he had counted out the quires,
+gave it back to him. At this act of unheard-of generosity the seven, who
+had remained to witness the transfer, stood speechless. As I went my way,
+with a sudden common impulse they kissed their hands at me, all rivalry
+forgotten in their admiration, and kept kissing, bowing, and salaaming
+until I was out of sight. "Not bad children," I mused as I went along,
+"good stuff in them, whatever their faults." I thought of the poor boy's
+stock, of the cheapness of it, and then it occurred to me that he had
+charged me just twice as much for the paper I gave him back as for the
+penny quire I bought. But when I went back to give him a piece of my mind
+the boys were gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+TONY AND HIS TRIBE
+
+
+I have a little friend somewhere in Mott Street whose picture comes up
+before me. I wish I could show it to the reader, but to photograph Tony is
+one of the unattained ambitions of my life. He is one of the whimsical
+birds one sees when he hasn't got a gun, and then never long enough in one
+place to give one a chance to get it. A ragged coat three sizes at least
+too large for the boy, though it has evidently been cropped to meet his
+case, hitched by its one button across a bare brown breast; one sleeve
+patched on the under side with a piece of sole-leather that sticks out
+straight, refusing to be reconciled; trousers that boasted a seat once,
+but probably not while Tony has worn them; two left boots tied on with
+packing twine, bare legs in them the color of the leather, heel and toe
+showing through; a shock of sunburnt hair struggling through the rent in
+the old straw hat; two frank, laughing eyes under its broken brim--that is
+Tony.
+
+He stood over the gutter the day I met him, reaching for a handful of mud
+with which to "paste" another hoodlum who was shouting defiance from
+across the street. He did not see me, and when my hand touched his
+shoulder his whole little body shrank with a convulsive shudder, as from
+an expected blow. Quick as a flash he dodged, and turning, out of reach,
+confronted the unknown enemy, gripping tight his handful of mud. I had a
+bunch of white pinks which a young lady had given me half an hour before
+for one of my little friends. "They are yours," I said, and held them out
+to him, "take them."
+
+Doubt, delight, and utter bewilderment struggled in the boy's face. He
+said not one word, but when he had brought his mind to believe that it
+really was so, clutched the flowers with one eager, grimy fist, held them
+close against his bare breast, and, shielding them with the other, ran as
+fast as his legs could carry him down the street. Not far; fifty feet away
+he stopped short, looked back, hesitated a moment, then turned on his
+track as fast as he had come. He brought up directly in front of me, a
+picture a painter would have loved, ragamuffin that he was, with the
+flowers held so tightly against his brown skin, scraped out with one foot
+and made one of the funniest little bows.
+
+"Thank you," he said. Then he was off. Down the street I saw squads of
+children like himself running out to meet him. He darted past and through
+them all, never stopping, but pointing back my way, and in a minute there
+bore down upon me a crowd of little ones, running breathless with
+desperate entreaty: "Oh, mister! give _me_ a flower." Hot tears of grief
+and envy--human passions are much the same in rags and in silks--fell when
+they saw I had no more. But by that time Tony was safe.
+
+And where did he run so fast? For whom did he shield the "posy" so
+eagerly, so faithfully, that ragged little wretch that was all mud and
+patches? I found out afterward when I met him giving his sister a ride in
+a dismantled tomato-crate, likely enough "hooked" at the grocer's. It was
+for his mother. In the dark hovel he called home, to the level of which
+all it sheltered had long since sunk through the brutal indifference of a
+drunken father, my lady's pinks blossomed, and, long after they were
+withered and yellow, still stood in their cracked jar, visible token of
+something that had entered Tony's life and tenement with sweetening touch
+that day for the first time. Alas! for the last, too, perhaps. I saw Tony
+off and on for a while and then he was as suddenly lost as he was found,
+with all that belonged to him. Moved away--put out, probably--and, except
+the assurance that they were still somewhere in Mott Street, even the
+saloon could give me no clue to them.
+
+I gained Tony's confidence, almost, in the time I knew him. There was a
+little misunderstanding between us that had still left a trace of
+embarrassment when Tony disappeared. It was when I asked him one day,
+while we were not yet "solid," if he ever went to school. He said
+"sometimes," and backed off. I am afraid Tony lied that time. The evidence
+was against him. It was different with little Katie, my nine-year-old
+housekeeper of the sober look. Her I met in the Fifty-second Street
+Industrial School, where she picked up such crumbs of learning as were for
+her in the intervals of her housework. The serious responsibilities of
+life had come early to Katie. On the top floor of a tenement in West
+Forty-ninth Street she was keeping house for her older sister and two
+brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to
+$1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the
+father brought home another wife. Their combined income was something like
+$9.50 a week, and the simple furniture was bought on instalments. But it
+was all clean, if poor. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the
+plain kind. They did not run much to fancy cooking, I guess. She scrubbed
+and swept and went to school, all as a matter of course, and ran the
+house generally, with an occasional lift from the neighbors in the
+tenement, who were, if anything, poorer than they. The picture shows what
+a sober, patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing
+on her day by day. At the school they loved her for her quiet, gentle
+ways. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a
+question and without a smile.
+
+"What kind of work do you do?" I asked, thinking to interest her while I
+made ready.
+
+"I scrubs," she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she
+scrubbed came out clean.
+
+
+[Illustration: "I SCRUBS."--KATIE, WHO KEEPS HOUSE IN WEST FORTY-NINTH
+STREET.]
+
+
+Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends. Very early the
+cross of her sex had been laid upon the little shoulders that bore it so
+stoutly. Tony's, as likely as not, would never begin. There were ear-marks
+upon the boy that warranted the suspicion. They were the ear-marks of the
+street to which his care and education had been left. The only work of
+which it heartily approves is that done by other people. I came upon Tony
+once under circumstances that foreshadowed his career with tolerable
+distinctness. He was at the head of a gang of little shavers like himself,
+none over eight or nine, who were swaggering around in a ring, in the
+middle of the street, rigged out in war-paint and hen-feathers, shouting
+as they went: "Whoop! We are the Houston Streeters." They meant no harm
+and they were not doing any just then. It was all in the future, but it
+was there, and no mistake. The game which they were then rehearsing was
+one in which the policeman who stood idly swinging his club on the corner
+would one day take a hand, and not always the winning one.
+
+The fortunes of Tony and Katie, simple and soon told as they are,
+encompass as between the covers of a book the whole story of the children
+of the poor, the story of the bad their lives struggle vainly to conquer,
+and the story of the good that crops out in spite of it. Sickness, that
+always finds the poor unprepared and soon leaves them the choice of
+beggary or starvation, hard times, the death of the bread-winner, or the
+part played by the growler in the poverty of the home, may vary the theme
+for the elders; for the children it is the same sad story, with little
+variation, and that rarely of a kind to improve. Happily for their peace
+of mind, they are the least concerned about it. In New York, at least, the
+poor children are not the stunted repining lot we have heard of as being
+hatched in cities abroad. Stunted in body perhaps. It was said of Napoleon
+that he shortened the average stature of the Frenchman one inch by getting
+all the tall men killed in his wars. The tenement has done that for New
+York. Only the other day one of the best known clergymen in the city, who
+tries to attract the boys to his church on the East Side by a very
+practical interest in them, and succeeds admirably in doing it, told me
+that the drill-master of his cadet corps was in despair because he could
+barely find two or three among half a hundred lads verging on manhood,
+over five feet six inches high. It is queer what different ways there are
+of looking at a thing. My medical friend finds in the fact that poverty
+stunts the body what he is pleased to call a beautiful provision of nature
+to prevent unnecessary suffering: there is less for the poverty to pinch
+then. It is self-defence, he says, and he claims that the consensus of
+learned professional opinion is with him. Yet, when this shortened
+sufferer steals a loaf of bread to make the pinching bear less hard on
+what is left, he is called a thief, thrown into jail, and frowned upon by
+the community that just now saw in his case a beautiful illustration of
+the operation of natural laws for the defence of the man.
+
+Stunted morally, yes! It could not well be otherwise. But stunted in
+spirits--never! As for repining, there is no such word in his vocabulary.
+He accepts life as it comes to him and gets out of it what he can. If that
+is not much, he is not justly to blame for not giving back more to the
+community of which by and by he will be a responsible member. The kind of
+the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and
+it pervades and shapes his young life. It is the tenement that gives up
+the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied
+him. Its exorbitant rents rob him of the schooling that is his one chance
+to elude its grasp, by compelling his enrolment in the army of
+wage-earners before he has learned to read. Its alliance with the saloon
+guides his baby feet along the well-beaten track of the growler that
+completes his ruin. Its power to pervert and corrupt has always to be
+considered, its point of view always to be taken to get the perspective
+in dealing with the poor, or the cart will seem to be forever getting
+before the horse in a way not to be understood. We had a girl once at our
+house in the country who left us suddenly after a brief stay and went back
+to her old tenement life, because "all the green hurt her eyes so." She
+meant just what she said, though she did not know herself what ailed her.
+It was the slum that had its fatal grip upon her. She longed for its
+noise, its bustle, and its crowds, and laid it all to the green grass and
+the trees that were new to her as steady company.
+
+From this tenement the street offered, until the kindergarten came not
+long ago, the one escape, does yet for the great mass of children--a
+Hobson's choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The
+opportunities rampant in the one are a sad commentary on the sure
+defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency
+like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M----,
+at that moment under arrest for half clubbing her husband to death, was "a
+very good, a very decent, woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the
+husband) was not much." Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a
+young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed
+District last autumn: "Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow," she
+said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; "them toughs don't know
+how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor."
+
+Hers was the standard of the street, the other's that of the tenement.
+Together they stamp the child's life with the vicious touch which is
+sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the
+rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather,
+perhaps, of the capacity for them, that crop out in constant exhibitions
+of loyalty, of gratitude, and true-heartedness, a never-ending source of
+encouragement and delight to those who have made their cause their own and
+have in their true sympathy the key to the best that is in the children.
+The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged
+schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the
+start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, leaves no room for
+doubt as to the influence the change has had upon the children. With the
+disappearance of the shanties--homesteads in effect, however humble--and
+the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in
+the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The
+crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the
+street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered,
+while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue-efforts put
+forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer
+of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a
+large extent, and his loss is our gain. The tough who has taken his place
+is able at least to spell his way through "The Bandits' Cave," the pattern
+exploits of Jesse James and his band, and the newspaper accounts of the
+latest raid in which he had a hand. Perhaps that explains why he is more
+dangerous than the old loafer. The transition period is always critical,
+and a little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing. It may be that in
+the day to come, when we shall have got the grip of our compulsory school
+law in good earnest, there will be an educational standard even for the
+tough, by which time he will, I think, have ceased to exist from sheer
+disgust, if for no other reason. At present he is in no immediate danger
+of extinction from such a source. It is not how much book-learning the boy
+can get, but how little he can get along with, and that is very little
+indeed. He knows how to make a little go a long way, however, and to serve
+on occasion a very practical purpose; as, for instance, when I read
+recently on the wall of the church next to my office in Mulberry Street
+this observation, chalked in an awkward hand half the length of the wall:
+"Mary McGee is engagd to the feller in the alley." Quite apt, I should
+think, to make Mary show her colors and to provoke the fight with the
+rival "feller" for which the writer was evidently spoiling. I shall get
+back, farther on, to the question of the children's schooling. It is so
+beset by lies ordinarily as to be seldom answered as promptly and as
+honestly as in the case of a little fellow whom I found in front of St.
+George's Church, engaged in the ćsthetic occupation of pelting the
+Friends' Seminary across the way with mud. There were two of them, and
+when I asked them the question that estranged Tony, the wicked one dug his
+fists deep down in the pockets of his blue-jeans trousers and shook his
+head gloomily. He couldn't read; didn't know how; never did.
+
+"He?" said the other, who could, "he? He don't learn nothing. He throws
+stones." The wicked one nodded. It was the extent of his education.
+
+But if the three R's suffer neglect among the children of the poor, their
+lessons in the three D's--Dirt, Discomfort, and Disease--that form the
+striking features of their environment, are early and thorough enough. The
+two latter, at least, are synonymous terms, if dirt and discomfort are
+not. Any dispensary doctor knows of scores of cases of ulceration of the
+eye that are due to the frequent rubbing of dirty faces with dirty little
+hands. Worse filth diseases than that find a fertile soil in the
+tenements, as the health officers learn when typhus and small-pox break
+out. It is not the desperate diet of ignorant mothers, who feed their
+month-old babies with sausage, beer, and Limburger cheese, that alone
+accounts for the great infant mortality among the poor in the tenements.
+The dirt and the darkness in their homes contribute their full share, and
+the landlord is more to blame than the mother. He holds the key to the
+situation which her ignorance fails to grasp, and it is he who is
+responsible for much of the unfounded and unnecessary prejudice against
+foreigners, who come here willing enough to fall in with the ways of the
+country that are shown to them. The way he shows them is not the way of
+decency. I am convinced that the really injurious foreigners in this
+community, outside of the walking delegate's tribe, are the foreign
+landlords of two kinds: those who, born in poverty abroad, have come up
+through tenement-house life to the ownership of tenement property, with
+all the bad traditions of such a career; and the absentee landlords of
+native birth who live and spend their rents away from home, without
+knowing or caring what the condition of their property is, so the income
+from it suffer no diminution. There are honorable exceptions to the first
+class, but few enough to the latter to make them hardly worth mentioning.
+
+To a good many of the children, or rather to their parents, this latter
+statement and the experience that warrants it must have a sadly familiar
+sound. The Irish element is still an important factor in New York's
+tenements, though it is yielding one stronghold after another to the
+Italian foe. It lost its grip on the Five Points and the Bend long ago,
+and at this writing the time seems not far distant when it must vacate for
+good also that classic ground of the Kerryman, Cherry Hill. It is Irish
+only by descent, however; the children are Americans, as they will not
+fail to convince the doubter. A school census of this district, the Fourth
+Ward, taken last winter, discovered 2,016 children between the ages of
+five and fourteen years. No less than 1,706 of them were put down as
+native born, but only one-fourth, or 519, had American parents. Of the
+others 572 had Irish and 536 Italian parents. Uptown, in many of the poor
+tenement localities, in Poverty Gap, in Battle Row, and in Hell's Kitchen,
+in short, wherever the gang flourishes, the Celt is still supreme and
+seasons the lump enough to give it his own peculiar flavor, easily
+discovered through its "native" guise in the story of the children of the
+poor.
+
+The case of one Irish family that exhibits a shoal which lies always close
+to the track of ignorant poverty is even now running in my mind, vainly
+demanding a practical solution. I may say that I have inherited it from
+professional philanthropists, who have struggled with it for more than
+half a dozen years without finding the way out they sought.
+
+There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had
+about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When I
+took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over.
+The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother's tears, by a transition
+imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of
+the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that
+were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and
+with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother's appeal. It
+required very little experience to make the prediction that, shortly, ten
+pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if
+those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I
+scarcely know which was most to be condemned, when we tried to break the
+family up by throwing it on the street as a necessary step to getting
+possession of the children--the politician who tripped us up with his
+influence in the court, or the landlord who had all those years made the
+poverty on the second floor pan out a golden interest. It was the
+outrageous rent for the filthy den that had been the most effective
+argument with sympathizing visitors. Their pity had represented to him, as
+nearly as I could make out, for eight long years, a capital of $2,600
+invested at six per cent., payable monthly. The idea of moving was
+preposterous; for what other landlord would take in a homeless family with
+ten children and no income?
+
+Children anywhere suffer little discomfort from mere dirt. As an
+ingredient of mud-pies it may be said to be not unwholesome. Play with the
+dirt is better than none without it. In the tenements the children and the
+dirt are sworn and loyal friends. In his early raids upon the established
+order of society, the gutter backs the boy up to the best of its ability,
+with more or less exasperating success. In the hot summer days, when he
+tries to sneak into the free baths with every fresh batch, twenty times a
+day, wretched little repeater that he is, it comes to his rescue against
+the policeman at the door. Fresh mud smeared on the face serves as a
+ticket of admission which no one can refuse. At least so he thinks, but in
+his anxiety he generally overdoes it and arouses the suspicion of the
+policeman, who, remembering that he was once a boy himself, feels of his
+hair and reads his title there. When it is a mission that is to be raided,
+or a "dutch" grocer's shop, or a parade of the rival gang from the next
+block, the gutter furnishes ammunition that is always handy. Dirt is a
+great leveller;[6] it is no respecter of persons or principles, and
+neither is the boy where it abounds. In proportion as it accumulates such
+raids increase, the Fresh Air Funds lose their grip, the saloon
+flourishes, and turbulence grows. Down from the Fourth Ward, where there
+is not much else, this wail came recently from a Baptist Mission Church:
+"The Temple stands in a hard spot and neighborhood. The past week we had
+to have arrested two fellows for throwing stones into the house and
+causing annoyance. On George Washington's Birthday we had not put a flag
+over the door on Henry Street half an hour before it was stolen. When they
+neither respect the house of prayer or the Stars and Stripes one can feel
+young America is in a bad state." The pastor added that it was a comfort
+to him to know that the "fellows" were Catholics; but I think he was
+hardly quite fair to them there. Religious enthusiasm very likely had
+something to do with it, but it was not the moving cause. The dirt was; in
+other words: the slum.
+
+Such diversions are among the few and simple joys of the street child's
+life, Not all it affords, but all the street has to offer. The Fresh Air
+Funds, the free excursions, and the many charities that year by year
+reach farther down among the poor for their children have done and are
+doing a great work in setting up new standards, ideals, and ambitions in
+the domain of the street. One result is seen in the effort of the poorest
+mothers to make their little ones presentable when there is anything to
+arouse their maternal pride. But all these things must and do come from
+the outside. Other resources than the sturdy independence that is its
+heritage the street has none. Rightly used, that in itself is the greatest
+of all. Chief among its native entertainments is that crowning joy, the
+parade of the circus when it comes to town in the spring. For many hours
+after that has passed, as after every public show that costs nothing, the
+matron's room at Police Headquarters is crowded with youngsters who have
+followed it miles and miles from home, devouring its splendors with hungry
+eyes until the last elephant, the last soldier, or the last policeman
+vanished from sight and the child comes back to earth again and to the
+knowledge that he is lost.
+
+If the delights of his life are few, its sorrows do not sit heavily upon
+him either. He is in too close and constant touch with misery, with death
+itself, to mind it much. To find a family of children living, sleeping,
+and eating in the room where father or mother lies dead, without seeming
+to be in any special distress about it, is no unusual experience. But if
+they do not weigh upon him, the cares of home leave their mark; and it is
+a bad mark. All the darkness, all the drudgery is there. All the freedom
+is in the street; all the brightness in the saloon to which he early finds
+his way. And as he grows in years and wisdom, if not in grace, he gets his
+first lessons in spelling and in respect for the law from the card behind
+the bar, with the big black letters: "No liquor sold here to children."
+His opportunities for studying it while the barkeeper fills his growler
+are unlimited and unrestricted.
+
+Someone has said that our poor children do not know how to play. He had
+probably seen a crowd of tenement children dancing in the street to the
+accompaniment of a hand-organ and been struck by their serious mien and
+painfully formal glide and carriage--if it was not a German neighborhood,
+where the "proprieties" are less strictly observed--but that was only
+because it was a ball and it was incumbent on the girls to act as ladies.
+Only ladies attend balls. "London Bridge is falling down," with as loud a
+din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred
+years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march
+"all around the mulberry-bush" as gleefully as if there were a green shrub
+to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the
+game too easily, and the kindergarten work comes in in helping to wipe off
+the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than
+those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. Only in
+the very worst tenements have I observed the children's play to languish.
+In such localities two policemen are required to do the work of one.
+Ordinarily they lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd
+of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties
+were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a
+knot of tenement-house children with tails improvised from a newspaper,
+and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly
+across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a
+heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any
+crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper
+came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where
+the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails;
+every block a ball-ground when the policeman's back is turned, and every
+roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city
+ordinance "below Fourteenth Street."
+
+
+[Illustration: PRESENT TENANTS OF JOHN ERICSSON'S OLD HOUSE NOW THE BEACH
+STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.]
+
+
+It is rather that their opportunities of mischief are greater than those
+of harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with
+deliberate purpose to hatch the "tough." Given idleness and the street,
+and he will grow without other encouragement than an occasional "fanning"
+of a policeman's club. And the street has to do for a playground. There is
+no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered
+for his benefit five years ago exist yet only on paper. Games like
+kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily
+they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law
+and order, that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year
+the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten
+vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night
+sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other,
+with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow
+bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given
+out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of
+public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a show-case, containing
+property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has
+happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal, and
+burned up election night. The boys, organized in gangs, with the one
+condition of membership that all must "give in wood," store up enormous
+piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a
+good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling-wood for
+the winter, the pile grows again in a single night, as the neighborhood
+reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the
+gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our
+courts and our jails, may without much difficulty be discovered in these
+early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.
+
+Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment
+of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not
+defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry
+its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the
+street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the
+hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that,
+banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, horns and bassoons
+hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer the innocent purveyor
+of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the
+policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades which the latter
+formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang
+organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.
+
+And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the
+first time, cries out in delight, "How blue the sky and what a lot of it
+there is!"--not much of it at home in his barrack--has in the very love of
+dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own
+club or die in the attempt, in the intense vanity that is only a
+perverted form of pride, capable of any achievement, a handle by which he
+may be most easily grasped and led. It cannot be done by gorging him _en
+masse_ with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party.[7] It can be done
+only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in
+direct contact with the child--the great secret of success in all dealings
+with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the
+reproach of "bad form" as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire
+eventually to "down" a policeman, is his ambition to be a "gentleman," as
+his sister's to be a "lady." The street is responsible for the caricature
+either makes of the character. On a play-bill I saw in an East Side
+street, only the other day, this _repertoire_ set down: "Thursday--The
+Bowery Tramp; Friday--The Thief." It was a theatre I knew newsboys, and
+the other children of the street who were earning money, to frequent in
+shoals. The play-bill suggested the sort of training they received there.
+
+I wish I might tell the story of some of these very lads whom certain
+enthusiastic friends of mine tried to reclaim on a plan of their own, in
+which the gang became a club and its members "Knights," who made and
+executed their own laws; but I am under heavy bonds of promises made to
+keep the peace on this point. The fact is, I tried it once, and my
+well-meant effort made no end of trouble. I had failed to appreciate the
+stride of civilization that under my friends' banner marched about the
+East Side with seven-league boots. They read the magazines down there and
+objected, rather illogically, to being "shown up." The incident was a
+striking revelation of the wide gap between the conditions that prevail
+abroad and those that confront us. Fancy the _Westminster Review_ or the
+_Nineteenth Century_ breeding contention among the denizens of East London
+by any criticism of their ways? Yet even from Hell's Kitchen had I not
+long before been driven forth with my camera by a band of angry women, who
+pelted me with brickbats and stones on my retreat, shouting at me never to
+come back unless I wanted my head broken, or let any other "duck" from the
+(mentioning a well-known newspaper of which I was unjustly suspected of
+being an emissary) poke his nose in there. Reform and the magazines had
+not taken that stronghold of toughdom yet, but their vanguard, the
+newspapers, had evidently got there.
+
+"It only shows," said one of my missionary friends, commenting upon the
+East Side incident, "that we are all at sixes and at sevens here." It is
+our own fault. In our unconscious pride of caste most of us are given to
+looking too much and too long at the rough outside. These same workers
+bore cheerful testimony to the "exquisite courtesy" with which they were
+received every day in the poorest homes; a courtesy that might not always
+know the ways of polite society, but always tried its best to find them.
+"In over fifty thousand visits," reports a physician, whose noble life is
+given early and late to work that has made her name blessed where sorrow
+and suffering add their sting to bitter poverty, "personal violence has
+been attempted on but two occasions. In each case children had died from
+neglect of parents, who, in their drunken rage, would certainly have taken
+the life of the physician, had she not promptly run away." Patience and
+kindness prevailed even with these. The doctor did not desert them, even
+though she had had to run, believing that one of the mothers at least
+drank because she was poor and unable to find work; and now, after five
+years of many trials and failures, she reports that the family is at work
+and happy and grateful in rooms "where the sun beams in." Gratitude,
+indeed, she found to be their strong point, always seeking an outlet in
+expression--evidence of a lack of bringing up, certainly. "Once," she
+says, "the thankful fathers of two of our patients wished to vote for us,
+as 'the lady doctors have no vote.' Their intention was to vote for
+General Butler; we have proof that they voted for Cleveland. They have
+even placed their own lives in danger for us. One man fought a duel with a
+woman, she having said that women doctors did not know as much as men.
+After bar-tumblers were used as weapons the question was decided in favor
+of women doctors by the man. It seemed but proper that 'the lady doctor'
+was called in to bind up the wounds of her champion, while a 'man doctor'
+performed the service for the woman."
+
+My friends, in time, by their gentle but firm management, gained the
+honest esteem and loyal support of the boys whose manners and minds they
+had set out to improve, and through such means worked wonders. While some
+of their experiences were exceedingly funny, more were of a kind to show
+how easily the material could be moulded, if the hands were only there to
+mould it. One of their number, by and by, hung out her shingle in another
+street with the word "Doctor" over the bell (not the physician above
+referred to), but her "character" had preceded her, and woe to the urchin
+who as much as glanced at that when the gang pulled all the other bells
+in the block and laughed at the wrath of the tenants. One luckless chap
+forgot himself far enough to yank it one night, and immediately an angry
+cry went up from the gang, "Who pulled dat bell?" "Mickey did," was the
+answer, and Mickey's howls announced to the amused doctor the next minute
+that he had been "slugged" and she avenged. This doctor's account of the
+first formal call of the gang in the block was highly amusing. It called
+in a body and showed a desire to please that tried the host's nerves not a
+little. The boys vied with each other in recounting for her entertainment
+their encounters with the police enemy, and in exhibiting their intimate
+knowledge of the wickedness of the slums in minutest detail. One, who was
+scarcely twelve years old, and had lately moved from Bayard Street, knew
+all the ins and outs of the Chinatown opium dives, and painted them in
+glowing colors. The doctor listened with half-amused dismay, and when the
+boys rose to go, told them she was glad they had called. So were they,
+they said, and they guessed they would call again the next night.
+
+"Oh! don't come to-morrow," said the doctor, in something of a fright;
+"come next week!" She was relieved upon hearing the leader of the gang
+reprove the rest of the fellows for their want of style. He bowed with
+great precision, and announced that he would call "in about two weeks."
+
+The testimony of these workers agrees with that of most others who reach
+the girls at an age when they are yet manageable, that the most abiding
+results follow with them, though they are harder to get at. The boys
+respond more readily, but also more easily fall from grace. The same good
+and bad traits are found in both; the same trying superficiality--which
+merely means that they are raw material; the same readiness to lie as the
+shortest cut out of a scrape; the same generous helpfulness,
+characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter
+poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial
+School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless
+and those even poorer than they such gifts as they could--a handful of
+ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar
+or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I
+found little Katie. In her person and work she answered the question
+sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the
+girls; because the home and the shop claim their work much earlier and to
+a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for
+themselves, and because, therefore, their miseries are so much more
+commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is a woman's lot to
+suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous
+protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the
+occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her
+bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the
+wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the
+sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the
+same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of
+the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not
+a distinguishing feature of tenement-house life, any more among the
+children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for
+a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six
+girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three days before a
+letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. "Mrs.
+Reilly," it read, "if you have any sinse you will send for your child."
+That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made
+out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high
+dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness
+of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby,
+and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus:
+"She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin' of herself, till the
+missus she says, says she, 'Does yer mother lave ye to sit that long at
+the table, sis?'" The poor thing was where there was enough to eat for
+once in her life, and she was making the most of her opportunity.
+
+Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that
+discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. It
+was in March a year ago that a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human
+shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the
+tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with
+his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out
+the child, she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the
+smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen climbing after, groped
+around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came
+upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll's trunk over the
+floor.
+
+"I could not leave it," she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized
+her; "my mother----"
+
+They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the
+sidewalk and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for
+her dead mother's grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her
+thirteen years.
+
+Yet Bessie might, likely would, have been found in the front row where
+anything was going on or to be had, crowding with the best of them and
+thrusting herself and her claim forward regardless of anything or anybody
+else. It is a quality in the children which, if not admirable, is at least
+natural. The poor have to take their turn always, and too often it never
+comes, or, as in the case of the poor young mother, whom one of our
+committee found riding aimlessly in a street car with her dying baby, not
+knowing where to go or what to do, when it is too late. She took mother
+and child to the dispensary. It was crowded and they had to wait their
+turn. When it came the baby was dead. It is not to be expected that
+children who have lived the lawless life of the street should patiently
+put up with such a prospect. That belongs to the discipline of a life of
+failure and want. The children know generally what they want and they go
+for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to
+give or pictures to take. In the latter case they reversed my Hell's
+Kitchen experience with a vengeance. Their determination to be "took," the
+moment the camera hove in sight, in the most striking pose they could
+hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met. The
+recollection of one such occasion haunts me yet. They were serving a
+Thanksgiving dinner free to all comers at a charitable institution in
+Mulberry Street, and more than a hundred children were in line at the door
+under the eye of a policeman when I tried to photograph them. Each one of
+the forlorn host had been hugging his particular place for an hour,
+shivering in the cold as the line slowly advanced toward the door and the
+promised dinner, and there had been numberless little spats due to the
+anxiety of some one farther back to steal a march on a neighbor nearer the
+goal; but the instant the camera appeared the line broke and a howling mob
+swarmed about me, up to the very eye of the camera, striking attitudes on
+the curb, squatting in the mud in alleged picturesque repose, and shoving
+and pushing in a wild struggle to get into the most prominent position.
+With immense trouble and labor the policeman and I made a narrow lane
+through the crowd from the camera to the curb, in the hope that the line
+might form again. The lane was studded, the moment I turned my back, with
+dirty faces that were thrust into it from both sides in ludicrous anxiety
+lest they should be left out, and in the middle of it two frowsy,
+ill-favored girls, children of ten or twelve, took position, hand in hand,
+flatly refusing to budge from in front of the camera. Neither jeers nor
+threats moved them. They stood their ground with a grim persistence that
+said as plainly as words that they were not going to let this, the supreme
+opportunity of their lives, pass, cost what it might. In their rags,
+barefooted, and in that disdainful pose in the midst of a veritable bedlam
+of shrieks and laughter, they were a most ludicrous spectacle. The boys
+fought rather shy of them, of one they called "Mag" especially, as it
+afterward appeared with good reason. A chunk of wood from the outskirts of
+the crowd that hit Mag on the ear at length precipitated a fight in which
+the boys struggled ten deep on the pavement, Mag in the middle of the
+heap, doing her full share. As a last expedient I bethought myself of a
+dog-fight as the means of scattering the mob, and sent around the corner
+to organize one. Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd
+broke and ran in a body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line
+collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone. As
+an attraction the dog-fight outranked the dinner.
+
+This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a
+tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way.
+The newspapers tickle it by recording the exploits of his gang with
+embellishments that fall in exactly with his tastes. Idleness encourages
+it. The home exercises no restraint. Parental authority is lost. At a
+certain age young men of all social grades know a heap more than their
+fathers, or think they do. The young tough has some apparent reason for
+thinking that way. He has likely learned to read. The old man has not; he
+probably never learned anything, not even to speak the language that his
+son knows without being taught. He thinks him "dead slow," of course, and
+lays it to his foreign birth. All foreigners are "slow." The father works
+hard. The boy thinks he knows a better plan. The old man has lost his grip
+on the lad, if he ever had any. That is the reason why the tough appears
+in the second generation and disappears in the third. By that time father
+and son are again on equal terms, whatever those terms may be. The
+exception to this rule is in the poorest Irish settlements where the
+manufacture of the tough goes right on, aided by the "inflooence" of the
+police court on one side and the saloon on the other. Between the two the
+police fall unwillingly into line. I was in the East Thirty-fifth Street
+police station one night when an officer came in with two young toughs
+whom he had arrested in a lumber yard where they were smoking and
+drinking. They had threatened to kill him and the watchman, and loaded
+revolvers were taken from them. In spite of this evidence against them,
+the Justice in the police court discharged them on the following morning
+with a scowl at the officer, and they were both jeering at him before
+noon. Naturally he let them alone after that. It was one case of hundreds
+of like character. The politician, of course, is behind them. Toughs have
+votes just as they have brickbats and brass-knuckles; when the emergency
+requires, an assortment to suit of the one as of the other.
+
+The story of the tough's career I told in "How the Other Half Lives," and
+there is no need of repeating it here. Its end is generally lurid, always
+dramatic. It is that even when it comes to him "with his boots off," in a
+peaceful sick bed. In his bravado one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the
+sturdiest traits in the Celtic nature, burlesqued and caricatured by the
+tenement. One who had been a cut-throat, bruiser, and prizefighter all his
+brief life lay dying from consumption in his Fourth Ward tenement not long
+ago. He had made what he proudly called a stand-up fight against the
+disease until now the end had come and he had at last to give up.
+
+"Maggie," he said, turning to his wife with eyes growing dim, "Mag! I had
+an iron heart, but now it is broke. Watch me die!" And Mag told it proudly
+at the wake as proof that Pat died game.
+
+And the girl that has come thus far with him? Fewer do than one might
+think. Many more switch off their lovers to some honest work this side of
+the jail, making decent husbands of them as they are loyal wives, thus
+proving themselves truly their better halves. But of her who goes his way
+with him--it is not generally a long way for either--what of her end? Let
+me tell the story of one that is the story of all. I came across it in the
+course of my work as a newspaper man a year ago and I repeat it here as I
+heard it then from those who knew, with only the names changed. The girl
+is dead, but he is alive and leading an honest life at last, so I am told.
+The story is that of "Kid" McDuff's girl.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE STORY OF KID McDUFF'S GIRL
+
+
+The back room of the saloon on the northwest corner of Pell Street and the
+Bowery is never cheery on the brightest day. The entrance to the dives of
+Chinatown yawns just outside, and in the bar-room gather the vilest of the
+wrecks of the Bend and the Sixth Ward slums. But on the morning of which I
+speak a shadow lay over it even darker than usual. The shadow of death was
+there. In the corner, propped on one chair, with her feet on another, sat
+a dead woman. Her glassy eyes looked straight ahead with a stony,
+unmeaning stare until the policeman who dozed at a table at the other end
+of the room, suddenly waking up and meeting it, got up with a shudder and
+covered the face with a handkerchief.
+
+What did they see, those dead eyes? Through its darkened windows what a
+review was the liberated spirit making of that sin-worn, wasted life,
+begun in innocence and wasted--there? Whatever their stare meant, the
+policeman knew little of it and cared less.
+
+"Oh! it is just a stiff," he said, and yawned wearily. There was still
+half an hour of his watch.
+
+The clinking of glasses and the shuffle of cowhide boots on the sanded
+floor outside grew louder and was muffled again as the door leading to the
+bar was opened and shut by a young woman. She lingered doubtfully on the
+threshold a moment, then walked with unsteady step across the room toward
+the corner where the corpse sat. The light that struggled in from the
+gloomy street fell upon her and showed that she trembled, as if with the
+ague. Yet she was young, not over twenty-five; but on her heavy eyes and
+sodden features there was the stamp death had just blotted from the
+other's face with the memory of her sins. Yet, curiously blended with it,
+not yet smothered wholly, there was something of the child, something that
+had once known a mother's love and pity.
+
+"Poor Kid," she said, stopping beside the body and sinking heavily in a
+chair. "He will be sorry, anyhow."
+
+"Who is Kid?" I asked.
+
+"Why, Kid McDuff! You know him? His brother Jim keeps the saloon on
+---- Street. Everybody knows Kid."
+
+"Well, what was she to Kid?" I asked, pointing to the corpse.
+
+"His girl," she said promptly. "An' he stuck to her till he was pulled for
+the job he didn't do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him too,
+you bet.
+
+"Annie wasn't no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the
+Kid," the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me; the policeman
+nodded in his chair. "He kep' her the best he could, 'ceptin' when he was
+sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder
+drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin' bar
+for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that Bridgeport skin job, and
+when he went to the pen she went to the bad, and now----"
+
+Here a thought that had been slowly working down through her besotted mind
+got a grip on her strong enough to hold her attention, and she leaned over
+and caught me by the sleeve, something almost akin to pity struggling in
+her bleary eyes.
+
+"Say, young feller," she whispered hoarsely, "don't spring this too hard.
+She's got two lovely brothers. One of them keeps a daisy saloon up on
+Eighth Avenue. They're respectable, they are."
+
+Then she went on telling what she knew of Annie Noonan who was sitting
+dead there before us. It was not much. She was the child of an honest
+shoemaker who came to this country twenty-two or three years before from
+his English home, when Annie was a little girl of six or seven. Before she
+was in her teens she was left fatherless. At the age of thirteen, when she
+was living in an East Side tenement with her mother, the Kid, then a young
+tough qualifying with one of the many gangs about the Hook for the
+penitentiary, crossed her path. Ever after she was his slave, and followed
+where he led.
+
+The path they trod together was not different from that travelled by
+hundreds of young men and women to-day. By way of the low dives and
+"morgues" with which the East Side abounds, it led him to the Island and
+her to the street. When he was sent up the first time, his mother died of
+a broken heart. His father, a well-to-do mechanic in the Seventh Ward, had
+been spared that misery. He had died before the son was fairly started on
+his bad career. The family were communicants at the parish church, and
+efforts without end were made to turn the Kid from his career of wicked
+folly. His two sisters labored faithfully with him, but without avail.
+When the Kid came back from the Island to find his mother dead, he did not
+know his oldest sister. Grief had turned her pretty brown hair a snowy
+white.
+
+He found his girl a little the worse for rum and late hours than when he
+left her, but he "took up" with her again. He was loyal at least. This
+time he tried, too, to be honest. His mother's death had shocked him to
+the point where his "nerve" gave out. His brother gave him charge of one
+of his saloons and the Kid was "at work" keeping bar, with the way to
+respectability, as it goes on the East Side, open to him, when one of his
+old pals, who had found him out, turned up with a demand for money. He was
+a burglar and wanted a hundred dollars to "do up a job" in the country.
+The Kid refused, and his brother came in during the quarrel that ensued,
+flew into a rage, and grabbing the thief by the collar, threw him into the
+street. He went his way shaking his fist and threatening vengeance on
+both.
+
+It was not long in coming. A jewelry store in Bridgeport was robbed and
+two burglars were arrested. One of them was the man "Jim" McDuff had
+thrown out of his saloon. He turned State's evidence and swore that the
+Kid was in the job too. He was arrested and held in bail of ten thousand
+dollars. The Kid always maintained that he was innocent. His family
+believed him, but his past was against him. It was said, too, that back of
+the arrest was political persecution. His brother the saloon-keeper, who
+mixed politics with his beer, was the under dog just then in the fight in
+his ward. The situation was discussed from a practical standpoint in the
+McDuff household, and it ended with the Kid going up to Bridgeport and
+pleading guilty to theft to escape the worse charge of burglary. He was
+sentenced to four years' imprisonment. That was how he got into "the pen."
+
+Annie, after he had been put in jail, went to the dogs on her own account
+rather faster than when they made a team. For a time she frequented the
+saloons of the Tenth Ward. When she crossed the Bowery at last she was
+nearing the end. For a year or two she frequented the disreputable houses
+in Elizabeth and Hester Streets. She was supposed to have a room in
+Downing Street, but it was the rarest of all events that she was there.
+
+Two weeks before this morning, Fay Leslie, the girl who sat there telling
+me her story, met her on the Bowery with a cut and bruised face. She had
+been beaten in a fight in a Pell Street saloon with Flossie Lowell, one of
+the habitues of Chinatown. Fay took her to Bellevue Hospital, where she
+"had a pull with the night watch," she told me, and she was kept there
+three or four days. When she came out she drifted back to Pell Street and
+took to drinking again. But she was a sick girl.
+
+The night before she was with Fay in the saloon on the corner, when she
+complained that she did not feel well. She sat down in a chair and put her
+feet on another. In that posture she was found dead a little later, when
+her friend went to see how she was getting on.
+
+"Rum killed her, I suppose," I said, when Fay had ended her story.
+
+"Yes! I suppose it did."
+
+"And you," I ventured, "some day it will kill you too, if you do not look
+out."
+
+The girl laughed a loud and coarse laugh.
+
+"Me?" she said, "not by a jugful. I've been soaking it fifteen years and I
+am alive yet."
+
+The dead girl sat there yet, with the cold, staring eyes, when I went my
+way. Outside the drinking went on with vile oaths. The dead wagon had been
+sent for, but it had other errands, and had not yet come around to Pell
+Street.
+
+Thus ended the story of Kid McDuff's girl.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE LITTLE TOILERS
+
+
+Poverty and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is
+perpetual, indissoluble. The one begets the other. Need sets the child to
+work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages,
+thus increasing the need. Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it
+has not been said better since: "The destruction of the poor is their
+poverty."
+
+It is the business of the State to see to it that its interest in the
+child as a future citizen is not imperilled by the compact. Here in New
+York we set about this within the memory of the youngest of us. To-day we
+have compulsory education and a factory law prohibiting the employment of
+young children. All between eight and fourteen years old must go to school
+at least fourteen weeks in each year. None may labor in factories under
+the age of fourteen; not under sixteen unless able to read and write
+simple sentences in English. These are the barriers thrown up against the
+inroads of ignorance, poverty's threat. They are barriers of paper. We
+have the laws, but we do not enforce them.
+
+By that I do not mean to say that we make no attempt to enforce them. We
+do. We catch a few hundred truants each year and send them to
+reformatories to herd with thieves and vagabonds worse than they, rather
+illogically, since there is no pretence that there would have been room
+for them in the schools had they wanted to go there. We set half a dozen
+factory inspectors to canvass more than twice as many thousand workshops
+and to catechise the children they find there. Some are turned out and go
+back the next day to that or some other shop. The great mass that are
+under age lie and stay. And their lies go on record as evidence that we
+are advancing, and that child-labor is getting to be a thing of the past.
+That the horrible cruelty of a former day is; that the children have
+better treatment and a better time of it in the shops--often a good enough
+time to make one feel that they are better off there learning habits of
+industry than running about the streets, so long as there is no way of
+_making_ them attend school--I believe from what I have seen. That the law
+has had the effect of greatly diminishing the number of child-workers I do
+not believe. It has had another and worse effect. It has bred wholesale
+perjury among them and their parents. Already they have become so used to
+it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them. The child
+of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a
+matter of course. Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose
+of the law.
+
+More than a year ago, in an effort to get at the truth of the matter of
+children's labor, I submitted to the Board of Health, after consultation
+with Dr. Felix Adler, who earned the lasting gratitude of the community by
+his labors on the Tenement House Commission, certain questions to be asked
+concerning the children by the sanitary police, then about to begin a
+general census of the tenements. The result was a surprise, and not least
+to the health officers. In the entire mass of nearly a million and a
+quarter of tenants[8] only two hundred and forty-nine children under
+fourteen years of age were found at work in living-rooms. To anyone
+acquainted with the ordinary aspect of tenement-house life the statement
+seemed preposterous, and there are valid reasons for believing that the
+policemen missed rather more than they found even of those that were
+confessedly or too evidently under age. They were seeking that which, when
+found, would furnish proof of law-breaking against the parent or employer,
+a fact of which these were fully aware. Hence their coming uniformed and
+in search of children into a house could scarcely fail to give those a
+holiday who were not big enough to be palmed off as fourteen at least.
+Nevertheless, upon reflection, it seemed probable that the policemen were
+nearer the truth than their critics. Their census took no account of the
+factory in the back yard, but only of the living rooms, and it was made
+during the day. Most of the little slaves, as of those older in years,
+were found in the sweater's district on the East Side, where the home work
+often only fairly begins after the factory has shut down for the day and
+the stores released their army of child-laborers. Had the policemen gone
+their rounds after dark they would have found a different state of things.
+Between the sweat-shops and the school, which, as I have shown, is made to
+reach farther down among the poorest in this Jewish quarter than anywhere
+else in this city, the children were fairly accounted for in the daytime.
+The record of school attendance in the district shows that forty-seven
+attended day-school for every one who went to night-school.
+
+To settle the matter to my own satisfaction I undertook a census of a
+number of the most crowded houses, in company with a policeman not in
+uniform. The outcome proved that, as regards those houses at least, it was
+as I suspected, and I have no doubt they were a fair sample of the rest.
+In nine tenements that were filled with home-workers we found five
+children at work who owned that they were under fourteen. Two were girls
+nine years of age. Two boys said they were thirteen. We found thirteen who
+swore that they were of age, proof which the policeman as an uninterested
+census-taker would have respected as a matter of course, even though he
+believed with me that the children lied. On the other hand, in seven
+back-yard factories we found a total of 63 children, of whom 5 admitted
+being under age, while of the rest 45 seemed surely so. To the other 13 we
+gave the benefit of the doubt, but I do not think they deserved it. All
+the 63 were to my mind certainly under fourteen, judging not only from
+their size, but from the whole appearance of the children. My subsequent
+experience confirmed me fully in this belief. Most of them were able to
+write their names after a fashion. Few spoke English, but that might have
+been a subterfuge. One of the home-workers, a marvellously small lad whose
+arms were black to the shoulder from the dye in the cloth he was sewing,
+and who said in his broken German, without evincing special interest in
+the matter, that he had gone to school "e' bische'," referred us to his
+"mother" for a statement as to his age. The "mother," who proved to be the
+boss's wife, held a brief consultation with her husband and then came
+forward with a verdict of sixteen. When we laughed rather incredulously
+the man offered to prove by his marriage certificate that the boy must be
+sixteen. The effect of this demonstration was rather marred, however, by
+the inopportune appearance of another tailor, who, ignorant of the crisis,
+claimed the boy as his. The situation was dramatic. The tailor with the
+certificate simply shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work,
+leaving the boy to his fate.
+
+One girl, who could not have been twelve years old, was hard at work at a
+sewing-machine in a Division Street shirt factory when we came in. She got
+up and ran the moment she saw us, but we caught her in the next room
+hiding behind a pile of shirts. She said at once that she was fourteen
+years old but didn't work there. She "just came in." The boss of the shop
+was lost in astonishment at seeing her when we brought her back. He could
+not account at all for her presence. There were three boys at work in the
+room who said "sixteen" without waiting to be asked. Not one of them was
+fourteen. The habit of saying fourteen or sixteen--the fashion varies with
+the shops and with the degree of the child's educational
+acquirements--soon becomes an unconscious one with the boy. He plumps it
+out without knowing it. While occupied with these investigations I once
+had my boots blacked by a little shaver, hardly knee-high, on a North
+River ferry-boat. While he was shining away, I suddenly asked him how old
+he was. "Fourteen, sir!" he replied promptly, without looking up.
+
+In a Hester Street house we found two little girls pulling basting-thread.
+They were both Italians and said that they were nine. In the room in which
+one of them worked thirteen men and two women were sewing. The child could
+speak English. She said that she was earning a dollar a week and worked
+every day from seven in the morning till eight in the evening. This
+sweat-shop was one of the kind that comes under the ban of the new law,
+passed last winter--that is, if the factory inspector ever finds it. Where
+the crowds are greatest and the pay poorest, the Italian laborer's wife
+and child have found their way in since the strikes among the sweater's
+Jewish slaves, outbidding even these in the fierce strife for bread.
+
+Even the crowding, the feverish haste of the half-naked men and women, and
+the litter and filth in which they worked, were preferable to the silence
+and desolation we encountered in one shop up under the roof of a Broome
+Street tenement. The work there had given out--there had been none these
+two months, said the gaunt, hard-faced woman who sat eating a crust of dry
+bread and drinking water from a tin pail at the empty bench. The man sat
+silent and moody in a corner; he was sick. The room was bare. The only
+machine left was not worth taking to the pawnshop. Two dirty children,
+naked but for a torn undershirt apiece, were fishing over the stair-rail
+with a bent pin on an idle thread. An old rag was their bait.
+
+From among a hundred and forty hands on two big lofts in a Suffolk Street
+factory we picked seventeen boys and ten girls who were patently under
+fourteen years of age, but who all had certificates, sworn to by their
+parents, to the effect that they were sixteen. One of them whom we judged
+to be between nine and ten, and whose teeth confirmed our diagnosis--the
+second bicuspids in the lower jaw were just coming out--said that he had
+worked there "by the year." The boss, deeming his case hopeless, explained
+that he only "made sleeves and went for beer." Two of the smallest girls
+represented themselves as sisters, respectively sixteen and seventeen, but
+when we came to inquire which was the oldest, it turned out that she was
+the sixteen-year one. Several boys scooted as we came up the stairs. When
+stopped they claimed to be visitors. I was told that this sweater had been
+arrested once by the Factory Inspector, but had successfully barricaded
+himself behind his pile of certificates. I caught the children laughing
+and making faces at us behind our backs as often as these were brought out
+anywhere. In an Attorney Street "pants" factory we counted thirteen boys
+and girls who could not have been of age, and on a top floor in Ludlow
+Street, among others, two brothers, sewing coats, who said that they were
+thirteen and fourteen, but, when told to stand up, looked so ridiculously
+small as to make even their employer laugh. Neither could read, but the
+oldest could sign his name and did it thus, from right to left:
+
+
+[Illustration: (signature)]
+
+
+It was the full extent of his learning, and all he would probably ever
+receive.
+
+He was one of many Jewish children we came across who could neither read
+nor write. Most of them answered that they had never gone to school. They
+were mostly those of larger growth, bordering on fourteen, whom the
+charity school managers find it next to impossible to reach, the children
+of the poorest and most ignorant immigrants, whose work is imperatively
+needed to make both ends meet at home, the "thousand" the school census
+failed to account for. To banish them from the shop serves no useful
+purpose. They are back the next day, if not sooner. One of the Factory
+Inspectors told me of how recently he found a little boy in a sweat-shop
+and sent him home. He went up through the house after that and stayed up
+there quite an hour. On his return it occurred to him to look in to see
+if the boy was gone. He was back and hard at work, and with him were two
+other boys of his age who, though they claimed to have come in with dinner
+for some of the hands, were evidently workers there.
+
+So much for the sweat-shops. Jewish, Italian, and Bohemian, the story is
+the same always. In the children that are growing up, to "vote as would
+their master's dogs if allowed the right of suffrage," the community reaps
+its reward in due season for allowing such things to exist. It is a kind
+of interest in the payment of which there is never default. The physician
+gets another view of it. "Not long ago," says Dr. Annie S. Daniel, in the
+last report of the out-practice of the Infirmary for Women and Children,
+"we found in such an apartment five persons making cigars, including the
+mother. Two children were ill with diphtheria. Both parents attended to
+the children; they would syringe the nose of each child and, without
+washing their hands, return to their cigars. We have repeatedly observed
+the same thing when the work was manufacturing clothing and
+under-garments, to be bought as well by the rich as the poor. Hand-sewed
+shoes, made for a fashionable Broadway shoe store, were sewed at home by a
+man in whose family were three children with scarlet fever. And such
+instances are common. Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house
+manufactories. When reported to the Board of Health, the inspector at once
+prohibits further manufacture during the continuance of the disease, but
+his back is scarcely turned before the people return to their work. When
+we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their
+heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be
+expected to impress the people."
+
+
+[Illustration: SHINE, SIR?]
+
+
+And she adds: "Wages have steadily decreased. Among the women who earned
+the whole or part of the income the finishing of pantaloons was the most
+common occupation. For this work in 1881 they received ten to fifteen
+cents per pair; for the same work in 1891 three to five, at the most ten
+cents per pair. When the women have paid the express charges to and from
+the factory there is little margin left for profit. The women doing this
+work claim that wages are reduced because of the influx of Italian women."
+The rent has not fallen, however, and the need of every member of the
+family contributing by his or her work to its keep is greater than ever.
+The average total wages of 160 families whom the doctor personally treated
+and interrogated during the year was $5.99 per week, while the average
+rent was $8.62-3/4. The list included twenty-three different occupations
+and trades. The maximum wages was $19, earned by three persons in one
+family; the minimum $1.50, by a woman finishing pantaloons and living in
+one room for which she paid $4 a month rent! In nearly every instance
+observed by Dr. Daniel, the children's wages, when there were working
+children, was the greater share of the family income. A specimen instance
+is that of a woman with a consumptive husband, who is under her treatment.
+The wife washes and goes out by the day, when she can get such work to do.
+The three children, aged eleven, seven, and five years, not counting the
+baby for a wonder, work at home covering wooden buttons with silk at four
+cents a gross. The oldest goes to school, but works with the rest evenings
+and on Saturday and Sunday, when the mother does the finishing. Their
+combined earnings are from $3 to $6 a week, the children earning
+two-thirds. The rent is $8 a month.
+
+The doctor's observations throw a bright side-light upon the economic home
+conditions that lie at the root of this problem of child labor in the
+factories. With that I have not done. Taking the Factory Inspector's
+report for 1890, the last at that time available, I found that in that
+year his deputies got around to 2,147 of the 11,000 workshops (the number
+given in the report) in the Second district, which is that portion of New
+York south of Twenty-third Street. In other words, they visited less than
+one-fifth of them all. They found 1,102 boys and 1,954 girls under sixteen
+at work; 3,485 boys under eighteen, and 12,701 girls under twenty-one, as
+nearly as I could make the footings. The figures alone are instructive, as
+showing the preponderance of girls in the shops. The report, speaking of
+the State as a whole, congratulates the community upon the alleged fact
+"that the policy of employing very young children in manufactories has
+been practically abolished." It states that "since the enactment of the
+law the sentiment among employers has become nearly unanimous in favor of
+its stringent enforcement," and that it "has had the further important
+effect of preventing newly arrived non-English speaking foreigners from
+forcing their children into factories before they learned the language of
+the country," these being "now compelled to send their children to school,
+for a time at least, until they can qualify under the law." Further, "the
+system of requiring sworn certificates, giving the name, date, and place
+of birth of all children under sixteen years of age ... has resulted in
+causing parents to be very cautious about making untrue statements of the
+ages of their children." The deputies "are aware of the various
+subterfuges which have been tried in order to evade the law and put
+children at labor before the legal time," and the Factory Inspector is
+"happy to say that they are not often imposed upon by such tactics."
+
+Without wading through nearly seventy pages of small print it was not
+possible to glean from the report how many of the "under sixteen" workers
+were really under fourteen, or so adjudged. A summary of what has been
+accomplished since 1886 showed that 1,614 children under fourteen were
+discharged by the Inspector in the Second District in that time, and that
+415 were discharged because they could not read or write simple sentences
+in the English language. The "number of working children who could not
+read and write English" was in 1890 alone 252, according to the report, or
+more than one-half of the whole number discharged in the four years, which
+does not look as if the law had had much effect in that way, at least in
+New York city. I determined to see for myself what were the facts.
+
+I visited a number of factories, in a few instances accompanied by the
+deputy factory inspector, more frequently alone. Where it was difficult to
+gain admission I watched at the door when the employees were going to or
+coming from work, finding that on the whole the better plan, as affording
+a fairer view of the children and a better opportunity to judge of their
+age than when they sat at their work-benches. I found many shops in which
+there were scarcely any children, some from which they had been driven, so
+I was informed by the inspectors. But where manufacturers were willing to
+employ their labor--and this I believe to be quite generally the case
+where children's labor can be made to pay--I found the age certificate
+serving as an excellent protection for the employer, never for the child.
+I found the law considered as a good joke by some conscienceless men, who
+hardly took the trouble to see that the certificates were filled out
+properly; loudly commended by others whom it enabled, at the expense of a
+little perjury in which they had no hand, to fill up their shops with
+cheap labor, with perfect security to themselves. The bookkeeper in an
+establishment of the conscienceless kind told me with glee how a boy who
+had been bounced there three times in one year, upon his return each time
+had presented a sworn certificate giving a different age. He was fifteen,
+sixteen, and seventeen years old upon the records of the shop, until the
+inspectors caught him one day and proved him only thirteen. I found boys
+at work, posing as seventeen, who had been so recorded in the same shop
+three full years, and were thirteen at most. As seventeen-year freaks they
+could have made more money in a dime museum than at the work-bench, only
+the museum would have required something more convincing than the
+certificate that satisfied the shop. Some of these boys were working at
+power-presses and doing other work beyond their years. An examination of
+their teeth often disproved their stories as to their age. It was not
+always possible to make this test, for the children seemed to see
+something funny in it, and laughed and giggled so, especially the girls,
+as to make it difficult to get a good look. Some of the girls, generally
+those with decayed teeth,[9] would pout and refuse to show them. These
+were usually American girls, that is to say, they were born here. The
+greater number of the child-workers I questioned were foreigners, and our
+birth returns could have given no clue to them. The few natives were alert
+and on the defensive from the moment they divined my purpose. They easily
+defeated it by giving a false address.
+
+I finally picked out a factory close to my office where Italian girls were
+employed in large numbers, and made it my business to ascertain the real
+ages of the children. They seemed to me, going and coming, to average
+twelve or thirteen years. The year before the factory inspector had
+reported that nearly a hundred girls "under sixteen" were employed there.
+She had discharged sixty of them as unable to read or write English. I
+went to see the manufacturers. They were not disposed to help me and fell
+back on their certificates--no child was employed by them without
+one--until I told them that my purpose was not to interfere with their
+business but to prove that a birth-certificate was the only proper warrant
+for employment of child-labor.
+
+"Why," said the manufacturer, in his astonishment forgetting that he had
+just told me his children were all of age, "my dear sir! would you throw
+them all out of work?"
+
+It was what I expected. I found out eventually that a number of the
+children attended the evening classes in the Leonard Street Italian
+School, and there one rainy night I corralled twenty-three of them, all
+but one officially certified under oath to be fourteen or sixteen. But for
+the rain I might have found twice the number. The twenty-three I polled,
+comparing their sworn age with the entry in the school register, which the
+teachers knew to be correct. This was the result: one was eleven years old
+and had worked in the factory a year; one, also eleven, had just been
+engaged and was going for her certificate that night; three were twelve
+years old, and had worked in the factory from one month to a year; seven
+were thirteen, and of them three had worked in the shop two years, the
+others one; nine were fourteen; one of them had been there three years,
+four others two years, the rest shorter terms; one was fifteen and had
+worked in the factory three years; the last and tallest was sixteen and
+had been employed in the one shop four years. She said with a laugh that
+she had a "certificate of sixteen" when she first went there. Not one of
+them all was of legal age when she went to work in the shop, under the
+warrant of her parents' oath. The majority were not even then legally
+employed, since of those who had passed fourteen there were several who
+could not read simple sentences in English intelligibly; yet they had been
+at work in the factory for months and years. One of the eleven-year
+workers, who felt insulted somehow, said spitefully that "I needn't
+bother, there was lots of other girls in the shop younger than she." I
+have no doubt she was right. I should add that the firm was a highly
+respectable one, and its members of excellent social standing.
+
+I learned incidentally where the convenient certificates came from, at
+least those that were current in that school. They were issued, the
+children said, free of charge, by a benevolent undertaker in the ward. I
+thought at first that it was a bid for business, or real helpfulness. The
+neighborhood undertaker is often found figuring suggestively as the
+nearest friend of the poor in his street, when they are in trouble. But I
+found out afterward that it was politics combined with business. The
+undertaker was an Irishman and an active organizer of his district.
+Unpolitical notaries charged twenty-five cents for each certificate. This
+one made them out for nothing. All they had to do was to call for them.
+The girls laughed scornfully at the idea of there being anything wrong in
+the transaction. Their parents swore in a good cause. They needed the
+money. The end conveniently justified the means in their case. Besides
+"they merely had to touch the pen." Evidently, any argument in favor of
+education could scarcely be expected to have effect upon parents who thus
+found in their own ignorance a valid defence against an accusing
+conscience as well as a source of added revenue.
+
+My experience satisfied me that the factory law has had little effect in
+prohibiting child labor in the factories of New York City, although it may
+have had some in stimulating attendance at the night schools. The census
+figures, when they appear, will be able to throw no valuable light on the
+subject. The certificate lie naturally obstructs the census as it does the
+factory law. The one thing that is made perfectly clear by even such
+limited inquiry as I have been able to make, is that a birth certificate
+should be substituted for the present sworn warrant, if it is intended to
+make a serious business of the prohibition. In the piles upon piles of
+these which I saw, I never came across one copy of the birth registry.
+There are two obstacles to such a change. One is that our birth returns
+are at present incomplete; the other, that most of the children are not
+born here. Concerning the first, the Registrar of Vital Statistics
+estimates that he is registering nearly or quite a thousand births a month
+less than actually occur in New York; but even that is a great improvement
+upon the record of a few years ago. The registered birthrate is increasing
+year by year, and experience has shown that a determination on the part of
+the Board of Health to prosecute doctors and midwives who neglect their
+duty brings it up with a rush many hundreds in a few weeks. A wholesome
+strictness at the Health Office on this point would in a short time make
+it a reliable guide for the Factory Inspector in the enforcement of the
+law. The other objection is less serious than it appears at first sight.
+Immigrants might be required to provide birth certificates from their old
+homes, where their children are sure to be registered under the stringent
+laws of European governments. But as a matter of fact that would not often
+be necessary. They all have passports in which the name and ages of their
+children are set down. The claim that they had purposely registered them
+as younger to cheapen transportation, which they would be sure to make,
+need not be considered seriously. One lie is as good and as easy as
+another.
+
+Another lesson we may learn with advantage from some old-country
+governments, which we are apt to look down upon as "slow," is to punish
+the parents for the truancy of their children, whether they are found
+running in the street or working in a shop when they should have been at
+school. Greed, the natural child of poverty, often has as much to do with
+it as real need. In the case of the Italians and the Jewish girls it is
+the inevitable marriage-portion, without which they would stand little
+chance of getting a husband, that dictates the sacrifice. One little one
+of twelve in a class in the Leonard Street School, who had been working on
+coats in a sweat-shop nine months, and had become expert enough to earn
+three dollars a week, told me that she had $200 in bank, and that her
+sister, also a worker, was as forehanded. Their teacher supported her
+story. But often a meaner motive than the desire to put money in bank
+forges the child's fetters. I came across a little girl in an East Side
+factory who pleaded so pitifully that she had to work, and looked so poor
+and wan, that I went to her home to see what it was like. It was on the
+top floor of a towering tenement. The mother, a decent German woman, was
+sewing at the window, doing her share, while at the table her husband, a
+big, lazy lout who weighed two hundred pounds if he weighed one, lolled
+over a game of checkers with another vagabond like himself. A half-empty
+beer-growler stood between them. The contrast between that pitiful child
+hard at work in the shop, and the big loafer taking his ease, was enough
+to make anybody lose patience, and I gave him the piece of my mind he so
+richly deserved. But it rolled off him as water rolls off a duck. He
+merely ducked his head, shifted his bare feet under the table, and told
+his crony to go on with the play.
+
+It is only when the child rebels in desperation against such atrocious
+cruelty and takes to the street as his only refuge, that his tyrant hands
+him over to the justice so long denied him. Then the school comes as an
+avenger, not as a friend, to the friendless lad, and it is scarcely to be
+wondered at if behind his prison-bars he fails to make sense of the
+justice of a world that locks him up and lets his persecutor go
+free--likely enough applauds him for his public spirit in doing what he
+did. When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not
+work, and has to be supported, at the odd intervals at least when he comes
+back from the street, the father surrenders him as a truant and
+incorrigible. A large number of the children that are every year sent to
+the Juvenile Asylum are admitted in that way. The real animus of it crops
+out when it is proposed to put the little prisoner in a way of growing up
+a useful citizen by sending him to a home out of the reach of his grasping
+relatives. Then follows a struggle for the possession of the child that
+would make the uninitiated onlooker think a gross outrage was about to be
+perpetrated on a fond parent. The experienced Superintendent of the
+Asylum, who has fought many such fights to a successful end, knows better.
+"In a majority of these cases," he remarks in his report for last year,
+"the opposition is due, not to any special interest in the child's
+welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation
+for the boy in order to get his weekly wages."
+
+Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin
+covers for pocket-flasks--one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible
+of classification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor--with hands
+so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but
+lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work
+begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags
+down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes,
+much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running
+errands and earning a few pennies that way, takes her place at the bench
+and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has
+earned sixty cents--"more than mother," she says with a smile. "Mother"
+has been finishing "knee-pants" for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a
+pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing buttons on; but she
+cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look
+after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who "does not
+love work well," in the patient language of the housekeeper, had been out
+of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of
+his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not
+press for the rent long due. That was Susie's doings, too, though he
+didn't know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that
+dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.
+
+
+[Illustration: LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.]
+
+
+Of Susie's hundred little companions in the alley--playmates they could
+scarcely be called--some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while
+the boys earned money at "shinin'" or selling newspapers. The smaller
+girls "minded the baby," so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them
+did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The
+rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children's labor in
+and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm
+in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them
+always. In an evening school class of nineteen boys and nine girls which I
+polled once I found twelve boys who "shined," five who sold papers, one of
+thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of
+twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and
+worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one
+twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age
+minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old,
+and of them one worked for a sweater and "finished twenty-five coats
+yesterday," she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman's
+work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to
+help her mother sew coats when baby slept.
+
+I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the
+children under age into the stores, where they find employment as "cash"
+girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are
+as rare as angels' visits. I do not believe this is true to any great
+extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other
+mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would
+alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the
+Working Women's Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates
+that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all
+the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger.
+Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and
+less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I
+think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and
+not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the
+children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who
+exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal
+dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked
+fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more
+than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down
+when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two
+dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to
+leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most
+wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the
+hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing
+the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour
+spent in going through such a store tires many grown persons more than a
+whole day's work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their
+whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their
+strength.
+
+An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law
+to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it
+is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave
+things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in
+defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get
+their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road
+is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be
+wanting to smooth the way for them.
+
+There is still another kind of employment that absorbs many of the boys
+and ought to be prohibited with the utmost rigor of the law. I refer to
+the messenger service of the District Telegraph Companies especially.
+Anyone can see for himself how old some of these boys are who carry
+messages about the streets every day; but everybody cannot see the kind of
+houses they have to go to, the kind of people they meet, or the sort of
+influences that beset them hourly at an age when they are most easily
+impressed for good or bad. If that were possible, the line would be drawn
+against their employment rather at eighteen than at sixteen or fourteen.
+At present there is none except the fanciful line drawn against truancy,
+which, to a boy who has learned the tricks of the telegraph messenger, is
+very elastic indeed.
+
+
+[Illustration: MINDING THE BABY.]
+
+
+To send the boys to school and see that they stay there until they have
+learned enough to at least vote intelligently when they grow up, is the
+bounden duty of the State--celebrated in theory but neglected in practice.
+If it did its duty much would have been gained, but even then the real
+kernel of this question of child labor would remain untouched. The trouble
+is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of
+work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown
+to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more, and
+therefore less, than when they began, and with the years that should have
+prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery.
+How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the
+senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor, in denying to
+our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting
+foreign workmen in in shoals to crowd our market under the plea of the
+"solidarity of labor"--a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor
+all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.
+The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of
+improving the condition of the poor, who said to me, "They are down on the
+scrub level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you
+can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to
+find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out
+mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the
+whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the
+responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to
+another generation that is so much worse to start off with." She spoke of
+the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity
+of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass
+of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the
+children.
+
+I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee
+wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man
+found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing. The
+woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train.
+But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her
+hand," reported her first employer, indignantly. The children were sent to
+good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing
+and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved; they were
+simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever
+received--that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original
+creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.
+
+I confess I had always laid the blame for this discouraging feature of the
+problem upon our general industrial development in a more or less vague
+way--steam, machinery, and all that sort of thing--until the other day I
+met a man who gave me another view of it altogether. He was a manufacturer
+of cheap clothing, a very intelligent and successful one at that; a large
+employer of cheap Hebrew labor and, heaven save the mark!--a Christian.
+His sincerity was unquestionable. He had no secrets to keep from me. He
+was in the business to make money, he said with perfect frankness, and one
+condition of his making money was, as he had had occasion to learn when he
+was himself a wage-worker and a union man, to keep his workmen where they
+were at his mercy. He had some four hundred hands, all Jewish immigrants,
+all working for the lowest wages for which he could hire them. Among them
+all there was not one tailor capable of making a whole garment. His policy
+was to keep them from learning. He saw to it that each one was kept at
+just one thing--sleeves, pockets, buttonholes--some small part of one
+garment, and never learned anything else.
+
+"This I do," he explained, "to prevent them from going on strike with the
+hope of getting a job anywhere else. They can't. They don't know enough.
+Not only do we limit them so that a man who has worked three months in my
+shop and never held a needle before is just as valuable to me as one I
+have had five years, but we make the different parts of the suit in
+different places and keep Christians over the hands as cutters so that
+they shall have no chance to learn."
+
+Where we stood in his shop, a little boy was stacking some coats for
+removal. The manufacturer pointed him out. "Now," he said, "this boy is
+not fourteen years old, as you can see as well as I. His father works here
+and when the Inspector comes I just call him up. He swears that the boy is
+old enough to work, and there the matter ends. What would you? Is it not
+better that he should be here than on the street? Bah!" And this
+successful Christian manufacturer turned upon his heel with a vexed air.
+It was curious to hear him, before I left, deliver a homily on the
+"immorality" of the sweat-shops, arraigning them severely as "a blot on
+humanity."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS
+
+
+On my way to the office the other day, I came upon three boys sitting on a
+beer-keg in the mouth of a narrow alley intent upon a game of cards. They
+were dirty and "tough." The bare feet of the smallest lad were nearly
+black with dried mud. His hair bristled, unrestrained by cap or covering
+of any kind. They paid no attention to me when I stopped to look at them.
+It was an hour before noon.
+
+"Why are you not in school?" I asked of the oldest rascal. He might have
+been thirteen.
+
+"'Cause," he retorted calmly, without taking his eye off his neighbor's
+cards, "'cause I don't believe in it. Go on, Jim!"
+
+I caught the black-footed one by the collar. "And you," I said, "why don't
+you go to school? Don't you know you have to?"
+
+The boy thrust one of his bare feet out at me as an argument there was no
+refuting. "They don't want me; I aint got no shoes." And he took the
+trick.
+
+I had heard his defence put in a different way to the same purpose more
+than once on my rounds through the sweat-shops. Every now and then some
+father, whose boy was working under age, would object, "We send the child
+to school, as the Inspector says, and there is no room for him. What shall
+we do?" He spoke the whole truth, likely enough; the boy only half of it.
+There was a charity school around the corner from where he sat struggling
+manfully with his disappointment, where they would have taken him, and
+fitted him out with shoes in the bargain, if the public school rejected
+him. If anything worried him, it was probably the fear that I might know
+of it and drag him around there. I had seen the same thought working in
+the tailor's mind. Neither had any use for the school; the one that his
+boy might work, the other that he might loaf and play hookey.
+
+Each had found his own flaw in our compulsory education law and succeeded.
+The boy was safe in the street because no truant officer had the right to
+arrest him at sight for loitering there in school-hours. His only risk was
+the chance of that functionary's finding him at home, and he was trying to
+provide against that. The tailor's defence was valid. With a law
+requiring--compelling is the word, but the compulsion is on the wrong
+tack--all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to go to
+school at least one-fourth of the year or a little more; with a costly
+machinery to enforce it, even more costly to the child who falls under the
+ban as a truant than to the citizens who foot the bills, we should most
+illogically be compelled to exclude, by force if they insisted, more than
+fifty thousand of the children, did they all take it into their heads to
+obey the law. We have neither schools enough nor seats enough in them. As
+it is, we are spared that embarrassment. They don't obey it.
+
+This is the way the case stands: Computing the school population upon the
+basis of the Federal census of 1880 and the State census of 1892, we had
+in New York, in the summer of 1891, 351,330 children between five and
+fourteen[10] years. I select these limits because children are admitted
+to the public schools under the law at the age of five years, and the
+statistics of the Board of Education show that the average age of the
+pupils entering the lowest primary grade is six years and five months. The
+whole number of different pupils taught in that year was 196,307.[11] The
+Catholic schools, parochial and select, reported a total of 35,055; the
+corporate schools (Children's Aid Society's, Orphan Asylums, American
+Female Guardian Society's, etc.), 23,276; evening schools, 29,165;
+Nautical School, 111; all other private schools (as estimated by
+Superintendent of Schools Jasper), 15,000; total, 298,914; any possible
+omissions in this list being more than made up for by the thousands over
+fourteen who are included. So that by deducting the number of pupils from
+the school population as given above, more than 50,000 children between
+the ages of five and fourteen are shown to have received no schooling
+whatever last year. As the public schools had seats for only 195,592,
+while the registered attendance exceeded that number, it follows that
+there was no room for the fifty thousand had they chosen to apply. In
+fact, the year before, 3,783 children had been refused admission at the
+opening of the schools after the summer vacation because there were no
+seats for them. To be told in the same breath that there were more than
+twenty thousand unoccupied seats in the schools at that time, is like
+adding insult to injury. Though vacant and inviting pupils they were
+worthless, for they were in the wrong schools. Where the crowding of the
+growing population was greatest and the need of schooling for the
+children most urgent, every seat was taken. Those who could not travel far
+from home--the poor never can--in search of an education had to go
+without.
+
+The Department of Education employs twelve truant officers, who in 1891
+"found and returned to school" 2,701 truants. There is a timid sort of
+pretence that this was "enforcing the compulsory education law," though it
+is coupled with the statement that at least eight more officers are needed
+to do it properly, and that they should have power to seize the culprits
+wherever found. Superintendent Jasper tells me that he thinks there are
+only about 8,000 children in New York who do not go to school at all. But
+the Department's own records furnish convincing proof that he is wrong,
+and that the 50,000 estimate is right. That number is just about
+one-seventh of the whole number of children between five and fourteen
+years, as stated above. In January of this year a school-census of the
+Fourth and Fifteenth wards,[12] two widely separated localities, differing
+greatly as to character of population, gave the following result: Fourth
+Ward, total number of children between five and fourteen years, 2,016;[13]
+of whom 297 did not go to school. Fifteenth Ward, total number of
+children, 2,276; number of non-attendants, 339. In each case the
+proportion of non-attendants was nearly one-seventh, curiously
+corroborating the estimate made by me for the whole city.
+
+Testimony to the same effect is borne by a different set of records, those
+of the reformatories that receive the truants of the city. The Juvenile
+Asylum, that takes most of those of the Protestant faith, reports that of
+28,745 children of school age committed to its care in thirty-nine years
+32 per cent. could not read when received. The proportion during the last
+five years was 23 per cent. At the Catholic Protectory, of 3,123 boys and
+girls cared for during the year 1891, 689 were utterly illiterate at the
+time of their reception and the education of the other 2,434 was
+classified in various degrees between illiterate and "able to read and
+write" only.[14] The moral status of these last children may be inferred
+from the statement that 739 of them possessed no religious instruction at
+all when admitted. The analysis might be extended, doubtless with the same
+result as to illiteracy, throughout the institutions that harbor the
+city's dependent children, to the State Reformatory, where the final
+product is set down in 75 per cent. of "grossly ignorant" inmates, in
+spite of the fact that more than that proportion is recorded as being of
+"average natural mental capacity." In other words, they could have
+learned, had they been taught.
+
+
+[Illustration: "SHOOTING CRAPS" IN THE HALL OF THE NEWSBOYS' LODGING
+HOUSE.]
+
+
+How much of this bad showing is due to the system, or the lack of system,
+of compulsory education, as we know it in New York, I shall not venture to
+say. In such a system a truant school or home would seem to be a logical
+necessity. Because a boy does not like to go to school, he is not
+necessarily bad. It may be the fault of the school and of the teacher as
+much as of the boy. Indeed, a good many people of sense hold that the boy
+who has never planned to run away from home or school does not amount to
+much. At all events, the boy ought not to be classed with thieves and
+vagabonds. But that is what New York does. It has no truant home. Its
+method of dealing with the truant is little less than downright savagery.
+It is thus set forth in a report of a special committee of the Board of
+Education, made to that body on November 18, 1891. "Under the law the
+truant agents act upon reports received from the principals of the
+schools. After exhausting the persuasion that they may be able to exercise
+to compel the attendance of truant children, and in cases which seem to
+call for the enforcement of the law, the agent procures the indorsement
+of the President of the Board of Education and the Superintendent of
+Schools upon his requisition for a warrant for the arrest of the truant,
+which warrant, under the provisions of the law, is then issued by a Police
+Justice. A policeman is then detailed to make the arrest, and when
+apprehended the truant is brought to the Police Court, where his parents
+or guardians are obliged to attend. Should it happen that the latter are
+not present, the boy is put in a cell to await their appearance. It has
+sometimes happened that a public-school boy, whose only offence against
+the law was his refusal to attend school, has been kept in a cell two or
+three days with old criminals pending the appearance of his parents or
+guardians.[15] While we fully realize the importance of enforcing the laws
+relating to compulsory education, we believe that bringing the boys into
+associations with criminals in this way and making it necessary for
+parents to be present under such circumstances, is unjust and improper,
+and that criminal associations of this kind in connection with the
+administration of the truancy laws should not be allowed to continue. The
+Justice may, after hearing the facts, commit the child, who, in a majority
+of cases, is between eight and eleven years old, to one of the
+institutions designated by law. We do not think that the enforcement of
+the laws relating to compulsory education should at any time enforce
+association with criminal classes."
+
+But it does, all the way through. The "institutions designated by law" for
+the reception of truants are chiefly the Protectory and the Juvenile
+Asylum. In the thirty-nine years of its existence the latter has harbored
+11,636 children committed to it for disobedience and truancy. And this
+was the company they mingled with there on a common footing: "Unfortunate
+children," 8,806; young thieves, 3,097; vagrants, 3,173; generally bad
+boys and girls, 1,390; beggars, 542; children committed for peddling, 51;
+as witnesses, 50. Of the whole lot barely a hundred, comprised within the
+last two items, might be supposed to be harmless, though there is no
+assurance that they were. Of the Protectory children I have already
+spoken. It will serve further to place them to say that nearly one-third
+of the 941 received last year were homeless, while fully 35 per cent. of
+all the boys suffered when entering from the contagious eye disease that
+is the scourge of the poorest tenements as of the public institutions that
+admit their children. I do not here take into account the House of Refuge,
+though that is also one of the institutions designated by law for the
+reception of truants, for the reason that only about one-fifth of those
+admitted to it last year came from New York City. Their number was 55. The
+rest came from other counties in the State. But even there the percentage
+of truants to those committed for stealing or other crimes was as 53 to
+47.
+
+This is the "system," or one end of it--the one where the waste goes on.
+The Committee spoken of reported that the city paid in 1890, $63,690 for
+the maintenance of the truants committed by magistrates, at the rate of
+$110 for every child, and that two truant schools and a home for
+incorrigible truants could be established and maintained at less cost,
+since it would probably not be necessary to send to the home for
+incorrigibles more than 25 per cent. of all. It further advised the
+creation of the special office of Truant Commissioner, to avoid dragging
+the children into the police courts. In his report for the present year
+Superintendent Jasper renews in substance these recommendations. But
+nothing has been done.
+
+The situation is this, then, that a vast horde of fifty thousand children
+is growing up in this city whom our public school does not and cannot
+reach; if it reaches them at all it is with the threat of the jail. The
+mass of them is no doubt to be found in the shops and factories, as I have
+shown. A large number peddle newspapers or black boots. Still another
+contingent, much too large, does nothing but idle, in training for the
+penitentiary. I stopped one of that kind at the corner of Baxter and Grand
+Streets one day to catechise him. It was in the middle of the afternoon
+when the schools were in session, but while I purposely detained him with
+a long talk to give the neighborhood time to turn out, thirteen other lads
+of his age, all of them under fourteen, gathered to listen to my business
+with Graccho. When they had become convinced that I was not an officer
+they frankly owned that they were all playing hookey. All of them lived in
+the block. How many more of their kind it sheltered I do not know. They
+were not exactly a nice lot, but not one of them would I have committed to
+the chance of contact with thieves with a clear conscience. I should have
+feared especial danger from such contact in their case.
+
+As a matter of fact the record of average attendance (136,413) shows that
+the public school _per se_ reaches little more than a third of all the
+children. And even those it does not hold long enough to do them the good
+that was intended. The Superintendent of Schools declares that the average
+age at which the children leave school is twelve or a little over. It must
+needs be, then, that very many quit much earlier, and the statement that
+in New York, as in Chicago, St. Louis, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and other
+American cities, half or more than half the school-boys leave school at
+the age of eleven (the source of the statement is unknown to me) seems
+credible enough. I am not going to discuss here the value of school
+education as a preventive of crime. That it is, so far as it goes, a
+positive influence for good I suppose few thinking people doubt nowadays.
+Dr. William T. Harris, Federal Commissioner of Education, in an address
+delivered before the National Prison Association in 1890, stated that an
+investigation of the returns of seventeen States that kept a record of the
+educational status of their criminals showed the number of criminals to be
+eight times as large from the illiterate stratum as from an equal number
+of the population that could read and write. That census was taken in
+1870. Ten years later a canvass of the jails of Michigan, a State that had
+an illiterate population of less than five per cent., showed exactly the
+same ratio, so that I presume that may safely be accepted.
+
+In view of these facts it does not seem that the showing the public school
+is making in New York is either creditable or safe. It is not creditable,
+because the city's wealth grows even faster than its population,[16] and
+there is no lack of means with which to provide schools enough and the
+machinery to enforce the law and fill them. Not to enforce it because it
+would cost a great deal of money is wicked waste and folly. It is not
+safe, because the school is our chief defence against the tenement and the
+flood of ignorance with which it would swamp us. Prohibition of child
+labor without compelling the attendance at school of the freed slaves is
+a mockery. The children are better off working than idling, any day. The
+physical objections to the one alternative are vastly outweighed by the
+moral iniquities of the other.
+
+I have tried to set forth the facts. They carry their own lesson. The then
+State Superintendent of Education, Andrew Draper, read it aright when, in
+his report for 1889, he said about the compulsory education law:
+
+"It does not go far enough and is without an executor. It is barren of
+results.... It may be safely said that no system will be effectual in
+bringing the unfortunate children of the streets into the schools which at
+least does not definitely fix the age within which children must attend
+the schools, which does not determine the period of the year within which
+all must be there, which does not determine the method for gathering all
+needed information, which does not provide especial schools for
+incorrigible cases, which does not punish people charged with the care of
+children for neglecting their education, and which does not provide the
+machinery and officials for executing the system."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD
+
+
+I am reminded, in trying to show up the causes that go to make children
+bad, of the experience of a certain sanitary inspector who was laboring
+with the proprietor of a seven-cent lodging-house to make him whitewash
+and clean up. The man had reluctantly given in to several of the
+inspector's demands; but, as they kept piling up, his irritation grew,
+until at the mention of clean sheets he lost all patience and said, with
+bitter contempt, "Well! you needn't tink dem's angels!"
+
+They were not--those lodgers of his--they were tramps. Neither are the
+children of the street angels. If, once in a while, they act more like
+little devils the opportunities we have afforded them, as I have tried to
+show, hardly give us the right to reproach them. They are not the kind of
+opportunities to make angels. And yet, looking the hundreds of boys in the
+Juvenile Asylum over, all of whom were supposed to be there because they
+were bad (though, as I had occasion to ascertain, that was a mistake--it
+was the parents that were bad in some cases), I was struck by the fact
+that they were anything but a depraved lot. Except as to their clothes and
+their manners, which were the manners of the street, they did not seem to
+be very different in looks from a like number of boys in any public
+school. Fourth of July was just then at hand, and when I asked the
+official who accompanied me how they proposed to celebrate it, he said
+that they were in the habit of marching in procession up Eleventh Avenue
+to Fort George, across to Washington Bridge, and all about the
+neighborhood, to a grove where speeches were made. Remembering the iron
+bars and high fences I had seen, I said something about it being unsafe to
+let a thousand young prisoners go at large in that way. The man looked at
+me in some bewilderment before he understood.
+
+"Bless you, no!" he said, when my meaning dawned upon him. "If any one of
+them was to run away that day he would be in eternal disgrace with all the
+rest. It is a point of honor with them to deserve it when they are
+trusted. Often we put a boy on duty outside, when he could walk off, if he
+chose, just as well as not; but he will come in in the evening, as
+straight as a string, only, perhaps, to twist his bed-clothes into a rope
+that very night and let himself down from a third-story window, at the
+risk of breaking his neck. Boys will be boys, you know."
+
+But it struck me that boys whose honor could be successfully appealed to
+in that way were rather the victims than the doers of a grievous wrong,
+being in that place, no matter if they _had_ stolen. It was a case of
+misdirection, or no direction at all, of their youthful energies. There
+was one little fellow in the Asylum band who was a living illustration of
+this. I watched him blow his horn with a supreme effort to be heard above
+the rest, growing redder and redder in the face, until the perspiration
+rolled off him in perfect sheets, the veins stood out swollen and blue and
+it seemed as if he must burst the next minute. He was a tremendous
+trumpeter. I was glad when it was over, and patted him on the head,
+telling him that if he put as much vim into all he had to do, as he did
+into his horn, he would come to something great yet. Then it occurred to
+me to ask him what he was there for.
+
+"'Cause I was lazy and played hookey," he said, and joined in the laugh
+his answer raised. The idea of that little body, that fairly throbbed with
+energy, being sent to prison for laziness was too absurd for anything.
+
+The report that comes from the Western Agency of the Asylum, through which
+the boys are placed out on farms, that the proportion of troublesome
+children is growing larger does not agree with the idea of laziness
+either, but well enough with the idleness of the street, which is what
+sends nine-tenths of the boys to the Asylum. Satan finds plenty of
+mischief for the idle hands of these lads to do. The one great point is to
+give them something to do--something they can see the end of, yet that
+will keep them busy right along. The more ignorant the child, the more
+urgent this rule, the shorter and simpler the lesson must be. Over in the
+Catholic Protectory, where they get the most ignorant boys, they
+appreciate this to the extent of encouraging the boys to a game of Sunday
+base-ball rather than see them idle even for the briefest spell. Of the
+practical wisdom of their course there can be no question.
+
+"I have come to the conclusion," said a well-known educator on a recent
+occasion, "that much of crime is a question of athletics." From over the
+sea the Earl of Meath adds his testimony: "Three fourths of the youthful
+rowdyism of large towns is owing to the stupidity, and, I may add,
+cruelty, of the ruling powers in not finding some safety-valve for the
+exuberant energies of the boys and girls of their respective cities." For
+our neglect to do so in New York we are paying heavily in the maintenance
+of these costly reform schools. I spoke of the chance for romping and
+play where the poor children crowd. In a Cherry Street hall-way I came
+across this sign in letters a foot long: "No ball-playing, dancing,
+card-playing, and no persons but tenants allowed in the yard." It was a
+five-story tenement, swarming with children, and there was another just as
+big across that yard. Out in the street the policeman saw to it that the
+ball-playing at least was stopped, and as for the dancing, that, of
+course, was bound to collect a crowd, the most heinous offence known to
+him as a preserver of the peace. How the peace was preserved by such means
+I saw on the occasion of my discovering that sign. The business that took
+me down there was a murder in another tenement just like it. A young man,
+hardly more than a boy, was killed in the course of a midnight
+"can-racket" on the roof, in which half the young people in the block had
+a hand night after night. It was _their_ outlet for the "exuberant
+energies" of their natures. The safety-valve was shut, with the landlord
+and the policeman holding it down.
+
+It is when the wrong outlet has thus been forced that the right and
+natural one has to be reopened with an effort as the first condition of
+reclaiming the boy. The play in him has all run to "toughness," and has
+first to be restored. "We have no great hope of a boy's reformation,"
+writes Mr. William F. Round, of the Burnham Industrial Farm, to a friend
+who has shown me his letter, "till he takes an active part and interest in
+out-door amusements. Plead with all your might for play-grounds for the
+city waifs and school-children. When the lungs are freely expanded, the
+blood coursing with a bound through all veins and arteries, the whole mind
+and body in a state of high emulation in wholesome play, there is no time
+or place for wicked thought or consequent wicked action and the body is
+growing every moment more able to help in the battle against temptation
+when it shall come at other times and places. Next time another transit
+company asks a franchise make them furnish tickets to the parks and
+suburbs to all school-children on all holidays and Saturdays, the same to
+be given out in school for regular attendance, as a method of health
+promotion and a preventive of truancy." Excellent scheme! If we could only
+make them. It is five years and over now since we made them pass a law at
+Albany appropriating a million dollars a year for the laying out of small
+parks in the most crowded tenement districts, in the Mulberry Street Bend
+for instance, and practically we stand to-day where we stood then. The
+Mulberry Street Bend is still there, with no sign of a park or play-ground
+other than in the gutter. When I asked, a year ago, why this was so, I was
+told by the Counsel to the Corporation that it was because "not much
+interest had been taken" by the previous administration in the matter. Is
+it likely that a corporation that runs a railroad to make money could be
+prevailed upon to take more interest in a proposition to make it surrender
+part of its profits than the city's sworn officers in their bounden duty?
+Yet let anyone go and see for himself what effect such a park has in a
+crowded tenement district. Let him look at Tompkins Square Park as it is
+to-day and compare the children that skip among the trees and lawns and
+around the band-stand with those that root in the gutters only a few
+blocks off. That was the way they looked in Tompkins Square twenty years
+ago when the square was a sand-lot given up to rioting and disorder. The
+police had their hands full then. I remember being present when they had
+to take the square by storm more than once, and there is at least one
+captain on the force to-day who owes his promotion to the part he took and
+the injuries he suffered in one of those battles. To-day it is as quiet
+and orderly a neighborhood as any in the city. Not a squeak has been heard
+about "bread or blood" since those trees were planted and the lawns and
+flower-beds laid out. It is not all the work of the missions, the
+kindergartens, and Boys' clubs and lodging-houses, of which more anon; nor
+even the larger share. The park did it, exactly as the managers of the
+Juvenile Asylum appealed to the sense of honor in their prisoners. It
+appealed with its trees and its grass and its birds to the sense of
+decency and of beauty, undeveloped but not smothered, in the children, and
+the whole neighborhood responded. One can go around the whole square that
+covers two big blocks, nowadays, and not come upon a single fight. I
+should like to see anyone walk that distance in Mulberry Street without
+running across half a dozen.
+
+Thus far the street and its idleness as factors in making criminals of the
+boys. Of the factory I have spoken. Certainly it is to be preferred to the
+street, if the choice must be between the two. Its offence is that it
+makes a liar of the boy and keeps him in ignorance, even of a useful
+trade, thus blazing a wide path for him straight to the prison gate. The
+school does not come to the rescue; the child must come to the school, and
+even then is not sure of a welcome. The trades' unions do their worst for
+the boy by robbing him of the slim chance to learn a trade which the
+factory left him. Of the tenement I have said enough. Apart from all other
+considerations and influences, as the destroyer of character and
+individuality everywhere, it is the wickedest of all the forces that
+attack the defenceless child. The tenements are increasing in number, and
+so is "the element that becomes criminal because of lack of individuality
+and the self-respect that comes with it."[17]
+
+I am always made to think in connection with this subject of a story told
+me by a bright little woman of her friend's kittens. There was a litter of
+them in the house and a jealous terrier dog to boot, whose one aim in life
+was to get rid of its mewing rivals. Out in the garden where the children
+played there was a sand-heap and the terrier's trick was to bury alive in
+the sand any kitten it caught unawares. The children were constantly
+rushing to the rescue and unearthing their pets; on the day when my friend
+was there on a visit they were too late. The first warning of the tragedy
+in the garden came to the ladies when one of the children rushed in, all
+red and excited, with bulging eyes. "There," she said, dropping the dead
+kitten out of her apron before them, "a perfectly good cat spoiled!"
+
+Perfectly good children, as good as any on the Avenue, are spoiled every
+day by the tenement; only we have not done with them then, as the terrier
+had with the kitten. There is still posterity to reckon with.
+
+What this question of heredity amounts to, whether in the past or in the
+future, I do not know. I have not had opportunity enough of observing. No
+one has that I know of. Those who have had the most disagree in their
+conclusions, or have come to none. I have known numerous instances of
+criminality, running apparently in families for generations, but there was
+always the desperate environment as the unknown factor in the make-up.
+Whether that bore the greatest share of the blame, or whether the
+reformation of the criminal to be effective should have begun with his
+grandfather, I could not tell. Besides, there was always the chance that
+the great-grandfather, or some one still farther back, of whom all trace
+was lost, might have been a paragon of virtue, even if his descendant was
+a thief, and so there was no telling just where to begin. In general I am
+inclined to think with such practical philanthropists as Superintendent
+Barnard, of the Five Points House of Industry, the Manager of the
+Children's Aid Society, Superintendent E. Fellows Jenkins, of the Society
+for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Mr. Israel C. Jones, who
+for more than thirty years was in charge of the House of Refuge, that the
+bugbear of heredity is not nearly as formidable as we have half taught
+ourselves to think. It is rather a question of getting hold of the child
+early enough before the evil influences surrounding him have got a firm
+grip on him. Among a mass of evidence quoted in support of this belief,
+perhaps this instance, related by Superintendent Jones in _The
+Independent_ last March, is as convincing as any:
+
+     Thirty years ago there was a depraved family living adjacent to what
+     is now a part of the city of New York. The mother was not only
+     dishonest, but exceedingly intemperate, wholly neglectful of her
+     duties as a mother, and frequently served terms in jail until she
+     finally died. The father was also dissipated and neglectful. It was a
+     miserable existence for the children.
+
+     Two of the little boys, in connection with two other boys in the
+     neighborhood, were arrested, tried, and found guilty of entering a
+     house in the daytime and stealing. In course of time both of these
+     boys were indentured. One remained in his place and the other left
+     for another part of the country, where he died. He was a reputable
+     lad.
+
+     The first boy, in one way and another, got a few pennies together
+     with which he purchased books. After a time he proposed to his master
+     that he be allowed to present himself for examination as a teacher.
+     The necessary consent was given, he presented himself, and was
+     awarded a "grade A" certificate.
+
+     Two years from that time he came to the House of Refuge, as proud as
+     a man could be, and exhibited to me his certificate. He then entered
+     a law office, diligently pursued his studies, and was admitted to the
+     bar. He was made a judge, and is now chief magistrate of the court in
+     the city where he lives.
+
+     His sister, a little girl, used to come to the Refuge with her
+     mother, wearing nothing but a thin cloak in very cold weather, almost
+     perishing with the cold. As soon as this young man got on his feet he
+     rescued the little girl. He placed her in a school; she finally
+     graduated from the Normal School, and to-day holds an excellent
+     position in the schools in the State where she lives.
+
+
+The records of the three reformatory institutions before mentioned throw
+their own light upon the question of what makes criminals of the young. At
+the Elmira Reformatory, of more than five thousand prisoners only a little
+over one per cent. were shown to have kept good company prior to their
+coming there. One and a half per cent. are put down under this head as
+"doubtful," while the character of association is recorded for 41.2 per
+cent. as "not good," and for 55.9 per cent. as "positively bad."
+Three-fourths possessed no culture or only the slightest. As to moral
+sense, 42.6 per cent. had absolutely none, 35 per cent. "possibly some."
+Only 7.6 per cent. came from good homes. Of the rest 39.8 per cent. had
+homes that are recorded as "fair only," and 52.6 per cent. downright bad
+homes; 4.8 per cent. had pauper, and 76.8 per cent. poor parents; 38.4 per
+cent. of the prisoners had drunken parents, and 13 per cent. parents of
+doubtful sobriety. Of more than twenty-two thousand inmates of the
+Juvenile Asylum in thirty-nine years one-fourth had either a drunken
+father or mother, or both. At the Protectory the percentage of drunkenness
+in parents was not quite one-fifth among over three thousand children
+cared for in the institution last year.
+
+There is never any lack of trashy novels and cheap shows in New York, and
+the children who earn money selling newspapers or otherwise take to them
+as ducks do to water. They fall in well with the ways of the street that
+are showy always, however threadbare may be the cloth. As for that, it is
+simply the cheap side of our national extravagance.
+
+The cigarette, if not a cause, is at least the mean accessory of half the
+mischief of the street. And I am not sure it is not a cause too. It is an
+inexorable creditor that has goaded many a boy to stealing; for cigarettes
+cost money, and they do not encourage industry. Of course there is a law
+against the cigarette, or rather against the boy smoking it who is not old
+enough to work--there is law in plenty, usually, if that would only make
+people good. It don't in the matter of the cigarette. It helps make the
+boy bad by adding the relish of law-breaking to his enjoyment of the
+smoke. Nobody stops him.
+
+The mania for gambling is all but universal. Every street child is a born
+gambler; he has nothing to lose and all to win. He begins by "shooting
+craps" in the street and ends by "chucking dice" in the saloon, two names
+for the same thing, sure to lead to the same goal. By the time he has
+acquired individual standing in the saloon, his long apprenticeship has
+left little or nothing for him to learn of the bad it has to teach. Never
+for his own sake is he turned away with the growler when he comes to have
+it filled; once in a while for the saloon-keeper's, if that worthy
+suspects in him a decoy and a "job." Just for the sake of the experiment,
+not because I expected it to develop anything new, I chose at random,
+while writing this chapter, a saloon in a tenement house district on the
+East Side and posted a man, whom I could trust implicitly, at the door
+with orders to count the children under age who went out and in with
+beer-jugs in open defiance of law. Neither he nor I had ever been in or
+even seen the saloon before. He reported as the result of three and a half
+hours' watch at noon and in the evening a total of fourteen--ten boys and
+a girl under ten years of age, and three girls between ten and fourteen
+years, not counting a little boy who bought a bottle of ginger. It was a
+cool, damp day; not a thirsty day, or the number would probably have been
+twice as great. There was not the least concealment about the transaction
+in any of the fourteen cases. The children were evidently old customers.
+
+The law that failed to save the boy while there was time yet to make a
+useful citizen of him provides the means of catching him when his training
+begins to bear fruit that threatens the public peace. Then it is with the
+same blundering disregard of common sense and common decency that marked
+his prosecution as a truant that the half grown lad is dragged into a
+police court and thrust into a prison-pen with hardened thieves and
+criminals to learn the lessons they have to teach him. The one thing New
+York needs most after a truant home is a special court for the trial of
+youthful offenders only. I am glad to say that this want seems at last in
+a way to be supplied. The last Legislature authorized the establishment of
+such a court, and it may be that even as these pages see the light this
+blot upon our city is about to be wiped out.
+
+Lastly, but not least, the Church is to blame for deserting the poor in
+their need. It is an old story that the churches have moved uptown with
+the wealth and fashion, leaving the poor crowds to find their way to
+heaven as best they could, and that the crowds have paid them back in
+their own coin by denying that they, the churches, knew the way at all.
+The Church has something to answer for; but it is a healthy sign at least
+that it is accepting the responsibility and professing anxiety to meet it.
+In much of the best work done among the poor and for the poor it has
+lately taken the lead, and it is not likely that any more of the churches
+will desert the downtown field, with the approval of Christian men and
+women at least.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Little enough of the light I promised in the opening chapter has struggled
+through these pages so far. We have looked upon the dark side of the
+picture; but there is a brighter. If the battle with ignorance, with
+misery, and with vice has but just begun, if the army that confronts us is
+strong, too strong, in numbers still and in malice--the gauntlet has been
+thrown down, the war waged, and blows struck that tell. They augur
+victory, for we have cut off the enemy's supplies and turned his flank. As
+I showed in the case of the immigrant Jews and the Italians, we have
+captured his recruits. With a firm grip on these, we may hope to win, for
+the rest of the problem ought to be and _can_ be solved. With our own we
+should be able to settle, if there is any virtue in our school and our
+system of government. In this, as in all things, the public conscience
+must be stirred before the community's machinery for securing justice can
+move. That it has been stirred, profoundly and to useful purpose, the
+multiplication in our day of charities for attaining the ends the law has
+failed to reach, gives evidence. Their number is so great that mention can
+be made here merely of a few of the most important and typical efforts
+along the line. A register of all those that deal with the children
+especially, as compiled by the Charity Organization Society, will be found
+in an appendix to this book. Before we proceed to look at the results
+achieved through endeavors to stop the waste down at the bottom by private
+reinforcement of the public school, we will glance briefly at two of the
+charities that have a plainer purpose--if I may so put it without
+disparagement to the rest--that look upon the child merely as a child
+worth saving for its own sake, because it is helpless and poor and
+wretched. Both of them represent distinct departures in charitable work.
+Both, to the everlasting credit of our city be it said, had their birth
+here, and in this generation, and from New York their blessings have been
+carried to the farthest lands. One is the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, known far and near now as the Children's Society,
+whose strong and beneficent plan has been embodied in the structure of law
+of half the civilized nations of the world. The other, always spoken of as
+the "Fresh Air Fund," never had law or structural organization of any
+kind, save the law of love, laid down on the Mount for all time; but the
+life of that divine command throbs in it and has touched the heart of
+mankind wherever its story has been told.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+LITTLE MARY ELLEN'S LEGACY
+
+
+On a thriving farm up in Central New York a happy young wife goes singing
+about her household work to-day who once as a helpless, wretched waif in
+the great city through her very helplessness and misery stirred up a
+social revolution whose waves beat literally upon the farthest shores. The
+story of little Mary Ellen moved New York eighteen years ago as it had
+scarce ever been stirred by news of disaster or distress before. In the
+simple but eloquent language of the public record it is thus told: "In the
+summer of 1874 a poor woman lay dying in the last stages of consumption in
+a miserable little room on the top floor of a big tenement in this city. A
+Methodist missionary, visiting among the poor, found her there and asked
+what she could do to soothe her sufferings. 'My time is short,' said the
+sick woman, 'but I cannot die in peace while the miserable little girl
+whom they call Mary Ellen is being beaten day and night by her step-mother
+next door to my room.' She told how the screams of the child were heard at
+all hours. She was locked in the room, she understood. It had been so for
+months, while she had been lying ill there. Prompted by the natural
+instinct of humanity, the missionary sought the aid of the police, but she
+was told that it was necessary to furnish evidence before an arrest could
+be made. 'Unless you can prove that an offence has been committed we
+cannot interfere, and all you know is hearsay.' She next went to several
+benevolent societies in the city whose object it was to care for children,
+and asked their interference in behalf of the child. The reply was: 'If
+the child is legally brought to us, and is a proper subject, we will take
+it; otherwise we cannot act in the matter.' In turn then she consulted
+several excellent charitable citizens as to what she should do. They
+replied: 'It is a dangerous thing to interfere between parent and child,
+and you might get yourself into trouble if you did so, as parents are
+proverbially the best guardians of their own children.' Finally, in
+despair, with the piteous appeals of the dying woman ringing in her ears,
+she said: 'I will make one more effort to save this child. There is one
+man in this city who has never turned a deaf ear to the cry of the
+helpless, and who has spent his life in just this work for the benefit of
+unoffending animals. I will go to Henry Bergh.'
+
+"She went, and the great friend of the dumb brute found a way. 'The child
+is an animal,' he said, 'if there is no justice for it as a human being,
+it shall at least have the rights of the stray cur in the street. It shall
+not be abused.' And thus was written the first bill of rights for the
+friendless waif the world over. The appearance of the starved, half-naked,
+and bruised child when it was brought into court wrapped in a
+horse-blanket caused a sensation that stirred the public conscience to its
+very depths. Complaints poured in upon Mr. Bergh; so many cases of
+child-beating and fiendish cruelty came to light in a little while, so
+many little savages were hauled forth from their dens of misery, that the
+community stood aghast. A meeting of citizens was called and an
+association for the defence of outraged childhood was formed, out of
+which grew the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that was
+formally incorporated in the following year. By that time Mary Ellen was
+safe in a good home. She never saw her tormentor again. The woman, whose
+name was Connolly, was not her mother. She steadily refused to tell where
+she got the child, and the mystery of its descent was never solved. The
+wretched woman was sent to the Island and forgotten.
+
+John D. Wright, a venerable Quaker merchant, was chosen the first
+President of the Society. Upon the original call for the first meeting,
+preserved in the archives of the Society, may still be read a foot-note in
+his handwriting, quaintly amending the date to read, Quaker fashion, "12th
+mo. 15th 1874." A year later, in his first review of the work that was
+before the young society, he wrote, "Ample laws have been passed by the
+Legislature of this State for the protection of and prevention of cruelty
+to little children. The trouble seems to be that it is nobody's business
+to enforce them. Existing societies have as much, nay more to do than they
+can attend to in providing for those entrusted to their care. The Society
+for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children proposes to enforce by lawful
+means and with energy those laws, not vindictively, not to gain public
+applause, but to convince those who cruelly ill-treat and shamefully
+neglect little children that the time has passed when this can be done, in
+this State at least, with impunity."
+
+The promise has been faithfully kept. The old Quaker is dead, but his work
+goes on. The good that he did lives after him, and will live forever. The
+applause of the crowd his Society has not always won; but it has merited
+the confidence and approval of all right-thinking and right-feeling men.
+Its aggressive advocacy of defenceless childhood, always and everywhere,
+is to-day reflected from the statute-books of every State in the American
+Union, and well-nigh every civilized government abroad, in laws that
+sprang directly from its fearless crusade.
+
+In theory it had always been the duty of the State to protect the child
+"in person, and property, and in its opportunity for life, liberty, and
+happiness," even against a worthless parent; in practice it held to the
+convenient view that, after all, the parent had the first right to the
+child and knew what was best for it. The result in many cases was thus
+described in the tenth annual report of the Society by President Elbridge
+T. Gerry, who in 1879 had succeeded Mr. Wright and has ever since been so
+closely identified with its work that it is as often spoken of nowadays as
+Mr. Gerry's Society as under its corporate name:
+
+     "Impecunious parents drove them from their miserable homes at all
+     hours of the day and night to beg and steal. They were trained as
+     acrobats at the risk of life and limb, and beaten cruelly if they
+     failed. They were sent at night to procure liquor for parents too
+     drunk to venture themselves into the streets. They were drilled in
+     juvenile operas and song-and-dance variety business until their
+     voices were cracked, their growth stunted, and their health
+     permanently ruined by exposure and want of rest. Numbers of young
+     Italians were imported by _padroni_ under promises of a speedy
+     return, and then sent out on the streets to play on musical
+     instruments, to peddle flowers and small wares to the passers-by, and
+     too often as a cover for immorality. Their surroundings were those of
+     vice, profanity, and obscenity. Their only amusements were the
+     dance-halls, the cheap theatres and museums, and the saloons. Their
+     acquaintances were those hardened in sin, and both boys and girls
+     soon became adepts in crime, and entered unhesitatingly on the
+     downward path. Beaten and abused at home, treated worse than
+     animals, no other result could be expected. In the prisons, to which
+     sooner or later these unhappy children gravitated, there was no
+     separation of them from hardened criminals. Their previous education
+     in vice rendered them apt scholars in the school of crime, and they
+     ripened into criminals as they advanced in years."
+
+
+[Illustration: CASE NO. 25,745 ON THE SOCIETY BLOTTER: ANNIE WOLFF, AGED
+SEVEN YEARS, AS SHE WAS DRIVEN FORTH BY HER CRUEL STEP-MOTHER, BEATEN AND
+STARVED, WITH HER ARMS TIED UPON HER BACK; AND AS SHE APPEARED AFTER SIX
+MONTHS IN THE SOCIETY'S CARE.]
+
+
+All that has not been changed in the seventeen years that have passed; to
+remodel depraved human nature has been beyond the power of the Society;
+but step by step under its prompting the law has been changed and
+strengthened; step by step life has been breathed into its dead letter,
+until now it is as able and willing to protect the child against violence
+or absolute cruelty as the Society is to enforce its protection. There is
+work enough for it to do yet. I have outlined some in the preceding
+chapters. In the past year (1891) it investigated 7,695 complaints and
+rescued 3,683 children from pernicious surroundings, some of them from a
+worse fate than death. "But let it not be supposed from this," writes the
+Superintendent, "that crimes of and against children are on the increase.
+As a matter of fact wrongs to children have been materially lessened in
+New York by the Society's action and influence during the past seventeen
+years. Some have entirely disappeared, having been eradicated root and
+branch from New York life, and an influence for good has been felt by the
+children themselves, as shown by the great diminution in juvenile
+delinquency from 1875, when the Society was first organized, to 1891, the
+figures indicating a decrease of fully fifty per cent."[18]
+
+Other charitable efforts, working along the same line, contributed their
+share, perhaps the greater, to the latter result, but the Society's
+influence upon the environment that shapes the childish mind and
+character, as well as upon the child itself, is undoubted. It is seen in
+the hot haste with which a general cleaning up and setting to rights is
+begun in a block of tenement barracks the moment the "cruelty man" heaves
+in sight; in the "holy horror" the child-beater has of him and his
+mission, and in the altered attitude of his victim, who not rarely
+nowadays confronts his tormentor with the threat, "if you do that I will
+go to the Children's Society," always effective except when drink blinds
+the wretch to consequences.
+
+The Society had hardly been in existence four years when it came into
+collision with the padrone and his abominable system of child slavery.
+These traders in human misery, adventurers of the worst type, made a
+practice of hiring the children of the poorest peasants in the Neapolitan
+mountain districts, to serve them begging, singing, and playing in the
+streets of American cities. The contract was for a term of years at the
+end of which they were to return the child and pay a fixed sum, a
+miserable pittance, to the parents for its use, but, practically, the
+bargain amounted to a sale, except that the money was never paid. The
+children left their homes never to return. They were shipped from Naples
+to Marseilles, and made to walk all the way through France, singing,
+playing, and dancing in the towns and villages through which they passed,
+to a seaport where they embarked for America. Upon their arrival here they
+were brought to a rendezvous in some out-of-the-way slum and taken in hand
+by the padrone, the partner of the one who had hired them abroad. He sent
+them out to play in the streets by day, singing and dancing in tune to
+their alleged music, and by night made them perform in the lowest dens in
+the city. All the money they made the padrone took from them, beating and
+starving them if they did not bring home enough. None of it ever reached
+their parents. Under this treatment the boys grew up thieves--the girls
+worse. The life soon wore them out, and the Potter's Field claimed them
+before their term of slavery was at an end, according to the contract. In
+far-off Italy the simple peasants waited anxiously for the return of
+little Tomaso or Antonia with the coveted American gold. No word ever came
+of them.
+
+The vile traffic had been broken up in England only to be transferred to
+America. The Italian government had protested. Congress had passed an act
+making it a felony for anyone knowingly to bring into the United States
+any person inveigled or forcibly kidnapped in any other country, with the
+intent to hold him here in involuntary service. But these children were
+not only unable to either speak or understand English, they were
+compelled, under horrible threats, to tell anyone who asked that the
+padrone was their father, brother, or other near relative. To get the
+evidence upon which to proceed against the padrone was a task of exceeding
+difficulty, but it was finally accomplished by co-operation of the Italian
+government with the Society's agents in the case of the padrone Ancarola,
+who, in November, 1879, brought over from Italy seven boy slaves, between
+nine and thirteen years old, with their outfit of harps and violins. They
+were seized, and the padrone, who escaped from the steamer, was arrested
+in a Crosby Street groggery five days later. Before a jury in the United
+States Court the whole vile scheme was laid bare. One of the boys
+testified that Ancarola had paid his mother 20 lire (about four dollars)
+and his uncle 60 lire. For this sum he was to serve the padrone four
+years. Ancarola was convicted and sent to the penitentiary. The children
+were returned to their homes.
+
+The news travelled slowly on the other side. For years the padrone's
+victims kept coming at intervals, but the society's agents were on the
+watch, and when the last of the kidnappers was sent to prison in 1885
+there was an end of the business. The excitement attending the trial and
+the vigor with which the society had pushed its pursuit of the rascally
+padrone drew increased attention to its work. At the end of the following
+year twenty-four societies had been organized in other States upon its
+plan, and half the governments of Europe were enacting laws patterned
+after those of New York State. To-day there are a hundred societies for
+the prevention of cruelty to children in this country, independent of each
+other but owning the New York Society as their common parent, and nearly
+twice as many abroad, in England, France, Italy, Spain, the West Indies,
+South America, Canada, Australia, etc. The old link that bound the dumb
+brute with the helpless child in a common bond of humane sympathy has
+never been broken. Many of them include both in their efforts, and all the
+American societies, whether their care be children or animals, are united
+in an association for annual conference and co-operation, called the
+American Humane Association.
+
+In seventeen years the Society has investigated 61,749 complaints of
+cruelly to children, involving 185,247 children, prosecuted 21,282
+offenders, and obtained 20,697 convictions. The children it has saved and
+released numbered at the end of the year 1891 no less than 32,633.
+Whenever it has been charged with erring it has been on the side of mercy
+for the helpless child. It follows its charges into the police courts,
+seeing to it that, if possible, no record of crime is made against the
+offending child and that it is placed at once where better environment may
+help bring out the better side of its nature. It follows them into the
+institutions to which they are committed through its care, and fights
+their battles there, if need be, or the battles of their guardians under
+the law, against the greed of parents that would sacrifice the child's
+prospects in life for the sake of the few pennies it could earn at home.
+And it generally wins the fight.
+
+The Society has never received any financial support from the city, but
+has depended entirely upon private benevolence. Ample means have always
+been at its disposal. Last year it sheltered, fed, and clothed 1,697
+children in its rooms. Most of them were the victims of drunken parents.
+With the Society they found safe shelter. "Sometimes," Superintendent
+Jenkins says, "the children cry when they are brought here. They always
+cry when they go away."
+
+"Lastly," so ran the old Quaker merchant's address in his first annual
+report, "this Society, so far from interfering with the numerous societies
+and institutions already existing, is intended to aid them in their noble
+work. It proposes to labor in the interest of no one religious
+denomination, and to keep entirely free from political influences of every
+kind. Its duties toward the children whom it may rescue will be discharged
+when the future custody of them is decided by the courts of justice."
+Before the faithful adherence to that plan all factious or sectarian
+opposition that impedes and obstructs so many other charities has fallen
+away entirely. Humanity is the religion of the Children's Society. In its
+Board of Directors are men of all nationalities and of every creed. Its
+fundamental doctrine is that every rescued child must be given finally
+into the keeping of those of its own faith who will carry on the work
+begun in its rescue. Beyond that point the Society does not go. It has
+once refused the gift of a sea-side home lest it become a rival in a field
+where it would render only friendly counsel and aid.
+
+In the case of the little John Does a doubt arises which the Society
+settles by passing them on to the best institution available for each
+particular child, quite irrespective of sect. There are thirteen of them
+by this time, waifs found in the street by the Society's agents or friends
+and never claimed by anybody. Though passed on, in the plan of the Society
+from which it never deviates, to be cared for by others, they are never
+lost sight of but always considered its special charges, for whom it bears
+a peculiar responsibility.
+
+Poor little Carmen, of whom I spoke in the chapter about Italian children,
+was one of the Society's wards. Its footprints may be found all through
+these pages. To its printed reports, with their array of revolting cruelty
+and neglect, the reader is referred who would fully understand what a gap
+in a Christian community it bridges over.
+
+[Illustration: CLUB WITH WHICH A FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD WAS BRUTALLY
+BEATEN.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE STORY OF THE FRESH AIR FUND
+
+
+The last echoes of the storm raised by the story of little Mary Ellen had
+not died in the Pennsylvania hills when a young clergyman in the obscure
+village of Sherman preached to his congregation one Sunday morning from
+the text, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these
+least, ye did it unto me," a sermon which in its far-reaching effects was
+to become one of the strongest links in the chain of remorseful human
+sympathy then being forged in the fires of public indignation. Willard
+Parsons was a man with a practical mind as well as an open heart. He had
+lived in the city and had witnessed the suffering of the poor children in
+the stony streets on the hot summer days. Out there in the country he saw
+the wild strawberry redden the fields in June only to be trampled down by
+the cattle, saw, as the summer wore on, the blackberry-vines by the
+wayside groaning under their burden of sweet fruit, unconsidered and going
+to waste, with this starved host scarce a day's journey away. Starved in
+body, in mind, and in soul! Not for them was the robin's song _they_
+scarcely heard; not for them the summer fields or the cool forest shade,
+the sweet smell of briar and fern. Theirs was poverty and want, and heat
+and suffering and death--death as the entrance to a life for which the
+slum had been their only preparation. And such a preparation!
+
+All this the young preacher put in his sermon, and as he saw the love that
+went out from his own full heart kindling in the eager faces of his
+listeners, he told them what had been in his mind on many a lonely walk
+through those fields: that while the flowers and the brook and the trees
+might not be taken to the great prison-pen where the children were, these
+might be brought out to enjoy them there. There was no reason why it
+should not be done, even though it had not been before. If they were poor
+and friendless and starved, yet there had been One even poorer, more
+friendless than they. They at least had their slum. He had not where to
+lay his head. Well they might, in receiving the children into their homes,
+be entertaining angels unawares. "Inasmuch as ye did it unto even the
+least of these, ye did it unto Me."
+
+The last hymn had been sung and the congregation had gone home, eagerly
+discussing their pastor's new scheme; but a little company of men and
+women remained behind in the church to talk it over with the minister.
+They were plain people. The sermon had shown them a plain duty to be done,
+and they knew only one way: to do it. The dinner-hour found them there
+yet, planning and talking it over. It was with a light heart that, as a
+result of their talk, the minister set out for New York the day after with
+an invitation to the children of the slums to come out in the woods and
+see how beautiful God had made his world. They were to be the guests of
+the people of Sherman for a fortnight, and a warm welcome awaited them
+there. A right royal one they received when, in a few days, the pastor
+returned, bringing with him nine little waifs, the poorest and the
+neediest he had found in the tenements to which he went with his offer.
+They were not such children as the farm-folk thereabouts saw every day,
+but they took them into their homes, and their hearts warmed to them day
+by day as they saw how much they needed their kindness, how under its
+influence they grew into bright and happy children like their own; and
+when, at the end of the two weeks, nine brown-faced laughing boys and
+girls went back to tell of the wondrous things they had heard and seen, it
+was only to make room for another little band. Nor has ever a summer
+passed since that first, which witnessed sixty city urchins made happy at
+Sherman, that has not seen the hospitable houses of the Pennsylvania
+village opened to receive holiday parties like those from the slums of the
+far city.
+
+Thus modestly began the Fresh Air movement that has brought health and
+happiness to more than a hundred thousand of New York's poor children
+since, and has spread far and near, not only through our own but to
+foreign lands, wherever there is poverty to relieve and suffering to
+soothe. It has literally grown up around the enthusiasm and practical
+purpose of the one man whose personality pervades it to this day. Willard
+Parsons preaches now to a larger flock than any church could contain, but
+the burden of his sermon is ever the same. From the _Tribune_ office he
+issues his appeals each spring, and money comes in abundance to carry on
+the work in which city and country vie with each other to lend a hand.
+After that first season at Sherman, a New York newspaper, the _Evening
+Post_, took the work under its wing and raised the necessary funds until
+in 1882 it passed into the keeping of its neighbor, the _Tribune_. Ever
+since it has been known as the _Tribune_ Fresh Air Fund, and year by year
+has grown in extent and importance until at the end of the year 1891 more
+than 94,000 children were shown to have been given a two weeks' vacation
+in the country in the fifteen summers that had passed. The original 60 of
+1877 had grown to an army of holiday-makers numbering 13,568 in 1891. By
+this time the hundred thousand mark has long been passed. The total amount
+of money expended in sending the children out was $250,633.88, and so well
+had the great fund been managed that the average cost per child had fallen
+from $3.12 in the first year to $2.07 in the last. Generalship, indeed, of
+the highest order was needed at the headquarters of this army. In that
+summer there was not a day except Sunday when less than seven companies
+were sent out from the city. The little knot of children that hung timidly
+to the skirts of the good minister's coat on that memorable first trip to
+Pennsylvania had been swelled until special trains, once of as many as
+eighteen cars, were in demand to carry those who came after.
+
+The plan of the Fresh Air Fund is practically unchanged from the day it
+was first conceived. The neediest and poorest are made welcome. Be they
+Protestants, Catholics, Jews, or heathen, it matters not if an invitation
+is waiting. The supply is governed entirely by the demands that come from
+the country. Sometimes it is a Catholic community that asks for children
+of that faith, sometimes prosperous Jews, who would bring sunlight and
+hope even to Ludlow Street; rarely yet Italians seeking their own. The cry
+of the missionary, from the slums in the hot July days: "How shall we give
+those babies the breath of air that means life?--no one asks for Italian
+children," has not yet been answered. Prejudice dies slowly. When an end
+has been made of this at last, the Fresh Air Fund will receive a new boom.
+To my mind there are no more tractable children than the little Italians,
+none more grateful for kindness; certainly none more in need of it.
+Against colored children there is no prejudice. Sometimes an invitation
+comes from Massachusetts or some other New England State for them, and
+then the missions and schools of Thompson Street give up their
+pickaninnies for a gleeful vacation spell. With the first spring days of
+April a canvass of the country within a radius of five hundred miles of
+New York has been begun. By the time the local committees send in their
+returns--so many children wanted in each town or district--the workers
+from the missions, the King's Daughters' circles, the hospitals,
+dispensaries, industrial schools, nurseries, kindergartens, and the other
+gates through which the children's host pours from the tenements, are at
+work, and the task of getting the little excursionists in shape for their
+holiday begins.
+
+
+[Illustration: SUMMER BOARDERS FROM MOTT STREET.]
+
+
+That is the hardest task of all. Places are found for them readily enough;
+the money to pay their way is to be had for the asking; but to satisfy the
+reasonable demand of the country hosts that their little guests shall come
+clean from their tenement homes costs an effort, how great the workers who
+go among those homes "with a Bible in one hand and a pair of scissors and
+a cake of soap in the other" know best. A physician presides over these
+necessary preliminaries. In the months of July and August he is kept
+running from church to hospital, from chapel to nursery, inspecting the
+brigades gathered there and parting the sheep from the goats. With a list
+of the houses in which the health officers report contagious diseases, he
+goes through the ranks. Any hailing from such houses--the list is brought
+up to date every morning--are rejected first. The rest as they pass in
+review are numbered 1 and 2 on the register. The No. 1's are ready to go
+at once if under the age limit of twelve years. They are the sheep, and,
+alas! few in number. Amid wailing and gnashing of teeth the cleansing of
+the goats is then begun. Heads are clipped and faces "planed off."
+Sometimes a second and a third inspection still fails to give the child a
+clean bill of entry. Just what it means is best shown by the following
+extract from a mission worker's report to Mr. Parsons, last summer, of the
+condition of her squad of 110, held under marching orders in an up-town
+chapel:
+
+"All the No. 2's have now been thoroughly oiled, larkspur'd, washed in hot
+suds, and finally had an application of exterminator. This has all been
+done in the church to be as sure as possible that they are safe to send
+away. Ninety have been thus treated." Her experience was typical. Twenty
+No. 1's in a hundred was the average given by one of the oldest workers in
+the Fresh Air Service whose field is in the East Side tenements.
+
+But all this is of the past, as are the long braids of many a little girl,
+sacrificed with tears upon the altar of the coveted holiday, when the
+procession finally starts for the depot, each happy child carrying a
+lunch-bag, for often the journey is long, though never wearisome to the
+little ones. Their chaperon--some student, missionary, teacher, or kind
+man or woman who, for sweet charity's sake, has taken upon him this
+arduous duty--awaits them and keeps the account of his charges as squad
+after squad is dropped at the station to which it is consigned. Sometimes
+the whole party goes in a lump to a common destination, more frequently
+the joyous freight is delivered, as the journey progresses, in this valley
+or that village, where wagons are waiting to receive it and carry it home.
+
+Once there, what wondrous things those little eyes behold, whose horizon
+was limited till that day, likely enough, by the gloom of the filthy
+court, or the stony street upon which it gave, with the gutter the
+boundary line between! The daisies by the roadside, with no sign to warn
+them "off the grass," the birds, the pig in its sty, the cow with its
+bell--each new marvel is hailed with screams of delight. "Sure, heaven
+can't be no nicer place than this," said a little child from one of the
+missions who for the first time saw a whole field of daisies; and her
+fellow-traveller, after watching intently a herd of cows chew the cud
+asked her host, "Say, mister, do you have to buy gum for all them cows to
+chew?"
+
+The children sent out by the Fresh Air Fund go as guests always. No penny
+of it is spent in paying for board. It goes toward paying their way only.
+Most of the railroad companies charge only one-fourth of the regular fare
+for the little picnickers up to the maximum of $3.50; beyond that they
+carry them without increase within the five hundred mile limit. Last year
+Mr. Parsons' wards were scattered over the country from the White
+Mountains in the East to Western Pennsylvania, from the lakes to West
+Virginia. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New York,
+New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia were hosts, and
+Canada entertained one large party. Ohio and North Carolina were on the
+list of entertainers, but the way was too long for the children. The
+largest party that went out comprised eleven hundred little summer
+boarders.
+
+Does any good result to the children? The physical effect may be summed up
+in Dr. Daniel's terse statement, after many years of practical interest in
+the work: "I believe the Fresh Air Fund is the best plaster we have for
+the unjust social condition of the people." She spoke as a doctor,
+familiar with the appearance of the children when they went out and when
+they came back. There are not wanting professional opinions showing most
+remarkable cures to have resulted from even this brief respite from the
+slum. The explanation is simple: it was the slum that was the real
+complaint; with it the cause was removed and improvement came with a
+bound. As to the moral and educational effect, Mr. Parsons thus answers a
+clergyman who objected that "it will only make the child discontented with
+the surroundings where God placed him:"
+
+"I contend that a great gain has been made if you can only succeed in
+making the tenement-house child thoroughly discontented with his lot.
+There is some hope then of his getting out of it and rising to a higher
+plane. The new life he sees in the country, the contact with good people,
+not at arm's length, but in their homes; not at the dinner, feast, or
+entertainment given to him while the giver stands by and looks _down_ to
+see how he enjoys it, and remarks on his forlorn appearance; but brought
+into the family and given a seat at the table, where, as one boy wrote
+home, 'I can have two pieces of pie if I want, and nobody says nothing if
+I take three pieces of cake;' or, as a little girl reported, where 'We
+have lots to eat, and so much to eat that we could not tell you how much
+we get to eat.'
+
+"This is quite a different kind of service, and has resulted in the
+complete transformation of many a child. It has gone back to its
+wretchedness, to be sure, but in hundreds of instances about which I have
+personally known, it has returned with head and heart full of new ways,
+new ideas of decent living, and has successfully taught the shiftless
+parents the better way."
+
+The host's side of it is presented by a pastor in Northern New York, whose
+people had entertained a hundred children: "They have left a rich blessing
+behind them," he wrote, "and they actually gave more than they received.
+They have touched the hearts of the people and opened the fountains of
+love, sympathy, and charity. The people have read about the importance of
+benevolence, and have heard many sermons on the beauty of charity; but
+these have been quickly forgotten. The children have been an object-lesson
+that will long live in their hearts and minds."
+
+Not least among the blessings of the Fresh Air work has been the drawing
+closer in a common interest and sympathy of the classes that are drifting
+farther and farther apart so fast, as wealth and poverty both increase
+with the growth of our great cities. Each year the invitations to the
+children have come in greater numbers. Each year the fund has grown
+larger, and as yet no collector has ever been needed or employed. "I can
+recall no community," says Mr. Parsons, "where hospitality has been given
+once, but that some children have been invited back the following years."
+In at least one instance of which he tells, the farmer's family that
+nursed a poor consumptive girl back to health and strength did entertain
+an angel unawares. They were poor themselves in their way, straining every
+nerve to save enough to pay interest on a mortgage and thus avert the sale
+of their farm. A wealthy and philanthropic lady, who became interested in
+the girl after her return from her six weeks' vacation, heard the story of
+their struggle and saved the farm in the eleventh hour.
+
+What sort of a gap the Fund sometimes bridges over the following instance
+from its report for 1891 gives a feeble idea of: "Something less than a
+year ago a boy from this family fell out of an upper-story window and was
+killed. Later on, a daughter in the same family likewise fell out of a
+window, sustaining severe injuries, but she is still alive. About this
+same time a baby came and the father had to quit work and stay at home to
+see that all was well with the mother. By the time she was well, the
+father was stricken down with a fever. On his recovery he went to hunt
+another job. On the first day at work a brick fell off a scaffold and
+fractured his skull. That night the _Tribune_ Fresh Air Fund came to the
+rescue and relieved the almost distracted mother by sending four of her
+children to the country for two weeks. The little ones made so many good
+friends that the family is now well provided for."
+
+From Mr. Parsons' record of "cases" that have multiplied in fifteen years
+until they would fill more than one stout volume, this one is taken as a
+specimen brick:
+
+In the earlier days of the work a bright boy of ten was one of a company
+invited to Schoharie County, N. Y. He endeared himself so thoroughly to
+his entertainers, who "live in a white house with green blinds and
+Christmas-trees all around it," that they asked and received permission to
+keep the lad permanently. The following is an exact copy of a part of the
+letter he wrote home after he had been for a few months in his new home:
+
+     DEAR MOTHER: i am still to Mrs. D---- and i was so Busy that i Could
+     not Write Sooner i drive the horses and put up the Cows and clean out
+     the Cow Stable i am all well i pick stones and i have an apple tree 6
+     Feet High and i have got a pair of new pants and a new Coat and a
+     pair of Suspenders and Mr. D---- is getting a pair of New Boots made
+     for me We killed one pig and one Cow i am going to plow a little
+     piece of land and plant Some Corn. When Mr. D---- killed the Cow i
+     helped and Mr. D----had to take the Cow skin to be taned to make
+     leather and Mr. D---- gave the man Cow skin for leather to make me
+     Boots i am going to school to-morrow and I want to tell
+     lizzie--pauline--Charlie--Christie--maggie--george and you to all
+     write to me and if they all do when Christmas Comes i will send all
+     of you something nice if my uncle frank comes to see yous you must
+     tell him to write to me i Close my letter
+
+     From your oldest son A----.
+
+
+A year after that time the mother died. Some time afterward an uncle began
+writing for the lad to come back to the city--he coveted his small
+earnings. But the little fellow had sense enough to see that he was better
+off where he was. Finally the uncle went after the boy, and told him his
+brother was dying in the hospital, and was calling constantly for him.
+Under such circumstances his foster parents readily gave him permission to
+return with the uncle for a visit. Before they reached the city the uncle
+told him he should never go back. He sent him to work at Eleventh Avenue
+and Twenty-ninth Street, in a workroom situated in the cellar, and his
+bedroom, like those in most tenement houses, had no outside window. The
+third day he was sent up-stairs on an errand, and as soon as he saw the
+open door he bolted. He remembered that a car that passed Fourth Street
+and Avenue C would take him to the People's Line for Albany. He ran with
+all his might to Fourth Street, and then followed the car-tracks till he
+saw on the large flag "People's Line." He told part of his story to the
+clerk, and finally added, "I am one of Mr. Parsons' Fresh-Air boys and I
+have got to go to Albany." That settled the matter, and the clerk readily
+gave him a pass. A gentleman standing by gave him a quarter for his
+supper. He held on to his appetite as well as his quarter, and in the
+morning laid his twenty-five cents before the ticket agent at Albany, and
+called for a ticket to R----, a small place fifty miles distant. He got
+the ticket. After a few miles' walk from R---- he reached his new home
+safely, and there he proposed to stay. He said he would take to the woods
+if his uncle came after him again. This happened ten years ago.
+
+About a year ago a letter came from the young fellow. He is now an active
+Christian, married, and worth property, and expects in a few years to have
+his farm all paid for.
+
+A hundred benevolent enterprises have clustered about the Fresh Air Fund
+as the years have passed, patterning after it and accepting help from it
+to carry out their own plans. Churches provide excursions for their poor
+children and the Fund pays the way. Vacations for working girls, otherwise
+out of reach, are made attainable by its intervention. An independent
+feature is the _Tribune_ Day Excursion that last summer gave nearly thirty
+thousand poor persons, young and old, a holiday at a beautiful grove on
+the Hudson, with music and milk to their hearts' desire. The expense was
+borne by a wealthy citizen of this city, who gave boats, groves, and
+entertainment free of charge, stipulating only that his name should not be
+disclosed.
+
+Other cities have followed the example of New York. Boston and
+Philadelphia have their "Country Week," fashioned after the Fresh Air Fund
+idea. Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other cities clear to San
+Francisco have sent committees to examine its workings, and deputations
+have come from Canada, from London and Manchester, where the holiday work
+is doing untold good and is counted among the most useful of philanthropic
+efforts. German, Austrian, and Italian cities have fallen into line, and
+the movement has spread even to the Sandwich Islands. Yet this great work,
+as far as New York, where it had its origin, is concerned, has never had
+organization or staff of officers of any sort. Three well-known citizens
+audit Mr. Parsons' accounts once a year. The rest he manages and always
+has managed himself. "The constitution and by-laws," he says, drily, "are
+made and amended from day to day as required, and have yet to be written."
+The Fresh Air Fund rests firmly upon a stronger foundation than any human
+law or enactment. Its charter was written in the last commandment that is
+the sum of all the rest: "That ye love one another."
+
+The method of the Fresh Air Fund was and is its great merit. Its plan,
+when first presented, was unique. There had been other and successful
+efforts before that to give the poor in their vile dwellings an outing in
+the dog days, but they took the form rather of organized charities than of
+this spontaneous outpouring of good-will and fellowship between brother
+and brother: "My house and my home are yours; come and see me!" The New
+York _Times_ had conducted a series of free excursions, and three summers
+before Mr. Parsons preached his famous sermon, the Children's Aid Society,
+that had battled for twenty years with the slum for the possession of the
+child, had established a Health Home down the Bay, to which it welcomed
+the children from its Industrial schools and the sick babies that were
+gathered in by its visiting physicians. This work has grown steadily in
+extent and importance with the new interest in the poor and their lives
+that has characterized our generation. To-day the Society conducts a
+Summer Home at Bath Beach where the girls are given a week's vacation, and
+the boys a day's outing; a cottage for crippled girls, and at Coney Island
+a Health Home for mothers with sick children. Sick and well, some ten
+thousand little ones were reached by them last year. The delight of a
+splash in the "big water" every day is the children's at Bath. Two
+hundred at a time, the boys plunge in headlong and strike out manfully for
+the Jersey shore, thirteen miles away; but the recollection of the
+merry-go-round with the marvellous wooden beasts, the camera obscura, the
+scups, and the flying machine on shore, not to mention the promised
+lemonade and cake, makes them turn back before yet they have reached the
+guard-boat where they cease to touch bottom. The girls, less boisterous,
+but quite as happy, enjoy the sight of the windmill "where they make the
+wind that makes it so nice and cool," the swings and the dinner, rarely
+forgetting, at first, after eating as much as they can possibly hold, to
+hide something away for their next meal, lest the unexampled abundance
+give out too soon. That it should last a whole week seems to them too
+unreasonable to risk.
+
+
+[Illustration: MAKING FOR THE "BIG WATER."]
+
+
+At the Health Home more than eighteen hundred sick babies were cared for
+last year. They are carried down, pale and fretful, in their mother's
+arms, and at the end of the week come back running at her side. The effect
+of the sea-air upon a child sick with the summer scourge of the tenements,
+cholera infantum, is little less than miraculous. Even a ride on a river
+ferryboat is often enough to put life into the weary little body again.
+The salt breeze no sooner fans the sunken cheeks than the fretful wail is
+hushed and the baby slumbers, quietly, restfully, to wake with a laugh and
+an appetite, on the way to recovery. The change is so sudden that even the
+mother is often deceived and runs in alarm for the doctor, thinking that
+the end is at hand.
+
+Scores of such scenes are witnessed daily in the floating hospital of St.
+John's Guild, the great marine cradle that goes down the Bay every
+week-day, save Saturday, in July and August, with hundreds upon hundreds
+of wailing babies and their mothers. Twice a week it is the west-siders'
+turn; on three days it gathers its cargo along the East River, where
+crowds with yellow tickets stand anxiously awaiting its arrival. The
+floating hospital carries its own staff of physicians, including a
+member of the Health Department's corps of tenement doctors, who is on the
+lookout for chance contagion. The summer corps is appointed by the Health
+Board upon the approach of hot weather and begins a systematic canvass of
+the tenements immediately after the Fourth of July, followed by the King's
+Daughters' nurses, who take up the doctor's work where he had to leave it.
+With his prescription pad he carries a bunch of tickets for the Floating
+Hospital, and the tickets usually give out first. Any illness that is not
+contagious is the baby's best plea for admission. It never pleads in vain,
+unless it be well and happy, and even then it is allowed to go along, if
+there is no other way for the mother to get off with its sick sister. For
+those who need more than one day's outing, the Guild maintains a Seaside
+hospital, three hours' sail down the Bay, on Staten Island, where mother
+and child may remain without a cent of charge until the rest, the fresh
+air, and the romp on the beach have given the baby back health and
+strength. Opposite the hospital, but out at sea where the breeze has free
+play over the crowded decks, the great hospital barge anchors every day
+while the hungry hosts are fed and the children given a salt-water bath on
+board.
+
+
+[Illustration: FLOATING HOSPITAL--ST. JOHN'S GUILD.]
+
+
+St. John's Guild is not, as some have supposed from its name, a
+denominational charity. It is absolutely neutral in matters of sect and
+religion, leaving the Church to take care of the soul while it heals the
+body of the child. It is so with the Bartholdi Crčche on Randall's Island,
+in the shadow of the city's Foundling Hospital, that ferries children over
+the river for a romp on the smooth, green lawns, on presentation of a
+ticket with the suggestive caution printed on the back that "all persons
+behaving rudely or taking liberties will be sent back by the first boat."
+"The Little Mothers" Aid Society follows the same plan in reaching out for
+the little home worker whose work never ends, the girl upon whom falls the
+burden and responsibility of caring for the perennial baby when scarcely
+more than a baby herself, often even the cooking and all the rest of the
+housework so that the mother may have her own hands free to help earn the
+family living. These little slaves the Society drums up, "hires" the baby
+attended in a nursery if need be, and carries the little mother off for a
+day in the woods up at Pelham Bay Park where the Park Commissioners have
+set a house on the beach apart for their use in the summer months. There
+was much opposition to this plan at first among the East Side Jews, whose
+children needed the outing more sorely than any other class; but when a
+few of the more venturesome had come back well-fed, in clean clothes,
+whereas they went out in rags, and reported that they had escaped baptism,
+the sentiment of Ludlow Street underwent a change, and so persistent were
+the raids made upon the Society's chaperones after that that they had to
+take another route for awhile, lest their resources should be swamped in a
+single trip. The United Hebrew Charities, like many other relief societies
+with a special field, provide semi-weekly excursions for the poorest of
+their own people, and maintain a sea-side sanitarium for the sick
+children.
+
+There is no lack of fresh air charities nowadays. Their number is
+increasing year by year and so is their helpfulness, though it has come to
+a pass where it is necessary to exercise some care to prevent them from
+lapping over, as Sunday School Christmas-trees have been known to do, and
+opening the way for mischief. There can be no doubt that their civilizing
+influence is great. It could hardly be otherwise, with the same lessons
+of cleanliness and decency enforced year after year. The testimony is that
+there is an improvement; the children come better "groomed" for
+inspection. The lesson has reached the mother and the home. The subtler
+lesson of the flowers, the fields, the sky, and the sea, and of the
+kindness that asked no reward, has not been lost either. One very striking
+fact this charity has brought out that is most hopeful. It emphasizes the
+difference I pointed out between the material we have here to work upon in
+these children and that which is the despair of philanthropists abroad, in
+England for instance. We are told of children there who, coming from their
+alleys into the field, "are able to feel no touch of kinship between
+themselves and Mother Nature"[19] when brought into her very presence. Not
+so with ours. They may "guess" that the sea is salt because it is full of
+codfish; may insist that the potatoes are home-made "cause I seen the
+garding;" both of which were actual opinions expressed by the Bath Beach
+summer boarders; but the interest, the sympathy, the hearty appreciation
+of it, is there always, the most encouraging symptom of all. Down in the
+worst little ruffian's soul there is, after all, a tender spot not yet
+pre-empted by the slum. And Mother Nature touches it at once. They are
+chums on the minute.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES
+
+
+If the influence of an annual cleaning up is thus distinctly traced in the
+lives of the children, what must be the effect of the daily teaching of
+the kindergarten, in which soap is always the moral agent that leads all
+the rest? I have before me the inventory of purchases for a single school
+of this kind that was started a year ago in a third loft of a Suffolk
+Street tenement. It included several boxes of soap and soap-dishes, 200
+feet of rope, 10 bean-bags, 24 tops, 200 marbles, a box of chalk, a
+base-ball outfit for indoor use, a supply of tiddledywinks and "sliced
+animals," and 20 clay pipes. The pipes were not for lessons in smoking,
+but to smooth the way for a closer acquaintance with the soap by the
+friendly intervention of the soap-bubble. There were other games and no
+end of colored paper to cut up, the dear delight of childhood, but made in
+the hands and under the eyes of the teacher to train eye and hand while
+gently but firmly cementing the friendship ushered in by the gorgeous
+bubble. No wonder, with such a stock, a mother complained that she had to
+whip her Jimmie to keep him home.
+
+Without a doubt the kindergarten is one of the longest steps forward that
+has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for in gathering in the
+children it is gradually, but surely, conquering also the street with its
+power for mischief. There is only one force that, to my mind, exerts an
+even stronger influence upon the boys' lives especially; I mean the club,
+of which I shall speak presently. But that comes at a later stage. The
+kindergarten begins at the very beginning, and in the best of all ways,
+with the children's play. What it does, counts at both ends on that tack.
+Very soon it makes itself felt in the street and in what goes on there, as
+anyone can see for himself by observing the children's play in a tenement
+neighborhood where there is a kindergarten and again where there is none,
+while by imperceptibly turning the play into work that teaches habits of
+observation and of industry that stick, it builds a strong barrier against
+the doctrine of the slum that the world owes one a living, which lies in
+ambush for the lad on every grog-shop corner. And all corners in the
+tenement districts are grog-shop corners. Beyond all other considerations,
+beyond its now admitted function as the right beginning of all education,
+whether of rich or poor, its war upon the street stands to me as the true
+office of the kindergarten in a city like New York, with a tenement-house
+population of a million and a quarter souls.[20] The street itself owns
+it, with virtual surrender. Hostile as its normal attitude is to every new
+agency of reform, the best with the worst, I have yet to hear of the first
+instance in which a kindergarten has been molested by the toughest
+neighborhood, or has started a single dead cat on a post-mortem career of
+window-smashing, whether it sprang from Christian, Jewish, or heathen
+humanity. There is scarce a mission or a boy's club in the city that can
+say as much.
+
+The kindergarten is no longer an experiment in New York. Probably as many
+as a hundred are to-day in operation, or will be when the recently
+expressed purpose of the Board of Education to make the kindergarten a
+part of the public school system has been fully carried out. The
+Children's Aid Society alone conducts a dozen in connection with its
+industrial schools, and the New York Kindergarten Association nine, if its
+intention of opening two new schools by the time this book is in the
+printer's hands is realized. There is no theology, though there is a heap
+of religion in most of them. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Theosophists,
+and Ethical Culturists, if I may so call them, men of one or of various
+opinions, or of none, concerning the hereafter, alike make use of the
+kindergarten as a means of reaching and saving the shipwrecked of the
+present. Sometimes the Sunday School is made to serve as a feeder for the
+kindergarten, or the kindergarten for the Sunday School. Sometimes the
+wisdom that wrests success from doubt and perplexity is expressed in the
+fundamental resolution that the kindergarten "shall not be a Sunday
+School." The system is the same in all cases with very little change. "We
+have tried it and seen it tried with various kinks and variations," said
+one of the old managers of the Children's Aid Society to me, "but after
+all there is only one way, the way of the great kindergartner who said,
+'We learn by doing.'"
+
+A clean face is the ticket of admission to the kindergarten. A clean or
+whole frock is wisely not insisted upon too firmly at the start; torn or
+dirty clothes are not so easily mended as a smudged face, but the
+kindergarten reaches that too in the end, and by the same road as the
+Fresh Air scrubbing--the home. Once he is let in, the child is in for a
+general good time that has little of school or visible discipline to
+frighten him. He joins in the ring for the familiar games, delighted to
+find that the teacher knows them too, and can be "It" and his "fair lady"
+in her turn. He does not notice the little changes the game has undergone,
+the kindergarten touch here and there that lifts it out of the mud; but
+the street does presently, when the new version is transferred to it, and
+is the better for it. After the game there are a hundred things for him to
+do that do not seem like work in the least. Between threading colored
+beads, cutting and folding pink and green papers in all sorts of odd
+ways, as boats and butterflies and fancy baskets; moulding, pasting,
+drawing, weaving and blowing soap-bubbles when all the rest has ceased to
+hold his attention, the day slips by like a beautiful dream, and he flatly
+refuses to believe that it is gone when the tenement home claims him
+again. Not infrequently he goes home howling, to be found the next morning
+waiting at the door an hour before the teacher comes. Little Jimmie's
+mother says that he gets up at six o'clock to go to the Fifty-first Street
+kindergarten, and that she has to whip him to make him wait until nine.
+
+
+[Illustration: PLAYING AT HOUSEKEEPING.]
+
+
+The hours pass with happy play that slowly but surely moulds head, hand,
+and heart together. The utmost freedom is allowed, but it stops short of
+the license of the street. Its law of violence is replaced by the law of
+love. The child learns to govern himself. Not at once; I observed two or
+three black eyes during a tour of a half-score kindergartens, last June,
+that showed that the street yielded its reign reluctantly. During my visit
+to the East Sixty-third Street school I became interested in a little
+fellow who was its special pet and the ward of the Alumnć of the Normal
+college, who through the New York Kindergarten Association had established
+and maintained the school. Johnny was a sweet little fellow, one of eight
+children from a wretched tenement home down the street into which the
+kindergartner had found her way. The youngest of the eight was a baby that
+was getting so big and heavy that it half killed the mother to drag it
+around when she went out working, and the father, with a consideration for
+her that was generously tempered with laziness, was considering the
+advisability of staying home to take care of it himself, "so as to give
+her a show." There was a refinement of look and manner, if not of dress,
+about little Johnny after he was washed clean, that made the tenement
+setting seem entirely too plebeian for him, and his rescuers had high
+hopes of his future. I regret to say that I saw the pet, before I left,
+deliberately knock the smallest baby in the school down, and when he was
+banished from the ring in consequence and condemned to take his howling
+playmate over in the corner and show her pictures until he repented, take
+an unworthy revenge by pinching her surreptitiously until she howled
+louder. Worse than that, when the baby had finally been comforted with a
+headless but squeaking toy sheep, he secretly pulled the insides and the
+ba-a out of the lambkin through its broken neck, when no one was looking.
+I was told that Johnny was believed to have the making of a diplomat in
+his little five-year-old body, and I think it very likely--of a politician
+anyway.
+
+While this was going on, another boy, twice as large as Johnny, had been
+temporarily exiled from the ring for clumsiness. It was even more
+hopelessly constitutional, to all appearances, than Johnny's Machiavelian
+cunning. In the game he had persistently stumbled over his own feet. Made
+to take a seat at the long table, he fell off his chair twice in one
+minute from sheer embarrassment. In luminous contrast to his awkwardness
+was the desperate agility of a little Irishman I had just left in another
+kindergarten. Each time he was told to take his seat, which was about
+every ten seconds, he would perform the feat with great readiness by
+climbing over the back of the chair as a dog climbs over a fence, to the
+consternation of the teacher, whose reproachful "O Alexander!" he disarmed
+with a cheerful "I'm all right, Miss Brown," and an offer to shake hands.
+
+Let it not be inferred from this that the kindergarten is the home of
+disorder. Just the reverse. Order and prompt obedience are the cardinal
+virtues taught there, but taught in such a way as to make the lesson seem
+all fun and play to the child. It sticks all the better. It is the
+province of the kindergarten to rediscover, as it were, the natural
+feelings the tenement had smothered. But for its appeal, the love of the
+beautiful might slumber in those children forever. In their homes there is
+nothing to call it into life. The ideal of the street is caricature,
+burlesque, if nothing worse. Under the gentle training of the
+kindergartner the slumbering instinct blossoms forth in a hundred
+different ways, from the day the little one first learns the difference
+between green and red by stringing colored beads for a necklace "for
+teacher," until later on he is taught to make really pretty things of
+pasteboard and chips to take home for papa and mamma to keep. And they do
+keep them, proud of the child--who would not?--and their influence is felt
+where mayhap there was darkness and dirt only before. So the kindergarten
+reaches directly into the home, too, and thither follows the teacher, if
+she is the right kind, with encouragement and advice that is not lost
+either. No door is barred against her who comes in the children's name. In
+the truest and best sense she is a missionary to the poor.
+
+Nearly all the kindergartens in this city are crowded. Many have scores of
+applicants upon the register whom they cannot receive. There are no
+truants among their pupils. All of the New York Kindergarten Association's
+schools are crowded, and new are added as fast as the necessary funds are
+contributed. The Association was organized in the fall of 1889 with the
+avowed purpose of engrafting the kindergarten upon the public school
+system of the city, through persistent agitation. There had been no
+official recognition of it up till that time. The Normal School
+kindergarten was an experiment not countenanced by the School Board. The
+Association has now accomplished its purpose, but its work, far from being
+ended, has but just begun. It is doubtful if all the kindergartens in the
+city, including those now in the public schools, accommodate much more
+than five or six thousand children, if that number. The last sanitary
+census showed that there were 160,708 children under five years old in the
+tenements. At least half of these are old enough to be in a kindergarten,
+and ought to be, seeing how little schooling they will get after they
+outgrow it. That leaves in round numbers 75,000 children yet to be so
+provided for in New York's tenements. There is no danger that the
+kindergarten will become too "common" in this city for a while yet. As an
+adjunct to the public school in preparing the young minds for more serious
+tasks, it is admitted by teachers to be most valuable. But its greatest
+success is as a jail deliverer. "The more kindergartens the fewer prisons"
+is a saying the truth of which the generation that comes after us will be
+better able to grasp than we.
+
+The kindergarten is the city's best truant officer. Not only has it no
+truants itself, but it ferrets out a lot who are truants from necessity,
+not from choice, and delivers them over to the public school. There are
+lots of children who are kept at home because someone has to mind the baby
+while father and mother earn the bread for the little mouths. The
+kindergarten steps in and releases these little prisoners. If the baby is
+old enough to hop around with the rest, the kindergarten takes it. If it
+can only crawl and coo, there is the nursery annex. Sometimes it is an
+independent concern. Almost every church or charity that comes into
+direct touch with the poor has nowadays its nursery where poor mothers may
+leave their children to be cared for while they are out working. Relief
+more practical could not be devised. A small fee, usually five cents, is
+charged as a rule for each baby. Pairs come cheaper, and three go for ten
+cents at the nursery in the Wilson mission. Over 50,000 babies were
+registered there last year, which meant, if not 5,000 separate children,
+at least 5,000 days' work and wages to poor mothers in dire need of both,
+and a good, clean, healthy start for the infants, a better than the
+tenement could have given them. To keep them busy, when the rocking-horse
+and the picture-book have lost their charm, the kindergarten grows
+naturally out of the nursery, where that was the beginning, just as the
+nursery stepped in to supplement the kindergarten where that had the lead.
+The two go hand in hand. The soap cure is even more potent in the nursery
+than in the kindergarten, as a silent rebuke to the mother, who rarely
+fails to take the hint. At the Five Points House of Industry the children
+who come in for the day receive a general scrubbing twice a week, and the
+whole neighborhood has a cleaner look after it. The establishment has come
+to be known among the ragamuffins of Paradise Park as "the school where
+dey washes 'em." Its value as a moral agent may be judged from the
+statements of the Superintendent that some of the children "cried at the
+sight of a washtub," as if it were some new and hideous instrument of
+torture for their oppression.
+
+Private benevolence in this, as in all measures for the relief of the
+poor, has been a long way ahead of public action; properly so, though it
+has seemed sometimes that we might as a body make a little more haste and
+try to catch up. It has lately, by the establishment of children's
+play-grounds in certain tenement districts, west and east, provided a kind
+of open-air kindergarten that has hit the street in a vital spot. These
+play-grounds do not take the place of the small parks which the city has
+neglected to provide, but they show what a boon these will be some day.
+There are at present, as far as I know, three of them, not counting the
+back-yard "beaches" and "Coney Islands," that have made the practical
+missionaries of the College Settlement, the King's Daughters' Tenement
+Chapter, and like helpers of the poor, solid with their little friends.
+One of them, the largest, is in Ninety-second Street, on the East Side,
+another at the foot of West Fiftieth Street, and still another in West
+Twenty-eighth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the block long
+since well named Poverty Gap. Two, three, or half a dozen vacant lots,
+borrowed or leased of the owner, have been levelled out, a few loads of
+sand dumped in them for the children to dig in; scups, swings, and
+see-saws, built of rough timber; a hydrant in the corner; little
+wheelbarrows, toy-spades and pails to go round, and the outfit is
+complete. Two at least of the three are supported each by a single
+generous woman, who pays the salaries of a man janitor and of two women
+"teachers" who join in the children's play, strike up "America" and the
+"Star Spangled Banner" when they tire of "Sally in our Alley" and
+"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," and by generally taking a hand in what goes on
+manage to steer it into safe and mannerly ways.
+
+
+[Illustration: POVERTY GAPPERS PLAYING CONEY ISLAND.]
+
+
+More than two hundred children were digging, swinging, see-sawing, and
+cavorting about the Poverty Gap playground when I looked in on a hot
+Saturday afternoon last July. Long files of eager girls, whose shrill
+voices used to make the echoes of the Gap ring with angry clamor, awaited
+their turn at the scups, quiet as mice and without an ill word when they
+trod upon each other's toes. The street that used to swarm with
+mischievous imps was as quiet as a church. The policeman on the beat stood
+swinging his club idly in the gate. It was within sight of this spot that
+the Alley Gang beat one of his comrades half to death for telling them to
+go home and let decent people pass; the same gang which afterward murdered
+young Healey for the offence of being a decent, hard-working lad, who was
+trying to support his aged father and mother by his work. The Healeys
+lived in one of the rear houses that stood where the children now skip at
+their play, and the murder was done on his doorstep. The next morning I
+found the gang camping on a vacant floor in the adjoining den, as if
+nothing had happened. The tenants knew the toughs were there, but were
+afraid of betraying them. All that was only a couple of years ago; but a
+marvellous transformation had been wrought in the Gap. The toughs were
+gone, with the old tenements that harbored them. Poverty Gap itself was
+gone. A decent flat had taken the place of the shanty across the street
+where a 'longshoreman kicked his wife to death in drunken rage. And this
+play-ground, with its swarms of happy children who a year ago would have
+pelted the stranger with mud from behind the nearest truck--that was the
+greatest change of all. The retiring toughs have dubbed it "Holy Terror
+Park" in memory of what it was, not of what it is. Poverty Park the
+policeman called it, with more reason. It was not exactly an attractive
+place. A single stunted ailanthus tree struggled over the fence of the
+adjoining yard, the one green spot between ugly and ragged brick walls.
+The "sand" was as yet all mud and dirt, and the dust the many little feet
+kicked up was smothering. But the children thought it lovely, and lovely
+it was for Poverty Gap, if not for Fifth Avenue.
+
+
+[Illustration: POVERTY GAP TRANSFORMED--THE SPOT WHERE YOUNG HEALEY WAS
+MURDERED IS NOW A PLAYGROUND.]
+
+
+I came back to my office to find a letter there from a rich man who lives
+on the Avenue, offering to make another Poverty Park for the
+tenement-house children of another street, if he had to buy the lots. I
+told him the story of Poverty Gap and bade him go and see for himself if
+he could spend his money to better purpose. There are no play-grounds yet
+below Fourteenth Street and room and need for fifty. The Alley and the
+Avenue could not meet on a plane that argues better for the understanding
+between the two that has been too long and needlessly delayed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS
+
+
+That "dirt is a disease," and their mission to cure it, was the new gospel
+which the managers of the Children's Aid Society carried to the slums a
+generation ago. In practice they have not departed from their profession.
+Their pill is the Industrial School, their plaster a Western farm and a
+living chance in exchange for the tenement and the city slum. The
+wonder-cures they have wrought by such simple treatment have been many. In
+the executive chair of a sovereign State sits to-day a young man who
+remembers with gratitude and pride the day they took him in hand and, of
+the material the street would have moulded into a tough, made an honorable
+man and a governor. And from among the men whose careers of usefulness
+began in the Society's schools, and who to-day, as teachers, ministers,
+lawyers, and editors, are conspicuous ornaments of the communities, far
+and near, in which they have made their homes, he would have no difficulty
+in choosing a cabinet that would do credit and honor to his government.
+Prouder monument could be erected to no man's memory than this record at
+the grave of the late Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's
+Aid Society.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE LATE CHARLES LORING BRACE, FOUNDER OF THE CHILDREN'S
+AID SOCIETY.]
+
+
+The Industrial School plants itself squarely in the gap between the
+tenement and the public school. If it does not fill it, it at least
+spreads itself over as much of it as it can, and in that position
+demonstrates that this land of lost or missing opportunities is not the
+barren ground once supposed, but of all soil the most fruitful, if
+properly tilled. Wherever the greatest and the poorest crowds are, there
+also is the Industrial School. The Children's Aid Society maintains
+twenty-one in seventeen of the city's twenty-four wards, not counting
+twelve evening schools, five of which are in the Society's
+lodging-houses. It is not alone in the field. The American Female Guardian
+Society conducts twelve such day schools, and individual efforts in the
+same direction are not wanting. The two societies' schools last year
+reached a total enrolment of nearly fifteen thousand children, and an
+average attendance of almost half that number. Slum children, all of them.
+Only such are sought and admitted. The purpose of the schools, in the
+language of the last report of the Children's Aid Society, whose work,
+still carried on with the aggressive enthusiasm that characterized its
+founder, may well be taken as typical and representative in this field,
+"is to receive and educate children who cannot be accepted by the public
+schools, either by reason of their ragged and dirty condition, or owing to
+the fact that they can attend but part of the time, because they are
+obliged to sell papers or to stay at home to help their parents. The
+children at our schools belong to the lowest and poorest class of people
+in the city." They are children, therefore, who to a very large extent
+speak another language at home than the one they come to the school to
+learn, and often have to work their way in by pantomime. It is encouraging
+to know that these schools are almost always crowded to their utmost
+capacity.
+
+A census of the Society's twenty-one day schools, that was taken last
+April, showed that they contained that day 5,132 pupils, of whom 198 were
+kindergarten children under five years of age, 2,347 between five and
+seven, and 2,587 between eight and fourteen years of age. Considerably
+more than ten per cent.--the exact number was 571--did not understand
+questions put to them in English. They were there waiting to "catch on,"
+silent but attentive observers of what was going on, until such time as
+they should be ready to take a hand in it themselves. Divided according to
+nativity, 2,082 of the children were found to be of foreign birth. They
+hailed from 22 different countries; 3,050 were born in this country, but
+they were able to show only 1,009 native parents out of 6,991 whose
+pedigrees could be obtained. The other 5,176 were foreign born, and only
+810 of them claimed English as their mother-tongue. This was the showing
+the chief nationalities made in the census:
+
+  -------------+---------+--------
+    Born in.   |Children.|Parents.
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  United States|  3,050  | 1,009
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Italy        |  1,066  | 2,354
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Germany      |    460  | 1,819
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Bohemia      |    198  |   720
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Ireland      |     98  |   583
+  -------------+---------+--------
+
+
+At that time the Jewish children were crowding into the Monroe Street and
+some other schools, at a rate that promised to put them in complete
+possession before long. Upon this lowest level, as upon every other where
+they come into competition with the children of Christian parents, they
+distanced them easily, taking all the prizes that were to be had for
+regular attendance, proficiency in studies, and good conduct generally.
+Generally these prizes consisted of shoes or much-needed clothing. Often,
+as in the Monroe Street School, the bitter poverty of the homes that gave
+up the children to the school because there they would receive the one
+square meal of the day, made a loaf of bread the most acceptable reward,
+and the teachers gladly took advantage of it as the means of forging
+another link in the chain to bind home and school, parents, children, and
+teachers, firmly together.
+
+This "square meal" is a chief element in the educational plan of most of
+the schools, because very often it is the one hot meal the little ones
+receive--not infrequently, as I have said, the only one of the day that is
+worthy of the name. It is not an elaborate or expensive affair, though
+substantial and plentiful. At the West Side Industrial School, on Seventh
+Avenue, where one day, not long ago, I watched a file of youngsters
+crowding into the dining-room with glistening eyes and happy faces, the
+cost of the dinners averaged 2-1/2 cents last year. In a specimen month
+they served there 4,080 meals and compared this showing gleefully with the
+record of the old School in Twenty-ninth Street, nine years before. The
+largest number of dinners served there in any one month, was 2,666. It is
+perhaps a somewhat novel way of measuring the progress of a school: by the
+amount of eating done on the premises. But it is a very practical one, as
+the teachers have found out. Yet it is not used as a bait. Care is taken
+that only those are fed who would otherwise go without their dinner, and
+it is served only in winter, when the need of "something warm" is
+imperative. In the West Side School, as in most of the others, the dinners
+are furnished by some one or more practical philanthropists, whose pockets
+as well as their hearts are in the work. The schools themselves, like the
+Society's lodging-houses for homeless children, stand as lasting monuments
+to a Christian charity that asks no other reward than the consciousness of
+having done good where the need was great. Sometimes the very name of the
+generous giver is unknown to all the world save the men who built as he or
+she directed. The benefactor is quite as often a devoted woman as a rich
+and charitable man, who hides his munificence under a modesty unsuspected
+by a community that applauds and envies his shrewd and successful
+business ventures, but never hears of the investment that paid him and it
+best of all.
+
+According to its location, the school is distinctively Italian, Bohemian,
+Hebrew or mixed; the German, Irish, and colored children coming in under
+this head, and mingling usually without the least friction. The Leonard
+Street School and the West Side Italian School in Sullivan Street are
+devoted wholly to the little swarthy Southerners. In the Leonard Street
+School alone there were between five and six hundred Italian children on
+the register last year; but in the Beach Street School, and in the Astor
+Memorial School in Mott Street they are fast crowding the Irish element,
+that used to possess the land, to the wall. So, in Monroe Street and East
+Broadway are the Jewish children. Neither the teachers nor the Society's
+managers are in any danger of falling into sleepy routine ways. The
+conditions with which they have to deal are constantly changing; new
+problems are given them to solve before the old are fairly worked out, old
+prejudices to be forgotten or worked over into a new and helpful interest.
+And they do it bravely, and are more than repaid for their devotion by the
+real influence they find themselves exerting upon the young lives which
+had never before felt the touch of genuine humane sympathy, or been
+awakened to the knowledge that somebody cared for them outside of their
+own dark slum.
+
+All the children are not as tractable as the Russian Jews or the Italians.
+The little Irishman, brimful of mischief, is, like his father, in the
+school and in the street, "ag'in' the government" on general principles,
+though in a jovial way that often makes it hard to sit in judgment on his
+tricks with serious mien. He feels, too, that to a certain extent he has
+the sympathy of his father in his unregenerate state, and is the more to
+be commended if he subdues the old Adam in himself and allows the
+instruction to proceed. The hardest of them all to deal with, until he has
+been won over as a friend and ally, is perhaps the Bohemian child. He
+inherits, with some of his father's obstinacy, all of his hardships, his
+bitter poverty and grinding work. School to him is merely a change of
+tasks in an unceasing round that leaves no room for play. If he lingers on
+the way home to take a hand in a stolen game of ball, the mother is
+speedily on his track. Her instruction to the teacher is not to let the
+child stay "a minute after three o'clock." He is wanted at home to roll
+cigars or strip tobacco-leaves for his father, while the mother gets the
+evening meal ready. The Bohemian has his own cause for the reserve that
+keeps him a stranger in a strange land after living half his life among
+us; his reception has not been altogether hospitable, and it is not only
+his hard language and his sullen moods that are to blame. All the better
+he knows the value of the privilege that is offered his child, and will
+"drive him to school with sticks" if need be; an introduction that might
+be held to account for a good deal of reasonable reluctance, even
+hostility to the school, in the pupil. The teacher has only to threaten
+the intractable ones with being sent home to bring them round. And yet, it
+is not that they are often cruelly treated there. On the contrary, the
+Bohemian is an exceptionally tender and loving father, perhaps because his
+whole life is lived with his family at home, in the tenement that is his
+shop and his world. He simply proposes that his child shall enjoy the
+advantages that are denied him--denied partly perhaps because of his
+refusal to accept them, but still from his point of view denied. And he
+takes a short cut to that goal by sending the child to school. The result
+is that the old Bohemian disappears in the first generation born upon our
+soil. His temper remains to some extent, it is true. He still has his
+surly streaks, refuses to sing or recite in school when the teacher or
+something else does not suit him, and can never be driven where yet he is
+easily led; but as he graduates into the public school and is thrown more
+into contact with the children of more light-hearted nationalities, he
+grows into that which his father would have long since become, had he not
+got a wrong start: a loyal American, proud of his country, and a useful
+citizen.
+
+In the school in East Seventy-third Street, of which I am thinking, there
+was last winter, besides the day school of some four hundred pupils, an
+evening class of big factory girls, most of them women grown, that vividly
+illustrated the difficulties that beset teaching in the Bohemian quarter.
+It had been got together with much difficulty by the principal and one of
+the officers of the Society, who gave up his nights and his own home life
+to the work of instructing the school. On the night when it opened, he was
+annoyed by a smell of tobacco in the hallways and took the janitor to task
+for smoking in the building. The man denied the charge, and Mr. H---- went
+hunting through the house for the offender with growing indignation, as he
+found the teachers in the class-rooms sneezing and sniffing the air to
+locate the source of the infliction. It was not until later in the
+evening, when the sneezing fit took him too as he was bending over a group
+of the girls to examine their slates, that he discovered it to be a
+feature of the new enterprise. The perfume was part of the school. Without
+it, it could not go on. The girls were all cigar makers; so were their
+parents at home. The shop and the tenement were organized on the tobacco
+plan, and the school must needs adopt it with what patience it could, if
+its business were to proceed.
+
+It did, and got on fairly well until a reporter found his way into it and
+roused the resentment of the girls by some inconsiderate, if well-meant,
+criticisms of their ways. The rebellion he caused was quelled with
+difficulty by Mr. H----, who re-established his influence over them at
+this point and gained their confidence by going to live among them in the
+school-house with his family. Still the sullen moods, the nightly
+ructions. The girls were as ready to fight as to write, in their fits of
+angry spite, until my friend was almost ready to declare with the angry
+Irishman, that he would have peace in the house if he had to whip all
+hands to get it. Christmas was at hand with its message of peace and
+good-will, but the school was more than usually unruly, when one night, in
+despair, he started to read a story to them to lay the storm. It was Hans
+Christian Andersen's story of the little girl who sold matches and lighted
+her way to mother and heaven with them as she sat lonely and starved,
+freezing to death in the street on New Year's eve. As match after match
+went out with the pictures of home, of warmth, and brightness it had shown
+the child, and her trembling fingers fumbled eagerly with the bunch to
+call them back, a breathless hush fell upon the class, and when the story
+was ended, and Mr. H---- looked up with misty eyes, he found the whole
+class in tears. The picture of friendless poverty, more bitterly desolate
+than any even they had known, had gone to their hearts and melted them.
+The crisis was passed and peace restored.
+
+A crisis of another kind came later, when the pupils' "young men" got into
+the habit of coming to see the girls home. They waited outside until
+school was dismissed, and night after night Mr. H---- found a ball in
+progress on the sidewalk when the girls should long have been home. The
+mothers complained and the success of the class was imperilled. Their
+passion for dancing was not to be overcome. They would give up the school
+first. Mr. H---- thought the matter out and took a long step--a perilous
+one. He started a dancing-class, and on certain nights in the week taught
+the girls the lanciers instead of writing and spelling. Simultaneously he
+wrote to every mother that the school was not to be blamed if the girls
+were not home at ten minutes after nine o'clock; it was dismissed at 8.55
+sharp every night. The thing took tremendously. The class filled right up,
+complaints ceased, and everything was lovely, when examination day
+approached with the annual visit of friends and patrons. My friend awaited
+its coming with fear and trembling. There was no telling what the
+committee might say to the innovation. The educational plan of the Society
+is most liberal, but the lanciers was a step even the broadest of its
+pedagogues had not yet ventured upon. The evil day came at last, and, full
+of forebodings, Mr. H---- had the girls soothe their guests with cakes and
+lemonade of their own brewing, until they were in a most amiable mood.
+Then, when they expected the reading to begin, with a sinking heart he
+bade them dance. The visitors stared in momentary amazement, but at the
+sight of the happy faces in the quadrilles, and the enthusiasm of the
+girls, they caught the spirit of the thing and applauded to the echo. The
+dancing-class was a success, and so has the school been ever since.
+
+As far as I know, this is the only instance in which the quadrille has
+been made one of the regular English branches taught in the Industrial
+Schools. But cake and lemonade have more than once smoothed the way to a
+hearty acceptance of the three R's with their useful concomitants, as
+taught there. One of the excellent features of the system is the "kitchen
+garden," for the little ones, a kind of play housekeeping that covers the
+whole range of house-work, and the cooking class for the larger girls that
+gives many of them a taste for housekeeping which helps to overcome their
+prejudice against domestic service, and so to solve one of the most
+perplexing questions of the day--no less serious to the children of the
+poor than to the wives of the rich, if they only knew or would believe it.
+It is the custom of the wise teachers, when the class has become
+proficient, to invite the mothers to a luncheon gotten up by their
+children. "I never," reports the teacher of the Eighteenth Ward Industrial
+School after such a session, "saw women so thoroughly interested." And it
+was not only the mother who was thus won over in the pride over her
+daughter's achievement. It was the home itself that was invaded with
+influences that had been strangers to it heretofore. For the mother
+learned something she would not be apt to forget, by seeing her child do
+intelligently and economically what she had herself done ignorantly and
+wastefully before. Poverty and waste go always hand in hand. The girls are
+taught, with the doing of a thing, enough also of the chemistry of cooking
+to enable them to understand the "why" of it. The influence of that sort
+of teaching in the tenement of the poor no man can measure. I am well
+persuaded that half of the drunkenness that makes so many homes miserable
+is at least encouraged, if not directly caused, by the mismanagement and
+bad cooking at home. All the wife and mother knows about housekeeping she
+has picked up in the tenement since she was married, among those who
+never knew how to cook a decent meal or set a clean table; while the
+saloonkeeper hires the best cook he can get for money, and serves his hot
+lunch free to her husband in a tidy and cheerful room, where no tired
+women--tired of the trials and squabbles of the day--no cross looks, and
+no dirty, fighting children come to spoil his appetite and his hour of
+rest.
+
+Here, as everywhere, it is the personal influence of the teacher that
+counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home,
+and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the
+way of trouble and sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred
+ways. "Sometimes," says one of the teachers, who has seen the children of
+her first pupils go from her school into their own homes to take up the
+battle of life, "sometimes a teacher, while conducting a class, is also
+fashioning, from some soft white material, a shroud for some little one
+whose parents can provide none themselves. When a child dies of a disease
+that is not contagious, its classmates gather around the coffin and sing
+in German or English, 'I am Jesus's little lamb.' Sometimes the children's
+hymn and the Lord's Prayer are the only service." Her life work has been
+among the poorest Germans on the East Side. "Among our young men," she
+reports, "I know of only three who have become drunkards, and many are
+stanch temperance men. I have never known of one of our girls drinking to
+excess. I have looked carefully over our records, and can truly say that,
+so far as I can learn, not one girl who remained with us until over
+seventeen lived a life of shame."
+
+What teaching meant to this woman the statement that follows gives an idea
+of: "Shrove Tuesday evening is a time when all Germans plan for a frolic;
+they call it 'Fastnacht.' Twenty years ago I gave the young people of the
+evening school a party on that evening, and at the suggestion of one of
+the girls decided to have a reunion every year at that time. So each year
+our married girls and boys, and those still unmarried, who have grown
+beyond us in other ways, come 'home.' We sing the old songs, talk over old
+times, play games, drink coffee and eat doughnuts, and always end the
+evening with 'Auld Lang Syne.' Last spring, two of the young men stood at
+the stairway and counted the guests as they went to the supper-room: they
+reported over four hundred. Letters came from Boston, Chicago,
+Philadelphia, Washington, Texas, Idaho, and Wyoming from those who would
+gladly have been with us. All who live within a radius of fifty miles try
+to be here."
+
+"Among our grown girls," she adds, "we have teachers, governesses,
+dressmakers, milliners, trained nurses, machine operators, hand sewers,
+embroiderers, designers for embroidering, servants in families,
+saleswomen, book-keepers, typewriters, candy packers, bric-ŕ-brac packers,
+bank-note printers, silk winders, button makers, box makers, hairdressers,
+and fur sewers. Among our boys are book-keepers, workers in stained glass,
+painters, printers, lithographers, salesmen in wholesale houses, as well
+as in many of our largest retail stores, typewriters, stenographers,
+commission merchants, farmers, electricians, ship carpenters, foremen in
+factories, grocers, carpet designers, silver engravers, metal burnishers,
+carpenters, masons, carpet weavers, plumbers, stone workers, cigar makers,
+and cigar packers. Only one of our boys, so far as we can learn, ever sold
+liquor, and he has given it up."
+
+Not a few of these, without a doubt, got the first inkling of their trade
+in the class where they learned to read. The curriculum of the Industrial
+Schools is comprehensive. The nationality of the pupils makes little or no
+difference in it. The start, as often as is necessary, is made with an
+object lesson--soap and water being the elements, and the child the
+object. As in the kindergarten, the alphabet comes second on the list.
+Then follow lessons in sewing, cooking, darning, mat-weaving, pasting, and
+dressmaking for the girls, and in carpentry, wood carving, drawing,
+printing, and like practical "branches" for the boys, not a few of whom
+develop surprising cleverness at this or that kind of work. The system is
+continually expanding. There are schools yet that have not the necessary
+facilities for classes in manual training, but as the importance of the
+subject is getting to be more clearly understood, and interest in the
+subject grows, new "shops" are being constantly opened and other
+occupations found for the children. Even where the school quarters are
+most pinched and inadequate, a shift is made to give the children work to
+do that will teach them habits of industry and precision as the
+all-important lesson to be learned there. In some of the Industrial
+Schools the boys learn to cook with the girls, and in the West Side
+Italian School an attempt to teach them to patch and sew buttons on their
+own jackets resulted last year in their making their own shirts, and
+making them well, too. Perhaps the possession of the shirt as a reward for
+making it acted as a stimulus. The teacher thought so, and she was
+probably right, for more than one of them had never owned a whole shirt
+before, let alone a clean one. A heap can be done with the children by
+appealing to their proper pride--much more than many might think, judging
+hastily from their rags. Call it vanity--if it is a kind of vanity that
+can be made a stepping-stone to the rescue of the child, it is worth
+laying hold of. It was distinct evidence that civilization and the
+nineteenth century had invaded Lewis Street, when a class of Hungarian
+boys in the American Female Guardian Society's school in that thoroughfare
+earned the name of the "neck-tie class" by adopting that article of
+apparel in a body. None of them had ever known collar or necktie before.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST PATRIOTIC ELECTION IN THE BEACH STREET INDUSTRIAL
+SCHOOL--PARLOR IN JOHN ERICSSON'S OLD HOUSE.]
+
+
+It is the practice to let the girls have what garments they make, from
+material, old or new, furnished by the school, and thus a good many of the
+pupils in the Industrial Schools are supplied with decent clothing. In the
+winter especially, some of them need it sadly. In the Italian school of
+which I just spoke, one of the teachers found a little girl of six years
+crying softly in her seat on a bitter cold day. She had just come in from
+the street. In answer to the question what ailed her, she sobbed out,
+"I'se so cold." And no wonder. Beside a worn old undergarment, all the
+clothing upon her shivering little body was a thin calico dress. The soles
+were worn off her shoes, and toes and heels stuck out. It seemed a marvel
+that she had come through the snow and ice as she had, without having her
+feet frozen.
+
+Naturally the teacher would follow such a child into her home and there
+endeavor to clinch the efforts begun for its reclamation in the school. It
+is the very core and kernel of the Society's purpose not to let go of the
+children of whom once it has laid hold, and to this end it employs its own
+physicians to treat those who are sick, and to canvass the poorest
+tenements in the summer months, on the plan pursued by the Health
+Department. Last year these doctors, ten in number, treated 1,578 sick
+children and 174 mothers. Into every sick-room and many wretched hovels,
+daily bouquets of sweet flowers found their way too, visible tokens of a
+sympathy and love in the world beyond--seemingly so far beyond the poverty
+and misery of the slum--that had thought and care even for such as they.
+Perhaps in the final reckoning these flowers, that came from friends far
+and near, will have a story to tell that will outweigh all the rest. It
+may be an "impracticable notion," as I have sometimes been told by
+hard-headed men of business; but it is not always the hard head that
+scores in work among the poor. The language of the heart is a tongue that
+is understood in the poorest tenements where the English speech is
+scarcely comprehended and rated little above the hovels in which the
+immigrants are receiving their first lessons in the dignity of American
+citizenship.
+
+Very lately a unique exercise has been added to the course in these
+schools, that lays hold of the very marrow of the problem with which they
+deal. It is called "saluting the flag," and originated with Colonel George
+T. Balch, of the Board of Education, who conceived the idea of instilling
+patriotism into the little future citizens of the Republic in doses to
+suit their childish minds. To talk about the Union, of which most of them
+had but the vaguest notion, or of the duty of the citizen, of which they
+had no notion at all, was nonsense. In the flag it was all found embodied
+in a central idea which they could grasp. In the morning the star-spangled
+banner was brought into the school, and the children were taught to salute
+it with patriotic words. Then the best scholar of the day before was
+called out of the ranks, and it was given to him or her to keep for the
+day. The thing took at once and was a tremendous success.
+
+Then was evolved the plan of letting the children decide for themselves
+whether or not they would so salute the flag as a voluntary offering,
+while incidentally instructing them in the duties of the voter at a time
+when voting was the one topic of general interest. Ballot-boxes were set
+up in the schools on the day before the last general election (1891). The
+children had been furnished with ballots for and against the flag the week
+before, and told to take them home to their parents and talk it over with
+them, a very apt reminder to those who were naturalized citizens of their
+own duties, then pressing. On the face of the ballot was the question to
+be decided: "Shall the school salute the Nation's flag every day at the
+morning exercises?" with a Yes and a No, to be crossed out as the voter
+wished. On its back was printed a Voter's A, B, C, in large plain type,
+easy to read:
+
+"This country in which I live, and which is _my_ country, is called a
+REPUBLIC. In a Republic, _the people govern_. The people who govern are
+called _citizens_. I am one of the people and _a little citizen_.
+
+"The way the citizens govern is, either by voting for the person whom they
+want to represent them, or who will say what the people want him to
+say--or by voting _for_ that thing they would like to do, or _against_
+that thing which they do not want to do.
+
+"The Citizen who votes is called a _voter_ or an _elector_, and the right
+of voting is called the _suffrage_. The voter puts on a piece of paper
+what he wants. The piece of paper is called a _Ballot_. THIS PIECE OF
+PAPER IS MY BALLOT.
+
+"The right of a Citizen to vote; the right to say what the citizen thinks
+is best for himself and all the rest of the people; the right to say who
+shall govern us and make laws for us, is A GREAT PRIVILEGE, A SACRED
+TRUST, A VERY GREAT RESPONSIBILITY, which I must learn to exercise
+conscientiously, and to the best of my knowledge and ability, as a little
+Citizen of this great AMERICAN REPUBLIC."
+
+On Monday the children cast their votes in the Society's twenty-one
+Industrial Schools, with all the solemnity of a regular election and with
+as much of its simple machinery as was practicable. Eighty-two per cent.
+of the whole number of enrolled scholars turned out for the occasion, and
+of the 4,306 votes cast, 88, not quite two per cent., voted against the
+flag. Some of these, probably the majority, voted No under a
+misapprehension, but there were a few exceptions. One little Irishman, in
+the Mott Street school, came without his ballot. "The old man tored it
+up," he reported. In the East Seventy-third Street school five Bohemians
+of tender years set themselves down as opposed to the scheme of making
+Americans of them. Only one, a little girl, gave her reason. She brought
+her own flag to school: "I vote for that," she said, sturdily, and the
+teacher wisely recorded her vote and let her keep the banner.
+
+I happened to witness the election in the Beach Street school, where the
+children are nearly all Italians. The minority elements were, however,
+represented on the board of election inspectors by a colored girl and a
+little Irish miss, who did not seem in the least abashed by the fact that
+they were nearly the only representatives of their people in the school.
+The tremendous show of dignity with which they took their seats at the
+poll was most impressive. As a lesson in practical politics, the occasion
+had its own humor. It was clear that the negress was most impressed with
+the solemnity of the occasion, and the Irish girl with its practical
+opportunities. The Italian's disposition to grin and frolic, even in her
+new and solemn character, betrayed the ease with which she would, were it
+real politics, become the game of her Celtic colleague. When it was all
+over they canvassed the vote with all the solemnity befitting the
+occasion, signed together a certificate stating the result, and handed it
+over to the principal sealed in a manner to defeat any attempt at fraud.
+Then the school sang Santa Lucia, a sweet Neapolitan ballad. It was
+amusing to hear the colored girl and the half-dozen little Irish children
+sing right along with the rest the Italian words, of which they did not
+understand one. They had learned them from hearing them sung by the
+others, and rolled them out just as loudly, if not as sweetly, as they.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE BOARD OF ELECTION INSPECTORS IN THE BEACH STREET
+SCHOOL.]
+
+
+The first patriotic election in the Fifth Ward Industrial School was held
+on historic ground. The house it occupies was John Ericsson's until his
+death, and there he planned nearly all his great inventions, among them
+one that helped save the flag for which the children voted that day. The
+children have lived faithfully up to their pledge. Every morning sees the
+flag carried to the principal's desk and all the little ones, rising at
+the stroke of the bell, say with one voice: "We turn to our flag as the
+sunflower turns to the sun!" One bell, and every brown right fist is
+raised to the brow, as in military salute: "We give our heads!" Another
+stroke, and the grimy little hands are laid on as many hearts: "and our
+hearts!" Then with a shout that can be heard around the corner: "---- to
+our country! One country, one language, one flag!" No one can hear it and
+doubt that the children mean every word and will not be apt to forget that
+lesson soon.
+
+The Industrial School has found a way of dealing with even the truants, of
+whom it gets more than its share, and the success of it is suggestive. As
+stated by the teacher in the West Eighteenth Street school who found it
+out, it is very simple: "I tell them, if they want to play truant to come
+to me and I will excuse them for the day, and give them a note so that if
+the truant officer sees them it will be all right." She adds that "only
+one boy ever availed himself of that privilege." The other boys with few
+exceptions became interested, as one would expect, and came to school
+regularly. It was the old story of the boys in the Juvenile Asylum who
+could be trusted to do guard duty in the grounds when put upon their
+honor, but the moment they were locked up for the night risked their necks
+to escape by climbing out of the third-story windows.
+
+But when it has cheated the street and made of the truant a steady
+scholar, the work of the Industrial School is not all done. Next, it hands
+him over to the Public School, clothed and in his right mind, if his time
+to go to work has not yet come. Last year the thirty-three Industrial
+Schools of the Children's Aid Society and the American Female Guardian
+Society thus dismissed nearly eleven hundred children who, but for their
+intervention, might never have reached that goal. That their charity had
+not been allowed to corrupt the children may be inferred from the
+statement that, with an average daily attendance of 4,348 in the
+Children's Aid Society's Schools, 1,729 children were depositors in the
+School Savings Banks to the aggregate amount of about $800--a very large
+sum for them--and this in the face of the fact, recorded on the school
+register, that 938 of the lot came from homes where drunkenness and
+poverty went hand in hand. It is not in the plan of the Industrial School
+to make paupers, but to develop to the utmost the kernel of self-help that
+is the one useful legacy of the street. The child's individuality is
+preserved at any cost. Even the clothes that are given to the poorest in
+exchange for their rags are of different cut and color, made so with this
+one end in view. The distressing "institution look" is wholly absent from
+these schools, and one of the great stumbling-blocks of charity
+administered at wholesale is thus avoided.
+
+The night schools are for the boys and girls already enlisted in the
+treadmill, and who must pick up what learning they can in their off hours.
+Together with the day-schools they footed up a total enrolment of nearly
+ten thousand children whom this Society reached in 1891. Upon the basis of
+the average daily attendance, the cost of their education to the
+community, which supported the charity, was $24.53 for each child. The
+cost of sheltering, feeding, and teaching 11,770 boys and girls in the
+Society's six lodging-houses was $32.76 for each; the expense of sending
+2,825 children to farm-homes $9.96 for each. The average cost per year for
+each prisoner in the Tombs is $107.75, and for every child maintained in
+an Asylum, or in the poor-house, nearly $140.[21]
+
+"One of our great difficulties," says the Secretary of the Children's Aid
+Society, in a recent statement of the Society's aims and purposes, echoing
+an old grievance, "is with the large boys of the city. There seems to be
+no place for them in the world as it is. They have grown up in it without
+any training but that in street trades. The trades unions have kept them
+from being apprenticed. They are soon too large for street occupations,
+and are unable to compete with the small boys. They are too old for our
+lodging-houses. We know not what to do with them. Some succeed well on
+Western farms, but they are usually disliked by their employers because
+they change places soon; and their occasional offences and disposition to
+move about have given us more trouble in the West than any other one
+thing. Very few people are willing to bear with them, even though a little
+patience will sometimes bring out excellent qualities in them." They are
+the boys for whom the street and the saloon have use that shall speedily
+fashion of their "excellent qualities" a lash to sting the community's
+purse, if not its conscience, with the memory of its neglect. As 107.75 is
+to 24.53, or 140 to 9.96, so will be the smart of it compared with the
+burden of patience that would have turned the scales the other way, to put
+the matter in a light where the hard-headed man of business can see it
+without an effort.
+
+There is at least one man of that kind in New York who has seen and
+understood it to some purpose. His name is Richard T. Auchmuty, and he is
+by profession an architect. In that capacity he has had opportunity enough
+of observing how the virtual exclusion of the New York boy from the trades
+worked to his harm, and he started for his relief an Industrial School
+that deserves to be ranked among the great benefactions of our day, even
+more for its power to set people to thinking than for the direct benefit
+it confers upon the boy, great as that is. Once it comes to be thoroughly
+understood that a chance to learn his father's honest trade is denied the
+New York boy by a foreign conspiracy, because he is an American lad and
+cannot be trusted to do its bidding, it is inconceivable that an end
+should not be put in quick order to this astounding abuse. This thing is
+exactly what is being done in New York now by the consent of its citizens,
+who without a protest read in the newspapers that a trades-union, one of
+the largest and strongest in the building trades, has decreed that for two
+years from a fixed date no apprentice shall be admitted to that trade in
+New York--decreed, with the consent and connivance of subservient
+employers, that so many lads who might have become useful mechanics shall
+grow up tramps and loafers; decreed that a system of robbery of the
+American mechanic shall go on by which it has come to pass that out of
+twenty-three millions of dollars paid in a year to the building trades in
+this city barely six millions are grudgingly accorded the native worker.
+There is no decree to exclude the mechanic from abroad. He may come and
+go--and go he does, in shoals, to his home across the sea at the end of
+each season, with its profits--under the scheme of international
+comradeship that excludes only the American workman and his boy. I have
+talked with some of the most intelligent of the labor leaders, men well
+known all over the land, to find out if there were any defence to be made
+for this that I was not aware of, but have got nothing but evasion and
+sophistries about the "protection of labor" for my answer. A protection,
+indeed, that has nearly resulted already in the practical extinction of
+the American mechanic, the best and cleverest in the world, in America's
+chief city, at the bidding of the Walking Delegate.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE PLUMBING SHOP IN THE NEW YORK TRADE SCHOOLS.]
+
+
+Even to Colonel Auchmuty's Industrial School this persecution has been
+extended in a persistent attempt for years to taboo its graduates. In
+spite of it, the New York Trade Schools open their twelfth season this
+winter with six hundred scholars and more, in place of the thirty who sat
+in the first class eleven years ago. The community's better sense is
+coming to the rescue, and the opposition to the school is wearing off. In
+the spring as many hundred young plasterers, printers, tailors, plumbers,
+stone-cutters, bricklayers, carpenters, and blacksmiths will go forth
+capable mechanics, and with their self-respect unimpaired by the
+associations of the shop and the saloon under the old apprentice system.
+In this one respect the trades union may have done them a service it did
+not intend. Colonel Auchmuty's school has demonstrated what it amounts to
+by furnishing from among its young men the bricklayers for more than as
+many handsome buildings in New York as there were pupils in its first
+class. When a committee of master builders came on from Philadelphia to
+see what their work was like, the report it brought back was that it
+looked as if the builders had put their hearts in it, and a trade-school
+was forthwith established in that city. Of that, too, Colonel Auchmuty
+paid the way from the start.
+
+His wealth has kept the New York school above water since it was started;
+but this winter a benevolent millionaire, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, for whom
+wealth has other and greater responsibilities than that of ministering to
+his own comfort, has endowed it with half a million dollars, and Mrs.
+Auchmuty has added a hundred thousand with the land on First Avenue
+between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets upon which the school
+stands, so that it starts out with an endowment sufficient to insure its
+future. The charges for tuition in the day and evening classes have never
+been much more than nominal, but these may now, perhaps, be reduced even
+further to allow the "excellent qualities" of the big boys, of whom the
+reformer despairs, to be put to their proper use without robbing them of
+the best of all, their self-respect. Then the gage will have been thrown
+to the street in good earnest, and the Walking Delegate's day will be
+nearly spent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE BOYS' CLUBS
+
+
+But it is by the boys' club that the street is hardest hit. In the fight
+for the lad it is that which knocks out the "gang," and with its own
+weapon--the weapon of organization. That this has seemed heretofore so
+little understood, even by some who have wielded the weapon valiantly, is
+to me the strongest argument for the University Settlement plan, which
+sends those who would be of service to the poor out to live among them, to
+study their ways and their needs. Very soon they discover why the gang has
+such a grip on the boy. It is because it responds to a real need of his
+nature. The distinguishing characteristic of the American city boy is his
+genius for organization. Whether it be in the air, in the soil, or in an
+aptitude for self-government that springs naturally from the street, where
+every little heathen is a law unto himself--one of them surely, for the
+children of foreigners, who never learn to speak the language in which
+their sons vote, exhibit it, if anything, more plainly than the
+native-born--he has it, undeniably. Unbridled, allowed to run riot, it
+results in the gang. Thwarted, it defeats all attempts to manage the boy.
+Accepted as a friend, an ally, it is the indispensable key to his nature
+in all efforts to reclaim him _en bloc_. Individuals may require different
+methods of treatment. To the boys as a class the club is the pass-key.
+
+There are many boys' clubs in New York now, and room for more. Some have
+had great success; a few have failed. I venture the guess that the real
+failure in a good many instances--most of them perhaps--was the failure to
+trust the boys to rule themselves. I say _rule_. Rule there must be; boss
+rule at that. That is the kind their fathers own, the fashion of the
+slums. It is a case of rule or ruin, order or anarchy. To let the boys
+have full swing would merely be to invite the street in to take charge of
+the house, and only trouble would come of it. But the boss must be a
+benevolent and very politic despot. The boy must have a fair chance. To
+enlist him heart and soul, the opportunity must be given him to show that
+he _can_ rule himself. And he will show it. He must be allowed to choose
+his own leaders. His freedom of speech must not be abridged in debate by
+any rule but that of parliamentary law. Ten to one he will not abuse it,
+but will enforce that rule and submit to it as scrupulously as the most
+punctilious of his elders. Let him be sure that his right to
+self-government will not be interfered with, and he will voluntarily give
+up the street and his gang. Three boys' clubs had been started by the
+ladies of the College Settlement, on the principle of non-interference
+within the few and simple rules of the house. The boys wrote their own
+laws and maintained order with success. The street looked on, observant.
+To the policeman it had opposed secret hostility or open war. But a social
+order with the policeman eliminated was something worthy of approval. Its
+offer of surrender was brought in form by a committee representing the
+"Pleasure Club" in the toughest block of the neighborhood. "We will change
+and have your kind of a club," was its message. Thus the fourth boys' club
+of the Settlement was launched.
+
+They have not all had so peaceful a beginning. Storm and stress of weather
+have ushered in most of them. Each new one has cost something for
+window-glass, and the mud of the neighborhood has had its inning before it
+was forced to abdicate in favor of the club. It was so with the first that
+was started, fourteen years ago, in Tompkins Square, that was then pretty
+much all mud and given over to anarchy and disorder. In fact, it was the
+mud that started the club. It flew so thick about the Wilson Mission, and
+bespattered those who went out and in so freely that on a particularly
+boisterous night the good missionary's wife decided that something must be
+done. She did not send for a policeman. She had tried that before, but the
+relief he brought lasted only while he was in sight. She went out and
+confronted the mob herself. When it had yelled itself hoarse at her, she
+sweetly asked it in to have some coffee and cakes. The mob stared,
+breathless. Coffee and cakes for stones and mud! This was the Gospel in a
+shape that was new and bewildering to Tompkins Square. The boys took
+counsel among themselves. Visions of a big policeman behind the door
+troubled the timid; but the more courageous were in favor of taking
+chances. When they had sidled through the open door and no yell of
+distress had betrayed treason within, the rest followed to find the coffee
+and the cakes a solid and reassuring fact. No awkward questions were asked
+about the broken windows, and the boys came out voting the "missionary
+people" trumps, with a tinge of remorse, let us hope, for the reception
+they had given them. There was no more mud-slinging after that, but the
+boys fell naturally into neighborly ways with the house and its occupants,
+and the proposition to be allowed to come in and "play games," came from
+them when the occasional misunderstandings with the policeman on the post
+made the street a ticklish play-ground. They were let in, and when certain
+good people heard of what was going on in Tompkins Square, they sent down
+chairs and tables and games, so that they might be made to feel at home.
+Thus kindness conquered the street, and that winter was founded the first
+boys' club here, or, for aught I know, anywhere. It is still the Boys'
+Club of St. Mark's Place, and has grown more popular with the boys as the
+years have passed. The record of last winter's doings over there show no
+less than 2,757 boys on its roll of membership. The total attendance for
+the year was 42,118, and the nightly average 218 boys, everyone of whom,
+but for the coffee and cakes of that memorable night, might have been in
+the streets slinging mud.
+
+These doings include, nowadays, more than amusements and games. They made
+the beginning, and they are yet the means of bringing the boys in. Once
+there, as many as choose may join classes in writing, in book-keeping,
+singing, and modelling; those who come merely for fun can have all they
+want, on condition that they pay their respects to the wash-room and keep
+within the bounds of the house. This they do with the aid of the
+Superintendent and his assistants, who are chosen from among the bigger
+boys and manage to preserve order marvellously well with very little show
+of authority, all considered. The present Superintendent, Mr. Tyrrell,
+still nurses the memory of a pair of black eyes he achieved in the
+management of a "tough" club in Macdougal Street, where the boys came with
+"billies" and pistols in their hip-pockets and taught him the secret of
+club management in their own way. He puts it briefly this way: "It is just
+a question of who is to be boss." That settled, things run smoothly
+enough if the right party is on top.
+
+In justice to the Tompkins Square boys, it should be said that the
+question with them once for all was decided by the missionary's coffee and
+cakes. If there was ever a passing disposition to forget it, "Pop's"
+blighting eye helped the club to recall it in no time. Pop was the
+doorkeeper, and a cripple, with a single mind. His one conscious purpose
+in life was to keep order in the club, and he was blessed beyond most
+mortals in attaining his ambition, if blessed in nothing else. Under
+different auspices Pop might have been a rare bruiser, for, cripple that
+he was, he was as strong as he was determined. Under the humanizing
+influences that had conquered Tompkins Square he became one of the jewels
+of the Boys' Club. If a round in the boxing-room threatened to wind up in
+a "slugging match;" if luck had gone against a boy at the game of
+"pot-cheese" until he felt that he must avenge his defeat by thumping his
+adversary, or burst--Pop's stern glance transfixed the offender and
+pointed him to the street, silent and meek, all the fight taken out of him
+on the spot. The boys liked him for all that, perhaps just because they
+were a little afraid of him, and when Pop died last summer, at the age of
+twenty-two, after ten years of faithful attendance upon the basement-door
+in St. Mark's Place, many an honest sob was gulped down at his funeral
+behind a dirty and tattered cap. It is not the style for boys to cry in
+Tompkins Square, but it _is_ the style to honor the memory of a dead
+friend, and the Square never saw such a funeral as poor Pop's. The boys
+chipped in and bought a gorgeous floral pillow for his coffin. So soft a
+pillow Pop never knew in life.
+
+Many a little account in the club's penny savings-bank was wiped out to
+do Pop that last good turn; but the Superintendent cashed all demands
+without a remonstrance. It is not often the money is drawn with so lofty a
+purpose. Most of the depositors earn a few pennies selling newspapers or
+doing errands. Their accounts are seldom large. In the aggregate they make
+up quite a little sum, however. On a certain night last June, when I was
+there, the bank contained almost a hundred dollars, in deposits ranging
+from ten cents up to nearly five dollars. That week the Superintendent had
+cashed sixteen books; the smallest had eleven cents to the credit of its
+owner, who had been greatly taken with a mouth-organ and had withdrawn his
+capital to buy it. Another had been saving up for a pair of boots. There
+were a few capitalists in the club, who, when they got a dollar and a half
+or two dollars together, transferred them to the Bowery Bank, where they
+kept an account. It was easy to predict a successful business career for
+these; not so with the general run, who were anything but steady
+depositors, though the Superintendent gave them the credit that "very few
+drew out their money till they had fifty cents in bank."
+
+If the club has developed no great financiers, it has at least brought out
+one latent genius in a young sculptor who has graduated from the modelling
+class into an art museum, and was at last accounts preparing to go abroad
+and spend his accumulated savings in the pursuit of further knowledge. A
+short time before the visit of which I speak, a sudden crisis had made the
+old class in "First Aid to the Injured" come out strong under
+difficulties. A man had fallen down the basement-stairs into the
+club-room, in an epileptic fit. It was three years since the boys had been
+taught how to manage till the doctor came, in case of accident, but they
+rose to the emergency with a jump. One unbuttoned the man's collar,
+another slapped his hands, while a third yelled for a dollar to put
+between his teeth. It had not occurred to the young surgeon who taught the
+boys the first principles of his profession that dollars are rather
+scarcer about Tompkins Square than on the Avenue, and this oversight came
+near upsetting the good done by the rest of his teaching. There was no
+dollar, not even a quarter, in the crowd, and the man lay gritting his
+teeth until one of the rescuers, less literal but more practical than the
+rest, suggested a pencil or a pocket-knife and broke the spell.
+
+The mass of the boys come in nightly just to have a good time, and they
+have it. They play at parchesi and messenger-boy with an ardor that leaves
+them no time to care what visitors come and go. Like street boys
+everywhere, they have a special fondness for games that admit the dice as
+an element. Gambling is in the very air of the street, and is encouraged
+in a hundred hidden ways the police rarely discover. Small candy stores
+and grocery back-rooms harbor policy shops, lotteries, and regular
+gambling hells, where the boys are taught how to buck the tiger on a penny
+scale. In the club games the dice are robbed of their power for evil. It
+is the environment here again that makes the difference. It has made a
+vast difference in the boy who once stalked in, hat on the back of his
+head, and grimy fists in his breeches' pockets until Pop's stony eye
+caught his. Now he hangs up his hat upon entering, and goes to the
+wash-room without waiting to be asked by the Superintendent if there is no
+soap and water where he comes from. Then he gets the game or the book he
+wants, surrendering his card as a check upon him until it is returned. It
+is a precaution intended to identify the borrower in case of any damage
+being done to the club's property. Such a thing as theft of book or game
+is not known. In his business meetings the boy debates a point of order
+with the skill and persistence of a trained politician. The aptitude for
+politics sticks out all over him; but he has some lessons of that trade to
+learn yet, to his harm. He has not mastered the trick of betraying a
+friend. Any member of his club, the Superintendent feels sure, would stand
+up for him and take a thrashing, if need be, should he be found in trouble
+on his "beat." The "beats" that converge at St. Mark's Place and Avenue A
+cover a good deal of ground. The lads come from a mile around to the Boys'
+Club. Occasionally "the gang" calls in a body. One evening it is the
+Thirteenth Street gang, the next the Eighth Street gang, and again a
+detachment from Avenue A. By the first-comers it is sometimes possible to
+foretell the particular complexion of the _clientčle_ of the night; but
+the business character of the gang is left outside on the sidewalk. Within
+it is amiability itself, and gradually the rough corners are rubbed off,
+old quarrels made up, feuds forgotten in the new companionship; the gang
+is merged in the club, the victory over the street won.
+
+
+[Illustration: A BOYS' CLUB READING-ROOM.]
+
+
+At Christmas and at odd seasons, when the necessary talent can be secured,
+entertainments are given in the club-room. Sometimes the boys themselves
+furnish the entertainment, and then there is never a lack of critics in
+the audience. There never is, for that matter. Mr. Evert Jansen Wendell,
+who has been one of the boys' best friends, tells some amusing things
+about his experience at such gatherings. Ice-cream is always intensely
+popular as a side issue. Some of the boys never fail to wrap a piece up in
+paper, or put it in the pocket without wrapping, to take home to the baby
+sister or brother. Only one, to Mr. Wendell's knowledge, ever refused
+ice-cream at an entertainment, and he explained, by way of apology, that
+he had had the colic all day and his mother had told him "she'd lick him
+if he took any." For a dignified missionary, who in telling the boys about
+the spread of the Gospel in the Far East, proposed to illustrate heathen
+customs by arraying himself in native costumes, brought along for the
+purpose, it must have been embarrassing to a degree to be cautioned by the
+audience to "keep his shirt on." But his mishap was as nothing to what
+befell a young lady, the daughter of a wealthy and distinguished
+financier, who with infinite trouble had persuaded her father to assist at
+a certain festive occasion in her favorite club. He was an amateur with
+the magic lantern, the boys' dear delight, and took it down to amuse them.
+Mr. Wendell tells what followed:
+
+The show was progressing famously, and the daughter was beaming with
+pride, when one of the boys suddenly beckoned to her, and pointing to the
+distinguished financier remarked:
+
+"What der yer call dat bloke?"
+
+"Whom do you mean?" asked the proud daughter, in a tone of much surprise,
+being quite unaccustomed to hearing the distinguished financier described
+as a "bloke."
+
+"I mean dat bloke over dere, settin' off dem picturs!" replied the boy.
+
+"What do you desire to know about him?" inquired the proud daughter, with
+freezing dignity.
+
+"I want ter know what yer call one of them fellers dat sets off picturs?"
+persisted the boy.
+
+"That gentleman," said the proud daughter, in her most impressive tone,
+"is my father."
+
+"Well!" said the boy, surveying her with supreme contempt, "don't yer know
+yer own father's trade?"
+
+The Boys' Club has had many followers. Some aim at teaching the lads
+trades; others content themselves with trying to mend their manners, while
+weaning them from the street and its coarse ways. Still others keep the
+moral improvement in view as the immediate object, as it is the ultimate
+end. Some follow the precedent of the Boys' Club in charging nothing for
+admission; other club-organizers, like the managers of the College
+Settlement, have found the weekly fee as necessary as home rule to
+encourage self-help and self-respect in the boy, and to bring out the best
+that is in him. Most of them have libraries suited to the children. The
+College Settlement has a very excellent one of more than a thousand
+volumes, which is in constant use. The managers report that the boys
+clamor for history and science, popularly presented, as boys do
+everywhere, while the girls mainly read fiction. The success of different
+plans demonstrates the futility of some pet theories on this phase of
+social economics at least, in the present state of knowledge on the
+subject. The Boys' Club in St. Mark's Place, for instance, is kept
+entirely free from religious influence of any sort, and their experience
+has led many of its friends to believe that success is possible only in
+that way. Probably in that particular case it might not have been possible
+on anything like such a scale in any other way. The mud of Tompkins Square
+testified loudly enough to that. On the other hand, the managers of some
+very successful and active boys' clubs that have sprouted under Church
+influence and with a strong Sunday-school bias, maintain with conviction
+that theirs is the true and only plan. One holds that only in leaving
+religion out is there hope of success; the other, that there can be none
+without letting it in and keeping it ever in the foreground. Each sees
+only half the truth. It is not the profession, or lack of profession, of a
+principle, but the principle itself that is the condition of success--the
+real sympathy and interest in the children that bids them come and be
+welcome, that seeks to understand their needs and help them for their own
+sake, a religion that "beats preaching" among the poor any day. It is a
+question of men and of hearts, not of faith. And the poorer the children,
+the more friendless and forsaken, the more readily do they respond to
+approaches in that spirit. The testimony of a teacher in the Poverty Gap
+play-ground, who went up town to take charge of one where the children
+were better dressed and correspondingly "stuck up," was that in all their
+rags and dirt the little toughs of the Gap were much the more approachable
+and more promising to work with.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CARPENTER SHOP IN THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS' CLUB.]
+
+
+Naturally the Church might be expected to have found this out and to be
+turning the knowledge to use. And it is so. All sects are reaching now for
+the children in a healthy rivalry, in which the old cry about empty pews
+is being smothered and forgotten. Of the twenty-six boys' clubs that are
+down in the Charity Organization Society's directory, nineteen are under
+church roofs or patronage, and of the remaining seven I know two at least
+to have been founded by churches. The proportion is more than preserved, I
+think, in the larger number not registered there, as in all the
+philanthropic work of many kinds that is now going on among the children.
+The Roman Catholics never lost sight of the fact that the little ones were
+the life of the Church, which the Protestants have had, in a measure, to
+rediscover. Their grip upon the children was never relaxed. The parochial
+school has enabled them to maintain it without need of recourse to the
+social shifts the Protestants are adopting to regain lost prestige.
+Nevertheless, they have not let lie unused the best grappling-hook by
+which the boy might be caught and held. Their schools and churches abound
+with clubs and societies, organized upon a plan of absolute home-rule,
+under the spiritual directorship of the parish priest. Among Protestant
+denominations the Episcopal Church especially shows this evidence of a
+strong life stirring within it. The Boys' Clubs of Calvary Parish, of St.
+George's, and of many other churches, are powerful moral agents in their
+own neighborhoods. Everywhere some strong sympathetic personality is found
+to be the centre and the life of the work. It may be that the pastor
+himself is the moving force; or he has the faculty of stirring it in
+others. His young men are at work in the parish. It is a hopeful sign to
+find young men, to whom the sacrifice meant the loss of much that makes
+life beautiful, giving their time and services freely to the poor night
+schools and rough boys' clubs--hopeful alike for the Church, for the boys,
+and for their teachers. The women have had the missionary work of the
+Church, as well as the pews, long enough to themselves. I am not speaking
+now of the college-bred men and women, who in their University Settlements
+pursue the plan that has proven so beneficent in England, but of another
+class, young business men, bank clerks, and professional men--sometimes of
+large means and of high social standing--whom night after night I have
+found thus unostentatiously working among the children with more patience
+than I could muster, and with the genuine love for their work that
+overcame all obstacles. They were not always going the errand of a church
+there, but that they were doing the work of the Church there could be no
+doubt, and doing it in a way to make it once more a living issue among the
+poor.
+
+The rector of old St. George's, which under his pastorate has grown from a
+forgotten temple with empty pews to be one of the strong factors in life
+on the crowded East Side, with Sunday congregations the great building can
+hardly contain, roughly outlines his plans for work among the children
+this way, which with variations of detail is the plan of all the churches:
+
+"Get as many of the very little children as possible into our
+kindergartens, and there let them have the advantage of Christian
+kindergarten training, before they are old enough to go to the public
+schools. Keep touch of those same children and get them into the infant
+departments of the Sunday-school. Then take the little fellows from these,
+and see that in one or two nights in the week we reach them in our boys'
+clubs; and then, when they are fourteen years old, they are eligible for
+admission to our battalion. There, by drills, exercises, etc., we hold
+them till they can enter our Men's Club."
+
+The Sunday-school commands the approach to the club, but does not obstruct
+it. It stands at the door and takes the tickets. Anyone may enter, but
+through that door only. Once he has passed in, he is his own master. The
+church is content with claiming only his Sundays when the club is not in
+session. The experience at St. George's on the home-rule question has been
+eminently characteristic. The boys could not be made to take a live
+interest in the club except on condition that they must run it themselves.
+That point yielded, they promptly boomed it to high-water mark. At present
+they elect their officers twice a year, to give them full swing, and one
+set is no sooner installed than wire-pulling begins for the next election.
+Once, when some trouble in the Athletic Club caused the clergy to take it
+in hand and appoint a president of their own choice, the membership fell
+off so rapidly that it was on the point of collapse when the tide was
+turned by a bold stroke. The managers announced a free election. The boys
+returned with a rush, put opposition tickets in the field, and amid
+intense enthusiasm over three hundred and fifty out of a total of four
+hundred votes were cast. The club was saved. It has been popular ever
+since.
+
+The payment of monthly dues was found at St. George's to be equally
+essential to success. "The boys know that they have to pay," said the
+young clergyman, who quietly superintends their doings; "if they didn't,
+it wouldn't be a right club." So they pay their pennies and enjoy the
+independence of it. The result has been a transformation in which the
+entire neighborhood rejoices. "Four years ago," said their friend, the
+clergyman, "these same boys stoned us and carried on like the toughs they
+were. Now we have got here a lot of young gentlemen and loyal friends."
+Every week-day night the Parish House in East Sixteenth Street resounds
+with their merriment; on Saturday, with the roll of drums and crash of
+martial music. Then the Battalion Club meets for drill under the
+instruction of a former officer in the United States Army. In their natty
+uniforms the lads are good to look upon, and thoroughly enjoy the
+exercises, as any boy of spirit would.
+
+The Little Boys' Club languished somewhat for want of a definite programme
+until the happy idea of a series of talks on elementary chemistry and
+physics was hit upon. An eminently practical turn was given to the talks
+by taking the boys to the gas-house, for instance, when gas was up for
+discussion; to the ship-yard, when boat-building was the topic; to the
+water-works, when it was water; and to see the great dynamos at work, when
+they were grappling with the subject of electricity. Afterward the boys
+were made to tell in writing what they had seen, and some of them told it
+surprisingly well, showing that they had made excellent use of their eyes
+and their brains. There is a limit, unfortunately, to the range of
+subjects that can be illustrated to advantage in that way; the managers
+had come to the end of their tether, and were puzzling over the question
+what to do next, when a friend of the club gave it several thousand
+dollars with which to fit up a manual training-school. Since then it has
+been in clover. A house was hired in East Eleventh Street and transformed
+into a carpenter-shop, and preparations to open it were in progress when
+these pages were sent to the printer. The club then had over two hundred
+members. It will probably have twice as many before the winter is over.
+
+
+[Illustration: TYPE-SETTING AT THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS' CLUB.]
+
+
+The carpenter-shop of the Avenue C Working Boys' Club has been a distinct
+success for several seasons. The work done by the boys after a few months'
+instruction compares often well with that of the majority of apprentices
+who have been years learning the trade in the regular way. The shop is
+fitted out with benches and all the necessary tools. A class in
+type-setting vies with the young carpenters in excellence of workmanship
+and devotion to business. The printers have ambitious designs upon the
+reading public. They intend to start a monthly "organ" of their club, an
+experiment that was tried once but frustrated by a change of base from
+Twenty-first Street to the present quarters at No. 650 East Fourteenth
+Street. The club grew up under the eaves of St. George's Church eight
+years ago, and was known by the name of the St. George's Boys' Club after
+it had been forced to move away to make room for the erection of the
+Parish House. Some of the boys work in the daytime at the trades which
+they are taught at the club in the evening, and the instruction thus
+received has helped them to earn better salaries in many cases. One of the
+managers keeps a bank account for those who can save money and want to
+invest it, and more than one of them has a snug little sum to his credit.
+There are fifty boys in each class, and always plenty waiting for
+vacancies to occur. The best pupils receive medals at the end of the year,
+and once every summer the managers, who are young men of position and
+character, take them out in the country for an outing, and are boys with
+them in their games and in their delight over the new sights they see
+there.
+
+Mr. Wendell tells of one of these trips down to see "Buffalo Bill" on
+Staten Island. There was a big crowd of excursionists on the boat going
+down, and the captain took a fatherly interest in the boys, who were
+gathered together in the bow of the boat, quiet as lambs. The return trip
+was not so peaceful, though the captain good-naturedly delayed the boat
+beyond the starting time for fear some of "our boys" would get left, as
+indeed proved to be the fate of several. But by the time this was
+discovered it was no longer a source of regret to him. The Indians and the
+bucking broncos had made the boys restless. They stood around the brass
+band, and one of them attempted to relieve his pent-up feelings by
+sticking a button into the big trombone, with the effect of nearly
+strangling the stout gentleman who was playing on it. The enraged musician
+made a wild dive for the boy, who dodged around the smokestack and caught
+up a chair to defend himself with. In a moment a first-class riot was in
+progress, chairs flying, the band men swearing, and the boys yelling like
+Comanches. When quiet had been finally restored, the boys banished to the
+after-deck, and the button fished out of the trombone, the perspiring
+captain swore with a round oath that he "wouldn't take those d----d boys
+down to Staten Island again for ten dollars a head."
+
+The trade-school feature of the Working Boys' Club may soon be reproduced
+in the Calvary Parish Boys' Club in East Twenty-third Street. They have
+already a useful type-setting class there, and they have that which their
+neighbors in Fourteenth Street have yet to get: their own handsome
+building, bought for the club by wealthy members of Calvary Church, in
+which it had its birth four years ago. More than that, they have a
+gymnasium that is the chief attraction of all that neighborhood,
+particularly the boxing-gloves in it. There were some serious doubts about
+these, and long and grave discussion before they were added to the general
+outfit. The street was rather too partial to fisticuffs, it was thought,
+and there were too many outstanding grudges among the boys to make their
+introduction safe. However, another view prevailed and the choice proved
+to be a wise one. The gloves are popular--very, and under the firm
+management of the experienced superintendent, who knows where to draw the
+safe line, the boys work off their superabundant spirits and sundry other
+little accounts very successfully in their nightly bouts. The feeling of
+fellowship and neighborly interest thus encouraged has even led to the
+establishment of a mutual benefit fund, through which the boys help each
+other in sickness or distress, and which they manage themselves, electing
+their own officers.
+
+For anyone who knows the boys of the East Side it is not hard to
+understand that the Calvary Parish Boys' Club has registered more than
+twenty-eight thousand callers since it was opened, only four years ago. It
+has four hundred enrolled members, who pay monthly dues of ten cents, so
+that they may feel that the club is theirs by right, not by charity.
+Though church and temperance stood at the cradle of the club--it was
+organized at a meeting of the Calvary branch of the Church Temperance
+Society--there is no preaching to the boys. The only sermons they hear at
+the club are the sermons of brotherly love and kindness, which the
+cheerful rooms, the games, the books, and the gymnasium--even the
+boxing-gloves--preach to them every night, and which the contrast of it
+all with the street, that was their all only a little while ago, is not
+apt to let them forget.
+
+
+[Illustration: A BOUT WITH THE GLOVES IN THE BOYS' CLUB OF CALVARY
+PARISH.]
+
+
+A small sign, with the words "Wayside Boys' Club," hung for a while over
+the Third Avenue door of the Bible House. Two years ago it was taken down;
+the club had been merged in the Boys' Club of Grace Mission, in East
+Thirteenth Street. The members were all little fellows. They were soon
+made aware that they had fallen among strangers who, boylike, proposed to
+investigate them and to test their prowess before letting them in on
+equal terms. Within a week, says Mr. Wendell, this note came to their
+patroness in the Bible House:
+
+     "DEAR MRS. ----:
+
+     "Would you please come and see to our Wayside Boys' Club; that the
+     first time it was open it was very nice, and after that near every
+     boy in that neighborhood came walking in. And if you would be so kind
+     to come and put them out it would be a great pleasure to us.
+
+     "Mrs. ----, the club is not nice any more, and when we want to go
+     home, the boys would wait for us outside, and hit you.
+
+     "Mrs. ----, since them boys are in the club we don't have any games
+     to play with, and if we do play with the games, they come over to us
+     and take it off us.
+
+     "And by so doing please oblige,
+
+           ----, _President_,
+           ----, _Vice-President_,
+           ----, _Treasurer_,
+           ----, _Secretary_,
+           ----, _Floor Manager_.
+
+     "Please excuse the writing. I was in haste.
+
+     "----, _Treasurer_."
+
+
+The appeal had its effect. The Wayside boys were rescued and there has
+been quiet in Thirteenth Street since. They have got a new house now, and
+are looking hopefully forward to the day when "near every boy in that
+neighborhood," shall "come walking in" upon an errand of peace.
+
+Most of the clubs close in the summer months, when it has heretofore been
+supposed that few of the boys would attend. The experience of the Boys'
+Club in St. Mark's Place, which this past summer was kept open a full
+month later than usual and experienced no such collapse, although the park
+across the street might be supposed to be an extra attraction on warm
+evenings, suggests that there is some mistake about this which it would be
+worth while to find out. The street is no less dangerous to the boy in
+summer because it is more crowded. The Free Reading-Room for boys in West
+Fourteenth Street is open all the year round, and though the attendance in
+summer decreases one-half, yet the rooms are never empty.
+
+The wish expressed by the President of the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, in a public utterance a year ago, that there might be
+a boys' club for every ward in the city, has been more than fulfilled.
+There are more boys' clubs nowadays than there are wards, though I am not
+sure that they are so distributed that each has one. There are some wards
+in which twenty might not come amiss. A directory of the local gangs,
+which might be obtained by consultation with the corner-grocers and with
+the policeman on the beat after a "scrap" with the boys, would be a good
+guide to the right spots and also in the choice of managers. Something
+over a year ago a club was opened in Bleecker Street that forthwith took
+on the character of a poultice upon a rather turbulent neighborhood. In
+the second week more than a hundred boys crowded to its meetings. It
+"drew" entirely too well. When I looked for it this fall, it was
+gone--"thank goodness!" said the owner of the tenement, a little woman who
+kept a shop across the street, with a sigh of relief that spoke volumes.
+Yet she had no more definite complaint to make than what might be inferred
+from the emphasis she put on the words "them boys!" A friend of the club,
+or of some of the boys belonging to it, whom I hunted up, interpreted the
+sigh and the emphasis. The boys got the upper hand, he said. They had just
+then made a fresh start under another roof and with a new manager.
+
+Such experiences have not been uncommon, and, as it often happens when
+inquiry is pursued in the right spirit, the mistakes they buoyed have been
+the greatest successes of the cause. There has been enough of the other
+kind too. Any club manager can tell of cases, lots of them, in which the
+club has been the stepping-stone of the boy to a useful career. In some
+cases the boys, having outgrown their club, have carried on the work
+unaided and organized young men's societies on a plane of in-door
+respectability that has raised an effectual barrier against the gang and
+its club-room, the saloon. These things show what a hold the idea has upon
+the boy and how much more might be made of it. So far, private benevolence
+has had the field to itself, properly so; but there is a way in which the
+municipality might help without departing from safe moorings, so it seems
+to me. Why not lend such schools or class-rooms as are not used at night
+to boys' clubs that can show a responsible management, for their meetings?
+In England the Recreative Evening Schools Association has accomplished
+something very like this by simply demonstrating its justice and
+usefulness. "Its object," says Robert Archey Woods, in his work on English
+social movements, "is to carry on through voluntary workers evening
+classes in the board schools, combining instruction and recreation for
+boys and girls who have passed through the elementary required course. Its
+plan includes also the use of the schools for social clubs, and the use of
+school play-grounds for gymnastics and out-door games. This simple
+programme, as carried out, has shown how much may be accomplished through
+means which are close at hand. There are in London three hundred and
+forty-five such classes, combining manual training with entertainment, and
+their average attendance is ten thousand. Schools of the same kind are
+carried on in a hundred other places outside of London. Beside their
+immediate success under private efforts, these schools are bringing
+Parliament to see the importance of their object. Of late the Government
+has been assuming the care of recreative evening classes, little by
+little, and it looks as if ultimately all the work of the Evening Schools
+Association would be undertaken by the school boards." I am not advocating
+the surrender of the boys' club to our New York School Board. I am afraid
+it would gain little by it and lose too much. But they might be trusted as
+landlords, if not as managers. The rent is always the heaviest item in the
+expense account of a boys' club, for the lads must have room. If cramped,
+they will boil over and make trouble. If this item were eliminated, the
+cause might experience a boom that would more than repay the community for
+the wear and tear of the school-rooms, by a reduction in the outlay for
+jails and police courts. There would be another advantage in the
+introduction of the school to the boy in the _rôle_ of a friend, which
+might speed the work of the truant officer. I cannot see any serious
+objection to such a proposition. I have no doubt there are school trustees
+who can see a whole string of them; but I should not be surprised if they
+all came to this, that the schools are not for any such purpose. To this
+it would be a sufficient answer that the schools belong to the people.
+
+
+[Illustration: LINING UP FOR THE GYMNASIUM.]
+
+
+Another suggestion came home to me with force while watching the drill of
+the Battalion Club at St. George's one night recently. It has long been
+the favorite idea of a friend and neighbor of mine, who is an old army
+officer and has seen service in the field, that a summer camp for boys
+from the city tenements could be established somewhere in the mountains at
+a safe distance from tempting orchards, where an army of them might be
+drilled with immense profit to themselves and to everybody. He will have
+it that they could be managed as easily as an equal number of men, with
+the right sort of organization and officers, and as in his business he
+runs along smoothly with four or five hundred girls under his command, I
+am bound to defer to his judgment, however much my own may rebel,
+particularly as he would be acting out my own convictions, after all, in
+his wholesale way. In any event the experiment might be tried with a
+regiment if not with an army, and it would be a very interesting one. The
+boys would have lots of chance for wholesome play as well as drill, and
+would get no end of fun out of it. The possible hardships of camping out
+would have no existence for them. As for any lasting good to come of it,
+outside of physical benefits, I think the discipline alone, with what it
+stands for, would cover that. In the reform schools, where they have
+military drill, they have found it their most useful ally in dealing with
+the worst and wildest class of the boys. It is the bump of organization
+that is touched again there. Resistance ceases of itself and the boys fall
+into line. Too much can be made of discipline, of course. The body may be
+drilled until it is a mere machine and the real boy is dead. But that has
+nothing to do with such an experiment as I spoke of. That is the concern
+of reform schools, and I do not think they are in any danger of overdoing
+it.
+
+I spoke of managing the girls. It is just the same with them. I have had
+the "gang" in mind as the alternative of the club, and therefore have
+dealt so far only with their brothers. Girls do not go in gangs, thank
+goodness, at least not yet in New York. They flock, until the boys scatter
+them and drive them off one by one. But the same instinct of
+self-government is in them. They take just as kindly to the club. The
+Neighborhood Guild, the College Settlement, and various church and
+philanthropic societies, carry on such clubs with great success. The girls
+sew, darn stockings, cook, make their own dresses, and run their own
+meetings with spirit when the boys are made to keep their profaning hands
+off. On occasion they develop the same rugged independence with an extra
+feminine touch to it, that is, a mixture of dash and spite. I recall the
+experience of a band of early philanthropists, who, a score of years ago
+or more, bought the Big Flat in the Sixth Ward and fitted it up as a
+boarding-house for working girls. They filled it without any trouble,
+though with a rather better grade of boarders than they had expected. No
+sooner were the girls in possession than they promptly organized and
+"resolved" that the management should make no rules for the house without
+first submitting them to their body for approval. Philanthropy chose the
+least pointed horn of the dilemma, and retired from the field. The Big
+Flat, from a model boarding-house became a very bad tenement, and the
+boarders' club dissolved, to the loss and injury of a posterity that was
+distinctly poorer and duller, no less for the want of the club than for
+the possession of the tenement.
+
+The boys' club was born of the struggle of the community with the street,
+as a measure of self-defence. It has proven a useful war-club too, but its
+conquests have been the conquests of peace. It has been the kernel of
+success in many a philanthropic undertaking, secular and religious alike.
+In the plan of the Free Reading-Room for Working Boys, of which I made
+mention, it is used as a battering-ram in an attack upon the saloon. The
+Free Reading-Room was organized some nine or ten years ago by the Loyal
+Legion Temperance Society. It has been popular with lads of all ages from
+the very start, not least on account of the club or clubs which they were
+encouraged to found--literary societies they call them there. The
+Superintendent found them helpful, too, as a means of interesting the
+boys, by debate and otherwise, in the cause of temperance which he had at
+heart. The first thing a boys' club casts about for after the offices have
+been manned and the by-laws made hard and fast, is a cause. One of young
+boys, that had been in existence a month or less at the College
+Settlement, almost took the ladies' breath away by announcing one day that
+it had decided to expel any boy who smoked or got drunk. The Free
+Reading-Room gives ample opportunity for the exercise of this spirit of
+convert zeal, when it manifests itself. The average nightly attendance
+last year was seventy-one, and a good deal larger than that in winter. The
+boys came from as far south as Houston Street, nearly a mile below, and
+from Forty-second Street, a mile and half to the north, in all kinds of
+weather.
+
+The doors of the reading-room stand wide open on Sunday as on week-day
+nights. With singing, and talks on serious or religious subjects in a vein
+the boys can follow, they try to give to the proceedings a Sabbath turn of
+which the impression may abide with them. The regular Sunday-School
+exercises have, I am told by the Superintendent, been abandoned, and the
+present less formal, but more effective, programme substituted. One has
+need of being wiser than the serpent if he would build effectually in this
+field among the poor of many races and faiths that swarm in New York's
+tenements, and he must make his foundation very broad. The great thing for
+the boys is that the room is not closed against them on the very night in
+all the week when they need it most. I think we are coming at last to
+understand what a trap we have been digging for the young in our great
+cities, when we thought to save them from temptation, by shutting every
+door but that of the church against them on the day when the devil was
+busiest finding mischief for their idle hands to do, while narrowing that
+down to the size of a wicket-gate with our creeds and confessions. The
+poor bury their dead on Sunday to save the loss of a day's pay. Poverty
+has given over their one day of rest to their sorrows. Is it likely that
+any attempt to rob it of its few harmless joys should win them over? It is
+the shadow of bigotry and intolerance falling across it that has turned
+healthy play into rioting and moral ruin. Open the museums, the libraries,
+and the clubs on Sunday, and the church that draws the bolt will find the
+tide of reawakened interest that will set in strong enough to fill its own
+pews, too, to overflowing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE OUTCAST AND THE HOMELESS
+
+
+Under the heading "Just one of God's Children," one of the morning
+newspapers told the story last winter of a newsboy at the Brooklyn Bridge,
+who fell in a fit with his bundle of papers under his arm, and was carried
+into the waiting-room by the bridge police. They sent for an ambulance,
+but before it came the boy was out selling papers again. The reporters
+asked the little dark-eyed news-woman at the bridge entrance which boy it
+was.
+
+"Little Maher it was," she answered.
+
+"Who takes care of him?"
+
+"Oh! no one but God," said she, "and he is too busy with other folks to
+give him much attention."
+
+Little Maher was the representative of a class that is happily growing
+smaller year by year in our city. It is altogether likely that a little
+inquiry into his case could have placed the responsibility for his forlorn
+condition considerably nearer home, upon someone who preferred giving
+Providence the job to taking the trouble himself. There are homeless
+children in New York. It is certain that we shall always have our full
+share. Yet it is equally certain that society is coming out ahead in its
+struggle with this problem. In ten years, during which New York added to
+her population one-fourth, the homelessness of our streets, taking the
+returns of the Children's Aid Society's lodging-houses as the gauge,
+instead of increasing proportionally, has decreased nearly one-fifth; and
+of the Topsy element, it may be set down as a fact, there is an end.
+
+
+[Illustration: A SNUG CORNER ON A COLD NIGHT.]
+
+
+If we were able to argue from this a corresponding improvement in the
+general lot of the poor, we should be on the high road to the millennium.
+But it is not so. The showing is due mainly to the perfection of
+organized charitable effort, that proceeds nowadays upon the sensible
+principle of putting out a fire, viz., that it must be headed off, not run
+down, and therefore concerns itself chiefly about the children. We are yet
+a long, a very long way from a safe port. The menace of the Submerged
+Tenth has not been blotted from the register of the Potter's Field, and
+though the "twenty thousand poor children who would not have known it was
+Christmas," but for public notice to that effect, be a benevolent fiction,
+there are plenty whose brief lives have had little enough of the
+embodiment of Christmas cheer and good-will in them to make the name seem
+like a bitter mockery. Yet, when all is said, this much remains, that we
+are steering the right course. Against the drift and the head-winds of an
+unparalleled immigration that has literally drained the pauperism of
+Europe into our city for two generations, against the false currents and
+the undertow of the tenement in our social life, we are making headway at
+last.
+
+Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a
+woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time. What if there be a
+thousand left? There is one less. What that one more on the wrong side of
+the account might have meant will never be known till the final reckoning.
+The records of jails and brothels and poor-houses, for a hundred years to
+come, might but have begun the tale.
+
+When, in 1849, the Chief of Police reported that in eleven wards there
+were 2,955 vagrants and dissolute children under fifteen years of age, the
+boys all thieves and the girls embryo prostitutes, and that ten per cent.
+of the entire child population of school age in the city were vagrants,
+there was no Children's Aid Society to plead their cause. There _was_ a
+reformatory, and that winter the American Female Guardian Society was
+incorporated, "to prevent vice and moral degradation;" but Mr. Brace had
+not yet found his life-work, and little Mary Ellen had not been born. The
+story of the legacy her sufferings left to the world of children I have
+briefly told, and in the chapter on Industrials Schools some of the
+momentous results of Mr. Brace's devotion have been set forth. The story
+is not ended; it never will be, while poverty and want exist in this great
+city. His greatest work was among the homeless and the outcast. In the
+thirty-nine years during which he was the life and soul of the Children's
+Aid Society it found safe country homes for 84,318[22] poor city children.
+And the work goes on. Very nearly already, the army thus started on the
+road to usefulness and independence equals in numbers the whole body of
+children that, four years before it took up its march, yielded its Lost
+Tenth, as the Chief of Police bore witness, to the prisons and perdition.
+
+This great mass of children--did they all come from the street? Not all of
+them. Not even the larger number. But they would have got there, all of
+them, had not the Society blocked the way. That is how the race of Topsies
+has been exterminated in New York. That in this, of all fields, prevention
+is the true cure, and that a farmer's home is better for the city child
+that has none than a prison or the best-managed public institution, are
+the simple lessons it has taught and enforced by example that has carried
+conviction at last. The conviction came slowly and by degrees. The degrees
+were not always creditable to sordid human nature that had put forth no
+hand to keep the child from the gutter, and in the effort to rescue it now
+saw only its selfish opportunity. There are people yet at this day, whose
+offers to accept "a strong and handsome girl of sixteen or so with sweet
+temper," as a cheap substitute for a paid servant--"an angel with mighty
+strong arms," as one of the officers of the Society indignantly put it
+once--show that the selfish stage has not been quite passed. Such offers
+are rejected with the emphatic answer: "We bring the children out because
+they need you, not because you need them." The Society farms out no girls
+of sixteen with strong arms. For them it finds ways of earning an honest
+living at such wages as their labor commands, homes in the West, if they
+wish it, where good husbands, not hard masters, are waiting for them. But,
+ordinarily, its effort is to bend the twig at a much tenderer age. And in
+this effort it is assisted by the growth of a strong humane sentiment in
+the West, that takes less account of the return the child can make in work
+for his keep, and more of the child itself. Time was when few children but
+those who were able to help about the farm could be sure of a welcome.
+Nowadays babies are in demand. Of all the children sent West in the last
+two years, 14 per cent. were under five years, 43.6 per cent. over five
+and under ten years, 36.8 per cent. over ten and under fifteen, and only
+5.3 per cent. over fifteen years of age. The average age of children sent
+to Western homes in 1891 by the Children's Aid Society was nine years and
+forty days, and in 1892 nine years and eight months, or an average of nine
+years, four months, and twenty days for the two years.
+
+It finds them in a hundred ways--in poverty-stricken homes, on the Island,
+in its Industrial Schools, in the street. Often they are brought to its
+office by parents who are unable to take care of them. Provided they are
+young enough, no questions are asked. It is not at the child's past, but
+at its future, that these men look. That it comes from among bad people is
+the best reason in the world why it should be put among those that are
+good. That is the one care of the Society. Its faith that the child, so
+placed, will respond and rise to their level, is unshaken after these many
+years. Its experience has knocked the bugbear of heredity all to flinders.
+
+So that this one condition may be fulfilled, a constant missionary work of
+an exceedingly practical and business-like character goes on in the
+Western farming communities, where there is more to eat than there are
+mouths to fill, and where a man's children are yet his wealth. When
+interest has been stirred in a community to the point of arousing demands
+for the homeless children, the best men in the place--the judge, the
+pastor, the local editor, and their peers--are prevailed upon to form a
+local committee that passes upon all applications, and judges of the
+responsibility and worthiness of the applicants. In this way a sense of
+responsibility is cultivated that is the best protection for the child in
+future years, should he need any, which he very rarely does. On a day set
+by the committee the agent arrives from New York with his little troop.
+Each child has been comfortably and neatly dressed in a new suit, and
+carries in his little bundle a Bible as a parting gift from the Society.
+The committee is on hand to receive them. So usually are half the mothers
+of the town, who divide the children among themselves and take them home
+to be cared for until the next day. If there are any babies in the lot, it
+is always hard work to make them give them up the next morning, and
+sometimes the company that gathers in the morning at the town hall, for
+inspection and apportionment among the farmers, has been unexpectedly
+depleted overnight. From twenty and thirty miles around, the big-hearted
+farmers come in their wagons to attend the show and to negotiate with the
+committee. The negotiations are rarely prolonged. Each picks out his
+child, sometimes two, often more than one the same child. The committee
+umpires between them. They all know each other, and the agent's knowledge
+of each child, gained on the way out and perhaps through previous
+acquaintance, helps to make the best choice. There is no ceremony of
+adoption. That is left to days to come, when the child and the new home
+have learned to know each other, and to the watchful care of the local
+committee. To any questions concerning faith or previous condition that
+may be asked, the Society's answer is always the same. In substance it is
+this:
+
+"We do not know. Here is the child. Take him and make a good Baptist, or
+Methodist, or Christian of any sect of him! That is your privilege and his
+gain. The fewer questions you ask the better. Let his past be behind him
+and the future his to work out. Love him for himself."[23]
+
+And in the spirit in which the advice is given it is usually accepted.
+Night falls upon a joyous band returning home over the quiet country
+roads, the little stranger snugly stowed among his new friends, one of
+them already, with home and life before him.
+
+And does the event justify the high hopes of that home journey? Almost
+always in the end, if the child was young enough when it was sent out.
+Sometimes a change has to be made. Oftener the change is of name, in the
+adoption that follows. Some of the boys get restless as they grow up, and
+"run about a good deal," to the anguish of the committee. A few are
+reported as having "gone to the bad." But even these commonly come out all
+right at last. One of them, of whom mention is made in the Society's
+thirty-fifth annual report, turned up after long years as Mayor of his
+town and a member of the legislature. "We can think," wrote Mr. Brace
+before his death, "of little Five Points thieves who are now ministers of
+the gospel or honest farmers; vagrants and street children who are men in
+professional life; and women who, as teachers or wives of good citizens,
+are everywhere respected; the children of outcasts or unfortunates whose
+inherited tendencies have been met by the new environment, and who are
+industrious and decent members of society." Only by their losing
+themselves does the Society lose sight of them. Two or three times a year
+the agent goes to see them all. In the big ledgers in St. Mark's Place
+each child who has been placed out has a page to himself on which all his
+doings are recorded, as he is heard of year by year. There are twenty-nine
+of these canvas-bound ledgers now, and the stories they have to tell would
+help anyone, who thinks he has lost faith in poor human nature, to pick it
+up with the vow never to let go of it again. I open one of them at random,
+and copy the page--page 289 of ledger No. 23. It tells the story of an
+English boy, one of four who were picked up down at Castle Garden twelve
+years ago. His mother was dead, and he had not seen his father for five
+years before he came here, a stowaway. He did not care, he said, where
+they sent him, so long as it was not back to England:
+
+June 15, 1880. James S----, aged fourteen years, English; orphan; goes
+West with J. P. Brace.
+
+Placed with J. R----, Neosha Rapids, Kan. January 26, 1880, James writes
+that he gets along pleasantly; wrote to him; twenty-sixth annual report
+sent August 4th. July 14, 1880, Mr. and Mrs. R---- write that James is
+impudent and tries them greatly. Wrote to him August 17, 1880; wrote again
+October 15th. October 21, 1880, Mr. R---- writes that they could not
+possibly get along with James and placed him with Mr. G. H----, about five
+miles from his house. Mr. H---- is a good man and has a handsome property.
+Wrote to James March 8, 1881. May 1, 1883, has left his place and has
+engaged to work for Mr. H----, of Hartford. James seems to be a pretty
+wild boy, and the probability is he will turn out badly; is very profane
+and has a violent temper. April 17, 1887, Mrs. Lyman Fry writes James was
+crushed to death in Kansas City, where he was employed as brakeman on a
+freight train.
+
+October 16, 1889.--The above is a mistake. James calls to-day at the
+office and says that after I saw him he turned over a new leaf, and has
+made a pretty good character for himself. Has worked steadily and has many
+friends in Emporia. Has been here three days and wants to look up his
+friends. Is grateful for having been sent West."
+
+So James came out right after all, and all his sins are forgiven. He was a
+fair sample of those who have troubled the Society's managers most,
+occasionally brought undeserved reproach upon them, but in the end given
+them the sweet joy of knowing that their faith and trust were not put to
+shame. Many pages in the ledgers shine with testimony to that. I shall
+mention but a single case, the one to which I alluded in the introduction
+to the story of the Industrial Schools. Andrew H. Burke was taken by the
+Society's agents from the nursery at Randall's Island, thirty-three years
+ago, with a number of other boys, and sent out to Nobleville, Ind. They
+heard from him in St. Mark's Place as joining the Sons of Temperance, then
+as going to the war, a drummer boy; next of his going to college with a
+determination "to be somebody in the world." He carried his point. That
+boy is now the Governor of North Dakota. Last winter he wrote to his kind
+friends, full of loyalty and gratitude, this message for the poor children
+of New York:
+
+"To the boys now under your charge please convey my best wishes, and that
+I hope that their pathways in life will be those of morality, of honor, of
+health, and industry. With these four attributes as a guidance and
+incentive, I can bespeak for them an honorable and happy and successful
+life. The goal is for them as well as for the rich man's son. They must
+learn to labor and to wait, for 'all things come to him who waits.' Many
+times will the road be rugged, winding, and long, and the sky overcast
+with ominous clouds. Still, it will not do to fall by the wayside and give
+up. If one does, the battle of life will be lost.
+
+"Tell the boys I am proud to have had as humble a beginning in life as
+they, and that I believe it has been my salvation. I hope my success in
+life, if it can be so termed, will be an incentive to them to struggle for
+a respectable recognition among their fellow-men. In this country family
+name cuts but little figure. It is the character of the man that wins
+recognition, hence I would urge them to build carefully and consistently
+for the future."
+
+The bigger boys do not always give so good an account of themselves. I
+have already spoken of the difficulty besetting the Society's efforts to
+deal with that end of the problem. The street in their case has had the
+first inning, and the battle is hard, often doubtful. Sometimes it is
+lost. These are rarely sent West, early consignments of them having
+stirred up a good deal of trouble there. They go South, where they seem to
+have more patience with them. "The people there," said an old agent of the
+Society to me, with an enthusiasm that was fairly contagious, "are the
+most generous, kind-hearted people in the world. And they are more easy
+going. If a boy turns out badly, steals and runs away perhaps, a letter
+comes, asking not for retaliation or upbraiding us for letting him come,
+but hoping that he will do better, expressing sorrow and concern, and
+ending usually with the big-hearted request that we send them another in
+his place." And another comes, and, ten to one, does better. What lad is
+there whose wayward spirit such kindness would not conquer in the end?[24]
+
+These bigger boys come usually out of the Society's lodging-houses for
+homeless children. Of these I spoke so fully in the account of the Street
+Arab in "How the Other Half Lives," that I shall not here enter into any
+detailed description of them. There are six, one for girls in East Twelfth
+Street, lately moved from St. Mark's Place, and five for boys. The oldest
+and best known of these is the Newsboys' lodging-house in Duane Street,
+now called the Brace Memorial Lodging-house for Boys. The others are the
+East Side house in East Broadway, the Tompkins Square house, the West Side
+house at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-second Street, and the lodging-house at
+Forty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. A list of the builders' names
+emphasizes what I said a while ago about the unostentatious charity of
+rich New Yorkers. I have never seen them published anywhere except in the
+Society's reports, but they make good and instructive reading, and here
+they are in the order in which I gave the houses they built, beginning
+with the one on East Broadway: Miss Catharine L. Wolfe, Mrs. Robert L.
+Stuart, John Jacob Astor, Morris K. Jesup. The girls' home in East Twelfth
+Street, just completed, was built as a memorial to Miss Elizabeth
+Davenport Wheeler by her family, and is to be known as the Elizabeth Home.
+The list might be greatly extended by including the twenty-one Industrial
+Schools, which are in fact links in the same great chain; but that is not
+to the present purpose, and probably I should not be thanked for doing it.
+I have already transgressed enough. The wealth that seeks its
+responsibilities among the outcast children in this city, is of the kind
+that prefers that it should remain unidentified and unheralded to the
+world in connection with its benefactions.
+
+It is in these lodging-houses that one may study the homelessness that
+mocks the miles of brick walls which enclose New York's tenements, but
+not its homes. Only with special opportunities is it nowadays possible to
+study it anywhere else in New York. One may still hunt up by night waifs
+who make their beds in alleys and cellars and abandoned sheds. This last
+winter two stable fires that broke out in the middle of the night routed
+out little colonies of boys, who slept in the hay and probably set it on
+fire. But one no longer stumbles over homeless waifs in the street
+gutters. One has to hunt for them and to know where. The "cruelty man"
+knows and hunts them so assiduously that the game is getting scarcer every
+day. The doors of the lodging-houses stand open day and night, offering
+shelter upon terms no cold or hungry lad would reject: six cents for
+breakfast and supper, six for a clean bed. They are not pauper barracks,
+and he is expected to pay; but he can have trust if his pockets are empty,
+as they probably are, and even a bootblack's kit or an armful of papers to
+start him in business, if need be. The only conditions are that he shall
+wash and not swear, and attend evening school when his work is done. It is
+not possible to-day that an outcast child should long remain supperless
+and without shelter in New York, unless he prefers to take his chances
+with the rats of the gutter. Such children there are, but they are no
+longer often met. The winter's cold drives even them to cover and to
+accept the terms they rejected in more hospitable seasons. Even the
+"dock-rat" is human.
+
+It seems a marvel that he is, sometimes, when one hears the story of what
+drove him to the street. Drunkenness and brutality at home helped the
+tenement do it, half the time. It drove his sister out to a life of shame,
+too, as likely as not. I have talked with a good many of the boys, trying
+to find out, and heard some yarns and some stories that were true. In
+seven cases out of ten, of those who had homes to go to, it was that, when
+we got down to hard pan. A drunken father or mother made the street
+preferable to the house, and to the street they went.[25] In other cases
+death, perhaps, had broken up the family and thrown the boys upon the
+world. That was the story of one of the boys I tried to photograph at a
+quiet game of "craps" (see picture on page 122) in the hallway of the
+Duane Street lodging-house--James Brady. Father and mother had both died
+two months after they came here from Ireland, and he went forth from the
+tenement alone and without a friend, but not without courage. He just
+walked on until he stumbled on the lodging-house, and fell into a job of
+selling papers. James, at the age of sixteen, was being initiated into the
+mysteries of the alphabet in the evening school. He was not sure that he
+liked it. The German boy who took a hand in the game, and who made his
+grub and bed money, when he was lucky, by picking up junk, had just such a
+career. The third, the bootblack, gave his reasons briefly for running
+away from his Philadelphia home: "Me muther wuz all the time hittin' me
+when I cum in the house, so I cum away." So did a German boy I met there,
+if for a slightly different reason. He was fresh from over the sea, and
+had not yet learned a word of English. In his own tongue he told why he
+came. His father sent him to a gymnasium, but the Latin was "zu schwer"
+for him, and "der Herr Papa sagt heraus!" He was evidently a boy of good
+family, but slow. His father could have taken no better course, certainly,
+to cure him of that defect, if he did not mind the danger of it.
+
+There are always some whom nobody owns. Boys who come from a distance
+perhaps, and are cast up in our streets with all the other drift that sets
+toward the city's maelstrom. But the great mass were born of the maelstrom
+and ground by it into what they are. Of fourteen lads rounded up by the
+officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children one
+night this past summer, in the alleys and byways down about the printing
+offices, where they have their run, two were from Brooklyn, one a runaway
+from a good home in White Plains, and the rest from the tenements of New
+York. Only one was really without home or friends. That was perhaps an
+unusually--I was going to say good showing; but I do not know that it can
+be called a good showing that ten boys who had homes to go to should
+prefer to sleep out in the street. The boy who has none would have no
+other choice until someone picked him up and took him in. The record of
+the 84,318 children that have been sent to Western homes in thirty-nine
+years show that 17,383 of them had both parents living, and therefore
+presumably homes, such as they were; 5,892 only the father, and 11,954 the
+mother, living; 39,406 had neither father nor mother. The rest either did
+not know, or did not tell. That again includes an earlier period when the
+streets were full of vagrants without home-ties, so that the statement, as
+applied to to-day, errs on the other side. The truth lies between the two
+extremes. Four-fifths, perhaps, are outcasts, the rest homeless waifs.
+
+The great mass, for instance, of the newsboys who cry their "extrees" in
+the streets by day, and whom one meets in the Duane Street lodging-house
+or in Theatre Alley and about the Post-office by night, are children with
+homes who thus contribute to the family earnings, and sleep out, if they
+do, because they have either not sold their papers or gambled away the
+money at "craps," and are afraid to go home. It was for such a reason
+little Giuseppe Margalto and his chum made their bed in the ventilating
+chute at the Post-office on the night General Sherman died, and were
+caught by the fire that broke out in the mail-room toward midnight.
+Giuseppe was burned to death; the other escaped to bring the news to the
+dark Crosby Street alley in which he had lived. Giuseppe did not die his
+cruel death in vain. A much stricter watch has been kept since upon the
+boys, and they are no longer allowed to sleep in many places to which they
+formerly had access.
+
+A bed in the street, in an odd box or corner, is good enough for the
+ragamuffin who thinks the latitude of his tenement unhealthy, when the
+weather is warm. It is cooler there, too, and it costs nothing, if one can
+keep out of the reach of the policeman. It is no new experience to the
+boy. Half the tenement population, men, women, and children, sleep out of
+doors, in streets and yards, on the roof, or on the fire-escape, from May
+to October. In winter the boys can curl themselves up on the steam-pipes
+in the newspaper offices that open their doors after midnight on secret
+purpose to let them in. When these fail, there is still the lodging-house
+as a last resort. To the lad whom ill-treatment or misfortune drove to the
+street it is always a friend. To the chronic vagrant it has several
+drawbacks: the school, the wash, the enforced tax for the supper and the
+bed, that cuts down the allowance for "craps," his all-absorbing passion,
+and finally the occasional inconvenient habit of mothers and fathers to
+come looking there for their missing boys. The police send them there, and
+sometimes they take the trouble to call when the boys have gone to bed,
+taking them at what they consider a mean disadvantage. However, most of
+them do not trouble themselves to that extent. They let the strap hang
+idle till the boy comes back, if he ever does.
+
+
+[Illustration: 2 A.M. IN THE DELIVERY ROOM IN THE "SUN" OFFICE.]
+
+
+Last February Harry Quill, aged fifteen, disappeared from the tenement No.
+45 Washington Street, and though he was not heard of again for many
+weeks, his people never bothered the police. Not until his dead body was
+fished up from the air-shaft at the bottom of which it had lain two whole
+months, was his disappearance explained. But the full explanation came
+only the other day, in September, when one of his playmates was arrested
+for throwing him down and confessed to doing it. Harry was drunk, he said,
+and attacked him on the roof with a knife. In the struggle he threw him
+into the air-shaft. Fifteen years old, and fighting drunk! The mere
+statement sheds a stronger light on the sources of child vagabondage in
+our city than I could do, were I to fill the rest of my book with an
+enumeration of them.
+
+However, it is a good deal oftener the father who gets drunk than the boy.
+Not all, nor even a majority, of the boys one meets at the lodging-houses
+are of that stamp. If they were, they would not be there long. They have
+their faults, and the code of morals proclaimed by the little newsboys,
+for instance, is not always in absolute harmony with that generally
+adopted by civilized society. But even they have virtues quite as
+conspicuous. They are honest after their fashion, and tremendously
+impartial in a fight. They are bound to see fair play, if they all have to
+take a hand. It generally ends that way. A good many of them--the great
+majority in all the other lodging-houses but that in Duane Street--work
+steadily in shops and factories, making their home there because it is the
+best they have, and because there they are among friends they know. Two
+little brothers, John and Willie, attracted my attention in the Newsboys'
+Lodging-house by the sturdy way in which they held together, back to back,
+against the world, as it were. Willie was thirteen and John eleven years
+old. Their story was simple and soon told. Their mother died, and their
+father, who worked in a gas-house, broke up the household, unable to
+maintain it. The boys went out to shift for themselves, while he made his
+home in a Bowery lodging-house. The oldest of the brothers was then
+earning three dollars a week in a factory; the younger was selling
+newspapers, and making out. The day I first saw him he came in from his
+route early--it was raining hard--to get dry trousers out for his brother
+against the time he should be home from the factory. There was no doubt
+the two would hew their way through the world together. The right stuff
+was in them, as in the two other lads, also brothers, I found in the
+Tompkins Square lodging-house. Their parents had both died, leaving them
+to care for a palsied sister and a little brother. They sent the little
+one to school, and went to work for the sister. Their combined earnings at
+the shop were just enough to support her and one of the brothers who
+stayed with her. The other went to the lodging-house, where he could live
+for eighteen cents a day, turning the rest of his earnings into the family
+fund. With this view of these homeless lads, the one who goes much among
+them is not surprised to hear of their clubbing together, as they did in
+the Seventh Avenue lodging-house, to fit out a little ragamuffin, who was
+brought in shivering from the street, with a suit of clothes. There was
+not one in the crowd that chipped in who had a whole coat to his back.
+
+It was in this lodging-house I first saw Buffalo. He was presented to me
+the night I took the picture of my little vegetable-peddling friend,
+Edward, asleep on the front bench in evening school. Edward was nine years
+old and an orphan, but hard at work every day earning his own living by
+shouting from a pedlar's cart. He could not be made to sit for his
+picture, and I took him at a disadvantage--in a double sense, for he had
+not made his toilet; it was in the days of the threatened water-famine,
+and the boys had been warned not to waste water in washing, an injunction
+they cheerfully obeyed. I was anxious not to have the boy disturbed, so
+the spelling-class went right on while I set up the camera. It was an
+original class, original in its answers as in its looks. This was what I
+heard while I focused on poor Eddie:
+
+The teacher: "Cheat! spell cheat."
+
+
+[Illustration: BUFFALO.]
+
+
+Boy spells correctly. Teacher: "Right! What is it to cheat?"
+
+Boy: "To skin one, like Tommy----"
+
+The teacher cut the explanation short, and ordering up another boy, bade
+him spell "nerve." He did it. "What is nerve?" demanded the teacher; "what
+does it mean?"
+
+
+[Illustration: NIGHT-SCHOOL IN THE WEST SIDE LODGING-HOUSE. EDWARD, THE
+LITTLE PEDLAR, CAUGHT NAPPING.]
+
+
+"Cheek! don't you know," said the boy, and at that moment I caught
+Buffalo blacking my sleeping pedlar's face with ink, just in time to
+prevent his waking him up. Then it was that I heard the disturber's story.
+He _was_ a character, and no mistake. He had run away from Buffalo, whence
+his name, "beating" his way down on the trains, until he reached New York.
+He "shined" around until he got so desperately hard up that he had to sell
+his kit. Just about then he was discovered by an artist, who paid him to
+sit for him in his awful rags with his tousled hair that had not known the
+restraint of a cap for months. "Oh! it was a daisy job," sighed Buffalo,
+at the recollection. He had only to sit still and crack jokes. Alas!
+Buffalo's first effort at righteousness upset him. He had been taught in
+the lodging-house that to be clean was the first requisite of a gentleman,
+and on his first pay-day he went bravely, eschewing "craps," and bought
+himself a new coat and had his hair cut. When, beaming with pride, he
+presented himself at the studio in his new character, the artist turned
+him out as no longer of any use to him. I am afraid that Buffalo's
+ambition to be "like folks," received a shock by this mysterious
+misfortune, that spoiled his career. A few days after that he was caught
+by a policeman in the street, at his old game of "craps." The officer took
+him to the police court and arraigned him as a hardened offender. To the
+judge's question if he had any home, he said frankly yes! in Buffalo, but
+he had run away from it.
+
+"Now, if I let you go, will you go right back?" asked the magistrate,
+looking over the desk at the youthful prisoner. Buffalo took off his
+tattered cap and stood up on the foot-rail so that he could reach across
+the desk with his hand.
+
+"Put it there, jedge!" he said. "I'll go. Square and honest, I will."
+
+And he went. I never heard of him again.
+
+The evening classes are a sort of latch-key to knowledge for belated
+travellers on the road. They make good use of it, if they are late, as
+instanced in the class in history in the Duane Street lodging-house, which
+the younger boys irreverently speak of as "The Soup-house Gang." I found
+it surprisingly proficient, if it was in its shirtsleeves, and there were
+at least a couple of pupils in it who promised to make their mark. All of
+its members are working lads, and not a few of them are capitalists in a
+small but very promising way. There is a savings bank attached to each
+lodging-house, with the superintendent as president and cashier at once.
+No less than $5,197 was deposited by the 11,435 boys who found shelter in
+them in 1891. They were not all depositors, of course. In the Duane Street
+lodging-house, out of 7,614 newsboys who were registered, 1,108 developed
+the instinct of saving, or were able to lay by something. Their little
+pile at the end of the year held the respectable sum of $3,162.39.[26] It
+is safe to say that the interest of the Soup-house Gang in it was
+proportionate to its other achievements. In the West Side lodging-house,
+where nearly a thousand boys were taken in during the year, 54 patronized
+the bank and saved up $360.11. I found a little newsboy there who sells
+papers in the Grand Central Depot, and whose bank-book showed deposits of
+$200. Some day that boy, for all he has a "tough" father and mother who
+made him prefer the lodging-house as a home at the age of nine years, will
+be running the news business on the road as the capable "boss" of any
+number of lads of his present age. He neglects no opportunity to learn
+what the house has to offer, if he can get to the school in time. On the
+whole, the teachers report the boys as slow at their books, and no wonder.
+A glimpse of little Eddie, in from the cart after his day's work and
+dropping asleep on the bench from sheer weariness, more than excuses him,
+I think. Eddie may have a chance now to learn something better than
+peddling apples. They have lately added to the nightly instruction there,
+I am told, the feature of manual training in the shape of a
+printing-office, to which the boys have taken amazingly and which
+promises great things.
+
+There was one pupil in that evening class, at whose door the charge of
+being "slow" could not be laid, indifferent though his scholarship was in
+anything but the tricks of the street. He was the most hopeless young
+scamp I ever knew, and withal so aggravatingly funny that it was
+impossible not to laugh, no matter how much one felt like scolding. He
+lived by "shinin'" and kept his kit in a saloon to save his dragging it
+home every night. When I last saw him he was in disgrace, for not showing
+up at the school four successive nights. He explained that the policeman
+who "collared" him "fur fightin'" was to blame. It was the third time he
+had been locked up for that offence. When he found out that I wanted to
+know his history, he set about helping me with a readiness to oblige that
+was very promising. Did he have any home? Oh, yes, he had.
+
+"Well, where do you live?" I asked.
+
+"Here!" said Tommy, promptly, with just a suspicion of a wink at the other
+boys who were gathered about watching the examination. He had no father;
+didn't know where his mother was.
+
+"Is she any relation to you!" put in one of the boys, gravely. Tommy
+disdained the question. It turned out that his mother had been after him
+repeatedly and that he was an incorrigible runaway. She had at last given
+him up for good. While his picture was being "took"--it will be found on
+page 100 of this book--one of the lads reported that she was at the door
+again, and Tommy broke and ran. He returned just when they closed the
+doors of the house for the night, with the report that "the old woman was
+a fake."
+
+
+[Illustration: THE "SOUP-HOUSE GANG," CLASS IN HISTORY IN THE DUANE STREET
+NEWSBOYS' LODGING-HOUSE.]
+
+
+The crippled boys' brush shop is a feature of the lodging-house in East
+Forty-fourth Street. It is the _bęte noire_ of the Society, partly on
+account of the difficulty of making it go without too great an outlay,
+partly on account of the boys themselves. They are of all the city's
+outcasts the most unfortunate and the hardest to manage. Their misfortune
+has soured their temper, and as a rule they are troublesome and
+headstrong. No wonder. There seems to be no room for a poor crippled lad
+in New York. There are plenty of institutions that are after the well and
+able-bodied, but for the cripples the only chance is to shrivel and die in
+the Randall's Island Asylum. No one wants them. The brush shop pays them
+wages that enables them to make their way, and the boys turn out enough
+brushes, if a market could only be found for them. It is a curious and
+saddening fact that the competition that robs it of its market comes from
+the prisons, to block the doors of which the Society expends all its
+energies--the prisons of other States than our own at that. The managers
+have a good word to say for the trades unions, which have been very kind
+to them, they say, in this matter of brushes, trying to help the boys, but
+without much success. The shop is able to employ only a small fraction of
+the number it might benefit, were it able to dispose of its wares readily.
+Despite their misfortunes the cripples manage to pick up and enjoy the
+good things they find in their path as they hobble through life. Last year
+they challenged the other crippled boys in the hospital on Randall's
+Island to a champion game of base-ball, and beat them on their crutches
+with a score of 42 to 31. The game was played on the hospital lawn, before
+an enthusiastic crowd of wrecks, young and old, and must have been a sight
+to see.
+
+A worse snag than the competition of the prisons is struck by the Society
+in the cheap Bowery lodging-houses--"hotels" they are called--that attract
+the homeless boys with their greater promise of freedom. There are no
+troublesome rules to obey there, no hours to keep, and very little to pay.
+An ordinance of the Health Department, which exercises jurisdiction over
+those houses, prohibits the admission of boys under sixteen years old, but
+the prohibition is easily evaded, and many slip in to encounter there the
+worst of all company for such as they. The lowest of these houses, that
+are also the cheapest and therefore the ones the boys patronize, are the
+nightly rendezvous of thieves and, as the police have more than once
+pointed out, murderers as well. There should be a much stricter
+supervision over them--supervision by the police as well as by the health
+officers--and the age limit should be put at eighteen years instead of
+sixteen. There is this much to be said for the lodging-houses, however,
+that it is a ticklish subject to approach until the city as a municipality
+has swept before its own door. They at least offer a bed, such as it is,
+and shelter after their fashion. The hospitality the city offers to its
+homeless poor in the police-station lodging-rooms is one of the scandals
+of a civilized age. The moral degradation of an enforced stay in these
+dens is immeasurable. To say that they are the resort of tramps and "bums"
+who know and deserve nothing better, is begging the question. It is true
+of the majority, but that very fact consigns the helpless minority, too
+poor to pay and too proud to beg, to a fate worse than death. I myself
+picked from the mass of festering human filth in a police-station
+lodging-room, one night last winter, six young lads, not one of whom was
+over eighteen, and who for one reason or another had been stranded there
+that night. They were not ruffians either, but boys who to all appearances
+had come from good homes, the memory of which might not efface the lessons
+learned that night in a lifetime. The scandal has been denounced over and
+over again by grand juries, by the Police Commissioners, and by
+philanthropists who know of the facts, and efforts without end have been
+made to get the city authorities to substitute some decent system of
+municipal hospitality for this unutterable disgrace, as other cities have
+done, but they have all been wrecked by political jobbery or official
+apathy.
+
+A thing to be profoundly thankful for is the practical elimination of the
+girl vagrant from our social life. Ten years ago, Broadway from Fourteenth
+Street up was crowded with little girls who, under the pretence of
+peddling flowers and newspapers, pandered to the worst immorality. They
+went in regular gangs, captained and employed by a few conscienceless old
+harpies, who took the wages of their infamy and paid them with blows and
+curses if they fell short of their greed. The police and the officers of
+the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children put an end to this
+traffic after a long fight, sending the old wretches to jail and some of
+their victims to the reformatories. One of the gangs that were broken up
+had a rendezvous in a stable in Thirtieth Street, near Broadway. The girls
+had latch-keys and went out and in at all hours of the night. To-day the
+flower-girl of tender years is scarcely ever met with in New York. Even
+the news-girl has disappeared almost entirely and left the field to the
+boys. Those who are not at work at home or in the shop have been gathered
+in by the agencies for their rescue, that have multiplied with the growth
+of the conviction that girl vagrancy is so much more corrosive than boy
+vagabondism, as it adds sexual immorality to the other dangers of the
+street. In 1881 the society's lodging-house in St. Mark's Place sheltered
+1,287 girls. Their number has gone down since, as the census has gone up,
+until last year it had fallen to 335, and even these were no longer
+vagrants, but wayward daughters brought by their parents to be trained to
+obedience and industry. In the same period, during which the city's
+population increased more than one-fourth, the increase being very largely
+made up of just the material to feed its homelessness, the register of the
+boys' lodging-houses showed a reduction from 13,155 to 11,435.
+
+In the introductory chapter I pointed out, as a result of the efforts made
+in behalf of the children in the past generation, not only by the
+Children's Aid Society, but by many kindred organizations, that the
+commitments of girls and women for vagrancy fell off between the years
+1860 and 1890 from 5,880 to 1,980, or from 1 in every 138-1/2 persons to 1
+in every 780 of a population that had more than doubled in the interval,
+while the commitments of petty girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890
+from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500. Illustrated by diagram this last statement
+looks this way, the year 1869 being substituted as the starting-point; it
+had almost exactly the same number of commitments as 1865 (see Chart A).
+
+
+[Illustration: CHART A.]
+
+
+The year is at the top, and its record of commitments of petty girl
+thieves at the bottom. The tendency is steadily downward, it will be seen,
+and downward here is the safe course. The police court arraignments for
+what is known as juvenile delinquency, which is, in short, all the
+mischief that is not crime under the code, make the following showing,
+starting with the year 1875, the upper line representing the boys and the
+lower the girls:
+
+
+[Illustration: CHART B.]
+
+
+Taking, finally, the commitments of girls under twenty for all causes, in
+thirteen years, we have this showing:
+
+
+[Illustration: CHART C.]
+
+
+These diagrams would be more satisfactory if they always meant exactly
+what they seem to show. The trouble is that they share in the general
+inapplicability to the purposes of scientific research of all public
+reports in this city (save those of the Health Department, which is
+fortunate in possessing a responsible expert statistician in Dr. Roger S.
+Tracy) by reason of lack of uniformity or otherwise. When one gets down to
+the bottom of a slump like that between the years 1888 and 1889, in the
+last diagram, one is as likely to find a negligent police clerk or some
+accidental change of classification there as an economic fact. Something
+like this last is, I believe, hidden in this particular one. The figures
+for 1891 maintain the point reached in 1887 and in 1890. However, the
+important thing is that the decrease has gone on more or less steadily
+through good years and bad since the children's societies took the field,
+while the population has increased as never before. Had these forms of
+disorder even held their own, the slope should have been steadily upward,
+not downward. In this there is encouragement, surely. There is enough left
+to battle with. The six lodging-houses sheltered in the last twelve years
+149,994 children, 8,820 of them girls. We are not near the end yet. The
+problem is a great one, but the efforts on foot to solve it are great and
+growing. It has been a forty years' fight with poverty and ignorance and
+crime, and it is only just begun. But the first blow is half the battle,
+it is said, and it has been struck in New York, and struck to win.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM
+
+
+In spite of all this labor and effort, in the face of the fact that half
+of the miseries of society are at last acknowledged to be due to the
+sundering of the home-tie in childhood, and that therefore the remedy lies
+in restoring it, where that can be done, as early as possible, we have in
+New York a city of mighty institutions, marshalling a standing army of
+nearly or quite sixteen thousand children, year in and year out.[27] Homes
+they are sometimes called; but too many of them are not homes in the
+saving sense. Those are, that are merely half-way houses to the ultimate
+family home that shall restore to the child what it has lost. Failing in
+that, they become public tenements, with most of the bad features of the
+tenement left out, but the worst retained: the smothering of the tenant's
+individuality. He is saved from becoming a tough to become an automaton.
+
+It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that makes the
+pauper. It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that marshals
+the greater part of this army. Money backed up by pharisaical
+sectarianism. Where two such powerful factors combine, politics is never
+far in the rear, though modestly invisible to the naked eye. To this
+irresponsible combination--conspiracy it might be called without
+stretching the point far--the care of the defenceless child that comes
+upon the public for support has been handed over without check or control
+of any sort. Worse, a premium has been put upon his coming, upon child
+desertion in our community. What are the causes of this?
+
+They have been stated often and urgently enough by those whose great
+experience gave weight to their arguments. Clothed in legal phrase, they
+may be found summed up in the law of 1875, which ordains that a dependent
+child shall be committed to an institution controlled by persons of the
+same religious faith as its parents, when that can be done, and that the
+county shall pay the child's board. It was a tremendous bid for child
+pauperism, and poverty, ignorance, and greed were not slow to respond.
+Under this so-called "religious clause," the number of children thrown
+upon the county, in New York City alone, was swelled, between 1875 and
+1890, from 9.363 to 16.358, this statement including only the twenty-nine
+institutions that can demand or do receive public money toward their
+support. Some of them, that have come into existence since it was passed,
+were directly created by the law. It was natural that this should be so,
+"because it provided exactly the care which parents desired for their
+children, that of persons of their own religious faith, and supplied ample
+means for the children's support; while, although the funds were to be
+derived from public sources, yet since the institutions were to be managed
+by private persons, the stigma which fortunately attaches to _public_
+relief was removed. Thus every incentive to parents to place their
+children upon the public for support was created by the provisions of the
+law, and every deterrent was removed; for the law demanded nothing from
+the parent in return for the support of the child, and did not deprive him
+of any of his rights over the child, although relieving him of every duty
+toward it."[28] But New York City went a step further, by having special
+laws passed securing a stated income from the money raised by local
+taxation to nine of its largest institutions. This is where the trail of
+the politician might perhaps be traced with an effort. The amount drawn by
+the nine in 1890 was nearly a million dollars, while the total so expended
+footed up in that year over sixteen hundred thousand dollars. New York
+City to-day supports one dependent child to each one hundred of its
+population, and the tax levied, directly and indirectly, for the purpose
+is about a dollar a head for every man, woman, and child in the city. The
+State in 1888 supported one child to every 251 of its population. The
+State of California, which had also gone into the wholesale charity
+business, supported one dependent child to every 290 of its population,
+while Michigan, which had gone out of it, taking her children out of the
+poor-houses and sending them to a State public school, with the proviso
+that thenceforth parents surrendering their children to be public charges
+should lose all rights over or to their custody, services, or earnings,
+had only 1 to every 10,000 of its people.[29]
+
+That proviso cut the matter to the quick. The law declared the school to
+be a "temporary home for dependent children, where they shall be detained
+only until they can be placed in family homes." That is a very different
+thing from the institution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns,
+and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand
+boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and
+taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the
+rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the
+family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the
+asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. To what
+extent these things are done in New York may be inferred from the
+statement of the Superintendent of the Juvenile Asylum, which contains an
+average of a thousand children, that three-fourths of the inmates could
+not be sent to free homes in the West because their relatives would not
+consent to their going.[30] It was only last summer that my attention was
+attracted, while on a visit to this Juvenile Asylum, to a fine-looking
+little fellow who seemed much above the average of the class in which I
+found him. On inquiring as to the causes that had brought him to that
+place, I was shocked to find that he was the son of a public official,
+well-known to me, whose income from the city's treasury was sufficient not
+only to provide for the support of his family, but to enable him to
+gratify somewhat expensive private tastes as well. The boy had been there
+two years, during which time the Asylum had drawn for his account from the
+public funds about $240, at the per capita rate of $110 for each inmate
+and his share of the school money. His father, when I asked him why the
+boy was there, told me that it was because he would insist upon paying
+unauthorized visits to his grandmother in the country. There was no
+evidence that he was otherwise unmanageable. Seeing my surprise, he put
+the question, as if that covered the ground: "Well, now! where would you
+put him in a better place?" It was a handsome compliment to the Asylum,
+which as a reform school it perhaps deserved; but it struck me, all the
+same, that he could hardly have put him in a worse place, on all accounts.
+
+I do not know how many such cases there were in the Asylum then. I hope
+not many. But it is certain that our public institutions are full of
+children who have parents amply able, but unwilling, to support them. From
+time to time enough such cases crop out to show how common the practice
+is. Reference to cases 59,703, 59,851, and 60,497 in the report of the
+Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1892), will discover
+some striking instances that were ferreted out by the Society's officers.
+All of the offenders were in thriving business. One of them kept a store
+in Newark--in another State--and was not even a resident of the city. He
+merely "honored it with the privilege of paying his children's
+boarding-school expenses in the institution." They were all Italians.
+These people seem to consider that it is their right to thus feed at the
+public crib. Perhaps it is the first quickening of the seed of municipal
+politics that sprouts so energetically among them in the slums, under the
+teaching of their Irish patrons.
+
+When Mrs. Lowell inspected the New York City institutions in 1889, she
+found "that of 20,384 individual children sheltered in them, 4,139 had
+been that year returned to parents or friends, that is, to the persons who
+had given them up to be paupers; that there were only 1,776 orphans among
+them, and 4,987 half orphans, of whom 2,247 had living fathers, who
+presumably ought to have been made to support their children themselves."
+Three years later, the imperfect returns to a circular inquiry sent out by
+the State Board of Charities, showed that of 18,556 children in
+institutions in this State, 3,671, or less than twenty per cent., were
+orphans. The rest then had, or should have, homes. Doubtless, many were
+homes of which they were well rid; but all experience shows that there
+must have been far too many of the kind that were well rid of _them_, and
+to that extent the tax-payers were robbed and the parents and the children
+pauperized. And that even that other kind were much better off in the long
+run, their being in the institution did not guarantee. Children, once for
+all, cannot be successfully reared in regiments within the narrow rules
+and the confinement of an asylum, if success is to be measured by the
+development of individual character. Power to regulate or shorten their
+stay is not vested to any practical extent or purpose in any outside
+agency. Within, with every benevolent desire to do the right, every
+interest of the institution as a whole tends to confuse the perception of
+it. The more children, the more money; the fewer children, the less money.
+A thousand children can be more economically managed for $110,000 than
+five hundred for half the money. The fortieth annual report of the
+Juvenile Asylum (1891) puts it very plainly, in this statement on page 23:
+"Until the capacity of the Asylum was materially increased, an annual
+deficit ranging between $5,000 and $10,000 had to be covered by appeals to
+private contributors." Now, it runs not only the New York house but its
+Western agency as well on its income.
+
+The city pays the bills, but exercises no other control over the
+institutions. It does not even trouble itself with counting the
+children.[31] The committing magistrate consults and is guided more or
+less by the Officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Children, in his choice of the institution into which the child is put.
+But both are bound by the law that imposes the "faith-test." The
+faith-test, as enforced by civil law anywhere, is absurd. The parents of
+the eighty per cent. of children in institutions who were not orphans,
+split no theological hairs in ridding themselves of their support. Backed
+by the money sacks of a great and wealthy city, it is injurious humbug.
+This is not the perfection of organized charitable effort for the rescue
+of the children of which I spoke, but rather the perversion of it.
+
+It is reasonable to ask that if the public is to pay the piper, the public
+should have the hiring of him too. A special city officer is needed to
+have this matter in charge. Nearly six years ago Commissioner Lowell
+submitted a draft for a bill creating a department for the care of
+dependent children in New York City, with a commissioner at the head whose
+powers would have been an effective check upon the evil tendencies of the
+present law. But we travel slowly along the path of municipal reform, and
+the commissioner is yet a dream. Some day we may wake up and find him
+there, and then we shall be ready, by and by, to carry out the ideal plan
+of placing those children, for whom free homes cannot be found, out at
+board in families where they shall come by their rights, denied them by
+institution life. Then, too, we shall find, I think, that there is a good
+deal less of the problem than we thought. The managers of the Union
+Temporary Home in Philadelphia decided, after thirty one years of work, to
+close the House and put the children out to board, because experience had
+convinced them that "life in the average institution is not so good for
+children as life in the average home." The intelligence of the conclusion,
+and the earnestness with which they presented it, guaranteed that their
+"Home" had been above the average.
+
+"The testimony of two gentlemen on our Board of Council," they reported,
+"both experienced as heads of great industrial enterprises, is that
+institution boys are generally the least desirable apprentices. They have
+been dulled in faculty, by not having been daily exercised in the use of
+themselves in small ways; have marched in platoons; have done everything
+in squads; have had all the particulars of life arranged for them; and, as
+a consequence, they wait for someone else to arrange every piece of work,
+and are never ready for emergencies, nor able to 'take hold.'" But when
+they came to actually board the children out, all but the parents of nine
+were suddenly able to take good care of them themselves, and of the rest
+three found a way before final arrangements were made. There were seventy
+children in the Home. Pauperism runs in the same ruts in New York as in
+Pennsylvania, and the motive power is the same--ill-spent money.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+THE VERDICT OF THE POTTER'S FIELD
+
+
+Looking back now over the field we have traversed, what is the verdict?
+Are we going backward or forward? To be standing still would be to lose
+ground. Nothing stands still in this community of ours, with its
+ever-swelling population, least of all the problem of the children of the
+poor. It got the start of our old indifference once, and we have had a
+long and wearisome race of it, running it down.
+
+But we have run it down. We are moving forward, and indifference will not
+again trap us into defeat. Evidence is multiplying on every hand to show
+that interest in the children is increasing. The personal service, that
+counts for so infinitely much more than money, is more freely given day by
+day, and no longer as a fashionable fad, but as a duty too long neglected.
+From the colleges young men and women are going forth to study the problem
+in a practical way that is full of promise. Charity is forgetting its
+petty jealousies and learning the lesson of organization and co-operation.
+"Looking back," writes the Secretary of the Charity Organization Society,
+"over the progress of the last ten years, the success seems large, while
+looking at our hopes and aims it often seems meagre." The Church is coming
+up, no longer down, to its work among the poor. In the multiplication of
+brotherhoods and sisterhoods, of societies of Christian Endeavor, of
+King's Daughters, of efforts on every hand to reach the masses, the law of
+love, the only law that has real power to protect the poor, is receiving
+fresh illustration day by day.
+
+The Fresh Air Work, the Boys' Clubs, the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, bear witness to it, and to the energy and resources
+that shall yet win the fight for us. They were born of New York's plight.
+The whole world shares in the good they have wrought.
+
+Kindergartens, industrial schools, baby nurseries are springing up
+everywhere. We have children's play-grounds, and we shall be getting more,
+if the promised small parks are yet in the future. Municipal progress has
+not kept step with private benevolence, but there is progress. New schools
+have been built this year and others are planned. We are beginning to
+understand that there are other and better ways of making citizens and
+voters than to grind them out through the political naturalization mill at
+every election. If the rum power has not lost its grip, it has not
+tightened it, at all events, in forty years. Then there was one saloon to
+every 90.8 inhabitants; to-day there is one to every 236.42.[32] The
+streets in the tenement districts, since I penned the first lines of this
+book, have been paved and cleaned as never before, and new standards of
+decency set up for the poor who live there and for their children. Jersey
+Street, Poverty Gap, have disappeared, and an end has been put, for a
+time at least, to the foul business of refuse gathering at the dumps.
+Nothing stands still in New York. Conditions change so suddenly, under the
+pressure of new exigencies, that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with
+them. The fact that it is generally business which prompts the changes for
+the better has this drawback, that the community, knowing that relief is
+coming sooner or later, gets into the habit of waiting for it to come that
+way as the natural one. It is not always the natural way, and though
+relief comes with bustle and stir at last, it is sometimes too long
+delayed.
+
+Another mischievous habit, characteristic of the American people,
+preoccupied with so many urgent private concerns, is to rise up and pass a
+law that is loudly in demand, and let it go with that, as if all social
+evils could be cured by mere legal enactment. As a result, some of the
+best and most necessary laws are dead letters on our statute books. The
+law is there, but no one thinks of enforcing it. The beginning was made at
+the wrong end; but we shall reach around to the other in season.
+
+The chief end has been gained in the recognition of the child problem as
+the all-important one, of the development of individual character as the
+strongest barrier against the evil forces of the street and the tenement.
+Last year I had occasion to address a convention at the National Capital,
+on certain phases of city poverty and suffering, and made use of the magic
+lantern to enforce some of the lessons presented. The last picture put on
+the screen showed the open trench in the Potter's Field. When it had
+passed, the Secretary of the Convention, a clergyman whose life has been
+given to rescue work among homeless boys, told how there had just come to
+join him in his work the man who had until very lately been in charge of
+this Potter's Field. His experience there had taught him that the waste
+before which he stood helpless at that end of the line, looking on without
+power to check or relieve, must be stopped at its source. So he had turned
+from the dead to the living, pledging the years that remained to him to
+that effort.
+
+It struck me then, and it has seemed to me since, that this man's position
+to the problem was most comprehensive. The evidence of his long-range view
+was convincing. Society had indeed arrived at the same diagnosis some time
+before. Reasoning by exclusion, as doctors do in doubtful diseases, the
+symptoms of which are clearer than their cause, it had conjectured that if
+the "tough" whom it must maintain in idleness behind prison-bars, to keep
+him from preying upon it, was a creature of environment, not justly to
+blame, the community must be, for allowing him to grow up a "tough." So,
+in self-defence, it had turned its hand to the forming of character in
+proportion as it had come to own its failure to reform it. To that failure
+the trench in the Potter's Field bore unceasing witness. Its claim to be
+heard in evidence was incontestable.
+
+Now that it has been heard, its testimony confirms the judgment that had
+already experience to back it. There is no longer room for doubt that with
+the children lies the solution of the problem of poverty, as far as it can
+be reached under existing forms of society and with our machinery for
+securing justice by government. The wisdom of generations that were dust
+two thousand years ago made this choice. We have been long in making it,
+but not too long if our travail has made it clear at last that for all
+time to come it must be the only safe choice. And this, whether from the
+standpoint of the Christian or the unbeliever, from that of humanity or
+mere business. If the matter is reduced to a simple sum in arithmetic, so
+much for so much--child-rescue, as the one way of balancing waste with
+gain, loss with profit, becomes the imperative duty of society, its chief
+bulwark against bankruptcy and wreck.
+
+Thus, through the gloom of the Potter's Field that has levied such heavy
+tribute on our city in the past--even the tenth of its life--brighter
+skies, a new hope, are discerned beyond. They brighten even the slum
+tenement, and shine into the home which just now we despaired of reaching
+by any other road than that of pulling it down. Tireless, indeed, the
+hands need be that have taken up this task. Flag their efforts ever so
+little, hard-won ground is lost, mischief done. But we are gaining, no
+longer losing, ground. Seen from the tenement, through the frame-work of
+injustice and greed that cursed us with it, the outlook seemed little less
+than despairing. Groping vainly, with unseeing eyes, we said: There is no
+way out. The children, upon whom the curse of the tenement lay heaviest,
+have found it for us. Truly it was said: "A little child shall lead
+them."
+
+
+
+
+REGISTER OF CHILDREN'S CHARITIES
+
+AS PUBLISHED BY THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY
+
+
+In addition to the charities given here, seventy-eight churches of all
+denominations conduct weekly industrial and sewing classes, generally on
+Saturdays, for which see the Directory of the Charity Organization
+Society, under Churches, where may also be found the register of
+thirty-two fresh-air funds not recorded below, and of some kindergartens
+and clubs established by various churches for the children of their
+congregations.
+
+
+NURSERIES.
+
+                                                            AGES RECEIVED.
+
+  AHAWATH CHESED SISTERHOOD, 71 East 3d St.                    3 to 6 yrs.
+
+  BETHANY DAY NURSERY, 453 East 57th St.                 2 weeks to 6 yrs.
+
+  BETH-EL SOCIETY, 355 East 62d St.                        2-1/2 to 6 yrs.
+
+  BETHLEHEM DAY NURSERY, 249 East 30th St.                1 week to 7 yrs.
+
+  CHILDREN'S CHARITABLE UNION, 70 Av. D.                       3 to 7 yrs.
+
+  DAY NURSERY AND BABIES' SHELTER, 118 West 21st St.           1 to 5 yrs.
+
+  ÉCOLE FRANÇAISE GRATUITE AND SALLE D'ASILE, 69 Washington Square.
+                                                              2 to 11 yrs.
+
+  EMANU-EL SISTERHOOD, 159 East 74th St.                       3 to 6 yrs.
+
+  GRACE HOUSE DAY NURSERY, 94 Fourth Av.                       1 to 8 yrs.
+
+  HOPE NURSERY, 226 Thompson St.
+
+  JEWELL DAY NURSERY, 20 Macdougal St.                         2 to 5 yrs.
+
+  MANHATTAN WORKING GIRLS' ASSOCIATION, 440 East 57th St.
+                                                        2 weeks to 10 yrs.
+
+  MEMORIAL DAY NURSERY, 275 East Broadway.                     1 to 6 yrs.
+
+  RIVERSIDE DAY NURSERY, 121 West 63d St.                  1 mo. to 8 yrs.
+
+  ST. AGNES' DAY NURSERY, 7 Charles St.                   8 days to 6 yrs.
+
+  ST. BARNABAS' HOUSE, 304 Mulberry St.                  4 weeks to 8 yrs.
+
+  ST. CHRYSOSTOM CHAPEL NURSERY, 224 West 38th St.
+
+  ST. JOHN'S DAY NURSERY, 223 East 67th St.                    1 to 6 yrs.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S DAY NURSERY, 473 West 57th St.            2 weeks to 7 yrs.
+
+  ST. STEPHEN'S EQUITY CLUB, KINDERGARTEN AND NURSERY, 59 West 46th St.
+
+  ST. THOMAS' DAY NURSERY, 231 East 59th St.                  -- to 6 yrs.
+
+  SALLE D'ASILE ET ÉCOLE PRIMAIRE, 2 South 5th Av.             3 to 8 yrs.
+
+  SILVER CROSS DAY NURSERY, 2249 Second Av.             2 weeks to 10 yrs.
+
+  SUNNYSIDE DAY NURSERY, 51 Prospect Pl.                 2 weeks to 7 yrs.
+
+  VIRGINIA DAY NURSERY, 632 5th St.                       6 mos. to 6 yrs.
+
+  WAYSIDE DAY NURSERY, 216 East 20th St.                  2 mos. to 7 yrs.
+
+  WEST SIDE DAY NURSERY, 266 West 40th St.               18 mos. to 7 yrs.
+
+  WILSON INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL DAY NURSERY, 125 St. Mark's Pl.
+                                                           1 mo. to 6 yrs.
+
+
+KINDERGARTENS.
+
+  AHAWATH CHESED SISTERHOOD FREE KINDERGARTEN               71 East 3d St.
+
+  ALL SOULS' CHURCH FREE KINDERGARTEN       70th St. East of Lexington Av.
+
+  BETH-EL SOCIETY FREE KINDERGARTEN                       355 East 62d St.
+
+  CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH FREE KINDERGARTEN           454 West 42d St.
+
+  CHERRY STREET KINDERGARTEN                                340 Cherry St.
+
+  CHILDREN'S CHARITABLE UNION KINDERGARTEN                       70 Av. D.
+
+  EAST SIDE CHAPEL AND BIBLE WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION KINDERGARTEN
+                                                         404 East 15th St.
+
+  EAST SIDE HOUSE KINDERGARTEN                       Foot of East 76th St.
+
+  EMANU-EL SISTERHOOD KINDERGARTEN                         159 E. 74th St.
+
+  FREE KINDERGARTEN ASS'N, OF HARLEM, No. 1 School          2048 First Av.
+
+  FREE KINDERGARTEN OF ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL                Varick near Beach.
+
+  FRENCH FREE SCHOOL                               69 South Washington Sq.
+
+  HEBREW FREE SCHOOL ASSOCIATION              East B'way and Jefferson St.
+
+  KINDERGARTEN OF MADISON SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH HOUSE
+                                                    Third Av. and 30th St.
+
+       "       "  ST. GEORGE'S AV. A MISSION                    253 Av. A.
+
+       "       "         "     CHAPEL                      130 Stanton St.
+
+       "       "  SHEARITH ISRAEL CONGREGATION             5 West 19th St.
+
+  LADIES' BIKUR CHOLIM SOCIETY KINDERGARTEN             177 East Broadway.
+
+  NEIGHBORHOOD GUILD KINDERGARTEN                          146 Forsyth St.
+
+  N. Y. FOUNDLING HOSPITAL KINDERGARTEN                  175 East 68th St.
+
+  N. Y. KINDERGARTEN ASSOCIATION SCHOOLS:
+          No. 1, 221 East 51st St.
+          No. 2, Alumnć Kindergarten, cor. 63d St. and First Av.
+          No. 3, 228 West 35th St.
+          No. 4, 348 West 26th St.
+          No. 5, Shaw Memorial, 61 Henry St.
+          No. 6, McAlpine, 62 Second St.
+          No. 7, Av. A and 15th St.
+
+  ST. ANDREWS' FREE KINDERGARTEN                           2067 Second Av.
+
+  ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S    "                                  209 East 42d St.
+
+  ST. JAMES' FREE KINDERGARTEN                          Av. A and 78th St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S KINDERGARTEN                                    438 Grand St.
+
+  SHAARAY TEFILLA SISTERHOOD KINDERGARTEN                127 West 44th St.
+
+  SILVER CROSS        "           "                        2249 Second Av.
+
+  SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL CULTURE     "                      109 West 54th St.
+
+  TEMPLE ISRAEL SISTERHOOD KINDERGARTEN              125th St. and 5th Av.
+
+  TRINITY CHURCH ASS'N          "                           209 Fulton St.
+
+  WILSON INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL KINDERGARTEN                  125 St Mark's Pl.
+
+
+INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS.
+
+  ABIGAIL SCHOOL AND KINDERGARTEN                           242 Spring St.
+
+  AMERICAN FEMALE GUARDIAN SOCIETY                Office, 32 East 30th St.
+
+  HOME SCHOOL                                             29 East 29th St.
+
+  INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL NO. 1                       552 First Av. cor. 32d St.
+
+       "        "    "  2 (Rose Memorial)                418 West 41st St.
+
+       "        "    "  3                                124 West 26th St.
+
+       "        "    "  4                                   34 Willett St.
+
+       "        "    "  5                                220 West 36th St.
+
+       "        "    "  6                                    125 Allen St.
+
+       "        "    "  7                                234 East 80th St.
+
+       "        "    "  8                                 463 West 32d St.
+
+       "        "    "  9                     East 60th St. and Boulevard.
+
+       "        "    " 10                                    125 Lewis St.
+
+       "        "    " 11                           52d St. and Second Av.
+
+       "        "    " 12                                  2247 Second Av.
+
+  CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY.                        Office, 24 St. Mark's Pl.
+      _Industrial Schools_--
+          ASTOR MEMORIAL                                      256 Mott St.
+          AV. B                                          607 East 14th St.
+          COTTAGE PLACE                                   208 Bleecker St.
+          BRACE MEMORIAL                                       9 Duane St.
+          EAST RIVER                                     247 East 44th St.
+          EAST SIDE                                     287 East Broadway.
+          ELEVENTH WARD                                     295 Eighth St.
+          FOURTH WARD                                        73 Monroe St.
+          FIFTH WARD                                          36 Beach St.
+          FIFTY-SECOND STREET                             573 West 52d St.
+          GERMAN                                            272 Second St.
+          HENRIETTA                                      215 East 21st St.
+          ITALIAN                                          156 Leonard St.
+          JONES MEMORIAL                                  407 East 73d St.
+          LORD                                           135 Greenwich St.
+          PARK                                     68th St. near Broadway.
+          PHELPS                                         314 East 35th St.
+          RHINELANDER                                    350 East 88th St.
+          SIXTEENTH WARD                                 211 West 18th St.
+          SIXTH STREET                                       632 Sixth St.
+          WEST SIDE                                       201 West 32d St.
+          WEST SIDE ITALIAN                                24 Sullivan St.
+      _Night Schools_--
+          GERMAN                                            272 Second St.
+          ITALIAN                                          156 Leonard St.
+          BRACE MEMORIAL (Newsboys)                            9 Duane St.
+          ELEVENTH WARD                                        295 8th St.
+          EAST SIDE                                     287 East Broadway.
+          LORD                                           135 Greenwich St.
+          JONES MEMORIAL                                  407 East 73d St.
+          FIFTY-SECOND STREET                             573 West 52d St.
+          WEST SIDE                                        400 Seventh Av.
+
+  CHURCH SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIANITY AMONG JEWS
+  (Industrial School for Girls)                            68 East 7th St.
+
+  EIGHTH WARD MISSION SCHOOL                                1 Charlton St.
+
+  FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY                              155 Worth St.
+
+   "     "    MISSION                                          63 Park St.
+
+  FREE GERMAN SCHOOL                                      140 East 4th St.
+
+  HEBREW FREE SCHOOL ASSOCIATION           East Broadway and Jefferson St.
+
+  ITALIAN MISSION (P. E. School for Girls)                809 Mulberry St.
+
+  INDUSTRIAL CHRISTIAN ALLIANCE                          113 Macdougal St.
+
+  LOUIS DOWN-TOWN SABBATH AND DAILY SCHOOL (Hebrew)          267 Henry St.
+
+  MISSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN       Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.
+
+  MISSION SCHOOL OF ALL SOULS' CHURCH                    213 East 21st St.
+
+  NEW YORK BIBLE AND TRACT MISSION (School for Girls)    422 East 26th St.
+
+  NEW YORK HOUSE AND SCHOOL OF INDUSTRY                  120 West 16th St.
+
+  SISTERHOOD OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD (P. E.)                419 West 19th St.
+
+  ST. BARNABAS HOUSE                                      304 Mulberry St.
+
+  ST. VINCENT DE PAUL INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                   346 West 43d St.
+
+  ST. ELIZABETH INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                        235 East 14th St.
+
+  SPANISH INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                             1345 Lexington Av.
+
+  TRINITY INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                                 90 Trinity Pl.
+
+  ST. GEORGE'S INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                            Teutonia Hall.
+
+  TRINITY CHAPEL INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                        15 West 25th St.
+
+  ST. AUGUSTINE'S CHAPEL INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL            105 East Houston St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S                                 Lawrence St., Manhattanville.
+
+  WEST SIDE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                            266 West 40th St.
+
+  WILSON INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                              125 St. Mark's Pl.
+
+  UNITED HEBREW CHARITIES (Industrial School for Girls)     128 Second Av.
+
+  ZION AND ST. TIMOTHY INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                 332 West 57th St.
+
+
+FRESH AIR WORK.
+
+  THE TRIBUNE FRESH-AIR FUND                             Tribune Building.
+
+  BARTHOLDI CRÉCHE                                       21 University Pl.
+
+  CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY--Health Home                   West Coney Island.
+
+     "        "     "     Summer Home                          Bath Beach.
+
+  THE KING'S DAUGHTERS TENEMENT-HOUSE COMMITTEE             77 Madison St.
+
+  NEW YORK INFIRMARY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN               5 Livingston Pl.
+
+  NEW YORK CITY MISSION AND TRACT SOCIETY                 106 Bible House.
+
+  ST. JOHN'S GUILD                                           501 Fifth Av.
+
+   "   "      "   Floating Hospital         (every week-day but Saturday).
+
+   "   "      "   Seaside Hospital             Cedar Grove, Staten Island.
+
+  SANITARIUM FOR HEBREW CHILDREN                         124 East 14th St.
+
+  SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL CULTURE                            109 West 54th St.
+
+  NEW YORK ASSOCIATION FOR IMPROVING THE CONDITION OF THE
+  POOR (Ocean Parties)                                       79 Fourth Av.
+
+  ST. BARNABAS FRESH-AIR FUND                              38 Bleecker St.
+
+  THE LITTLE MOTHERS' AID SOCIETY                        305 East 17th St.
+
+  NEW YORK BIBLE AND TRACT MISSION                       416 East 26th St.
+
+  NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR PARKS AND PLAY-GROUNDS FOR CHILDREN
+                                                          36 Union Square.
+
+  AMERICAN FEMALE GUARDIAN SOCIETY         Summer Home at Oceanport, N. J.
+
+  SUMMER SHELTER                                         Morristown, N. J.
+                (Apply to Charity Organization Society, 21 University Pl.)
+
+
+BOYS' CLUBS AND READING-ROOMS.
+
+  ASCENSION MEMORIAL CHAPEL (P. E.)                       330 West 43d St.
+
+  AVENUE C CLUB                                           65 East 14th St.
+
+  BETHANY CHURCH                        Tenth Av., bet. 35th and 36th Sts.
+
+  CALVARY PARISH                                          344 East 23d St.
+
+  CHAPEL OF THE COMFORTER                                814 Greenwich St.
+
+  CHRIST CHAPEL                           West 65th St. near Amsterdam Av.
+
+  CHURCH OF THE ARCHANGEL (P. E.)           117th St. and St. Nicholas Av.
+
+  CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER                             Park Av. and 81st St.
+
+  COLLEGE SETTLEMENT                                      95 Rivington St.
+
+  COVENANT CHAPEL                                         310 East 42d St.
+
+  DEWITT CHAPEL                                          160 West 29th St.
+
+  EAST SIDE HOUSE                         Foot of 76th St. and East River.
+
+  FREE READING-ROOMS  8 West 14th St., 330 Fourth Av., and 590 Seventh Av.
+
+  GRACE MISSION                                          640 East 13th St.
+
+  HOLY COMMUNION (P. E.) CHURCH                           49 West 20th St.
+
+  HOLY CROSS LYCEUM                   43d St., bet. Eighth and Ninth Aves.
+
+  HOLY CROSS MISSION                                   300 East Fourth St.
+
+  LAFAYETTE CLUB (Middle Collegiate Church)               14 Lafayette Pl.
+
+  MISSION CHAPEL OF MADISON AV. CHURCH                   440 East 57th St.
+
+  MADISON SQUARE CHURCH HOUSE                     Third Av., cor. 30th St.
+
+  MANOR CHAPEL                                           348 West 26th St.
+
+  MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH                        Washington Square, South.
+
+  MONDAY NIGHT CLUB (Church of Holy Communion)            49 West 20th St.
+
+  NEIGHBORHOOD GUILD                                       147 Forsyth St.
+
+  NEW JERUSALEM CHURCH                                   114 East 35th St.
+
+  NORTH SIDE BOYS' CLUB                                   79 Macdougal St.
+
+  ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S PARISH HOUSE                          207 East 42d St.
+
+  ST. GEORGE'S (P. E.) CHURCH (Memorial House)           207 East 16th St.
+
+  ST. LUKE'S M. E. CHURCH (Knights of St Luke)           108 West 41st St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S                                 Lawrence St., Manhattanville.
+
+  WEST SIDE                                 Vermilye Chapel, 794 Tenth Av.
+
+  WILSON MISSION BUILDING ("Av. A Club")                125 St. Mark's Pl.
+
+
+CHILDREN'S LODGING-HOUSES.
+
+  BRACE MEMORIAL                                               9 Duane St.
+
+  GIRLS' TEMPORARY HOME                              307-309 East 12th St.
+
+  TOMPKINS SQUARE                                              295 8th St.
+
+  EAST SIDE                                             287 East Broadway.
+
+  FORTY-FOURTH STREET                                    247 East 44th St.
+
+  WEST SIDE                                                400 Seventh Av.
+
+  MISSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN       Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.
+
+
+CHILDREN'S HOMES--TEMPORARY AND PERMANENT.
+
+  ASYLUM OF ST. VINCENT DE PAUL                          215 West 39th St.
+
+  ASYLUM OF SISTERS OF ST. DOMINIC (House of Reception)     137 Second St.
+
+  BERACHAH ORPHANAGE (Gospel Tabernacle)                    692 Eighth Av.
+
+  BETHLEHEM ORPHAN AND HALF-ORPHAN ASYLUM             College Point. L. I.
+      (Controlled by thirteen Lutheran churches of New York and vicinity.)
+
+  CHILDREN'S FOLD                                   92d St. and Eighth Av.
+
+  COLORED ORPHAN ASYLUM                       West 143d St. and Boulevard.
+
+  FREE HOME FOR DESTITUTE YOUNG GIRLS                     23 East 11th St.
+
+  DOMINICAN CONVENT OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY             329 East 63d St.
+
+  FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY                              155 Worth St.
+
+  GERMAN ODD FELLOWS' ORPHANAGE               Apply at Home, 82 Second Av.
+
+  HEBREW BENEVOLENT AND ORPHAN ASYLUM          Amsterdam Av. and 136th St.
+
+  HEBREW SHELTERING GUARDIAN ORPHAN ASYLUM      Eleventh Av. and 151st St.
+
+  HOLY ANGELS' ORPHAN ASYLUM (for Italian Children from New York)
+                                                  West Park-on-the-Hudson.
+
+  HOUSE OF MERCY                                  81st St. and Madison Av.
+
+  LADIES' DEBORAH NURSERY AND CHILD'S PROTECTORY, Male Department,
+    95 East Broadway and 83 Henry St.; Female Department, East 162d St.,
+    near Eagle Av.
+
+  LEAKE AND WATTS ORPHAN HOUSE                Ludlow Station, Hudson R. R.
+
+  MESSIAH HOME FOR LITTLE CHILDREN                        4 Rutherford Pl.
+
+  MISSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN FOR HOMELESS AND DESTITUTE CHILDREN
+                                         Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S HOME FOR DESTITUTE CHILDREN
+                                 House of Reception, 143 West 31st Street.
+
+  NEW YORK FOUNDLING HOSPITAL (Asylum of Sisters of Charity)
+                                                         175 East 68th St.
+
+  NEW YORK INFANT ASYLUM                        Amsterdam Av. and 61st St.
+
+  ORPHANAGE OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY            400 East 50th St.
+
+  ORPHAN ASYLUM SOCIETY                   Riverside Drive and West 73d St.
+
+  ORPHANS' HOME AND ASYLUM OF PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH
+                                               49th St. near Lexington Av.
+
+  ROMAN CATHOLIC ORPHAN ASYLUM                    Madison Av. and 51st St.
+
+  ST. AGATHA'S HOME FOR CHILDREN                         209 West 15th St.
+
+  ST. ANN'S HOME FOR DESTITUTE CHILDREN               Av. A, cor. 90th St.
+
+  ST. BENEDICT'S HOME FOR COLORED CHILDREN
+                                     House of Reception, 120 Macdougal St.
+
+  ST. CHRISTOPHER'S HOME                     Riverside Drive and 112th St.
+
+  ST. JAMES' HOME                               21 Oliver and 26 James St.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S ORPHAN ASYLUM                           89th St. and Av. A.
+
+  SHEPHERD'S FOLD (P. E. Church)                    92d St. and Eighth Av.
+
+  PROTESTANT HALF-ORPHAN ASYLUM               Manhattan Av. near 104th St.
+
+  HOME FOR SEAMEN'S CHILDREN (New York and vicinity)
+                                                  West New Brighton, S. I.
+
+  SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN       100 East 23d St.
+
+
+REFORMATORY INSTITUTIONS.
+
+  BURNHAM INDUSTRIAL FARM                        Office, 135 East 15th St.
+
+  HEBREW SHELTERING GUARDIAN SOCIETY            Eleventh Av. and 151st St.
+
+  NEW YORK CATHOLIC PROTECTORY                      Office, 415 Broome St.
+
+  NEW YORK JUVENILE ASYLUM                     176th St. and Amsterdam Av.
+
+  ST. JAMES' HOME                                            21 Oliver St.
+
+  HOUSE OF REFUGE                                        Randall's Island.
+
+  HOUSE OF THE HOLY FAMILY                                  132 Second Av.
+
+
+CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES.
+
+  ALL SAINTS' CONVALESCENT HOME FOR MEN AND BOYS (Holy Cross Mission)
+                                                      Avenue C and 4th St.
+
+  BABIES' HOSPITAL OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK               657 Lexington Av.
+
+  BABIES' WARD, POST-GRADUATE HOSPITAL                   226 East 20th St.
+
+  CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL                                    Randall's Island.
+
+  NEW YORK INFIRMARY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN               5 Livingston Pl.
+
+  FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY INFIRMARY                    147 Worth St.
+
+  GOOD SAMARITAN DIAKONISSEN (Hahnemann Hospital)    Park Av. and 67th St.
+
+  INFANTS' HOSPITAL                                      Randall's Island.
+
+  LAURA FRANKLIN FREE HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN              17 East 111th St.
+
+  NEW YORK FOUNDLING HOSPITAL                            175 East 68th St.
+
+  NURSERY AND CHILD'S HOSPITAL                  Lexington Av. and 51st St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S FREE HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN                  405 West 34th St.
+
+  HARLEM DISPENSARY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN                 2331 Second Av.
+
+  SICK CHILDREN'S MISSION OF CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY     287 East Broadway.
+
+  YORKVILLE DISPENSARY AND HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN
+                                                        1307 Lexington Av.
+
+  NEW YORK ORTHOPĆDIC HOSPITAL                           126 East 59th St.
+
+  NEW YORK OPHTHALMIC HOSPITAL                            201 East 23d St.
+
+
+ASYLUMS FOR DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.
+
+  CRIPPLED BOYS' HOME (Forty-fourth Street Lodging House)
+                                                         247 East 44th St.
+
+  INSTITUTION FOR THE IMPROVED INSTRUCTION OF DEAF MUTES
+                                                Lexington Av. and 67th St.
+
+  IDIOT ASYLUM                                           Randall's Island.
+
+  NEW YORK INSTITUTION FOR THE BLIND                Ninth Av. and 34th St.
+
+  NEW YORK INSTITUTION FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF THE DEAF AND DUMB
+                                                 Eleventh Av. and 163d St.
+
+  NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE RELIEF OF THE RUPTURED AND CRIPPLED
+                                                 Lexington Av. and 42d St.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S INSTITUTION FOR THE IMPROVED INSTRUCTION OF DEAF MUTES
+                                                        772 East 188th St.
+
+  SHELTERING ARMS                              Amsterdam Av. and 129th St.
+
+  SOCIETY OF ST. JOHNLAND        Apply at Calvary Chapel, 220 East 23d St.
+
+  SYRACUSE STATE SCHOOL FOR FEEBLE-MINDED
+                               (Apply to Superintendent of Out-door Poor.)
+
+  CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY                 Haxtun Cottage, Bath Beach, L. I.
+
+  HOUSE OF ST. GILES THE CRIPPLE                 422 Degraw St., Brooklyn.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] It is, nevertheless, true that while immigration peoples our slums, it
+also keeps them from stagnation. The working of the strong instinct to
+better themselves, that brought the crowds here, forces layer after layer
+of this population up to make room for the new crowds coming in at the
+bottom, and thus a circulation is kept up that does more than any sanitary
+law to render the slums harmless. Even the useless sediment is kept from
+rotting by being constantly stirred.
+
+[2] Report of committing magistrates. See Annual Report of Children's Aid
+Society, 1891.
+
+[3] The census referred to in this chapter was taken for a special
+purpose, by a committee of prominent Hebrews, in August, 1890, and was
+very searching.
+
+[4] Dr. Roger S. Tracy's report of the vital statistics for 1891 shows
+that, while the general death-rate of the city was 25.96 per 1,000 of the
+population--that of adults (over five years) 17.13, and the baby
+death-rate (under five years) 93.21--in the Italian settlement in the west
+half of the Fourteenth Ward the record stood as follows: general
+death-rate, 33.52; adult death-rate, 16.29; and baby death-rate, 150.52.
+In the Italian section of the Fourth Ward it stood: general death-rate,
+34.88; adult death-rate, 21.29; baby death-rate 119.02. In the sweaters
+district in the lower part of the Tenth Ward the general death rate was
+16.23; the adult death rate, 7.59; and the baby death rate 61.15. Dr.
+Tracy adds: "The death-rate from phthisis was highest in houses entirely
+occupied by cigarmakers (Bohemians), and lowest in those entirely occupied
+by tailors. On the other hand, the death-rates from diphtheria and croup
+and measles were highest in houses entirely occupied by tailors."
+
+[5] Meaning "teachers."
+
+[6] Even as I am writing a transformation is being worked in some of the
+filthiest streets on the East Side by a combination of new asphalt
+pavements with a greatly improved street cleaning service that promises
+great things. Some of the worst streets have within a few weeks become as
+clean as I have not seen them in twenty years, and as they probably never
+were since they were made. The unwonted brightness of the surroundings is
+already visibly reflected in the persons and dress of the tenants, notably
+the children. They take to it gladly, giving the lie to the old assertion
+that they are pigs and would rather live like pigs.
+
+[7] As a matter of fact, I heard, after the last one that caused so much
+discussion, in a court that sent seventy-five children to the show, a
+universal growl of discontent. The effect on the children, even to those
+who received presents, was bad. They felt that they had been on
+exhibition, and their greed was aroused. It was as I expected it would be.
+
+[8] The Sanitary census of 1891 gave 37,358 tenements, containing 276,565
+families, including 160,708 children under five years of age; total
+population of tenements, 1,225,411.
+
+[9] The general impression survives with me that the children's teeth were
+bad, and those of the native born the worst. Ignorance and neglect were
+clearly to blame for most of it, poor and bad food for the rest, I
+suppose. I give it as a layman's opinion, and leave it to the dentist to
+account for the bad teeth of the many who are not poor. That is his
+business.
+
+[10] The fourteenth year is included. The census phrase means "up to 15."
+
+[11] The average attendance was only 136,413, so that there were 60,000
+who were taught only a small part of the time.
+
+[12] See Minutes of Stated Session of the Board of Education, February 8,
+1892.
+
+[13] Meaning evidently in this case "up to fourteen."
+
+[14] Report of New York Catholic Protectory, 1892.
+
+[15] If this were not the sober statement of public officials of high
+repute it would seem fairly incredible.
+
+[16] Between 1880 and 1890 the increase in assessed value of the real and
+personal property in this city was 48.36 per cent., while the population
+increased 41.06 per cent.
+
+[17] Philosophy of Crime and Punishment, by Dr. William T. Harris, Federal
+Commissioner of Education.
+
+[18] Seventeenth Annual Report of Society, 1892.
+
+[19] English Social Movements, by Robert Archey Woods, page 196.
+
+[20] The Superintendent of the House of Refuge for thirty years wrote
+recently: "It is essential to have the plays of the children more
+carefully watched than their work."
+
+[21] Report for 1891 of Children's Aid Society.
+
+[22] In this reckoning is included employment found for many big boys and
+girls, who were taken as help, and were thus given the chance which the
+city denied them.
+
+[23] It is inevitable, of course, that such a programme should steer clear
+of the sectarian snags that lie plentifully scattered about. I have a
+Roman Catholic paper before me in which the Society's "villainous work,
+which consists chiefly in robbing the Catholic child of his faith," is
+hotly denounced in an address to the Archbishop of New York. Mr. Brace's
+policy was to meet such attacks with silence, and persevere in his work.
+The Society still follows his plan. Catholic or Protestant--the question
+is never raised. "No Catholic child," said one of its managers once to me,
+"is ever brought to us. A _poor_ child is brought and we care for it."
+
+[24] The Society pleads for a farm of its own, close to the city, where it
+can organize a "farm school" for the older boys. There they could be taken
+on probation and their fitness for the West be ascertained. They would be
+more useful to the farmers and some trouble would be avoided. Two farms,
+or three, to get as near to the family plan as possible, would be better.
+The Children's Aid Society of Boston has three farm schools, and its work
+is very successful.
+
+[25] I once questioned a class of 71 boys between eight and twelve years
+old in a reform school, with this result: 22 said they blacked boots; 36
+sold papers; 26 did both; 40 "slept out;" but only 3 of them all were
+fatherless, 11 motherless, showing that they slept out by choice. The
+father probably had something to do with it most of the time.
+Three-fourths of the lads stood up when I asked them if they had been to
+Central Park. The teacher asked one of those who did not rise, a little
+shaver, if he had never been in the Park. "No, mem!" he replied, "me
+father he went that time."
+
+[26] The lodging-houses are following a noteworthy precedent. From the
+Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, organized in the beginning of
+this century, sprang the first savings bank in the country.
+
+[27] That is the average number constantly in asylums. With those that
+come and go, it foots up quite 25,000 children a year that are a public
+charge.
+
+[28] Report upon the Care of Dependent Children in New York City and
+elsewhere, to the State Board of Charities, by Commissioner Josephine Shaw
+Lowell. December, 1889.
+
+[29] Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell on Dependent Children. Report of 1889.
+
+[30] Anna T. Wilson: Some Arguments for the Boarding-out of Dependent
+Children in the State of New York. This opposition the Superintendent
+explains in his report for 1891, to be due in part to the lying stories
+about abuse in the West, told by bad boys who return to the city. He adds,
+however, that "oftentimes the most strenuous opposition ... is made by
+step-mothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins," and is "due in the majority of
+cases not to any special interest in the child's welfare, but to
+self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation for the boy in
+order to get his weekly wages."
+
+[31] It will do so hereafter. This autumn the discovery was made that the
+city was asked to pay for more children than there ought to be in the
+institutions according to the record of commitments. The comptroller sent
+two of his clerks to count all the children. The result was to show
+slipshod book-keeping, if nothing worse, in certain cases. Hereafter the
+ceremony of counting the children will be gone through every six months.
+Nothing could more clearly show the irresponsible character of the whole
+business and the need of a change, lest we drift into corporate pauperism
+in addition to encouraging the vice in the individual.
+
+[32] In 1854, with a population of 605,000, there were 6,657 licensed and
+unlicensed saloons in the city, or 1 to every 90.8 of its inhabitants. At
+the beginning of 1892, with a population of 1,706,500, there were 7,218
+saloons, or 1 to every 236.42. Counting all places where liquor was sold
+by license, including hotels, groceries, steamboats, etc., the number was
+9,050, or 1 to every 188.56 inhabitants.
+
+
+
+
+How the Other Half Lives.
+
+STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS OF NEW YORK.
+
+By JACOB A. RIIS.
+
+_With 40 Illustrations from Photographs taken by the Author._
+
+12mo, net $1.25.
+
+
+This volume is the result of fifteen years' familiarity as police reporter
+with the seamy side of New York life. It is, however, by no means a mere
+record of personal observations, but a careful, comprehensive, and
+systematic presentation of a thesis with illustrations. It is philosophic
+as well as expository, and from beginning to end is an indictment of the
+tenement system as it exists at present in New York.
+
+No page is uninstructive, but it would be misleading to suppose the book
+even tinctured with didacticism. It is from beginning to end as
+picturesque in treatment as it is in material. The author's acquaintance
+with the latter is extremely intimate. The reader feels that he is being
+guided through the dirt and crime, the tatters and rags, the byways and
+alleys of nether New York by an experienced cicerone. Mr. Riis, in a word,
+though a philanthropist and philosopher, is an artist as well. He has also
+the advantage of being an amateur photographer, and his book is abundantly
+illustrated from negatives of the odd, the out-of-the-way, and
+characteristic sights and scenes he has himself caught with his camera. No
+work yet published--certainly not the official reports of the charity
+societies--shows so vividly the complexion and countenance of the
+"Down-town Back Alleys," "The Bend," "Chinatown," "Jewtown," "The Cheap
+Lodging-houses," the haunts of the negro, the Italian, the Bohemian poor,
+or gives such a veracious picture of the toughs, the tramps, the waifs,
+drunkards, paupers, gamins, and the generally gruesome populace of this
+centre of civilization.
+
+
+
+
+  THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.                                  87
+
+  perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals,
+  but they have not far to fall to the next tier of bunks,
+  and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the
+  boss and his club. On cold winter nights, when every
+
+  [Illustration: BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET.]
+
+  bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room
+  more than once, and listening to the snoring of the
+  sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and the
+  slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight,
+  imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very
+
+                     [SPECIMEN PAGE.]
+
+
+
+
+COMMENDATIONS.
+
+  THE NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE
+  PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN,
+  100 East 23d Street.
+
+NEW YORK, February 28th, 1891.
+
+JACOB A RIIS, Esq.,
+
+_Dear Sir_:--"It gives me very great pleasure to express my gratification
+in reading your valuable work 'How the Other Half Lives.' I regard it as
+one of the most valuable contributions to the history of child-saving work
+in this great city, and as pointing out the numerous evils which exist at
+the present time and which loudly call for legislative aid and
+interference.
+
+"The thorough familiarity which you have shown with the subject of your
+work is equaled only by the accuracy of its detail and the graphic
+pictures which illustrate the scenes described. It is a book which every
+one may peruse with interest, and the larger the circulation which can be
+given to it, the sooner I think will the charitable and well-disposed
+people of this city realize the need, on the part of The Other Half, of
+support, aid, and assistance, and which you have so graphically
+described."
+
+  I have the honor to remain, with great respect,
+  ELDRIDGE T. GERRY,
+  President, etc.
+
+
+  THE CHRISTIAN UNION,
+  80 Lafayette Place,
+  New York.
+
+"It is one of the encouraging signs of the times that Jacob Riis's book on
+'How the Other Half Lives' has found so many readers that a new edition is
+now called for. The priest and the Levite are no longer passing by on the
+other side; that is itself a sign of moral weakness.
+
+"I was first attracted to Mr. Riis's work by an illustrated lecture which
+he gave in Plymouth Church which stirred our hearts very deeply, and which
+showed how thorough an investigation and exploration he had made.
+
+"His book presents by pictures for the eye, and by pen and ink pictures
+quite as graphic, those phases of modern paganism which exist in our great
+cities and are beginning to arouse the wonder, the indignation, and the
+wrath of philanthropists and Christians.
+
+"'How the Other Half Lives' is worthy to be a companion to 'In Darkest
+England,' to which, indeed, as a picture of existing conditions it is
+superior; nor is it without suggestions of remedy, which, if less
+elaborate than Mr. Booth's, will strike the average reader as more
+immediately practicable."
+
+  LYMAN ABBOTT.
+
+
+"It was a murderer who asked the question 'Am I my brother's keeper?' and
+hoped for a negative answer. But the affirmative answer of God has been
+ringing through all the milleniums since then. This eternal 'YES' meets
+the church of to-day, and there are signs that the church is waking to
+seek some method by which that 'YES' shall be adequately carried out. The
+first thing is to know how my brother lives, and what are his
+temptations, difficulties, trials, hopes, fears. On this no book that has
+ever appeared in this land pours such light as Mr. Riis's book on 'The
+Other Half.' Let all who want to know what to do for these brothers of
+theirs in this town, read this book which is enormously more interesting
+than any novel that ever was written or that ever will be. Dens, dives,
+hovels, sickness, death, sorrow, drink, and murder, all these exist in our
+midst in appalling magnitude, and with all of these we must have to do if
+we are not to be modern Cains. No '_eau de cologne_' business is this, if
+we are to uplift these brothers of ours, as will be apparent from a
+reading of this remarkable book. Let all who are in any way interested in
+the welfare of humanity buy and read it at once, and let all who are not
+interested repent at once and get the book, and then bring forth fruits
+meet for repentance."
+
+  A. F. SCHAUFFLER.
+
+
+
+
+PRESS NOTICES.
+
+"Criticism, in the narrower sense, has no hold on 'How the Other Half
+Lives.' The book is most beautiful without, as fascinating within. Every
+word bears its message; every illustration--there are many--means
+something. Mr. Riis has deserved nobly of the public for his thorough and
+resourceful work. We cannot believe that his reward will fail. We should
+be sorry to think that his earnest words would be less to any reader than
+a commanding invitation to the thick of the battle against social
+injustice."--_The Boston Times._
+
+"From personal observation, conducted with the perseverance and tact
+needed by the newspaper reporter, Mr. Riis has gathered, and here
+presents, many interesting, pathetic, and monitory facts concerning the
+extreme poverty, filth, or unhomelike existence of too many of the
+tenement-dwellers of New York--omitting mention of those costlier
+tenements which are called flats. He ventures upon some suggestions of
+remedy, but the chief value of his chapters lies in their
+exposition."--_Sunday School Times._
+
+"The studies of Mr. Riis among the tenements of New York take the reader
+into strange places and bring him into contact with startling conditions;
+but among all the problems now pressing for solution there are none so
+grave or so difficult as those upon the fundamental facts of which these
+pages throw light. The author has made a thorough exploration of the great
+city, and has produced a series of pictures which illustrate strikingly
+the many phases of life concerned."--_The N. Y. Tribune._
+
+"Mr. Riis's book is an important contribution to sociological literature,
+and the truths it brings forward as well as the conclusions it deduces
+must not be evaded, for on them rest all really hopeful projects for the
+restriction of poverty and crime."--_The Boston Beacon._
+
+"This is a book to be studied alike by the social scientist and by the
+philanthropist. It presents, in compact form, the story of the nether
+world of New York City, which, in general outline, varies but little from
+the story of the nether world of any large city."--_Chicago Times._
+
+"This book bears evidence on every page of faithful investigation and
+intelligent sympathy with the subject, and should be read by everyone who
+has it in any way in his power to help on the work, for as the author
+says: 'The "dangerous classes" of New York long ago compelled recognition.
+They are dangerous less because of their own crimes than because of the
+criminal ignorance of those who are not of their kind.'"--_Milwaukee
+Sentinel._
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate
+both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as
+presented in the original text.
+
+The following misprints have been corrected:
+  "unfamilar" corrected to "unfamiliar" (page 2)
+  "opportunties" corrected to "opportunities" (page 36)
+  "virture" corrected to "virtue" (page 43)
+  "inpectors" corrected to "inspectors" (page 103)
+  "Commisioners" corrected to "Commissioners" (page 172)
+  "bookblack's" corrected to "bootblack's" (page 257)
+
+Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
+spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained.
+
+Unmatched quotation marks are presented as in the original text.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Children of the Poor, by Jacob A. Riis
+
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+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Children Of The Poor, by Jacob A. Riis.
+    </title>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Children of the Poor, by Jacob A. Riis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Children of the Poor
+
+Author: Jacob A. Riis
+
+Release Date: May 30, 2010 [EBook #32609]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR ***
+
+
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+Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i001.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h1>THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR</h1>
+
+<p><a name="front" id="front"></a>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i002.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<h2>THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">BY<br /><br />
+<big>JACOB A. RIIS</big><br />
+<small>AUTHOR OF &#8220;HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES&#8221;</small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>ILLUSTRATED</i></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />CHARLES SCRIBNER&#8217;S SONS<br />1908</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1892, by</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">CHARLES SCRIBNER&#8217;S SONS</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/printersmark.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>To my little ones, who, as I lay down my pen, come rushing in from the
+autumn fields, their hands filled with flowers &#8220;for the poor children,&#8221; I
+inscribe this book. May the love that shines in their eager eyes never
+grow cold within them; then they shall yet grow up to give a helping hand
+in working out this problem which so plagues the world to-day. As to their
+father&#8217;s share, it has been a very small and simple one, and now it is
+done. Other hands may carry forward the work. My aim has been to gather
+the facts for them to build upon. I said it in &#8220;How the Other Half Lives,&#8221;
+and now, in sending this volume to the printer, I can add nothing. The two
+books are one. Each supplements the other. Ours is an age of facts. It
+wants facts, not theories, and facts I have endeavored to set down in
+these pages. The reader may differ with me as to the application of them.
+He may be right and I wrong. But we shall not quarrel as to the facts
+themselves, I think. A false prophet in our day could do less harm than a
+careless reporter. That name I hope I shall not deserve.</p>
+
+<p>To lay aside a work that has been so long a part of one&#8217;s life, is like
+losing a friend. But for the one lost I have gained many. They have been
+much to me. The friendship and counsel of Dr. Roger S. Tracy, of the
+Bureau of Vital Statistics, have lightened my labors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> as nothing else
+could save the presence and the sympathy of the best and dearest friend of
+all, my wife. To Major Willard Bullard, the most efficient chief of the
+Sanitary Police; Rabbi Adolph M. Radin; Mr. A. S. Solomons, of the Baron
+de Hirsch Relief Committee; Dr. Annie Sturges Daniel; Mr. L. W. Holste, of
+the Children&#8217;s Aid Society; Colonel George T. Balch, of the Board of
+Education; Mr. A. S. Fairchild, and to Dr. Max L. Margolis, my thanks are
+due and here given. Jew and Gentile, we have sought the truth together.
+Our reward must be in the consciousness that we have sought it faithfully
+and according to our light.</p>
+
+<p class="right">J. A. R.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Richmond Hill, Long Island,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">October 1, 1892.</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="contents">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span></td><td align="right"><span class="smcaplc">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Problem of the Children,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Italian Slum Children,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">In the Great East Side Treadmill,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Tony and His Tribe,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Story of Kid McDuff&#8217;s Girl,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Little Toilers,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Truants of Our Streets,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">What it is that Makes Boys Bad,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum">[Pg viii]</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Little Mary Ellen&#8217;s Legacy,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Kindergartens and Nurseries,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Industrial Schools,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Boys&#8217; Clubs,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Outcast and the Homeless,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Putting a Premium on Pauperism,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_277">277</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Verdict of the Potters Field,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#REGISTER">Register of Children&#8217;s Charities</a>,</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_291">291</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum">[Pg ix]</span></p>
+<h2>LISTS OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="illustrations">
+<tr><td>Saluting the Flag,</td><td align="right"><a href="#front"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><span class="smcaplc">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Mott Street Barracks,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>An Italian Home under a Dump,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Child of the Dump,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pietro Learning to Make an Englis&#8217; Letter,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_31">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&#8220;Slept in the Cellar Four Years,&#8221;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Synagogue School in a Hester Street Tenement,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_47">46</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Backstairs to Learning,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Class of Melammedim Learning English,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_51">50</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&#8220;I Scrubs.&#8221;&mdash;Katie who Keeps House in West Forty-ninth Street,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Present Tenants of John Ericsson&#8217;s Old House, now the Beach Street Industrial School,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Their Playground a Truck,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Shine, Sir?</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Little Susie at her Work,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_111">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Minding the Baby,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&#8220;Shooting Craps&#8221; in the Hall of the Newsboys&#8217; Lodging House,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum">[Pg x]</span>Case No. 25,745 on the Society&#8217;s Blotter, Before and After,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Club Used for Beating a Child,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Summer Boarders from Mott Street,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Making for the &#8220;Big Water,&#8221;</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_168">167</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Floating Hospital&mdash;St. John&#8217;s Guild,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Playing at Housekeeping,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_178">177</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Poverty Gappers Playing Coney Island,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_184">183</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Poverty Gap Transformed&mdash;the Spot where Young Healey was murdered is now a Playground,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_186">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Late Charles Loring Brace, Founder of the Children&#8217;s Aid Society,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The First Patriotic Election in the Beach Street Industrial School&mdash;Parlor in John Ericsson&#8217;s Old House,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Board of Election Inspectors in the Beach Street School,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_207">207</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Plumbing Shop in the New York Trade Schools,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Boys&#8217; Club Reading room,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_223">222</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Carpenter Shop in the Avenue C Working Boys&#8217; Club,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_227">226</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Type-setting at the Avenue C Working Boys&#8217; Club,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_232">231</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Bout with the Gloves in the Boys&#8217; Club of Calvary Parish,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lining up for the Gymnasium,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Snug Corner on a Cold Night,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_246">246</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>2 <span class="smcaplc">A.M.</span> in the Delivery-room in the &#8220;Sun&#8221; Office,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum">[Pg xi]</span>Buffalo,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_263">264</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Night School in the West Side Lodging-house.&mdash;Edward, the Little Pedlar, Caught Napping,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_265">265</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Soup-House Gang,&#8221; Class in History in the Duane Street Newsboy&#8217;s Lodging-house,</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_269">269</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h1>THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+<h3>THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">The</span> problem of the children is the problem of the State. As we mould the
+children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of
+the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our
+hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad
+government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance
+of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future
+finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power
+and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of
+that energy. At the beginning of the century the urban population of the
+United States was 3.97 per cent. of the whole, or not quite one in
+twenty-five. To-day it is 29.12 per cent., or nearly one in three. In the
+lifetime of those who were babies in arms when the first gun was fired
+upon Fort Sumter it has all but doubled. A million and a quarter live
+to-day in the tenements of the American metropolis. Clearly, there is
+reason for the sharp attention given at last to the life and the doings of
+the other half, too long unconsidered.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> Philanthropy we call it sometimes
+with patronizing airs. Better call it self-defence.</p>
+
+<p>In New York there is all the more reason because it is the open door
+through which pours in a practically unrestricted immigration, <ins class="correction" title="original: unfamilar">unfamiliar</ins>
+with and unattuned to our institutions; the dumping-ground where it rids
+itself of its burden of helplessness and incapacity, leaving the
+procession of the strong and the able free to move on. This sediment forms
+the body of our poor, the contingent that lives, always from hand to
+mouth, with no provision and no means of providing for the morrow. In the
+first generation it pre-empts our slums;<small><a name="f1.1" id="f1.1" href="#f1">[1]</a></small> in the second, its worst
+elements, reinforced by the influences that prevail there, develop the
+tough, who confronts society with the claim that the world owes him a
+living and that he will collect it in his own way. His plan is a practical
+application of the spirit of our free institutions as his opportunities
+have enabled him to grasp it.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it comes about that here in New York to seek the children of the poor
+one must go among those who, if they did not themselves come over the sea,
+can rarely count back another generation born on American soil. Not that
+there is far to go. Any tenement district will furnish its own tribe, or
+medley of many tribes. Nor is it by any means certain that the children
+when found will own their alien descent. Indeed, as a preliminary to
+gaining their confidence, to hint at such a thing would be a bad blunder.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+The ragged Avenue B boy, whose father at his age had barely heard, in his
+corner of the Fatherland, of America as a place where the streets were
+paved with nuggets of gold and roast pigeons flew into mouths opening wide
+with wonder, would, it is safe to bet, be as prompt to resent the
+insinuation that he was a &#8220;Dutchman,&#8221; as would the little &#8220;Mick&#8221; the
+Teuton&#8217;s sore taunt. Even the son of the immigrant Jew in his virtual
+isolation strains impatiently at the fetters of race and faith, while the
+Italian takes abuse philosophically only when in the minority and bides
+his time until he too shall be able to prove his title by calling those
+who came after him names. However, to quarrel with the one or the other on
+that ground would be useless. It is the logic of the lad&#8217;s evolution, the
+way of patriotism in the slums. His sincerity need not be questioned.</p>
+
+<p>Many other things about him may be, and justly are, but not that. It is
+perfectly transparent. His badness is as spontaneous as his goodness, and
+for the moment all there is of the child. Whichever streak happens to
+prevail, it is in full possession; if the bad is on top more frequently
+than the other, it is his misfortune rather than his design. He is as
+ready to give his only cent to a hungrier boy than he if it is settled
+that he can &#8220;lick&#8221; him, and that he is therefore not a rival, as he is to
+join him in torturing an unoffending cat for the common cheer. The penny
+and the cat, the charity and the cruelty, are both pregnant facts in the
+life that surrounds him, and of which he is to be the coming exponent. In
+after years, when he is arrested by the officers of the Society for the
+Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for beating his horse, the episode adds
+but to his confusion of mind in which a single impression stands out clear
+and lasting, viz., that somehow he got the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> worst of it as usual. But for
+the punishment, the whole proceeding must seem ludicrous to him. As it is
+he submits without comprehending. <i>He</i> had to take the hard knocks always;
+why should not his horse?</p>
+
+<p>In other words, the child is a creature of environment, of opportunity, as
+children are everywhere. And the environment here has been bad, as it was
+and is in the lands across the sea that sent him to us. Our slums have
+fairly rivalled, and in some respects outdone, the older ones after which
+they patterned. Still, there is a difference, the difference between the
+old slum and the new. The hopelessness, the sullen submission of life in
+East London as we have seen it portrayed, has no counterpart here; neither
+has the child born in the gutter and predestined by the order of society,
+from which there is no appeal, to die there. We have our Lost Tenth to
+fill the trench in the Potter&#8217;s Field; quite as many wrecks at the finish,
+perhaps, but the start seems fairer in the promise. Even on the slums the
+doctrine of liberty has set its stamp. To be sure, for the want of the
+schooling to decipher it properly, they spell it license there, and the
+slip makes trouble. The tough and his scheme of levying tribute are the
+result. But the police settle that with him, and when it comes to a
+choice, the tough is to be preferred to the born pauper any day. The one
+has the making of something in him, unpromising as he looks; seen in a
+certain light he may even be considered a hopeful symptom. The other is
+just so much dead loss. The tough is not born: he is made. The
+all-important point is the one at which the manufacture can be stopped.</p>
+
+<p>So rapid and great are the changes in American cities, that no slum has
+yet had a chance here to grow old enough to distil its deadliest poison.
+New York has been no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> exception. But we cannot always go at so fast a
+pace. There is evidence enough in the crystallization of the varying
+elements of the population along certain lines, no longer as uncertain as
+they were, that we are slowing up already. Any observer of the poor in
+this city is familiar with the appearance among them of that most
+distressing and most dangerous symptom, the home-feeling for the slum that
+opposes all efforts at betterment with dull indifference. Pauperism seems
+to have grown faster of late than even the efforts put forth to check it.
+We have witnessed this past winter a dozen times the spectacle of beggars
+extorting money by threats or violence without the excuse which a season
+of exceptional distress or hardship might have furnished. Further, the
+raid in the last Legislature upon the structure of law built up in a
+generation to regulate and keep the tenements within safe limits, shows
+that fresh danger threatens in the alliance of the slum with politics.
+Only the strongest public sentiment, kept always up to the point of prompt
+action, avails to ward off this peril. But public sentiment soon wearies
+of such watch-duty, as instanced on this occasion, when several bills
+radically remodelling the tenement-house law and repealing some of its
+most beneficent provisions, had passed both houses and were in the hands
+of the Governor before a voice was raised against them, or anyone beside
+the politicians and their backers seemed even to have heard of them. And
+this hardly five years after a special commission of distinguished
+citizens had sat an entire winter under authority of the State considering
+the tenement-house problem, and as the result of its labors had secured as
+vital the enactment of the very law against which the raid seemed to be
+chiefly directed!</p>
+
+<p>The tenement and the saloon, with the street that does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> always divide
+them, form the environment that is to make or unmake the child. The
+influence of each of the three is bad. Together they have power to
+overcome the strongest resistance. But the child born under their evil
+spell has none such to offer. The testimony of all to whom has fallen the
+task of undoing as much of the harm done by them as may be, from the
+priest of the parish school to the chaplain of the penitentiary, agrees
+upon this point, that even the tough, with all his desperation, is weak
+rather than vicious. He promises well, he even means well; he is as
+downright sincere in his repentance as he was in his wrong-doing; but it
+doesn&#8217;t prevent him from doing the very same evil deed over again the
+minute he is rid of restraint. He would rather be a saint than a sinner;
+but somehow he doesn&#8217;t keep in the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of saint, while the police help
+perpetuate the memory of his wickedness. After all, he is not so very
+different from the rest of us. Perhaps that, with a remorseful review of
+the chances he has had, may help to make a fellow-feeling for him in us.</p>
+
+<p>That is what he needs. The facts clearly indicate that from the
+environment little improvement in the child is to be expected. There has
+been progress in the way of building the tenements of late years, but they
+swarm with greater crowds than ever&mdash;good reason why they challenge the
+pernicious activity of the politician; and the old rookeries disappear
+slowly. In the relation of the saloon to the child there has been no
+visible improvement, and the street is still his refuge. It is, then, his
+opportunities outside that must be improved if relief is to come. We have
+the choice of hailing him man and brother or of being slugged and robbed
+by him. It ought not to be a hard choice, despite the tatters and the
+dirt, for which our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> past neglect is in great part to blame. Plenty of
+evidence will be found in these pages to show that it has been made in the
+right spirit already, and that it has proved a wise choice. No investment
+gives a better return to-day on the capital put out than work among the
+children of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>A single fact will show what is meant by that. Within the lifetime of the
+Children&#8217;s Aid Society, in the thirty years between 1860 and 1890, while
+the population of this city was doubled, the commitments of girls and
+women for vagrancy fell off from 5,880 to 1,980, while the commitments of
+girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890 from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500.<small><a name="f2.1" id="f2.1" href="#f2">[2]</a></small>
+Stealing and vagrancy among boys has decreased too; if not so fast, yet at
+a gratifying rate.</p>
+
+<p>Enough has been written and said about the children of the poor and their
+sufferings to make many a bigger book than this. From some of it one might
+almost be led to believe that one-half of the children are worked like
+slaves from toddling infancy, while the other half wander homeless and
+helpless about the streets. Their miseries are great enough without
+inventing any that do not exist. There is no such host of child outcasts
+in New York as that. Thanks to the unwearied efforts of the children&#8217;s
+societies in the last generation, what there is is decreasing, if
+anything. As for the little toilers, they will receive attention further
+on. There are enough of them, but as a whole they are anything but a
+repining lot. They suffer less, to their own knowledge, from their
+wretched life than the community suffers for letting them live it, though
+it, too, sees the truth but in glimpses. If the question were put to a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+vote of the children to-morrow, whether they would take the old life with
+its drawbacks, its occasional starvation, and its everyday kicks and hard
+knocks; or the good clothes, the plentiful grub, and warm bed, with all
+the restraints of civilized society and the &#8220;Sunday-school racket&#8221; of the
+other boy thrown in, I have as little doubt that the street would carry
+the day by a practically unanimous vote as I have that there are people
+still to be found&mdash;too many of them&mdash;who would indorse the choice with a
+sigh of relief and dismiss the subject, if it could be dismissed that way;
+which, happily, it cannot.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate duty which the community has to perform for its own
+protection is to school the children first of all into good Americans, and
+next into useful citizens. As a community it has not attended to this duty
+as it should; but private effort has stepped in and is making up for its
+neglect with encouraging success. The outlook that was gloomy from the
+point of view of the tenement, brightens when seen from this angle,
+however toilsome the road yet ahead. The inpouring of alien races no
+longer darkens it. The problems that seemed so perplexing in the light of
+freshly-formed prejudices against this or that immigrant, yield to this
+simple solution that discovers all alarm to have been groundless.
+Yesterday it was the swarthy Italian, to-day the Russian Jew, that excited
+our distrust. To-morrow it may be the Arab or the Greek. All alike they
+have taken, or are taking, their places in the ranks of our social
+phalanx, pushing upward from the bottom with steady effort, as I believe
+they will continue to do unless failure to provide them with proper homes
+arrests the process. And in the general advance the children, thus firmly
+grasped, are seen to be a powerful moving force. The one immigrant who
+does not keep step, who, having<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> fallen out of the ranks, has been ordered
+to the rear, is the Chinaman, who brought neither wife nor children to
+push him ahead. He left them behind that he might not become an American,
+and by the standard he himself set up he has been judged.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+<h3>THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Who</span> and where are the slum children of New York to-day? That depends on
+what is understood by the term. The moralist might seek them in Hell&#8217;s
+Kitchen, in Battle Row, and in the tenements, east and west, where the
+descendants of the poorest Irish immigrants live. They are the ones, as I
+have before tried to show, upon whom the tenement and the saloon set their
+stamp soonest and deepest. The observer of physical facts merely would
+doubtless pick out the Italian ragamuffins first, and from his standpoint
+he would be right. Irish poverty is not picturesque in the New World,
+whatever it may have been in the Old. Italian poverty is. The worst old
+rookeries fall everywhere in this city to the share of the immigrants from
+Southern Italy, who are content to occupy them, partly, perhaps, because
+they are no worse than the hovels they left behind, but mainly because
+they are tricked or bullied into putting up with them by their smarter
+countrymen who turn their helplessness and ignorance to good account.
+Wherever the invasion of some old home section by the tide of business has
+left ramshackle tenements falling into hopeless decay, as in the old
+&#8220;Africa,&#8221; in the Bend, and in many other places in the down-town wards,
+the Italian sweater landlord is ready with his offer of a lease to bridge
+over the interregnum, a lease that takes no account of repairs or of the
+improvements the owner sought to avoid.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> The crowds to make it profitable
+to him are never wanting. The bait he holds out is a job at the ash-dump
+with which he connects at the other end of the line. The house, the job,
+and the man as he comes to them fit in well together, and the
+copartnership has given the Italian a character which, I am satisfied from
+close observation of him, he does not wholly deserve. At all events, his
+wife does not. Dirty as <i>he</i> seems and is in the old rags that harmonize
+so well with his surroundings, there is that about her which suggests not
+only the capacity for better things, but a willingness to be clean and to
+look decent, if cause can be shown. It may be a bright kerchief, a bit of
+old-fashioned jewelry, or the neatly smoothed and braided hair of the
+wrinkled old hag who presides over the stale bread counter. Even in the
+worst dens occupied by these people, provided that they had not occupied
+them too long, I have found this trait crop out in the careful scrubbing
+of some piece of oil-cloth rescued from the dump and laid as a mat in
+front of the family bed; or in a bit of fringe on the sheet or quilt,
+ragged and black with age though it was, that showed what a fruitful soil
+proper training and decent housing would have found there.</p>
+
+<p>I have in mind one Italian &#8220;flat&#8221; among many, a half underground hole in a
+South Fifth Avenue yard, reached by odd passage-ways through a tumbledown
+tenement that was always full of bad smells and scooting rats. Across the
+foul and slippery yard, down three steps made of charred timbers from some
+worse wreck, was this &#8220;flat,&#8221; where five children slept with their elders.
+How many of those there were I never knew. There were three big family
+beds, and they nearly filled the room, leaving only patches of the mud
+floor visible. The walls were absolutely black with age and smoke. The
+plaster had fallen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> off in patches and there was green mould on the
+ceiling. And yet, with it all, with the swarm of squirming youngsters that
+were as black as the floor they rolled upon, there was evidence of a
+desperate, if hopeless, groping after order, even neatness. The beds were
+made up as nicely as they could be with the old quilts and pieces of
+carpet that served for covering. In Poverty Gap, where an Italian would be
+stoned as likely as not, there would have been a heap of dirty straw
+instead of beds, and the artistic arrangement of tallow-dips stuck in the
+necks of bottles about the newspaper cut of a saint on the corner shelf
+would have been missing altogether, fervent though the personal regard
+might be of Poverty Gap for the saint. The bottles would have been the
+only part of the exhibition sure to be seen there.</p>
+
+<p>I am satisfied that this instinct inhabits not only the more aristocratic
+Genoese, but his fellow countryman from the southern hills as well, little
+as they resemble each other or agree in most things. But the Neapolitan
+especially does not often get a chance to prove it. He is so altogether
+uninviting an object when he presents himself, fresh from the steamer,
+that he falls naturally the victim of the slum tenement, which in his keep
+becomes, despite the vigilance of the sanitary police, easily enough the
+convenient depot and half-way house between the garbage-dump and the
+bone-factory. Starting thus below the bottom, as it were, he has an
+up-hill journey before him if he is to work out of the slums, and the
+promise, to put it mildly, is not good. He does it all the same, or, if
+not he, his boy. It is not an Italian sediment that breeds the tough.
+Parental authority has a strong enough grip on the lad in Mulberry Street
+to make him work, and that is his salvation. &#8220;In seventeen years,&#8221; said
+the teacher of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> the oldest Italian ragged school in the city that, day and
+night, takes in quite six hundred, &#8220;I have seen my boys work up into
+decent mechanics and useful citizens almost to a man, and of my girls only
+two I know of have gone astray.&#8221; I had observed the process often enough
+myself to know that she was right. It is to be remembered, furthermore,
+that her school is in the very heart of the Five Points district, and
+takes in always the worst and the dirtiest crowds of children.</p>
+
+<p>Within a year there has been, through some caprice of immigration, a
+distinct descent in the quality of the children, viewed from even the
+standard of cleanliness that prevails at the Five Points. Perhaps the
+exodus from Italy has worked farther south, where there seems to be an
+unusual supply of mud. Perhaps the rivalry of steamship lines has brought
+it about. At any rate, the testimony is positive that the children that
+came to the schools after last vacation, and have kept coming since, were
+the worst seen here since the influx began. I have watched with
+satisfaction, since this became apparent, some of the bad old tenements,
+which the newcomers always sought in droves, disappear to make room for
+great factory buildings. But there are enough left. The cleaning out of a
+Mulberry Street block left one lop-sided old rear tenement that had long
+since been shut in on three sides by buildings four stories higher than
+itself, and forgotten by all the world save the miserable wretches who
+burrowed in that dark and dismal pit at the bottom of a narrow alley. Now,
+when the fourth structure goes up against its very windows, it will stand
+there in the heart of the block, a survival of the unfittest, that, in all
+its disheartening dreariness, bears testimony, nevertheless, to the
+beneficent activity of the best Board of Health New York has ever had&mdash;the
+onward<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> sweep of business. It will wipe that last remnant out also, even
+if the law lack the power to reach it.</p>
+
+<p>Shoals of Italian children lived in that rookery, and in those the workmen
+tore down, in the actual physical atmosphere of the dump. Not a gun-shot
+away there is a block of tenements, known as the Mott Street Barracks, in
+which still greater shoals are&mdash;I was going to say housed, but that would
+have been a mistake. Happily they are that very rarely, except when they
+are asleep, and not then if they can help it. Out on the street they may
+be found tumbling in the dirt, or up on the roof lying stark-naked,
+blinking in the sun&mdash;content with life as they find it. If they are not a
+very cleanly crew, they are at least as clean as the frame they are set
+in, though it must be allowed that something has been done of late years
+to redeem the buildings from the reproach of a bad past. The combination
+of a Jew for a landlord and a saloon-keeper&mdash;Italian, of course&mdash;for a
+lessee, was not propitious; but the buildings happen to be directly under
+the windows of the Health Board, and something, I suppose, was due to
+appearances. The authorities did all that could be done, short of tearing
+down the tenement, but though comparatively clean, and not nearly as
+crowded as it was, it is still the old slum. It is an instructive instance
+of what can and cannot be done with the tenements into which we invite
+these dirty strangers to teach them American ways and the self-respect of
+future citizens and voters. There are five buildings&mdash;that is, five front
+and four rear houses, the latter a story higher than those on the street;
+that is because the rear houses were built last, to &#8220;accommodate&#8221; this
+very Italian immigration that could be made to pay for anything. Chiefly
+Irish had lived there before, but they moved out then. There were 360
+tenants in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> Barracks when the police census was taken in 1888, and 40
+of them were babies. How many were romping children I do not know. The
+&#8220;yard&#8221; they had to play in is just 5 feet 10 inches wide, and a dozen
+steps below the street-level. The closets of all the buildings are in the
+cellar of the rear houses and open upon this &#8220;yard,&#8221; where it is always
+dark and damp as in a dungeon. Its foul stenches reach even the top floor,
+but so also does the sun at mid-day, and that is a luxury that counts as
+an extra in the contract with the landlord. The rent is nearly one-half
+higher near the top than it is on the street-level. Nine dollars above,
+six and a half below, for one room with windows, two without, and with
+barely space for a bed in each. But water-pipes have been put in lately,
+under orders from the Health Department, and the rents have doubtless been
+raised. &#8220;No windows&#8221; means no ventilation. The rear building backs up
+against the tenement on the next street; a space a foot wide separates
+them, but an attempt to ventilate the bed-rooms by windows on that was a
+failure.</p>
+
+<p>When the health officers got through with the Barracks in time for the
+police census of 1891, the 360 tenants had been whittled down to 238, of
+whom 47 were babies under five years. Persistent effort had succeeded in
+establishing a standard of cleanliness that was a very great improvement
+upon the condition prevailing in 1888. But still, as I have said, the slum
+remained and will remain as long as that rear tenement stands. In the four
+years fifty-one funerals had gone out from the Barracks. The white hearse
+alone had made thirty-five trips carrying baby coffins. This was the way
+the two standards showed up in the death returns at the Bureau of Vital
+Statistics: in 1888 the adult death-rate, in a population of 320 over five
+years old, was 15.62 per 1,000; the baby death-rate, 325.00 per 1,000,
+or nearly one-third in a total of 40. As a matter of fact 13 of the 40 had
+died that year. The adult death-rate for the entire tenement population of
+more than a million souls was that year 12.81, and the baby death-rate
+88.38. Last year, in 1891, the case stood thus: Total population, 238,
+including 47 babies. Adult death-rate per 1,000, 20.94; child death-rate
+(under five years) per 1,000, 106.38. General adult death-rate for 1891 in
+the tenements, 14.25; general child death-rate for 1891 in the tenements,
+86.67. It should be added that the reduced baby death-rate of the
+Barracks, high as it was, was probably much lower than it can be
+successfully maintained. The year before, in 1890, when practically the
+same improved conditions prevailed, it was twice as high. Twice as many
+babies died.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i003.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>I have referred to some of the typical Italian tenements at some length to
+illustrate the conditions under which their children grow up and absorb
+the impressions that are to shape their lives as men and women. Is it to
+be marvelled at, if the first impression of them is sometimes not
+favorable? I recall, not without amusement, one of the early experiences
+of a committee with which I was trying to relieve some of the child misery
+in the East Side tenements by providing an outing for the very poorest of
+the little ones, who might otherwise have been overlooked. In our anxiety
+to make our little charges as presentable as possible, it seems we had
+succeeded so well as to arouse a suspicion in our friends at the other end
+of the line that something was wrong, either with us or with the poor of
+which the patrician youngsters in new frocks and with clean faces, that
+came to them, were representatives. They wrote to us that they were in the
+field for the &#8220;slum<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> children,&#8221; and slum children they wanted. It happened
+that their letter came just as we had before us two little lads from the
+Mulberry Street Bend, ragged, dirty, unkempt, and altogether a sight to
+see. Our wardrobe was running low, and we were at our wits&#8217; end how to
+make these come up to our standard. We sat looking at each other after we
+had heard the letter read, all thinking the same thing, until the most
+courageous said it: &#8220;Send them as they are.&#8221; Well, we did, and waited
+rather breathlessly for the verdict. It came, with the children, in a note
+by return train, that said: &#8220;Not <i>that</i> kind, please!&#8221; And after that we
+were allowed to have things our own way.</p>
+
+<p>The two little fellows were Italians. In justice to our frightened
+friends, it should be said that it was not their nationality, but their
+rags, to which they objected; but not very many seasons have passed since
+the crowding of the black-eyed brigade of &#8220;guinnies,&#8221; as they were
+contemptuously dubbed, in ever-increasing numbers, into the ragged schools
+and the kindergartens, was watched with regret and alarm by the teachers,
+as by many others who had no better cause. The event proved that the
+children were the real teachers. They had a more valuable lesson to impart
+than they came to learn, and it has been a salutary one. To-day they are
+gladly welcomed. Their sunny temper, which no hovel is dreary enough, no
+hardship has power to cloud, has made them universal favorites, and the
+discovery has been made by their teachers that as the crowds pressed
+harder their school-rooms have marvellously expanded, until they embrace
+within their walls an unsuspected multitude, even many a slum tenement
+itself, cellar, &#8220;stoop,&#8221; attic, and all. Every lesson of cleanliness, of
+order, and of English taught at the school is reflected into some wretched
+home, and rehearsed there as far as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> the limited opportunities will allow.
+No demonstration with soap and water upon a dirty little face but widens
+the sphere of these chief promoters of education in the slums. &#8220;By &#8217;m by,&#8221;
+said poor crippled Pietro to me, with a sober look, as he labored away on
+his writing lesson, holding down the paper with his maimed hand, &#8220;I learn
+t&#8217; make an Englis&#8217; letter; maybe my fadder he learn too.&#8221; I had my doubts
+of the father. He sat watching Pietro with a pride in the achievement that
+was clearly proportionate to the struggle it cost, and mirrored in his own
+face every grimace and contortion the progress of education caused the
+boy. &#8220;Si! si!&#8221; he nodded, eagerly. &#8220;Pietro he good a boy; make Englis&#8217;,
+Englis&#8217;!&#8221; and he made a flourish with his clay-pipe, as if he too were
+making the English letter that was the object of their common veneration.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it is as much his growing and well-founded distrust of the
+middle-man, whose unresisting victim he has heretofore been, and his need
+of some other joint to connect him with the English-speaking world that
+surrounds him, as any personal interest in book-learning, that impels the
+illiterate Italian to bring his boy to school early and see that he
+attends it. Greed has something to do with it too. In their anxiety to lay
+hold of the child, the charity schools have fallen into a way of bidding
+for him with clothes, shoes, and other bait that is never lost on Mulberry
+Street. Even sectarian scruples yield to such an argument, and the
+parochial school, where they get nothing but on the contrary are expected
+to contribute, gets left.</p>
+
+<p>In a few charity schools where the children are boarded they have
+discovered this, and frown upon Italian children unless there is the best
+of evidence that the father is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> really unable to pay for their keep and
+not simply unwilling. But whatever his motive, the effect is to
+demonstrate in a striking way the truth of the observation that real
+reform of poverty and ignorance must begin with the children. In his case,
+at all events, the seed thus sown bears some fruit in the present as well
+as in the coming generation of toilers. The little ones, with their new
+standards and new ambitions, become in a very real sense missionaries of
+the slums, whose work of regeneration begins with their parents. They are
+continually fetched away from school by the mother or father to act as
+interpreters or go-betweens in all the affairs of daily life, to be
+conscientiously returned within the hour stipulated by the teacher, who
+offers no objection to this sort of interruption, knowing it to be the
+best condition of her own success. One cannot help the hope that the
+office of trust with which the children are thus invested may, in some
+measure, help to mitigate their home-hardships. From their birth they have
+little else, though Italian parents are rarely cruel in the sense of
+abusing their offspring.</p>
+
+<p>It is the home itself that constitutes their chief hardship. It is only
+when his years offer the boy an opportunity of escape to the street, that
+a ray of sunlight falls into his life. In his backyard or in his alley it
+seldom finds him out. Thenceforward most of his time is spent there, until
+the school and the shop claim him, but not in idleness. His mother toiled,
+while she bore him at her breast, under burdens heavy enough to break a
+man&#8217;s back. She lets him out of her arms only to share her labor. How well
+he does it anyone may see for himself by watching the children that swarm
+where an old house is being torn down, lugging upon their heads loads of
+kindling wood twice their own size and sometimes larger<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> than that. They
+come, as crows scenting carrion, from every side at the first blow of the
+axe. Their odd old-mannish or old-womanish appearance, due more to their
+grotesque rags than to anything in the children themselves, betrays their
+race even without their chatter. Be there ever so many children of other
+nationalities nearer by&mdash;the wood-gatherers are nearly all Italians. There
+are still a lot of girls among them who drag as big loads as their
+brothers, but since the sewing machine found its way, with the sweater&#8217;s
+mortgage, into the Italian slums also, little Antonia has been robbed to a
+large extent even of this poor freedom, and has taken her place among the
+wage-earners when not on the school-bench. Once taken, the place is hers
+to keep for good. Sickness, unless it be mortal, is no excuse from the
+drudgery of the tenement. When, recently, one little Italian girl, hardly
+yet in her teens, stayed away from her class in the Mott Street Industrial
+School so long that her teacher went to her home to look her up, she found
+the child in a high fever, in bed, sewing on coats, with swollen eyes,
+though barely able to sit up.</p>
+
+<p>But neither poverty nor hard knocks has power to discourage the child of
+Italy. His nickname he pockets with a grin that has in it no thought of
+the dagger and the revenge that come to solace his after years. Only the
+prospect of immediate punishment eclipses his spirits for the moment.
+While the teacher of the sick little girl was telling me her pitiful story
+in the Mott Street school, a characteristic group appeared on the
+stairway. Three little Italian culprits in the grasp of Nellie, the tall
+and slender Irish girl who was the mentor of her class for the day. They
+had been arrested &#8220;fur fightin&#8217;&#8221; she briefly explained as she dragged them
+by the collar toward the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> principal, who just then appeared to inquire the
+cause of the rumpus, and thrust them forward to receive sentence. The
+three, none of whom was over eight years old, evidently felt that they
+were in the power of an enemy from whom no mercy was to be expected, and
+made no appeal for any. One scowled defiance. He was evidently the injured
+party.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He hit-a me a clip on de jaw,&#8221; he said in his defence, in the dialect of
+Mott Street with a slight touch of &#8220;the Bend.&#8221; The aggressor, a heavy
+browed little ruffian, hung back with a dreary howl, knuckling his eyes
+with a pair of fists that were nearly black. The third and youngest was in
+a state of bewilderment that was most ludicrous. He only knew that he had
+received a kick on the back and had struck out in self-defence, when he
+was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty&mdash;school had only
+just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection&mdash;that he
+was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two
+were led away to the principal&#8217;s desk. All three went out howling.</p>
+
+<p>I said that the Italians do not often abuse their children downright. The
+padrone has had his day; the last was convicted seven years ago, and an
+end has been put to the business of selling children into a slavery that
+meant outrage, starvation, and death; but poverty and ignorance are
+fearful allies in the homes of the poor against defenceless childhood,
+even without the child-beating fiend. Two cases which I encountered in the
+East Side tenements, in the summer of 1891, show how the combination works
+at its worst. Without a doubt they are typical of very many, though I hope
+that few come quite up to their standard. The one was the case of little
+Carmen, who last March died in the New York Hospital, where she had lain
+five<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> long months, the special care of the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children. One of the summer corps doctors found her in a Mott
+Street tenement, within stone-throw of the Health Department office,
+suffering from a wasting disease that could only be combated by the most
+careful nursing. He put her case into the hands of the King&#8217;s Daughters&#8217;
+Committee that followed in the steps of the doctor, and it was then that I
+saw her. She lay in a little back room, up two flights and giving upon a
+narrow yard where it was always twilight. The room was filthy and close,
+and entirely devoid of furniture, with the exception of a rickety stool, a
+slop pail, and a rusty old stove, one end of which was propped up with
+bricks. Carmen&#8217;s bed was a board laid across the top of a barrel and a
+trunk set on end. I could not describe, if I would, the condition of the
+child when she was raised from the mess of straw and rags in which she
+lay. The sight unnerved even the nurse, who had seen little else than such
+scenes all summer. Loathsome bedsores had attacked the wasted little body,
+and in truth Carmen was more dead than alive. But when, shocked and
+disgusted, we made preparations for her removal with all speed to the
+hospital, the parents objected and refused to let us take her away. They
+had to be taken into court and forced to surrender the child under warrant
+of law, though it was clearly the little sufferer&#8217;s only chance for life,
+and only the slenderest of chances at that.</p>
+
+<p>Carmen was the victim of the stubborn ignorance that dreads the hospital
+and the doctor above the discomfort of the dirt and darkness and suffering
+that are its every-day attendants. Her parents were no worse than the
+Monroe Street mother who refused to let the health officer vaccinate her
+baby, because her crippled boy, with one leg an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> inch shorter than the
+other, had &#8220;caught it&#8221;&mdash;the lame leg, that is to say&mdash;from his
+vaccination. She knew it was so, and with ignorance of that stamp there is
+no other argument than force. But another element entered into the case of
+a sick Essex Street baby. The tenement would not let it recover from a bad
+attack of scarlet fever, and the parents would not let it be taken to the
+country or to the sea-shore, despite all efforts and entreaties. When
+their motive came out at last, it proved to be a mercenary one. They were
+behind with the rent, and as long as they had a sick child in the house
+the landlord could not put them out. Sick, the baby was to them a source
+of income, at all events a bar to expense, and in that way so much
+capital. Well, or away, it would put them at the mercy of the
+rent-collector at once. So they chose to let it suffer. The parents were
+Jews, a fact that emphasizes the share borne by desperate poverty in the
+transaction, for the family tie is notoriously strong among their people.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt Mott Street echoed with the blare of brass bands when poor little
+Carmen was carried from her bed of long suffering to her grave in Calvary.
+Scarce a day passes now in these tenements that does not see some little
+child, not rarely a new-born babe, carried to the grave in solemn state,
+preceded by a band playing mournful dirges and followed by a host with
+trailing banners, from some wretched home that barely sheltered it alive.
+No suspicion of the ludicrous incongruity of the show disturbs the
+paraders. It seems as if, but one remove from the dump, an insane passion
+for pomp and display, perhaps a natural reaction from the ash-barrel, lies
+in wait for this Italian, to which he falls a helpless victim. Not content
+with his own national and religious holidays and those he finds awaiting
+him here, he has invented or introduced a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> system of his own, a sort of
+communal celebration of proprietary saints, as it were, that has taken
+Mulberry Street by storm. As I understand it, the townsmen of some Italian
+village, when there is a sufficient number of them within reach, club
+together to celebrate its patron saint, and hire a band and set up a
+gorgeous altar in a convenient back yard. The fire-escapes overlooking it
+are draped with flags and transformed into reserved-seat galleries with
+the taste these people display under the most adverse circumstances.
+Crowds come and go, parading at intervals in gorgeous uniforms around the
+block. Admission is by the saloon-door, which nearly always holds the key
+to the situation, the saloonist who prompts the sudden attack of devotion
+being frequently a namesake of the saint and willing to go shares on the
+principle that he takes the profit and the saint the glory.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i004.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">AN ITALIAN HOME UNDER A DUMP.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>The partnership lasts as long as there is any profit in it, sometimes the
+better part of the week, during which time all work stops. If the feast
+panned out well, the next block is liable to be the scene of a rival
+celebration before the first is fairly ended. As the supply of Italian
+villages represented in New York is practically as inexhaustible as that
+of the saloons, there is no reason why Mulberry Street may not become a
+perennial picnic ground long before the scheme to make a park of one end
+of it gets under way. From the standpoint of the children there can be no
+objection to this, but from that of the police there is. They found
+themselves called upon to interfere in such a four days&#8217; celebration of
+
+St. Rocco last year, when his votaries strung cannon fire-crackers along
+the street the whole length of the block and set them all off at once. It
+was at just such a feast, in honor of the same saint, that a dozen
+Italians were killed a week later at Newark in the explosion of their
+fireworks.</p>
+
+<p>It goes without saying that the children enter into this sort of thing
+with all the enthusiasm of their little souls. The politician watches it
+attentively, alert for some handle to catch his new allies by and effect
+their &#8220;organization.&#8221; If it is a new experience for him to find the saloon
+put to such use, he betrays no surprise. It is his vantage ground, and
+whether it serve as the political bait for the Irishman,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> or as the
+religious initiative of the Italian, is of less account than that its
+patrons, young and old, in the end fall into his trap. Conclusive proof
+that the Italian has been led into camp came to me on last St. Patrick&#8217;s
+Day through the assurance of a certain popular clergyman, that he had
+observed, on a walk through the city, a number of hand-organs draped in
+green, evidently for the occasion.</p>
+
+<p>This dump of which I have spoken as furnishing the background of the
+social life of Mulberry Street, has lately challenged attention as a slum
+annex to the Bend, with fresh horrors in store for defenceless childhood.
+To satisfy myself upon this point I made a personal inspection of the
+dumps along both rivers last winter and found the Italian crews at work
+there making their home in every instance among the refuse they picked
+from the scows. The dumps are wooden bridges raised above the level of the
+piers upon which they are built to allow the discharge of the carts
+directly into the scows moored under them. Under each bridge a cabin had
+been built of old boards, oil-cloth, and the like, that had found its way
+down on the carts; an old milk-can had been made into a fireplace without
+the ceremony of providing stove-pipe or draught, and here, flanked by
+mountains of refuse, slept the crews of from half a dozen to three times
+that number of men, secure from the police, who had grown tired of driving
+them from dump to dump and had finally let them alone. There were women at
+some of them, and at four dumps, three on the North River and one on the
+East Side, I found boys who ought to have been at school, picking bones
+and sorting rags. They said that they slept there, and as the men did, why
+should they not? It was their home. They were children of the dump,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>literally. All of them except one were Italians. That one was a little
+homeless Jew who had drifted down at first to pick cinders. Now that his
+mother was dead and his father in a hospital, he had become a sort of
+fixture there, it seemed, having made the acquaintance of the other lads.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i005.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">A CHILD OF THE DUMP.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Two boys whom I found at the West Nineteenth Street dumps sorting bones
+were as bright lads as I had seen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> anywhere. One was nine years old and
+the other twelve. Filthy and ragged, they fitted well into their
+environment&mdash;even the pig I had encountered at one of the East River dumps
+was much the more respectable, as to appearance, of the lot&mdash;but were
+entirely undaunted by it. They scarcely remembered anything but the dump.
+Neither could read, of course. Further down the river I came upon one
+seemingly not over fifteen, who assured me that he was twenty-one. I
+thought it possible when I took a closer look at him. The dump had stunted
+him. He did not even know what a letter was. He had been there five years,
+and garbage limited his mental as well as his physical horizon.</p>
+
+<p>Enough has been said to show that the lot of the poor child of the
+Mulberry Street Bend, or of Little Italy, is not a happy one, courageously
+and uncomplainingly, even joyously, though it be borne. The stories of two
+little lads from the region of Crosby Street always stand to me as typical
+of their kind. One I knew all about from personal observation and
+acquaintance; the other I give as I have it from his teachers in the Mott
+Street Industrial School, where he was a pupil in spells. It was the death
+of little Giuseppe that brought me to his home, a dismal den in a rear
+tenement down a dark and forbidding alley. I have seldom seen a worse
+place. There was no trace there of a striving for better things&mdash;the
+tenement had stamped that out&mdash;nothing but darkness and filth and misery.
+From this hole Giuseppe had come to the school a mass of rags, but with
+that jovial gleam in his brown eyes that made him an instant favorite with
+the teachers as well as with the boys. One of them especially, little
+Mike, became attached to him, and a year after his cruel death shed tears
+yet, when reminded of it. Giuseppe had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> not been long at the school when
+he was sent to an Elizabeth Street tenement for a little absentee. He
+brought her, shivering in even worse rags than his own; it was a cold
+winter day.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This girl is very poor,&#8221; he said, presenting her to the teacher, with a
+pitying look. It was only then that he learned that she had no mother. His
+own had often stood between the harsh father and him when he came home
+with unsold evening papers. Giuseppe fished his only penny out of his
+pocket&mdash;his capital for the afternoon&#8217;s trade. &#8220;I would like to give her
+that,&#8221; he said. After that he brought her pennies regularly from his day&#8217;s
+sale, and took many a thrashing for it. He undertook the general
+supervision of the child&#8217;s education, and saw to it that she came to
+school every day. Giuseppe was twelve years old.</p>
+
+<p>There came an evening when business had been very bad, so bad that he
+thought a bed in the street healthier for him than the Crosby Street
+alley. With three other lads in similar straits he crawled into the iron
+chute that ventilated the basement of the Post-office on the Mail Street
+side and snuggled down on the grating. They were all asleep, when fire
+broke out in the cellar. The three climbed out, but Giuseppe, whose feet
+were wrapped in a mail-bag, was too late. He was burned to death.</p>
+
+<p>The little girl still goes to the Mott Street school. She is too young to
+understand, and marvels why Giuseppe comes no more with his pennies. Mike
+cries for his friend. When, some months ago, I found myself in the Crosby
+Street alley, and went up to talk to Giuseppe&#8217;s parents, they would answer
+no questions before I had replied to one of theirs. It was thus
+interpreted to me by a girl from the basement, who had come in out of
+curiosity:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>&#8220;Are youse goin&#8217; to give us any money?&#8221; Poor Giuseppe!</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i006.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">PIETRO LEARNING TO MAKE AN ENGLIS&#8217; LETTER.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>My other little friend was Pietro, of whom I spoke before. Perhaps of all
+the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the
+course of years&mdash;and they are many and sad, most of them&mdash;none comes
+nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than his,
+exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I
+met him first in the Mulberry Street police-station, where he was
+interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd
+from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his
+rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, he seemed to fit
+in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of
+the police-station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but
+for his maimed hand and his oddly grave yet eager face, which no smile
+ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I
+afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son
+of a laborer, not &#8220;borned here&#8221; as the rest of his sisters and brothers.
+There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it:
+&#8220;2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 modder,&#8221; subsisting on an unsteady
+maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking always the earnings of one
+week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a
+dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that until
+very recently preserved to Jersey Street the memory of its former bad
+eminence as among the worst of the city&#8217;s slums. Pietro had gone to the
+Sisters&#8217; school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his
+off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his
+education was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his
+graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earners, that were sadly in
+need of recruiting. A steady job of &#8220;shinin&#8217;&#8221; was found for him in an
+Eighth Ward saloon, and that afternoon, just before Christmas, he came
+home from school and putting his books away on the shelf for the next in
+order to use, ran across Broadway full of joyous anticipation of his new
+dignity in an independent job. He did not see the street-car until it was
+fairly upon him, and then it was too late. They thought he was killed, but
+he was only crippled for life. When, after many months, he came out of the
+hospital, where the company had paid his board and posed as doing a
+generous thing, his bright smile was gone; his &#8220;shining&#8221; was at an end,
+and with it his career as it had been marked out for him. He must needs
+take up something new, and he was bending all his energies, when I met
+him, toward learning to make the &#8220;Englis&#8217; letter&#8221; with a degree of
+proficiency that would justify the hope of his doing something somewhere
+at sometime to make up for what he had lost. It was a far-off possibility
+yet. With the same end in view, probably, he was taking nightly
+writing-lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating
+schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony, peddling education
+cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with
+the prospect. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him,
+now let him alone. &#8220;When they see this,&#8221; he said, holding up his scarred
+and misshapen arm, &#8220;they don&#8217;t strike me no more.&#8221; Then there was his
+fourteen months old baby brother who was beginning to walk, and could
+almost &#8220;make a letter.&#8221; Pietro was much concerned about his education,
+anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. &#8220;I take him to
+school<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> sometime,&#8221; he said, piloting him across the floor and talking
+softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave,
+unchanging face.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Pietro,&#8221; I said, with a sudden yearning to know, &#8220;did you ever laugh?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I did wonst,&#8221; he said, quietly, and went on his way. And I would gladly
+have forgotten that I ever asked the question; even as Pietro had
+forgotten his laugh.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+<h3>IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">If</span> the sightseer finds less to engage his interest in Jewtown than in the
+Bend, outside of the clamoring crowds in the Chasir&mdash;the Pig-market&mdash;he
+will discover enough to enlist his sympathies, provided he did not leave
+them behind when he crossed the Bowery. The loss is his own then. There is
+that in the desolation of child-life in those teeming hives to make the
+shrivelled heart ache with compassion for its kind and throb with a new
+life of pain, enough to dispel some prejudices that are as old as our
+faith, and sometimes, I fear, a good deal stronger. The Russian exile adds
+to the offence of being an alien and a disturber of economic balances the
+worse one of being a Jew. Let those who cannot forgive this damaging fact
+possess their souls in patience. There is some evidence that the welcome
+he has received in those East Side tenements has done more than centuries
+of persecution could toward making him forget it himself.</p>
+
+<p>The Italian who comes here gravitates naturally to the oldest and most
+dilapidated tenements in search of cheap rents, which he doesn&#8217;t find. The
+Jew has another plan, characteristic of the man. He seeks out the biggest
+ones and makes the rent come within his means by taking in boarders,
+&#8220;sweating&#8221; his flat to the point of police intervention. That that point
+is a long way beyond human decency, let alone comfort, an instance from
+Ludlow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> Street, that came to my notice while writing this, quite clearly
+demonstrates. The offender was a tailor, who lived with his wife, two
+children, and two boarders in two rooms on the top floor. [It is always
+the top floor; in fifteen years of active service as a police reporter I
+have had to climb to the top floor five times for every one my business
+was further down, irrespective of where the tenement was or what kind of
+people lived in it. Crime, suicide, and police business generally seem to
+bear the same relation to the stairs in a tenement that they bear to
+poverty itself. The more stairs the more trouble. The deepest poverty is
+at home in the attic.] But this tailor; with his immediate household,
+including the boarders, he occupied the larger of the two rooms. The
+other, a bedroom eight feet square, he sublet to a second tailor and his
+wife; which couple, following his example as their <ins class="correction" title="original: opportunties">opportunities</ins> allowed,
+divided the bedroom in two by hanging a curtain in the middle, took
+one-half for themselves and let the other half to still another tailor
+with a wife and child. A midnight inspection by the sanitary police was
+followed by the arrest of the housekeeper and the original tailor, and
+they were fined or warned in the police-court, I forget which. It doesn&#8217;t
+much matter. That the real point was missed was shown by the appearance of
+the owner of the house, a woman, at Sanitary Headquarters, on the day
+following, with the charge against the policeman that he was robbing her
+of her tenants.</p>
+
+<p>The story of inhuman packing of human swarms, of bitter poverty, of
+landlord greed, of sweater slavery, of darkness and squalor and misery,
+which these tenements have to tell, is equalled, I suppose, nowhere in a
+civilized land. Despite the prevalence of the boarder, who is usually a
+married man, come over alone the better to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> able to prepare the way for
+the family, the census<small><a name="f3.1" id="f3.1" href="#f3">[3]</a></small> shows that fifty-four per cent. of the entire
+population of immigrant Jews were children, or under age. Every steamer
+has added to their number since, and judging from the sights one sees
+daily in the office of the United Hebrew Charities, and from the general
+appearance of Ludlow Street, the proportion of children has suffered no
+decrease. Let the reader who would know for himself what they are like,
+and what their chances are, take that street some evening from Hester
+Street down and observe what he sees going on there. Not that it is the
+only place where he can find them. The census I spoke of embraced
+forty-five streets in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards. But at
+that end of Ludlow Street the tenements are taller and the crowds always
+denser than anywhere else. Let him watch the little pedlars hawking their
+shoe-strings, their matches, and their penny paper-pads, with the restless
+energy that seems so strangely out of proportion to the reward it reaps;
+the half-grown children staggering under heavy bundles of clothes from the
+sweater&#8217;s shop; the ragamuffins at their fretful play, play yet,
+discouraged though it be by the nasty surroundings&mdash;thank goodness, every
+year brings its Passover with the scrubbing brigade to Ludlow Street, and
+the dirt is shifted from the houses to the streets once anyhow; if it does
+find its way back, something may be lost on the way&mdash;the crowding, the
+pushing for elbow-room, the wails of bruised babies that keep falling
+down-stairs, or rolling off the stoop, and the raids of angry mothers
+swooping down upon their offspring and distributing thumps right and left
+to pay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> for the bruises, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Whose
+eye, whose tooth, is of less account in Jewtown than that the capital put
+out bears lawful interest in kind. What kind of interest may society some
+day expect to reap from Ghettos like these, where even the sunny temper of
+childhood is soured by want and woe, or smothered in filth? It is a long
+time since I have heard a good honest laugh, a child&#8217;s gleeful shout, in
+Ludlow Street. Angry cries, jeers, enough. They are as much part of the
+place as the dirty pavements; but joyous, honest laughs, like soap and
+water, are at a premium there.</p>
+
+<p>But children laugh because they are happy. They are not happy in Ludlow
+Street. Nobody is except the landlord. Why should they be? Born to toil
+and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late. There
+is even less time than there is room for play in Jewtown, good reason why
+the quality of the play is poor. There is work for the weakest hands, a
+step for the smallest feet in the vast tread-mill of these East Side
+homes. A thing is worth there what it will bring. All other
+considerations, ambitions, desires, yield to that. Education pays as an
+investment, and therefore the child is sent to school. The moment his
+immediate value as a worker overbalances the gain in prospect by keeping
+him at his books, he goes to the shop. The testimony of Jewish observers,
+who have had quite unusual opportunities for judging, is that the average
+age at which these children leave school for good is rather below twelve
+than beyond it, by which time their work at home, helping their parents,
+has qualified them to earn wages that will more than pay for their keep.
+They are certainly on the safe side in their reckoning, if the children
+are not. The legal age for shop employment is fourteen. On my visits among
+the homes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> workshops, and evening schools of Jewtown, I was always struck
+by the number of diminutive wage-earners who were invariably &#8220;just
+fourteen.&#8221; It was clearly not the child which the tenement had dwarfed in
+their case, but the memory or the moral sense of the parents.</p>
+
+<p>If, indeed, the shop were an exchange for the home; if the child quit the
+one upon entering the other, there might be little objection to make; but
+too often they are two names for the same thing; where they are not, the
+shop is probably preferable, bad as that may be. When, in the midnight
+hour, the noise of the sewing-machine was stilled at last, I have gone the
+rounds of Ludlow and Hester and Essex Streets among the poorest of the
+Russian Jews, with the sanitary police, and counted often four, five, and
+even six of the little ones in a single bed, sometimes a shake-down on the
+hard floor, often a pile of half-finished clothing brought home from the
+sweater, in the stuffy rooms of their tenements. In one I visited very
+lately, the only bed was occupied by the entire family lying lengthwise
+and crosswise, literally in layers, three children at the feet, all except
+a boy of ten or twelve, for whom there was no room. He slept with his
+clothes on to keep him warm, in a pile of rags just inside the door. It
+seemed to me impossible that families of children could be raised at all
+in such dens as I had my daily and nightly walks in. And yet the vital
+statistics and all close observation agree in allotting to these Jews even
+an unusual degree of good health. The records of the Sanitary Bureau show
+that while the Italians have the highest death-rate, the mortality in the
+lower part of the Tenth Ward, of which Ludlow Street is the heart and
+type, is the lowest in the city. Even the baby death-rate is very low. But
+for the fact that the ravages of diphtheria, croup, and measles run up the
+record<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> in the houses occupied entirely by tailors&mdash;in other words, in the
+sweater district, where contagion always runs riot<small><a name="f4.1" id="f4.1" href="#f4">[4]</a></small>&mdash;the Tenth Ward
+would seem to be the healthiest spot in the city, as well as the dirtiest
+and the most crowded. The temperate habits of the Jew and his freedom from
+enfeebling vices generally must account for this, along with his
+marvellous vitality. I cannot now recall ever having known a Jewish
+drunkard. On the other hand, I have never come across a Prohibitionist
+among them. The absence of the one renders the other superfluous.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i007.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">&#8220;SLEPT IN THAT CELLAR FOUR YEARS.&#8221;</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It was only last winter I had occasion to visit repeatedly a double
+tenement at the lower end of Ludlow Street, which the police census showed
+to contain 297 tenants, 45 of whom were under five years of age, not
+counting 3 pedlars who slept in the mouldy cellar, where the water was
+ankle deep on the mud floor. The feeblest ray of daylight never found its
+way down there, the hatches having been carefully covered with rags and
+matting; but freshets often did. Sometimes the water rose to the height of
+a foot, and never quite soaked away in the dryest season. It was an awful
+place, and by the light of my candle the three, with their unkempt beards
+and hair and sallow faces, looked more like hideous ghosts than living
+men. Yet they had slept there among and upon decaying fruit and wreckage
+of all sorts from the tenement for over three years, according to their
+own and the housekeeper&#8217;s statements. There had been four. One was then in
+the hospital, but not because of any ill effect the cellar had had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> upon
+him. He had been run over in the street and was making the most of his
+vacation, charging it up to the owner of the wagon, whom he was getting
+ready to sue for breaking his leg. Up-stairs, especially in the rear
+tenement, I found the scene from the cellar repeated with variations. In
+one room a family of seven, including the oldest daughter, a young woman
+of eighteen, and her brother, a year older than she, slept in a common bed
+made on the floor of the kitchen, and manifested scarcely any concern at
+our appearance. A complaint to the Board of Health resulted in an
+overhauling that showed the tenement to be unusually bad even for that bad
+spot; but when we came to look up its record, from the standpoint of the
+vital statistics, we discovered that not only had there not been a single
+death in the house during the whole year, but on the third floor lived a
+woman over a hundred years old, who had been there a long time. I was
+never more surprised in my life, and while we laughed at it, I confess it
+came nearer to upsetting my faith in the value of statistics than anything
+I had seen till then. And yet I had met with similar experiences, if not
+quite so striking, often enough to convince me that poverty and want beget
+their own power to resist the evil influences of their worst surroundings.
+I was at a loss how to put this plainly to the good people who often asked
+wonderingly why the children of the poor one saw in the street seemed
+generally such a thriving lot, until a slip of Mrs. Partington&#8217;s
+discriminating tongue did it for me: &#8220;Manured to the soil.&#8221; That is it. In
+so far as it does not merely seem so&mdash;one does not see the sick and
+suffering&mdash;that puts it right.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the effect upon the physical health of the children, it cannot be
+otherwise, of course, than that such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> conditions should corrupt their
+morals. I have the authority of a distinguished rabbi, whose field and
+daily walk are among the poorest of his people, to support me in the
+statement that the moral tone of the young girls is distinctly lower than
+it was. The entire absence of privacy in their homes and the foul contact
+of the sweaters&#8217; shops, where men and women work side by side from morning
+till night, scarcely half clad in the hot summer weather, does for the
+girls what the street completes in the boy. But for the patriarchal family
+life of the Jew that is his strongest <ins class="correction" title="original: virture">virtue</ins>, their ruin would long since
+have been complete. It is that which pilots him safely through shoals upon
+which the Gentile would have been inevitably wrecked. It is that which
+keeps the almshouse from casting its shadow over Ludlow Street to add to
+its gloom. It is the one quality which redeems, and on the Sabbath eve
+when he gathers his household about his board, scant though the fare be,
+dignifies the darkest slum of Jewtown.</p>
+
+<p>How strong is this attachment to home and kindred that makes the Jew cling
+to the humblest hearth and gather his children and his children&#8217;s children
+about it, though grinding poverty leave them only a bare crust to share, I
+saw in the case of little Jette Brodsky, who strayed away from her own
+door, looking for her papa. They were strangers and ignorant and poor, so
+that weeks went by before they could make their loss known and get a
+hearing, and meanwhile Jette, who had been picked up and taken to Police
+Headquarters, had been hidden away in an asylum, given another name when
+nobody came to claim her, and had been quite forgotten. But in the two
+years that passed before she was found at last, her empty chair stood ever
+by her father&#8217;s, at the family board, and no Sabbath eve but heard his
+prayer for the restoration of their lost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> one. It happened once that I
+came in on a Friday evening at the breaking of bread, just as the four
+candles upon the table had been lit with the Sabbath blessing upon the
+home and all it sheltered. Their light fell on little else than empty
+plates and anxious faces; but in the patriarchal host who arose and bade
+the guest welcome with a dignity a king might have envied I recognized
+with difficulty the humble pedlar I had known only from the street and
+from the police office, where he hardly ventured beyond the door.</p>
+
+<p>But the tenement that has power to turn purest gold to dross digs a pit
+for the Jew even through this virtue that has been his shield against its
+power for evil. In its atmosphere it turns too often to a curse by helping
+to crowd his lodgings, already overflowing, beyond the point of official
+forbearance. Then follow orders to &#8220;reduce&#8221; the number of tenants that
+mean increased rent, which the family cannot pay, or the breaking up of
+the home. An appeal to avert such a calamity came to the Board of Health
+recently from one of the refugee tenements. The tenant was a man with a
+houseful of children, too full for the official scale as applied to the
+flat, and his plea was backed by the influence of his only friend in
+need&mdash;the family undertaker. There was something so cruelly suggestive in
+the idea that the laugh it raised died without an echo.</p>
+
+<p>The census of the sweaters&#8217; district gave a total of 23,405 children under
+six years, and 21,285 between six and fourteen, in a population of
+something over a hundred and eleven thousand Russian, Polish, and
+Roumanian Jews in the three wards mentioned; 15,567 are set down as
+&#8220;children over fourteen.&#8221; According to the record, scarce one-third of the
+heads of families had become naturalized citizens, though the average of
+their stay in the United<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> States was between nine and ten years. The very
+language of our country was to them a strange tongue, understood and
+spoken by only 15,837 of the fifty thousand and odd adults enumerated.
+Seven thousand of the rest spoke only German, five thousand Russian, and
+over twenty-one thousand, could only make themselves understood to each
+other, never to the world around them, in the strange jargon that passes
+for Hebrew on the East Side, but is really a mixture of a dozen known
+dialects and tongues and of some that were never known or heard anywhere
+else. In the census it is down as just what it is&mdash;jargon, and nothing
+else.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, are conditions as unfavorable to the satisfactory, even safe,
+development of child life in the chief American city as could well be
+imagined; more unfavorable even than with the Bohemians, who have at least
+their faith in common with us, if safety lies in the merging through the
+rising generation of the discordant elements into a common harmony. A
+community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing
+interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in
+tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief
+from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness
+fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. Clearly, if ever there
+was need of moulding any material for the citizenship that awaits it, it
+is with this; and if ever trouble might be expected to beset the effort,
+it might be looked for here. But it is not so. The record shows that of
+the sixty thousand children, including the fifteen thousand young men and
+women over fourteen who earn a large share of the money that pays for rent
+and food, and the twenty-three thousand toddlers under six years, fully
+one-third go to school. Deducting the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> two extremes, little more than a
+thousand children of between six and fourteen years, that is, of school
+age, were put down as receiving no instruction at the time the census was
+taken; but it is not at all likely that this condition was permanent in
+the case of the greater number of these. The poorest Hebrew knows&mdash;the
+poorer he is, the better he knows it&mdash;that knowledge is power, and power
+as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long is
+what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day
+and night schools are crowded by his children, who are everywhere forging
+ahead of their Christian school-fellows, taking more than their share of
+prizes and promotions. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark
+back yard, has its school and its school-master with his scourge to
+intercept those who might otherwise escape. In the census there are put
+down 251 Jewish teachers as living in these tenements, a large number of
+whom conduct such schools, so that, as the children form always more than
+one-half of the population in the Jewish quarter, the evidence is after
+all that even here, with the tremendous inpour of a destitute, ignorant
+people, and with the undoubted employment of child labor on a large scale,
+the cause of progress along the safe line is holding its own.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i008.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">A SYNAGOGUE SCHOOL IN A HESTER STREET TENEMENT.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i009.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE BACKSTAIRS TO LEARNING.</span><br />
+(Entrance to a Talmud School<br />in Hester Street.)</p></div>
+
+<p>It is true that these tenement schools that absorb several thousand
+children are not what they might be from a sanitary point of view. It is
+also true that heretofore nothing but Hebrew and the Talmud have been
+taught there. But to the one evil the health authorities have recently
+been aroused; of the other, the wise and patriotic men who are managing
+the Baron de Hirsch charity are making a useful handle by gathering the
+teachers in and setting them to learn English. Their new knowledge will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+soon be reflected in their teaching, and the Hebrew schools become primary
+classes in the system of public education. The school in a Hester Street
+tenement that is shown in the picture is a fair specimen of its kind&mdash;by
+no means one of the worst&mdash;and so is the back yard behind it, that serves
+as the children&#8217;s play-ground, with its dirty mud-puddles, its
+slop-barrels and broken flags, and its foul tenement-house surroundings.
+Both fall in well with the home-lives and environment of the unhappy
+little wretches whose daily horizon they limit. They get there the first
+instruction they receive in the only tongues with which the teachers are
+familiar, Hebrew and the Jargon, in the only studies which they are
+competent to teach, the Talmud and the Prophets. Until they are six years
+old they are under the &#8220;Melammed&#8217;s&#8221; rod all day; after that only in the
+interval between public school and supper. It is practically<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> the only
+religious instruction the poorest Jewish children receive, but it is
+claimed by some of their rabbis that they had better have none at all. The
+daily transition, they say, from the bright and, by comparison,
+&aelig;sthetically beautiful public school-room to these dark and inhospitable
+dens, with which the faith that has brought so many miseries upon their
+race comes to be inseparably associated in the child&#8217;s mind as he grows
+up, tends to reflections that breed indifference, if not infidelity, in
+the young. It would not be strange if this were so. If the schools,
+through this process, also help pave the way for the acceptance of the
+Messiah heretofore rejected, which I greatly doubt, it may be said to be
+the only instance in which the East Side tenement has done its tenants a
+good Christian turn.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more remarkable class in any school than that of these
+Melammedim,<small><a name="f5.1" id="f5.1" href="#f5">[5]</a></small> that may be seen in session any week day forenoon, save on
+Saturday, of course, in the Hebrew Institute in East Broadway. Old bearded
+men struggling through the intricacies of the first reader, &#8220;a cow, a
+cat,&#8221; and all the rest of childish learning, with a rapt attention and a
+concentration of energy as if they were devoting themselves to the most
+heroic of tasks, which, indeed, they are, for the good that may come of it
+cannot easily be overestimated. As an educational measure it may be said
+to be getting down to first principles with a vengeance. When the reader
+has been mastered, brief courses in the history of the United States, the
+Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution follow. The test of
+proficiency in the pupil is his ability to translate the books of the Old
+Testament, with which he is familiar, of course, from Hebrew into English,
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> <i>vice versa</i>. The Melammed is rarely a dull scholar. No one knows
+better than he, to whom it has come only in the evening of his hard life,
+the value of the boon that is offered him. One of the odd group that was
+deep in the lesson of the day had five children at home, whom he had
+struggled to bring up on an income of ten dollars a week. The oldest, a
+bright boy who had graduated with honor, despite the patch on his
+trousers, from the public school, was ambitious to go to college, and the
+father had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> saved and pinched in a thousand ways to gratify his desire.
+One of the managers of the Institute who knew how the family were starving
+on half rations, had offered the father, a short time before, to get the
+boy employment in a store at three dollars a week. It was a tremendous
+temptation, for the money was badly needed at home. But the old man put it
+resolutely away from him. &#8220;No,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I must send him to college. He
+shall have the chance that was denied his father.&#8221; And he was as good as
+his word. And so was the lad, a worthy son of a worthy father. When I met
+him he had already proved himself a long way the best student in his
+class.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i010.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">CLASS OF MELAMMEDIM LEARNING ENGLISH.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In other class-rooms in the great building, which is devoted entirely to
+the cause of Americanizing the young Russian immigrants, hundreds of
+children get daily their first lessons in English and in patriotism in
+simultaneous doses. The two are inseparable in the beneficent plan of
+their instructors. Their effort is to lay hold of the children of the
+new-comers at once; tender years are no barrier. For the toddlers there
+are kindergarten classes, with play the street has had no chance to soil.
+And while playing they learn to speak the strange new tongue and to love
+the pretty flag with the stars that is everywhere in sight. The night
+school gathers in as many as can be corralled of those who are big enough,
+if not old enough, to work. The ease and rapidity with which they learn is
+equalled only by their good behavior and close attention while in school.
+There is no whispering and no rioting at these desks, no trial of strength
+with the teacher, as in the Italian ragged schools, where the question who
+is boss has always to be settled before the business of the school can
+proceed. These children come to learn. Even from the Christian schools in
+the district that gather in their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> share comes the same testimony. All the
+disturbance they report was made by their elders, outside the school, in
+the street. In the Hebrew Institute the average of absence for all causes
+was, during the first year, less than eight per cent. of the registered
+attendance, and in nearly every case sickness furnished a valid excuse. In
+a year and a half the principal had only been called upon three times to
+reprove an obstreperous pupil, in a total of 1,500. While I was visiting
+one of the day classes a little girl who had come from Moscow only two
+months before presented herself with her green vaccination card from the
+steamer. She understood already perfectly the questions put to her and was
+able to answer most of them in English. Boys of eight and nine years who
+had come over as many months before, knowing only the jargon of their
+native village, read to me whole pages from the reader with almost perfect
+accent, and did sums on the blackboard that would have done credit to the
+average boy of twelve in our public schools. Figuring is always their
+strong point. They would not be Jews if it was not.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening classes the girls of &#8220;fourteen&#8221; flourished, as everywhere
+in Jewtown. There were many who were much older, and some who were a long
+way yet from that safe goal. One sober-faced little girl, who wore a medal
+for faithful attendance and who could not have been much over ten, if as
+old as that, said that she &#8220;went out dressmaking&#8221; and so helped her
+mother. Another, who was even smaller and had been here just three weeks,
+yet understood what was said to her, explained in broken German that she
+was learning to work at &#8220;Blumen&#8221; in a Grand Street shop, and would soon be
+able to earn wages that would help support the family of four children, of
+whom she was the oldest. The girl who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> sat in the seat with her was from a
+Hester Street tenement. Her clothes showed that she was very poor. She
+read very fluently on demand a story about a big dog that tried to run
+away, or something, &#8220;when he had a chance.&#8221; When she came to translate
+what she had read into German, which many of the Russian children
+understand, she got along until she reached the word &#8220;chance.&#8221; There she
+stopped, bewildered. It was the one idea of which her brief life had no
+embodiment, the thing it had altogether missed.</p>
+
+<p>The Declaration of Independence half the children knew by heart before
+they had gone over it twice. To help them along it is printed in the
+school-books with a Hebrew translation and another in Jargon, a
+&#8220;Jewish-German,&#8221; in parallel columns and the explanatory notes in Hebrew.
+The Constitution of the United States is treated in the same manner, but
+it is too hard, or too wearisome, for the children. They &#8220;hate&#8221; it, says
+the teacher, while the Declaration of Independence takes their fancy at
+sight. They understand it in their own practical way, and the spirit of
+the immortal document suffers no loss from the annotations of Ludlow
+Street, if its dignity is sometimes slightly rumpled.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When,&#8221; said the teacher to one of the pupils, a little working-girl from
+an Essex Street sweater&#8217;s shop, &#8220;the Americans could no longer put up with
+the abuse of the English who governed the colonies, what occurred then?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A strike!&#8221; responded the girl, promptly. She had found it here on coming
+and evidently thought it a national institution upon which the whole
+scheme of our government was founded.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/declar1.jpg" alt="Declaration of Independence" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/declar2.jpg" alt="Hebrew Notes" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>It was curious to find the low voices of the children, particularly the
+girls, an impediment to instruction in this school. They could sometimes
+hardly be heard for the noise in the street, when the heat made it
+necessary to have the windows open. But shrillness is not characteristic
+even of the Pig-market when it is noisiest and most crowded. Some of the
+children had sweet singing voices. One especially, a boy with straight red
+hair and a freckled face, chanted in a plaintive minor key the One Hundred
+and Thirtieth Psalm, &#8220;Out of the depths&#8221; etc., and the harsh gutturals of
+the Hebrew became sweet harmony until the sad strain brought tears to our
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The dirt of Ludlow Street is all-pervading and the children do not escape
+it. Rather, it seems to have a special affinity for them, or they for the
+dirt. The duty of imparting the fundamental lesson of cleanliness devolves
+upon a special school officer, a matron, who makes the round of the
+classes every morning with her alphabet: a cake of soap, a sponge, and a
+pitcher of water, and picks out those who need to be washed. One little
+fellow expressed his disapproval of this programme in the first English
+composition he wrote, as follows:</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/indians.jpg" alt="Indians. Indians do not want to wash because they like not water. I wish I was a Indian." /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Despite this hint, the lesson is enforced upon the children, but there is
+no evidence that it bears fruit in their homes to any noticeable extent,
+as is the case with the Italians I spoke of. The homes are too hopeless,
+the grind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> too unceasing. The managers know it and have little hope of the
+older immigrants. It is toward getting hold of their children that they
+bend every effort, and with a success that shows how easily these children
+can be moulded for good or for bad. Nor do they let go their grasp of them
+until the job is finished. The United Hebrew Charities maintain
+trade-schools for those who show aptness for such work, and a very
+creditable showing they make. The public school receives all those who
+graduate from what might be called the American primary in East Broadway.</p>
+
+<p>The smoky torches on many hucksters&#8217; carts threw their uncertain yellow
+light over Hester Street as I watched the children troop homeward from
+school one night. Eight little pedlers hawking their wares had stopped
+under the lamp on the corner to bargain with each other for want of cash
+customers. They were engaged in a desperate but vain attempt to cheat one
+of their number who was deaf and dumb. I bought a quire of note-paper of
+the mute for a cent and instantly the whole crew beset me in a fierce
+rivalry, to which I put a hasty end by buying out the little mute&#8217;s poor
+stock&mdash;ten cents covered it all&mdash;and after he had counted out the quires,
+gave it back to him. At this act of unheard-of generosity the seven, who
+had remained to witness the transfer, stood speechless. As I went my way,
+with a sudden common impulse they kissed their hands at me, all rivalry
+forgotten in their admiration, and kept kissing, bowing, and salaaming
+until I was out of sight. &#8220;Not bad children,&#8221; I mused as I went along,
+&#8220;good stuff in them, whatever their faults.&#8221; I thought of the poor boy&#8217;s
+stock, of the cheapness of it, and then it occurred to me that he had
+charged me just twice as much for the paper I gave him back as for the
+penny quire I bought. But when I went back to give him a piece of my mind
+the boys were gone.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+<h3>TONY AND HIS TRIBE</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">I have</span> a little friend somewhere in Mott Street whose picture comes up
+before me. I wish I could show it to the reader, but to photograph Tony is
+one of the unattained ambitions of my life. He is one of the whimsical
+birds one sees when he hasn&#8217;t got a gun, and then never long enough in one
+place to give one a chance to get it. A ragged coat three sizes at least
+too large for the boy, though it has evidently been cropped to meet his
+case, hitched by its one button across a bare brown breast; one sleeve
+patched on the under side with a piece of sole-leather that sticks out
+straight, refusing to be reconciled; trousers that boasted a seat once,
+but probably not while Tony has worn them; two left boots tied on with
+packing twine, bare legs in them the color of the leather, heel and toe
+showing through; a shock of sunburnt hair struggling through the rent in
+the old straw hat; two frank, laughing eyes under its broken brim&mdash;that is
+Tony.</p>
+
+<p>He stood over the gutter the day I met him, reaching for a handful of mud
+with which to &#8220;paste&#8221; another hoodlum who was shouting defiance from
+across the street. He did not see me, and when my hand touched his
+shoulder his whole little body shrank with a convulsive shudder, as from
+an expected blow. Quick as a flash he dodged, and turning, out of reach,
+confronted the unknown enemy, gripping tight his handful of mud. I had a
+bunch<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> of white pinks which a young lady had given me half an hour before
+for one of my little friends. &#8220;They are yours,&#8221; I said, and held them out
+to him, &#8220;take them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Doubt, delight, and utter bewilderment struggled in the boy&#8217;s face. He
+said not one word, but when he had brought his mind to believe that it
+really was so, clutched the flowers with one eager, grimy fist, held them
+close against his bare breast, and, shielding them with the other, ran as
+fast as his legs could carry him down the street. Not far; fifty feet away
+he stopped short, looked back, hesitated a moment, then turned on his
+track as fast as he had come. He brought up directly in front of me, a
+picture a painter would have loved, ragamuffin that he was, with the
+flowers held so tightly against his brown skin, scraped out with one foot
+and made one of the funniest little bows.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Thank you,&#8221; he said. Then he was off. Down the street I saw squads of
+children like himself running out to meet him. He darted past and through
+them all, never stopping, but pointing back my way, and in a minute there
+bore down upon me a crowd of little ones, running breathless with
+desperate entreaty: &#8220;Oh, mister! give <i>me</i> a flower.&#8221; Hot tears of grief
+and envy&mdash;human passions are much the same in rags and in silks&mdash;fell when
+they saw I had no more. But by that time Tony was safe.</p>
+
+<p>And where did he run so fast? For whom did he shield the &#8220;posy&#8221; so
+eagerly, so faithfully, that ragged little wretch that was all mud and
+patches? I found out afterward when I met him giving his sister a ride in
+a dismantled tomato-crate, likely enough &#8220;hooked&#8221; at the grocer&#8217;s. It was
+for his mother. In the dark hovel he called home, to the level of which
+all it sheltered had long since sunk through the brutal indifference of a
+drunken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> father, my lady&#8217;s pinks blossomed, and, long after they were
+withered and yellow, still stood in their cracked jar, visible token of
+something that had entered Tony&#8217;s life and tenement with sweetening touch
+that day for the first time. Alas! for the last, too, perhaps. I saw Tony
+off and on for a while and then he was as suddenly lost as he was found,
+with all that belonged to him. Moved away&mdash;put out, probably&mdash;and, except
+the assurance that they were still somewhere in Mott Street, even the
+saloon could give me no clue to them.</p>
+
+<p>I gained Tony&#8217;s confidence, almost, in the time I knew him. There was a
+little misunderstanding between us that had still left a trace of
+embarrassment when Tony disappeared. It was when I asked him one day,
+while we were not yet &#8220;solid,&#8221; if he ever went to school. He said
+&#8220;sometimes,&#8221; and backed off. I am afraid Tony lied that time. The evidence
+was against him. It was different with little Katie, my nine-year-old
+housekeeper of the sober look. Her I met in the Fifty-second Street
+Industrial School, where she picked up such crumbs of learning as were for
+her in the intervals of her housework. The serious responsibilities of
+life had come early to Katie. On the top floor of a tenement in West
+Forty-ninth Street she was keeping house for her older sister and two
+brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to
+$1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the
+father brought home another wife. Their combined income was something like
+$9.50 a week, and the simple furniture was bought on instalments. But it
+was all clean, if poor. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the
+plain kind. They did not run much to fancy cooking, I guess. She scrubbed
+and swept and went to school, all as a matter of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> course, and ran the
+house generally, with an occasional lift from the neighbors in the
+tenement, who were, if anything, poorer than they. The picture shows what
+a sober, patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing
+on her day by day. At the school they loved her for her quiet, gentle
+ways. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a
+question and without a smile.</p>
+
+<div class="figright"><img src="images/i011.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">&#8220;I SCRUBS.&#8221;&mdash;KATIE,</span><br /><span class="smcaplc">WHO KEEPS HOUSE IN</span><br /><span class="smcaplc">WEST FORTY-NINTH STREET.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;What kind of work do you do?&#8221; I asked, thinking to interest her while I
+made ready.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I scrubs,&#8221; she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she
+scrubbed came out clean.</p>
+
+<p>Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends. Very early the
+cross of her sex had been laid upon the little shoulders that bore it so
+stoutly. Tony&#8217;s, as likely as not, would never begin. There were ear-marks
+upon the boy that warranted the suspicion. They were the ear-marks of the
+street to which his care and education had been left. The only work of
+which it heartily approves is that done by other people. I came<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> upon Tony
+once under circumstances that foreshadowed his career with tolerable
+distinctness. He was at the head of a gang of little shavers like himself,
+none over eight or nine, who were swaggering around in a ring, in the
+middle of the street, rigged out in war-paint and hen-feathers, shouting
+as they went: &#8220;Whoop! We are the Houston Streeters.&#8221; They meant no harm
+and they were not doing any just then. It was all in the future, but it
+was there, and no mistake. The game which they were then rehearsing was
+one in which the policeman who stood idly swinging his club on the corner
+would one day take a hand, and not always the winning one.</p>
+
+<p>The fortunes of Tony and Katie, simple and soon told as they are,
+encompass as between the covers of a book the whole story of the children
+of the poor, the story of the bad their lives struggle vainly to conquer,
+and the story of the good that crops out in spite of it. Sickness, that
+always finds the poor unprepared and soon leaves them the choice of
+beggary or starvation, hard times, the death of the bread-winner, or the
+part played by the growler in the poverty of the home, may vary the theme
+for the elders; for the children it is the same sad story, with little
+variation, and that rarely of a kind to improve. Happily for their peace
+of mind, they are the least concerned about it. In New York, at least, the
+poor children are not the stunted repining lot we have heard of as being
+hatched in cities abroad. Stunted in body perhaps. It was said of Napoleon
+that he shortened the average stature of the Frenchman one inch by getting
+all the tall men killed in his wars. The tenement has done that for New
+York. Only the other day one of the best known clergymen in the city, who
+tries to attract the boys to his church on the East Side by a very
+practical interest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> in them, and succeeds admirably in doing it, told me
+that the drill-master of his cadet corps was in despair because he could
+barely find two or three among half a hundred lads verging on manhood,
+over five feet six inches high. It is queer what different ways there are
+of looking at a thing. My medical friend finds in the fact that poverty
+stunts the body what he is pleased to call a beautiful provision of nature
+to prevent unnecessary suffering: there is less for the poverty to pinch
+then. It is self-defence, he says, and he claims that the consensus of
+learned professional opinion is with him. Yet, when this shortened
+sufferer steals a loaf of bread to make the pinching bear less hard on
+what is left, he is called a thief, thrown into jail, and frowned upon by
+the community that just now saw in his case a beautiful illustration of
+the operation of natural laws for the defence of the man.</p>
+
+<p>Stunted morally, yes! It could not well be otherwise. But stunted in
+spirits&mdash;never! As for repining, there is no such word in his vocabulary.
+He accepts life as it comes to him and gets out of it what he can. If that
+is not much, he is not justly to blame for not giving back more to the
+community of which by and by he will be a responsible member. The kind of
+the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and
+it pervades and shapes his young life. It is the tenement that gives up
+the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied
+him. Its exorbitant rents rob him of the schooling that is his one chance
+to elude its grasp, by compelling his enrolment in the army of
+wage-earners before he has learned to read. Its alliance with the saloon
+guides his baby feet along the well-beaten track of the growler that
+completes his ruin. Its power to pervert and corrupt has always to be
+considered,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> its point of view always to be taken to get the perspective
+in dealing with the poor, or the cart will seem to be forever getting
+before the horse in a way not to be understood. We had a girl once at our
+house in the country who left us suddenly after a brief stay and went back
+to her old tenement life, because &#8220;all the green hurt her eyes so.&#8221; She
+meant just what she said, though she did not know herself what ailed her.
+It was the slum that had its fatal grip upon her. She longed for its
+noise, its bustle, and its crowds, and laid it all to the green grass and
+the trees that were new to her as steady company.</p>
+
+<p>From this tenement the street offered, until the kindergarten came not
+long ago, the one escape, does yet for the great mass of children&mdash;a
+Hobson&#8217;s choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The
+opportunities rampant in the one are a sad commentary on the sure
+defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency
+like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M&mdash;&mdash;,
+at that moment under arrest for half clubbing her husband to death, was &#8220;a
+very good, a very decent, woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the
+husband) was not much.&#8221; Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a
+young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed
+District last autumn: &#8220;Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow,&#8221; she
+said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; &#8220;them toughs don&#8217;t know
+how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Hers was the standard of the street, the other&#8217;s that of the tenement.
+Together they stamp the child&#8217;s life with the vicious touch which is
+sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the
+rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+perhaps, of the capacity for them, that crop out in constant exhibitions
+of loyalty, of gratitude, and true-heartedness, a never-ending source of
+encouragement and delight to those who have made their cause their own and
+have in their true sympathy the key to the best that is in the children.
+The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged
+schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the
+start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, leaves no room for
+doubt as to the influence the change has had upon the children. With the
+disappearance of the shanties&mdash;homesteads in effect, however humble&mdash;and
+the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in
+the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The
+crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the
+street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered,
+while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue-efforts put
+forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer
+of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a
+large extent, and his loss is our gain. The tough who has taken his place
+is able at least to spell his way through &#8220;The Bandits&#8217; Cave,&#8221; the pattern
+exploits of Jesse James and his band, and the newspaper accounts of the
+latest raid in which he had a hand. Perhaps that explains why he is more
+dangerous than the old loafer. The transition period is always critical,
+and a little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing. It may be that in
+the day to come, when we shall have got the grip of our compulsory school
+law in good earnest, there will be an educational standard even for the
+tough, by which time he will, I think, have ceased to exist from sheer
+disgust, if for no other reason. At present he is in no immediate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> danger
+of extinction from such a source. It is not how much book-learning the boy
+can get, but how little he can get along with, and that is very little
+indeed. He knows how to make a little go a long way, however, and to serve
+on occasion a very practical purpose; as, for instance, when I read
+recently on the wall of the church next to my office in Mulberry Street
+this observation, chalked in an awkward hand half the length of the wall:
+&#8220;Mary McGee is engagd to the feller in the alley.&#8221; Quite apt, I should
+think, to make Mary show her colors and to provoke the fight with the
+rival &#8220;feller&#8221; for which the writer was evidently spoiling. I shall get
+back, farther on, to the question of the children&#8217;s schooling. It is so
+beset by lies ordinarily as to be seldom answered as promptly and as
+honestly as in the case of a little fellow whom I found in front of St.
+George&#8217;s Church, engaged in the &aelig;sthetic occupation of pelting the
+Friends&#8217; Seminary across the way with mud. There were two of them, and
+when I asked them the question that estranged Tony, the wicked one dug his
+fists deep down in the pockets of his blue-jeans trousers and shook his
+head gloomily. He couldn&#8217;t read; didn&#8217;t know how; never did.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He?&#8221; said the other, who could, &#8220;he? He don&#8217;t learn nothing. He throws
+stones.&#8221; The wicked one nodded. It was the extent of his education.</p>
+
+<p>But if the three R&#8217;s suffer neglect among the children of the poor, their
+lessons in the three D&#8217;s&mdash;Dirt, Discomfort, and Disease&mdash;that form the
+striking features of their environment, are early and thorough enough. The
+two latter, at least, are synonymous terms, if dirt and discomfort are
+not. Any dispensary doctor knows of scores of cases of ulceration of the
+eye that are due to the frequent rubbing of dirty faces with dirty little
+hands. Worse filth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> diseases than that find a fertile soil in the
+tenements, as the health officers learn when typhus and small-pox break
+out. It is not the desperate diet of ignorant mothers, who feed their
+month-old babies with sausage, beer, and Limburger cheese, that alone
+accounts for the great infant mortality among the poor in the tenements.
+The dirt and the darkness in their homes contribute their full share, and
+the landlord is more to blame than the mother. He holds the key to the
+situation which her ignorance fails to grasp, and it is he who is
+responsible for much of the unfounded and unnecessary prejudice against
+foreigners, who come here willing enough to fall in with the ways of the
+country that are shown to them. The way he shows them is not the way of
+decency. I am convinced that the really injurious foreigners in this
+community, outside of the walking delegate&#8217;s tribe, are the foreign
+landlords of two kinds: those who, born in poverty abroad, have come up
+through tenement-house life to the ownership of tenement property, with
+all the bad traditions of such a career; and the absentee landlords of
+native birth who live and spend their rents away from home, without
+knowing or caring what the condition of their property is, so the income
+from it suffer no diminution. There are honorable exceptions to the first
+class, but few enough to the latter to make them hardly worth mentioning.</p>
+
+<p>To a good many of the children, or rather to their parents, this latter
+statement and the experience that warrants it must have a sadly familiar
+sound. The Irish element is still an important factor in New York&#8217;s
+tenements, though it is yielding one stronghold after another to the
+Italian foe. It lost its grip on the Five Points and the Bend long ago,
+and at this writing the time seems not far distant when it must vacate for
+good also that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> classic ground of the Kerryman, Cherry Hill. It is Irish
+only by descent, however; the children are Americans, as they will not
+fail to convince the doubter. A school census of this district, the Fourth
+Ward, taken last winter, discovered 2,016 children between the ages of
+five and fourteen years. No less than 1,706 of them were put down as
+native born, but only one-fourth, or 519, had American parents. Of the
+others 572 had Irish and 536 Italian parents. Uptown, in many of the poor
+tenement localities, in Poverty Gap, in Battle Row, and in Hell&#8217;s Kitchen,
+in short, wherever the gang flourishes, the Celt is still supreme and
+seasons the lump enough to give it his own peculiar flavor, easily
+discovered through its &#8220;native&#8221; guise in the story of the children of the
+poor.</p>
+
+<p>The case of one Irish family that exhibits a shoal which lies always close
+to the track of ignorant poverty is even now running in my mind, vainly
+demanding a practical solution. I may say that I have inherited it from
+professional philanthropists, who have struggled with it for more than
+half a dozen years without finding the way out they sought.</p>
+
+<p>There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had
+about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When I
+took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over.
+The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother&#8217;s tears, by a transition
+imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of
+the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that
+were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and
+with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother&#8217;s appeal. It
+required very little experience to make the prediction that, shortly,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> ten
+pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if
+those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I
+scarcely know which was most to be condemned, when we tried to break the
+family up by throwing it on the street as a necessary step to getting
+possession of the children&mdash;the politician who tripped us up with his
+influence in the court, or the landlord who had all those years made the
+poverty on the second floor pan out a golden interest. It was the
+outrageous rent for the filthy den that had been the most effective
+argument with sympathizing visitors. Their pity had represented to him, as
+nearly as I could make out, for eight long years, a capital of $2,600
+invested at six per cent., payable monthly. The idea of moving was
+preposterous; for what other landlord would take in a homeless family with
+ten children and no income?</p>
+
+<p>Children anywhere suffer little discomfort from mere dirt. As an
+ingredient of mud-pies it may be said to be not unwholesome. Play with the
+dirt is better than none without it. In the tenements the children and the
+dirt are sworn and loyal friends. In his early raids upon the established
+order of society, the gutter backs the boy up to the best of its ability,
+with more or less exasperating success. In the hot summer days, when he
+tries to sneak into the free baths with every fresh batch, twenty times a
+day, wretched little repeater that he is, it comes to his rescue against
+the policeman at the door. Fresh mud smeared on the face serves as a
+ticket of admission which no one can refuse. At least so he thinks, but in
+his anxiety he generally overdoes it and arouses the suspicion of the
+policeman, who, remembering that he was once a boy himself, feels of his
+hair and reads his title there. When it is a mission that is to be raided,
+or a &#8220;dutch&#8221; grocer&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> shop, or a parade of the rival gang from the next
+block, the gutter furnishes ammunition that is always handy. Dirt is a
+great leveller;<small><a name="f6.1" id="f6.1" href="#f6">[6]</a></small> it is no respecter of persons or principles, and
+neither is the boy where it abounds. In proportion as it accumulates such
+raids increase, the Fresh Air Funds lose their grip, the saloon
+flourishes, and turbulence grows. Down from the Fourth Ward, where there
+is not much else, this wail came recently from a Baptist Mission Church:
+&#8220;The Temple stands in a hard spot and neighborhood. The past week we had
+to have arrested two fellows for throwing stones into the house and
+causing annoyance. On George Washington&#8217;s Birthday we had not put a flag
+over the door on Henry Street half an hour before it was stolen. When they
+neither respect the house of prayer or the Stars and Stripes one can feel
+young America is in a bad state.&#8221; The pastor added that it was a comfort
+to him to know that the &#8220;fellows&#8221; were Catholics; but I think he was
+hardly quite fair to them there. Religious enthusiasm very likely had
+something to do with it, but it was not the moving cause. The dirt was; in
+other words: the slum.</p>
+
+<p>Such diversions are among the few and simple joys of the street child&#8217;s
+life, Not all it affords, but all the street has to offer. The Fresh Air
+Funds, the free excursions,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> and the many charities that year by year
+reach farther down among the poor for their children have done and are
+doing a great work in setting up new standards, ideals, and ambitions in
+the domain of the street. One result is seen in the effort of the poorest
+mothers to make their little ones presentable when there is anything to
+arouse their maternal pride. But all these things must and do come from
+the outside. Other resources than the sturdy independence that is its
+heritage the street has none. Rightly used, that in itself is the greatest
+of all. Chief among its native entertainments is that crowning joy, the
+parade of the circus when it comes to town in the spring. For many hours
+after that has passed, as after every public show that costs nothing, the
+matron&#8217;s room at Police Headquarters is crowded with youngsters who have
+followed it miles and miles from home, devouring its splendors with hungry
+eyes until the last elephant, the last soldier, or the last policeman
+vanished from sight and the child comes back to earth again and to the
+knowledge that he is lost.</p>
+
+<p>If the delights of his life are few, its sorrows do not sit heavily upon
+him either. He is in too close and constant touch with misery, with death
+itself, to mind it much. To find a family of children living, sleeping,
+and eating in the room where father or mother lies dead, without seeming
+to be in any special distress about it, is no unusual experience. But if
+they do not weigh upon him, the cares of home leave their mark; and it is
+a bad mark. All the darkness, all the drudgery is there. All the freedom
+is in the street; all the brightness in the saloon to which he early finds
+his way. And as he grows in years and wisdom, if not in grace, he gets his
+first lessons in spelling and in respect for the law from the card behind
+the bar,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> with the big black letters: &#8220;No liquor sold here to children.&#8221;
+His opportunities for studying it while the barkeeper fills his growler
+are unlimited and unrestricted.</p>
+
+<p>Someone has said that our poor children do not know how to play. He had
+probably seen a crowd of tenement children dancing in the street to the
+accompaniment of a hand-organ and been struck by their serious mien and
+painfully formal glide and carriage&mdash;if it was not a German neighborhood,
+where the &#8220;proprieties&#8221; are less strictly observed&mdash;but that was only
+because it was a ball and it was incumbent on the girls to act as ladies.
+Only ladies attend balls. &#8220;London Bridge is falling down,&#8221; with as loud a
+din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred
+years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march
+&#8220;all around the mulberry-bush&#8221; as gleefully as if there were a green shrub
+to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the
+game too easily, and the kindergarten work comes in in helping to wipe off
+the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than
+those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. Only in
+the very worst tenements have I observed the children&#8217;s play to languish.
+In such localities two policemen are required to do the work of one.
+Ordinarily they lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd
+of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties
+were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a
+knot of tenement-house children with tails improvised from a newspaper,
+and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly
+across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a
+heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any
+crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper
+came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where
+the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails;
+every block a ball-ground when the policeman&#8217;s back is turned, and every
+roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city
+ordinance &#8220;below Fourteenth Street.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i012.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">PRESENT TENANTS OF JOHN ERICSSON&#8217;S OLD HOUSE<br />NOW THE BEACH STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>It is rather that their opportunities of mischief are greater than those
+of harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with
+deliberate purpose to hatch the &#8220;tough.&#8221; Given idleness and the street,
+and he will grow without other encouragement than an occasional &#8220;fanning&#8221;
+of a policeman&#8217;s club. And the street has to do for a playground. There is
+no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered
+for his benefit five years ago exist yet only on paper. Games like
+kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily
+they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law
+and order, that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year
+the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten
+vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night
+sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other,
+with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow
+bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given
+out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of
+public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a show-case, containing
+property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has
+happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal, and
+burned up election night.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> The boys, organized in gangs, with the one
+condition of membership that all must &#8220;give in wood,&#8221; store up enormous
+piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a
+good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling-wood for
+the winter, the pile grows again in a single night, as the neighborhood
+reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the
+gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our
+courts and our jails, may without much difficulty be discovered in these
+early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.</p>
+
+<p>Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment
+of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not
+defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry
+its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the
+street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the
+hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that,
+banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, horns and bassoons
+hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer the innocent purveyor
+of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the
+policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades which the latter
+formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang
+organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.</p>
+
+<p>And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the
+first time, cries out in delight, &#8220;How blue the sky and what a lot of it
+there is!&#8221;&mdash;not much of it at home in his barrack&mdash;has in the very love of
+dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own
+club or die in the attempt, in the intense<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> vanity that is only a
+perverted form of pride, capable of any achievement, a handle by which he
+may be most easily grasped and led. It cannot be done by gorging him <i>en
+masse</i> with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party.<small><a name="f7.1" id="f7.1" href="#f7">[7]</a></small> It can be done
+only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in
+direct contact with the child&mdash;the great secret of success in all dealings
+with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the
+reproach of &#8220;bad form&#8221; as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire
+eventually to &#8220;down&#8221; a policeman, is his ambition to be a &#8220;gentleman,&#8221; as
+his sister&#8217;s to be a &#8220;lady.&#8221; The street is responsible for the caricature
+either makes of the character. On a play-bill I saw in an East Side
+street, only the other day, this <i>repertoire</i> set down: &#8220;Thursday&mdash;The
+Bowery Tramp; Friday&mdash;The Thief.&#8221; It was a theatre I knew newsboys, and
+the other children of the street who were earning money, to frequent in
+shoals. The play-bill suggested the sort of training they received there.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I might tell the story of some of these very lads whom certain
+enthusiastic friends of mine tried to reclaim on a plan of their own, in
+which the gang became a club and its members &#8220;Knights,&#8221; who made and
+executed their own laws; but I am under heavy bonds of promises made to
+keep the peace on this point. The fact is, I tried it once, and my
+well-meant effort made no end of trouble. I had failed to appreciate the
+stride of civilization that under my friends&#8217; banner marched about the
+East Side<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> with seven-league boots. They read the magazines down there and
+objected, rather illogically, to being &#8220;shown up.&#8221; The incident was a
+striking revelation of the wide gap between the conditions that prevail
+abroad and those that confront us. Fancy the <i>Westminster Review</i> or the
+<i>Nineteenth Century</i> breeding contention among the denizens of East London
+by any criticism of their ways? Yet even from Hell&#8217;s Kitchen had I not
+long before been driven forth with my camera by a band of angry women, who
+pelted me with brickbats and stones on my retreat, shouting at me never to
+come back unless I wanted my head broken, or let any other &#8220;duck&#8221; from the
+(mentioning a well-known newspaper of which I was unjustly suspected of
+being an emissary) poke his nose in there. Reform and the magazines had
+not taken that stronghold of toughdom yet, but their vanguard, the
+newspapers, had evidently got there.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It only shows,&#8221; said one of my missionary friends, commenting upon the
+East Side incident, &#8220;that we are all at sixes and at sevens here.&#8221; It is
+our own fault. In our unconscious pride of caste most of us are given to
+looking too much and too long at the rough outside. These same workers
+bore cheerful testimony to the &#8220;exquisite courtesy&#8221; with which they were
+received every day in the poorest homes; a courtesy that might not always
+know the ways of polite society, but always tried its best to find them.
+&#8220;In over fifty thousand visits,&#8221; reports a physician, whose noble life is
+given early and late to work that has made her name blessed where sorrow
+and suffering add their sting to bitter poverty, &#8220;personal violence has
+been attempted on but two occasions. In each case children had died from
+neglect of parents, who, in their drunken rage, would certainly have taken
+the life of the physician,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> had she not promptly run away.&#8221; Patience and
+kindness prevailed even with these. The doctor did not desert them, even
+though she had had to run, believing that one of the mothers at least
+drank because she was poor and unable to find work; and now, after five
+years of many trials and failures, she reports that the family is at work
+and happy and grateful in rooms &#8220;where the sun beams in.&#8221; Gratitude,
+indeed, she found to be their strong point, always seeking an outlet in
+expression&mdash;evidence of a lack of bringing up, certainly. &#8220;Once,&#8221; she
+says, &#8220;the thankful fathers of two of our patients wished to vote for us,
+as &#8216;the lady doctors have no vote.&#8217; Their intention was to vote for
+General Butler; we have proof that they voted for Cleveland. They have
+even placed their own lives in danger for us. One man fought a duel with a
+woman, she having said that women doctors did not know as much as men.
+After bar-tumblers were used as weapons the question was decided in favor
+of women doctors by the man. It seemed but proper that &#8216;the lady doctor&#8217;
+was called in to bind up the wounds of her champion, while a &#8216;man doctor&#8217;
+performed the service for the woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>My friends, in time, by their gentle but firm management, gained the
+honest esteem and loyal support of the boys whose manners and minds they
+had set out to improve, and through such means worked wonders. While some
+of their experiences were exceedingly funny, more were of a kind to show
+how easily the material could be moulded, if the hands were only there to
+mould it. One of their number, by and by, hung out her shingle in another
+street with the word &#8220;Doctor&#8221; over the bell (not the physician above
+referred to), but her &#8220;character&#8221; had preceded her, and woe to the urchin
+who as much<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> as glanced at that when the gang pulled all the other bells
+in the block and laughed at the wrath of the tenants. One luckless chap
+forgot himself far enough to yank it one night, and immediately an angry
+cry went up from the gang, &#8220;Who pulled dat bell?&#8221; &#8220;Mickey did,&#8221; was the
+answer, and Mickey&#8217;s howls announced to the amused doctor the next minute
+that he had been &#8220;slugged&#8221; and she avenged. This doctor&#8217;s account of the
+first formal call of the gang in the block was highly amusing. It called
+in a body and showed a desire to please that tried the host&#8217;s nerves not a
+little. The boys vied with each other in recounting for her entertainment
+their encounters with the police enemy, and in exhibiting their intimate
+knowledge of the wickedness of the slums in minutest detail. One, who was
+scarcely twelve years old, and had lately moved from Bayard Street, knew
+all the ins and outs of the Chinatown opium dives, and painted them in
+glowing colors. The doctor listened with half-amused dismay, and when the
+boys rose to go, told them she was glad they had called. So were they,
+they said, and they guessed they would call again the next night.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! don&#8217;t come to-morrow,&#8221; said the doctor, in something of a fright;
+&#8220;come next week!&#8221; She was relieved upon hearing the leader of the gang
+reprove the rest of the fellows for their want of style. He bowed with
+great precision, and announced that he would call &#8220;in about two weeks.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The testimony of these workers agrees with that of most others who reach
+the girls at an age when they are yet manageable, that the most abiding
+results follow with them, though they are harder to get at. The boys
+respond more readily, but also more easily fall from grace. The same good
+and bad traits are found in both; the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> trying superficiality&mdash;which
+merely means that they are raw material; the same readiness to lie as the
+shortest cut out of a scrape; the same generous helpfulness,
+characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter
+poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial
+School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless
+and those even poorer than they such gifts as they could&mdash;a handful of
+ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar
+or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I
+found little Katie. In her person and work she answered the question
+sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the
+girls; because the home and the shop claim their work much earlier and to
+a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for
+themselves, and because, therefore, their miseries are so much more
+commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is a woman&#8217;s lot to
+suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous
+protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the
+occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her
+bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the
+wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the
+sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the
+same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of
+the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not
+a distinguishing feature of tenement-house life, any more among the
+children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for
+a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six
+girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> days before a
+letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. &#8220;Mrs.
+Reilly,&#8221; it read, &#8220;if you have any sinse you will send for your child.&#8221;
+That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made
+out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high
+dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness
+of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby,
+and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus:
+&#8220;She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin&#8217; of herself, till the
+missus she says, says she, &#8216;Does yer mother lave ye to sit that long at
+the table, sis?&#8217;&#8221; The poor thing was where there was enough to eat for
+once in her life, and she was making the most of her opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that
+discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. It
+was in March a year ago that a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human
+shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the
+tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with
+his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out
+the child, she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the
+smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen climbing after, groped
+around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came
+upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll&#8217;s trunk over the
+floor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I could not leave it,&#8221; she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized
+her; &#8220;my mother&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the
+sidewalk and, breaking open, revealed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> no doll or finery, but the deed for
+her dead mother&#8217;s grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her
+thirteen years.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Bessie might, likely would, have been found in the front row where
+anything was going on or to be had, crowding with the best of them and
+thrusting herself and her claim forward regardless of anything or anybody
+else. It is a quality in the children which, if not admirable, is at least
+natural. The poor have to take their turn always, and too often it never
+comes, or, as in the case of the poor young mother, whom one of our
+committee found riding aimlessly in a street car with her dying baby, not
+knowing where to go or what to do, when it is too late. She took mother
+and child to the dispensary. It was crowded and they had to wait their
+turn. When it came the baby was dead. It is not to be expected that
+children who have lived the lawless life of the street should patiently
+put up with such a prospect. That belongs to the discipline of a life of
+failure and want. The children know generally what they want and they go
+for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to
+give or pictures to take. In the latter case they reversed my Hell&#8217;s
+Kitchen experience with a vengeance. Their determination to be &#8220;took,&#8221; the
+moment the camera hove in sight, in the most striking pose they could
+hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met. The
+recollection of one such occasion haunts me yet. They were serving a
+Thanksgiving dinner free to all comers at a charitable institution in
+Mulberry Street, and more than a hundred children were in line at the door
+under the eye of a policeman when I tried to photograph them. Each one of
+the forlorn host had been hugging his particular place for an hour,
+shivering in the cold as the line slowly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> advanced toward the door and the
+promised dinner, and there had been numberless little spats due to the
+anxiety of some one farther back to steal a march on a neighbor nearer the
+goal; but the instant the camera appeared the line broke and a howling mob
+swarmed about me, up to the very eye of the camera, striking attitudes on
+the curb, squatting in the mud in alleged picturesque repose, and shoving
+and pushing in a wild struggle to get into the most prominent position.
+With immense trouble and labor the policeman and I made a narrow lane
+through the crowd from the camera to the curb, in the hope that the line
+might form again. The lane was studded, the moment I turned my back, with
+dirty faces that were thrust into it from both sides in ludicrous anxiety
+lest they should be left out, and in the middle of it two frowsy,
+ill-favored girls, children of ten or twelve, took position, hand in hand,
+flatly refusing to budge from in front of the camera. Neither jeers nor
+threats moved them. They stood their ground with a grim persistence that
+said as plainly as words that they were not going to let this, the supreme
+opportunity of their lives, pass, cost what it might. In their rags,
+barefooted, and in that disdainful pose in the midst of a veritable bedlam
+of shrieks and laughter, they were a most ludicrous spectacle. The boys
+fought rather shy of them, of one they called &#8220;Mag&#8221; especially, as it
+afterward appeared with good reason. A chunk of wood from the outskirts of
+the crowd that hit Mag on the ear at length precipitated a fight in which
+the boys struggled ten deep on the pavement, Mag in the middle of the
+heap, doing her full share. As a last expedient I bethought myself of a
+dog-fight as the means of scattering the mob, and sent around the corner
+to organize one. Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd
+broke and ran in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line
+collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone. As
+an attraction the dog-fight outranked the dinner.</p>
+
+<p>This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a
+tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way.
+The newspapers tickle it by recording the exploits of his gang with
+embellishments that fall in exactly with his tastes. Idleness encourages
+it. The home exercises no restraint. Parental authority is lost. At a
+certain age young men of all social grades know a heap more than their
+fathers, or think they do. The young tough has some apparent reason for
+thinking that way. He has likely learned to read. The old man has not; he
+probably never learned anything, not even to speak the language that his
+son knows without being taught. He thinks him &#8220;dead slow,&#8221; of course, and
+lays it to his foreign birth. All foreigners are &#8220;slow.&#8221; The father works
+hard. The boy thinks he knows a better plan. The old man has lost his grip
+on the lad, if he ever had any. That is the reason why the tough appears
+in the second generation and disappears in the third. By that time father
+and son are again on equal terms, whatever those terms may be. The
+exception to this rule is in the poorest Irish settlements where the
+manufacture of the tough goes right on, aided by the &#8220;inflooence&#8221; of the
+police court on one side and the saloon on the other. Between the two the
+police fall unwillingly into line. I was in the East Thirty-fifth Street
+police station one night when an officer came in with two young toughs
+whom he had arrested in a lumber yard where they were smoking and
+drinking. They had threatened to kill him and the watchman, and loaded
+revolvers were taken from them.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> In spite of this evidence against them,
+the Justice in the police court discharged them on the following morning
+with a scowl at the officer, and they were both jeering at him before
+noon. Naturally he let them alone after that. It was one case of hundreds
+of like character. The politician, of course, is behind them. Toughs have
+votes just as they have brickbats and brass-knuckles; when the emergency
+requires, an assortment to suit of the one as of the other.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the tough&#8217;s career I told in &#8220;How the Other Half Lives,&#8221; and
+there is no need of repeating it here. Its end is generally lurid, always
+dramatic. It is that even when it comes to him &#8220;with his boots off,&#8221; in a
+peaceful sick bed. In his bravado one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the
+sturdiest traits in the Celtic nature, burlesqued and caricatured by the
+tenement. One who had been a cut-throat, bruiser, and prizefighter all his
+brief life lay dying from consumption in his Fourth Ward tenement not long
+ago. He had made what he proudly called a stand-up fight against the
+disease until now the end had come and he had at last to give up.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Maggie,&#8221; he said, turning to his wife with eyes growing dim, &#8220;Mag! I had
+an iron heart, but now it is broke. Watch me die!&#8221; And Mag told it proudly
+at the wake as proof that Pat died game.</p>
+
+<p>And the girl that has come thus far with him? Fewer do than one might
+think. Many more switch off their lovers to some honest work this side of
+the jail, making decent husbands of them as they are loyal wives, thus
+proving themselves truly their better halves. But of her who goes his way
+with him&mdash;it is not generally a long way for either&mdash;what of her end? Let
+me tell the story of one that is the story of all. I came across it in the
+course<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> of my work as a newspaper man a year ago and I repeat it here as I
+heard it then from those who knew, with only the names changed. The girl
+is dead, but he is alive and leading an honest life at last, so I am told.
+The story is that of &#8220;Kid&#8221; McDuff&#8217;s girl.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i013.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+<h3>THE STORY OF KID McDUFF&#8217;S GIRL</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">The</span> back room of the saloon on the northwest corner of Pell Street and the
+Bowery is never cheery on the brightest day. The entrance to the dives of
+Chinatown yawns just outside, and in the bar-room gather the vilest of the
+wrecks of the Bend and the Sixth Ward slums. But on the morning of which I
+speak a shadow lay over it even darker than usual. The shadow of death was
+there. In the corner, propped on one chair, with her feet on another, sat
+a dead woman. Her glassy eyes looked straight ahead with a stony,
+unmeaning stare until the policeman who dozed at a table at the other end
+of the room, suddenly waking up and meeting it, got up with a shudder and
+covered the face with a handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>What did they see, those dead eyes? Through its darkened windows what a
+review was the liberated spirit making of that sin-worn, wasted life,
+begun in innocence and wasted&mdash;there? Whatever their stare meant, the
+policeman knew little of it and cared less.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! it is just a stiff,&#8221; he said, and yawned wearily. There was still
+half an hour of his watch.</p>
+
+<p>The clinking of glasses and the shuffle of cowhide boots on the sanded
+floor outside grew louder and was muffled again as the door leading to the
+bar was opened and shut by a young woman. She lingered doubtfully on the
+threshold a moment, then walked with unsteady step<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> across the room toward
+the corner where the corpse sat. The light that struggled in from the
+gloomy street fell upon her and showed that she trembled, as if with the
+ague. Yet she was young, not over twenty-five; but on her heavy eyes and
+sodden features there was the stamp death had just blotted from the
+other&#8217;s face with the memory of her sins. Yet, curiously blended with it,
+not yet smothered wholly, there was something of the child, something that
+had once known a mother&#8217;s love and pity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Poor Kid,&#8221; she said, stopping beside the body and sinking heavily in a
+chair. &#8220;He will be sorry, anyhow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who is Kid?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why, Kid McDuff! You know him? His brother Jim keeps the saloon on
+&mdash;&mdash; Street. Everybody knows Kid.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, what was she to Kid?&#8221; I asked, pointing to the corpse.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His girl,&#8221; she said promptly. &#8220;An&#8217; he stuck to her till he was pulled for
+the job he didn&#8217;t do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him too,
+you bet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Annie wasn&#8217;t no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the
+Kid,&#8221; the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me; the policeman
+nodded in his chair. &#8220;He kep&#8217; her the best he could, &#8217;ceptin&#8217; when he was
+sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder
+drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin&#8217; bar
+for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that Bridgeport skin job, and
+when he went to the pen she went to the bad, and now&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here a thought that had been slowly working down through her besotted mind
+got a grip on her strong enough to hold her attention, and she leaned over
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> caught me by the sleeve, something almost akin to pity struggling in
+her bleary eyes.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Say, young feller,&#8221; she whispered hoarsely, &#8220;don&#8217;t spring this too hard.
+She&#8217;s got two lovely brothers. One of them keeps a daisy saloon up on
+Eighth Avenue. They&#8217;re respectable, they are.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then she went on telling what she knew of Annie Noonan who was sitting
+dead there before us. It was not much. She was the child of an honest
+shoemaker who came to this country twenty-two or three years before from
+his English home, when Annie was a little girl of six or seven. Before she
+was in her teens she was left fatherless. At the age of thirteen, when she
+was living in an East Side tenement with her mother, the Kid, then a young
+tough qualifying with one of the many gangs about the Hook for the
+penitentiary, crossed her path. Ever after she was his slave, and followed
+where he led.</p>
+
+<p>The path they trod together was not different from that travelled by
+hundreds of young men and women to-day. By way of the low dives and
+&#8220;morgues&#8221; with which the East Side abounds, it led him to the Island and
+her to the street. When he was sent up the first time, his mother died of
+a broken heart. His father, a well-to-do mechanic in the Seventh Ward, had
+been spared that misery. He had died before the son was fairly started on
+his bad career. The family were communicants at the parish church, and
+efforts without end were made to turn the Kid from his career of wicked
+folly. His two sisters labored faithfully with him, but without avail.
+When the Kid came back from the Island to find his mother dead, he did not
+know his oldest sister. Grief had turned her pretty brown hair a snowy
+white.</p>
+
+<p>He found his girl a little the worse for rum and late<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> hours than when he
+left her, but he &#8220;took up&#8221; with her again. He was loyal at least. This
+time he tried, too, to be honest. His mother&#8217;s death had shocked him to
+the point where his &#8220;nerve&#8221; gave out. His brother gave him charge of one
+of his saloons and the Kid was &#8220;at work&#8221; keeping bar, with the way to
+respectability, as it goes on the East Side, open to him, when one of his
+old pals, who had found him out, turned up with a demand for money. He was
+a burglar and wanted a hundred dollars to &#8220;do up a job&#8221; in the country.
+The Kid refused, and his brother came in during the quarrel that ensued,
+flew into a rage, and grabbing the thief by the collar, threw him into the
+street. He went his way shaking his fist and threatening vengeance on
+both.</p>
+
+<p>It was not long in coming. A jewelry store in Bridgeport was robbed and
+two burglars were arrested. One of them was the man &#8220;Jim&#8221; McDuff had
+thrown out of his saloon. He turned State&#8217;s evidence and swore that the
+Kid was in the job too. He was arrested and held in bail of ten thousand
+dollars. The Kid always maintained that he was innocent. His family
+believed him, but his past was against him. It was said, too, that back of
+the arrest was political persecution. His brother the saloon-keeper, who
+mixed politics with his beer, was the under dog just then in the fight in
+his ward. The situation was discussed from a practical standpoint in the
+McDuff household, and it ended with the Kid going up to Bridgeport and
+pleading guilty to theft to escape the worse charge of burglary. He was
+sentenced to four years&#8217; imprisonment. That was how he got into &#8220;the pen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Annie, after he had been put in jail, went to the dogs on her own account
+rather faster than when they made a team. For a time she frequented the
+saloons of the Tenth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> Ward. When she crossed the Bowery at last she was
+nearing the end. For a year or two she frequented the disreputable houses
+in Elizabeth and Hester Streets. She was supposed to have a room in
+Downing Street, but it was the rarest of all events that she was there.</p>
+
+<p>Two weeks before this morning, Fay Leslie, the girl who sat there telling
+me her story, met her on the Bowery with a cut and bruised face. She had
+been beaten in a fight in a Pell Street saloon with Flossie Lowell, one of
+the habitues of Chinatown. Fay took her to Bellevue Hospital, where she
+&#8220;had a pull with the night watch,&#8221; she told me, and she was kept there
+three or four days. When she came out she drifted back to Pell Street and
+took to drinking again. But she was a sick girl.</p>
+
+<p>The night before she was with Fay in the saloon on the corner, when she
+complained that she did not feel well. She sat down in a chair and put her
+feet on another. In that posture she was found dead a little later, when
+her friend went to see how she was getting on.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rum killed her, I suppose,&#8221; I said, when Fay had ended her story.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Yes! I suppose it did.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And you,&#8221; I ventured, &#8220;some day it will kill you too, if you do not look
+out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The girl laughed a loud and coarse laugh.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Me?&#8221; she said, &#8220;not by a jugful. I&#8217;ve been soaking it fifteen years and I
+am alive yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The dead girl sat there yet, with the cold, staring eyes, when I went my
+way. Outside the drinking went on with vile oaths. The dead wagon had been
+sent for, but it had other errands, and had not yet come around to Pell
+Street.</p>
+
+<p>Thus ended the story of Kid McDuff&#8217;s girl.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+<h3>THE LITTLE TOILERS</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Poverty</span> and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is
+perpetual, indissoluble. The one begets the other. Need sets the child to
+work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages,
+thus increasing the need. Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it
+has not been said better since: &#8220;The destruction of the poor is their
+poverty.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is the business of the State to see to it that its interest in the
+child as a future citizen is not imperilled by the compact. Here in New
+York we set about this within the memory of the youngest of us. To-day we
+have compulsory education and a factory law prohibiting the employment of
+young children. All between eight and fourteen years old must go to school
+at least fourteen weeks in each year. None may labor in factories under
+the age of fourteen; not under sixteen unless able to read and write
+simple sentences in English. These are the barriers thrown up against the
+inroads of ignorance, poverty&#8217;s threat. They are barriers of paper. We
+have the laws, but we do not enforce them.</p>
+
+<p>By that I do not mean to say that we make no attempt to enforce them. We
+do. We catch a few hundred truants each year and send them to
+reformatories to herd with thieves and vagabonds worse than they, rather
+illogically,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> since there is no pretence that there would have been room
+for them in the schools had they wanted to go there. We set half a dozen
+factory inspectors to canvass more than twice as many thousand workshops
+and to catechise the children they find there. Some are turned out and go
+back the next day to that or some other shop. The great mass that are
+under age lie and stay. And their lies go on record as evidence that we
+are advancing, and that child-labor is getting to be a thing of the past.
+That the horrible cruelty of a former day is; that the children have
+better treatment and a better time of it in the shops&mdash;often a good enough
+time to make one feel that they are better off there learning habits of
+industry than running about the streets, so long as there is no way of
+<i>making</i> them attend school&mdash;I believe from what I have seen. That the law
+has had the effect of greatly diminishing the number of child-workers I do
+not believe. It has had another and worse effect. It has bred wholesale
+perjury among them and their parents. Already they have become so used to
+it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them. The child
+of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a
+matter of course. Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose
+of the law.</p>
+
+<p>More than a year ago, in an effort to get at the truth of the matter of
+children&#8217;s labor, I submitted to the Board of Health, after consultation
+with Dr. Felix Adler, who earned the lasting gratitude of the community by
+his labors on the Tenement House Commission, certain questions to be asked
+concerning the children by the sanitary police, then about to begin a
+general census of the tenements. The result was a surprise, and not least
+to the health officers. In the entire mass of nearly a million<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> and a
+quarter of tenants<small><a name="f8.1" id="f8.1" href="#f8">[8]</a></small> only two hundred and forty-nine children under
+fourteen years of age were found at work in living-rooms. To anyone
+acquainted with the ordinary aspect of tenement-house life the statement
+seemed preposterous, and there are valid reasons for believing that the
+policemen missed rather more than they found even of those that were
+confessedly or too evidently under age. They were seeking that which, when
+found, would furnish proof of law-breaking against the parent or employer,
+a fact of which these were fully aware. Hence their coming uniformed and
+in search of children into a house could scarcely fail to give those a
+holiday who were not big enough to be palmed off as fourteen at least.
+Nevertheless, upon reflection, it seemed probable that the policemen were
+nearer the truth than their critics. Their census took no account of the
+factory in the back yard, but only of the living rooms, and it was made
+during the day. Most of the little slaves, as of those older in years,
+were found in the sweater&#8217;s district on the East Side, where the home work
+often only fairly begins after the factory has shut down for the day and
+the stores released their army of child-laborers. Had the policemen gone
+their rounds after dark they would have found a different state of things.
+Between the sweat-shops and the school, which, as I have shown, is made to
+reach farther down among the poorest in this Jewish quarter than anywhere
+else in this city, the children were fairly accounted for in the daytime.
+The record of school attendance in the district shows that forty-seven
+attended day-school for every one who went to night-school.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>To settle the matter to my own satisfaction I undertook a census of a
+number of the most crowded houses, in company with a policeman not in
+uniform. The outcome proved that, as regards those houses at least, it was
+as I suspected, and I have no doubt they were a fair sample of the rest.
+In nine tenements that were filled with home-workers we found five
+children at work who owned that they were under fourteen. Two were girls
+nine years of age. Two boys said they were thirteen. We found thirteen who
+swore that they were of age, proof which the policeman as an uninterested
+census-taker would have respected as a matter of course, even though he
+believed with me that the children lied. On the other hand, in seven
+back-yard factories we found a total of 63 children, of whom 5 admitted
+being under age, while of the rest 45 seemed surely so. To the other 13 we
+gave the benefit of the doubt, but I do not think they deserved it. All
+the 63 were to my mind certainly under fourteen, judging not only from
+their size, but from the whole appearance of the children. My subsequent
+experience confirmed me fully in this belief. Most of them were able to
+write their names after a fashion. Few spoke English, but that might have
+been a subterfuge. One of the home-workers, a marvellously small lad whose
+arms were black to the shoulder from the dye in the cloth he was sewing,
+and who said in his broken German, without evincing special interest in
+the matter, that he had gone to school &#8220;e&#8217; bische&#8217;,&#8221; referred us to his
+&#8220;mother&#8221; for a statement as to his age. The &#8220;mother,&#8221; who proved to be the
+boss&#8217;s wife, held a brief consultation with her husband and then came
+forward with a verdict of sixteen. When we laughed rather incredulously
+the man offered to prove by his marriage certificate that the boy must be
+sixteen. The effect of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> demonstration was rather marred, however, by
+the inopportune appearance of another tailor, who, ignorant of the crisis,
+claimed the boy as his. The situation was dramatic. The tailor with the
+certificate simply shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work,
+leaving the boy to his fate.</p>
+
+<p>One girl, who could not have been twelve years old, was hard at work at a
+sewing-machine in a Division Street shirt factory when we came in. She got
+up and ran the moment she saw us, but we caught her in the next room
+hiding behind a pile of shirts. She said at once that she was fourteen
+years old but didn&#8217;t work there. She &#8220;just came in.&#8221; The boss of the shop
+was lost in astonishment at seeing her when we brought her back. He could
+not account at all for her presence. There were three boys at work in the
+room who said &#8220;sixteen&#8221; without waiting to be asked. Not one of them was
+fourteen. The habit of saying fourteen or sixteen&mdash;the fashion varies with
+the shops and with the degree of the child&#8217;s educational
+acquirements&mdash;soon becomes an unconscious one with the boy. He plumps it
+out without knowing it. While occupied with these investigations I once
+had my boots blacked by a little shaver, hardly knee-high, on a North
+River ferry-boat. While he was shining away, I suddenly asked him how old
+he was. &#8220;Fourteen, sir!&#8221; he replied promptly, without looking up.</p>
+
+<p>In a Hester Street house we found two little girls pulling basting-thread.
+They were both Italians and said that they were nine. In the room in which
+one of them worked thirteen men and two women were sewing. The child could
+speak English. She said that she was earning a dollar a week and worked
+every day from seven in the morning till eight in the evening. This
+sweat-shop was one of the kind that comes under the ban of the new law,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+passed last winter&mdash;that is, if the factory inspector ever finds it. Where
+the crowds are greatest and the pay poorest, the Italian laborer&#8217;s wife
+and child have found their way in since the strikes among the sweater&#8217;s
+Jewish slaves, outbidding even these in the fierce strife for bread.</p>
+
+<p>Even the crowding, the feverish haste of the half-naked men and women, and
+the litter and filth in which they worked, were preferable to the silence
+and desolation we encountered in one shop up under the roof of a Broome
+Street tenement. The work there had given out&mdash;there had been none these
+two months, said the gaunt, hard-faced woman who sat eating a crust of dry
+bread and drinking water from a tin pail at the empty bench. The man sat
+silent and moody in a corner; he was sick. The room was bare. The only
+machine left was not worth taking to the pawnshop. Two dirty children,
+naked but for a torn undershirt apiece, were fishing over the stair-rail
+with a bent pin on an idle thread. An old rag was their bait.</p>
+
+<p>From among a hundred and forty hands on two big lofts in a Suffolk Street
+factory we picked seventeen boys and ten girls who were patently under
+fourteen years of age, but who all had certificates, sworn to by their
+parents, to the effect that they were sixteen. One of them whom we judged
+to be between nine and ten, and whose teeth confirmed our diagnosis&mdash;the
+second bicuspids in the lower jaw were just coming out&mdash;said that he had
+worked there &#8220;by the year.&#8221; The boss, deeming his case hopeless, explained
+that he only &#8220;made sleeves and went for beer.&#8221; Two of the smallest girls
+represented themselves as sisters, respectively sixteen and seventeen, but
+when we came to inquire which was the oldest, it turned out that she was
+the sixteen-year one. Several boys scooted as we came<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> up the stairs. When
+stopped they claimed to be visitors. I was told that this sweater had been
+arrested once by the Factory Inspector, but had successfully barricaded
+himself behind his pile of certificates. I caught the children laughing
+and making faces at us behind our backs as often as these were brought out
+anywhere. In an Attorney Street &#8220;pants&#8221; factory we counted thirteen boys
+and girls who could not have been of age, and on a top floor in Ludlow
+Street, among others, two brothers, sewing coats, who said that they were
+thirteen and fourteen, but, when told to stand up, looked so ridiculously
+small as to make even their employer laugh. Neither could read, but the
+oldest could sign his name and did it thus, from right to left:</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/signature.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It was the full extent of his learning, and all he would probably ever
+receive.</p>
+
+<p>He was one of many Jewish children we came across who could neither read
+nor write. Most of them answered that they had never gone to school. They
+were mostly those of larger growth, bordering on fourteen, whom the
+charity school managers find it next to impossible to reach, the children
+of the poorest and most ignorant immigrants, whose work is imperatively
+needed to make both ends meet at home, the &#8220;thousand&#8221; the school census
+failed to account for. To banish them from the shop serves no useful
+purpose. They are back the next day, if not sooner. One of the Factory
+Inspectors told me of how recently he found a little boy in a sweat-shop
+and sent him home. He went up through the house after that and stayed up
+there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> quite an hour. On his return it occurred to him to look in to see
+if the boy was gone. He was back and hard at work, and with him were two
+other boys of his age who, though they claimed to have come in with dinner
+for some of the hands, were evidently workers there.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the sweat-shops. Jewish, Italian, and Bohemian, the story is
+the same always. In the children that are growing up, to &#8220;vote as would
+their master&#8217;s dogs if allowed the right of suffrage,&#8221; the community reaps
+its reward in due season for allowing such things to exist. It is a kind
+of interest in the payment of which there is never default. The physician
+gets another view of it. &#8220;Not long ago,&#8221; says Dr. Annie S. Daniel, in the
+last report of the out-practice of the Infirmary for Women and Children,
+&#8220;we found in such an apartment five persons making cigars, including the
+mother. Two children were ill with diphtheria. Both parents attended to
+the children; they would syringe the nose of each child and, without
+washing their hands, return to their cigars. We have repeatedly observed
+the same thing when the work was manufacturing clothing and
+under-garments, to be bought as well by the rich as the poor. Hand-sewed
+shoes, made for a fashionable Broadway shoe store, were sewed at home by a
+man in whose family were three children with scarlet fever. And such
+instances are common. Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house
+manufactories. When reported to the Board of Health, the inspector at once
+prohibits further manufacture during the continuance of the disease, but
+his back is scarcely turned before the people return to their work. When
+we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their
+heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be
+expected to impress the people.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i014.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">SHINE, SIR?</span></p></div>
+
+<p>And she adds: &#8220;Wages have steadily decreased. Among the women who earned
+the whole or part of the income the finishing of pantaloons was the most
+common occupation. For this work in 1881 they received ten to fifteen
+cents per pair; for the same work in 1891 three to five, at the most ten
+cents per pair. When the women have paid the express charges to and from
+the factory there is little margin left for profit. The women doing this
+work claim that wages are reduced because of the influx of Italian women.&#8221;
+The rent has not fallen, however, and the need of every member of the
+family contributing by his or her work to its keep is greater than ever.
+The average total wages of 160 families whom the doctor personally treated
+and interrogated during the year was $5.99 per week, while the average
+rent was $8.62&#190;. The list included twenty-three different occupations
+and trades. The maximum wages was $19, earned by three persons in one
+family; the minimum $1.50, by a woman finishing pantaloons and living in
+one room for which she paid $4 a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> month rent! In nearly every instance
+observed by Dr. Daniel, the children&#8217;s wages, when there were working
+children, was the greater share of the family income. A specimen instance
+is that of a woman with a consumptive husband, who is under her treatment.
+The wife washes and goes out by the day, when she can get such work to do.
+The three children, aged eleven, seven, and five years, not counting the
+baby for a wonder, work at home covering wooden buttons with silk at four
+cents a gross. The oldest goes to school, but works with the rest evenings
+and on Saturday and Sunday, when the mother does the finishing. Their
+combined earnings are from $3 to $6 a week, the children earning
+two-thirds. The rent is $8 a month.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor&#8217;s observations throw a bright side-light upon the economic home
+conditions that lie at the root of this problem of child labor in the
+factories. With that I have not done. Taking the Factory Inspector&#8217;s
+report for 1890, the last at that time available, I found that in that
+year his deputies got around to 2,147 of the 11,000 workshops (the number
+given in the report) in the Second district, which is that portion of New
+York south of Twenty-third Street. In other words, they visited less than
+one-fifth of them all. They found 1,102 boys and 1,954 girls under sixteen
+at work; 3,485 boys under eighteen, and 12,701 girls under twenty-one, as
+nearly as I could make the footings. The figures alone are instructive, as
+showing the preponderance of girls in the shops. The report, speaking of
+the State as a whole, congratulates the community upon the alleged fact
+&#8220;that the policy of employing very young children in manufactories has
+been practically abolished.&#8221; It states that &#8220;since the enactment of the
+law the sentiment among employers has become nearly unanimous in favor of
+its stringent enforcement,&#8221; and that it &#8220;has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> had the further important
+effect of preventing newly arrived non-English speaking foreigners from
+forcing their children into factories before they learned the language of
+the country,&#8221; these being &#8220;now compelled to send their children to school,
+for a time at least, until they can qualify under the law.&#8221; Further, &#8220;the
+system of requiring sworn certificates, giving the name, date, and place
+of birth of all children under sixteen years of age ... has resulted in
+causing parents to be very cautious about making untrue statements of the
+ages of their children.&#8221; The deputies &#8220;are aware of the various
+subterfuges which have been tried in order to evade the law and put
+children at labor before the legal time,&#8221; and the Factory Inspector is
+&#8220;happy to say that they are not often imposed upon by such tactics.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Without wading through nearly seventy pages of small print it was not
+possible to glean from the report how many of the &#8220;under sixteen&#8221; workers
+were really under fourteen, or so adjudged. A summary of what has been
+accomplished since 1886 showed that 1,614 children under fourteen were
+discharged by the Inspector in the Second District in that time, and that
+415 were discharged because they could not read or write simple sentences
+in the English language. The &#8220;number of working children who could not
+read and write English&#8221; was in 1890 alone 252, according to the report, or
+more than one-half of the whole number discharged in the four years, which
+does not look as if the law had had much effect in that way, at least in
+New York city. I determined to see for myself what were the facts.</p>
+
+<p>I visited a number of factories, in a few instances accompanied by the
+deputy factory inspector, more frequently alone. Where it was difficult to
+gain admission<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> I watched at the door when the employees were going to or
+coming from work, finding that on the whole the better plan, as affording
+a fairer view of the children and a better opportunity to judge of their
+age than when they sat at their work-benches. I found many shops in which
+there were scarcely any children, some from which they had been driven, so
+I was informed by the inspectors. But where manufacturers were willing to
+employ their labor&mdash;and this I believe to be quite generally the case
+where children&#8217;s labor can be made to pay&mdash;I found the age certificate
+serving as an excellent protection for the employer, never for the child.
+I found the law considered as a good joke by some conscienceless men, who
+hardly took the trouble to see that the certificates were filled out
+properly; loudly commended by others whom it enabled, at the expense of a
+little perjury in which they had no hand, to fill up their shops with
+cheap labor, with perfect security to themselves. The bookkeeper in an
+establishment of the conscienceless kind told me with glee how a boy who
+had been bounced there three times in one year, upon his return each time
+had presented a sworn certificate giving a different age. He was fifteen,
+sixteen, and seventeen years old upon the records of the shop, until the
+<ins class="correction" title="original: inpectors">inspectors</ins> caught him one day and proved him only thirteen. I found boys
+at work, posing as seventeen, who had been so recorded in the same shop
+three full years, and were thirteen at most. As seventeen-year freaks they
+could have made more money in a dime museum than at the work-bench, only
+the museum would have required something more convincing than the
+certificate that satisfied the shop. Some of these boys were working at
+power-presses and doing other work beyond their years. An examination of
+their teeth often disproved their stories as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> to their age. It was not
+always possible to make this test, for the children seemed to see
+something funny in it, and laughed and giggled so, especially the girls,
+as to make it difficult to get a good look. Some of the girls, generally
+those with decayed teeth,<small><a name="f9.1" id="f9.1" href="#f9">[9]</a></small> would pout and refuse to show them. These
+were usually American girls, that is to say, they were born here. The
+greater number of the child-workers I questioned were foreigners, and our
+birth returns could have given no clue to them. The few natives were alert
+and on the defensive from the moment they divined my purpose. They easily
+defeated it by giving a false address.</p>
+
+<p>I finally picked out a factory close to my office where Italian girls were
+employed in large numbers, and made it my business to ascertain the real
+ages of the children. They seemed to me, going and coming, to average
+twelve or thirteen years. The year before the factory inspector had
+reported that nearly a hundred girls &#8220;under sixteen&#8221; were employed there.
+She had discharged sixty of them as unable to read or write English. I
+went to see the manufacturers. They were not disposed to help me and fell
+back on their certificates&mdash;no child was employed by them without
+one&mdash;until I told them that my purpose was not to interfere with their
+business but to prove that a birth-certificate was the only proper warrant
+for employment of child-labor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why,&#8221; said the manufacturer, in his astonishment forgetting that he had
+just told me his children were all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> of age, &#8220;my dear sir! would you throw
+them all out of work?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It was what I expected. I found out eventually that a number of the
+children attended the evening classes in the Leonard Street Italian
+School, and there one rainy night I corralled twenty-three of them, all
+but one officially certified under oath to be fourteen or sixteen. But for
+the rain I might have found twice the number. The twenty-three I polled,
+comparing their sworn age with the entry in the school register, which the
+teachers knew to be correct. This was the result: one was eleven years old
+and had worked in the factory a year; one, also eleven, had just been
+engaged and was going for her certificate that night; three were twelve
+years old, and had worked in the factory from one month to a year; seven
+were thirteen, and of them three had worked in the shop two years, the
+others one; nine were fourteen; one of them had been there three years,
+four others two years, the rest shorter terms; one was fifteen and had
+worked in the factory three years; the last and tallest was sixteen and
+had been employed in the one shop four years. She said with a laugh that
+she had a &#8220;certificate of sixteen&#8221; when she first went there. Not one of
+them all was of legal age when she went to work in the shop, under the
+warrant of her parents&#8217; oath. The majority were not even then legally
+employed, since of those who had passed fourteen there were several who
+could not read simple sentences in English intelligibly; yet they had been
+at work in the factory for months and years. One of the eleven-year
+workers, who felt insulted somehow, said spitefully that &#8220;I needn&#8217;t
+bother, there was lots of other girls in the shop younger than she.&#8221; I
+have no doubt she was right. I should add that the firm was a highly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+respectable one, and its members of excellent social standing.</p>
+
+<p>I learned incidentally where the convenient certificates came from, at
+least those that were current in that school. They were issued, the
+children said, free of charge, by a benevolent undertaker in the ward. I
+thought at first that it was a bid for business, or real helpfulness. The
+neighborhood undertaker is often found figuring suggestively as the
+nearest friend of the poor in his street, when they are in trouble. But I
+found out afterward that it was politics combined with business. The
+undertaker was an Irishman and an active organizer of his district.
+Unpolitical notaries charged twenty-five cents for each certificate. This
+one made them out for nothing. All they had to do was to call for them.
+The girls laughed scornfully at the idea of there being anything wrong in
+the transaction. Their parents swore in a good cause. They needed the
+money. The end conveniently justified the means in their case. Besides
+&#8220;they merely had to touch the pen.&#8221; Evidently, any argument in favor of
+education could scarcely be expected to have effect upon parents who thus
+found in their own ignorance a valid defence against an accusing
+conscience as well as a source of added revenue.</p>
+
+<p>My experience satisfied me that the factory law has had little effect in
+prohibiting child labor in the factories of New York City, although it may
+have had some in stimulating attendance at the night schools. The census
+figures, when they appear, will be able to throw no valuable light on the
+subject. The certificate lie naturally obstructs the census as it does the
+factory law. The one thing that is made perfectly clear by even such
+limited inquiry as I have been able to make, is that a birth certificate
+should be substituted for the present sworn warrant,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> if it is intended to
+make a serious business of the prohibition. In the piles upon piles of
+these which I saw, I never came across one copy of the birth registry.
+There are two obstacles to such a change. One is that our birth returns
+are at present incomplete; the other, that most of the children are not
+born here. Concerning the first, the Registrar of Vital Statistics
+estimates that he is registering nearly or quite a thousand births a month
+less than actually occur in New York; but even that is a great improvement
+upon the record of a few years ago. The registered birthrate is increasing
+year by year, and experience has shown that a determination on the part of
+the Board of Health to prosecute doctors and midwives who neglect their
+duty brings it up with a rush many hundreds in a few weeks. A wholesome
+strictness at the Health Office on this point would in a short time make
+it a reliable guide for the Factory Inspector in the enforcement of the
+law. The other objection is less serious than it appears at first sight.
+Immigrants might be required to provide birth certificates from their old
+homes, where their children are sure to be registered under the stringent
+laws of European governments. But as a matter of fact that would not often
+be necessary. They all have passports in which the name and ages of their
+children are set down. The claim that they had purposely registered them
+as younger to cheapen transportation, which they would be sure to make,
+need not be considered seriously. One lie is as good and as easy as
+another.</p>
+
+<p>Another lesson we may learn with advantage from some old-country
+governments, which we are apt to look down upon as &#8220;slow,&#8221; is to punish
+the parents for the truancy of their children, whether they are found
+running in the street or working in a shop when they should have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> been at
+school. Greed, the natural child of poverty, often has as much to do with
+it as real need. In the case of the Italians and the Jewish girls it is
+the inevitable marriage-portion, without which they would stand little
+chance of getting a husband, that dictates the sacrifice. One little one
+of twelve in a class in the Leonard Street School, who had been working on
+coats in a sweat-shop nine months, and had become expert enough to earn
+three dollars a week, told me that she had $200 in bank, and that her
+sister, also a worker, was as forehanded. Their teacher supported her
+story. But often a meaner motive than the desire to put money in bank
+forges the child&#8217;s fetters. I came across a little girl in an East Side
+factory who pleaded so pitifully that she had to work, and looked so poor
+and wan, that I went to her home to see what it was like. It was on the
+top floor of a towering tenement. The mother, a decent German woman, was
+sewing at the window, doing her share, while at the table her husband, a
+big, lazy lout who weighed two hundred pounds if he weighed one, lolled
+over a game of checkers with another vagabond like himself. A half-empty
+beer-growler stood between them. The contrast between that pitiful child
+hard at work in the shop, and the big loafer taking his ease, was enough
+to make anybody lose patience, and I gave him the piece of my mind he so
+richly deserved. But it rolled off him as water rolls off a duck. He
+merely ducked his head, shifted his bare feet under the table, and told
+his crony to go on with the play.</p>
+
+<p>It is only when the child rebels in desperation against such atrocious
+cruelty and takes to the street as his only refuge, that his tyrant hands
+him over to the justice so long denied him. Then the school comes as an
+avenger, not as a friend, to the friendless lad, and it is scarcely to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> be
+wondered at if behind his prison-bars he fails to make sense of the
+justice of a world that locks him up and lets his persecutor go
+free&mdash;likely enough applauds him for his public spirit in doing what he
+did. When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not
+work, and has to be supported, at the odd intervals at least when he comes
+back from the street, the father surrenders him as a truant and
+incorrigible. A large number of the children that are every year sent to
+the Juvenile Asylum are admitted in that way. The real animus of it crops
+out when it is proposed to put the little prisoner in a way of growing up
+a useful citizen by sending him to a home out of the reach of his grasping
+relatives. Then follows a struggle for the possession of the child that
+would make the uninitiated onlooker think a gross outrage was about to be
+perpetrated on a fond parent. The experienced Superintendent of the
+Asylum, who has fought many such fights to a successful end, knows better.
+&#8220;In a majority of these cases,&#8221; he remarks in his report for last year,
+&#8220;the opposition is due, not to any special interest in the child&#8217;s
+welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation
+for the boy in order to get his weekly wages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin
+covers for pocket-flasks&mdash;one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible
+of classification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor&mdash;with hands
+so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but
+lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work
+begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags
+down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes,
+much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running
+errands and earning a few pennies that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> way, takes her place at the bench
+and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has
+earned sixty cents&mdash;&#8220;more than mother,&#8221; she says with a smile. &#8220;Mother&#8221;
+has been finishing &#8220;knee-pants&#8221; for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a
+pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing buttons on; but she
+cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look
+after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who &#8220;does not
+love work well,&#8221; in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> patient language of the housekeeper, had been out
+of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of
+his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not
+press for the rent long due. That was Susie&#8217;s doings, too, though he
+didn&#8217;t know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that
+dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i015.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Of Susie&#8217;s hundred little companions in the alley&mdash;playmates they could
+scarcely be called&mdash;some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while
+the boys earned money at &#8220;shinin&#8217;&#8221; or selling newspapers. The smaller
+girls &#8220;minded the baby,&#8221; so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them
+did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The
+rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children&#8217;s labor in
+and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm
+in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them
+always. In an evening school class of nineteen boys and nine girls which I
+polled once I found twelve boys who &#8220;shined,&#8221; five who sold papers, one of
+thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of
+twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and
+worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one
+twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age
+minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old,
+and of them one worked for a sweater and &#8220;finished twenty-five coats
+yesterday,&#8221; she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman&#8217;s
+work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to
+help her mother sew coats when baby slept.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the
+children under age into the stores, where they find employment as &#8220;cash&#8221;
+girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are
+as rare as angels&#8217; visits. I do not believe this is true to any great
+extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other
+mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would
+alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the
+Working Women&#8217;s Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates
+that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all
+the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger.
+Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and
+less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I
+think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and
+not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the
+children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who
+exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal
+dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked
+fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more
+than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down
+when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two
+dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to
+leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most
+wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the
+hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing
+the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour
+spent in going through such a store tires many<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> grown persons more than a
+whole day&#8217;s work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their
+whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law
+to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it
+is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave
+things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in
+defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get
+their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road
+is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be
+wanting to smooth the way for them.</p>
+
+<p>There is still another kind of employment that absorbs many of the boys
+and ought to be prohibited with the utmost rigor of the law. I refer to
+the messenger service of the District Telegraph Companies especially.
+Anyone can see for himself how old some of these boys are who carry
+messages about the streets every day; but everybody cannot see the kind of
+houses they have to go to, the kind of people they meet, or the sort of
+influences that beset them hourly at an age when they are most easily
+impressed for good or bad. If that were possible, the line would be drawn
+against their employment rather at eighteen than at sixteen or fourteen.
+At present there is none except the fanciful line drawn against truancy,
+which, to a boy who has learned the tricks of the telegraph messenger, is
+very elastic indeed.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/i016.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">MINDING THE BABY.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>To send the boys to school and see that they stay there until they have
+learned enough to at least vote intelligently when they grow up, is the
+bounden duty of the State&mdash;celebrated in theory but neglected in practice.
+If it did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> its duty much would have been gained, but even then the real
+kernel of this question of child labor would remain untouched. The trouble
+is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of
+work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown
+to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more, and
+therefore less, than when they began, and with the years that should have
+prepared them for life&#8217;s work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery.
+How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the
+senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor, in denying to
+our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting
+foreign workmen in in shoals to crowd our market under the plea of the
+&#8220;solidarity of labor&#8221;&mdash;a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor
+all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.
+The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of
+improving the condition of the poor, who said to me, &#8220;They are down on the
+scrub level; there you find them and have to put them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> to such use as you
+can. They don&#8217;t know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to
+find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out
+mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the
+whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the
+responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to
+another generation that is so much worse to start off with.&#8221; She spoke of
+the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity
+of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass
+of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the
+children.</p>
+
+<p>I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee
+wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man
+found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing. The
+woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train.
+But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. &#8220;She can&#8217;t even hold a flat-iron in her
+hand,&#8221; reported her first employer, indignantly. The children were sent to
+good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing
+and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved; they were
+simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever
+received&mdash;that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original
+creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.</p>
+
+<p>I confess I had always laid the blame for this discouraging feature of the
+problem upon our general industrial development in a more or less vague
+way&mdash;steam, machinery, and all that sort of thing&mdash;until the other day I
+met a man who gave me another view of it altogether. He was a manufacturer
+of cheap clothing, a very intelligent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> and successful one at that; a large
+employer of cheap Hebrew labor and, heaven save the mark!&mdash;a Christian.
+His sincerity was unquestionable. He had no secrets to keep from me. He
+was in the business to make money, he said with perfect frankness, and one
+condition of his making money was, as he had had occasion to learn when he
+was himself a wage-worker and a union man, to keep his workmen where they
+were at his mercy. He had some four hundred hands, all Jewish immigrants,
+all working for the lowest wages for which he could hire them. Among them
+all there was not one tailor capable of making a whole garment. His policy
+was to keep them from learning. He saw to it that each one was kept at
+just one thing&mdash;sleeves, pockets, buttonholes&mdash;some small part of one
+garment, and never learned anything else.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This I do,&#8221; he explained, &#8220;to prevent them from going on strike with the
+hope of getting a job anywhere else. They can&#8217;t. They don&#8217;t know enough.
+Not only do we limit them so that a man who has worked three months in my
+shop and never held a needle before is just as valuable to me as one I
+have had five years, but we make the different parts of the suit in
+different places and keep Christians over the hands as cutters so that
+they shall have no chance to learn.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Where we stood in his shop, a little boy was stacking some coats for
+removal. The manufacturer pointed him out. &#8220;Now,&#8221; he said, &#8220;this boy is
+not fourteen years old, as you can see as well as I. His father works here
+and when the Inspector comes I just call him up. He swears that the boy is
+old enough to work, and there the matter ends. What would you? Is it not
+better that he should be here than on the street? Bah!&#8221; And this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+successful Christian manufacturer turned upon his heel with a vexed air.
+It was curious to hear him, before I left, deliver a homily on the
+&#8220;immorality&#8221; of the sweat-shops, arraigning them severely as &#8220;a blot on
+humanity.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+<h3>THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">On</span> my way to the office the other day, I came upon three boys sitting on a
+beer-keg in the mouth of a narrow alley intent upon a game of cards. They
+
+were dirty and &#8220;tough.&#8221; The bare feet of the smallest lad were nearly
+black with dried mud. His hair bristled, unrestrained by cap or covering
+of any kind. They paid no attention to me when I stopped to look at them.
+It was an hour before noon.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Why are you not in school?&#8221; I asked of the oldest rascal. He might have
+been thirteen.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Cause,&#8221; he retorted calmly, without taking his eye off his neighbor&#8217;s
+cards, &#8220;&#8217;cause I don&#8217;t believe in it. Go on, Jim!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I caught the black-footed one by the collar. &#8220;And you,&#8221; I said, &#8220;why don&#8217;t
+you go to school? Don&#8217;t you know you have to?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The boy thrust one of his bare feet out at me as an argument there was no
+refuting. &#8220;They don&#8217;t want me; I aint got no shoes.&#8221; And he took the
+trick.</p>
+
+<p>I had heard his defence put in a different way to the same purpose more
+than once on my rounds through the sweat-shops. Every now and then some
+father, whose boy was working under age, would object, &#8220;We send the child
+to school, as the Inspector says, and there is no room for him. What shall
+we do?&#8221; He spoke the whole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> truth, likely enough; the boy only half of it.
+There was a charity school around the corner from where he sat struggling
+manfully with his disappointment, where they would have taken him, and
+fitted him out with shoes in the bargain, if the public school rejected
+him. If anything worried him, it was probably the fear that I might know
+of it and drag him around there. I had seen the same thought working in
+the tailor&#8217;s mind. Neither had any use for the school; the one that his
+boy might work, the other that he might loaf and play hookey.</p>
+
+<p>Each had found his own flaw in our compulsory education law and succeeded.
+The boy was safe in the street because no truant officer had the right to
+arrest him at sight for loitering there in school-hours. His only risk was
+the chance of that functionary&#8217;s finding him at home, and he was trying to
+provide against that. The tailor&#8217;s defence was valid. With a law
+requiring&mdash;compelling is the word, but the compulsion is on the wrong
+tack&mdash;all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to go to
+school at least one-fourth of the year or a little more; with a costly
+machinery to enforce it, even more costly to the child who falls under the
+ban as a truant than to the citizens who foot the bills, we should most
+illogically be compelled to exclude, by force if they insisted, more than
+fifty thousand of the children, did they all take it into their heads to
+obey the law. We have neither schools enough nor seats enough in them. As
+it is, we are spared that embarrassment. They don&#8217;t obey it.</p>
+
+<p>This is the way the case stands: Computing the school population upon the
+basis of the Federal census of 1880 and the State census of 1892, we had
+in New York, in the summer of 1891, 351,330 children between five and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>fourteen<small><a name="f10.1" id="f10.1" href="#f10">[10]</a></small> years. I select these limits because children are admitted
+to the public schools under the law at the age of five years, and the
+statistics of the Board of Education show that the average age of the
+pupils entering the lowest primary grade is six years and five months. The
+whole number of different pupils taught in that year was 196,307.<small><a name="f11.1" id="f11.1" href="#f11">[11]</a></small> The
+Catholic schools, parochial and select, reported a total of 35,055; the
+corporate schools (Children&#8217;s Aid Society&#8217;s, Orphan Asylums, American
+Female Guardian Society&#8217;s, etc.), 23,276; evening schools, 29,165;
+Nautical School, 111; all other private schools (as estimated by
+Superintendent of Schools Jasper), 15,000; total, 298,914; any possible
+omissions in this list being more than made up for by the thousands over
+fourteen who are included. So that by deducting the number of pupils from
+the school population as given above, more than 50,000 children between
+the ages of five and fourteen are shown to have received no schooling
+whatever last year. As the public schools had seats for only 195,592,
+while the registered attendance exceeded that number, it follows that
+there was no room for the fifty thousand had they chosen to apply. In
+fact, the year before, 3,783 children had been refused admission at the
+opening of the schools after the summer vacation because there were no
+seats for them. To be told in the same breath that there were more than
+twenty thousand unoccupied seats in the schools at that time, is like
+adding insult to injury. Though vacant and inviting pupils they were
+worthless, for they were in the wrong schools. Where the crowding of the
+growing population was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> greatest and the need of schooling for the
+children most urgent, every seat was taken. Those who could not travel far
+from home&mdash;the poor never can&mdash;in search of an education had to go
+without.</p>
+
+<p>The Department of Education employs twelve truant officers, who in 1891
+&#8220;found and returned to school&#8221; 2,701 truants. There is a timid sort of
+pretence that this was &#8220;enforcing the compulsory education law,&#8221; though it
+is coupled with the statement that at least eight more officers are needed
+to do it properly, and that they should have power to seize the culprits
+wherever found. Superintendent Jasper tells me that he thinks there are
+only about 8,000 children in New York who do not go to school at all. But
+the Department&#8217;s own records furnish convincing proof that he is wrong,
+and that the 50,000 estimate is right. That number is just about
+one-seventh of the whole number of children between five and fourteen
+years, as stated above. In January of this year a school-census of the
+Fourth and Fifteenth wards,<small><a name="f12.1" id="f12.1" href="#f12">[12]</a></small> two widely separated localities, differing
+greatly as to character of population, gave the following result: Fourth
+Ward, total number of children between five and fourteen years, 2,016;<small><a name="f13.1" id="f13.1" href="#f13">[13]</a></small>
+of whom 297 did not go to school. Fifteenth Ward, total number of
+children, 2,276; number of non-attendants, 339. In each case the
+proportion of non-attendants was nearly one-seventh, curiously
+corroborating the estimate made by me for the whole city.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i017.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">&#8220;SHOOTING CRAPS&#8221; IN THE HALL OF THE NEWSBOYS&#8217; LODGING HOUSE.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Testimony to the same effect is borne by a different set of records, those
+of the reformatories that receive the truants of the city. The Juvenile
+Asylum, that takes most of those of the Protestant faith, reports that of
+28,745 children of school age committed to its care in thirty-nine years
+32 per cent. could not read when received. The proportion during the last
+five years was 23 per cent. At the Catholic Protectory, of 3,123 boys and
+girls cared for during the year 1891, 689 were utterly illiterate at the
+time of their reception and the education of the other 2,434 was
+classified in various degrees between illiterate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> and &#8220;able to read and
+write&#8221; only.<small><a name="f14.1" id="f14.1" href="#f14">
+[14]</a></small> The moral status of these last children may be inferred
+from the statement that 739 of them possessed no religious instruction at
+all when admitted. The analysis might be extended, doubtless with the same
+result as to illiteracy, throughout the institutions that harbor the
+city&#8217;s dependent children, to the State Reformatory, where the final
+product is set down in 75 per cent. of &#8220;grossly ignorant&#8221; inmates, in
+spite of the fact that more than that proportion is recorded as being of
+&#8220;average natural mental capacity.&#8221; In other words, they could have
+learned, had they been taught.</p>
+
+<p>How much of this bad showing is due to the system, or the lack of system,
+of compulsory education, as we know it in New York, I shall not venture to
+say. In such a system a truant school or home would seem to be a logical
+necessity. Because a boy does not like to go to school, he is not
+necessarily bad. It may be the fault of the school and of the teacher as
+much as of the boy. Indeed, a good many people of sense hold that the boy
+who has never planned to run away from home or school does not amount to
+much. At all events, the boy ought not to be classed with thieves and
+vagabonds. But that is what New York does. It has no truant home. Its
+method of dealing with the truant is little less than downright savagery.
+It is thus set forth in a report of a special committee of the Board of
+Education, made to that body on November 18, 1891. &#8220;Under the law the
+truant agents act upon reports received from the principals of the
+schools. After exhausting the persuasion that they may be able to exercise
+to compel the attendance of truant children, and in cases which seem to
+call for the enforcement of the law,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> the agent procures the indorsement
+of the President of the Board of Education and the Superintendent of
+Schools upon his requisition for a warrant for the arrest of the truant,
+which warrant, under the provisions of the law, is then issued by a Police
+Justice. A policeman is then detailed to make the arrest, and when
+apprehended the truant is brought to the Police Court, where his parents
+or guardians are obliged to attend. Should it happen that the latter are
+not present, the boy is put in a cell to await their appearance. It has
+sometimes happened that a public-school boy, whose only offence against
+the law was his refusal to attend school, has been kept in a cell two or
+three days with old criminals pending the appearance of his parents or
+guardians.<small><a name="f15.1" id="f15.1" href="#f15">[15]</a></small> While we fully realize the importance of enforcing the laws
+relating to compulsory education, we believe that bringing the boys into
+associations with criminals in this way and making it necessary for
+parents to be present under such circumstances, is unjust and improper,
+and that criminal associations of this kind in connection with the
+administration of the truancy laws should not be allowed to continue. The
+Justice may, after hearing the facts, commit the child, who, in a majority
+of cases, is between eight and eleven years old, to one of the
+institutions designated by law. We do not think that the enforcement of
+the laws relating to compulsory education should at any time enforce
+association with criminal classes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But it does, all the way through. The &#8220;institutions designated by law&#8221; for
+the reception of truants are chiefly the Protectory and the Juvenile
+Asylum. In the thirty-nine years of its existence the latter has harbored
+11,636<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> children committed to it for disobedience and truancy. And this
+was the company they mingled with there on a common footing: &#8220;Unfortunate
+children,&#8221; 8,806; young thieves, 3,097; vagrants, 3,173; generally bad
+boys and girls, 1,390; beggars, 542; children committed for peddling, 51;
+as witnesses, 50. Of the whole lot barely a hundred, comprised within the
+last two items, might be supposed to be harmless, though there is no
+assurance that they were. Of the Protectory children I have already
+spoken. It will serve further to place them to say that nearly one-third
+of the 941 received last year were homeless, while fully 35 per cent. of
+all the boys suffered when entering from the contagious eye disease that
+is the scourge of the poorest tenements as of the public institutions that
+admit their children. I do not here take into account the House of Refuge,
+though that is also one of the institutions designated by law for the
+reception of truants, for the reason that only about one-fifth of those
+admitted to it last year came from New York City. Their number was 55. The
+rest came from other counties in the State. But even there the percentage
+of truants to those committed for stealing or other crimes was as 53 to
+47.</p>
+
+<p>This is the &#8220;system,&#8221; or one end of it&mdash;the one where the waste goes on.
+The Committee spoken of reported that the city paid in 1890, $63,690 for
+the maintenance of the truants committed by magistrates, at the rate of
+$110 for every child, and that two truant schools and a home for
+incorrigible truants could be established and maintained at less cost,
+since it would probably not be necessary to send to the home for
+incorrigibles more than 25 per cent. of all. It further advised the
+creation of the special office of Truant Commissioner, to avoid dragging
+the children into the police courts. In his report for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> present year
+Superintendent Jasper renews in substance these recommendations. But
+nothing has been done.</p>
+
+<p>The situation is this, then, that a vast horde of fifty thousand children
+is growing up in this city whom our public school does not and cannot
+reach; if it reaches them at all it is with the threat of the jail. The
+mass of them is no doubt to be found in the shops and factories, as I have
+shown. A large number peddle newspapers or black boots. Still another
+contingent, much too large, does nothing but idle, in training for the
+penitentiary. I stopped one of that kind at the corner of Baxter and Grand
+Streets one day to catechise him. It was in the middle of the afternoon
+when the schools were in session, but while I purposely detained him with
+a long talk to give the neighborhood time to turn out, thirteen other lads
+of his age, all of them under fourteen, gathered to listen to my business
+with Graccho. When they had become convinced that I was not an officer
+they frankly owned that they were all playing hookey. All of them lived in
+the block. How many more of their kind it sheltered I do not know. They
+were not exactly a nice lot, but not one of them would I have committed to
+the chance of contact with thieves with a clear conscience. I should have
+feared especial danger from such contact in their case.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact the record of average attendance (136,413) shows that
+the public school <i>per se</i> reaches little more than a third of all the
+children. And even those it does not hold long enough to do them the good
+that was intended. The Superintendent of Schools declares that the average
+age at which the children leave school is twelve or a little over. It must
+needs be, then, that very many quit much earlier, and the statement that
+in New York, as in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> Chicago, St. Louis, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and other
+American cities, half or more than half the school-boys leave school at
+the age of eleven (the source of the statement is unknown to me) seems
+credible enough. I am not going to discuss here the value of school
+education as a preventive of crime. That it is, so far as it goes, a
+positive influence for good I suppose few thinking people doubt nowadays.
+Dr. William T. Harris, Federal Commissioner of Education, in an address
+delivered before the National Prison Association in 1890, stated that an
+investigation of the returns of seventeen States that kept a record of the
+educational status of their criminals showed the number of criminals to be
+eight times as large from the illiterate stratum as from an equal number
+of the population that could read and write. That census was taken in
+1870. Ten years later a canvass of the jails of Michigan, a State that had
+an illiterate population of less than five per cent., showed exactly the
+same ratio, so that I presume that may safely be accepted.</p>
+
+<p>In view of these facts it does not seem that the showing the public school
+is making in New York is either creditable or safe. It is not creditable,
+because the city&#8217;s wealth grows even faster than its population,<small><a name="f16.1" id="f16.1" href="#f16">[16]</a></small> and
+there is no lack of means with which to provide schools enough and the
+machinery to enforce the law and fill them. Not to enforce it because it
+would cost a great deal of money is wicked waste and folly. It is not
+safe, because the school is our chief defence against the tenement and the
+flood of ignorance with which it would swamp us. Prohibition of child
+labor without compelling the attendance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> at school of the freed slaves is
+a mockery. The children are better off working than idling, any day. The
+physical objections to the one alternative are vastly outweighed by the
+moral iniquities of the other.</p>
+
+<p>I have tried to set forth the facts. They carry their own lesson. The then
+State Superintendent of Education, Andrew Draper, read it aright when, in
+his report for 1889, he said about the compulsory education law:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It does not go far enough and is without an executor. It is barren of
+results.... It may be safely said that no system will be effectual in
+bringing the unfortunate children of the streets into the schools which at
+least does not definitely fix the age within which children must attend
+the schools, which does not determine the period of the year within which
+all must be there, which does not determine the method for gathering all
+needed information, which does not provide especial schools for
+incorrigible cases, which does not punish people charged with the care of
+children for neglecting their education, and which does not provide the
+machinery and officials for executing the system.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+<h3>WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">I am</span> reminded, in trying to show up the causes that go to make children
+bad, of the experience of a certain sanitary inspector who was laboring
+with the proprietor of a seven-cent lodging-house to make him whitewash
+and clean up. The man had reluctantly given in to several of the
+inspector&#8217;s demands; but, as they kept piling up, his irritation grew,
+until at the mention of clean sheets he lost all patience and said, with
+bitter contempt, &#8220;Well! you needn&#8217;t tink dem&#8217;s angels!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>They were not&mdash;those lodgers of his&mdash;they were tramps. Neither are the
+children of the street angels. If, once in a while, they act more like
+little devils the opportunities we have afforded them, as I have tried to
+show, hardly give us the right to reproach them. They are not the kind of
+opportunities to make angels. And yet, looking the hundreds of boys in the
+Juvenile Asylum over, all of whom were supposed to be there because they
+were bad (though, as I had occasion to ascertain, that was a mistake&mdash;it
+was the parents that were bad in some cases), I was struck by the fact
+that they were anything but a depraved lot. Except as to their clothes and
+their manners, which were the manners of the street, they did not seem to
+be very different in looks from a like number of boys in any public
+school. Fourth of July was just then at hand, and when I asked the
+official who accompanied me how they proposed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> celebrate it, he said
+that they were in the habit of marching in procession up Eleventh Avenue
+to Fort George, across to Washington Bridge, and all about the
+neighborhood, to a grove where speeches were made. Remembering the iron
+bars and high fences I had seen, I said something about it being unsafe to
+let a thousand young prisoners go at large in that way. The man looked at
+me in some bewilderment before he understood.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Bless you, no!&#8221; he said, when my meaning dawned upon him. &#8220;If any one of
+them was to run away that day he would be in eternal disgrace with all the
+rest. It is a point of honor with them to deserve it when they are
+trusted. Often we put a boy on duty outside, when he could walk off, if he
+chose, just as well as not; but he will come in in the evening, as
+straight as a string, only, perhaps, to twist his bed-clothes into a rope
+that very night and let himself down from a third-story window, at the
+risk of breaking his neck. Boys will be boys, you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But it struck me that boys whose honor could be successfully appealed to
+in that way were rather the victims than the doers of a grievous wrong,
+being in that place, no matter if they <i>had</i> stolen. It was a case of
+misdirection, or no direction at all, of their youthful energies. There
+was one little fellow in the Asylum band who was a living illustration of
+this. I watched him blow his horn with a supreme effort to be heard above
+the rest, growing redder and redder in the face, until the perspiration
+rolled off him in perfect sheets, the veins stood out swollen and blue and
+it seemed as if he must burst the next minute. He was a tremendous
+trumpeter. I was glad when it was over, and patted him on the head,
+telling him that if he put as much vim into all he had to do, as he did
+into his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> horn, he would come to something great yet. Then it occurred to
+me to ask him what he was there for.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Cause I was lazy and played hookey,&#8221; he said, and joined in the laugh
+his answer raised. The idea of that little body, that fairly throbbed with
+energy, being sent to prison for laziness was too absurd for anything.</p>
+
+<p>The report that comes from the Western Agency of the Asylum, through which
+the boys are placed out on farms, that the proportion of troublesome
+children is growing larger does not agree with the idea of laziness
+either, but well enough with the idleness of the street, which is what
+sends nine-tenths of the boys to the Asylum. Satan finds plenty of
+mischief for the idle hands of these lads to do. The one great point is to
+give them something to do&mdash;something they can see the end of, yet that
+will keep them busy right along. The more ignorant the child, the more
+urgent this rule, the shorter and simpler the lesson must be. Over in the
+Catholic Protectory, where they get the most ignorant boys, they
+appreciate this to the extent of encouraging the boys to a game of Sunday
+base-ball rather than see them idle even for the briefest spell. Of the
+practical wisdom of their course there can be no question.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I have come to the conclusion,&#8221; said a well-known educator on a recent
+occasion, &#8220;that much of crime is a question of athletics.&#8221; From over the
+sea the Earl of Meath adds his testimony: &#8220;Three fourths of the youthful
+rowdyism of large towns is owing to the stupidity, and, I may add,
+cruelty, of the ruling powers in not finding some safety-valve for the
+exuberant energies of the boys and girls of their respective cities.&#8221; For
+our neglect to do so in New York we are paying heavily in the maintenance
+of these costly reform schools. I spoke of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> chance for romping and
+play where the poor children crowd. In a Cherry Street hall-way I came
+across this sign in letters a foot long: &#8220;No ball-playing, dancing,
+card-playing, and no persons but tenants allowed in the yard.&#8221; It was a
+five-story tenement, swarming with children, and there was another just as
+big across that yard. Out in the street the policeman saw to it that the
+ball-playing at least was stopped, and as for the dancing, that, of
+course, was bound to collect a crowd, the most heinous offence known to
+him as a preserver of the peace. How the peace was preserved by such means
+I saw on the occasion of my discovering that sign. The business that took
+me down there was a murder in another tenement just like it. A young man,
+hardly more than a boy, was killed in the course of a midnight
+&#8220;can-racket&#8221; on the roof, in which half the young people in the block had
+a hand night after night. It was <i>their</i> outlet for the &#8220;exuberant
+energies&#8221; of their natures. The safety-valve was shut, with the landlord
+and the policeman holding it down.</p>
+
+<p>It is when the wrong outlet has thus been forced that the right and
+natural one has to be reopened with an effort as the first condition of
+reclaiming the boy. The play in him has all run to &#8220;toughness,&#8221; and has
+first to be restored. &#8220;We have no great hope of a boy&#8217;s reformation,&#8221;
+writes Mr. William F. Round, of the Burnham Industrial Farm, to a friend
+who has shown me his letter, &#8220;till he takes an active part and interest in
+out-door amusements. Plead with all your might for play-grounds for the
+city waifs and school-children. When the lungs are freely expanded, the
+blood coursing with a bound through all veins and arteries, the whole mind
+and body in a state of high emulation in wholesome play, there is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> no time
+or place for wicked thought or consequent wicked action and the body is
+growing every moment more able to help in the battle against temptation
+when it shall come at other times and places. Next time another transit
+company asks a franchise make them furnish tickets to the parks and
+suburbs to all school-children on all holidays and Saturdays, the same to
+be given out in school for regular attendance, as a method of health
+promotion and a preventive of truancy.&#8221; Excellent scheme! If we could only
+make them. It is five years and over now since we made them pass a law at
+Albany appropriating a million dollars a year for the laying out of small
+parks in the most crowded tenement districts, in the Mulberry Street Bend
+for instance, and practically we stand to-day where we stood then. The
+Mulberry Street Bend is still there, with no sign of a park or play-ground
+other than in the gutter. When I asked, a year ago, why this was so, I was
+told by the Counsel to the Corporation that it was because &#8220;not much
+interest had been taken&#8221; by the previous administration in the matter. Is
+it likely that a corporation that runs a railroad to make money could be
+prevailed upon to take more interest in a proposition to make it surrender
+part of its profits than the city&#8217;s sworn officers in their bounden duty?
+Yet let anyone go and see for himself what effect such a park has in a
+crowded tenement district. Let him look at Tompkins Square Park as it is
+to-day and compare the children that skip among the trees and lawns and
+around the band-stand with those that root in the gutters only a few
+blocks off. That was the way they looked in Tompkins Square twenty years
+ago when the square was a sand-lot given up to rioting and disorder. The
+police had their hands full then. I remember being present when they had
+to take the square<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> by storm more than once, and there is at least one
+captain on the force to-day who owes his promotion to the part he took and
+the injuries he suffered in one of those battles. To-day it is as quiet
+and orderly a neighborhood as any in the city. Not a squeak has been heard
+about &#8220;bread or blood&#8221; since those trees were planted and the lawns and
+flower-beds laid out. It is not all the work of the missions, the
+kindergartens, and Boys&#8217; clubs and lodging-houses, of which more anon; nor
+even the larger share. The park did it, exactly as the managers of the
+Juvenile Asylum appealed to the sense of honor in their prisoners. It
+appealed with its trees and its grass and its birds to the sense of
+decency and of beauty, undeveloped but not smothered, in the children, and
+the whole neighborhood responded. One can go around the whole square that
+covers two big blocks, nowadays, and not come upon a single fight. I
+should like to see anyone walk that distance in Mulberry Street without
+running across half a dozen.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far the street and its idleness as factors in making criminals of the
+boys. Of the factory I have spoken. Certainly it is to be preferred to the
+street, if the choice must be between the two. Its offence is that it
+makes a liar of the boy and keeps him in ignorance, even of a useful
+trade, thus blazing a wide path for him straight to the prison gate. The
+school does not come to the rescue; the child must come to the school, and
+even then is not sure of a welcome. The trades&#8217; unions do their worst for
+the boy by robbing him of the slim chance to learn a trade which the
+factory left him. Of the tenement I have said enough. Apart from all other
+considerations and influences, as the destroyer of character and
+individuality everywhere, it is the wickedest of all the forces that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>attack the defenceless child. The tenements are increasing in number, and
+so is &#8220;the element that becomes criminal because of lack of individuality
+and the self-respect that comes with it.&#8221;<small><a name="f17.1" id="f17.1" href="#f17">[17]</a></small></p>
+
+<p>I am always made to think in connection with this subject of a story told
+me by a bright little woman of her friend&#8217;s kittens. There was a litter of
+them in the house and a jealous terrier dog to boot, whose one aim in life
+was to get rid of its mewing rivals. Out in the garden where the children
+played there was a sand-heap and the terrier&#8217;s trick was to bury alive in
+the sand any kitten it caught unawares. The children were constantly
+rushing to the rescue and unearthing their pets; on the day when my friend
+was there on a visit they were too late. The first warning of the tragedy
+in the garden came to the ladies when one of the children rushed in, all
+red and excited, with bulging eyes. &#8220;There,&#8221; she said, dropping the dead
+kitten out of her apron before them, &#8220;a perfectly good cat spoiled!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Perfectly good children, as good as any on the Avenue, are spoiled every
+day by the tenement; only we have not done with them then, as the terrier
+had with the kitten. There is still posterity to reckon with.</p>
+
+<p>What this question of heredity amounts to, whether in the past or in the
+future, I do not know. I have not had opportunity enough of observing. No
+one has that I know of. Those who have had the most disagree in their
+conclusions, or have come to none. I have known numerous instances of
+criminality, running apparently in families for generations, but there was
+always the desperate environment as the unknown factor in the make-up.
+Whether<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> that bore the greatest share of the blame, or whether the
+reformation of the criminal to be effective should have begun with his
+grandfather, I could not tell. Besides, there was always the chance that
+the great-grandfather, or some one still farther back, of whom all trace
+was lost, might have been a paragon of virtue, even if his descendant was
+a thief, and so there was no telling just where to begin. In general I am
+inclined to think with such practical philanthropists as Superintendent
+Barnard, of the Five Points House of Industry, the Manager of the
+Children&#8217;s Aid Society, Superintendent E. Fellows Jenkins, of the Society
+for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Mr. Israel C. Jones, who
+for more than thirty years was in charge of the House of Refuge, that the
+bugbear of heredity is not nearly as formidable as we have half taught
+ourselves to think. It is rather a question of getting hold of the child
+early enough before the evil influences surrounding him have got a firm
+grip on him. Among a mass of evidence quoted in support of this belief,
+perhaps this instance, related by Superintendent Jones in <i>The
+Independent</i> last March, is as convincing as any:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Thirty years ago there was a depraved family living adjacent to what
+is now a part of the city of New York. The mother was not only
+dishonest, but exceedingly intemperate, wholly neglectful of her
+duties as a mother, and frequently served terms in jail until she
+finally died. The father was also dissipated and neglectful. It was a
+miserable existence for the children.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the little boys, in connection with two other boys in the
+neighborhood, were arrested, tried, and found guilty of entering a
+house in the daytime and stealing. In course of time both of these
+boys were indentured. One remained in his place and the other left
+for another part of the country, where he died. He was a reputable
+lad.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>The first boy, in one way and another, got a few pennies together
+with which he purchased books. After a time he proposed to his master
+that he be allowed to present himself for examination as a teacher.
+The necessary consent was given, he presented himself, and was
+awarded a &#8220;grade A&#8221; certificate.</p>
+
+<p>Two years from that time he came to the House of Refuge, as proud as
+a man could be, and exhibited to me his certificate. He then entered
+a law office, diligently pursued his studies, and was admitted to the
+bar. He was made a judge, and is now chief magistrate of the court in
+the city where he lives.</p>
+
+<p>His sister, a little girl, used to come to the Refuge with her
+mother, wearing nothing but a thin cloak in very cold weather, almost
+perishing with the cold. As soon as this young man got on his feet he
+rescued the little girl. He placed her in a school; she finally
+graduated from the Normal School, and to-day holds an excellent
+position in the schools in the State where she lives.</p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>The records of the three reformatory institutions before mentioned throw
+their own light upon the question of what makes criminals of the young. At
+the Elmira Reformatory, of more than five thousand prisoners only a little
+over one per cent. were shown to have kept good company prior to their
+coming there. One and a half per cent. are put down under this head as
+&#8220;doubtful,&#8221; while the character of association is recorded for 41.2 per
+cent. as &#8220;not good,&#8221; and for 55.9 per cent. as &#8220;positively bad.&#8221;
+Three-fourths possessed no culture or only the slightest. As to moral
+sense, 42.6 per cent. had absolutely none, 35 per cent. &#8220;possibly some.&#8221;
+Only 7.6 per cent. came from good homes. Of the rest 39.8 per cent. had
+homes that are recorded as &#8220;fair only,&#8221; and 52.6 per cent. downright bad
+homes; 4.8 per cent. had pauper, and 76.8 per cent. poor parents; 38.4 per
+cent. of the prisoners had drunken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> parents, and 13 per cent. parents of
+doubtful sobriety. Of more than twenty-two thousand inmates of the
+Juvenile Asylum in thirty-nine years one-fourth had either a drunken
+father or mother, or both. At the Protectory the percentage of drunkenness
+in parents was not quite one-fifth among over three thousand children
+cared for in the institution last year.</p>
+
+<p>There is never any lack of trashy novels and cheap shows in New York, and
+the children who earn money selling newspapers or otherwise take to them
+as ducks do to water. They fall in well with the ways of the street that
+are showy always, however threadbare may be the cloth. As for that, it is
+simply the cheap side of our national extravagance.</p>
+
+<p>The cigarette, if not a cause, is at least the mean accessory of half the
+mischief of the street. And I am not sure it is not a cause too. It is an
+inexorable creditor that has goaded many a boy to stealing; for cigarettes
+cost money, and they do not encourage industry. Of course there is a law
+against the cigarette, or rather against the boy smoking it who is not old
+enough to work&mdash;there is law in plenty, usually, if that would only make
+people good. It don&#8217;t in the matter of the cigarette. It helps make the
+boy bad by adding the relish of law-breaking to his enjoyment of the
+smoke. Nobody stops him.</p>
+
+<p>The mania for gambling is all but universal. Every street child is a born
+gambler; he has nothing to lose and all to win. He begins by &#8220;shooting
+craps&#8221; in the street and ends by &#8220;chucking dice&#8221; in the saloon, two names
+for the same thing, sure to lead to the same goal. By the time he has
+acquired individual standing in the saloon, his long apprenticeship has
+left little or nothing for him to learn of the bad it has to teach. Never
+for his own sake<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> is he turned away with the growler when he comes to have
+it filled; once in a while for the saloon-keeper&#8217;s, if that worthy
+suspects in him a decoy and a &#8220;job.&#8221; Just for the sake of the experiment,
+not because I expected it to develop anything new, I chose at random,
+while writing this chapter, a saloon in a tenement house district on the
+East Side and posted a man, whom I could trust implicitly, at the door
+with orders to count the children under age who went out and in with
+beer-jugs in open defiance of law. Neither he nor I had ever been in or
+even seen the saloon before. He reported as the result of three and a half
+hours&#8217; watch at noon and in the evening a total of fourteen&mdash;ten boys and
+a girl under ten years of age, and three girls between ten and fourteen
+years, not counting a little boy who bought a bottle of ginger. It was a
+cool, damp day; not a thirsty day, or the number would probably have been
+twice as great. There was not the least concealment about the transaction
+in any of the fourteen cases. The children were evidently old customers.</p>
+
+<p>The law that failed to save the boy while there was time yet to make a
+useful citizen of him provides the means of catching him when his training
+begins to bear fruit that threatens the public peace. Then it is with the
+same blundering disregard of common sense and common decency that marked
+his prosecution as a truant that the half grown lad is dragged into a
+police court and thrust into a prison-pen with hardened thieves and
+criminals to learn the lessons they have to teach him. The one thing New
+York needs most after a truant home is a special court for the trial of
+youthful offenders only. I am glad to say that this want seems at last in
+a way to be supplied. The last Legislature authorized the establishment of
+such a court, and it may be that even as these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> pages see the light this
+blot upon our city is about to be wiped out.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, but not least, the Church is to blame for deserting the poor in
+their need. It is an old story that the churches have moved uptown with
+the wealth and fashion, leaving the poor crowds to find their way to
+heaven as best they could, and that the crowds have paid them back in
+their own coin by denying that they, the churches, knew the way at all.
+The Church has something to answer for; but it is a healthy sign at least
+that it is accepting the responsibility and professing anxiety to meet it.
+In much of the best work done among the poor and for the poor it has
+lately taken the lead, and it is not likely that any more of the churches
+will desert the downtown field, with the approval of Christian men and
+women at least.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Little enough of the light I promised in the opening chapter has struggled
+through these pages so far. We have looked upon the dark side of the
+picture; but there is a brighter. If the battle with ignorance, with
+misery, and with vice has but just begun, if the army that confronts us is
+strong, too strong, in numbers still and in malice&mdash;the gauntlet has been
+thrown down, the war waged, and blows struck that tell. They augur
+victory, for we have cut off the enemy&#8217;s supplies and turned his flank. As
+I showed in the case of the immigrant Jews and the Italians, we have
+captured his recruits. With a firm grip on these, we may hope to win, for
+the rest of the problem ought to be and <i>can</i> be solved. With our own we
+should be able to settle, if there is any virtue in our school and our
+system of government. In this, as in all things, the public conscience
+must be stirred before the community&#8217;s machinery for securing justice can
+move. That it has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> been stirred, profoundly and to useful purpose, the
+multiplication in our day of charities for attaining the ends the law has
+failed to reach, gives evidence. Their number is so great that mention can
+be made here merely of a few of the most important and typical efforts
+along the line. A register of all those that deal with the children
+
+especially, as compiled by the Charity Organization Society, will be found
+in an appendix to this book. Before we proceed to look at the results
+achieved through endeavors to stop the waste down at the bottom by private
+reinforcement of the public school, we will glance briefly at two of the
+charities that have a plainer purpose&mdash;if I may so put it without
+disparagement to the rest&mdash;that look upon the child merely as a child
+worth saving for its own sake, because it is helpless and poor and
+wretched. Both of them represent distinct departures in charitable work.
+Both, to the everlasting credit of our city be it said, had their birth
+here, and in this generation, and from New York their blessings have been
+carried to the farthest lands. One is the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, known far and near now as the Children&#8217;s Society,
+whose strong and beneficent plan has been embodied in the structure of law
+of half the civilized nations of the world. The other, always spoken of as
+the &#8220;Fresh Air Fund,&#8221; never had law or structural organization of any
+kind, save the law of love, laid down on the Mount for all time; but the
+life of that divine command throbs in it and has touched the heart of
+mankind wherever its story has been told.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+<h3>LITTLE MARY ELLEN&#8217;S LEGACY</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">On</span> a thriving farm up in Central New York a happy young wife goes singing
+about her household work to-day who once as a helpless, wretched waif in
+the great city through her very helplessness and misery stirred up a
+social revolution whose waves beat literally upon the farthest shores. The
+story of little Mary Ellen moved New York eighteen years ago as it had
+scarce ever been stirred by news of disaster or distress before. In the
+simple but eloquent language of the public record it is thus told: &#8220;In the
+summer of 1874 a poor woman lay dying in the last stages of consumption in
+a miserable little room on the top floor of a big tenement in this city. A
+Methodist missionary, visiting among the poor, found her there and asked
+what she could do to soothe her sufferings. &#8216;My time is short,&#8217; said the
+sick woman, &#8216;but I cannot die in peace while the miserable little girl
+whom they call Mary Ellen is being beaten day and night by her step-mother
+next door to my room.&#8217; She told how the screams of the child were heard at
+all hours. She was locked in the room, she understood. It had been so for
+months, while she had been lying ill there. Prompted by the natural
+instinct of humanity, the missionary sought the aid of the police, but she
+was told that it was necessary to furnish evidence before an arrest could
+be made. &#8216;Unless you can prove that an offence has been committed we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+cannot interfere, and all you know is hearsay.&#8217; She next went to several
+benevolent societies in the city whose object it was to care for children,
+and asked their interference in behalf of the child. The reply was: &#8216;If
+the child is legally brought to us, and is a proper subject, we will take
+it; otherwise we cannot act in the matter.&#8217; In turn then she consulted
+several excellent charitable citizens as to what she should do. They
+replied: &#8216;It is a dangerous thing to interfere between parent and child,
+and you might get yourself into trouble if you did so, as parents are
+proverbially the best guardians of their own children.&#8217; Finally, in
+despair, with the piteous appeals of the dying woman ringing in her ears,
+she said: &#8216;I will make one more effort to save this child. There is one
+man in this city who has never turned a deaf ear to the cry of the
+helpless, and who has spent his life in just this work for the benefit of
+unoffending animals. I will go to Henry Bergh.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She went, and the great friend of the dumb brute found a way. &#8216;The child
+is an animal,&#8217; he said, &#8216;if there is no justice for it as a human being,
+it shall at least have the rights of the stray cur in the street. It shall
+not be abused.&#8217; And thus was written the first bill of rights for the
+friendless waif the world over. The appearance of the starved, half-naked,
+and bruised child when it was brought into court wrapped in a
+horse-blanket caused a sensation that stirred the public conscience to its
+very depths. Complaints poured in upon Mr. Bergh; so many cases of
+child-beating and fiendish cruelty came to light in a little while, so
+many little savages were hauled forth from their dens of misery, that the
+community stood aghast. A meeting of citizens was called and an
+association for the defence of outraged childhood was formed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> out of
+which grew the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that was
+formally incorporated in the following year. By that time Mary Ellen was
+safe in a good home. She never saw her tormentor again. The woman, whose
+name was Connolly, was not her mother. She steadily refused to tell where
+she got the child, and the mystery of its descent was never solved. The
+wretched woman was sent to the Island and forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>John D. Wright, a venerable Quaker merchant, was chosen the first
+President of the Society. Upon the original call for the first meeting,
+preserved in the archives of the Society, may still be read a foot-note in
+his handwriting, quaintly amending the date to read, Quaker fashion, &#8220;12th
+mo. 15th 1874.&#8221; A year later, in his first review of the work that was
+before the young society, he wrote, &#8220;Ample laws have been passed by the
+Legislature of this State for the protection of and prevention of cruelty
+to little children. The trouble seems to be that it is nobody&#8217;s business
+to enforce them. Existing societies have as much, nay more to do than they
+can attend to in providing for those entrusted to their care. The Society
+for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children proposes to enforce by lawful
+means and with energy those laws, not vindictively, not to gain public
+applause, but to convince those who cruelly ill-treat and shamefully
+neglect little children that the time has passed when this can be done, in
+this State at least, with impunity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The promise has been faithfully kept. The old Quaker is dead, but his work
+goes on. The good that he did lives after him, and will live forever. The
+applause of the crowd his Society has not always won; but it has merited
+the confidence and approval of all right-thinking and right-feeling men.
+Its aggressive advocacy of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> defenceless childhood, always and everywhere,
+is to-day reflected from the statute-books of every State in the American
+Union, and well-nigh every civilized government abroad, in laws that
+sprang directly from its fearless crusade.</p>
+
+<p>In theory it had always been the duty of the State to protect the child
+&#8220;in person, and property, and in its opportunity for life, liberty, and
+happiness,&#8221; even against a worthless parent; in practice it held to the
+convenient view that, after all, the parent had the first right to the
+child and knew what was best for it. The result in many cases was thus
+described in the tenth annual report of the Society by President Elbridge
+T. Gerry, who in 1879 had succeeded Mr. Wright and has ever since been so
+closely identified with its work that it is as often spoken of nowadays as
+Mr. Gerry&#8217;s Society as under its corporate name:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>&#8220;Impecunious parents drove them from their miserable homes at all
+hours of the day and night to beg and steal. They were trained as
+acrobats at the risk of life and limb, and beaten cruelly if they
+failed. They were sent at night to procure liquor for parents too
+drunk to venture themselves into the streets. They were drilled in
+juvenile operas and song-and-dance variety business until their
+voices were cracked, their growth stunted, and their health
+permanently ruined by exposure and want of rest. Numbers of young
+Italians were imported by <i>padroni</i> under promises of a speedy
+return, and then sent out on the streets to play on musical
+instruments, to peddle flowers and small wares to the passers-by, and
+too often as a cover for immorality. Their surroundings were those of
+vice, profanity, and obscenity. Their only amusements were the
+dance-halls, the cheap theatres and museums, and the saloons. Their
+acquaintances were those hardened in sin, and both boys and girls
+soon became adepts in crime, and entered unhesitatingly on the
+downward path. Beaten <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>and abused at home, treated worse than
+animals, no other result could be expected. In the prisons, to which
+sooner or later these unhappy children gravitated, there was no
+separation of them from hardened criminals. Their previous education
+in vice rendered them apt scholars in the school of crime, and they
+ripened into criminals as they advanced in years.&#8221;</p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i018.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">CASE NO. 25,745 ON THE SOCIETY BLOTTER: ANNIE WOLFF, AGED
+SEVEN YEARS,<br />AS SHE WAS DRIVEN FORTH BY HER CRUEL STEP-MOTHER,<br />BEATEN AND
+STARVED, WITH HER ARMS TIED UPON HER BACK;<br />AND AS SHE APPEARED AFTER SIX MONTHS IN THE SOCIETY&#8217;S CARE.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>All that has not been changed in the seventeen years that have passed; to
+remodel depraved human nature has been beyond the power of the Society;
+but step by step under its prompting the law has been changed and
+strengthened; step by step life has been breathed into its dead letter,
+until now it is as able and willing to protect the child against violence
+or absolute cruelty as the Society is to enforce its protection. There is
+work enough for it to do yet. I have outlined some in the preceding
+chapters. In the past year (1891) it investigated 7,695 complaints and
+rescued 3,683 children from pernicious surroundings, some of them from a
+worse fate than death. &#8220;But let it not be supposed from this,&#8221; writes the
+Superintendent, &#8220;that crimes of and against children are on the increase.
+As a matter of fact wrongs to children have been materially lessened in
+New York by the Society&#8217;s action and influence during the past seventeen
+years. Some have entirely disappeared, having been eradicated root and
+branch from New York life, and an influence for good has been felt by the
+children themselves, as shown by the great diminution in juvenile
+delinquency from 1875, when the Society was first organized, to 1891, the
+figures indicating a decrease of fully fifty per cent.&#8221;<small><a name="f18.1" id="f18.1" href="#f18">[18]</a></small></p>
+
+<p>Other charitable efforts, working along the same line, contributed their
+share, perhaps the greater, to the latter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> result, but the Society&#8217;s
+influence upon the environment that shapes the childish mind and
+character, as well as upon the child itself, is undoubted. It is seen in
+the hot haste with which a general cleaning up and setting to rights is
+begun in a block of tenement barracks the moment the &#8220;cruelty man&#8221; heaves
+in sight; in the &#8220;holy horror&#8221; the child-beater has of him and his
+mission, and in the altered attitude of his victim, who not rarely
+nowadays confronts his tormentor with the threat, &#8220;if you do that I will
+go to the Children&#8217;s Society,&#8221; always effective except when drink blinds
+the wretch to consequences.</p>
+
+<p>The Society had hardly been in existence four years when it came into
+collision with the padrone and his abominable system of child slavery.
+These traders in human misery, adventurers of the worst type, made a
+practice of hiring the children of the poorest peasants in the Neapolitan
+mountain districts, to serve them begging, singing, and playing in the
+streets of American cities. The contract was for a term of years at the
+end of which they were to return the child and pay a fixed sum, a
+miserable pittance, to the parents for its use, but, practically, the
+bargain amounted to a sale, except that the money was never paid. The
+children left their homes never to return. They were shipped from Naples
+to Marseilles, and made to walk all the way through France, singing,
+playing, and dancing in the towns and villages through which they passed,
+to a seaport where they embarked for America. Upon their arrival here they
+were brought to a rendezvous in some out-of-the-way slum and taken in hand
+by the padrone, the partner of the one who had hired them abroad. He sent
+them out to play in the streets by day, singing and dancing in tune to
+their alleged music, and by night made them perform in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> lowest dens in
+the city. All the money they made the padrone took from them, beating and
+starving them if they did not bring home enough. None of it ever reached
+their parents. Under this treatment the boys grew up thieves&mdash;the girls
+worse. The life soon wore them out, and the Potter&#8217;s Field claimed them
+before their term of slavery was at an end, according to the contract. In
+far-off Italy the simple peasants waited anxiously for the return of
+little Tomaso or Antonia with the coveted American gold. No word ever came
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>The vile traffic had been broken up in England only to be transferred to
+America. The Italian government had protested. Congress had passed an act
+making it a felony for anyone knowingly to bring into the United States
+any person inveigled or forcibly kidnapped in any other country, with the
+intent to hold him here in involuntary service. But these children were
+not only unable to either speak or understand English, they were
+compelled, under horrible threats, to tell anyone who asked that the
+padrone was their father, brother, or other near relative. To get the
+evidence upon which to proceed against the padrone was a task of exceeding
+difficulty, but it was finally accomplished by co-operation of the Italian
+government with the Society&#8217;s agents in the case of the padrone Ancarola,
+who, in November, 1879, brought over from Italy seven boy slaves, between
+nine and thirteen years old, with their outfit of harps and violins. They
+were seized, and the padrone, who escaped from the steamer, was arrested
+in a Crosby Street groggery five days later. Before a jury in the United
+States Court the whole vile scheme was laid bare. One of the boys
+testified that Ancarola had paid his mother 20 lire (about four dollars)
+and his uncle 60 lire. For this sum he was to serve the padrone four
+years.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> Ancarola was convicted and sent to the penitentiary. The children
+were returned to their homes.</p>
+
+<p>The news travelled slowly on the other side. For years the padrone&#8217;s
+victims kept coming at intervals, but the society&#8217;s agents were on the
+watch, and when the last of the kidnappers was sent to prison in 1885
+there was an end of the business. The excitement attending the trial and
+the vigor with which the society had pushed its pursuit of the rascally
+padrone drew increased attention to its work. At the end of the following
+year twenty-four societies had been organized in other States upon its
+plan, and half the governments of Europe were enacting laws patterned
+after those of New York State. To-day there are a hundred societies for
+the prevention of cruelty to children in this country, independent of each
+other but owning the New York Society as their common parent, and nearly
+twice as many abroad, in England, France, Italy, Spain, the West Indies,
+South America, Canada, Australia, etc. The old link that bound the dumb
+brute with the helpless child in a common bond of humane sympathy has
+never been broken. Many of them include both in their efforts, and all the
+American societies, whether their care be children or animals, are united
+in an association for annual conference and co-operation, called the
+American Humane Association.</p>
+
+<p>In seventeen years the Society has investigated 61,749 complaints of
+cruelly to children, involving 185,247 children, prosecuted 21,282
+offenders, and obtained 20,697 convictions. The children it has saved and
+released numbered at the end of the year 1891 no less than 32,633.
+Whenever it has been charged with erring it has been on the side of mercy
+for the helpless child. It follows its charges into the police courts,
+seeing to it that, if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> possible, no record of crime is made against the
+offending child and that it is placed at once where better environment may
+help bring out the better side of its nature. It follows them into the
+institutions to which they are committed through its care, and fights
+their battles there, if need be, or the battles of their guardians under
+the law, against the greed of parents that would sacrifice the child&#8217;s
+prospects in life for the sake of the few pennies it could earn at home.
+And it generally wins the fight.</p>
+
+<p>The Society has never received any financial support from the city, but
+has depended entirely upon private benevolence. Ample means have always
+been at its disposal. Last year it sheltered, fed, and clothed 1,697
+children in its rooms. Most of them were the victims of drunken parents.
+With the Society they found safe shelter. &#8220;Sometimes,&#8221; Superintendent
+Jenkins says, &#8220;the children cry when they are brought here. They always
+cry when they go away.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Lastly,&#8221; so ran the old Quaker merchant&#8217;s address in his first annual
+report, &#8220;this Society, so far from interfering with the numerous societies
+and institutions already existing, is intended to aid them in their noble
+work. It proposes to labor in the interest of no one religious
+denomination, and to keep entirely free from political influences of every
+kind. Its duties toward the children whom it may rescue will be discharged
+when the future custody of them is decided by the courts of justice.&#8221;
+Before the faithful adherence to that plan all factious or sectarian
+opposition that impedes and obstructs so many other charities has fallen
+away entirely. Humanity is the religion of the Children&#8217;s Society. In its
+Board of Directors are men of all nationalities and of every creed. Its
+fundamental doctrine is that every rescued child must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> be given finally
+into the keeping of those of its own faith who will carry on the work
+begun in its rescue. Beyond that point the Society does not go. It has
+once refused the gift of a sea-side home lest it become a rival in a field
+where it would render only friendly counsel and aid.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of the little John Does a doubt arises which the Society
+settles by passing them on to the best institution available for each
+particular child, quite irrespective of sect. There are thirteen of them
+by this time, waifs found in the street by the Society&#8217;s agents or friends
+and never claimed by anybody. Though passed on, in the plan of the Society
+from which it never deviates, to be cared for by others, they are never
+lost sight of but always considered its special charges, for whom it bears
+a peculiar responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>Poor little Carmen, of whom I spoke in the chapter about Italian children,
+was one of the Society&#8217;s wards. Its footprints may be found all through
+these pages. To its printed reports, with their array of revolting cruelty
+and neglect, the reader is referred who would fully understand what a gap
+in a Christian community it bridges over.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i019.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">CLUB WITH WHICH A FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD WAS BRUTALLY BEATEN.</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+<h3>THE STORY OF THE FRESH AIR FUND</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">The</span> last echoes of the storm raised by the story of little Mary Ellen had
+not died in the Pennsylvania hills when a young clergyman in the obscure
+village of Sherman preached to his congregation one Sunday morning from
+the text, &#8220;Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these
+least, ye did it unto me,&#8221; a sermon which in its far-reaching effects was
+to become one of the strongest links in the chain of remorseful human
+sympathy then being forged in the fires of public indignation. Willard
+Parsons was a man with a practical mind as well as an open heart. He had
+lived in the city and had witnessed the suffering of the poor children in
+the stony streets on the hot summer days. Out there in the country he saw
+the wild strawberry redden the fields in June only to be trampled down by
+the cattle, saw, as the summer wore on, the blackberry-vines by the
+wayside groaning under their burden of sweet fruit, unconsidered and going
+to waste, with this starved host scarce a day&#8217;s journey away. Starved in
+body, in mind, and in soul! Not for them was the robin&#8217;s song <i>they</i>
+scarcely heard; not for them the summer fields or the cool forest shade,
+the sweet smell of briar and fern. Theirs was poverty and want, and heat
+and suffering and death&mdash;death as the entrance to a life for which the
+slum had been their only preparation. And such a preparation!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>All this the young preacher put in his sermon, and as he saw the love that
+went out from his own full heart kindling in the eager faces of his
+listeners, he told them what had been in his mind on many a lonely walk
+through those fields: that while the flowers and the brook and the trees
+might not be taken to the great prison-pen where the children were, these
+might be brought out to enjoy them there. There was no reason why it
+should not be done, even though it had not been before. If they were poor
+and friendless and starved, yet there had been One even poorer, more
+friendless than they. They at least had their slum. He had not where to
+lay his head. Well they might, in receiving the children into their homes,
+be entertaining angels unawares. &#8220;Inasmuch as ye did it unto even the
+least of these, ye did it unto Me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The last hymn had been sung and the congregation had gone home, eagerly
+discussing their pastor&#8217;s new scheme; but a little company of men and
+women remained behind in the church to talk it over with the minister.
+They were plain people. The sermon had shown them a plain duty to be done,
+and they knew only one way: to do it. The dinner-hour found them there
+yet, planning and talking it over. It was with a light heart that, as a
+result of their talk, the minister set out for New York the day after with
+an invitation to the children of the slums to come out in the woods and
+see how beautiful God had made his world. They were to be the guests of
+the people of Sherman for a fortnight, and a warm welcome awaited them
+there. A right royal one they received when, in a few days, the pastor
+returned, bringing with him nine little waifs, the poorest and the
+neediest he had found in the tenements to which he went with his offer.
+They were not such children as the farm-folk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> thereabouts saw every day,
+but they took them into their homes, and their hearts warmed to them day
+by day as they saw how much they needed their kindness, how under its
+influence they grew into bright and happy children like their own; and
+when, at the end of the two weeks, nine brown-faced laughing boys and
+girls went back to tell of the wondrous things they had heard and seen, it
+was only to make room for another little band. Nor has ever a summer
+passed since that first, which witnessed sixty city urchins made happy at
+Sherman, that has not seen the hospitable houses of the Pennsylvania
+village opened to receive holiday parties like those from the slums of the
+far city.</p>
+
+<p>Thus modestly began the Fresh Air movement that has brought health and
+happiness to more than a hundred thousand of New York&#8217;s poor children
+since, and has spread far and near, not only through our own but to
+foreign lands, wherever there is poverty to relieve and suffering to
+soothe. It has literally grown up around the enthusiasm and practical
+purpose of the one man whose personality pervades it to this day. Willard
+Parsons preaches now to a larger flock than any church could contain, but
+the burden of his sermon is ever the same. From the <i>Tribune</i> office he
+issues his appeals each spring, and money comes in abundance to carry on
+the work in which city and country vie with each other to lend a hand.
+After that first season at Sherman, a New York newspaper, the <i>Evening
+Post</i>, took the work under its wing and raised the necessary funds until
+in 1882 it passed into the keeping of its neighbor, the <i>Tribune</i>. Ever
+since it has been known as the <i>Tribune</i> Fresh Air Fund, and year by year
+has grown in extent and importance until at the end of the year 1891 more
+than 94,000 children were shown to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> have been given a two weeks&#8217; vacation
+in the country in the fifteen summers that had passed. The original 60 of
+1877 had grown to an army of holiday-makers numbering 13,568 in 1891. By
+this time the hundred thousand mark has long been passed. The total amount
+of money expended in sending the children out was $250,633.88, and so well
+had the great fund been managed that the average cost per child had fallen
+from $3.12 in the first year to $2.07 in the last. Generalship, indeed, of
+the highest order was needed at the headquarters of this army. In that
+summer there was not a day except Sunday when less than seven companies
+were sent out from the city. The little knot of children that hung timidly
+to the skirts of the good minister&#8217;s coat on that memorable first trip to
+Pennsylvania had been swelled until special trains, once of as many as
+eighteen cars, were in demand to carry those who came after.</p>
+
+<p>The plan of the Fresh Air Fund is practically unchanged from the day it
+was first conceived. The neediest and poorest are made welcome. Be they
+Protestants, Catholics, Jews, or heathen, it matters not if an invitation
+is waiting. The supply is governed entirely by the demands that come from
+the country. Sometimes it is a Catholic community that asks for children
+of that faith, sometimes prosperous Jews, who would bring sunlight and
+hope even to Ludlow Street; rarely yet Italians seeking their own. The cry
+of the missionary, from the slums in the hot July days: &#8220;How shall we give
+those babies the breath of air that means life?&mdash;no one asks for Italian
+children,&#8221; has not yet been answered. Prejudice dies slowly. When an end
+has been made of this at last, the Fresh Air Fund will receive a new boom.
+To my mind there are no more tractable children than the little Italians,
+none<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> more grateful for kindness; certainly none more in need of it.
+Against colored children there is no prejudice. Sometimes an invitation
+comes from Massachusetts or some other New England State for them, and
+then the missions and schools of Thompson Street give up their
+pickaninnies for a gleeful vacation spell. With the first spring days of
+April a canvass of the country within a radius of five hundred miles of
+New York has been begun. By the time the local committees send in their
+returns&mdash;so many children wanted in each town or district&mdash;the workers
+from the missions, the King&#8217;s Daughters&#8217; circles, the hospitals,
+dispensaries, industrial schools, nurseries, kindergartens, and the other
+gates through which the children&#8217;s host pours from the tenements, are at
+work, and the task of getting the little excursionists in shape for their
+holiday begins.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i020.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">SUMMER BOARDERS FROM MOTT STREET.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>That is the hardest task of all. Places are found for them readily enough;
+the money to pay their way is to be had for the asking; but to satisfy the
+reasonable demand of the country hosts that their little guests shall come
+clean from their tenement homes costs an effort, how great the workers who
+go among those homes &#8220;with a Bible in one hand and a pair of scissors and
+a cake of soap in the other&#8221; know best. A physician presides over these
+necessary preliminaries. In the months of July and August he is kept
+running from church to hospital, from chapel to nursery, inspecting the
+brigades gathered there and parting the sheep from the goats. With a list
+of the houses in which the health officers report contagious diseases, he
+goes through the ranks. Any hailing from such houses&mdash;the list is brought
+up to date every morning&mdash;are rejected first. The rest as they pass in
+review are numbered 1 and 2 on the register. The No. 1&#8217;s are ready to go
+at once if under the age limit of twelve years. They are the sheep, and,
+alas! few in number. Amid wailing and gnashing of teeth the cleansing of
+the goats is then begun. Heads are clipped and faces &#8220;planed off.&#8221;
+Sometimes a second and a third inspection still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> fails to give the child a
+clean bill of entry. Just what it means is best shown by the following
+extract from a mission worker&#8217;s report to Mr. Parsons, last summer, of the
+condition of her squad of 110, held under marching orders in an up-town
+chapel:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All the No. 2&#8217;s have now been thoroughly oiled, larkspur&#8217;d, washed in hot
+suds, and finally had an application of exterminator. This has all been
+done in the church to be as sure as possible that they are safe to send
+away. Ninety have been thus treated.&#8221; Her experience was typical. Twenty
+No. 1&#8217;s in a hundred was the average given by one of the oldest workers in
+the Fresh Air Service whose field is in the East Side tenements.</p>
+
+<p>But all this is of the past, as are the long braids of many a little girl,
+sacrificed with tears upon the altar of the coveted holiday, when the
+procession finally starts for the depot, each happy child carrying a
+lunch-bag, for often the journey is long, though never wearisome to the
+little ones. Their chaperon&mdash;some student, missionary, teacher, or kind
+man or woman who, for sweet charity&#8217;s sake, has taken upon him this
+arduous duty&mdash;awaits them and keeps the account of his charges as squad
+after squad is dropped at the station to which it is consigned. Sometimes
+the whole party goes in a lump to a common destination, more frequently
+the joyous freight is delivered, as the journey progresses, in this valley
+or that village, where wagons are waiting to receive it and carry it home.</p>
+
+<p>Once there, what wondrous things those little eyes behold, whose horizon
+was limited till that day, likely enough, by the gloom of the filthy
+court, or the stony street upon which it gave, with the gutter the
+boundary line between! The daisies by the roadside, with no sign to warn<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+them &#8220;off the grass,&#8221; the birds, the pig in its sty, the cow with its
+bell&mdash;each new marvel is hailed with screams of delight. &#8220;Sure, heaven
+can&#8217;t be no nicer place than this,&#8221; said a little child from one of the
+missions who for the first time saw a whole field of daisies; and her
+fellow-traveller, after watching intently a herd of cows chew the cud
+asked her host, &#8220;Say, mister, do you have to buy gum for all them cows to
+chew?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The children sent out by the Fresh Air Fund go as guests always. No penny
+of it is spent in paying for board. It goes toward paying their way only.
+Most of the railroad companies charge only one-fourth of the regular fare
+for the little picnickers up to the maximum of $3.50; beyond that they
+carry them without increase within the five hundred mile limit. Last year
+Mr. Parsons&#8217; wards were scattered over the country from the White
+Mountains in the East to Western Pennsylvania, from the lakes to West
+Virginia. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New York,
+New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia were hosts, and
+Canada entertained one large party. Ohio and North Carolina were on the
+list of entertainers, but the way was too long for the children. The
+largest party that went out comprised eleven hundred little summer
+boarders.</p>
+
+<p>Does any good result to the children? The physical effect may be summed up
+in Dr. Daniel&#8217;s terse statement, after many years of practical interest in
+the work: &#8220;I believe the Fresh Air Fund is the best plaster we have for
+the unjust social condition of the people.&#8221; She spoke as a doctor,
+familiar with the appearance of the children when they went out and when
+they came back. There are not wanting professional opinions showing most
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>remarkable cures to have resulted from even this brief respite from the
+slum. The explanation is simple: it was the slum that was the real
+complaint; with it the cause was removed and improvement came with a
+bound. As to the moral and educational effect, Mr. Parsons thus answers a
+clergyman who objected that &#8220;it will only make the child discontented with
+the surroundings where God placed him:&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I contend that a great gain has been made if you can only succeed in
+making the tenement-house child thoroughly discontented with his lot.
+There is some hope then of his getting out of it and rising to a higher
+plane. The new life he sees in the country, the contact with good people,
+not at arm&#8217;s length, but in their homes; not at the dinner, feast, or
+entertainment given to him while the giver stands by and looks <i>down</i> to
+see how he enjoys it, and remarks on his forlorn appearance; but brought
+into the family and given a seat at the table, where, as one boy wrote
+home, &#8216;I can have two pieces of pie if I want, and nobody says nothing if
+I take three pieces of cake;&#8217; or, as a little girl reported, where &#8216;We
+have lots to eat, and so much to eat that we could not tell you how much
+we get to eat.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is quite a different kind of service, and has resulted in the
+complete transformation of many a child. It has gone back to its
+wretchedness, to be sure, but in hundreds of instances about which I have
+personally known, it has returned with head and heart full of new ways,
+new ideas of decent living, and has successfully taught the shiftless
+parents the better way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The host&#8217;s side of it is presented by a pastor in Northern New York, whose
+people had entertained a hundred children: &#8220;They have left a rich blessing
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>behind them,&#8221; he wrote, &#8220;and they actually gave more than they received.
+They have touched the hearts of the people and opened the fountains of
+love, sympathy, and charity. The people have read about the importance of
+benevolence, and have heard many sermons on the beauty of charity; but
+these have been quickly forgotten. The children have been an object-lesson
+that will long live in their hearts and minds.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not least among the blessings of the Fresh Air work has been the drawing
+closer in a common interest and sympathy of the classes that are drifting
+farther and farther apart so fast, as wealth and poverty both increase
+with the growth of our great cities. Each year the invitations to the
+children have come in greater numbers. Each year the fund has grown
+larger, and as yet no collector has ever been needed or employed. &#8220;I can
+recall no community,&#8221; says Mr. Parsons, &#8220;where hospitality has been given
+once, but that some children have been invited back the following years.&#8221;
+In at least one instance of which he tells, the farmer&#8217;s family that
+nursed a poor consumptive girl back to health and strength did entertain
+an angel unawares. They were poor themselves in their way, straining every
+nerve to save enough to pay interest on a mortgage and thus avert the sale
+of their farm. A wealthy and philanthropic lady, who became interested in
+the girl after her return from her six weeks&#8217; vacation, heard the story of
+their struggle and saved the farm in the eleventh hour.</p>
+
+<p>What sort of a gap the Fund sometimes bridges over the following instance
+from its report for 1891 gives a feeble idea of: &#8220;Something less than a
+year ago a boy from this family fell out of an upper-story window and was
+killed. Later on, a daughter in the same family likewise fell out of a
+window, sustaining severe injuries, but she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> is still alive. About this
+same time a baby came and the father had to quit work and stay at home to
+see that all was well with the mother. By the time she was well, the
+father was stricken down with a fever. On his recovery he went to hunt
+another job. On the first day at work a brick fell off a scaffold and
+fractured his skull. That night the <i>Tribune</i> Fresh Air Fund came to the
+rescue and relieved the almost distracted mother by sending four of her
+children to the country for two weeks. The little ones made so many good
+friends that the family is now well provided for.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>From Mr. Parsons&#8217; record of &#8220;cases&#8221; that have multiplied in fifteen years
+until they would fill more than one stout volume, this one is taken as a
+specimen brick:</p>
+
+<p>In the earlier days of the work a bright boy of ten was one of a company
+invited to Schoharie County, N. Y. He endeared himself so thoroughly to
+his entertainers, who &#8220;live in a white house with green blinds and
+Christmas-trees all around it,&#8221; that they asked and received permission to
+keep the lad permanently. The following is an exact copy of a part of the
+letter he wrote home after he had been for a few months in his new home:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dear mother</span>: i am still to Mrs. D&mdash;&mdash; and i was so Busy that i Could
+not Write Sooner i drive the horses and put up the Cows and clean out
+the Cow Stable i am all well i pick stones and i have an apple tree 6
+Feet High and i have got a pair of new pants and a new Coat and a
+pair of Suspenders and Mr. D&mdash;&mdash; is getting a pair of New Boots made
+for me We killed one pig and one Cow i am going to plow a little
+piece of land and plant Some Corn. When Mr. D&mdash;&mdash; killed the Cow i
+helped and Mr. D&mdash;&mdash;had to take the Cow skin to be taned to make
+leather and Mr. D&mdash;&mdash; gave the man Cow skin for leather to make me
+Boots i am going to school to-morrow and I want to tell<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+lizzie&mdash;pauline&mdash;Charlie&mdash;Christie&mdash;maggie&mdash;george and you to all
+write to me and if they all do when Christmas Comes i will send all
+of you something nice if my uncle frank comes to see yous you must
+tell him to write to me i Close my letter</p>
+
+<p class="right">From your oldest son A&mdash;&mdash;.</p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>A year after that time the mother died. Some time afterward an uncle began
+writing for the lad to come back to the city&mdash;he coveted his small
+earnings. But the little fellow had sense enough to see that he was better
+off where he was. Finally the uncle went after the boy, and told him his
+brother was dying in the hospital, and was calling constantly for him.
+Under such circumstances his foster parents readily gave him permission to
+return with the uncle for a visit. Before they reached the city the uncle
+told him he should never go back. He sent him to work at Eleventh Avenue
+and Twenty-ninth Street, in a workroom situated in the cellar, and his
+bedroom, like those in most tenement houses, had no outside window. The
+third day he was sent up-stairs on an errand, and as soon as he saw the
+open door he bolted. He remembered that a car that passed Fourth Street
+and Avenue C would take him to the People&#8217;s Line for Albany. He ran with
+all his might to Fourth Street, and then followed the car-tracks till he
+saw on the large flag &#8220;People&#8217;s Line.&#8221; He told part of his story to the
+clerk, and finally added, &#8220;I am one of Mr. Parsons&#8217; Fresh-Air boys and I
+have got to go to Albany.&#8221; That settled the matter, and the clerk readily
+gave him a pass. A gentleman standing by gave him a quarter for his
+supper. He held on to his appetite as well as his quarter, and in the
+morning laid his twenty-five cents before the ticket agent at Albany, and
+called for a ticket to R&mdash;&mdash;, a small place fifty miles distant. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> got
+the ticket. After a few miles&#8217; walk from R&mdash;&mdash; he reached his new home
+safely, and there he proposed to stay. He said he would take to the woods
+if his uncle came after him again. This happened ten years ago.</p>
+
+<p>About a year ago a letter came from the young fellow. He is now an active
+Christian, married, and worth property, and expects in a few years to have
+his farm all paid for.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred benevolent enterprises have clustered about the Fresh Air Fund
+as the years have passed, patterning after it and accepting help from it
+to carry out their own plans. Churches provide excursions for their poor
+children and the Fund pays the way. Vacations for working girls, otherwise
+out of reach, are made attainable by its intervention. An independent
+feature is the <i>Tribune</i> Day Excursion that last summer gave nearly thirty
+thousand poor persons, young and old, a holiday at a beautiful grove on
+the Hudson, with music and milk to their hearts&#8217; desire. The expense was
+borne by a wealthy citizen of this city, who gave boats, groves, and
+entertainment free of charge, stipulating only that his name should not be
+disclosed.</p>
+
+<p>Other cities have followed the example of New York. Boston and
+Philadelphia have their &#8220;Country Week,&#8221; fashioned after the Fresh Air Fund
+idea. Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other cities clear to San
+Francisco have sent committees to examine its workings, and deputations
+have come from Canada, from London and Manchester, where the holiday work
+is doing untold good and is counted among the most useful of philanthropic
+efforts. German, Austrian, and Italian cities have fallen into line, and
+the movement has spread even to the Sandwich Islands. Yet this great work,
+as far as New York, where it had its origin, is concerned, has never had
+organization<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> or staff of officers of any sort. Three well-known citizens
+audit Mr. Parsons&#8217; accounts once a year. The rest he manages and always
+has managed himself. &#8220;The constitution and by-laws,&#8221; he says, drily, &#8220;are
+made and amended from day to day as required, and have yet to be written.&#8221;
+The Fresh Air Fund rests firmly upon a stronger foundation than any human
+law or enactment. Its charter was written in the last commandment that is
+the sum of all the rest: &#8220;That ye love one another.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The method of the Fresh Air Fund was and is its great merit. Its plan,
+when first presented, was unique. There had been other and successful
+efforts before that to give the poor in their vile dwellings an outing in
+the dog days, but they took the form rather of organized charities than of
+this spontaneous outpouring of good-will and fellowship between brother
+and brother: &#8220;My house and my home are yours; come and see me!&#8221; The New
+York <i>Times</i> had conducted a series of free excursions, and three summers
+before Mr. Parsons preached his famous sermon, the Children&#8217;s Aid Society,
+that had battled for twenty years with the slum for the possession of the
+child, had established a Health Home down the Bay, to which it welcomed
+the children from its Industrial schools and the sick babies that were
+gathered in by its visiting physicians. This work has grown steadily in
+extent and importance with the new interest in the poor and their lives
+that has characterized our generation. To-day the Society conducts a
+Summer Home at Bath Beach where the girls are given a week&#8217;s vacation, and
+the boys a day&#8217;s outing; a cottage for crippled girls, and at Coney Island
+a Health Home for mothers with sick children. Sick and well, some ten
+thousand little ones were reached by them last year. The delight of a
+splash in the &#8220;big<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> water&#8221; every day is the children&#8217;s at Bath. Two
+hundred at a time, the boys plunge in headlong and strike out manfully for
+the Jersey shore, thirteen miles away; but the recollection of the
+merry-go-round with the marvellous wooden beasts, the camera obscura, the
+scups, and the flying machine on shore, not to mention the promised
+lemonade and cake, makes them turn back before yet they have reached the
+guard-boat where they cease to touch bottom. The girls, less boisterous,
+but quite as happy, enjoy the sight of the windmill &#8220;where they make the
+wind that makes it so nice and cool,&#8221; the swings and the dinner, rarely
+forgetting, at first, after eating as much as they can possibly hold, to
+hide something away for their next meal, lest the unexampled abundance
+give out too soon. That it should last a whole week seems to them too
+unreasonable to risk.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i021.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">MAKING FOR THE &#8220;BIG WATER.&#8221;</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>At the Health Home more than eighteen hundred sick babies were cared for
+last year. They are carried down, pale and fretful, in their mother&#8217;s
+arms, and at the end of the week come back running at her side. The effect
+of the sea-air upon a child sick with the summer scourge of the tenements,
+cholera infantum, is little less than miraculous. Even a ride on a river
+ferryboat is often enough to put life into the weary little body again.
+The salt breeze no sooner fans the sunken cheeks than the fretful wail is
+hushed and the baby slumbers, quietly, restfully, to wake with a laugh and
+an appetite, on the way to recovery. The change is so sudden that even the
+mother is often deceived and runs in alarm for the doctor, thinking that
+the end is at hand.</p>
+
+<p>Scores of such scenes are witnessed daily in the floating hospital of St.
+John&#8217;s Guild, the great marine cradle that goes down the Bay every
+week-day, save Saturday, in July and August, with hundreds upon hundreds
+of wailing babies and their mothers. Twice a week it is the west-siders&#8217;
+turn; on three days it gathers its cargo along the East River, where
+crowds with yellow tickets stand anxiously awaiting its arrival. The
+floating hospital carries its own staff of physicians, including a
+member of the Health Department&#8217;s corps of tenement doctors, who is on the
+lookout for chance contagion. The summer corps is appointed by the Health
+Board upon the approach of hot weather and begins a systematic canvass of
+the tenements immediately after the Fourth of July, followed by the King&#8217;s
+Daughters&#8217; nurses, who take up the doctor&#8217;s work where he had to leave it.
+With his prescription pad he carries a bunch of tickets for the Floating
+Hospital, and the tickets usually give out first. Any illness that is not
+contagious is the baby&#8217;s best plea for admission. It never pleads in vain,
+unless it be well and happy, and even then it is allowed to go along, if
+there is no other way for the mother to get off with its sick sister. For
+those who need more than one day&#8217;s outing, the Guild maintains a Seaside
+hospital, three hours&#8217; sail down the Bay, on Staten Island, where mother
+and child may remain without a cent of charge until the rest, the fresh
+air, and the romp on the beach have given the baby back health and
+strength. Opposite the hospital, but out at sea where the breeze has free
+play over the crowded decks, the great hospital barge anchors every day
+while the hungry hosts are fed and the children given a salt-water bath on
+board.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i022.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">FLOATING HOSPITAL&mdash;ST. JOHN&#8217;S GUILD.</span></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>St. John&#8217;s Guild is not, as some have supposed from its name, a
+denominational charity. It is absolutely neutral in matters of sect and
+religion, leaving the Church to take care of the soul while it heals the
+body of the child. It is so with the Bartholdi Cr&egrave;che on Randall&#8217;s Island,
+in the shadow of the city&#8217;s Foundling Hospital, that ferries children over
+the river for a romp on the smooth, green lawns, on presentation of a
+ticket with the suggestive caution printed on the back that &#8220;all persons
+behaving rudely or taking liberties will be sent back by the first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> boat.&#8221;
+&#8220;The Little Mothers&#8221; Aid Society follows the same plan in reaching out for
+the little home worker whose work never ends, the girl upon whom falls the
+burden and responsibility of caring for the perennial baby when scarcely
+more than a baby herself, often even the cooking and all the rest of the
+housework so that the mother may have her own hands free to help earn the
+family living. These little slaves the Society drums up, &#8220;hires&#8221; the baby
+attended in a nursery if need be, and carries the little mother off for a
+day in the woods up at Pelham Bay Park where the Park <ins class="correction" title="original: Commisioners">Commissioners</ins> have
+set a house on the beach apart for their use in the summer months. There
+was much opposition to this plan at first among the East Side Jews, whose
+children needed the outing more sorely than any other class; but when a
+few of the more venturesome had come back well-fed, in clean clothes,
+whereas they went out in rags, and reported that they had escaped baptism,
+the sentiment of Ludlow Street underwent a change, and so persistent were
+the raids made upon the Society&#8217;s chaperones after that that they had to
+take another route for awhile, lest their resources should be swamped in a
+single trip. The United Hebrew Charities, like many other relief societies
+with a special field, provide semi-weekly excursions for the poorest of
+their own people, and maintain a sea-side sanitarium for the sick
+children.</p>
+
+<p>There is no lack of fresh air charities nowadays. Their number is
+increasing year by year and so is their helpfulness, though it has come to
+a pass where it is necessary to exercise some care to prevent them from
+lapping over, as Sunday School Christmas-trees have been known to do, and
+opening the way for mischief. There can be no doubt that their civilizing
+influence is great. It could hardly be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> otherwise, with the same lessons
+of cleanliness and decency enforced year after year. The testimony is that
+there is an improvement; the children come better &#8220;groomed&#8221; for
+inspection. The lesson has reached the mother and the home. The subtler
+lesson of the flowers, the fields, the sky, and the sea, and of the
+kindness that asked no reward, has not been lost either. One very striking
+fact this charity has brought out that is most hopeful. It emphasizes the
+difference I pointed out between the material we have here to work upon in
+these children and that which is the despair of philanthropists abroad, in
+England for instance. We are told of children there who, coming from their
+alleys into the field, &#8220;are able to feel no touch of kinship between
+themselves and Mother Nature&#8221;<small><a name="f19.1" id="f19.1" href="#f19">[19]</a></small> when brought into her very presence. Not
+so with ours. They may &#8220;guess&#8221; that the sea is salt because it is full of
+codfish; may insist that the potatoes are home-made &#8220;cause I seen the
+garding;&#8221; both of which were actual opinions expressed by the Bath Beach
+summer boarders; but the interest, the sympathy, the hearty appreciation
+of it, is there always, the most encouraging symptom of all. Down in the
+worst little ruffian&#8217;s soul there is, after all, a tender spot not yet
+pre-empted by the slum. And Mother Nature touches it at once. They are
+chums on the minute.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+<h3>THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">If</span> the influence of an annual cleaning up is thus distinctly traced in the
+lives of the children, what must be the effect of the daily teaching of
+the kindergarten, in which soap is always the moral agent that leads all
+the rest? I have before me the inventory of purchases for a single school
+of this kind that was started a year ago in a third loft of a Suffolk
+Street tenement. It included several boxes of soap and soap-dishes, 200
+feet of rope, 10 bean-bags, 24 tops, 200 marbles, a box of chalk, a
+base-ball outfit for indoor use, a supply of tiddledywinks and &#8220;sliced
+animals,&#8221; and 20 clay pipes. The pipes were not for lessons in smoking,
+but to smooth the way for a closer acquaintance with the soap by the
+friendly intervention of the soap-bubble. There were other games and no
+end of colored paper to cut up, the dear delight of childhood, but made in
+the hands and under the eyes of the teacher to train eye and hand while
+gently but firmly cementing the friendship ushered in by the gorgeous
+bubble. No wonder, with such a stock, a mother complained that she had to
+whip her Jimmie to keep him home.</p>
+
+<p>Without a doubt the kindergarten is one of the longest steps forward that
+has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for in gathering in the
+children it is gradually, but surely, conquering also the street with its
+power for mischief. There is only one force that, to my mind,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> exerts an
+even stronger influence upon the boys&#8217; lives especially; I mean the club,
+of which I shall speak presently. But that comes at a later stage. The
+kindergarten begins at the very beginning, and in the best of all ways,
+with the children&#8217;s play. What it does, counts at both ends on that tack.
+Very soon it makes itself felt in the street and in what goes on there, as
+anyone can see for himself by observing the children&#8217;s play in a tenement
+neighborhood where there is a kindergarten and again where there is none,
+while by imperceptibly turning the play into work that teaches habits of
+observation and of industry that stick, it builds a strong barrier against
+the doctrine of the slum that the world owes one a living, which lies in
+ambush for the lad on every grog-shop corner. And all corners in the
+tenement districts are grog-shop corners. Beyond all other considerations,
+beyond its now admitted function as the right beginning of all education,
+whether of rich or poor, its war upon the street stands to me as the true
+office of the kindergarten in a city like New York, with a tenement-house
+population of a million and a quarter souls.<small><a name="f20.1" id="f20.1" href="#f20">[20]</a></small> The street itself owns
+it, with virtual surrender. Hostile as its normal attitude is to every new
+agency of reform, the best with the worst, I have yet to hear of the first
+instance in which a kindergarten has been molested by the toughest
+neighborhood, or has started a single dead cat on a post-mortem career of
+window-smashing, whether it sprang from Christian, Jewish, or heathen
+humanity. There is scarce a mission or a boy&#8217;s club in the city that can
+say as much.</p>
+
+<p>The kindergarten is no longer an experiment in New<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> York. Probably as many
+as a hundred are to-day in operation, or will be when the recently
+expressed purpose of the Board of Education to make the kindergarten a
+part of the public school system has been fully carried out. The
+Children&#8217;s Aid Society alone conducts a dozen in connection with its
+industrial schools, and the New York Kindergarten Association nine, if its
+intention of opening two new schools by the time this book is in the
+printer&#8217;s hands is realized. There is no theology, though there is a heap
+of religion in most of them. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Theosophists,
+and Ethical Culturists, if I may so call them, men of one or of various
+opinions, or of none, concerning the hereafter, alike make use of the
+kindergarten as a means of reaching and saving the shipwrecked of the
+present. Sometimes the Sunday School is made to serve as a feeder for the
+kindergarten, or the kindergarten for the Sunday School. Sometimes the
+wisdom that wrests success from doubt and perplexity is expressed in the
+fundamental resolution that the kindergarten &#8220;shall not be a Sunday
+School.&#8221; The system is the same in all cases with very little change. &#8220;We
+have tried it and seen it tried with various kinks and variations,&#8221; said
+one of the old managers of the Children&#8217;s Aid Society to me, &#8220;but after
+all there is only one way, the way of the great kindergartner who said,
+&#8216;We learn by doing.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A clean face is the ticket of admission to the kindergarten. A clean or
+whole frock is wisely not insisted upon too firmly at the start; torn or
+dirty clothes are not so easily mended as a smudged face, but the
+kindergarten reaches that too in the end, and by the same road as the
+Fresh Air scrubbing&mdash;the home. Once he is let in, the child is in for a
+general good time that has little of school or visible discipline to
+frighten<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> him. He joins in the ring for the familiar games, delighted to
+find that the teacher knows them too, and can be &#8220;It&#8221; and his &#8220;fair lady&#8221;
+in her turn. He does not notice the little changes the game has undergone,
+the kindergarten touch here and there that lifts it out of the mud; but
+the street does presently, when the new version is transferred to it, and
+is the better for it. After the game there are a hundred things for him to
+do that do not seem like work in the least. Between threading colored
+beads, cutting and folding pink and green papers in all sorts of odd
+ways, as boats and butterflies and fancy baskets; moulding, pasting,
+drawing, weaving and blowing soap-bubbles when all the rest has ceased to
+hold his attention, the day slips by like a beautiful dream, and he flatly
+refuses to believe that it is gone when the tenement home claims him
+again. Not infrequently he goes home howling, to be found the next morning
+waiting at the door an hour before the teacher comes. Little Jimmie&#8217;s
+mother says that he gets up at six o&#8217;clock to go to the Fifty-first Street
+kindergarten, and that she has to whip him to make him wait until nine.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i023.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">PLAYING AT HOUSEKEEPING.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The hours pass with happy play that slowly but surely moulds head, hand,
+and heart together. The utmost freedom is allowed, but it stops short of
+the license of the street. Its law of violence is replaced by the law of
+love. The child learns to govern himself. Not at once; I observed two or
+three black eyes during a tour of a half-score kindergartens, last June,
+that showed that the street yielded its reign reluctantly. During my visit
+to the East Sixty-third Street school I became interested in a little
+fellow who was its special pet and the ward of the Alumn&aelig; of the Normal
+college, who through the New York Kindergarten Association had established
+and maintained the school. Johnny was a sweet little fellow, one of eight
+children from a wretched tenement home down the street into which the
+kindergartner had found her way. The youngest of the eight was a baby that
+was getting so big and heavy that it half killed the mother to drag it
+around when she went out working, and the father, with a consideration for
+her that was generously tempered with laziness, was considering the
+advisability of staying home to take care of it himself, &#8220;so as to give
+her a show.&#8221; There was a refinement of look and manner, if not of dress,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+about little Johnny after he was washed clean, that made the tenement
+setting seem entirely too plebeian for him, and his rescuers had high
+hopes of his future. I regret to say that I saw the pet, before I left,
+deliberately knock the smallest baby in the school down, and when he was
+banished from the ring in consequence and condemned to take his howling
+playmate over in the corner and show her pictures until he repented, take
+an unworthy revenge by pinching her surreptitiously until she howled
+louder. Worse than that, when the baby had finally been comforted with a
+headless but squeaking toy sheep, he secretly pulled the insides and the
+ba-a out of the lambkin through its broken neck, when no one was looking.
+I was told that Johnny was believed to have the making of a diplomat in
+his little five-year-old body, and I think it very likely&mdash;of a politician
+anyway.</p>
+
+<p>While this was going on, another boy, twice as large as Johnny, had been
+temporarily exiled from the ring for clumsiness. It was even more
+hopelessly constitutional, to all appearances, than Johnny&#8217;s Machiavelian
+cunning. In the game he had persistently stumbled over his own feet. Made
+to take a seat at the long table, he fell off his chair twice in one
+minute from sheer embarrassment. In luminous contrast to his awkwardness
+was the desperate agility of a little Irishman I had just left in another
+kindergarten. Each time he was told to take his seat, which was about
+every ten seconds, he would perform the feat with great readiness by
+climbing over the back of the chair as a dog climbs over a fence, to the
+consternation of the teacher, whose reproachful &#8220;O Alexander!&#8221; he disarmed
+with a cheerful &#8220;I&#8217;m all right, Miss Brown,&#8221; and an offer to shake hands.</p>
+
+<p>Let it not be inferred from this that the kindergarten<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> is the home of
+disorder. Just the reverse. Order and prompt obedience are the cardinal
+virtues taught there, but taught in such a way as to make the lesson seem
+all fun and play to the child. It sticks all the better. It is the
+province of the kindergarten to rediscover, as it were, the natural
+feelings the tenement had smothered. But for its appeal, the love of the
+beautiful might slumber in those children forever. In their homes there is
+nothing to call it into life. The ideal of the street is caricature,
+burlesque, if nothing worse. Under the gentle training of the
+kindergartner the slumbering instinct blossoms forth in a hundred
+different ways, from the day the little one first learns the difference
+between green and red by stringing colored beads for a necklace &#8220;for
+teacher,&#8221; until later on he is taught to make really pretty things of
+pasteboard and chips to take home for papa and mamma to keep. And they do
+keep them, proud of the child&mdash;who would not?&mdash;and their influence is felt
+where mayhap there was darkness and dirt only before. So the kindergarten
+reaches directly into the home, too, and thither follows the teacher, if
+she is the right kind, with encouragement and advice that is not lost
+either. No door is barred against her who comes in the children&#8217;s name. In
+the truest and best sense she is a missionary to the poor.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly all the kindergartens in this city are crowded. Many have scores of
+applicants upon the register whom they cannot receive. There are no
+truants among their pupils. All of the New York Kindergarten Association&#8217;s
+schools are crowded, and new are added as fast as the necessary funds are
+contributed. The Association was organized in the fall of 1889 with the
+avowed purpose of engrafting the kindergarten upon the public school
+system of the city, through persistent agitation. There had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> been no
+official recognition of it up till that time. The Normal School
+kindergarten was an experiment not countenanced by the School Board. The
+Association has now accomplished its purpose, but its work, far from being
+ended, has but just begun. It is doubtful if all the kindergartens in the
+city, including those now in the public schools, accommodate much more
+than five or six thousand children, if that number. The last sanitary
+census showed that there were 160,708 children under five years old in the
+tenements. At least half of these are old enough to be in a kindergarten,
+and ought to be, seeing how little schooling they will get after they
+outgrow it. That leaves in round numbers 75,000 children yet to be so
+provided for in New York&#8217;s tenements. There is no danger that the
+kindergarten will become too &#8220;common&#8221; in this city for a while yet. As an
+adjunct to the public school in preparing the young minds for more serious
+tasks, it is admitted by teachers to be most valuable. But its greatest
+success is as a jail deliverer. &#8220;The more kindergartens the fewer prisons&#8221;
+is a saying the truth of which the generation that comes after us will be
+better able to grasp than we.</p>
+
+<p>The kindergarten is the city&#8217;s best truant officer. Not only has it no
+truants itself, but it ferrets out a lot who are truants from necessity,
+not from choice, and delivers them over to the public school. There are
+lots of children who are kept at home because someone has to mind the baby
+while father and mother earn the bread for the little mouths. The
+kindergarten steps in and releases these little prisoners. If the baby is
+old enough to hop around with the rest, the kindergarten takes it. If it
+can only crawl and coo, there is the nursery annex. Sometimes it is an
+independent concern. Almost every church or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> charity that comes into
+direct touch with the poor has nowadays its nursery where poor mothers may
+leave their children to be cared for while they are out working. Relief
+more practical could not be devised. A small fee, usually five cents, is
+charged as a rule for each baby. Pairs come cheaper, and three go for ten
+cents at the nursery in the Wilson mission. Over 50,000 babies were
+registered there last year, which meant, if not 5,000 separate children,
+at least 5,000 days&#8217; work and wages to poor mothers in dire need of both,
+and a good, clean, healthy start for the infants, a better than the
+tenement could have given them. To keep them busy, when the rocking-horse
+and the picture-book have lost their charm, the kindergarten grows
+naturally out of the nursery, where that was the beginning, just as the
+nursery stepped in to supplement the kindergarten where that had the lead.
+The two go hand in hand. The soap cure is even more potent in the nursery
+than in the kindergarten, as a silent rebuke to the mother, who rarely
+fails to take the hint. At the Five Points House of Industry the children
+who come in for the day receive a general scrubbing twice a week, and the
+whole neighborhood has a cleaner look after it. The establishment has come
+to be known among the ragamuffins of Paradise Park as &#8220;the school where
+dey washes &#8217;em.&#8221; Its value as a moral agent may be judged from the
+statements of the Superintendent that some of the children &#8220;cried at the
+sight of a washtub,&#8221; as if it were some new and hideous instrument of
+torture for their oppression.</p>
+
+<p>Private benevolence in this, as in all measures for the relief of the
+poor, has been a long way ahead of public action; properly so, though it
+has seemed sometimes that we might as a body make a little more haste and
+try to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> catch up. It has lately, by the establishment of children&#8217;s
+play-grounds in certain tenement districts, west and east, provided a kind
+of open-air kindergarten that has hit the street in a vital spot. These
+play-grounds do not take the place of the small parks which the city has
+neglected to provide, but they show what a boon these will be some day.
+There are at present, as far as I know, three of them, not counting the
+back-yard &#8220;beaches&#8221; and &#8220;Coney Islands,&#8221; that have made the practical
+missionaries of the College Settlement, the King&#8217;s Daughters&#8217; Tenement
+Chapter, and like helpers of the poor, solid with their little friends.
+One of them, the largest, is in Ninety-second Street, on the East Side,
+another at the foot of West Fiftieth Street, and still another in West
+Twenty-eighth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the block long
+since well named Poverty Gap. Two, three, or half a dozen vacant lots,
+borrowed or leased of the owner, have been levelled out, a few loads of
+sand dumped in them for the children to dig in; scups, swings, and
+see-saws, built of rough timber; a hydrant in the corner; little
+wheelbarrows, toy-spades and pails to go round, and the outfit is
+complete. Two at least of the three are supported each by a single
+generous woman, who pays the salaries of a man janitor and of two women
+&#8220;teachers&#8221; who join in the children&#8217;s play, strike up &#8220;America&#8221; and the
+&#8220;Star Spangled Banner&#8221; when they tire of &#8220;Sally in our Alley&#8221; and
+&#8220;Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,&#8221; and by generally taking a hand in what goes on
+manage to steer it into safe and mannerly ways.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i024.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">POVERTY GAPPERS PLAYING CONEY ISLAND.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>More than two hundred children were digging, swinging, see-sawing, and
+cavorting about the Poverty Gap playground when I looked in on a hot
+Saturday afternoon last July. Long files of eager girls, whose shrill
+voices used to make the echoes of the Gap ring with angry clamor, awaited
+their turn at the scups, quiet as mice and without an ill word when they
+trod upon each other&#8217;s toes. The street that used to swarm with
+mischievous imps was as quiet as a church. The policeman on the beat stood
+swinging his club idly in the gate. It was within sight of this spot that
+the Alley Gang beat one of his comrades half to death for telling them to
+go home and let decent people pass; the same gang which afterward murdered
+young Healey for the offence of being a decent, hard-working lad, who was
+trying to support his aged father and mother by his work. The Healeys
+lived in one of the rear houses that stood where the children now skip at
+their play, and the murder was done on his doorstep. The next morning I
+found the gang camping on a vacant floor in the adjoining den, as if
+nothing had happened. The tenants knew the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> toughs were there, but were
+afraid of betraying them. All that was only a couple of years ago; but a
+marvellous transformation had been wrought in the Gap. The toughs were
+gone, with the old tenements that harbored them. Poverty Gap itself was
+gone. A decent flat had taken the place of the shanty across the street
+where a &#8217;longshoreman kicked his wife to death in drunken rage. And this
+play-ground, with its swarms of happy children who a year ago would have
+pelted the stranger with mud from behind the nearest truck&mdash;that was the
+greatest change of all. The retiring toughs have dubbed it &#8220;Holy Terror
+Park&#8221; in memory of what it was, not of what it is. Poverty Park the
+policeman called it, with more reason. It was not exactly an attractive
+place. A single stunted ailanthus tree struggled over the fence of the
+adjoining yard, the one green spot between ugly and ragged brick walls.
+The &#8220;sand&#8221; was as yet all mud and dirt, and the dust the many little feet
+kicked up was smothering. But the children thought it lovely, and lovely
+it was for Poverty Gap, if not for Fifth Avenue.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i025.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">POVERTY GAP TRANSFORMED&mdash;THE SPOT WHERE YOUNG HEALEY WAS MURDERED IS NOW A PLAYGROUND.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I came back to my office to find a letter there from a rich man who lives
+on the Avenue, offering to make another Poverty Park for the
+tenement-house children of another street, if he had to buy the lots. I
+told him the story of Poverty Gap and bade him go and see for himself if
+he could spend his money to better purpose. There are no play-grounds yet
+below Fourteenth Street and room and need for fifty. The Alley and the
+Avenue could not meet on a plane that argues better for the understanding
+between the two that has been too long and needlessly delayed.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+<h3>THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">That</span> &#8220;dirt is a disease,&#8221; and their mission to cure it, was the new gospel
+which the managers of the Children&#8217;s Aid Society carried to the slums a
+generation ago. In practice they have not departed from their profession.
+Their pill is the Industrial School, their plaster a Western farm and a
+living chance in exchange for the tenement and the city slum. The
+wonder-cures they have wrought by such simple treatment have been many. In
+the executive chair of a sovereign State sits to-day a young man who
+remembers with gratitude and pride the day they took him in hand and, of
+the material the street would have moulded into a tough, made an honorable
+man and a governor. And from among the men whose careers of usefulness
+began in the Society&#8217;s schools, and who to-day, as teachers, ministers,
+lawyers, and editors, are conspicuous ornaments of the communities, far
+and near, in which they have made their homes, he would have no difficulty
+in choosing a cabinet that would do credit and honor to his government.
+Prouder monument could be erected to no man&#8217;s memory than this record at
+the grave of the late Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children&#8217;s
+Aid Society.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i026.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE LATE CHARLES LORING BRACE, FOUNDER OF THE CHILDREN&#8217;S AID SOCIETY.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The Industrial School plants itself squarely in the gap between the
+tenement and the public school. If it does not fill it, it at least
+spreads itself over as much of it as it can, and in that position
+demonstrates that this land of lost or missing opportunities is not the
+barren ground once supposed, but of all soil the most fruitful, if
+properly tilled. Wherever the greatest and the poorest crowds are, there
+also is the Industrial School. The Children&#8217;s Aid Society maintains
+twenty-one in seventeen of the city&#8217;s twenty-four wards, not counting
+twelve evening schools,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> five of which are in the Society&#8217;s
+lodging-houses. It is not alone in the field. The American Female Guardian
+Society conducts twelve such day schools, and individual efforts in the
+same direction are not wanting. The two societies&#8217; schools last year
+reached a total enrolment of nearly fifteen thousand children, and an
+average attendance of almost half that number. Slum children, all of them.
+Only such are sought and admitted. The purpose of the schools, in the
+language of the last report of the Children&#8217;s Aid Society, whose work,
+still carried on with the aggressive enthusiasm that characterized its
+founder, may well be taken as typical and representative in this field,
+&#8220;is to receive and educate children who cannot be accepted by the public
+schools, either by reason of their ragged and dirty condition, or owing to
+the fact that they can attend but part of the time, because they are
+obliged to sell papers or to stay at home to help their parents. The
+children at our schools belong to the lowest and poorest class of people
+in the city.&#8221; They are children, therefore, who to a very large extent
+speak another language at home than the one they come to the school to
+learn, and often have to work their way in by pantomime. It is encouraging
+to know that these schools are almost always crowded to their utmost
+capacity.</p>
+
+<p>A census of the Society&#8217;s twenty-one day schools, that was taken last
+April, showed that they contained that day 5,132 pupils, of whom 198 were
+kindergarten children under five years of age, 2,347 between five and
+seven, and 2,587 between eight and fourteen years of age. Considerably
+more than ten per cent.&mdash;the exact number was 571&mdash;did not understand
+questions put to them in English. They were there waiting to &#8220;catch on,&#8221;
+silent but attentive observers of what was going on, until such time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> as
+they should be ready to take a hand in it themselves. Divided according to
+nativity, 2,082 of the children were found to be of foreign birth. They
+hailed from 22 different countries; 3,050 were born in this country, but
+they were able to show only 1,009 native parents out of 6,991 whose
+pedigrees could be obtained. The other 5,176 were foreign born, and only
+810 of them claimed English as their mother-tongue. This was the showing
+the chief nationalities made in the census:<br /><br /></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="census">
+<tr><td class="btr" align="center">Born in.</td><td class="btr" align="center">Children.</td><td class="bt" align="center">Parents.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="btr">United States</td><td class="btr" align="right">3,050</td><td class="bt" align="right">1,009</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="br">Italy</td><td class="br" align="right">1,066</td><td class="pad" align="right">2,354</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="br">Germany</td><td class="br" align="right">460</td><td class="pad" align="right">1,819</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="br">Bohemia</td><td class="br" align="right">198</td><td class="pad" align="right">720</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="bbr">Ireland</td><td class="bbr" align="right">98</td><td class="bb" align="right">583</td></tr></table>
+
+<p><br />At that time the Jewish children were crowding into the Monroe Street and
+some other schools, at a rate that promised to put them in complete
+possession before long. Upon this lowest level, as upon every other where
+they come into competition with the children of Christian parents, they
+distanced them easily, taking all the prizes that were to be had for
+regular attendance, proficiency in studies, and good conduct generally.
+Generally these prizes consisted of shoes or much-needed clothing. Often,
+as in the Monroe Street School, the bitter poverty of the homes that gave
+up the children to the school because there they would receive the one
+square meal of the day, made a loaf of bread the most acceptable reward,
+and the teachers gladly took advantage of it as the means of forging
+another link in the chain to bind home and school, parents, children, and
+teachers, firmly together.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>This &#8220;square meal&#8221; is a chief element in the educational plan of most of
+the schools, because very often it is the one hot meal the little ones
+receive&mdash;not infrequently, as I have said, the only one of the day that is
+worthy of the name. It is not an elaborate or expensive affair, though
+substantial and plentiful. At the West Side Industrial School, on Seventh
+Avenue, where one day, not long ago, I watched a file of youngsters
+crowding into the dining-room with glistening eyes and happy faces, the
+cost of the dinners averaged 2&#189; cents last year. In a specimen month
+they served there 4,080 meals and compared this showing gleefully with the
+record of the old School in Twenty-ninth Street, nine years before. The
+largest number of dinners served there in any one month, was 2,666. It is
+perhaps a somewhat novel way of measuring the progress of a school: by the
+amount of eating done on the premises. But it is a very practical one, as
+the teachers have found out. Yet it is not used as a bait. Care is taken
+that only those are fed who would otherwise go without their dinner, and
+it is served only in winter, when the need of &#8220;something warm&#8221; is
+imperative. In the West Side School, as in most of the others, the dinners
+are furnished by some one or more practical philanthropists, whose pockets
+as well as their hearts are in the work. The schools themselves, like the
+Society&#8217;s lodging-houses for homeless children, stand as lasting monuments
+to a Christian charity that asks no other reward than the consciousness of
+having done good where the need was great. Sometimes the very name of the
+generous giver is unknown to all the world save the men who built as he or
+she directed. The benefactor is quite as often a devoted woman as a rich
+and charitable man, who hides his munificence under a modesty unsuspected
+by a community that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> applauds and envies his shrewd and successful
+business ventures, but never hears of the investment that paid him and it
+best of all.</p>
+
+<p>According to its location, the school is distinctively Italian, Bohemian,
+Hebrew or mixed; the German, Irish, and colored children coming in under
+this head, and mingling usually without the least friction. The Leonard
+Street School and the West Side Italian School in Sullivan Street are
+devoted wholly to the little swarthy Southerners. In the Leonard Street
+School alone there were between five and six hundred Italian children on
+the register last year; but in the Beach Street School, and in the Astor
+Memorial School in Mott Street they are fast crowding the Irish element,
+that used to possess the land, to the wall. So, in Monroe Street and East
+Broadway are the Jewish children. Neither the teachers nor the Society&#8217;s
+managers are in any danger of falling into sleepy routine ways. The
+conditions with which they have to deal are constantly changing; new
+problems are given them to solve before the old are fairly worked out, old
+prejudices to be forgotten or worked over into a new and helpful interest.
+And they do it bravely, and are more than repaid for their devotion by the
+real influence they find themselves exerting upon the young lives which
+had never before felt the touch of genuine humane sympathy, or been
+awakened to the knowledge that somebody cared for them outside of their
+own dark slum.</p>
+
+<p>All the children are not as tractable as the Russian Jews or the Italians.
+The little Irishman, brimful of mischief, is, like his father, in the
+school and in the street, &#8220;ag&#8217;in&#8217; the government&#8221; on general principles,
+though in a jovial way that often makes it hard to sit in judgment on his
+tricks with serious mien. He feels, too, that to a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> certain extent he has
+the sympathy of his father in his unregenerate state, and is the more to
+be commended if he subdues the old Adam in himself and allows the
+instruction to proceed. The hardest of them all to deal with, until he has
+been won over as a friend and ally, is perhaps the Bohemian child. He
+inherits, with some of his father&#8217;s obstinacy, all of his hardships, his
+bitter poverty and grinding work. School to him is merely a change of
+tasks in an unceasing round that leaves no room for play. If he lingers on
+the way home to take a hand in a stolen game of ball, the mother is
+speedily on his track. Her instruction to the teacher is not to let the
+child stay &#8220;a minute after three o&#8217;clock.&#8221; He is wanted at home to roll
+cigars or strip tobacco-leaves for his father, while the mother gets the
+evening meal ready. The Bohemian has his own cause for the reserve that
+keeps him a stranger in a strange land after living half his life among
+us; his reception has not been altogether hospitable, and it is not only
+his hard language and his sullen moods that are to blame. All the better
+he knows the value of the privilege that is offered his child, and will
+&#8220;drive him to school with sticks&#8221; if need be; an introduction that might
+be held to account for a good deal of reasonable reluctance, even
+hostility to the school, in the pupil. The teacher has only to threaten
+the intractable ones with being sent home to bring them round. And yet, it
+is not that they are often cruelly treated there. On the contrary, the
+Bohemian is an exceptionally tender and loving father, perhaps because his
+whole life is lived with his family at home, in the tenement that is his
+shop and his world. He simply proposes that his child shall enjoy the
+advantages that are denied him&mdash;denied partly perhaps because of his
+refusal to accept them, but still from his point of view denied. And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> he
+takes a short cut to that goal by sending the child to school. The result
+is that the old Bohemian disappears in the first generation born upon our
+soil. His temper remains to some extent, it is true. He still has his
+surly streaks, refuses to sing or recite in school when the teacher or
+something else does not suit him, and can never be driven where yet he is
+easily led; but as he graduates into the public school and is thrown more
+into contact with the children of more light-hearted nationalities, he
+grows into that which his father would have long since become, had he not
+got a wrong start: a loyal American, proud of his country, and a useful
+citizen.</p>
+
+<p>In the school in East Seventy-third Street, of which I am thinking, there
+was last winter, besides the day school of some four hundred pupils, an
+evening class of big factory girls, most of them women grown, that vividly
+illustrated the difficulties that beset teaching in the Bohemian quarter.
+It had been got together with much difficulty by the principal and one of
+the officers of the Society, who gave up his nights and his own home life
+to the work of instructing the school. On the night when it opened, he was
+annoyed by a smell of tobacco in the hallways and took the janitor to task
+for smoking in the building. The man denied the charge, and Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; went
+hunting through the house for the offender with growing indignation, as he
+found the teachers in the class-rooms sneezing and sniffing the air to
+locate the source of the infliction. It was not until later in the
+evening, when the sneezing fit took him too as he was bending over a group
+of the girls to examine their slates, that he discovered it to be a
+feature of the new enterprise. The perfume was part of the school. Without
+it, it could not go on. The girls were all cigar makers; so were their
+parents at home. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> shop and the tenement were organized on the tobacco
+plan, and the school must needs adopt it with what patience it could, if
+its business were to proceed.</p>
+
+<p>It did, and got on fairly well until a reporter found his way into it and
+roused the resentment of the girls by some inconsiderate, if well-meant,
+criticisms of their ways. The rebellion he caused was quelled with
+difficulty by Mr. H&mdash;&mdash;, who re-established his influence over them at
+this point and gained their confidence by going to live among them in the
+school-house with his family. Still the sullen moods, the nightly
+ructions. The girls were as ready to fight as to write, in their fits of
+angry spite, until my friend was almost ready to declare with the angry
+Irishman, that he would have peace in the house if he had to whip all
+hands to get it. Christmas was at hand with its message of peace and
+good-will, but the school was more than usually unruly, when one night, in
+despair, he started to read a story to them to lay the storm. It was Hans
+Christian Andersen&#8217;s story of the little girl who sold matches and lighted
+her way to mother and heaven with them as she sat lonely and starved,
+freezing to death in the street on New Year&#8217;s eve. As match after match
+went out with the pictures of home, of warmth, and brightness it had shown
+the child, and her trembling fingers fumbled eagerly with the bunch to
+call them back, a breathless hush fell upon the class, and when the story
+was ended, and Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; looked up with misty eyes, he found the whole
+class in tears. The picture of friendless poverty, more bitterly desolate
+than any even they had known, had gone to their hearts and melted them.
+The crisis was passed and peace restored.</p>
+
+<p>A crisis of another kind came later, when the pupils&#8217; &#8220;young men&#8221; got into
+the habit of coming to see the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> girls home. They waited outside until
+school was dismissed, and night after night Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; found a ball in
+progress on the sidewalk when the girls should long have been home. The
+mothers complained and the success of the class was imperilled. Their
+passion for dancing was not to be overcome. They would give up the school
+first. Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; thought the matter out and took a long step&mdash;a perilous
+one. He started a dancing-class, and on certain nights in the week taught
+the girls the lanciers instead of writing and spelling. Simultaneously he
+wrote to every mother that the school was not to be blamed if the girls
+were not home at ten minutes after nine o&#8217;clock; it was dismissed at 8.55
+sharp every night. The thing took tremendously. The class filled right up,
+complaints ceased, and everything was lovely, when examination day
+approached with the annual visit of friends and patrons. My friend awaited
+its coming with fear and trembling. There was no telling what the
+committee might say to the innovation. The educational plan of the Society
+is most liberal, but the lanciers was a step even the broadest of its
+pedagogues had not yet ventured upon. The evil day came at last, and, full
+of forebodings, Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; had the girls soothe their guests with cakes and
+lemonade of their own brewing, until they were in a most amiable mood.
+Then, when they expected the reading to begin, with a sinking heart he
+bade them dance. The visitors stared in momentary amazement, but at the
+sight of the happy faces in the quadrilles, and the enthusiasm of the
+girls, they caught the spirit of the thing and applauded to the echo. The
+dancing-class was a success, and so has the school been ever since.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I know, this is the only instance in which the quadrille has
+been made one of the regular English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> branches taught in the Industrial
+Schools. But cake and lemonade have more than once smoothed the way to a
+hearty acceptance of the three R&#8217;s with their useful concomitants, as
+taught there. One of the excellent features of the system is the &#8220;kitchen
+garden,&#8221; for the little ones, a kind of play housekeeping that covers the
+whole range of house-work, and the cooking class for the larger girls that
+gives many of them a taste for housekeeping which helps to overcome their
+prejudice against domestic service, and so to solve one of the most
+perplexing questions of the day&mdash;no less serious to the children of the
+poor than to the wives of the rich, if they only knew or would believe it.
+It is the custom of the wise teachers, when the class has become
+proficient, to invite the mothers to a luncheon gotten up by their
+children. &#8220;I never,&#8221; reports the teacher of the Eighteenth Ward Industrial
+School after such a session, &#8220;saw women so thoroughly interested.&#8221; And it
+was not only the mother who was thus won over in the pride over her
+daughter&#8217;s achievement. It was the home itself that was invaded with
+influences that had been strangers to it heretofore. For the mother
+learned something she would not be apt to forget, by seeing her child do
+intelligently and economically what she had herself done ignorantly and
+wastefully before. Poverty and waste go always hand in hand. The girls are
+taught, with the doing of a thing, enough also of the chemistry of cooking
+to enable them to understand the &#8220;why&#8221; of it. The influence of that sort
+of teaching in the tenement of the poor no man can measure. I am well
+persuaded that half of the drunkenness that makes so many homes miserable
+is at least encouraged, if not directly caused, by the mismanagement and
+bad cooking at home. All the wife and mother knows about housekeeping she
+has picked up in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> the tenement since she was married, among those who
+never knew how to cook a decent meal or set a clean table; while the
+saloonkeeper hires the best cook he can get for money, and serves his hot
+lunch free to her husband in a tidy and cheerful room, where no tired
+women&mdash;tired of the trials and squabbles of the day&mdash;no cross looks, and
+no dirty, fighting children come to spoil his appetite and his hour of
+rest.</p>
+
+<p>Here, as everywhere, it is the personal influence of the teacher that
+counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home,
+and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the
+way of trouble and sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred
+ways. &#8220;Sometimes,&#8221; says one of the teachers, who has seen the children of
+her first pupils go from her school into their own homes to take up the
+battle of life, &#8220;sometimes a teacher, while conducting a class, is also
+fashioning, from some soft white material, a shroud for some little one
+whose parents can provide none themselves. When a child dies of a disease
+that is not contagious, its classmates gather around the coffin and sing
+in German or English, &#8216;I am Jesus&#8217;s little lamb.&#8217; Sometimes the children&#8217;s
+hymn and the Lord&#8217;s Prayer are the only service.&#8221; Her life work has been
+among the poorest Germans on the East Side. &#8220;Among our young men,&#8221; she
+reports, &#8220;I know of only three who have become drunkards, and many are
+stanch temperance men. I have never known of one of our girls drinking to
+excess. I have looked carefully over our records, and can truly say that,
+so far as I can learn, not one girl who remained with us until over
+seventeen lived a life of shame.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What teaching meant to this woman the statement that follows gives an idea
+of: &#8220;Shrove Tuesday evening is a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> time when all Germans plan for a frolic;
+they call it &#8216;Fastnacht.&#8217; Twenty years ago I gave the young people of the
+evening school a party on that evening, and at the suggestion of one of
+the girls decided to have a reunion every year at that time. So each year
+our married girls and boys, and those still unmarried, who have grown
+beyond us in other ways, come &#8216;home.&#8217; We sing the old songs, talk over old
+times, play games, drink coffee and eat doughnuts, and always end the
+evening with &#8216;Auld Lang Syne.&#8217; Last spring, two of the young men stood at
+the stairway and counted the guests as they went to the supper-room: they
+reported over four hundred. Letters came from Boston, Chicago,
+Philadelphia, Washington, Texas, Idaho, and Wyoming from those who would
+gladly have been with us. All who live within a radius of fifty miles try
+to be here.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Among our grown girls,&#8221; she adds, &#8220;we have teachers, governesses,
+dressmakers, milliners, trained nurses, machine operators, hand sewers,
+embroiderers, designers for embroidering, servants in families,
+saleswomen, book-keepers, typewriters, candy packers, bric-&agrave;-brac packers,
+bank-note printers, silk winders, button makers, box makers, hairdressers,
+and fur sewers. Among our boys are book-keepers, workers in stained glass,
+painters, printers, lithographers, salesmen in wholesale houses, as well
+as in many of our largest retail stores, typewriters, stenographers,
+commission merchants, farmers, electricians, ship carpenters, foremen in
+factories, grocers, carpet designers, silver engravers, metal burnishers,
+carpenters, masons, carpet weavers, plumbers, stone workers, cigar makers,
+and cigar packers. Only one of our boys, so far as we can learn, ever sold
+liquor, and he has given it up.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not a few of these, without a doubt, got the first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> inkling of their trade
+in the class where they learned to read. The curriculum of the Industrial
+Schools is comprehensive. The nationality of the pupils makes little or no
+difference in it. The start, as often as is necessary, is made with an
+object lesson&mdash;soap and water being the elements, and the child the
+object. As in the kindergarten, the alphabet comes second on the list.
+Then follow lessons in sewing, cooking, darning, mat-weaving, pasting, and
+dressmaking for the girls, and in carpentry, wood carving, drawing,
+printing, and like practical &#8220;branches&#8221; for the boys, not a few of whom
+develop surprising cleverness at this or that kind of work. The system is
+continually expanding. There are schools yet that have not the necessary
+facilities for classes in manual training, but as the importance of the
+subject is getting to be more clearly understood, and interest in the
+subject grows, new &#8220;shops&#8221; are being constantly opened and other
+occupations found for the children. Even where the school quarters are
+most pinched and inadequate, a shift is made to give the children work to
+do that will teach them habits of industry and precision as the
+all-important lesson to be learned there. In some of the Industrial
+Schools the boys learn to cook with the girls, and in the West Side
+Italian School an attempt to teach them to patch and sew buttons on their
+own jackets resulted last year in their making their own shirts, and
+making them well, too. Perhaps the possession of the shirt as a reward for
+making it acted as a stimulus. The teacher thought so, and she was
+probably right, for more than one of them had never owned a whole shirt
+before, let alone a clean one. A heap can be done with the children by
+appealing to their proper pride&mdash;much more than many might think, judging
+hastily from their rags. Call it vanity&mdash;if it is a kind of vanity that
+can be made a stepping-stone to the rescue of the child, it is worth
+laying hold of. It was distinct evidence that civilization and the
+nineteenth century had invaded Lewis Street, when a class of Hungarian
+boys in the American Female Guardian Society&#8217;s school in that thoroughfare
+earned the name of the &#8220;neck-tie class&#8221; by adopting that article of
+apparel in a body. None of them had ever known collar or necktie before.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i027.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE FIRST PATRIOTIC ELECTION IN THE BEACH STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL&mdash;<br />PARLOR IN JOHN ERICSSON&#8217;S OLD HOUSE.</span></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>It is the practice to let the girls have what garments they make, from
+material, old or new, furnished by the school, and thus a good many of the
+pupils in the Industrial Schools are supplied with decent clothing. In the
+winter especially, some of them need it sadly. In the Italian school of
+which I just spoke, one of the teachers found a little girl of six years
+crying softly in her seat on a bitter cold day. She had just come in from
+the street. In answer to the question what ailed her, she sobbed out,
+&#8220;I&#8217;se so cold.&#8221; And no wonder. Beside a worn old undergarment, all the
+clothing upon her shivering little body was a thin calico dress. The soles
+were worn off her shoes, and toes and heels stuck out. It seemed a marvel
+that she had come through the snow and ice as she had, without having her
+feet frozen.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the teacher would follow such a child into her home and there
+endeavor to clinch the efforts begun for its reclamation in the school. It
+is the very core and kernel of the Society&#8217;s purpose not to let go of the
+children of whom once it has laid hold, and to this end it employs its own
+physicians to treat those who are sick, and to canvass the poorest
+tenements in the summer months, on the plan pursued by the Health
+Department. Last year these doctors, ten in number, treated 1,578 sick
+children and 174 mothers. Into every sick-room and many wretched<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> hovels,
+daily bouquets of sweet flowers found their way too, visible tokens of a
+sympathy and love in the world beyond&mdash;seemingly so far beyond the poverty
+and misery of the slum&mdash;that had thought and care even for such as they.
+Perhaps in the final reckoning these flowers, that came from friends far
+and near, will have a story to tell that will outweigh all the rest. It
+may be an &#8220;impracticable notion,&#8221; as I have sometimes been told by
+hard-headed men of business; but it is not always the hard head that
+scores in work among the poor. The language of the heart is a tongue that
+is understood in the poorest tenements where the English speech is
+scarcely comprehended and rated little above the hovels in which the
+immigrants are receiving their first lessons in the dignity of American
+citizenship.</p>
+
+<p>Very lately a unique exercise has been added to the course in these
+schools, that lays hold of the very marrow of the problem with which they
+deal. It is called &#8220;saluting the flag,&#8221; and originated with Colonel George
+T. Balch, of the Board of Education, who conceived the idea of instilling
+patriotism into the little future citizens of the Republic in doses to
+suit their childish minds. To talk about the Union, of which most of them
+had but the vaguest notion, or of the duty of the citizen, of which they
+had no notion at all, was nonsense. In the flag it was all found embodied
+in a central idea which they could grasp. In the morning the star-spangled
+banner was brought into the school, and the children were taught to salute
+it with patriotic words. Then the best scholar of the day before was
+called out of the ranks, and it was given to him or her to keep for the
+day. The thing took at once and was a tremendous success.</p>
+
+<p>Then was evolved the plan of letting the children<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> decide for themselves
+whether or not they would so salute the flag as a voluntary offering,
+while incidentally instructing them in the duties of the voter at a time
+when voting was the one topic of general interest. Ballot-boxes were set
+up in the schools on the day before the last general election (1891). The
+children had been furnished with ballots for and against the flag the week
+before, and told to take them home to their parents and talk it over with
+them, a very apt reminder to those who were naturalized citizens of their
+own duties, then pressing. On the face of the ballot was the question to
+be decided: &#8220;Shall the school salute the Nation&#8217;s flag every day at the
+morning exercises?&#8221; with a Yes and a No, to be crossed out as the voter
+wished. On its back was printed a Voter&#8217;s A, B, C, in large plain type,
+easy to read:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This country in which I live, and which is <i>my</i> country, is called a
+<span class="smcap">Republic</span>. In a Republic, <i>the people govern</i>. The people who govern are
+called <i>citizens</i>. I am one of the people and <i>a little citizen</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The way the citizens govern is, either by voting for the person whom they
+want to represent them, or who will say what the people want him to
+say&mdash;or by voting <i>for</i> that thing they would like to do, or <i>against</i>
+that thing which they do not want to do.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Citizen who votes is called a <i>voter</i> or an <i>elector</i>, and the right
+of voting is called the <i>suffrage</i>. The voter puts on a piece of paper
+what he wants. The piece of paper is called a <i>Ballot</i>. <span class="smcap">This Piece of
+Paper is my Ballot.</span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The right of a Citizen to vote; the right to say what the citizen thinks
+is best for himself and all the rest of the people; the right to say who
+shall govern us and make laws for us, is <span class="smcap">a Great Privilege, a Sacred
+Trust,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> A very great Responsibility</span>, which I must learn to exercise
+conscientiously, and to the best of my knowledge and ability, as a little
+Citizen of this great <span class="smcap">American Republic</span>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>On Monday the children cast their votes in the Society&#8217;s twenty-one
+Industrial Schools, with all the solemnity of a regular election and with
+as much of its simple machinery as was practicable. Eighty-two per cent.
+of the whole number of enrolled scholars turned out for the occasion, and
+of the 4,306 votes cast, 88, not quite two per cent., voted against the
+flag. Some of these, probably the majority, voted No under a
+misapprehension, but there were a few exceptions. One little Irishman, in
+the Mott Street school, came without his ballot. &#8220;The old man tored it
+up,&#8221; he reported. In the East Seventy-third Street school five Bohemians
+of tender years set themselves down as opposed to the scheme of making
+Americans of them. Only one, a little girl, gave her reason. She brought
+her own flag to school: &#8220;I vote for that,&#8221; she said, sturdily, and the
+teacher wisely recorded her vote and let her keep the banner.</p>
+
+<p>I happened to witness the election in the Beach Street school, where the
+children are nearly all Italians. The minority elements were, however,
+represented on the board of election inspectors by a colored girl and a
+little Irish miss, who did not seem in the least abashed by the fact that
+they were nearly the only representatives of their people in the school.
+The tremendous show of dignity with which they took their seats at the
+poll was most impressive. As a lesson in practical politics, the occasion
+had its own humor. It was clear that the negress was most impressed with
+the solemnity of the occasion, and the Irish girl with its practical
+opportunities. The Italian&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> disposition to grin and frolic, even in her
+new and solemn character, betrayed the ease with which she would, were it
+real politics, become the game of her Celtic colleague. When it was all
+over they canvassed the vote with all the solemnity befitting the
+occasion, signed together a certificate stating the result, and handed it
+over to the principal sealed in a manner to defeat any attempt at fraud.
+Then the school sang Santa Lucia, a sweet Neapolitan ballad. It was
+amusing to hear the colored girl and the half-dozen little Irish children
+sing right along with the rest the Italian words, of which they did not
+understand one. They had learned them from hearing them sung by the
+others, and rolled them out just as loudly, if not as sweetly, as they.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i028.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE BOARD OF ELECTION INSPECTORS IN THE BEACH STREET SCHOOL.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>The first patriotic election in the Fifth Ward Industrial School was held
+on historic ground. The house it occupies was John Ericsson&#8217;s until his
+death, and there he planned nearly all his great inventions, among them
+one that helped save the flag for which the children voted that day. The
+children have lived faithfully up to their pledge. Every morning sees the
+flag carried to the principal&#8217;s desk and all the little ones, rising at
+the stroke of the bell, say with one voice: &#8220;We turn to our flag as the
+sunflower turns to the sun!&#8221; One bell, and every brown right fist is
+raised to the brow, as in military salute: &#8220;We give our heads!&#8221; Another
+stroke, and the grimy little hands are laid on as many hearts: &#8220;and our
+hearts!&#8221; Then with a shout that can be heard around the corner: &#8220;&mdash;&mdash; to
+our country! One country, one language, one flag!&#8221; No one can hear it and
+doubt that the children mean every word and will not be apt to forget that
+lesson soon.</p>
+
+<p>The Industrial School has found a way of dealing with even the truants, of
+whom it gets more than its share, and the success of it is suggestive. As
+stated by the teacher in the West Eighteenth Street school who found it
+out, it is very simple: &#8220;I tell them, if they want to play truant to come
+to me and I will excuse them for the day, and give them a note so that if
+the truant officer sees them it will be all right.&#8221; She adds that &#8220;only
+one boy ever availed himself of that privilege.&#8221; The other boys with few
+exceptions became interested, as one would expect,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> and came to school
+regularly. It was the old story of the boys in the Juvenile Asylum who
+could be trusted to do guard duty in the grounds when put upon their
+honor, but the moment they were locked up for the night risked their necks
+to escape by climbing out of the third-story windows.</p>
+
+<p>But when it has cheated the street and made of the truant a steady
+scholar, the work of the Industrial School is not all done. Next, it hands
+him over to the Public School, clothed and in his right mind, if his time
+to go to work has not yet come. Last year the thirty-three Industrial
+Schools of the Children&#8217;s Aid Society and the American Female Guardian
+Society thus dismissed nearly eleven hundred children who, but for their
+intervention, might never have reached that goal. That their charity had
+not been allowed to corrupt the children may be inferred from the
+statement that, with an average daily attendance of 4,348 in the
+Children&#8217;s Aid Society&#8217;s Schools, 1,729 children were depositors in the
+School Savings Banks to the aggregate amount of about $800&mdash;a very large
+sum for them&mdash;and this in the face of the fact, recorded on the school
+register, that 938 of the lot came from homes where drunkenness and
+poverty went hand in hand. It is not in the plan of the Industrial School
+to make paupers, but to develop to the utmost the kernel of self-help that
+is the one useful legacy of the street. The child&#8217;s individuality is
+preserved at any cost. Even the clothes that are given to the poorest in
+exchange for their rags are of different cut and color, made so with this
+one end in view. The distressing &#8220;institution look&#8221; is wholly absent from
+these schools, and one of the great stumbling-blocks of charity
+administered at wholesale is thus avoided.</p>
+
+<p>The night schools are for the boys and girls already<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> enlisted in the
+treadmill, and who must pick up what learning they can in their off hours.
+Together with the day-schools they footed up a total enrolment of nearly
+ten thousand children whom this Society reached in 1891. Upon the basis of
+the average daily attendance, the cost of their education to the
+community, which supported the charity, was $24.53 for each child. The
+cost of sheltering, feeding, and teaching 11,770 boys and girls in the
+Society&#8217;s six lodging-houses was $32.76 for each; the expense of sending
+2,825 children to farm-homes $9.96 for each. The average cost per year for
+each prisoner in the Tombs is $107.75, and for every child maintained in
+an Asylum, or in the poor-house, nearly $140.<small><a name="f21.1" id="f21.1" href="#f21">[21]</a></small></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One of our great difficulties,&#8221; says the Secretary of the Children&#8217;s Aid
+Society, in a recent statement of the Society&#8217;s aims and purposes, echoing
+an old grievance, &#8220;is with the large boys of the city. There seems to be
+no place for them in the world as it is. They have grown up in it without
+any training but that in street trades. The trades unions have kept them
+from being apprenticed. They are soon too large for street occupations,
+and are unable to compete with the small boys. They are too old for our
+lodging-houses. We know not what to do with them. Some succeed well on
+Western farms, but they are usually disliked by their employers because
+they change places soon; and their occasional offences and disposition to
+move about have given us more trouble in the West than any other one
+thing. Very few people are willing to bear with them, even though a little
+patience will sometimes bring out excellent qualities in them.&#8221; They are
+the boys for whom the street and the saloon have use that shall speedily
+fashion of their &#8220;excellent qualities&#8221; a lash<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> to sting the community&#8217;s
+purse, if not its conscience, with the memory of its neglect. As 107.75 is
+to 24.53, or 140 to 9.96, so will be the smart of it compared with the
+burden of patience that would have turned the scales the other way, to put
+the matter in a light where the hard-headed man of business can see it
+without an effort.</p>
+
+<p>There is at least one man of that kind in New York who has seen and
+understood it to some purpose. His name is Richard T. Auchmuty, and he is
+by profession an architect. In that capacity he has had opportunity enough
+of observing how the virtual exclusion of the New York boy from the trades
+worked to his harm, and he started for his relief an Industrial School
+that deserves to be ranked among the great benefactions of our day, even
+more for its power to set people to thinking than for the direct benefit
+it confers upon the boy, great as that is. Once it comes to be thoroughly
+understood that a chance to learn his father&#8217;s honest trade is denied the
+New York boy by a foreign conspiracy, because he is an American lad and
+cannot be trusted to do its bidding, it is inconceivable that an end
+should not be put in quick order to this astounding abuse. This thing is
+exactly what is being done in New York now by the consent of its citizens,
+who without a protest read in the newspapers that a trades-union, one of
+the largest and strongest in the building trades, has decreed that for two
+years from a fixed date no apprentice shall be admitted to that trade in
+New York&mdash;decreed, with the consent and connivance of subservient
+employers, that so many lads who might have become useful mechanics shall
+grow up tramps and loafers; decreed that a system of robbery of the
+American mechanic shall go on by which it has come to pass that out of
+twenty-three millions of dollars paid in a year to the building trades in
+this city barely six millions are grudgingly accorded the native worker.
+There is no decree to exclude the mechanic from abroad. He may come and
+go&mdash;and go he does, in shoals, to his home across the sea at the end of
+each season, with its profits&mdash;under the scheme of international
+comradeship that excludes only the American workman and his boy. I have
+talked with some of the most intelligent of the labor leaders, men well
+known all over the land, to find out if there were any defence to be made
+for this that I was not aware of, but have got nothing but evasion and
+sophistries about the &#8220;protection of labor&#8221; for my answer. A protection,
+indeed, that has nearly resulted already in the practical extinction of
+the American mechanic, the best and cleverest in the world, in America&#8217;s
+chief city, at the bidding of the Walking Delegate.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i029.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE PLUMBING SHOP IN THE NEW YORK TRADE SCHOOLS.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>Even to Colonel Auchmuty&#8217;s Industrial School this persecution has been
+extended in a persistent attempt for years to taboo its graduates. In
+spite of it, the New York Trade Schools open their twelfth season this
+winter with six hundred scholars and more, in place of the thirty who sat
+in the first class eleven years ago. The community&#8217;s better sense is
+coming to the rescue, and the opposition to the school is wearing off. In
+the spring as many hundred young plasterers, printers, tailors, plumbers,
+stone-cutters, bricklayers, carpenters, and blacksmiths will go forth
+capable mechanics, and with their self-respect unimpaired by the
+associations of the shop and the saloon under the old apprentice system.
+In this one respect the trades union may have done them a service it did
+not intend. Colonel Auchmuty&#8217;s school has demonstrated what it amounts to
+by furnishing from among its young men the bricklayers for more than as
+many handsome buildings in New York as there were pupils in its first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+class. When a committee of master builders came on from Philadelphia to
+see what their work was like, the report it brought back was that it
+looked as if the builders had put their hearts in it, and a trade-school
+was forthwith established in that city. Of that, too, Colonel Auchmuty
+paid the way from the start.</p>
+
+<p>His wealth has kept the New York school above water since it was started;
+but this winter a benevolent millionaire, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, for whom
+wealth has other and greater responsibilities than that of ministering to
+his own comfort, has endowed it with half a million dollars, and Mrs.
+Auchmuty has added a hundred thousand with the land on First Avenue
+between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets upon which the school
+stands, so that it starts out with an endowment sufficient to insure its
+future. The charges for tuition in the day and evening classes have never
+been much more than nominal, but these may now, perhaps, be reduced even
+further to allow the &#8220;excellent qualities&#8221; of the big boys, of whom the
+reformer despairs, to be put to their proper use without robbing them of
+the best of all, their self-respect. Then the gage will have been thrown
+to the street in good earnest, and the Walking Delegate&#8217;s day will be
+nearly spent.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+<h3>THE BOYS&#8217; CLUBS</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">But</span> it is by the boys&#8217; club that the street is hardest hit. In the fight
+for the lad it is that which knocks out the &#8220;gang,&#8221; and with its own
+weapon&mdash;the weapon of organization. That this has seemed heretofore so
+little understood, even by some who have wielded the weapon valiantly, is
+to me the strongest argument for the University Settlement plan, which
+sends those who would be of service to the poor out to live among them, to
+study their ways and their needs. Very soon they discover why the gang has
+such a grip on the boy. It is because it responds to a real need of his
+nature. The distinguishing characteristic of the American city boy is his
+genius for organization. Whether it be in the air, in the soil, or in an
+aptitude for self-government that springs naturally from the street, where
+every little heathen is a law unto himself&mdash;one of them surely, for the
+children of foreigners, who never learn to speak the language in which
+their sons vote, exhibit it, if anything, more plainly than the
+native-born&mdash;he has it, undeniably. Unbridled, allowed to run riot, it
+results in the gang. Thwarted, it defeats all attempts to manage the boy.
+Accepted as a friend, an ally, it is the indispensable key to his nature
+in all efforts to reclaim him <i>en bloc</i>. Individuals may require different
+methods of treatment. To the boys as a class the club is the pass-key.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>There are many boys&#8217; clubs in New York now, and room for more. Some have
+had great success; a few have failed. I venture the guess that the real
+failure in a good many instances&mdash;most of them perhaps&mdash;was the failure to
+trust the boys to rule themselves. I say <i>rule</i>. Rule there must be; boss
+rule at that. That is the kind their fathers own, the fashion of the
+slums. It is a case of rule or ruin, order or anarchy. To let the boys
+have full swing would merely be to invite the street in to take charge of
+the house, and only trouble would come of it. But the boss must be a
+benevolent and very politic despot. The boy must have a fair chance. To
+enlist him heart and soul, the opportunity must be given him to show that
+he <i>can</i> rule himself. And he will show it. He must be allowed to choose
+his own leaders. His freedom of speech must not be abridged in debate by
+any rule but that of parliamentary law. Ten to one he will not abuse it,
+but will enforce that rule and submit to it as scrupulously as the most
+punctilious of his elders. Let him be sure that his right to
+self-government will not be interfered with, and he will voluntarily give
+up the street and his gang. Three boys&#8217; clubs had been started by the
+ladies of the College Settlement, on the principle of non-interference
+within the few and simple rules of the house. The boys wrote their own
+laws and maintained order with success. The street looked on, observant.
+To the policeman it had opposed secret hostility or open war. But a social
+order with the policeman eliminated was something worthy of approval. Its
+offer of surrender was brought in form by a committee representing the
+&#8220;Pleasure Club&#8221; in the toughest block of the neighborhood. &#8220;We will change
+and have your kind of a club,&#8221; was its message. Thus the fourth boys&#8217; club
+of the Settlement was launched.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>They have not all had so peaceful a beginning. Storm and stress of weather
+have ushered in most of them. Each new one has cost something for
+window-glass, and the mud of the neighborhood has had its inning before it
+was forced to abdicate in favor of the club. It was so with the first that
+was started, fourteen years ago, in Tompkins Square, that was then pretty
+much all mud and given over to anarchy and disorder. In fact, it was the
+mud that started the club. It flew so thick about the Wilson Mission, and
+bespattered those who went out and in so freely that on a particularly
+boisterous night the good missionary&#8217;s wife decided that something must be
+done. She did not send for a policeman. She had tried that before, but the
+relief he brought lasted only while he was in sight. She went out and
+confronted the mob herself. When it had yelled itself hoarse at her, she
+sweetly asked it in to have some coffee and cakes. The mob stared,
+breathless. Coffee and cakes for stones and mud! This was the Gospel in a
+shape that was new and bewildering to Tompkins Square. The boys took
+counsel among themselves. Visions of a big policeman behind the door
+troubled the timid; but the more courageous were in favor of taking
+chances. When they had sidled through the open door and no yell of
+distress had betrayed treason within, the rest followed to find the coffee
+and the cakes a solid and reassuring fact. No awkward questions were asked
+about the broken windows, and the boys came out voting the &#8220;missionary
+people&#8221; trumps, with a tinge of remorse, let us hope, for the reception
+they had given them. There was no more mud-slinging after that, but the
+boys fell naturally into neighborly ways with the house and its occupants,
+and the proposition to be allowed to come in and &#8220;play games,&#8221; came from
+them when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> the occasional misunderstandings with the policeman on the post
+made the street a ticklish play-ground. They were let in, and when certain
+good people heard of what was going on in Tompkins Square, they sent down
+chairs and tables and games, so that they might be made to feel at home.
+Thus kindness conquered the street, and that winter was founded the first
+boys&#8217; club here, or, for aught I know, anywhere. It is still the Boys&#8217;
+Club of St. Mark&#8217;s Place, and has grown more popular with the boys as the
+years have passed. The record of last winter&#8217;s doings over there show no
+less than 2,757 boys on its roll of membership. The total attendance for
+the year was 42,118, and the nightly average 218 boys, everyone of whom,
+but for the coffee and cakes of that memorable night, might have been in
+the streets slinging mud.</p>
+
+<p>These doings include, nowadays, more than amusements and games. They made
+the beginning, and they are yet the means of bringing the boys in. Once
+there, as many as choose may join classes in writing, in book-keeping,
+singing, and modelling; those who come merely for fun can have all they
+want, on condition that they pay their respects to the wash-room and keep
+within the bounds of the house. This they do with the aid of the
+Superintendent and his assistants, who are chosen from among the bigger
+boys and manage to preserve order marvellously well with very little show
+of authority, all considered. The present Superintendent, Mr. Tyrrell,
+still nurses the memory of a pair of black eyes he achieved in the
+management of a &#8220;tough&#8221; club in Macdougal Street, where the boys came with
+&#8220;billies&#8221; and pistols in their hip-pockets and taught him the secret of
+club management in their own way. He puts it briefly this way: &#8220;It is just
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> question of who is to be boss.&#8221; That settled, things run smoothly
+enough if the right party is on top.</p>
+
+<p>In justice to the Tompkins Square boys, it should be said that the
+question with them once for all was decided by the missionary&#8217;s coffee and
+cakes. If there was ever a passing disposition to forget it, &#8220;Pop&#8217;s&#8221;
+blighting eye helped the club to recall it in no time. Pop was the
+doorkeeper, and a cripple, with a single mind. His one conscious purpose
+in life was to keep order in the club, and he was blessed beyond most
+mortals in attaining his ambition, if blessed in nothing else. Under
+different auspices Pop might have been a rare bruiser, for, cripple that
+he was, he was as strong as he was determined. Under the humanizing
+influences that had conquered Tompkins Square he became one of the jewels
+of the Boys&#8217; Club. If a round in the boxing-room threatened to wind up in
+a &#8220;slugging match;&#8221; if luck had gone against a boy at the game of
+&#8220;pot-cheese&#8221; until he felt that he must avenge his defeat by thumping his
+adversary, or burst&mdash;Pop&#8217;s stern glance transfixed the offender and
+pointed him to the street, silent and meek, all the fight taken out of him
+on the spot. The boys liked him for all that, perhaps just because they
+were a little afraid of him, and when Pop died last summer, at the age of
+twenty-two, after ten years of faithful attendance upon the basement-door
+in St. Mark&#8217;s Place, many an honest sob was gulped down at his funeral
+behind a dirty and tattered cap. It is not the style for boys to cry in
+Tompkins Square, but it <i>is</i> the style to honor the memory of a dead
+friend, and the Square never saw such a funeral as poor Pop&#8217;s. The boys
+chipped in and bought a gorgeous floral pillow for his coffin. So soft a
+pillow Pop never knew in life.</p>
+
+<p>Many a little account in the club&#8217;s penny savings-bank<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> was wiped out to
+do Pop that last good turn; but the Superintendent cashed all demands
+without a remonstrance. It is not often the money is drawn with so lofty a
+purpose. Most of the depositors earn a few pennies selling newspapers or
+doing errands. Their accounts are seldom large. In the aggregate they make
+up quite a little sum, however. On a certain night last June, when I was
+there, the bank contained almost a hundred dollars, in deposits ranging
+from ten cents up to nearly five dollars. That week the Superintendent had
+cashed sixteen books; the smallest had eleven cents to the credit of its
+owner, who had been greatly taken with a mouth-organ and had withdrawn his
+capital to buy it. Another had been saving up for a pair of boots. There
+were a few capitalists in the club, who, when they got a dollar and a half
+or two dollars together, transferred them to the Bowery Bank, where they
+kept an account. It was easy to predict a successful business career for
+these; not so with the general run, who were anything but steady
+depositors, though the Superintendent gave them the credit that &#8220;very few
+drew out their money till they had fifty cents in bank.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>If the club has developed no great financiers, it has at least brought out
+one latent genius in a young sculptor who has graduated from the modelling
+class into an art museum, and was at last accounts preparing to go abroad
+and spend his accumulated savings in the pursuit of further knowledge. A
+short time before the visit of which I speak, a sudden crisis had made the
+old class in &#8220;First Aid to the Injured&#8221; come out strong under
+difficulties. A man had fallen down the basement-stairs into the
+club-room, in an epileptic fit. It was three years since the boys had been
+taught how to manage till the doctor came, in case of accident, but they
+rose to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> emergency with a jump. One unbuttoned the man&#8217;s collar,
+another slapped his hands, while a third yelled for a dollar to put
+between his teeth. It had not occurred to the young surgeon who taught the
+boys the first principles of his profession that dollars are rather
+scarcer about Tompkins Square than on the Avenue, and this oversight came
+near upsetting the good done by the rest of his teaching. There was no
+dollar, not even a quarter, in the crowd, and the man lay gritting his
+teeth until one of the rescuers, less literal but more practical than the
+rest, suggested a pencil or a pocket-knife and broke the spell.</p>
+
+<p>The mass of the boys come in nightly just to have a good time, and they
+have it. They play at parchesi and messenger-boy with an ardor that leaves
+them no time to care what visitors come and go. Like street boys
+everywhere, they have a special fondness for games that admit the dice as
+an element. Gambling is in the very air of the street, and is encouraged
+in a hundred hidden ways the police rarely discover. Small candy stores
+and grocery back-rooms harbor policy shops, lotteries, and regular
+gambling hells, where the boys are taught how to buck the tiger on a penny
+scale. In the club games the dice are robbed of their power for evil. It
+is the environment here again that makes the difference. It has made a
+vast difference in the boy who once stalked in, hat on the back of his
+head, and grimy fists in his breeches&#8217; pockets until Pop&#8217;s stony eye
+caught his. Now he hangs up his hat upon entering, and goes to the
+wash-room without waiting to be asked by the Superintendent if there is no
+soap and water where he comes from. Then he gets the game or the book he
+wants, surrendering his card as a check upon him until it is returned. It
+is a precaution intended to identify the borrower in case of any damage
+being done to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>the club&#8217;s property. Such a thing as theft of book or game
+is not known. In his business meetings the boy debates a point of order
+with the skill and persistence of a trained politician. The aptitude for
+politics sticks out all over him; but he has some lessons of that trade to
+learn yet, to his harm. He has not mastered the trick of betraying a
+friend. Any member of his club, the Superintendent feels sure, would stand
+up for him and take a thrashing, if need be, should he be found in trouble
+on his &#8220;beat.&#8221; The &#8220;beats&#8221; that converge at St. Mark&#8217;s Place and Avenue A
+cover a good deal of ground. The lads come from a mile around to the Boys&#8217;
+Club. Occasionally &#8220;the gang&#8221; calls in a body. One evening it is the
+Thirteenth Street gang, the next the Eighth Street gang, and again a
+detachment from Avenue A. By the first-comers it is sometimes possible to
+foretell the particular complexion of the <i>client&egrave;le</i> of the night; but
+the business character of the gang is left outside on the sidewalk. Within
+it is amiability itself, and gradually the rough corners are rubbed off,
+old quarrels made up, feuds forgotten in the new companionship; the gang
+is merged in the club, the victory over the street won.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i030.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">A BOYS&#8217; CLUB READING-ROOM.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>At Christmas and at odd seasons, when the necessary talent can be secured,
+entertainments are given in the club-room. Sometimes the boys themselves
+furnish the entertainment, and then there is never a lack of critics in
+the audience. There never is, for that matter. Mr. Evert Jansen Wendell,
+who has been one of the boys&#8217; best friends, tells some amusing things
+about his experience at such gatherings. Ice-cream is always intensely
+popular as a side issue. Some of the boys never fail to wrap a piece up in
+paper, or put it in the pocket without wrapping, to take home to the baby
+sister or brother.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> Only one, to Mr. Wendell&#8217;s knowledge, ever refused
+ice-cream at an entertainment, and he explained, by way of apology, that
+he had had the colic all day and his mother had told him &#8220;she&#8217;d lick him
+if he took any.&#8221; For a dignified missionary, who in telling the boys about
+the spread of the Gospel in the Far East, proposed to illustrate heathen
+customs by arraying himself in native costumes, brought along for the
+purpose, it must have been embarrassing to a degree to be cautioned by the
+audience to &#8220;keep his shirt on.&#8221; But his mishap was as nothing to what
+befell a young lady, the daughter of a wealthy and distinguished
+financier, who with infinite trouble had persuaded her father to assist at
+a certain festive occasion in her favorite club. He was an amateur with
+the magic lantern, the boys&#8217; dear delight, and took it down to amuse them.
+Mr. Wendell tells what followed:</p>
+
+<p>The show was progressing famously, and the daughter was beaming with
+pride, when one of the boys suddenly beckoned to her, and pointing to the
+distinguished financier remarked:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What der yer call dat bloke?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whom do you mean?&#8221; asked the proud daughter, in a tone of much surprise,
+being quite unaccustomed to hearing the distinguished financier described
+as a &#8220;bloke.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I mean dat bloke over dere, settin&#8217; off dem picturs!&#8221; replied the boy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What do you desire to know about him?&#8221; inquired the proud daughter, with
+freezing dignity.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I want ter know what yer call one of them fellers dat sets off picturs?&#8221;
+persisted the boy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That gentleman,&#8221; said the proud daughter, in her most impressive tone,
+&#8220;is my father.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>&#8220;Well!&#8221; said
+the boy, surveying her with supreme contempt, &#8220;don&#8217;t yer know yer own father&#8217;s trade?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Boys&#8217; Club has had many followers. Some aim at teaching the lads
+trades; others content themselves with trying to mend their manners, while
+weaning them from the street and its coarse ways. Still others keep the
+moral improvement in view as the immediate object, as it is the ultimate
+end. Some follow the precedent of the Boys&#8217; Club in charging nothing for
+admission; other club-organizers, like the managers of the College
+Settlement, have found the weekly fee as necessary as home rule to
+encourage self-help and self-respect in the boy, and to bring out the best
+that is in him. Most of them have libraries suited to the children. The
+College Settlement has a very excellent one of more than a thousand
+volumes, which is in constant use. The managers report that the boys
+clamor for history and science, popularly presented, as boys do
+everywhere, while the girls mainly read fiction. The success of different
+plans demonstrates the futility of some pet theories on this phase of
+social economics at least, in the present state of knowledge on the
+subject. The Boys&#8217; Club in St. Mark&#8217;s Place, for instance, is kept
+entirely free from religious influence of any sort, and their experience
+has led many of its friends to believe that success is possible only in
+that way. Probably in that particular case it might not have been possible
+on anything like such a scale in any other way. The mud of Tompkins Square
+testified loudly enough to that. On the other hand, the managers of some
+very successful and active boys&#8217; clubs that have sprouted under Church
+influence and with a strong Sunday-school bias, maintain with conviction
+that theirs is the true and only plan. One holds that only in leaving
+religion out is there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> hope of success; the other, that there can be none
+without letting it in and keeping it ever in the foreground. Each sees
+only half the truth. It is not the profession, or lack of profession, of a
+principle, but the principle itself that is the condition of success&mdash;the
+real sympathy and interest in the children that bids them come and be
+welcome, that seeks to understand their needs and help them for their own
+sake, a religion that &#8220;beats preaching&#8221; among the poor any day. It is a
+question of men and of hearts, not of faith. And the poorer the children,
+the more friendless and forsaken, the more readily do they respond to
+approaches in that spirit. The testimony of a teacher in the Poverty Gap
+play-ground, who went up town to take charge of one where the children
+were better dressed and correspondingly &#8220;stuck up,&#8221; was that in all their
+rags and dirt the little toughs of the Gap were much the more approachable
+and more promising to work with.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i031.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE CARPENTER SHOP IN THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS&#8217; CLUB.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the Church might be expected to have found this out and to be
+turning the knowledge to use. And it is so. All sects are reaching now for
+the children in a healthy rivalry, in which the old cry about empty pews
+is being smothered and forgotten. Of the twenty-six boys&#8217; clubs that are
+down in the Charity Organization Society&#8217;s directory, nineteen are under
+church roofs or patronage, and of the remaining seven I know two at least
+to have been founded by churches. The proportion is more than preserved, I
+think, in the larger number not registered there, as in all the
+philanthropic work of many kinds that is now going on among the children.
+The Roman Catholics never lost sight of the fact that the little ones were
+the life of the Church, which the Protestants have had, in a measure, to
+rediscover. Their grip upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> the children was never relaxed. The parochial
+school has enabled them to maintain it without need of recourse to the
+social shifts the Protestants are adopting to regain lost prestige.
+Nevertheless, they have not let lie unused the best grappling-hook by
+which the boy might be caught and held. Their schools and churches abound
+with clubs and societies, organized upon a plan of absolute home-rule,
+under the spiritual directorship of the parish priest. Among Protestant
+denominations the Episcopal Church especially shows this evidence of a
+strong life stirring within it. The Boys&#8217; Clubs of Calvary Parish, of St.
+George&#8217;s, and of many other churches, are powerful moral agents in their
+own neighborhoods. Everywhere some strong sympathetic personality is found
+to be the centre and the life of the work. It may be that the pastor
+himself is the moving force; or he has the faculty of stirring it in
+others. His young men are at work in the parish. It is a hopeful sign to
+find young men, to whom the sacrifice meant the loss of much that makes
+life beautiful, giving their time and services freely to the poor night
+schools and rough boys&#8217; clubs&mdash;hopeful alike for the Church, for the boys,
+and for their teachers. The women have had the missionary work of the
+Church, as well as the pews, long enough to themselves. I am not speaking
+now of the college-bred men and women, who in their University Settlements
+pursue the plan that has proven so beneficent in England, but of another
+class, young business men, bank clerks, and professional men&mdash;sometimes of
+large means and of high social standing&mdash;whom night after night I have
+found thus unostentatiously working among the children with more patience
+than I could muster, and with the genuine love for their work that
+overcame all obstacles. They were not always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> going the errand of a church
+there, but that they were doing the work of the Church there could be no
+doubt, and doing it in a way to make it once more a living issue among the
+poor.</p>
+
+<p>The rector of old St. George&#8217;s, which under his pastorate has grown from a
+forgotten temple with empty pews to be one of the strong factors in life
+on the crowded East Side, with Sunday congregations the great building can
+hardly contain, roughly outlines his plans for work among the children
+this way, which with variations of detail is the plan of all the churches:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Get as many of the very little children as possible into our
+kindergartens, and there let them have the advantage of Christian
+kindergarten training, before they are old enough to go to the public
+schools. Keep touch of those same children and get them into the infant
+departments of the Sunday-school. Then take the little fellows from these,
+and see that in one or two nights in the week we reach them in our boys&#8217;
+clubs; and then, when they are fourteen years old, they are eligible for
+admission to our battalion. There, by drills, exercises, etc., we hold
+them till they can enter our Men&#8217;s Club.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Sunday-school commands the approach to the club, but does not obstruct
+it. It stands at the door and takes the tickets. Anyone may enter, but
+through that door only. Once he has passed in, he is his own master. The
+church is content with claiming only his Sundays when the club is not in
+session. The experience at St. George&#8217;s on the home-rule question has been
+eminently characteristic. The boys could not be made to take a live
+interest in the club except on condition that they must run it themselves.
+That point yielded, they promptly boomed it to high-water mark. At present
+they elect their officers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> twice a year, to give them full swing, and one
+set is no sooner installed than wire-pulling begins for the next election.
+Once, when some trouble in the Athletic Club caused the clergy to take it
+in hand and appoint a president of their own choice, the membership fell
+off so rapidly that it was on the point of collapse when the tide was
+turned by a bold stroke. The managers announced a free election. The boys
+returned with a rush, put opposition tickets in the field, and amid
+intense enthusiasm over three hundred and fifty out of a total of four
+hundred votes were cast. The club was saved. It has been popular ever
+since.</p>
+
+<p>The payment of monthly dues was found at St. George&#8217;s to be equally
+essential to success. &#8220;The boys know that they have to pay,&#8221; said the
+young clergyman, who quietly superintends their doings; &#8220;if they didn&#8217;t,
+it wouldn&#8217;t be a right club.&#8221; So they pay their pennies and enjoy the
+independence of it. The result has been a transformation in which the
+entire neighborhood rejoices. &#8220;Four years ago,&#8221; said their friend, the
+clergyman, &#8220;these same boys stoned us and carried on like the toughs they
+were. Now we have got here a lot of young gentlemen and loyal friends.&#8221;
+Every week-day night the Parish House in East Sixteenth Street resounds
+with their merriment; on Saturday, with the roll of drums and crash of
+martial music. Then the Battalion Club meets for drill under the
+instruction of a former officer in the United States Army. In their natty
+uniforms the lads are good to look upon, and thoroughly enjoy the
+exercises, as any boy of spirit would.</p>
+
+<p>The Little Boys&#8217; Club languished somewhat for want of a definite programme
+until the happy idea of a series of talks on elementary chemistry and
+physics was hit upon. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>An eminently practical turn was given to the talks
+by taking the boys to the gas-house, for instance, when gas was up for
+discussion; to the ship-yard, when boat-building was the topic; to the
+water-works, when it was water; and to see the great dynamos at work, when
+they were grappling with the subject of electricity. Afterward the boys
+were made to tell in writing what they had seen, and some of them told it
+surprisingly well, showing that they had made excellent use of their eyes
+and their brains. There is a limit, unfortunately, to the range of
+subjects that can be illustrated to advantage in that way; the managers
+had come to the end of their tether, and were puzzling over the question
+what to do next, when a friend of the club gave it several thousand
+dollars with which to fit up a manual training-school. Since then it has
+been in clover. A house was hired in East Eleventh<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> Street and transformed
+into a carpenter-shop, and preparations to open it were in progress when
+these pages were sent to the printer. The club then had over two hundred
+members. It will probably have twice as many before the winter is over.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i032.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">TYPE-SETTING AT THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS&#8217; CLUB.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The carpenter-shop of the Avenue C Working Boys&#8217; Club has been a distinct
+success for several seasons. The work done by the boys after a few months&#8217;
+instruction compares often well with that of the majority of apprentices
+who have been years learning the trade in the regular way. The shop is
+fitted out with benches and all the necessary tools. A class in
+type-setting vies with the young carpenters in excellence of workmanship
+and devotion to business. The printers have ambitious designs upon the
+reading public. They intend to start a monthly &#8220;organ&#8221; of their club, an
+experiment that was tried once but frustrated by a change of base from
+Twenty-first Street to the present quarters at No. 650 East Fourteenth
+Street. The club grew up under the eaves of St. George&#8217;s Church eight
+years ago, and was known by the name of the St. George&#8217;s Boys&#8217; Club after
+it had been forced to move away to make room for the erection of the
+Parish House. Some of the boys work in the daytime at the trades which
+they are taught at the club in the evening, and the instruction thus
+received has helped them to earn better salaries in many cases. One of the
+managers keeps a bank account for those who can save money and want to
+invest it, and more than one of them has a snug little sum to his credit.
+There are fifty boys in each class, and always plenty waiting for
+vacancies to occur. The best pupils receive medals at the end of the year,
+and once every summer the managers, who are young men of position and
+character, take them out in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> the country for an outing, and are boys with
+them in their games and in their delight over the new sights they see
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wendell tells of one of these trips down to see &#8220;Buffalo Bill&#8221; on
+Staten Island. There was a big crowd of excursionists on the boat going
+down, and the captain took a fatherly interest in the boys, who were
+gathered together in the bow of the boat, quiet as lambs. The return trip
+was not so peaceful, though the captain good-naturedly delayed the boat
+beyond the starting time for fear some of &#8220;our boys&#8221; would get left, as
+indeed proved to be the fate of several. But by the time this was
+discovered it was no longer a source of regret to him. The Indians and the
+bucking broncos had made the boys restless. They stood around the brass
+band, and one of them attempted to relieve his pent-up feelings by
+sticking a button into the big trombone, with the effect of nearly
+strangling the stout gentleman who was playing on it. The enraged musician
+made a wild dive for the boy, who dodged around the smokestack and caught
+up a chair to defend himself with. In a moment a first-class riot was in
+progress, chairs flying, the band men swearing, and the boys yelling like
+Comanches. When quiet had been finally restored, the boys banished to the
+after-deck, and the button fished out of the trombone, the perspiring
+captain swore with a round oath that he &#8220;wouldn&#8217;t take those d&mdash;&mdash;d boys
+down to Staten Island again for ten dollars a head.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The trade-school feature of the Working Boys&#8217; Club may soon be reproduced
+in the Calvary Parish Boys&#8217; Club in East Twenty-third Street. They have
+already a useful type-setting class there, and they have that which their
+neighbors in Fourteenth Street have yet to get: their own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> handsome
+building, bought for the club by wealthy members of Calvary Church, in
+which it had its birth four years ago. More than that, they have a
+gymnasium that is the chief attraction of all that neighborhood,
+particularly the boxing-gloves in it. There were some serious doubts about
+these, and long and grave discussion before they were added to the general
+outfit. The street was rather too partial to fisticuffs, it was thought,
+and there were too many outstanding grudges among the boys to make their
+introduction safe. However, another view prevailed and the choice proved
+to be a wise one. The gloves are popular&mdash;very, and under the firm
+management of the experienced superintendent, who knows where to draw the
+safe line, the boys work off their superabundant spirits and sundry other
+little accounts very successfully in their nightly bouts. The feeling of
+fellowship and neighborly interest thus encouraged has even led to the
+establishment of a mutual benefit fund, through which the boys help each
+other in sickness or distress, and which they manage themselves, electing
+their own officers.</p>
+
+<p>For anyone who knows the boys of the East Side it is not hard to
+understand that the Calvary Parish Boys&#8217; Club has registered more than
+twenty-eight thousand callers since it was opened, only four years ago. It
+has four hundred enrolled members, who pay monthly dues of ten cents, so
+that they may feel that the club is theirs by right, not by charity.
+Though church and temperance stood at the cradle of the club&mdash;it was
+organized at a meeting of the Calvary branch of the Church Temperance
+Society&mdash;there is no preaching to the boys. The only sermons they hear at
+the club are the sermons of brotherly love and kindness, which the
+cheerful rooms, the games, the books, and the gymnasium&mdash;even the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+boxing-gloves&mdash;preach to them every night, and which the contrast of it
+all with the street, that was their all only a little while ago, is not
+apt to let them forget.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i033.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">A BOUT WITH THE GLOVES IN THE BOYS&#8217; CLUB OF CALVARY PARISH.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A small sign, with the words &#8220;Wayside Boys&#8217; Club,&#8221; hung for a while over
+the Third Avenue door of the Bible House. Two years ago it was taken down;
+the club had been merged in the Boys&#8217; Club of Grace Mission, in East
+Thirteenth Street. The members were all little fellows. They were soon
+made aware that they had fallen among strangers who, boylike, proposed to
+investigate them and to test their prowess before letting them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> in on
+equal terms. Within a week, says Mr. Wendell, this note came to their
+patroness in the Bible House:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>&#8220;<span class="smcap">Dear Mrs. &mdash;&mdash;</span>:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Would you please come and see to our Wayside Boys&#8217; Club; that the first
+time it was open it was very nice, and after that near every boy in that
+neighborhood came walking in. And if you would be so kind to come and put
+them out it would be a great pleasure to us.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mrs. &mdash;&mdash;, the club is not nice any more, and when we want to go home,
+the boys would wait for us outside, and hit you.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mrs. &mdash;&mdash;, since them boys are in the club we don&#8217;t have any games to
+play with, and if we do play with the games, they come over to us and take
+it off us.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And by so doing please oblige,</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 14em;">&mdash;&mdash;, <i>President</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">&mdash;&mdash;, <i>Vice-President</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">&mdash;&mdash;, <i>Treasurer</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">&mdash;&mdash;, <i>Secretary</i>,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 14em;">&mdash;&mdash;, <i>Floor Manager</i>.</span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Please excuse the writing. I was in haste.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 14em;">&#8220;&mdash;&mdash;, <i>Treasurer</i>.&#8221;</span></p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>The appeal had its effect. The Wayside boys were rescued and there has
+been quiet in Thirteenth Street since. They have got a new house now, and
+are looking hopefully forward to the day when &#8220;near every boy in that
+neighborhood,&#8221; shall &#8220;come walking in&#8221; upon an errand of peace.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p><p>Most of the clubs close in the summer months, when it has heretofore been
+supposed that few of the boys would attend. The experience of the Boys&#8217;
+Club in St. Mark&#8217;s Place, which this past summer was kept open a full
+month later than usual and experienced no such collapse, although the park
+across the street might be supposed to be an extra attraction on warm
+evenings, suggests that there is some mistake about this which it would be
+worth while to find out. The street is no less dangerous to the boy in
+summer because it is more crowded. The Free Reading-Room for boys in West
+Fourteenth Street is open all the year round, and though the attendance in
+summer decreases one-half, yet the rooms are never empty.</p>
+
+<p>The wish expressed by the President of the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, in a public utterance a year ago, that there might be
+a boys&#8217; club for every ward in the city, has been more than fulfilled.
+There are more boys&#8217; clubs nowadays than there are wards, though I am not
+sure that they are so distributed that each has one. There are some wards
+in which twenty might not come amiss. A directory of the local gangs,
+which might be obtained by consultation with the corner-grocers and with
+the policeman on the beat after a &#8220;scrap&#8221; with the boys, would be a good
+guide to the right spots and also in the choice of managers. Something
+over a year ago a club was opened in Bleecker Street that forthwith took
+on the character of a poultice upon a rather turbulent neighborhood. In
+the second week more than a hundred boys crowded to its meetings. It
+&#8220;drew&#8221; entirely too well. When I looked for it this fall, it was
+gone&mdash;&#8220;thank goodness!&#8221; said the owner of the tenement, a little woman who
+kept a shop across the street, with a sigh of relief that spoke volumes.
+Yet she had no more definite complaint to make than what might be inferred
+from the emphasis she put on the words<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> &#8220;them boys!&#8221; A friend of the club,
+or of some of the boys belonging to it, whom I hunted up, interpreted the
+sigh and the emphasis. The boys got the upper hand, he said. They had just
+then made a fresh start under another roof and with a new manager.</p>
+
+<p>Such experiences have not been uncommon, and, as it often happens when
+inquiry is pursued in the right spirit, the mistakes they buoyed have been
+the greatest successes of the cause. There has been enough of the other
+kind too. Any club manager can tell of cases, lots of them, in which the
+club has been the stepping-stone of the boy to a useful career. In some
+cases the boys, having outgrown their club, have carried on the work
+unaided and organized young men&#8217;s societies on a plane of in-door
+respectability that has raised an effectual barrier against the gang and
+its club-room, the saloon. These things show what a hold the idea has upon
+the boy and how much more might be made of it. So far, private benevolence
+has had the field to itself, properly so; but there is a way in which the
+municipality might help without departing from safe moorings, so it seems
+to me. Why not lend such schools or class-rooms as are not used at night
+to boys&#8217; clubs that can show a responsible management, for their meetings?
+In England the Recreative Evening Schools Association has accomplished
+something very like this by simply demonstrating its justice and
+usefulness. &#8220;Its object,&#8221; says Robert Archey Woods, in his work on English
+social movements, &#8220;is to carry on through voluntary workers evening
+classes in the board schools, combining instruction and recreation for
+boys and girls who have passed through the elementary required course. Its
+plan includes also the use of the schools for social clubs, and the use of
+school play-grounds for gymnastics and out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>-door games. This simple
+programme, as carried out, has shown how much may be accomplished through
+means which are close at hand. There are in London three hundred and
+forty-five such classes, combining manual training with entertainment, and
+their average attendance is ten thousand. Schools of the same kind are
+carried on in a hundred other places outside of London. Beside their
+immediate success under private efforts, these schools are bringing
+Parliament to see the importance of their object. Of late the Government
+has been assuming the care of recreative evening classes, little by
+little, and it looks as if ultimately all the work of the Evening Schools
+Association would be undertaken by the school boards.&#8221; I am not advocating
+the surrender of the boys&#8217; club to our New York School Board. I am afraid
+it would gain little by it and lose too much. But they might be trusted as
+landlords, if not as managers. The rent is always the heaviest item in the
+expense account of a boys&#8217; club, for the lads must have room. If cramped,
+they will boil over and make trouble. If this item were eliminated, the
+cause might experience a boom that would more than repay the community for
+the wear and tear of the school-rooms, by a reduction in the outlay for
+jails and police courts. There would be another advantage in the
+introduction of the school to the boy in the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of a friend, which
+might speed the work of the truant officer. I cannot see any serious
+objection to such a proposition. I have no doubt there are school trustees
+who can see a whole string of them; but I should not be surprised if they
+all came to this, that the schools are not for any such purpose. To this
+it would be a sufficient answer that the schools belong to the people.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i034.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">LINING UP FOR THE GYMNASIUM.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Another suggestion came home to me with force while watching the drill of
+the Battalion Club at St. George&#8217;s one night recently. It has long been
+the favorite idea of a friend and neighbor of mine, who is an old army
+officer and has seen service in the field, that a summer camp for boys
+from the city tenements could be established somewhere in the mountains at
+a safe distance from tempting orchards, where an army of them might be
+drilled with immense profit to themselves and to everybody. He will have
+it that they could be managed as easily as an equal number of men, with
+the right sort of organization and officers, and as in his business he
+runs along smoothly with four or five hundred girls under his command, I
+am bound to defer to his judgment, however much my own may rebel,
+particularly as he would be acting out my own convictions, after all, in
+his wholesale way. In any event the experiment might be tried with a
+regiment if not with an army, and it would be a very interesting one. The
+boys would have lots of chance for wholesome play as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> well as drill, and
+would get no end of fun out of it. The possible hardships of camping out
+would have no existence for them. As for any lasting good to come of it,
+outside of physical benefits, I think the discipline alone, with what it
+stands for, would cover that. In the reform schools, where they have
+military drill, they have found it their most useful ally in dealing with
+the worst and wildest class of the boys. It is the bump of organization
+that is touched again there. Resistance ceases of itself and the boys fall
+into line. Too much can be made of discipline, of course. The body may be
+drilled until it is a mere machine and the real boy is dead. But that has
+nothing to do with such an experiment as I spoke of. That is the concern
+of reform schools, and I do not think they are in any danger of overdoing
+it.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke of managing the girls. It is just the same with them. I have had
+the &#8220;gang&#8221; in mind as the alternative of the club, and therefore have
+dealt so far only with their brothers. Girls do not go in gangs, thank
+goodness, at least not yet in New York. They flock, until the boys scatter
+them and drive them off one by one. But the same instinct of
+self-government is in them. They take just as kindly to the club. The
+Neighborhood Guild, the College Settlement, and various church and
+philanthropic societies, carry on such clubs with great success. The girls
+sew, darn stockings, cook, make their own dresses, and run their own
+meetings with spirit when the boys are made to keep their profaning hands
+off. On occasion they develop the same rugged independence with an extra
+feminine touch to it, that is, a mixture of dash and spite. I recall the
+experience of a band of early philanthropists, who, a score of years ago
+or more, bought the Big Flat in the Sixth Ward and fitted it up as a
+boarding-house<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> for working girls. They filled it without any trouble,
+though with a rather better grade of boarders than they had expected. No
+sooner were the girls in possession than they promptly organized and
+&#8220;resolved&#8221; that the management should make no rules for the house without
+first submitting them to their body for approval. Philanthropy chose the
+least pointed horn of the dilemma, and retired from the field. The Big
+Flat, from a model boarding-house became a very bad tenement, and the
+boarders&#8217; club dissolved, to the loss and injury of a posterity that was
+distinctly poorer and duller, no less for the want of the club than for
+the possession of the tenement.</p>
+
+<p>The boys&#8217; club was born of the struggle of the community with the street,
+as a measure of self-defence. It has proven a useful war-club too, but its
+conquests have been the conquests of peace. It has been the kernel of
+success in many a philanthropic undertaking, secular and religious alike.
+In the plan of the Free Reading-Room for Working Boys, of which I made
+mention, it is used as a battering-ram in an attack upon the saloon. The
+Free Reading-Room was organized some nine or ten years ago by the Loyal
+Legion Temperance Society. It has been popular with lads of all ages from
+the very start, not least on account of the club or clubs which they were
+encouraged to found&mdash;literary societies they call them there. The
+Superintendent found them helpful, too, as a means of interesting the
+boys, by debate and otherwise, in the cause of temperance which he had at
+heart. The first thing a boys&#8217; club casts about for after the offices have
+been manned and the by-laws made hard and fast, is a cause. One of young
+boys, that had been in existence a month or less at the College
+Settlement, almost took the ladies&#8217; breath away by announcing one day that
+it had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> decided to expel any boy who smoked or got drunk. The Free
+Reading-Room gives ample opportunity for the exercise of this spirit of
+convert zeal, when it manifests itself. The average nightly attendance
+last year was seventy-one, and a good deal larger than that in winter. The
+boys came from as far south as Houston Street, nearly a mile below, and
+from Forty-second Street, a mile and half to the north, in all kinds of
+weather.</p>
+
+<p>The doors of the reading-room stand wide open on Sunday as on week-day
+nights. With singing, and talks on serious or religious subjects in a vein
+the boys can follow, they try to give to the proceedings a Sabbath turn of
+which the impression may abide with them. The regular Sunday-School
+exercises have, I am told by the Superintendent, been abandoned, and the
+present less formal, but more effective, programme substituted. One has
+need of being wiser than the serpent if he would build effectually in this
+field among the poor of many races and faiths that swarm in New York&#8217;s
+tenements, and he must make his foundation very broad. The great thing for
+the boys is that the room is not closed against them on the very night in
+all the week when they need it most. I think we are coming at last to
+understand what a trap we have been digging for the young in our great
+cities, when we thought to save them from temptation, by shutting every
+door but that of the church against them on the day when the devil was
+busiest finding mischief for their idle hands to do, while narrowing that
+down to the size of a wicket-gate with our creeds and confessions. The
+poor bury their dead on Sunday to save the loss of a day&#8217;s pay. Poverty
+has given over their one day of rest to their sorrows. Is it likely that
+any attempt to rob it of its few harmless joys should win them over? It is
+the shadow of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> bigotry and intolerance falling across it that has turned
+healthy play into rioting and moral ruin. Open the museums, the libraries,
+and the clubs on Sunday, and the church that draws the bolt will find the
+tide of reawakened interest that will set in strong enough to fill its own
+pews, too, to overflowing.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+<h3>THE OUTCAST AND THE HOMELESS</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Under</span> the heading &#8220;Just one of God&#8217;s Children,&#8221; one of the morning
+newspapers told the story last winter of a newsboy at the Brooklyn Bridge,
+who fell in a fit with his bundle of papers under his arm, and was carried
+into the waiting-room by the bridge police. They sent for an ambulance,
+but before it came the boy was out selling papers again. The reporters
+asked the little dark-eyed news-woman at the bridge entrance which boy it
+was.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Little Maher it was,&#8221; she answered.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Who takes care of him?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Oh! no one but God,&#8221; said she, &#8220;and he is too busy with other folks to
+give him much attention.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Little Maher was the representative of a class that is happily growing
+smaller year by year in our city. It is altogether likely that a little
+inquiry into his case could have placed the responsibility for his forlorn
+condition considerably nearer home, upon someone who preferred giving
+Providence the job to taking the trouble himself. There are homeless
+children in New York. It is certain that we shall always have our full
+share. Yet it is equally certain that society is coming out ahead in its
+struggle with this problem. In ten years, during which New York added to
+her population one-fourth, the homelessness of our streets, taking the
+returns of the Children&#8217;s Aid Society&#8217;s lodging-houses as the gauge,
+instead of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> increasing proportionally, has decreased nearly one-fifth; and
+of the Topsy element, it may be set down as a fact, there is an end.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i035.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">A SNUG CORNER ON A COLD NIGHT.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>If we were able to argue from this a corresponding improvement in the
+general lot of the poor, we should be on the high road to the millennium.
+But it is not so. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> showing is due mainly to the perfection of
+organized charitable effort, that proceeds nowadays upon the sensible
+principle of putting out a fire, viz., that it must be headed off, not run
+down, and therefore concerns itself chiefly about the children. We are yet
+a long, a very long way from a safe port. The menace of the Submerged
+Tenth has not been blotted from the register of the Potter&#8217;s Field, and
+though the &#8220;twenty thousand poor children who would not have known it was
+Christmas,&#8221; but for public notice to that effect, be a benevolent fiction,
+there are plenty whose brief lives have had little enough of the
+embodiment of Christmas cheer and good-will in them to make the name seem
+like a bitter mockery. Yet, when all is said, this much remains, that we
+are steering the right course. Against the drift and the head-winds of an
+unparalleled immigration that has literally drained the pauperism of
+Europe into our city for two generations, against the false currents and
+the undertow of the tenement in our social life, we are making headway at
+last.</p>
+
+<p>Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a
+woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time. What if there be a
+thousand left? There is one less. What that one more on the wrong side of
+the account might have meant will never be known till the final reckoning.
+The records of jails and brothels and poor-houses, for a hundred years to
+come, might but have begun the tale.</p>
+
+<p>When, in 1849, the Chief of Police reported that in eleven wards there
+were 2,955 vagrants and dissolute children under fifteen years of age, the
+boys all thieves and the girls embryo prostitutes, and that ten per cent.
+of the entire child population of school age in the city were vagrants,
+there was no Children&#8217;s Aid Society to plead<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> their cause. There <i>was</i> a
+reformatory, and that winter the American Female Guardian Society was
+incorporated, &#8220;to prevent vice and moral degradation;&#8221; but Mr. Brace had
+not yet found his life-work, and little Mary Ellen had not been born. The
+story of the legacy her sufferings left to the world of children I have
+briefly told, and in the chapter on Industrials Schools some of the
+momentous results of Mr. Brace&#8217;s devotion have been set forth. The story
+is not ended; it never will be, while poverty and want exist in this great
+city. His greatest work was among the homeless and the outcast. In the
+thirty-nine years during which he was the life and soul of the Children&#8217;s
+Aid Society it found safe country homes for 84,318<small><a name="f22.1" id="f22.1" href="#f22">[22]</a></small> poor city children.
+And the work goes on. Very nearly already, the army thus started on the
+road to usefulness and independence equals in numbers the whole body of
+children that, four years before it took up its march, yielded its Lost
+Tenth, as the Chief of Police bore witness, to the prisons and perdition.</p>
+
+<p>This great mass of children&mdash;did they all come from the street? Not all of
+them. Not even the larger number. But they would have got there, all of
+them, had not the Society blocked the way. That is how the race of Topsies
+has been exterminated in New York. That in this, of all fields, prevention
+is the true cure, and that a farmer&#8217;s home is better for the city child
+that has none than a prison or the best-managed public institution, are
+the simple lessons it has taught and enforced by example that has carried
+conviction at last. The conviction came slowly and by degrees. The degrees
+were not always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> creditable to sordid human nature that had put forth no
+hand to keep the child from the gutter, and in the effort to rescue it now
+saw only its selfish opportunity. There are people yet at this day, whose
+offers to accept &#8220;a strong and handsome girl of sixteen or so with sweet
+temper,&#8221; as a cheap substitute for a paid servant&mdash;&#8220;an angel with mighty
+strong arms,&#8221; as one of the officers of the Society indignantly put it
+once&mdash;show that the selfish stage has not been quite passed. Such offers
+are rejected with the emphatic answer: &#8220;We bring the children out because
+they need you, not because you need them.&#8221; The Society farms out no girls
+of sixteen with strong arms. For them it finds ways of earning an honest
+living at such wages as their labor commands, homes in the West, if they
+wish it, where good husbands, not hard masters, are waiting for them. But,
+ordinarily, its effort is to bend the twig at a much tenderer age. And in
+this effort it is assisted by the growth of a strong humane sentiment in
+the West, that takes less account of the return the child can make in work
+for his keep, and more of the child itself. Time was when few children but
+those who were able to help about the farm could be sure of a welcome.
+Nowadays babies are in demand. Of all the children sent West in the last
+two years, 14 per cent. were under five years, 43.6 per cent. over five
+and under ten years, 36.8 per cent. over ten and under fifteen, and only
+5.3 per cent. over fifteen years of age. The average age of children sent
+to Western homes in 1891 by the Children&#8217;s Aid Society was nine years and
+forty days, and in 1892 nine years and eight months, or an average of nine
+years, four months, and twenty days for the two years.</p>
+
+<p>It finds them in a hundred ways&mdash;in poverty-stricken homes, on the Island,
+in its Industrial Schools, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> street. Often they are brought to its
+office by parents who are unable to take care of them. Provided they are
+young enough, no questions are asked. It is not at the child&#8217;s past, but
+at its future, that these men look. That it comes from among bad people is
+the best reason in the world why it should be put among those that are
+good. That is the one care of the Society. Its faith that the child, so
+placed, will respond and rise to their level, is unshaken after these many
+years. Its experience has knocked the bugbear of heredity all to flinders.</p>
+
+<p>So that this one condition may be fulfilled, a constant missionary work of
+an exceedingly practical and business-like character goes on in the
+Western farming communities, where there is more to eat than there are
+mouths to fill, and where a man&#8217;s children are yet his wealth. When
+interest has been stirred in a community to the point of arousing demands
+for the homeless children, the best men in the place&mdash;the judge, the
+pastor, the local editor, and their peers&mdash;are prevailed upon to form a
+local committee that passes upon all applications, and judges of the
+responsibility and worthiness of the applicants. In this way a sense of
+responsibility is cultivated that is the best protection for the child in
+future years, should he need any, which he very rarely does. On a day set
+by the committee the agent arrives from New York with his little troop.
+Each child has been comfortably and neatly dressed in a new suit, and
+carries in his little bundle a Bible as a parting gift from the Society.
+The committee is on hand to receive them. So usually are half the mothers
+of the town, who divide the children among themselves and take them home
+to be cared for until the next day. If there are any babies in the lot, it
+is always hard work to make them give them up the next morning,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> and
+sometimes the company that gathers in the morning at the town hall, for
+inspection and apportionment among the farmers, has been unexpectedly
+depleted overnight. From twenty and thirty miles around, the big-hearted
+farmers come in their wagons to attend the show and to negotiate with the
+committee. The negotiations are rarely prolonged. Each picks out his
+child, sometimes two, often more than one the same child. The committee
+umpires between them. They all know each other, and the agent&#8217;s knowledge
+of each child, gained on the way out and perhaps through previous
+acquaintance, helps to make the best choice. There is no ceremony of
+adoption. That is left to days to come, when the child and the new home
+have learned to know each other, and to the watchful care of the local
+committee. To any questions concerning faith or previous condition that
+may be asked, the Society&#8217;s answer is always the same. In substance it is
+this:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We do not know. Here is the child. Take him and make a good Baptist, or
+Methodist, or Christian of any sect of him! That is your privilege and his
+gain. The fewer questions you ask the better. Let his past be behind him
+and the future his to work out. Love him for himself.&#8221;<small><a name="f23.1" id="f23.1" href="#f23">[23]</a></small></p>
+
+<p>And in the spirit in which the advice is given it is usually accepted.
+Night falls upon a joyous band returning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> home over the quiet country
+roads, the little stranger snugly stowed among his new friends, one of
+them already, with home and life before him.</p>
+
+<p>And does the event justify the high hopes of that home journey? Almost
+always in the end, if the child was young enough when it was sent out.
+Sometimes a change has to be made. Oftener the change is of name, in the
+adoption that follows. Some of the boys get restless as they grow up, and
+&#8220;run about a good deal,&#8221; to the anguish of the committee. A few are
+reported as having &#8220;gone to the bad.&#8221; But even these commonly come out all
+right at last. One of them, of whom mention is made in the Society&#8217;s
+thirty-fifth annual report, turned up after long years as Mayor of his
+town and a member of the legislature. &#8220;We can think,&#8221; wrote Mr. Brace
+before his death, &#8220;of little Five Points thieves who are now ministers of
+the gospel or honest farmers; vagrants and street children who are men in
+professional life; and women who, as teachers or wives of good citizens,
+are everywhere respected; the children of outcasts or unfortunates whose
+inherited tendencies have been met by the new environment, and who are
+industrious and decent members of society.&#8221; Only by their losing
+themselves does the Society lose sight of them. Two or three times a year
+the agent goes to see them all. In the big ledgers in St. Mark&#8217;s Place
+each child who has been placed out has a page to himself on which all his
+doings are recorded, as he is heard of year by year. There are twenty-nine
+of these canvas-bound ledgers now, and the stories they have to tell would
+help anyone, who thinks he has lost faith in poor human nature, to pick it
+up with the vow never to let go of it again. I open one of them at random,
+and copy the page&mdash;page 289 of ledger No. 23. It tells the story<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> of an
+English boy, one of four who were picked up down at Castle Garden twelve
+years ago. His mother was dead, and he had not seen his father for five
+years before he came here, a stowaway. He did not care, he said, where
+they sent him, so long as it was not back to England:</p>
+
+<p>June 15, 1880. James S&mdash;&mdash;, aged fourteen years, English; orphan; goes
+West with J. P. Brace.</p>
+
+<p>Placed with J. R&mdash;&mdash;, Neosha Rapids, Kan. January 26, 1880, James writes
+that he gets along pleasantly; wrote to him; twenty-sixth annual report
+sent August 4th. July 14, 1880, Mr. and Mrs. R&mdash;&mdash; write that James is
+impudent and tries them greatly. Wrote to him August 17, 1880; wrote again
+October 15th. October 21, 1880, Mr. R&mdash;&mdash; writes that they could not
+possibly get along with James and placed him with Mr. G. H&mdash;&mdash;, about five
+miles from his house. Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; is a good man and has a handsome property.
+Wrote to James March 8, 1881. May 1, 1883, has left his place and has
+engaged to work for Mr. H&mdash;&mdash;, of Hartford. James seems to be a pretty
+wild boy, and the probability is he will turn out badly; is very profane
+and has a violent temper. April 17, 1887, Mrs. Lyman Fry writes James was
+crushed to death in Kansas City, where he was employed as brakeman on a
+freight train.</p>
+
+<p>October 16, 1889.&mdash;The above is a mistake. James calls to-day at the
+office and says that after I saw him he turned over a new leaf, and has
+made a pretty good character for himself. Has worked steadily and has many
+friends in Emporia. Has been here three days and wants to look up his
+friends. Is grateful for having been sent West.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So James came out right after all, and all his sins are forgiven. He was a
+fair sample of those who have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> troubled the Society&#8217;s managers most,
+occasionally brought undeserved reproach upon them, but in the end given
+them the sweet joy of knowing that their faith and trust were not put to
+shame. Many pages in the ledgers shine with testimony to that. I shall
+mention but a single case, the one to which I alluded in the introduction
+to the story of the Industrial Schools. Andrew H. Burke was taken by the
+Society&#8217;s agents from the nursery at Randall&#8217;s Island, thirty-three years
+ago, with a number of other boys, and sent out to Nobleville, Ind. They
+heard from him in St. Mark&#8217;s Place as joining the Sons of Temperance, then
+as going to the war, a drummer boy; next of his going to college with a
+determination &#8220;to be somebody in the world.&#8221; He carried his point. That
+boy is now the Governor of North Dakota. Last winter he wrote to his kind
+friends, full of loyalty and gratitude, this message for the poor children
+of New York:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To the boys now under your charge please convey my best wishes, and that
+I hope that their pathways in life will be those of morality, of honor, of
+health, and industry. With these four attributes as a guidance and
+incentive, I can bespeak for them an honorable and happy and successful
+life. The goal is for them as well as for the rich man&#8217;s son. They must
+learn to labor and to wait, for &#8216;all things come to him who waits.&#8217; Many
+times will the road be rugged, winding, and long, and the sky overcast
+with ominous clouds. Still, it will not do to fall by the wayside and give
+up. If one does, the battle of life will be lost.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Tell the boys I am proud to have had as humble a beginning in life as
+they, and that I believe it has been my salvation. I hope my success in
+life, if it can be so termed, will be an incentive to them to struggle for
+a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> respectable recognition among their fellow-men. In this country family
+name cuts but little figure. It is the character of the man that wins
+recognition, hence I would urge them to build carefully and consistently
+for the future.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The bigger boys do not always give so good an account of themselves. I
+have already spoken of the difficulty besetting the Society&#8217;s efforts to
+deal with that end of the problem. The street in their case has had the
+first inning, and the battle is hard, often doubtful. Sometimes it is
+lost. These are rarely sent West, early consignments of them having
+stirred up a good deal of trouble there. They go South, where they seem to
+have more patience with them. &#8220;The people there,&#8221; said an old agent of the
+Society to me, with an enthusiasm that was fairly contagious, &#8220;are the
+most generous, kind-hearted people in the world. And they are more easy
+going. If a boy turns out badly, steals and runs away perhaps, a letter
+comes, asking not for retaliation or upbraiding us for letting him come,
+but hoping that he will do better, expressing sorrow and concern, and
+ending usually with the big-hearted request that we send them another in
+his place.&#8221; And another comes, and, ten to one, does better. What lad is
+there whose wayward spirit such kindness would not conquer in the end?<small><a name="f24.1" id="f24.1" href="#f24">[24]</a></small></p>
+
+<p>These bigger boys come usually out of the Society&#8217;s lodging-houses for
+homeless children. Of these I spoke<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> so fully in the account of the Street
+Arab in &#8220;How the Other Half Lives,&#8221; that I shall not here enter into any
+detailed description of them. There are six, one for girls in East Twelfth
+Street, lately moved from St. Mark&#8217;s Place, and five for boys. The oldest
+and best known of these is the Newsboys&#8217; lodging-house in Duane Street,
+now called the Brace Memorial Lodging-house for Boys. The others are the
+East Side house in East Broadway, the Tompkins Square house, the West Side
+house at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-second Street, and the lodging-house at
+Forty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. A list of the builders&#8217; names
+emphasizes what I said a while ago about the unostentatious charity of
+rich New Yorkers. I have never seen them published anywhere except in the
+Society&#8217;s reports, but they make good and instructive reading, and here
+they are in the order in which I gave the houses they built, beginning
+with the one on East Broadway: Miss Catharine L. Wolfe, Mrs. Robert L.
+Stuart, John Jacob Astor, Morris K. Jesup. The girls&#8217; home in East Twelfth
+Street, just completed, was built as a memorial to Miss Elizabeth
+Davenport Wheeler by her family, and is to be known as the Elizabeth Home.
+The list might be greatly extended by including the twenty-one Industrial
+Schools, which are in fact links in the same great chain; but that is not
+to the present purpose, and probably I should not be thanked for doing it.
+I have already transgressed enough. The wealth that seeks its
+responsibilities among the outcast children in this city, is of the kind
+that prefers that it should remain unidentified and unheralded to the
+world in connection with its benefactions.</p>
+
+<p>It is in these lodging-houses that one may study the homelessness that
+mocks the miles of brick walls which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> enclose New York&#8217;s tenements, but
+not its homes. Only with special opportunities is it nowadays possible to
+study it anywhere else in New York. One may still hunt up by night waifs
+who make their beds in alleys and cellars and abandoned sheds. This last
+winter two stable fires that broke out in the middle of the night routed
+out little colonies of boys, who slept in the hay and probably set it on
+fire. But one no longer stumbles over homeless waifs in the street
+gutters. One has to hunt for them and to know where. The &#8220;cruelty man&#8221;
+knows and hunts them so assiduously that the game is getting scarcer every
+day. The doors of the lodging-houses stand open day and night, offering
+shelter upon terms no cold or hungry lad would reject: six cents for
+breakfast and supper, six for a clean bed. They are not pauper barracks,
+and he is expected to pay; but he can have trust if his pockets are empty,
+as they probably are, and even a <ins class="correction" title="original: bookblack's">bootblack&#8217;s</ins> kit or an armful of papers to
+start him in business, if need be. The only conditions are that he shall
+wash and not swear, and attend evening school when his work is done. It is
+not possible to-day that an outcast child should long remain supperless
+and without shelter in New York, unless he prefers to take his chances
+with the rats of the gutter. Such children there are, but they are no
+longer often met. The winter&#8217;s cold drives even them to cover and to
+accept the terms they rejected in more hospitable seasons. Even the
+&#8220;dock-rat&#8221; is human.</p>
+
+<p>It seems a marvel that he is, sometimes, when one hears the story of what
+drove him to the street. Drunkenness and brutality at home helped the
+tenement do it, half the time. It drove his sister out to a life of shame,
+too, as likely as not. I have talked with a good many of the boys, trying
+to find out, and heard some yarns and some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> stories that were true. In
+seven cases out of ten, of those who had homes to go to, it was that, when
+we got down to hard pan. A drunken father or mother made the street
+preferable to the house, and to the street they went.<small><a name="f25.1" id="f25.1" href="#f25">[25]</a></small> In other cases
+death, perhaps, had broken up the family and thrown the boys upon the
+world. That was the story of one of the boys I tried to photograph at a
+quiet game of &#8220;craps&#8221; (see picture on page 122) in the hallway of the
+Duane Street lodging-house&mdash;James Brady. Father and mother had both died
+two months after they came here from Ireland, and he went forth from the
+tenement alone and without a friend, but not without courage. He just
+walked on until he stumbled on the lodging-house, and fell into a job of
+selling papers. James, at the age of sixteen, was being initiated into the
+mysteries of the alphabet in the evening school. He was not sure that he
+liked it. The German boy who took a hand in the game, and who made his
+grub and bed money, when he was lucky, by picking up junk, had just such a
+career. The third, the bootblack, gave his reasons briefly for running
+away from his Philadelphia home: &#8220;Me muther wuz all the time hittin&#8217; me
+when I cum in the house, so I cum away.&#8221; So did a German boy I met there,
+if for a slightly different reason. He was fresh from over the sea, and
+had not yet learned a word of English. In his own tongue he told why<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> he
+came. His father sent him to a gymnasium, but the Latin was &#8220;zu schwer&#8221;
+for him, and &#8220;der Herr Papa sagt heraus!&#8221; He was evidently a boy of good
+family, but slow. His father could have taken no better course, certainly,
+to cure him of that defect, if he did not mind the danger of it.</p>
+
+<p>There are always some whom nobody owns. Boys who come from a distance
+perhaps, and are cast up in our streets with all the other drift that sets
+toward the city&#8217;s maelstrom. But the great mass were born of the maelstrom
+and ground by it into what they are. Of fourteen lads rounded up by the
+officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children one
+night this past summer, in the alleys and byways down about the printing
+offices, where they have their run, two were from Brooklyn, one a runaway
+from a good home in White Plains, and the rest from the tenements of New
+York. Only one was really without home or friends. That was perhaps an
+unusually&mdash;I was going to say good showing; but I do not know that it can
+be called a good showing that ten boys who had homes to go to should
+prefer to sleep out in the street. The boy who has none would have no
+other choice until someone picked him up and took him in. The record of
+the 84,318 children that have been sent to Western homes in thirty-nine
+years show that 17,383 of them had both parents living, and therefore
+presumably homes, such as they were; 5,892 only the father, and 11,954 the
+mother, living; 39,406 had neither father nor mother. The rest either did
+not know, or did not tell. That again includes an earlier period when the
+streets were full of vagrants without home-ties, so that the statement, as
+applied to to-day, errs on the other side. The truth lies between the two
+extremes. Four-fifths, perhaps, are outcasts, the rest homeless waifs.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>The great mass, for instance, of the newsboys who cry their &#8220;extrees&#8221; in
+the streets by day, and whom one meets in the Duane Street lodging-house
+or in Theatre Alley and about the Post-office by night, are children with
+homes who thus contribute to the family earnings, and sleep out, if they
+do, because they have either not sold their papers or gambled away the
+money at &#8220;craps,&#8221; and are afraid to go home. It was for such a reason
+little Giuseppe Margalto and his chum made their bed in the ventilating
+chute at the Post-office on the night General Sherman died, and were
+caught by the fire that broke out in the mail-room toward midnight.
+Giuseppe was burned to death; the other escaped to bring the news to the
+dark Crosby Street alley in which he had lived. Giuseppe did not die his
+cruel death in vain. A much stricter watch has been kept since upon the
+boys, and they are no longer allowed to sleep in many places to which they
+formerly had access.</p>
+
+<p>A bed in the street, in an odd box or corner, is good enough for the
+ragamuffin who thinks the latitude of his tenement unhealthy, when the
+weather is warm. It is cooler there, too, and it costs nothing, if one can
+keep out of the reach of the policeman. It is no new experience to the
+boy. Half the tenement population, men, women, and children, sleep out of
+doors, in streets and yards, on the roof, or on the fire-escape, from May
+to October. In winter the boys can curl themselves up on the steam-pipes
+in the newspaper offices that open their doors after midnight on secret
+purpose to let them in. When these fail, there is still the lodging-house
+as a last resort. To the lad whom ill-treatment or misfortune drove to the
+street it is always a friend. To the chronic vagrant it has several
+drawbacks: the school, the wash, the enforced tax for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> supper and the
+bed, that cuts down the allowance for &#8220;craps,&#8221; his all-absorbing passion,
+and finally the occasional inconvenient habit of mothers and fathers to
+come looking there for their missing boys. The police send them there, and
+sometimes they take the trouble to call when the boys have gone to bed,
+taking them at what they consider a mean disadvantage. However, most of
+them do not trouble themselves to that extent. They let the strap hang
+idle till the boy comes back, if he ever does.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i036.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">2 A.M. IN THE DELIVERY ROOM IN THE &#8220;SUN&#8221; OFFICE.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Last February Harry Quill, aged fifteen, disappeared from the tenement No.
+45 Washington Street, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> though he was not heard of again for many
+weeks, his people never bothered the police. Not until his dead body was
+fished up from the air-shaft at the bottom of which it had lain two whole
+months, was his disappearance explained. But the full explanation came
+only the other day, in September, when one of his playmates was arrested
+for throwing him down and confessed to doing it. Harry was drunk, he said,
+and attacked him on the roof with a knife. In the struggle he threw him
+into the air-shaft. Fifteen years old, and fighting drunk! The mere
+statement sheds a stronger light on the sources of child vagabondage in
+our city than I could do, were I to fill the rest of my book with an
+enumeration of them.</p>
+
+<p>However, it is a good deal oftener the father who gets drunk than the boy.
+Not all, nor even a majority, of the boys one meets at the lodging-houses
+are of that stamp. If they were, they would not be there long. They have
+their faults, and the code of morals proclaimed by the little newsboys,
+for instance, is not always in absolute harmony with that generally
+adopted by civilized society. But even they have virtues quite as
+conspicuous. They are honest after their fashion, and tremendously
+impartial in a fight. They are bound to see fair play, if they all have to
+take a hand. It generally ends that way. A good many of them&mdash;the great
+majority in all the other lodging-houses but that in Duane Street&mdash;work
+steadily in shops and factories, making their home there because it is the
+best they have, and because there they are among friends they know. Two
+little brothers, John and Willie, attracted my attention in the Newsboys&#8217;
+Lodging-house by the sturdy way in which they held together, back to back,
+against the world, as it were. Willie was thirteen and John eleven years
+old. Their story was simple and soon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> told. Their mother died, and their
+father, who worked in a gas-house, broke up the household, unable to
+maintain it. The boys went out to shift for themselves, while he made his
+home in a Bowery lodging-house. The oldest of the brothers was then
+earning three dollars a week in a factory; the younger was selling
+newspapers, and making out. The day I first saw him he came in from his
+route early&mdash;it was raining hard&mdash;to get dry trousers out for his brother
+against the time he should be home from the factory. There was no doubt
+the two would hew their way through the world together. The right stuff
+was in them, as in the two other lads, also brothers, I found in the
+Tompkins Square lodging-house. Their parents had both died, leaving them
+to care for a palsied sister and a little brother. They sent the little
+one to school, and went to work for the sister. Their combined earnings at
+the shop were just enough to support her and one of the brothers who
+stayed with her. The other went to the lodging-house, where he could live
+for eighteen cents a day, turning the rest of his earnings into the family
+fund. With this view of these homeless lads, the one who goes much among
+them is not surprised to hear of their clubbing together, as they did in
+the Seventh Avenue lodging-house, to fit out a little ragamuffin, who was
+brought in shivering from the street, with a suit of clothes. There was
+not one in the crowd that chipped in who had a whole coat to his back.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i037.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">BUFFALO.</span></p></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It was in this lodging-house I first saw Buffalo. He was presented to me
+the night I took the picture of my little vegetable-peddling friend,
+Edward, asleep on the front bench in evening school. Edward was nine years
+old and an orphan, but hard at work every day earning his own living by
+shouting from a pedlar&#8217;s cart. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> could not be made to sit for his
+picture, and I took him at a disadvantage&mdash;in a double sense, for he had
+not made his toilet; it was in the days of the threatened water-famine,
+and the boys had been warned not to waste water in washing, an injunction
+they cheerfully obeyed. I was anxious not to have the boy disturbed, so
+the spelling-class went right on while I set up the camera. It was an
+original class, original in its answers as in its looks. This was what I
+heard while I focused on poor Eddie:</p>
+
+<p>The teacher: &#8220;Cheat! spell cheat.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Boy spells correctly. Teacher: &#8220;Right! What is it to cheat?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Boy: &#8220;To skin one, like Tommy&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The teacher cut the explanation short, and ordering up another boy, bade
+him spell &#8220;nerve.&#8221; He did it. &#8220;What is nerve?&#8221; demanded the teacher; &#8220;what
+does it mean?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i038.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">NIGHT-SCHOOL IN THE WEST SIDE LODGING-HOUSE. EDWARD, THE LITTLE PEDLAR, CAUGHT NAPPING.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Cheek! don&#8217;t you know,&#8221; said the boy, and at that moment I caught
+Buffalo blacking my sleeping pedlar&#8217;s face with ink, just in time to
+prevent his waking him up. Then it was that I heard the disturber&#8217;s story.
+He <i>was</i> a character, and no mistake. He had run away from Buffalo, whence
+his name, &#8220;beating&#8221; his way down on the trains, until he reached New York.
+He &#8220;shined&#8221; around until he got so desperately hard up that he had to sell
+his kit. Just about then he was discovered by an artist, who paid him to
+sit for him in his awful rags with his tousled hair that had not known the
+restraint of a cap for months. &#8220;Oh! it was a daisy job,&#8221; sighed Buffalo,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+at the recollection. He had only to sit still and crack jokes. Alas!
+Buffalo&#8217;s first effort at righteousness upset him. He had been taught in
+the lodging-house that to be clean was the first requisite of a gentleman,
+and on his first pay-day he went bravely, eschewing &#8220;craps,&#8221; and bought
+himself a new coat and had his hair cut. When, beaming with pride, he
+presented himself at the studio in his new character, the artist turned
+him out as no longer of any use to him. I am afraid that Buffalo&#8217;s
+ambition to be &#8220;like folks,&#8221; received a shock by this mysterious
+misfortune, that spoiled his career. A few days after that he was caught
+by a policeman in the street, at his old game of &#8220;craps.&#8221; The officer took
+him to the police court and arraigned him as a hardened offender. To the
+judge&#8217;s question if he had any home, he said frankly yes! in Buffalo, but
+he had run away from it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Now, if I let you go, will you go right back?&#8221; asked the magistrate,
+looking over the desk at the youthful prisoner. Buffalo took off his
+tattered cap and stood up on the foot-rail so that he could reach across
+the desk with his hand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Put it there, jedge!&#8221; he said. &#8220;I&#8217;ll go. Square and honest, I will.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And he went. I never heard of him again.</p>
+
+<p>The evening classes are a sort of latch-key to knowledge for belated
+travellers on the road. They make good use of it, if they are late, as
+instanced in the class in history in the Duane Street lodging-house, which
+the younger boys irreverently speak of as &#8220;The Soup-house Gang.&#8221; I found
+it surprisingly proficient, if it was in its shirtsleeves, and there were
+at least a couple of pupils in it who promised to make their mark. All of
+its members are working lads, and not a few of them are capitalists in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> a
+small but very promising way. There is a savings bank attached to each
+lodging-house, with the superintendent as president and cashier at once.
+No less than $5,197 was deposited by the 11,435 boys who found shelter in
+them in 1891. They were not all depositors, of course. In the Duane Street
+lodging-house, out of 7,614 newsboys who were registered, 1,108 developed
+the instinct of saving, or were able to lay by something. Their little
+pile at the end of the year held the respectable sum of $3,162.39.<small><a name="f26.1" id="f26.1" href="#f26">[26]</a></small> It
+is safe to say that the interest of the Soup-house Gang in it was
+proportionate to its other achievements. In the West Side lodging-house,
+where nearly a thousand boys were taken in during the year, 54 patronized
+the bank and saved up $360.11. I found a little newsboy there who sells
+papers in the Grand Central Depot, and whose bank-book showed deposits of
+$200. Some day that boy, for all he has a &#8220;tough&#8221; father and mother who
+made him prefer the lodging-house as a home at the age of nine years, will
+be running the news business on the road as the capable &#8220;boss&#8221; of any
+number of lads of his present age. He neglects no opportunity to learn
+what the house has to offer, if he can get to the school in time. On the
+whole, the teachers report the boys as slow at their books, and no wonder.
+A glimpse of little Eddie, in from the cart after his day&#8217;s work and
+dropping asleep on the bench from sheer weariness, more than excuses him,
+I think. Eddie may have a chance now to learn something better than
+peddling apples. They have lately added to the nightly instruction there,
+I am told, the feature of manual training in the shape of a
+printing-office,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> to which the boys have taken amazingly and which
+promises great things.</p>
+
+<p>There was one pupil in that evening class, at whose door the charge of
+being &#8220;slow&#8221; could not be laid, indifferent though his scholarship was in
+anything but the tricks of the street. He was the most hopeless young
+scamp I ever knew, and withal so aggravatingly funny that it was
+impossible not to laugh, no matter how much one felt like scolding. He
+lived by &#8220;shinin&#8217;&#8221; and kept his kit in a saloon to save his dragging it
+home every night. When I last saw him he was in disgrace, for not showing
+up at the school four successive nights. He explained that the policeman
+who &#8220;collared&#8221; him &#8220;fur fightin&#8217;&#8221; was to blame. It was the third time he
+had been locked up for that offence. When he found out that I wanted to
+know his history, he set about helping me with a readiness to oblige that
+was very promising. Did he have any home? Oh, yes, he had.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Well, where do you live?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Here!&#8221; said Tommy, promptly, with just a suspicion of a wink at the other
+boys who were gathered about watching the examination. He had no father;
+didn&#8217;t know where his mother was.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is she any relation to you!&#8221; put in one of the boys, gravely. Tommy
+disdained the question. It turned out that his mother had been after him
+repeatedly and that he was an incorrigible runaway. She had at last given
+him up for good. While his picture was being &#8220;took&#8221;&mdash;it will be found on
+page 100 of this book&mdash;one of the lads reported that she was at the door
+again, and Tommy broke and ran. He returned just when they closed the
+doors of the house for the night, with the report that &#8220;the old woman was
+a fake.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i039.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">THE &#8220;SOUP-HOUSE GANG,&#8221; CLASS IN HISTORY IN THE DUANE STREET NEWSBOYS&#8217; LODGING-HOUSE.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>The crippled boys&#8217; brush shop is a feature of the lodging-house in East
+Forty-fourth Street. It is the <i>b&ecirc;te noire</i> of the Society, partly on
+account of the difficulty of making it go without too great an outlay,
+partly on account of the boys themselves. They are of all the city&#8217;s
+outcasts the most unfortunate and the hardest to manage. Their misfortune
+has soured their temper, and as a rule they are troublesome and
+headstrong. No wonder. There seems to be no room for a poor crippled lad
+in New York. There are plenty of institutions that are after the well and
+able-bodied, but for the cripples the only chance is to shrivel and die in
+the Randall&#8217;s Island Asylum. No one wants them. The brush shop pays them
+wages that enables them to make their way, and the boys turn out enough
+brushes, if a market could only be found for them. It is a curious and
+saddening fact that the competition that robs it of its market comes from
+the prisons, to block the doors of which the Society expends all its
+energies&mdash;the prisons of other States than our own at that. The managers
+have a good word to say for the trades unions, which have been very kind
+to them, they say, in this matter of brushes, trying to help the boys, but
+without much success. The shop is able to employ only a small fraction of
+the number it might benefit, were it able to dispose of its wares readily.
+Despite their misfortunes the cripples manage to pick up and enjoy the
+good things they find in their path as they hobble through life. Last year
+they challenged the other crippled boys in the hospital on Randall&#8217;s
+Island to a champion game of base-ball, and beat them on their crutches
+with a score of 42 to 31. The game was played on the hospital lawn, before
+an enthusiastic crowd of wrecks, young and old, and must have been a sight
+to see.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>A worse snag than the competition of the prisons is struck by the Society
+in the cheap Bowery lodging-houses&mdash;&#8220;hotels&#8221; they are called&mdash;that attract
+the homeless boys with their greater promise of freedom. There are no
+troublesome rules to obey there, no hours to keep, and very little to pay.
+An ordinance of the Health Department, which exercises jurisdiction over
+those houses, prohibits the admission of boys under sixteen years old, but
+the prohibition is easily evaded, and many slip in to encounter there the
+worst of all company for such as they. The lowest of these houses, that
+are also the cheapest and therefore the ones the boys patronize, are the
+nightly rendezvous of thieves and, as the police have more than once
+pointed out, murderers as well. There should be a much stricter
+supervision over them&mdash;supervision by the police as well as by the health
+officers&mdash;and the age limit should be put at eighteen years instead of
+sixteen. There is this much to be said for the lodging-houses, however,
+that it is a ticklish subject to approach until the city as a municipality
+has swept before its own door. They at least offer a bed, such as it is,
+and shelter after their fashion. The hospitality the city offers to its
+homeless poor in the police-station lodging-rooms is one of the scandals
+of a civilized age. The moral degradation of an enforced stay in these
+dens is immeasurable. To say that they are the resort of tramps and &#8220;bums&#8221;
+who know and deserve nothing better, is begging the question. It is true
+of the majority, but that very fact consigns the helpless minority, too
+poor to pay and too proud to beg, to a fate worse than death. I myself
+picked from the mass of festering human filth in a police-station
+lodging-room, one night last winter, six young lads, not one of whom was
+over eighteen, and who for one reason or another had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> been stranded there
+that night. They were not ruffians either, but boys who to all appearances
+had come from good homes, the memory of which might not efface the lessons
+learned that night in a lifetime. The scandal has been denounced over and
+over again by grand juries, by the Police Commissioners, and by
+philanthropists who know of the facts, and efforts without end have been
+made to get the city authorities to substitute some decent system of
+municipal hospitality for this unutterable disgrace, as other cities have
+done, but they have all been wrecked by political jobbery or official
+apathy.</p>
+
+<p>A thing to be profoundly thankful for is the practical elimination of the
+girl vagrant from our social life. Ten years ago, Broadway from Fourteenth
+Street up was crowded with little girls who, under the pretence of
+peddling flowers and newspapers, pandered to the worst immorality. They
+went in regular gangs, captained and employed by a few conscienceless old
+harpies, who took the wages of their infamy and paid them with blows and
+curses if they fell short of their greed. The police and the officers of
+the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children put an end to this
+traffic after a long fight, sending the old wretches to jail and some of
+their victims to the reformatories. One of the gangs that were broken up
+had a rendezvous in a stable in Thirtieth Street, near Broadway. The girls
+had latch-keys and went out and in at all hours of the night. To-day the
+flower-girl of tender years is scarcely ever met with in New York. Even
+the news-girl has disappeared almost entirely and left the field to the
+boys. Those who are not at work at home or in the shop have been gathered
+in by the agencies for their rescue, that have multiplied with the growth
+of the conviction that girl vagrancy is so much more corrosive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> than boy
+vagabondism, as it adds sexual immorality to the other dangers of the
+street. In 1881 the society&#8217;s lodging-house in St. Mark&#8217;s Place sheltered
+1,287 girls. Their number has gone down since, as the census has gone up,
+until last year it had fallen to 335, and even these were no longer
+vagrants, but wayward daughters brought by their parents to be trained to
+obedience and industry. In the same period, during which the city&#8217;s
+population increased more than one-fourth, the increase being very largely
+made up of just the material to feed its homelessness, the register of the
+boys&#8217; lodging-houses showed a reduction from 13,155 to 11,435.</p>
+
+<p>In the introductory chapter I pointed out, as a result of the efforts made
+in behalf of the children in the past generation, not only by the
+Children&#8217;s Aid Society, but by many kindred organizations, that the
+commitments of girls and women for vagrancy fell off between the years
+1860 and 1890 from 5,880 to 1,980, or from 1 in every 138&#189; persons to 1
+in every 780 of a population that had more than doubled in the interval,
+while the commitments of petty girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890
+from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500. Illustrated by diagram this last statement
+looks this way, the year 1869 being substituted as the starting-point; it
+had almost exactly the same number of commitments as 1865 (see Chart A).</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/charta.png" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">CHART A.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>The year is at the top, and its record of commitments of petty girl
+thieves at the bottom. The tendency is steadily downward, it will be seen,
+and downward here is the safe course. The police court arraignments for
+what is known as juvenile delinquency, which is, in short, all the
+mischief that is not crime under the code, make the following showing,
+starting with the year 1875, the upper line representing the boys and the
+lower the girls:</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/chartb.png" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">CHART B.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>Taking, finally, the commitments of girls under twenty for all causes, in
+thirteen years, we have this showing:</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/chartc.png" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">CHART C.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>These diagrams would be more satisfactory if they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> always meant exactly
+what they seem to show. The trouble is that they share in the general
+inapplicability to the purposes of scientific research of all public
+reports in this city (save those of the Health Department, which is
+fortunate in possessing a responsible expert statistician in Dr. Roger S.
+Tracy) by reason of lack of uniformity or otherwise. When one gets down to
+the bottom of a slump like that between the years 1888 and 1889, in the
+last diagram, one is as likely to find a negligent police clerk or some
+accidental change of classification there as an economic fact. Something
+like this last is, I believe, hidden in this particular one. The figures
+for 1891 maintain the point reached in 1887 and in 1890. However, the
+important thing is that the decrease has gone on more or less steadily
+through good years and bad since the children&#8217;s societies took the field,
+while the population has increased as never before. Had these forms of
+disorder even held their own, the slope should have been steadily upward,
+not downward. In this there is encouragement, surely. There is enough left
+to battle with. The six lodging-houses sheltered in the last twelve years
+149,994 children, 8,820 of them girls. We are not near the end yet. The
+problem is a great one, but the efforts on foot to solve it are great and
+growing. It has been a forty years&#8217; fight with poverty and ignorance and
+crime, and it is only just begun. But the first blow is half the battle,
+it is said, and it has been struck in New York, and struck to win.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+<h3>PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">In</span> spite of all this labor and effort, in the face of the fact that half
+of the miseries of society are at last acknowledged to be due to the
+sundering of the home-tie in childhood, and that therefore the remedy lies
+in restoring it, where that can be done, as early as possible, we have in
+New York a city of mighty institutions, marshalling a standing army of
+nearly or quite sixteen thousand children, year in and year out.<small><a name="f27.1" id="f27.1" href="#f27">[27]</a></small> Homes
+they are sometimes called; but too many of them are not homes in the
+saving sense. Those are, that are merely half-way houses to the ultimate
+family home that shall restore to the child what it has lost. Failing in
+that, they become public tenements, with most of the bad features of the
+tenement left out, but the worst retained: the smothering of the tenant&#8217;s
+individuality. He is saved from becoming a tough to become an automaton.</p>
+
+<p>It is money scattered without judgment&mdash;not poverty&mdash;that makes the
+pauper. It is money scattered without judgment&mdash;not poverty&mdash;that marshals
+the greater part of this army. Money backed up by pharisaical
+sectarianism. Where two such powerful factors combine, politics is never
+far in the rear, though modestly invisible to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> naked eye. To this
+irresponsible combination&mdash;conspiracy it might be called without
+stretching the point far&mdash;the care of the defenceless child that comes
+upon the public for support has been handed over without check or control
+of any sort. Worse, a premium has been put upon his coming, upon child
+desertion in our community. What are the causes of this?</p>
+
+<p>They have been stated often and urgently enough by those whose great
+experience gave weight to their arguments. Clothed in legal phrase, they
+may be found summed up in the law of 1875, which ordains that a dependent
+child shall be committed to an institution controlled by persons of the
+same religious faith as its parents, when that can be done, and that the
+county shall pay the child&#8217;s board. It was a tremendous bid for child
+pauperism, and poverty, ignorance, and greed were not slow to respond.
+Under this so-called &#8220;religious clause,&#8221; the number of children thrown
+upon the county, in New York City alone, was swelled, between 1875 and
+1890, from 9.363 to 16.358, this statement including only the twenty-nine
+institutions that can demand or do receive public money toward their
+support. Some of them, that have come into existence since it was passed,
+were directly created by the law. It was natural that this should be so,
+&#8220;because it provided exactly the care which parents desired for their
+children, that of persons of their own religious faith, and supplied ample
+means for the children&#8217;s support; while, although the funds were to be
+derived from public sources, yet since the institutions were to be managed
+by private persons, the stigma which fortunately attaches to <i>public</i>
+relief was removed. Thus every incentive to parents to place their
+children upon the public for support was created by the provisions of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>
+law, and every deterrent was removed; for the law demanded nothing from
+the parent in return for the support of the child, and did not deprive him
+of any of his rights over the child, although relieving him of every duty
+toward it.&#8221;<small><a name="f28.1" id="f28.1" href="#f28">[28]</a></small> But New York City went a step further, by having special
+laws passed securing a stated income from the money raised by local
+taxation to nine of its largest institutions. This is where the trail of
+the politician might perhaps be traced with an effort. The amount drawn by
+the nine in 1890 was nearly a million dollars, while the total so expended
+footed up in that year over sixteen hundred thousand dollars. New York
+City to-day supports one dependent child to each one hundred of its
+population, and the tax levied, directly and indirectly, for the purpose
+is about a dollar a head for every man, woman, and child in the city. The
+State in 1888 supported one child to every 251 of its population. The
+State of California, which had also gone into the wholesale charity
+business, supported one dependent child to every 290 of its population,
+while Michigan, which had gone out of it, taking her children out of the
+poor-houses and sending them to a State public school, with the proviso
+that thenceforth parents surrendering their children to be public charges
+should lose all rights over or to their custody, services, or earnings,
+had only 1 to every 10,000 of its people.<small><a name="f29.1" id="f29.1" href="#f29">[29]</a></small></p>
+
+<p>That proviso cut the matter to the quick. The law declared the school to
+be a &#8220;temporary home for dependent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> children, where they shall be detained
+only until they can be placed in family homes.&#8221; That is a very different
+thing from the institution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns,
+and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand
+boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and
+taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the
+rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the
+family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the
+asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. To what
+extent these things are done in New York may be inferred from the
+statement of the Superintendent of the Juvenile Asylum, which contains an
+average of a thousand children, that three-fourths of the inmates could
+not be sent to free homes in the West because their relatives would not
+consent to their going.<small><a name="f30.1" id="f30.1" href="#f30">[30]</a></small> It was only last summer that my attention was
+attracted, while on a visit to this Juvenile Asylum, to a fine-looking
+little fellow who seemed much above the average of the class in which I
+found him. On inquiring as to the causes that had brought him to that
+place, I was shocked to find that he was the son of a public official,
+well-known to me, whose income from the city&#8217;s treasury was sufficient not
+only to provide for the support of his family, but to enable him to
+gratify somewhat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> expensive private tastes as well. The boy had been there
+two years, during which time the Asylum had drawn for his account from the
+public funds about $240, at the per capita rate of $110 for each inmate
+and his share of the school money. His father, when I asked him why the
+boy was there, told me that it was because he would insist upon paying
+unauthorized visits to his grandmother in the country. There was no
+evidence that he was otherwise unmanageable. Seeing my surprise, he put
+the question, as if that covered the ground: &#8220;Well, now! where would you
+put him in a better place?&#8221; It was a handsome compliment to the Asylum,
+which as a reform school it perhaps deserved; but it struck me, all the
+same, that he could hardly have put him in a worse place, on all accounts.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know how many such cases there were in the Asylum then. I hope
+not many. But it is certain that our public institutions are full of
+children who have parents amply able, but unwilling, to support them. From
+time to time enough such cases crop out to show how common the practice
+is. Reference to cases 59,703, 59,851, and 60,497 in the report of the
+Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1892), will discover
+some striking instances that were ferreted out by the Society&#8217;s officers.
+All of the offenders were in thriving business. One of them kept a store
+in Newark&mdash;in another State&mdash;and was not even a resident of the city. He
+merely &#8220;honored it with the privilege of paying his children&#8217;s
+boarding-school expenses in the institution.&#8221; They were all Italians.
+These people seem to consider that it is their right to thus feed at the
+public crib. Perhaps it is the first quickening of the seed of municipal
+politics that sprouts so energetically among them in the slums, under the
+teaching of their Irish patrons.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>When Mrs. Lowell inspected the New York City institutions in 1889, she
+found &#8220;that of 20,384 individual children sheltered in them, 4,139 had
+been that year returned to parents or friends, that is, to the persons who
+had given them up to be paupers; that there were only 1,776 orphans among
+them, and 4,987 half orphans, of whom 2,247 had living fathers, who
+presumably ought to have been made to support their children themselves.&#8221;
+Three years later, the imperfect returns to a circular inquiry sent out by
+the State Board of Charities, showed that of 18,556 children in
+institutions in this State, 3,671, or less than twenty per cent., were
+orphans. The rest then had, or should have, homes. Doubtless, many were
+homes of which they were well rid; but all experience shows that there
+must have been far too many of the kind that were well rid of <i>them</i>, and
+to that extent the tax-payers were robbed and the parents and the children
+pauperized. And that even that other kind were much better off in the long
+run, their being in the institution did not guarantee. Children, once for
+all, cannot be successfully reared in regiments within the narrow rules
+and the confinement of an asylum, if success is to be measured by the
+development of individual character. Power to regulate or shorten their
+stay is not vested to any practical extent or purpose in any outside
+agency. Within, with every benevolent desire to do the right, every
+interest of the institution as a whole tends to confuse the perception of
+it. The more children, the more money; the fewer children, the less money.
+A thousand children can be more economically managed for $110,000 than
+five hundred for half the money. The fortieth annual report of the
+Juvenile Asylum (1891) puts it very plainly, in this statement on page 23:
+&#8220;Until the capacity of the Asylum was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> materially increased, an annual
+deficit ranging between $5,000 and $10,000 had to be covered by appeals to
+private contributors.&#8221; Now, it runs not only the New York house but its
+Western agency as well on its income.</p>
+
+<p>The city pays the bills, but exercises no other control over the
+institutions. It does not even trouble itself with counting the
+children.<small><a name="f31.1" id="f31.1" href="#f31">[31]</a></small> The committing magistrate consults and is guided more or
+less by the Officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Children, in his choice of the institution into which the child is put.
+But both are bound by the law that imposes the &#8220;faith-test.&#8221; The
+faith-test, as enforced by civil law anywhere, is absurd. The parents of
+the eighty per cent. of children in institutions who were not orphans,
+split no theological hairs in ridding themselves of their support. Backed
+by the money sacks of a great and wealthy city, it is injurious humbug.
+This is not the perfection of organized charitable effort for the rescue
+of the children of which I spoke, but rather the perversion of it.</p>
+
+<p>It is reasonable to ask that if the public is to pay the piper, the public
+should have the hiring of him too. A special city officer is needed to
+have this matter in charge. Nearly six years ago Commissioner Lowell
+submitted a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> draft for a bill creating a department for the care of
+dependent children in New York City, with a commissioner at the head whose
+powers would have been an effective check upon the evil tendencies of the
+present law. But we travel slowly along the path of municipal reform, and
+the commissioner is yet a dream. Some day we may wake up and find him
+there, and then we shall be ready, by and by, to carry out the ideal plan
+of placing those children, for whom free homes cannot be found, out at
+board in families where they shall come by their rights, denied them by
+institution life. Then, too, we shall find, I think, that there is a good
+deal less of the problem than we thought. The managers of the Union
+Temporary Home in Philadelphia decided, after thirty one years of work, to
+close the House and put the children out to board, because experience had
+convinced them that &#8220;life in the average institution is not so good for
+children as life in the average home.&#8221; The intelligence of the conclusion,
+and the earnestness with which they presented it, guaranteed that their
+&#8220;Home&#8221; had been above the average.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The testimony of two gentlemen on our Board of Council,&#8221; they reported,
+&#8220;both experienced as heads of great industrial enterprises, is that
+institution boys are generally the least desirable apprentices. They have
+been dulled in faculty, by not having been daily exercised in the use of
+themselves in small ways; have marched in platoons; have done everything
+in squads; have had all the particulars of life arranged for them; and, as
+a consequence, they wait for someone else to arrange every piece of work,
+and are never ready for emergencies, nor able to &#8216;take hold.&#8217;&#8221; But when
+they came to actually board the children out, all but the parents of nine
+were suddenly able<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> to take good care of them themselves, and of the rest
+three found a way before final arrangements were made. There were seventy
+children in the Home. Pauperism runs in the same ruts in New York as in
+Pennsylvania, and the motive power is the same&mdash;ill-spent money.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+<h3>THE VERDICT OF THE POTTER&#8217;S FIELD</h3>
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Looking</span> back now over the field we have traversed, what is the verdict?
+Are we going backward or forward? To be standing still would be to lose
+ground. Nothing stands still in this community of ours, with its
+ever-swelling population, least of all the problem of the children of the
+poor. It got the start of our old indifference once, and we have had a
+long and wearisome race of it, running it down.</p>
+
+<p>But we have run it down. We are moving forward, and indifference will not
+again trap us into defeat. Evidence is multiplying on every hand to show
+that interest in the children is increasing. The personal service, that
+counts for so infinitely much more than money, is more freely given day by
+day, and no longer as a fashionable fad, but as a duty too long neglected.
+From the colleges young men and women are going forth to study the problem
+in a practical way that is full of promise. Charity is forgetting its
+petty jealousies and learning the lesson of organization and co-operation.
+
+&#8220;Looking back,&#8221; writes the Secretary of the Charity Organization Society,
+&#8220;over the progress of the last ten years, the success seems large, while
+looking at our hopes and aims it often seems meagre.&#8221; The Church is coming
+up, no longer down, to its work among the poor. In the multiplication of
+brotherhoods and sisterhoods, of societies of Christian Endeavor,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> of
+King&#8217;s Daughters, of efforts on every hand to reach the masses, the law of
+love, the only law that has real power to protect the poor, is receiving
+fresh illustration day by day.</p>
+
+<p>The Fresh Air Work, the Boys&#8217; Clubs, the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, bear witness to it, and to the energy and resources
+that shall yet win the fight for us. They were born of New York&#8217;s plight.
+The whole world shares in the good they have wrought.</p>
+
+<p>Kindergartens, industrial schools, baby nurseries are springing up
+everywhere. We have children&#8217;s play-grounds, and we shall be getting more,
+if the promised small parks are yet in the future. Municipal progress has
+not kept step with private benevolence, but there is progress. New schools
+have been built this year and others are planned. We are beginning to
+understand that there are other and better ways of making citizens and
+voters than to grind them out through the political naturalization mill at
+every election. If the rum power has not lost its grip, it has not
+tightened it, at all events, in forty years. Then there was one saloon to
+every 90.8 inhabitants; to-day there is one to every 236.42.<small><a name="f32.1" id="f32.1" href="#f32">[32]</a></small> The
+streets in the tenement districts, since I penned the first lines of this
+book, have been paved and cleaned as never before, and new standards of
+decency set up for the poor who live there and for their children. Jersey
+Street, Poverty Gap, have disappeared, and an end has been put, for a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+time at least, to the foul business of refuse gathering at the dumps.
+Nothing stands still in New York. Conditions change so suddenly, under the
+pressure of new exigencies, that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with
+them. The fact that it is generally business which prompts the changes for
+the better has this drawback, that the community, knowing that relief is
+coming sooner or later, gets into the habit of waiting for it to come that
+way as the natural one. It is not always the natural way, and though
+relief comes with bustle and stir at last, it is sometimes too long
+delayed.</p>
+
+<p>Another mischievous habit, characteristic of the American people,
+preoccupied with so many urgent private concerns, is to rise up and pass a
+law that is loudly in demand, and let it go with that, as if all social
+evils could be cured by mere legal enactment. As a result, some of the
+best and most necessary laws are dead letters on our statute books. The
+law is there, but no one thinks of enforcing it. The beginning was made at
+the wrong end; but we shall reach around to the other in season.</p>
+
+<p>The chief end has been gained in the recognition of the child problem as
+the all-important one, of the development of individual character as the
+strongest barrier against the evil forces of the street and the tenement.
+Last year I had occasion to address a convention at the National Capital,
+on certain phases of city poverty and suffering, and made use of the magic
+lantern to enforce some of the lessons presented. The last picture put on
+the screen showed the open trench in the Potter&#8217;s Field. When it had
+passed, the Secretary of the Convention, a clergyman whose life has been
+given to rescue work among homeless boys, told how there had just come to
+join him in his work the man who had until very lately been in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> charge of
+this Potter&#8217;s Field. His experience there had taught him that the waste
+before which he stood helpless at that end of the line, looking on without
+power to check or relieve, must be stopped at its source. So he had turned
+from the dead to the living, pledging the years that remained to him to
+that effort.</p>
+
+<p>It struck me then, and it has seemed to me since, that this man&#8217;s position
+to the problem was most comprehensive. The evidence of his long-range view
+was convincing. Society had indeed arrived at the same diagnosis some time
+before. Reasoning by exclusion, as doctors do in doubtful diseases, the
+symptoms of which are clearer than their cause, it had conjectured that if
+the &#8220;tough&#8221; whom it must maintain in idleness behind prison-bars, to keep
+him from preying upon it, was a creature of environment, not justly to
+blame, the community must be, for allowing him to grow up a &#8220;tough.&#8221; So,
+in self-defence, it had turned its hand to the forming of character in
+proportion as it had come to own its failure to reform it. To that failure
+the trench in the Potter&#8217;s Field bore unceasing witness. Its claim to be
+heard in evidence was incontestable.</p>
+
+<p>Now that it has been heard, its testimony confirms the judgment that had
+already experience to back it. There is no longer room for doubt that with
+the children lies the solution of the problem of poverty, as far as it can
+be reached under existing forms of society and with our machinery for
+securing justice by government. The wisdom of generations that were dust
+two thousand years ago made this choice. We have been long in making it,
+but not too long if our travail has made it clear at last that for all
+time to come it must be the only safe choice. And this, whether from the
+standpoint of the Christian or the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> unbeliever, from that of humanity or
+mere business. If the matter is reduced to a simple sum in arithmetic, so
+much for so much&mdash;child-rescue, as the one way of balancing waste with
+gain, loss with profit, becomes the imperative duty of society, its chief
+bulwark against bankruptcy and wreck.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, through the gloom of the Potter&#8217;s Field that has levied such heavy
+tribute on our city in the past&mdash;even the tenth of its life&mdash;brighter
+skies, a new hope, are discerned beyond. They brighten even the slum
+tenement, and shine into the home which just now we despaired of reaching
+by any other road than that of pulling it down. Tireless, indeed, the
+hands need be that have taken up this task. Flag their efforts ever so
+little, hard-won ground is lost, mischief done. But we are gaining, no
+longer losing, ground. Seen from the tenement, through the frame-work of
+injustice and greed that cursed us with it, the outlook seemed little less
+than despairing. Groping vainly, with unseeing eyes, we said: There is no
+way out. The children, upon whom the curse of the tenement lay heaviest,
+have found it for us. Truly it was said: &#8220;A little child shall lead
+them.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="REGISTER" id="REGISTER"></a>REGISTER OF CHILDREN&#8217;S CHARITIES</h2>
+<h3>AS PUBLISHED BY THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY</h3>
+
+<p>In addition to the charities given here, seventy-eight churches of all
+denominations conduct weekly industrial and sewing classes, generally on
+Saturdays, for which see the Directory of the Charity Organization
+Society, under Churches, where may also be found the register of
+thirty-two fresh-air funds not recorded below, and of some kindergartens
+and clubs established by various churches for the children of their
+congregations.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="register">
+
+
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">NURSERIES.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">AGES RECEIVED.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Ahawath Chesed Sisterhood</span>, 71 East 3d St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3 to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Bethany Day Nursery</span>, 453 East 57th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 weeks to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Beth-El Society</span>, 355 East 62d St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2&#189; to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Bethlehem Day Nursery</span>, 249 East 30th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 week to 7 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Children&#8217;s Charitable Union</span>, 70 Av. D.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3 to 7 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Day Nursery and Babies&#8217; Shelter</span>, 118 West 21st St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 to 5 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">&Eacute;cole Fran&ccedil;aise Gratuite and Salle d&#8217;Asile</span>, 69 Washington Square.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 to 11 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Emanu-El Sisterhood</span>, 159 East 74th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3 to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Grace House Day Nursery</span>, 94 Fourth Av.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 to 8 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Hope Nursery</span>, 226 Thompson St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Jewell Day Nursery</span>, 20 Macdougal St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 to 5 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Manhattan Working Girls&#8217; Association</span>, 440 East 57th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 weeks to 10 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Memorial Day Nursery</span>, 275 East Broadway.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Riverside Day Nursery</span>, 121 West 63d St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 mo. to 8 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">St. Agnes&#8217; Day Nursery</span>, 7 Charles St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">8 days to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Barnabas&#8217; House</span>, 304 Mulberry St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">4 weeks to 8 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Chrysostom Chapel Nursery</span>, 224 West 38th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. John&#8217;s Day Nursery</span>, 223 East 67th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Joseph&#8217;s Day Nursery</span>, 473 West 57th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 weeks to 7 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3"><span class="smcap">St. Stephen&#8217;s Equity Club, Kindergarten and Nursery</span>, 59 West 46th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Thomas&#8217; Day Nursery</span>, 231 East 59th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">&mdash; to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Salle d&#8217;Asile et &Eacute;cole Primaire</span>, 2 South 5th Av.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">3 to 8 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Silver Cross Day Nursery</span>, 2249 Second Av.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 weeks to 10 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Sunnyside Day Nursery</span>, 51 Prospect Pl.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 weeks to 7 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Virginia Day Nursery</span>, 632 5th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">6 mos. to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Wayside Day Nursery</span>, 216 East 20th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2 mos. to 7 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">West Side Day Nursery</span>, 266 West 40th St.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">18 mos. to 7 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Wilson Industrial School Day Nursery</span>, 125 St. Mark&#8217;s Pl.</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 mo. to 6 yrs.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">KINDERGARTENS.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Ahawath Chesed Sisterhood Free Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">71 East 3d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">All Souls&#8217; Church Free Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">70th St. East of Lexington Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Beth-El Society Free Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">355 East 62d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Central Presbyterian Church Free Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">454 West 42d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Cherry Street Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">340 Cherry St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Children&#8217;s Charitable Union Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">70 Av. D.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">East Side Chapel and Bible Women&#8217;s Association Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">404 East 15th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">East Side House Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Foot of East 76th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Emanu-El Sisterhood Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">159 E. 74th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Free Kindergarten Ass&#8217;n, of Harlem</span>, No. 1 School</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2048 First Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Free Kindergarten of St. John&#8217;s Chapel</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Varick near Beach.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">French Free School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">69 South Washington Sq.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Hebrew Free School Association</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">East B&#8217;way and Jefferson St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Kindergarten of Madison Square Presbyterian Church House</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Third Av. and 30th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="smcap">St. George&#8217;s Av. A Mission</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">253 Av. A.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="smcap">Chapel</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">130 Stanton St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="smcap">Shearith Israel Congregation</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">5 West 19th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Ladies&#8217; Bikur Cholim Society Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">177 East Broadway.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Neighborhood Guild Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">146 Forsyth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">N. Y. Foundling Hospital Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">175 East 68th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">N. Y. Kindergarten Association Schools:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No. 1, 221 East 51st St.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No. 2, Alumn&aelig; Kindergarten, cor. 63d St. and First Av.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No. 3, 228 West 35th St.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No. 4, 348 West 26th St.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No. 5, Shaw Memorial, 61 Henry St.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No. 6, McAlpine, 62 Second St.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">No. 7, Av. A and 15th St.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Andrews&#8217; Free Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2067 Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Bartholomew&#8217;s</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">209 East 42d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. James&#8217; Free Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Av. A and 78th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Mary&#8217;s Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">438 Grand St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Shaaray Tefilla Sisterhood Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">127 West 44th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Silver Cross</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2249 Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Society for Ethical Culture</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">109 West 54th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Temple Israel Sisterhood Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">125th St. and 5th Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Trinity Church Ass&#8217;n</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">209 Fulton St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Wilson Industrial School Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">125 St Mark&#8217;s Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Abigail School and Kindergarten</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">242 Spring St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">American Female Guardian Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Office, 32 East 30th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Home School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">29 East 29th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Industrial School No. 1</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">552 First Av. cor. 32d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>2 (Rose Memorial)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">418 West 41st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>3</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">124 West 26th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>4</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">34 Willett St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>5</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">220 West 36th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>6</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">125 Allen St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>7</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">234 East 80th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>8</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">463 West 32d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>9</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">East 60th St. and Boulevard.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>10</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">125 Lewis St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>11</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">52d St. and Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer2">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>12</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2247 Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">Children&#8217;s Aid Society.</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Office, 24 St. Mark&#8217;s Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Industrial Schools</i>&mdash;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Astor Memorial</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">256 Mott St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Av. B</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">607 East 14th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Cottage Place</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">208 Bleecker St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Brace Memorial</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">9 Duane St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">East River</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">247 East 44th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">East Side</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">287 East Broadway.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Eleventh Ward</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">295 Eighth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Fourth Ward</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">73 Monroe St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Fifth Ward</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">36 Beach St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Fifty-Second Street</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">573 West 52d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">German</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">272 Second St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Henrietta</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">215 East 21st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Italian</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">156 Leonard St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Jones Memorial</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">407 East 73d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Lord</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">135 Greenwich St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Park</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">68th St. near Broadway.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Phelps</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">314 East 35th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Rhinelander</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">350 East 88th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Sixteenth Ward</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">211 West 18th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Sixth Street</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">632 Sixth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">West Side</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">201 West 32d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">West Side Italian</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">24 Sullivan St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Night Schools</i>&mdash;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">German</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">272 Second St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Italian</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">156 Leonard St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Brace Memorial</span> (Newsboys)</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">9 Duane St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Eleventh Ward</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">295 8th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">East Side</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">287 East Broadway.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Lord</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">135 Greenwich St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Jones Memorial</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">407 East 73d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Fifty-Second Street</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">573 West 52d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">West Side</span></span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">400 Seventh Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Church Society for Promoting Christianity among Jews</span> (Industrial School for Girls)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">68 East 7th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Eighth Ward Mission School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1 Charlton St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Five Points House of Industry</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">155 Worth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span><span class="smcap">Mission</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">63 Park St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Free German School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">140 East 4th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">Hebrew Free School Association</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">East Broadway and Jefferson St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Italian Mission</span> (P. E. School for Girls)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">809 Mulberry St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Industrial Christian Alliance</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">113 Macdougal St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Louis Down-Town Sabbath and Daily School</span> (Hebrew)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">267 Henry St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Mission of the Immaculate Virgin</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Mission School of All Souls&#8217; Church</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">213 East 21st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Bible and Tract Mission</span> (School for Girls)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">422 East 26th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York House and School of Industry</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">120 West 16th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Sisterhood of the Good Shepherd (P. E.)</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">419 West 19th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Barnabas House</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">304 Mulberry St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Vincent de Paul Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">346 West 43d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Elizabeth Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">235 East 14th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Spanish Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1345 Lexington Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Trinity Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">90 Trinity Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. George&#8217;s Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Teutonia Hall.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Trinity Chapel Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">15 West 25th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Augustine&#8217;s Chapel Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">105 East Houston St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Mary&#8217;s</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lawrence St., Manhattanville.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">West Side Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">266 West 40th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Wilson Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">125 St. Mark&#8217;s Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">United Hebrew Charities</span> (Industrial School for Girls)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">128 Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Zion and St. Timothy Industrial School</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">332 West 57th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">FRESH AIR WORK.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Tribune Fresh-Air Fund</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Tribune Building.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Bartholdi Cr&eacute;che</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">21 University Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Children&#8217;s Aid Society</span>&mdash;Health Home</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">West Coney Island.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span><span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>Summer Home</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Bath Beach.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The King&#8217;s Daughters Tenement-House Committee</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">77 Madison St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Infirmary for Women and Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">5 Livingston Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York City Mission and Tract Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">106 Bible House.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. John&#8217;s Guild</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">501 Fifth Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>Floating Hospital</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">(every week-day but Saturday).</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>"<span class="spacer3">&nbsp;</span>Seaside Hospital</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Cedar Grove, Staten Island.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Sanitarium for Hebrew Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">124 East 14th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">Society for Ethical Culture</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">109 West 54th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor</span> (Ocean Parties)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">79 Fourth Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Barnabas Fresh-Air Fund</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">38 Bleecker St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Little Mothers&#8217; Aid Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">305 East 17th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Bible and Tract Mission</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">416 East 26th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Society for Parks and Play-grounds for Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">36 Union Square.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">American Female Guardian Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Summer Home at Oceanport, N. J.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Summer Shelter</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Morristown, N. J.</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="right">(Apply to Charity Organization Society, 21 University Pl.)</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">BOYS&#8217; CLUBS AND READING-ROOMS.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Ascension Memorial Chapel</span> (P. E.)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">330 West 43d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Avenue C Club</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">65 East 14th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Bethany Church</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Tenth Av., bet. 35th and 36th Sts.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Calvary Parish</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">344 East 23d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Chapel of the Comforter</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">814 Greenwich St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Christ Chapel</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">West 65th St. near Amsterdam Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Church of the Archangel</span> (P. E.)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">117th St. and St. Nicholas Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Church of the Redeemer</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Park Av. and 81st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">College Settlement</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">95 Rivington St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Covenant Chapel</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">310 East 42d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">DeWitt Chapel</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">160 West 29th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">East Side House</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Foot of 76th St. and East River.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Free Reading-Rooms</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">8 West 14th St., 330 Fourth Av., and 590 Seventh Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Grace Mission</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">640 East 13th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Holy Communion (P. E.) Church</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">49 West 20th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Holy Cross Lyceum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">43d St., bet. Eighth and Ninth Aves.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Holy Cross Mission</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">300 East Fourth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Lafayette Club</span> (Middle Collegiate Church)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">14 Lafayette Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Mission Chapel of Madison Av. Church</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">440 East 57th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Madison Square Church House</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Third Av., cor. 30th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Manor Chapel</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">348 West 26th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Memorial Baptist Church</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Washington Square, South.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Monday Night Club</span> (Church of Holy Communion)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">49 West 20th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Neighborhood Guild</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">147 Forsyth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">New Jerusalem Church</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">114 East 35th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">North Side Boys&#8217; Club</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">79 Macdougal St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Bartholomew&#8217;s Parish House</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">207 East 42d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. George&#8217;s (P. E.) Church</span> (Memorial House)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">207 East 16th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Luke&#8217;s M. E. Church</span> (Knights of St Luke)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">108 West 41st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Mary&#8217;s</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lawrence St., Manhattanville.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">West Side</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Vermilye Chapel, 794 Tenth Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Wilson Mission Building</span> (&#8220;Av. A Club&#8221;)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">125 St. Mark&#8217;s Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">CHILDREN&#8217;S LODGING-HOUSES.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Brace Memorial</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">9 Duane St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Girls&#8217; Temporary Home</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">307-309 East 12th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Tompkins Square</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">295 8th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">East Side</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">287 East Broadway.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Forty-fourth Street</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">247 East 44th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">West Side</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">400 Seventh Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Mission of the Immaculate Virgin</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">CHILDREN&#8217;S HOMES&mdash;TEMPORARY AND PERMANENT.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Asylum of St. Vincent de Paul</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">215 West 39th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Asylum of Sisters of St. Dominic</span> (House of Reception)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">137 Second St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Berachah Orphanage</span> (Gospel Tabernacle)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">692 Eighth Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Bethlehem Orphan and Half-Orphan Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">College Point. L. I.</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="right">(Controlled by thirteen Lutheran churches of New York and vicinity.)</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Children&#8217;s Fold</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">92d St. and Eighth Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Colored Orphan Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">West 143d St. and Boulevard.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Free Home for Destitute Young Girls</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">23 East 11th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Dominican Convent of Our Lady of the Rosary</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">329 East 63d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Five Points House of Industry</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">155 Worth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">German Odd Fellows&#8217; Orphanage</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Apply at Home, 82 Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Hebrew Benevolent and Orphan Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Amsterdam Av. and 136th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Orphan Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Eleventh Av. and 151st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Holy Angels&#8217; Orphan Asylum</span> (for Italian Children from New York)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">West Park-on-the-Hudson.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">House of Mercy</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">81st St. and Madison Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Ladies&#8217; Deborah Nursery and Child&#8217;s Protectory</span>,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Male Department, 95 East Broadway and 83 Henry St.;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Female Department, East 162d St., near Eagle Av.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Leake and Watts Orphan House</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Ludlow Station, Hudson R. R.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Messiah Home for Little Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">4 Rutherford Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Mission of the Immaculate Virgin for Homeless and Destitute Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Joseph&#8217;s Home for Destitute Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">House of Reception, 143 West 31st Street.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Foundling Hospital</span> (Asylum of Sisters of Charity)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">175 East 68th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Infant Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Amsterdam Av. and 61st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Orphanage of the Church of the Holy Trinity</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">400 East 50th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Orphan Asylum Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Riverside Drive and West 73d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Orphans&#8217; Home and Asylum of Protestant Episcopal Church</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">49th St. near Lexington Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Madison Av. and 51st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Agatha&#8217;s Home for Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">209 West 15th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Ann&#8217;s Home for Destitute Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Av. A, cor. 90th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Benedict&#8217;s Home for Colored Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">House of Reception, 120 Macdougal St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Christopher&#8217;s Home</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Riverside Drive and 112th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. James&#8217; Home</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">21 Oliver and 26 James St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Joseph&#8217;s Orphan Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">89th St. and Av. A.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Shepherd&#8217;s Fold</span> (P. E. Church)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">92d St. and Eighth Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Protestant Half-Orphan Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Manhattan Av. near 104th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Home for Seamen&#8217;s Children</span> (New York and vicinity)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">West New Brighton, S. I.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">100 East 23d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">REFORMATORY INSTITUTIONS.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Burnham Industrial Farm</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Office, 135 East 15th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Eleventh Av. and 151st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Catholic Protectory</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Office, 415 Broome St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">New York Juvenile Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">176th St. and Amsterdam Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. James&#8217; Home</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">21 Oliver St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">House of Refuge</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Randall&#8217;s Island.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">House of the Holy Family</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">132 Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">CHILDREN&#8217;S HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">All Saints&#8217; Convalescent Home for Men and Boys</span> (Holy Cross Mission)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Avenue C and 4th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Babies&#8217; Hospital of the City of New York</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">657 Lexington Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Babies&#8217; Ward, Post-Graduate Hospital</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">226 East 20th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Children&#8217;s Hospital</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Randall&#8217;s Island.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Infirmary for Women and Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">5 Livingston Pl.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Five Points House of Industry Infirmary</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">147 Worth St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Good Samaritan Diakonissen</span> (Hahnemann Hospital)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Park Av. and 67th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Infants&#8217; Hospital</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Randall&#8217;s Island.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Laura Franklin Free Hospital for Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">17 East 111th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Foundling Hospital</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">175 East 68th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Nursery and Child&#8217;s Hospital</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lexington Av. and 51st St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Mary&#8217;s Free Hospital for Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">405 West 34th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Harlem Dispensary for Women and Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">2331 Second Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Sick Children&#8217;s Mission of Children&#8217;s Aid Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">287 East Broadway.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Yorkville Dispensary and Hospital for Women and Children</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">1307 Lexington Av.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Orthop&aelig;dic Hospital</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">126 East 59th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Ophthalmic Hospital</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">201 East 23d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="3" align="center">ASYLUMS FOR DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Crippled Boys&#8217; Home</span> (Forty-fourth Street Lodging House)</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">247 East 44th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf Mutes</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lexington Av. and 67th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Idiot Asylum</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Randall&#8217;s Island.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Institution for the Blind</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Ninth Av. and 34th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Eleventh Av. and 163d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+<span class="smcap">New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Lexington Av. and 42d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">St. Joseph&#8217;s Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf Mutes</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">772 East 188th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Sheltering Arms</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Amsterdam Av. and 129th St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Society of St. Johnland</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Apply at Calvary Chapel, 220 East 23d St.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Syracuse State School for Feeble-Minded</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">(Apply to Superintendent of Out-door Poor.)</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Children&#8217;s Aid Society</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">Haxtun Cottage, Bath Beach, L. I.</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">House of St. Giles the Cripple</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right">422 Degraw St., Brooklyn.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class="adverts">
+<p class="center"><big>How the Other Half Lives.</big></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Studies among the Tenements of New York.</span></p>
+<p class="center">By JACOB A. RIIS.</p>
+<p class="center"><i>With 40 Illustrations from Photographs taken by the Author.</i></p>
+<p class="center">12mo, net $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>This volume is the result of fifteen years&#8217; familiarity as police reporter
+with the seamy side of New York life. It is, however, by no means a mere
+record of personal observations, but a careful, comprehensive, and
+systematic presentation of a thesis with illustrations. It is philosophic
+as well as expository, and from beginning to end is an indictment of the
+tenement system as it exists at present in New York.</p>
+
+<p>No page is uninstructive, but it would be misleading to suppose the book
+even tinctured with didacticism. It is from beginning to end as
+picturesque in treatment as it is in material. The author&#8217;s acquaintance
+with the latter is extremely intimate. The reader feels that he is being
+guided through the dirt and crime, the tatters and rags, the byways and
+alleys of nether New York by an experienced cicerone. Mr. Riis, in a word,
+though a philanthropist and philosopher, is an artist as well. He has also
+the advantage of being an amateur photographer, and his book is abundantly
+illustrated from negatives of the odd, the out-of-the-way, and
+characteristic sights and scenes he has himself caught with his camera. No
+work yet published&mdash;certainly not the official reports of the charity
+societies&mdash;shows so vividly the complexion and countenance of the
+&#8220;Down-town Back Alleys,&#8221; &#8220;The Bend,&#8221; &#8220;Chinatown,&#8221; &#8220;Jewtown,&#8221; &#8220;The Cheap
+Lodging-houses,&#8221; the haunts of the negro, the Italian, the Bohemian poor,
+or gives such a veracious picture of the toughs, the tramps, the waifs,
+drunkards, paupers, gamins, and the generally gruesome populace of this
+centre of civilization.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.<span class="spacer">&nbsp; &nbsp;</span><span class="spacer">&nbsp; &nbsp;</span>87</p>
+
+<p>perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals, but they have
+not far to fall to the next tier of bunks, and the commotion that ensues
+is speedily quieted by the boss and his club. On cold winter nights, when
+every</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i040.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET.</span></p>
+
+<p>bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room more than once,
+and listening to the snoring of the sleepers like the regular strokes of
+an engine, and the slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight,
+imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very</p>
+
+<p class="center"><strong>[SPECIMEN PAGE.]</strong></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><big>COMMENDATIONS.</big></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The New York Society for the<br />
+Prevention of Cruelty to Children</span>,<br />
+100 East 23d Street.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">New York</span>, February 28th, 1891.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jacob A Riis</span>, Esq.,</p>
+
+<p><i>Dear Sir</i>:&mdash;&#8220;It gives me very great pleasure to express my gratification
+in reading your valuable work &#8216;How the Other Half Lives.&#8217; I regard it as
+one of the most valuable contributions to the history of child-saving work
+in this great city, and as pointing out the numerous evils which exist at
+the present time and which loudly call for legislative aid and
+interference.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The thorough familiarity which you have shown with the subject of your
+work is equaled only by the accuracy of its detail and the graphic
+pictures which illustrate the scenes described. It is a book which every
+one may peruse with interest, and the larger the circulation which can be
+given to it, the sooner I think will the charitable and well-disposed
+people of this city realize the need, on the part of The Other Half, of
+support, aid, and assistance, and which you have so graphically
+described.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I have the honor to remain, with great respect,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">ELDRIDGE T. GERRY,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">President, etc.</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">The Christian Union</span>,<br />
+80 Lafayette Place,<br />
+New York.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is one of the encouraging signs of the times that Jacob Riis&#8217;s book on
+&#8216;How the Other Half Lives&#8217; has found so many readers that a new edition is
+now called for. The priest and the Levite are no longer passing by on the
+other side; that is itself a sign of moral weakness.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was first attracted to Mr. Riis&#8217;s work by an illustrated lecture which
+he gave in Plymouth Church which stirred our hearts very deeply, and which
+showed how thorough an investigation and exploration he had made.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His book presents by pictures for the eye, and by pen and ink pictures
+quite as graphic, those phases of modern paganism which exist in our great
+cities and are beginning to arouse the wonder, the indignation, and the
+wrath of philanthropists and Christians.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;How the Other Half Lives&#8217; is worthy to be a companion to &#8216;In Darkest
+England,&#8217; to which, indeed, as a picture of existing conditions it is
+superior; nor is it without suggestions of remedy, which, if less
+elaborate than Mr. Booth&#8217;s, will strike the average reader as more
+immediately practicable.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="right">LYMAN ABBOTT.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&#8220;It was a murderer who asked the question &#8216;Am I my brother&#8217;s keeper?&#8217; and
+hoped for a negative answer. But the affirmative answer of God has been
+ringing through all the milleniums since then. This eternal &#8216;YES&#8217; meets
+the church of to-day, and there are signs that the church is waking to
+seek some method by which that &#8216;YES&#8217; shall be adequately carried out. The
+first thing is to know how my brother lives, and what are his
+temptations, difficulties, trials, hopes, fears. On this no book that has
+ever appeared in this land pours such light as Mr. Riis&#8217;s book on &#8216;The
+Other Half.&#8217; Let all who want to know what to do for these brothers of
+theirs in this town, read this book which is enormously more interesting
+than any novel that ever was written or that ever will be. Dens, dives,
+hovels, sickness, death, sorrow, drink, and murder, all these exist in our
+midst in appalling magnitude, and with all of these we must have to do if
+we are not to be modern Cains. No &#8216;<i>eau de cologne</i>&#8217; business is this, if
+we are to uplift these brothers of ours, as will be apparent from a
+reading of this remarkable book. Let all who are in any way interested in
+the welfare of humanity buy and read it at once, and let all who are not
+interested repent at once and get the book, and then bring forth fruits
+meet for repentance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="right">A. F. SCHAUFFLER.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><big>PRESS NOTICES.</big></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Criticism, in the narrower sense, has no hold on &#8216;How the Other Half
+Lives.&#8217; The book is most beautiful without, as fascinating within. Every
+word bears its message; every illustration&mdash;there are many&mdash;means
+something. Mr. Riis has deserved nobly of the public for his thorough and
+resourceful work. We cannot believe that his reward will fail. We should
+be sorry to think that his earnest words would be less to any reader than
+a commanding invitation to the thick of the battle against social
+injustice.&#8221;&mdash;<i>The Boston Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;From personal observation, conducted with the perseverance and tact
+needed by the newspaper reporter, Mr. Riis has gathered, and here
+presents, many interesting, pathetic, and monitory facts concerning the
+extreme poverty, filth, or unhomelike existence of too many of the
+tenement-dwellers of New York&mdash;omitting mention of those costlier
+tenements which are called flats. He ventures upon some suggestions of
+remedy, but the chief value of his chapters lies in their
+exposition.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Sunday School Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The studies of Mr. Riis among the tenements of New York take the reader
+into strange places and bring him into contact with startling conditions;
+but among all the problems now pressing for solution there are none so
+grave or so difficult as those upon the fundamental facts of which these
+pages throw light. The author has made a thorough exploration of the great
+city, and has produced a series of pictures which illustrate strikingly
+the many phases of life concerned.&#8221;&mdash;<i>The N. Y. Tribune.</i></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mr. Riis&#8217;s book is an important contribution to sociological literature,
+and the truths it brings forward as well as the conclusions it deduces
+must not be evaded, for on them rest all really hopeful projects for the
+restriction of poverty and crime.&#8221;&mdash;<i>The Boston Beacon.</i></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This is a book to be studied alike by the social scientist and by the
+philanthropist. It presents, in compact form, the story of the nether
+world of New York City, which, in general outline, varies but little from
+the story of the nether world of any large city.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Chicago Times.</i></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;This book bears evidence on every page of faithful investigation and
+intelligent sympathy with the subject, and should be read by everyone who
+has it in any way in his power to help on the work, for as the author
+says: &#8216;The &#8220;dangerous classes&#8221; of New York long ago compelled recognition.
+They are dangerous less because of their own crimes than because of the
+criminal ignorance of those who are not of their kind.&#8217;&#8221;&mdash;<i>Milwaukee
+Sentinel.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><b>Footnotes:</b></p>
+
+<p><a name="f1" id="f1" href="#f1.1">[1]</a> It is, nevertheless, true that while immigration peoples our slums, it
+also keeps them from stagnation. The working of the strong instinct to
+better themselves, that brought the crowds here, forces layer after layer
+of this population up to make room for the new crowds coming in at the
+bottom, and thus a circulation is kept up that does more than any sanitary
+law to render the slums harmless. Even the useless sediment is kept from
+rotting by being constantly stirred.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f2" id="f2" href="#f2.1">[2]</a> Report of committing magistrates. See Annual Report of Children&#8217;s Aid
+Society, 1891.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f3" id="f3" href="#f3.1">[3]</a> The census referred to in this chapter was taken for a special
+purpose, by a committee of prominent Hebrews, in August, 1890, and was
+very searching.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f4" id="f4" href="#f4.1">[4]</a> Dr. Roger S. Tracy&#8217;s report of the vital statistics for 1891 shows
+that, while the general death-rate of the city was 25.96 per 1,000 of the
+population&mdash;that of adults (over five years) 17.13, and the baby
+death-rate (under five years) 93.21&mdash;in the Italian settlement in the west
+half of the Fourteenth Ward the record stood as follows: general
+death-rate, 33.52; adult death-rate, 16.29; and baby death-rate, 150.52.
+In the Italian section of the Fourth Ward it stood: general death-rate,
+34.88; adult death-rate, 21.29; baby death-rate 119.02. In the sweaters
+district in the lower part of the Tenth Ward the general death rate was
+16.23; the adult death rate, 7.59; and the baby death rate 61.15. Dr.
+Tracy adds: &#8220;The death-rate from phthisis was highest in houses entirely
+occupied by cigarmakers (Bohemians), and lowest in those entirely occupied
+by tailors. On the other hand, the death-rates from diphtheria and croup
+and measles were highest in houses entirely occupied by tailors.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f5" id="f5" href="#f5.1">[5]</a> Meaning &#8220;teachers.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f6" id="f6" href="#f6.1">[6]</a> Even as I am writing a transformation is being worked in some of the
+filthiest streets on the East Side by a combination of new asphalt
+pavements with a greatly improved street cleaning service that promises
+great things. Some of the worst streets have within a few weeks become as
+clean as I have not seen them in twenty years, and as they probably never
+were since they were made. The unwonted brightness of the surroundings is
+already visibly reflected in the persons and dress of the tenants, notably
+the children. They take to it gladly, giving the lie to the old assertion
+that they are pigs and would rather live like pigs.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f7" id="f7" href="#f7.1">[7]</a> As a matter of fact, I heard, after the last one that caused so much
+discussion, in a court that sent seventy-five children to the show, a
+universal growl of discontent. The effect on the children, even to those
+who received presents, was bad. They felt that they had been on
+exhibition, and their greed was aroused. It was as I expected it would be.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f8" id="f8" href="#f8.1">[8]</a> The Sanitary census of 1891 gave 37,358 tenements, containing 276,565
+families, including 160,708 children under five years of age; total
+population of tenements, 1,225,411.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f9" id="f9" href="#f9.1">[9]</a> The general impression survives with me that the children&#8217;s teeth were
+bad, and those of the native born the worst. Ignorance and neglect were
+clearly to blame for most of it, poor and bad food for the rest, I
+suppose. I give it as a layman&#8217;s opinion, and leave it to the dentist to
+account for the bad teeth of the many who are not poor. That is his
+business.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f10" id="f10" href="#f10.1">[10]</a> The fourteenth year is included. The census phrase means &#8220;up to 15.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f11" id="f11" href="#f11.1">[11]</a> The average attendance was only 136,413, so that there were 60,000
+who were taught only a small part of the time.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f12" id="f12" href="#f12.1">[12]</a> See Minutes of Stated Session of the Board of Education, February 8,
+1892.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f13" id="f13" href="#f13.1">[13]</a> Meaning evidently in this case &#8220;up to fourteen.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f14" id="f14" href="#f14.1">[14]</a> Report of New York Catholic Protectory, 1892.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f15" id="f15" href="#f15.1">[15]</a> If this were not the sober statement of public officials of high
+repute it would seem fairly incredible.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f16" id="f16" href="#f16.1">[16]</a> Between 1880 and 1890 the increase in assessed value of the real and
+personal property in this city was 48.36 per cent., while the population
+increased 41.06 per cent.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f17" id="f17" href="#f17.1">[17]</a> Philosophy of Crime and Punishment, by Dr. William T. Harris, Federal
+Commissioner of Education.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f18" id="f18" href="#f18.1">[18]</a> Seventeenth Annual Report of Society, 1892.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f19" id="f19" href="#f19.1">[19]</a> English Social Movements, by Robert Archey Woods, page 196.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f20" id="f20" href="#f20.1">[20]</a> The Superintendent of the House of Refuge for thirty years wrote
+recently: &#8220;It is essential to have the plays of the children more
+carefully watched than their work.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f21" id="f21" href="#f21.1">[21]</a> Report for 1891 of Children&#8217;s Aid Society.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f22" id="f22" href="#f22.1">[22]</a> In this reckoning is included employment found for many big boys and
+girls, who were taken as help, and were thus given the chance which the
+city denied them.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f23" id="f23" href="#f23.1">[23]</a> It is inevitable, of course, that such a programme should steer clear
+of the sectarian snags that lie plentifully scattered about. I have a
+Roman Catholic paper before me in which the Society&#8217;s &#8220;villainous work,
+which consists chiefly in robbing the Catholic child of his faith,&#8221; is
+hotly denounced in an address to the Archbishop of New York. Mr. Brace&#8217;s
+policy was to meet such attacks with silence, and persevere in his work.
+The Society still follows his plan. Catholic or Protestant&mdash;the question
+is never raised. &#8220;No Catholic child,&#8221; said one of its managers once to me,
+&#8220;is ever brought to us. A <i>poor</i> child is brought and we care for it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f24" id="f24" href="#f24.1">[24]</a> The Society pleads for a farm of its own, close to the city, where it
+can organize a &#8220;farm school&#8221; for the older boys. There they could be taken
+on probation and their fitness for the West be ascertained. They would be
+more useful to the farmers and some trouble would be avoided. Two farms,
+or three, to get as near to the family plan as possible, would be better.
+The Children&#8217;s Aid Society of Boston has three farm schools, and its work
+is very successful.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f25" id="f25" href="#f25.1">[25]</a> I once questioned a class of 71 boys between eight and twelve years
+old in a reform school, with this result: 22 said they blacked boots; 36
+sold papers; 26 did both; 40 &#8220;slept out;&#8221; but only 3 of them all were
+fatherless, 11 motherless, showing that they slept out by choice. The
+father probably had something to do with it most of the time.
+Three-fourths of the lads stood up when I asked them if they had been to
+Central Park. The teacher asked one of those who did not rise, a little
+shaver, if he had never been in the Park. &#8220;No, mem!&#8221; he replied, &#8220;me
+father he went that time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f26" id="f26" href="#f26.1">[26]</a> The lodging-houses are following a noteworthy precedent. From the
+Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, organized in the beginning of
+this century, sprang the first savings bank in the country.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f27" id="f27" href="#f27.1">[27]</a> That is the average number constantly in asylums. With those that
+come and go, it foots up quite 25,000 children a year that are a public
+charge.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f28" id="f28" href="#f28.1">[28]</a> Report upon the Care of Dependent Children in New York City and
+elsewhere, to the State Board of Charities, by Commissioner Josephine Shaw
+Lowell. December, 1889.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f29" id="f29" href="#f29.1">[29]</a> Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell on Dependent Children. Report of 1889.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f30" id="f30" href="#f30.1">[30]</a> Anna T. Wilson: Some Arguments for the Boarding-out of Dependent
+Children in the State of New York. This opposition the Superintendent
+explains in his report for 1891, to be due in part to the lying stories
+about abuse in the West, told by bad boys who return to the city. He adds,
+however, that &#8220;oftentimes the most strenuous opposition ... is made by
+step-mothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins,&#8221; and is &#8220;due in the majority of
+cases not to any special interest in the child&#8217;s welfare, but to
+self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation for the boy in
+order to get his weekly wages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name="f31" id="f31" href="#f31.1">[31]</a> It will do so hereafter. This autumn the discovery was made that the
+city was asked to pay for more children than there ought to be in the
+institutions according to the record of commitments. The comptroller sent
+two of his clerks to count all the children. The result was to show
+slipshod book-keeping, if nothing worse, in certain cases. Hereafter the
+ceremony of counting the children will be gone through every six months.
+Nothing could more clearly show the irresponsible character of the whole
+business and the need of a change, lest we drift into corporate pauperism
+in addition to encouraging the vice in the individual.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f32" id="f32" href="#f32.1">[32]</a> In 1854, with a population of 605,000, there were 6,657 licensed and
+unlicensed saloons in the city, or 1 to every 90.8 of its inhabitants. At
+the beginning of 1892, with a population of 1,706,500, there were 7,218
+saloons, or 1 to every 236.42. Counting all places where liquor was sold
+by license, including hotels, groceries, steamboats, etc., the number was
+9,050, or 1 to every 188.56 inhabitants.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><b>Transcriber&#8217;s Notes:</b></p>
+
+<p>Images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break. Thus, page numbering around the illustrations does not exactly match the original.</p>
+
+<p>The text in the list of illustrations is presented as in the original text, but the links
+navigate to the page number closest to the illustration&#8217;s loaction in this document.</p>
+
+<p>Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate
+both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as
+presented in the original text.</p>
+
+<p>Unmatched quotation marks are presented as in the original text.</p>
+
+<p>Other than the corrections noted by hover information, printer&#8217;s
+inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Children of the Poor, by Jacob A. Riis
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Children of the Poor, by Jacob A. Riis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Children of the Poor
+
+Author: Jacob A. Riis
+
+Release Date: May 30, 2010 [EBook #32609]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
+
+
+  BY
+  JACOB A. RIIS
+  AUTHOR OF "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES"
+
+
+  _ILLUSTRATED_
+
+
+  NEW YORK
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+  1908
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY
+  CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+To my little ones, who, as I lay down my pen, come rushing in from the
+autumn fields, their hands filled with flowers "for the poor children," I
+inscribe this book. May the love that shines in their eager eyes never
+grow cold within them; then they shall yet grow up to give a helping hand
+in working out this problem which so plagues the world to-day. As to their
+father's share, it has been a very small and simple one, and now it is
+done. Other hands may carry forward the work. My aim has been to gather
+the facts for them to build upon. I said it in "How the Other Half Lives,"
+and now, in sending this volume to the printer, I can add nothing. The two
+books are one. Each supplements the other. Ours is an age of facts. It
+wants facts, not theories, and facts I have endeavored to set down in
+these pages. The reader may differ with me as to the application of them.
+He may be right and I wrong. But we shall not quarrel as to the facts
+themselves, I think. A false prophet in our day could do less harm than a
+careless reporter. That name I hope I shall not deserve.
+
+To lay aside a work that has been so long a part of one's life, is like
+losing a friend. But for the one lost I have gained many. They have been
+much to me. The friendship and counsel of Dr. Roger S. Tracy, of the
+Bureau of Vital Statistics, have lightened my labors as nothing else
+could save the presence and the sympathy of the best and dearest friend of
+all, my wife. To Major Willard Bullard, the most efficient chief of the
+Sanitary Police; Rabbi Adolph M. Radin; Mr. A. S. Solomons, of the Baron
+de Hirsch Relief Committee; Dr. Annie Sturges Daniel; Mr. L. W. Holste, of
+the Children's Aid Society; Colonel George T. Balch, of the Board of
+Education; Mr. A. S. Fairchild, and to Dr. Max L. Margolis, my thanks are
+due and here given. Jew and Gentile, we have sought the truth together.
+Our reward must be in the consciousness that we have sought it faithfully
+and according to our light.
+
+J. A. R.
+
+RICHMOND HILL, LONG ISLAND,
+
+October 1, 1892.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                   PAGE
+
+  CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN,             1
+
+
+  CHAPTER II. THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN,             10
+
+
+  CHAPTER III. IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL,     35
+
+
+  CHAPTER IV. TONY AND HIS TRIBE,                    58
+
+
+  CHAPTER V. THE STORY OF KID MCDUFF'S GIRL,         87
+
+
+  CHAPTER VI. THE LITTLE TOILERS,                    92
+
+
+  CHAPTER VII. THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS,          118
+
+
+  CHAPTER VIII. WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD,     129
+
+
+  CHAPTER IX. LITTLE MARY ELLEN'S LEGACY,           142
+
+
+  CHAPTER X. THE STORY OF THE FRESH AIR FUND,       153
+
+
+  CHAPTER XI. THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES,      174
+
+
+  CHAPTER XII. THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS,              187
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIII. THE BOYS' CLUBS,                    215
+
+
+  CHAPTER XIV. THE OUTCAST AND THE HOMELESS,        245
+
+
+  CHAPTER XV. PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM,       277
+
+
+  CHAPTER XVI. THE VERDICT OF THE POTTERS FIELD,    286
+
+
+  REGISTER OF CHILDREN'S CHARITIES,                 291
+
+
+
+
+LISTS OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  Saluting the Flag,                                    _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+  The Mott Street Barracks,                                         16
+
+  An Italian Home under a Dump,                                     25
+
+  A Child of the Dump,                                              28
+
+  Pietro Learning to Make an Englis' Letter,                        32
+
+  "Slept in the Cellar Four Years,"                                 41
+
+  A Synagogue School in a Hester Street Tenement,                   46
+
+  The Backstairs to Learning,                                       48
+
+  Class of Melammedim Learning English,                             50
+
+  "I Scrubs."--Katie who Keeps House in West Forty-ninth Street,    61
+
+  Present Tenants of John Ericsson's Old House, now the Beach
+  Street Industrial School,                                         73
+
+  Their Playground a Truck,                                         86
+
+  Shine, Sir?                                                      100
+
+  Little Susie at her Work,                                        110
+
+  Minding the Baby,                                                114
+
+  "Shooting Craps" in the Hall of the Newsboys' Lodging House,     122
+
+  Case No. 25,745 on the Society's Blotter, Before and After,      146
+
+  Club Used for Beating a Child,                                   152
+
+  Summer Boarders from Mott Street,                                158
+
+  Making for the "Big Water,"                                      167
+
+  Floating Hospital--St. John's Guild,                             169
+
+  Playing at Housekeeping,                                         177
+
+  Poverty Gappers Playing Coney Island,                            183
+
+  Poverty Gap Transformed--the Spot where Young Healey was
+  murdered is now a Playground,                                    185
+
+  The Late Charles Loring Brace, Founder of the Children's
+  Aid Society,                                                     188
+
+  The First Patriotic Election in the Beach Street Industrial
+  School--Parlor in John Ericsson's Old House,                     201
+
+  The Board of Election Inspectors in the Beach Street School,     207
+
+  The Plumbing Shop in the New York Trade Schools,                 212
+
+  A Boys' Club Reading room,                                       222
+
+  The Carpenter Shop in the Avenue C Working Boys' Club,           226
+
+  Type-setting at the Avenue C Working Boys' Club,                 231
+
+  A Bout with the Gloves in the Boys' Club of Calvary Parish,      235
+
+  Lining up for the Gymnasium,                                     240
+
+  A Snug Corner on a Cold Night,                                   246
+
+  2 A.M. in the Delivery-room in the "Sun" Office,                 261
+
+  Buffalo,                                                         264
+
+  Night School in the West Side Lodging-house.--Edward, the
+  Little Pedlar, Caught Napping,                                   265
+
+  The "Soup-House Gang," Class in History in the Duane Street
+  Newsboy's Lodging-house,                                         269
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN
+
+
+The problem of the children is the problem of the State. As we mould the
+children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of
+the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our
+hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad
+government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance
+of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future
+finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power
+and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of
+that energy. At the beginning of the century the urban population of the
+United States was 3.97 per cent. of the whole, or not quite one in
+twenty-five. To-day it is 29.12 per cent., or nearly one in three. In the
+lifetime of those who were babies in arms when the first gun was fired
+upon Fort Sumter it has all but doubled. A million and a quarter live
+to-day in the tenements of the American metropolis. Clearly, there is
+reason for the sharp attention given at last to the life and the doings of
+the other half, too long unconsidered. Philanthropy we call it sometimes
+with patronizing airs. Better call it self-defence.
+
+In New York there is all the more reason because it is the open door
+through which pours in a practically unrestricted immigration, unfamiliar
+with and unattuned to our institutions; the dumping-ground where it rids
+itself of its burden of helplessness and incapacity, leaving the
+procession of the strong and the able free to move on. This sediment forms
+the body of our poor, the contingent that lives, always from hand to
+mouth, with no provision and no means of providing for the morrow. In the
+first generation it pre-empts our slums;[1] in the second, its worst
+elements, reinforced by the influences that prevail there, develop the
+tough, who confronts society with the claim that the world owes him a
+living and that he will collect it in his own way. His plan is a practical
+application of the spirit of our free institutions as his opportunities
+have enabled him to grasp it.
+
+Thus it comes about that here in New York to seek the children of the poor
+one must go among those who, if they did not themselves come over the sea,
+can rarely count back another generation born on American soil. Not that
+there is far to go. Any tenement district will furnish its own tribe, or
+medley of many tribes. Nor is it by any means certain that the children
+when found will own their alien descent. Indeed, as a preliminary to
+gaining their confidence, to hint at such a thing would be a bad blunder.
+The ragged Avenue B boy, whose father at his age had barely heard, in his
+corner of the Fatherland, of America as a place where the streets were
+paved with nuggets of gold and roast pigeons flew into mouths opening wide
+with wonder, would, it is safe to bet, be as prompt to resent the
+insinuation that he was a "Dutchman," as would the little "Mick" the
+Teuton's sore taunt. Even the son of the immigrant Jew in his virtual
+isolation strains impatiently at the fetters of race and faith, while the
+Italian takes abuse philosophically only when in the minority and bides
+his time until he too shall be able to prove his title by calling those
+who came after him names. However, to quarrel with the one or the other on
+that ground would be useless. It is the logic of the lad's evolution, the
+way of patriotism in the slums. His sincerity need not be questioned.
+
+Many other things about him may be, and justly are, but not that. It is
+perfectly transparent. His badness is as spontaneous as his goodness, and
+for the moment all there is of the child. Whichever streak happens to
+prevail, it is in full possession; if the bad is on top more frequently
+than the other, it is his misfortune rather than his design. He is as
+ready to give his only cent to a hungrier boy than he if it is settled
+that he can "lick" him, and that he is therefore not a rival, as he is to
+join him in torturing an unoffending cat for the common cheer. The penny
+and the cat, the charity and the cruelty, are both pregnant facts in the
+life that surrounds him, and of which he is to be the coming exponent. In
+after years, when he is arrested by the officers of the Society for the
+Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for beating his horse, the episode adds
+but to his confusion of mind in which a single impression stands out clear
+and lasting, viz., that somehow he got the worst of it as usual. But for
+the punishment, the whole proceeding must seem ludicrous to him. As it is
+he submits without comprehending. _He_ had to take the hard knocks always;
+why should not his horse?
+
+In other words, the child is a creature of environment, of opportunity, as
+children are everywhere. And the environment here has been bad, as it was
+and is in the lands across the sea that sent him to us. Our slums have
+fairly rivalled, and in some respects outdone, the older ones after which
+they patterned. Still, there is a difference, the difference between the
+old slum and the new. The hopelessness, the sullen submission of life in
+East London as we have seen it portrayed, has no counterpart here; neither
+has the child born in the gutter and predestined by the order of society,
+from which there is no appeal, to die there. We have our Lost Tenth to
+fill the trench in the Potter's Field; quite as many wrecks at the finish,
+perhaps, but the start seems fairer in the promise. Even on the slums the
+doctrine of liberty has set its stamp. To be sure, for the want of the
+schooling to decipher it properly, they spell it license there, and the
+slip makes trouble. The tough and his scheme of levying tribute are the
+result. But the police settle that with him, and when it comes to a
+choice, the tough is to be preferred to the born pauper any day. The one
+has the making of something in him, unpromising as he looks; seen in a
+certain light he may even be considered a hopeful symptom. The other is
+just so much dead loss. The tough is not born: he is made. The
+all-important point is the one at which the manufacture can be stopped.
+
+So rapid and great are the changes in American cities, that no slum has
+yet had a chance here to grow old enough to distil its deadliest poison.
+New York has been no exception. But we cannot always go at so fast a
+pace. There is evidence enough in the crystallization of the varying
+elements of the population along certain lines, no longer as uncertain as
+they were, that we are slowing up already. Any observer of the poor in
+this city is familiar with the appearance among them of that most
+distressing and most dangerous symptom, the home-feeling for the slum that
+opposes all efforts at betterment with dull indifference. Pauperism seems
+to have grown faster of late than even the efforts put forth to check it.
+We have witnessed this past winter a dozen times the spectacle of beggars
+extorting money by threats or violence without the excuse which a season
+of exceptional distress or hardship might have furnished. Further, the
+raid in the last Legislature upon the structure of law built up in a
+generation to regulate and keep the tenements within safe limits, shows
+that fresh danger threatens in the alliance of the slum with politics.
+Only the strongest public sentiment, kept always up to the point of prompt
+action, avails to ward off this peril. But public sentiment soon wearies
+of such watch-duty, as instanced on this occasion, when several bills
+radically remodelling the tenement-house law and repealing some of its
+most beneficent provisions, had passed both houses and were in the hands
+of the Governor before a voice was raised against them, or anyone beside
+the politicians and their backers seemed even to have heard of them. And
+this hardly five years after a special commission of distinguished
+citizens had sat an entire winter under authority of the State considering
+the tenement-house problem, and as the result of its labors had secured as
+vital the enactment of the very law against which the raid seemed to be
+chiefly directed!
+
+The tenement and the saloon, with the street that does not always divide
+them, form the environment that is to make or unmake the child. The
+influence of each of the three is bad. Together they have power to
+overcome the strongest resistance. But the child born under their evil
+spell has none such to offer. The testimony of all to whom has fallen the
+task of undoing as much of the harm done by them as may be, from the
+priest of the parish school to the chaplain of the penitentiary, agrees
+upon this point, that even the tough, with all his desperation, is weak
+rather than vicious. He promises well, he even means well; he is as
+downright sincere in his repentance as he was in his wrong-doing; but it
+doesn't prevent him from doing the very same evil deed over again the
+minute he is rid of restraint. He would rather be a saint than a sinner;
+but somehow he doesn't keep in the _role_ of saint, while the police help
+perpetuate the memory of his wickedness. After all, he is not so very
+different from the rest of us. Perhaps that, with a remorseful review of
+the chances he has had, may help to make a fellow-feeling for him in us.
+
+That is what he needs. The facts clearly indicate that from the
+environment little improvement in the child is to be expected. There has
+been progress in the way of building the tenements of late years, but they
+swarm with greater crowds than ever--good reason why they challenge the
+pernicious activity of the politician; and the old rookeries disappear
+slowly. In the relation of the saloon to the child there has been no
+visible improvement, and the street is still his refuge. It is, then, his
+opportunities outside that must be improved if relief is to come. We have
+the choice of hailing him man and brother or of being slugged and robbed
+by him. It ought not to be a hard choice, despite the tatters and the
+dirt, for which our past neglect is in great part to blame. Plenty of
+evidence will be found in these pages to show that it has been made in the
+right spirit already, and that it has proved a wise choice. No investment
+gives a better return to-day on the capital put out than work among the
+children of the poor.
+
+A single fact will show what is meant by that. Within the lifetime of the
+Children's Aid Society, in the thirty years between 1860 and 1890, while
+the population of this city was doubled, the commitments of girls and
+women for vagrancy fell off from 5,880 to 1,980, while the commitments of
+girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890 from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500.[2]
+Stealing and vagrancy among boys has decreased too; if not so fast, yet at
+a gratifying rate.
+
+Enough has been written and said about the children of the poor and their
+sufferings to make many a bigger book than this. From some of it one might
+almost be led to believe that one-half of the children are worked like
+slaves from toddling infancy, while the other half wander homeless and
+helpless about the streets. Their miseries are great enough without
+inventing any that do not exist. There is no such host of child outcasts
+in New York as that. Thanks to the unwearied efforts of the children's
+societies in the last generation, what there is is decreasing, if
+anything. As for the little toilers, they will receive attention further
+on. There are enough of them, but as a whole they are anything but a
+repining lot. They suffer less, to their own knowledge, from their
+wretched life than the community suffers for letting them live it, though
+it, too, sees the truth but in glimpses. If the question were put to a
+vote of the children to-morrow, whether they would take the old life with
+its drawbacks, its occasional starvation, and its everyday kicks and hard
+knocks; or the good clothes, the plentiful grub, and warm bed, with all
+the restraints of civilized society and the "Sunday-school racket" of the
+other boy thrown in, I have as little doubt that the street would carry
+the day by a practically unanimous vote as I have that there are people
+still to be found--too many of them--who would indorse the choice with a
+sigh of relief and dismiss the subject, if it could be dismissed that way;
+which, happily, it cannot.
+
+The immediate duty which the community has to perform for its own
+protection is to school the children first of all into good Americans, and
+next into useful citizens. As a community it has not attended to this duty
+as it should; but private effort has stepped in and is making up for its
+neglect with encouraging success. The outlook that was gloomy from the
+point of view of the tenement, brightens when seen from this angle,
+however toilsome the road yet ahead. The inpouring of alien races no
+longer darkens it. The problems that seemed so perplexing in the light of
+freshly-formed prejudices against this or that immigrant, yield to this
+simple solution that discovers all alarm to have been groundless.
+Yesterday it was the swarthy Italian, to-day the Russian Jew, that excited
+our distrust. To-morrow it may be the Arab or the Greek. All alike they
+have taken, or are taking, their places in the ranks of our social
+phalanx, pushing upward from the bottom with steady effort, as I believe
+they will continue to do unless failure to provide them with proper homes
+arrests the process. And in the general advance the children, thus firmly
+grasped, are seen to be a powerful moving force. The one immigrant who
+does not keep step, who, having fallen out of the ranks, has been ordered
+to the rear, is the Chinaman, who brought neither wife nor children to
+push him ahead. He left them behind that he might not become an American,
+and by the standard he himself set up he has been judged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN
+
+
+Who and where are the slum children of New York to-day? That depends on
+what is understood by the term. The moralist might seek them in Hell's
+Kitchen, in Battle Row, and in the tenements, east and west, where the
+descendants of the poorest Irish immigrants live. They are the ones, as I
+have before tried to show, upon whom the tenement and the saloon set their
+stamp soonest and deepest. The observer of physical facts merely would
+doubtless pick out the Italian ragamuffins first, and from his standpoint
+he would be right. Irish poverty is not picturesque in the New World,
+whatever it may have been in the Old. Italian poverty is. The worst old
+rookeries fall everywhere in this city to the share of the immigrants from
+Southern Italy, who are content to occupy them, partly, perhaps, because
+they are no worse than the hovels they left behind, but mainly because
+they are tricked or bullied into putting up with them by their smarter
+countrymen who turn their helplessness and ignorance to good account.
+Wherever the invasion of some old home section by the tide of business has
+left ramshackle tenements falling into hopeless decay, as in the old
+"Africa," in the Bend, and in many other places in the down-town wards,
+the Italian sweater landlord is ready with his offer of a lease to bridge
+over the interregnum, a lease that takes no account of repairs or of the
+improvements the owner sought to avoid. The crowds to make it profitable
+to him are never wanting. The bait he holds out is a job at the ash-dump
+with which he connects at the other end of the line. The house, the job,
+and the man as he comes to them fit in well together, and the
+copartnership has given the Italian a character which, I am satisfied from
+close observation of him, he does not wholly deserve. At all events, his
+wife does not. Dirty as _he_ seems and is in the old rags that harmonize
+so well with his surroundings, there is that about her which suggests not
+only the capacity for better things, but a willingness to be clean and to
+look decent, if cause can be shown. It may be a bright kerchief, a bit of
+old-fashioned jewelry, or the neatly smoothed and braided hair of the
+wrinkled old hag who presides over the stale bread counter. Even in the
+worst dens occupied by these people, provided that they had not occupied
+them too long, I have found this trait crop out in the careful scrubbing
+of some piece of oil-cloth rescued from the dump and laid as a mat in
+front of the family bed; or in a bit of fringe on the sheet or quilt,
+ragged and black with age though it was, that showed what a fruitful soil
+proper training and decent housing would have found there.
+
+I have in mind one Italian "flat" among many, a half underground hole in a
+South Fifth Avenue yard, reached by odd passage-ways through a tumbledown
+tenement that was always full of bad smells and scooting rats. Across the
+foul and slippery yard, down three steps made of charred timbers from some
+worse wreck, was this "flat," where five children slept with their elders.
+How many of those there were I never knew. There were three big family
+beds, and they nearly filled the room, leaving only patches of the mud
+floor visible. The walls were absolutely black with age and smoke. The
+plaster had fallen off in patches and there was green mould on the
+ceiling. And yet, with it all, with the swarm of squirming youngsters that
+were as black as the floor they rolled upon, there was evidence of a
+desperate, if hopeless, groping after order, even neatness. The beds were
+made up as nicely as they could be with the old quilts and pieces of
+carpet that served for covering. In Poverty Gap, where an Italian would be
+stoned as likely as not, there would have been a heap of dirty straw
+instead of beds, and the artistic arrangement of tallow-dips stuck in the
+necks of bottles about the newspaper cut of a saint on the corner shelf
+would have been missing altogether, fervent though the personal regard
+might be of Poverty Gap for the saint. The bottles would have been the
+only part of the exhibition sure to be seen there.
+
+I am satisfied that this instinct inhabits not only the more aristocratic
+Genoese, but his fellow countryman from the southern hills as well, little
+as they resemble each other or agree in most things. But the Neapolitan
+especially does not often get a chance to prove it. He is so altogether
+uninviting an object when he presents himself, fresh from the steamer,
+that he falls naturally the victim of the slum tenement, which in his keep
+becomes, despite the vigilance of the sanitary police, easily enough the
+convenient depot and half-way house between the garbage-dump and the
+bone-factory. Starting thus below the bottom, as it were, he has an
+up-hill journey before him if he is to work out of the slums, and the
+promise, to put it mildly, is not good. He does it all the same, or, if
+not he, his boy. It is not an Italian sediment that breeds the tough.
+Parental authority has a strong enough grip on the lad in Mulberry Street
+to make him work, and that is his salvation. "In seventeen years," said
+the teacher of the oldest Italian ragged school in the city that, day and
+night, takes in quite six hundred, "I have seen my boys work up into
+decent mechanics and useful citizens almost to a man, and of my girls only
+two I know of have gone astray." I had observed the process often enough
+myself to know that she was right. It is to be remembered, furthermore,
+that her school is in the very heart of the Five Points district, and
+takes in always the worst and the dirtiest crowds of children.
+
+Within a year there has been, through some caprice of immigration, a
+distinct descent in the quality of the children, viewed from even the
+standard of cleanliness that prevails at the Five Points. Perhaps the
+exodus from Italy has worked farther south, where there seems to be an
+unusual supply of mud. Perhaps the rivalry of steamship lines has brought
+it about. At any rate, the testimony is positive that the children that
+came to the schools after last vacation, and have kept coming since, were
+the worst seen here since the influx began. I have watched with
+satisfaction, since this became apparent, some of the bad old tenements,
+which the newcomers always sought in droves, disappear to make room for
+great factory buildings. But there are enough left. The cleaning out of a
+Mulberry Street block left one lop-sided old rear tenement that had long
+since been shut in on three sides by buildings four stories higher than
+itself, and forgotten by all the world save the miserable wretches who
+burrowed in that dark and dismal pit at the bottom of a narrow alley. Now,
+when the fourth structure goes up against its very windows, it will stand
+there in the heart of the block, a survival of the unfittest, that, in all
+its disheartening dreariness, bears testimony, nevertheless, to the
+beneficent activity of the best Board of Health New York has ever had--the
+onward sweep of business. It will wipe that last remnant out also, even
+if the law lack the power to reach it.
+
+Shoals of Italian children lived in that rookery, and in those the workmen
+tore down, in the actual physical atmosphere of the dump. Not a gun-shot
+away there is a block of tenements, known as the Mott Street Barracks, in
+which still greater shoals are--I was going to say housed, but that would
+have been a mistake. Happily they are that very rarely, except when they
+are asleep, and not then if they can help it. Out on the street they may
+be found tumbling in the dirt, or up on the roof lying stark-naked,
+blinking in the sun--content with life as they find it. If they are not a
+very cleanly crew, they are at least as clean as the frame they are set
+in, though it must be allowed that something has been done of late years
+to redeem the buildings from the reproach of a bad past. The combination
+of a Jew for a landlord and a saloon-keeper--Italian, of course--for a
+lessee, was not propitious; but the buildings happen to be directly under
+the windows of the Health Board, and something, I suppose, was due to
+appearances. The authorities did all that could be done, short of tearing
+down the tenement, but though comparatively clean, and not nearly as
+crowded as it was, it is still the old slum. It is an instructive instance
+of what can and cannot be done with the tenements into which we invite
+these dirty strangers to teach them American ways and the self-respect of
+future citizens and voters. There are five buildings--that is, five front
+and four rear houses, the latter a story higher than those on the street;
+that is because the rear houses were built last, to "accommodate" this
+very Italian immigration that could be made to pay for anything. Chiefly
+Irish had lived there before, but they moved out then. There were 360
+tenants in the Barracks when the police census was taken in 1888, and 40
+of them were babies. How many were romping children I do not know. The
+"yard" they had to play in is just 5 feet 10 inches wide, and a dozen
+steps below the street-level. The closets of all the buildings are in the
+cellar of the rear houses and open upon this "yard," where it is always
+dark and damp as in a dungeon. Its foul stenches reach even the top floor,
+but so also does the sun at mid-day, and that is a luxury that counts as
+an extra in the contract with the landlord. The rent is nearly one-half
+higher near the top than it is on the street-level. Nine dollars above,
+six and a half below, for one room with windows, two without, and with
+barely space for a bed in each. But water-pipes have been put in lately,
+under orders from the Health Department, and the rents have doubtless been
+raised. "No windows" means no ventilation. The rear building backs up
+against the tenement on the next street; a space a foot wide separates
+them, but an attempt to ventilate the bed-rooms by windows on that was a
+failure.
+
+When the health officers got through with the Barracks in time for the
+police census of 1891, the 360 tenants had been whittled down to 238, of
+whom 47 were babies under five years. Persistent effort had succeeded in
+establishing a standard of cleanliness that was a very great improvement
+upon the condition prevailing in 1888. But still, as I have said, the slum
+remained and will remain as long as that rear tenement stands. In the four
+years fifty-one funerals had gone out from the Barracks. The white hearse
+alone had made thirty-five trips carrying baby coffins. This was the way
+the two standards showed up in the death returns at the Bureau of Vital
+Statistics: in 1888 the adult death-rate, in a population of 320 over five
+years old, was 15.62 per 1,000; the baby death-rate, 325.00 per 1,000,
+or nearly one-third in a total of 40. As a matter of fact 13 of the 40 had
+died that year. The adult death-rate for the entire tenement population of
+more than a million souls was that year 12.81, and the baby death-rate
+88.38. Last year, in 1891, the case stood thus: Total population, 238,
+including 47 babies. Adult death-rate per 1,000, 20.94; child death-rate
+(under five years) per 1,000, 106.38. General adult death-rate for 1891 in
+the tenements, 14.25; general child death-rate for 1891 in the tenements,
+86.67. It should be added that the reduced baby death-rate of the
+Barracks, high as it was, was probably much lower than it can be
+successfully maintained. The year before, in 1890, when practically the
+same improved conditions prevailed, it was twice as high. Twice as many
+babies died.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS.]
+
+
+I have referred to some of the typical Italian tenements at some length to
+illustrate the conditions under which their children grow up and absorb
+the impressions that are to shape their lives as men and women. Is it to
+be marvelled at, if the first impression of them is sometimes not
+favorable? I recall, not without amusement, one of the early experiences
+of a committee with which I was trying to relieve some of the child misery
+in the East Side tenements by providing an outing for the very poorest of
+the little ones, who might otherwise have been overlooked. In our anxiety
+to make our little charges as presentable as possible, it seems we had
+succeeded so well as to arouse a suspicion in our friends at the other end
+of the line that something was wrong, either with us or with the poor of
+which the patrician youngsters in new frocks and with clean faces, that
+came to them, were representatives. They wrote to us that they were in the
+field for the "slum children," and slum children they wanted. It happened
+that their letter came just as we had before us two little lads from the
+Mulberry Street Bend, ragged, dirty, unkempt, and altogether a sight to
+see. Our wardrobe was running low, and we were at our wits' end how to
+make these come up to our standard. We sat looking at each other after we
+had heard the letter read, all thinking the same thing, until the most
+courageous said it: "Send them as they are." Well, we did, and waited
+rather breathlessly for the verdict. It came, with the children, in a note
+by return train, that said: "Not _that_ kind, please!" And after that we
+were allowed to have things our own way.
+
+The two little fellows were Italians. In justice to our frightened
+friends, it should be said that it was not their nationality, but their
+rags, to which they objected; but not very many seasons have passed since
+the crowding of the black-eyed brigade of "guinnies," as they were
+contemptuously dubbed, in ever-increasing numbers, into the ragged schools
+and the kindergartens, was watched with regret and alarm by the teachers,
+as by many others who had no better cause. The event proved that the
+children were the real teachers. They had a more valuable lesson to impart
+than they came to learn, and it has been a salutary one. To-day they are
+gladly welcomed. Their sunny temper, which no hovel is dreary enough, no
+hardship has power to cloud, has made them universal favorites, and the
+discovery has been made by their teachers that as the crowds pressed
+harder their school-rooms have marvellously expanded, until they embrace
+within their walls an unsuspected multitude, even many a slum tenement
+itself, cellar, "stoop," attic, and all. Every lesson of cleanliness, of
+order, and of English taught at the school is reflected into some wretched
+home, and rehearsed there as far as the limited opportunities will allow.
+No demonstration with soap and water upon a dirty little face but widens
+the sphere of these chief promoters of education in the slums. "By 'm by,"
+said poor crippled Pietro to me, with a sober look, as he labored away on
+his writing lesson, holding down the paper with his maimed hand, "I learn
+t' make an Englis' letter; maybe my fadder he learn too." I had my doubts
+of the father. He sat watching Pietro with a pride in the achievement that
+was clearly proportionate to the struggle it cost, and mirrored in his own
+face every grimace and contortion the progress of education caused the
+boy. "Si! si!" he nodded, eagerly. "Pietro he good a boy; make Englis',
+Englis'!" and he made a flourish with his clay-pipe, as if he too were
+making the English letter that was the object of their common veneration.
+
+Perhaps it is as much his growing and well-founded distrust of the
+middle-man, whose unresisting victim he has heretofore been, and his need
+of some other joint to connect him with the English-speaking world that
+surrounds him, as any personal interest in book-learning, that impels the
+illiterate Italian to bring his boy to school early and see that he
+attends it. Greed has something to do with it too. In their anxiety to lay
+hold of the child, the charity schools have fallen into a way of bidding
+for him with clothes, shoes, and other bait that is never lost on Mulberry
+Street. Even sectarian scruples yield to such an argument, and the
+parochial school, where they get nothing but on the contrary are expected
+to contribute, gets left.
+
+In a few charity schools where the children are boarded they have
+discovered this, and frown upon Italian children unless there is the best
+of evidence that the father is really unable to pay for their keep and
+not simply unwilling. But whatever his motive, the effect is to
+demonstrate in a striking way the truth of the observation that real
+reform of poverty and ignorance must begin with the children. In his case,
+at all events, the seed thus sown bears some fruit in the present as well
+as in the coming generation of toilers. The little ones, with their new
+standards and new ambitions, become in a very real sense missionaries of
+the slums, whose work of regeneration begins with their parents. They are
+continually fetched away from school by the mother or father to act as
+interpreters or go-betweens in all the affairs of daily life, to be
+conscientiously returned within the hour stipulated by the teacher, who
+offers no objection to this sort of interruption, knowing it to be the
+best condition of her own success. One cannot help the hope that the
+office of trust with which the children are thus invested may, in some
+measure, help to mitigate their home-hardships. From their birth they have
+little else, though Italian parents are rarely cruel in the sense of
+abusing their offspring.
+
+It is the home itself that constitutes their chief hardship. It is only
+when his years offer the boy an opportunity of escape to the street, that
+a ray of sunlight falls into his life. In his backyard or in his alley it
+seldom finds him out. Thenceforward most of his time is spent there, until
+the school and the shop claim him, but not in idleness. His mother toiled,
+while she bore him at her breast, under burdens heavy enough to break a
+man's back. She lets him out of her arms only to share her labor. How well
+he does it anyone may see for himself by watching the children that swarm
+where an old house is being torn down, lugging upon their heads loads of
+kindling wood twice their own size and sometimes larger than that. They
+come, as crows scenting carrion, from every side at the first blow of the
+axe. Their odd old-mannish or old-womanish appearance, due more to their
+grotesque rags than to anything in the children themselves, betrays their
+race even without their chatter. Be there ever so many children of other
+nationalities nearer by--the wood-gatherers are nearly all Italians. There
+are still a lot of girls among them who drag as big loads as their
+brothers, but since the sewing machine found its way, with the sweater's
+mortgage, into the Italian slums also, little Antonia has been robbed to a
+large extent even of this poor freedom, and has taken her place among the
+wage-earners when not on the school-bench. Once taken, the place is hers
+to keep for good. Sickness, unless it be mortal, is no excuse from the
+drudgery of the tenement. When, recently, one little Italian girl, hardly
+yet in her teens, stayed away from her class in the Mott Street Industrial
+School so long that her teacher went to her home to look her up, she found
+the child in a high fever, in bed, sewing on coats, with swollen eyes,
+though barely able to sit up.
+
+But neither poverty nor hard knocks has power to discourage the child of
+Italy. His nickname he pockets with a grin that has in it no thought of
+the dagger and the revenge that come to solace his after years. Only the
+prospect of immediate punishment eclipses his spirits for the moment.
+While the teacher of the sick little girl was telling me her pitiful story
+in the Mott Street school, a characteristic group appeared on the
+stairway. Three little Italian culprits in the grasp of Nellie, the tall
+and slender Irish girl who was the mentor of her class for the day. They
+had been arrested "fur fightin'" she briefly explained as she dragged them
+by the collar toward the principal, who just then appeared to inquire the
+cause of the rumpus, and thrust them forward to receive sentence. The
+three, none of whom was over eight years old, evidently felt that they
+were in the power of an enemy from whom no mercy was to be expected, and
+made no appeal for any. One scowled defiance. He was evidently the injured
+party.
+
+"He hit-a me a clip on de jaw," he said in his defence, in the dialect of
+Mott Street with a slight touch of "the Bend." The aggressor, a heavy
+browed little ruffian, hung back with a dreary howl, knuckling his eyes
+with a pair of fists that were nearly black. The third and youngest was in
+a state of bewilderment that was most ludicrous. He only knew that he had
+received a kick on the back and had struck out in self-defence, when he
+was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty--school had only
+just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection--that he
+was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two
+were led away to the principal's desk. All three went out howling.
+
+I said that the Italians do not often abuse their children downright. The
+padrone has had his day; the last was convicted seven years ago, and an
+end has been put to the business of selling children into a slavery that
+meant outrage, starvation, and death; but poverty and ignorance are
+fearful allies in the homes of the poor against defenceless childhood,
+even without the child-beating fiend. Two cases which I encountered in the
+East Side tenements, in the summer of 1891, show how the combination works
+at its worst. Without a doubt they are typical of very many, though I hope
+that few come quite up to their standard. The one was the case of little
+Carmen, who last March died in the New York Hospital, where she had lain
+five long months, the special care of the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children. One of the summer corps doctors found her in a Mott
+Street tenement, within stone-throw of the Health Department office,
+suffering from a wasting disease that could only be combated by the most
+careful nursing. He put her case into the hands of the King's Daughters'
+Committee that followed in the steps of the doctor, and it was then that I
+saw her. She lay in a little back room, up two flights and giving upon a
+narrow yard where it was always twilight. The room was filthy and close,
+and entirely devoid of furniture, with the exception of a rickety stool, a
+slop pail, and a rusty old stove, one end of which was propped up with
+bricks. Carmen's bed was a board laid across the top of a barrel and a
+trunk set on end. I could not describe, if I would, the condition of the
+child when she was raised from the mess of straw and rags in which she
+lay. The sight unnerved even the nurse, who had seen little else than such
+scenes all summer. Loathsome bedsores had attacked the wasted little body,
+and in truth Carmen was more dead than alive. But when, shocked and
+disgusted, we made preparations for her removal with all speed to the
+hospital, the parents objected and refused to let us take her away. They
+had to be taken into court and forced to surrender the child under warrant
+of law, though it was clearly the little sufferer's only chance for life,
+and only the slenderest of chances at that.
+
+Carmen was the victim of the stubborn ignorance that dreads the hospital
+and the doctor above the discomfort of the dirt and darkness and suffering
+that are its every-day attendants. Her parents were no worse than the
+Monroe Street mother who refused to let the health officer vaccinate her
+baby, because her crippled boy, with one leg an inch shorter than the
+other, had "caught it"--the lame leg, that is to say--from his
+vaccination. She knew it was so, and with ignorance of that stamp there is
+no other argument than force. But another element entered into the case of
+a sick Essex Street baby. The tenement would not let it recover from a bad
+attack of scarlet fever, and the parents would not let it be taken to the
+country or to the sea-shore, despite all efforts and entreaties. When
+their motive came out at last, it proved to be a mercenary one. They were
+behind with the rent, and as long as they had a sick child in the house
+the landlord could not put them out. Sick, the baby was to them a source
+of income, at all events a bar to expense, and in that way so much
+capital. Well, or away, it would put them at the mercy of the
+rent-collector at once. So they chose to let it suffer. The parents were
+Jews, a fact that emphasizes the share borne by desperate poverty in the
+transaction, for the family tie is notoriously strong among their people.
+
+No doubt Mott Street echoed with the blare of brass bands when poor little
+Carmen was carried from her bed of long suffering to her grave in Calvary.
+Scarce a day passes now in these tenements that does not see some little
+child, not rarely a new-born babe, carried to the grave in solemn state,
+preceded by a band playing mournful dirges and followed by a host with
+trailing banners, from some wretched home that barely sheltered it alive.
+No suspicion of the ludicrous incongruity of the show disturbs the
+paraders. It seems as if, but one remove from the dump, an insane passion
+for pomp and display, perhaps a natural reaction from the ash-barrel, lies
+in wait for this Italian, to which he falls a helpless victim. Not content
+with his own national and religious holidays and those he finds awaiting
+him here, he has invented or introduced a system of his own, a sort of
+communal celebration of proprietary saints, as it were, that has taken
+Mulberry Street by storm. As I understand it, the townsmen of some Italian
+village, when there is a sufficient number of them within reach, club
+together to celebrate its patron saint, and hire a band and set up a
+gorgeous altar in a convenient back yard. The fire-escapes overlooking it
+are draped with flags and transformed into reserved-seat galleries with
+the taste these people display under the most adverse circumstances.
+Crowds come and go, parading at intervals in gorgeous uniforms around the
+block. Admission is by the saloon-door, which nearly always holds the key
+to the situation, the saloonist who prompts the sudden attack of devotion
+being frequently a namesake of the saint and willing to go shares on the
+principle that he takes the profit and the saint the glory.
+
+
+[Illustration: AN ITALIAN HOME UNDER A DUMP.]
+
+
+The partnership lasts as long as there is any profit in it, sometimes the
+better part of the week, during which time all work stops. If the feast
+panned out well, the next block is liable to be the scene of a rival
+celebration before the first is fairly ended. As the supply of Italian
+villages represented in New York is practically as inexhaustible as that
+of the saloons, there is no reason why Mulberry Street may not become a
+perennial picnic ground long before the scheme to make a park of one end
+of it gets under way. From the standpoint of the children there can be no
+objection to this, but from that of the police there is. They found
+themselves called upon to interfere in such a four days' celebration of
+St. Rocco last year, when his votaries strung cannon fire-crackers along
+the street the whole length of the block and set them all off at once. It
+was at just such a feast, in honor of the same saint, that a dozen
+Italians were killed a week later at Newark in the explosion of their
+fireworks.
+
+It goes without saying that the children enter into this sort of thing
+with all the enthusiasm of their little souls. The politician watches it
+attentively, alert for some handle to catch his new allies by and effect
+their "organization." If it is a new experience for him to find the saloon
+put to such use, he betrays no surprise. It is his vantage ground, and
+whether it serve as the political bait for the Irishman, or as the
+religious initiative of the Italian, is of less account than that its
+patrons, young and old, in the end fall into his trap. Conclusive proof
+that the Italian has been led into camp came to me on last St. Patrick's
+Day through the assurance of a certain popular clergyman, that he had
+observed, on a walk through the city, a number of hand-organs draped in
+green, evidently for the occasion.
+
+This dump of which I have spoken as furnishing the background of the
+social life of Mulberry Street, has lately challenged attention as a slum
+annex to the Bend, with fresh horrors in store for defenceless childhood.
+To satisfy myself upon this point I made a personal inspection of the
+dumps along both rivers last winter and found the Italian crews at work
+there making their home in every instance among the refuse they picked
+from the scows. The dumps are wooden bridges raised above the level of the
+piers upon which they are built to allow the discharge of the carts
+directly into the scows moored under them. Under each bridge a cabin had
+been built of old boards, oil-cloth, and the like, that had found its way
+down on the carts; an old milk-can had been made into a fireplace without
+the ceremony of providing stove-pipe or draught, and here, flanked by
+mountains of refuse, slept the crews of from half a dozen to three times
+that number of men, secure from the police, who had grown tired of driving
+them from dump to dump and had finally let them alone. There were women at
+some of them, and at four dumps, three on the North River and one on the
+East Side, I found boys who ought to have been at school, picking bones
+and sorting rags. They said that they slept there, and as the men did, why
+should they not? It was their home. They were children of the dump,
+literally. All of them except one were Italians. That one was a little
+homeless Jew who had drifted down at first to pick cinders. Now that his
+mother was dead and his father in a hospital, he had become a sort of
+fixture there, it seemed, having made the acquaintance of the other lads.
+
+
+[Illustration: A CHILD OF THE DUMP.]
+
+
+Two boys whom I found at the West Nineteenth Street dumps sorting bones
+were as bright lads as I had seen anywhere. One was nine years old and
+the other twelve. Filthy and ragged, they fitted well into their
+environment--even the pig I had encountered at one of the East River dumps
+was much the more respectable, as to appearance, of the lot--but were
+entirely undaunted by it. They scarcely remembered anything but the dump.
+Neither could read, of course. Further down the river I came upon one
+seemingly not over fifteen, who assured me that he was twenty-one. I
+thought it possible when I took a closer look at him. The dump had stunted
+him. He did not even know what a letter was. He had been there five years,
+and garbage limited his mental as well as his physical horizon.
+
+Enough has been said to show that the lot of the poor child of the
+Mulberry Street Bend, or of Little Italy, is not a happy one, courageously
+and uncomplainingly, even joyously, though it be borne. The stories of two
+little lads from the region of Crosby Street always stand to me as typical
+of their kind. One I knew all about from personal observation and
+acquaintance; the other I give as I have it from his teachers in the Mott
+Street Industrial School, where he was a pupil in spells. It was the death
+of little Giuseppe that brought me to his home, a dismal den in a rear
+tenement down a dark and forbidding alley. I have seldom seen a worse
+place. There was no trace there of a striving for better things--the
+tenement had stamped that out--nothing but darkness and filth and misery.
+From this hole Giuseppe had come to the school a mass of rags, but with
+that jovial gleam in his brown eyes that made him an instant favorite with
+the teachers as well as with the boys. One of them especially, little
+Mike, became attached to him, and a year after his cruel death shed tears
+yet, when reminded of it. Giuseppe had not been long at the school when
+he was sent to an Elizabeth Street tenement for a little absentee. He
+brought her, shivering in even worse rags than his own; it was a cold
+winter day.
+
+"This girl is very poor," he said, presenting her to the teacher, with a
+pitying look. It was only then that he learned that she had no mother. His
+own had often stood between the harsh father and him when he came home
+with unsold evening papers. Giuseppe fished his only penny out of his
+pocket--his capital for the afternoon's trade. "I would like to give her
+that," he said. After that he brought her pennies regularly from his day's
+sale, and took many a thrashing for it. He undertook the general
+supervision of the child's education, and saw to it that she came to
+school every day. Giuseppe was twelve years old.
+
+There came an evening when business had been very bad, so bad that he
+thought a bed in the street healthier for him than the Crosby Street
+alley. With three other lads in similar straits he crawled into the iron
+chute that ventilated the basement of the Post-office on the Mail Street
+side and snuggled down on the grating. They were all asleep, when fire
+broke out in the cellar. The three climbed out, but Giuseppe, whose feet
+were wrapped in a mail-bag, was too late. He was burned to death.
+
+The little girl still goes to the Mott Street school. She is too young to
+understand, and marvels why Giuseppe comes no more with his pennies. Mike
+cries for his friend. When, some months ago, I found myself in the Crosby
+Street alley, and went up to talk to Giuseppe's parents, they would answer
+no questions before I had replied to one of theirs. It was thus
+interpreted to me by a girl from the basement, who had come in out of
+curiosity:
+
+"Are youse goin' to give us any money?" Poor Giuseppe!
+
+My other little friend was Pietro, of whom I spoke before. Perhaps of all
+the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the
+course of years--and they are many and sad, most of them--none comes
+nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than his,
+exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I
+met him first in the Mulberry Street police-station, where he was
+interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd
+from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his
+rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, he seemed to fit
+in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of
+the police-station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but
+for his maimed hand and his oddly grave yet eager face, which no smile
+ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I
+afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son
+of a laborer, not "borned here" as the rest of his sisters and brothers.
+There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it:
+"2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 modder," subsisting on an unsteady
+maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking always the earnings of one
+week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a
+dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that until
+very recently preserved to Jersey Street the memory of its former bad
+eminence as among the worst of the city's slums. Pietro had gone to the
+Sisters' school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his
+off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his
+education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his
+graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earners, that were sadly in
+need of recruiting. A steady job of "shinin'" was found for him in an
+Eighth Ward saloon, and that afternoon, just before Christmas, he came
+home from school and putting his books away on the shelf for the next in
+order to use, ran across Broadway full of joyous anticipation of his new
+dignity in an independent job. He did not see the street-car until it was
+fairly upon him, and then it was too late. They thought he was killed, but
+he was only crippled for life. When, after many months, he came out of the
+hospital, where the company had paid his board and posed as doing a
+generous thing, his bright smile was gone; his "shining" was at an end,
+and with it his career as it had been marked out for him. He must needs
+take up something new, and he was bending all his energies, when I met
+him, toward learning to make the "Englis' letter" with a degree of
+proficiency that would justify the hope of his doing something somewhere
+at sometime to make up for what he had lost. It was a far-off possibility
+yet. With the same end in view, probably, he was taking nightly
+writing-lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating
+schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony, peddling education
+cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with
+the prospect. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him,
+now let him alone. "When they see this," he said, holding up his scarred
+and misshapen arm, "they don't strike me no more." Then there was his
+fourteen months old baby brother who was beginning to walk, and could
+almost "make a letter." Pietro was much concerned about his education,
+anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. "I take him to
+school sometime," he said, piloting him across the floor and talking
+softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave,
+unchanging face.
+
+
+[Illustration: PIETRO LEARNING TO MAKE AN ENGLIS' LETTER.]
+
+
+"Pietro," I said, with a sudden yearning to know, "did you ever laugh?"
+
+The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look.
+
+"I did wonst," he said, quietly, and went on his way. And I would gladly
+have forgotten that I ever asked the question; even as Pietro had
+forgotten his laugh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL
+
+
+If the sightseer finds less to engage his interest in Jewtown than in the
+Bend, outside of the clamoring crowds in the Chasir--the Pig-market--he
+will discover enough to enlist his sympathies, provided he did not leave
+them behind when he crossed the Bowery. The loss is his own then. There is
+that in the desolation of child-life in those teeming hives to make the
+shrivelled heart ache with compassion for its kind and throb with a new
+life of pain, enough to dispel some prejudices that are as old as our
+faith, and sometimes, I fear, a good deal stronger. The Russian exile adds
+to the offence of being an alien and a disturber of economic balances the
+worse one of being a Jew. Let those who cannot forgive this damaging fact
+possess their souls in patience. There is some evidence that the welcome
+he has received in those East Side tenements has done more than centuries
+of persecution could toward making him forget it himself.
+
+The Italian who comes here gravitates naturally to the oldest and most
+dilapidated tenements in search of cheap rents, which he doesn't find. The
+Jew has another plan, characteristic of the man. He seeks out the biggest
+ones and makes the rent come within his means by taking in boarders,
+"sweating" his flat to the point of police intervention. That that point
+is a long way beyond human decency, let alone comfort, an instance from
+Ludlow Street, that came to my notice while writing this, quite clearly
+demonstrates. The offender was a tailor, who lived with his wife, two
+children, and two boarders in two rooms on the top floor. [It is always
+the top floor; in fifteen years of active service as a police reporter I
+have had to climb to the top floor five times for every one my business
+was further down, irrespective of where the tenement was or what kind of
+people lived in it. Crime, suicide, and police business generally seem to
+bear the same relation to the stairs in a tenement that they bear to
+poverty itself. The more stairs the more trouble. The deepest poverty is
+at home in the attic.] But this tailor; with his immediate household,
+including the boarders, he occupied the larger of the two rooms. The
+other, a bedroom eight feet square, he sublet to a second tailor and his
+wife; which couple, following his example as their opportunities allowed,
+divided the bedroom in two by hanging a curtain in the middle, took
+one-half for themselves and let the other half to still another tailor
+with a wife and child. A midnight inspection by the sanitary police was
+followed by the arrest of the housekeeper and the original tailor, and
+they were fined or warned in the police-court, I forget which. It doesn't
+much matter. That the real point was missed was shown by the appearance of
+the owner of the house, a woman, at Sanitary Headquarters, on the day
+following, with the charge against the policeman that he was robbing her
+of her tenants.
+
+The story of inhuman packing of human swarms, of bitter poverty, of
+landlord greed, of sweater slavery, of darkness and squalor and misery,
+which these tenements have to tell, is equalled, I suppose, nowhere in a
+civilized land. Despite the prevalence of the boarder, who is usually a
+married man, come over alone the better to be able to prepare the way for
+the family, the census[3] shows that fifty-four per cent. of the entire
+population of immigrant Jews were children, or under age. Every steamer
+has added to their number since, and judging from the sights one sees
+daily in the office of the United Hebrew Charities, and from the general
+appearance of Ludlow Street, the proportion of children has suffered no
+decrease. Let the reader who would know for himself what they are like,
+and what their chances are, take that street some evening from Hester
+Street down and observe what he sees going on there. Not that it is the
+only place where he can find them. The census I spoke of embraced
+forty-five streets in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards. But at
+that end of Ludlow Street the tenements are taller and the crowds always
+denser than anywhere else. Let him watch the little pedlars hawking their
+shoe-strings, their matches, and their penny paper-pads, with the restless
+energy that seems so strangely out of proportion to the reward it reaps;
+the half-grown children staggering under heavy bundles of clothes from the
+sweater's shop; the ragamuffins at their fretful play, play yet,
+discouraged though it be by the nasty surroundings--thank goodness, every
+year brings its Passover with the scrubbing brigade to Ludlow Street, and
+the dirt is shifted from the houses to the streets once anyhow; if it does
+find its way back, something may be lost on the way--the crowding, the
+pushing for elbow-room, the wails of bruised babies that keep falling
+down-stairs, or rolling off the stoop, and the raids of angry mothers
+swooping down upon their offspring and distributing thumps right and left
+to pay for the bruises, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Whose
+eye, whose tooth, is of less account in Jewtown than that the capital put
+out bears lawful interest in kind. What kind of interest may society some
+day expect to reap from Ghettos like these, where even the sunny temper of
+childhood is soured by want and woe, or smothered in filth? It is a long
+time since I have heard a good honest laugh, a child's gleeful shout, in
+Ludlow Street. Angry cries, jeers, enough. They are as much part of the
+place as the dirty pavements; but joyous, honest laughs, like soap and
+water, are at a premium there.
+
+But children laugh because they are happy. They are not happy in Ludlow
+Street. Nobody is except the landlord. Why should they be? Born to toil
+and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late. There
+is even less time than there is room for play in Jewtown, good reason why
+the quality of the play is poor. There is work for the weakest hands, a
+step for the smallest feet in the vast tread-mill of these East Side
+homes. A thing is worth there what it will bring. All other
+considerations, ambitions, desires, yield to that. Education pays as an
+investment, and therefore the child is sent to school. The moment his
+immediate value as a worker overbalances the gain in prospect by keeping
+him at his books, he goes to the shop. The testimony of Jewish observers,
+who have had quite unusual opportunities for judging, is that the average
+age at which these children leave school for good is rather below twelve
+than beyond it, by which time their work at home, helping their parents,
+has qualified them to earn wages that will more than pay for their keep.
+They are certainly on the safe side in their reckoning, if the children
+are not. The legal age for shop employment is fourteen. On my visits among
+the homes, workshops, and evening schools of Jewtown, I was always struck
+by the number of diminutive wage-earners who were invariably "just
+fourteen." It was clearly not the child which the tenement had dwarfed in
+their case, but the memory or the moral sense of the parents.
+
+If, indeed, the shop were an exchange for the home; if the child quit the
+one upon entering the other, there might be little objection to make; but
+too often they are two names for the same thing; where they are not, the
+shop is probably preferable, bad as that may be. When, in the midnight
+hour, the noise of the sewing-machine was stilled at last, I have gone the
+rounds of Ludlow and Hester and Essex Streets among the poorest of the
+Russian Jews, with the sanitary police, and counted often four, five, and
+even six of the little ones in a single bed, sometimes a shake-down on the
+hard floor, often a pile of half-finished clothing brought home from the
+sweater, in the stuffy rooms of their tenements. In one I visited very
+lately, the only bed was occupied by the entire family lying lengthwise
+and crosswise, literally in layers, three children at the feet, all except
+a boy of ten or twelve, for whom there was no room. He slept with his
+clothes on to keep him warm, in a pile of rags just inside the door. It
+seemed to me impossible that families of children could be raised at all
+in such dens as I had my daily and nightly walks in. And yet the vital
+statistics and all close observation agree in allotting to these Jews even
+an unusual degree of good health. The records of the Sanitary Bureau show
+that while the Italians have the highest death-rate, the mortality in the
+lower part of the Tenth Ward, of which Ludlow Street is the heart and
+type, is the lowest in the city. Even the baby death-rate is very low. But
+for the fact that the ravages of diphtheria, croup, and measles run up the
+record in the houses occupied entirely by tailors--in other words, in the
+sweater district, where contagion always runs riot[4]--the Tenth Ward
+would seem to be the healthiest spot in the city, as well as the dirtiest
+and the most crowded. The temperate habits of the Jew and his freedom from
+enfeebling vices generally must account for this, along with his
+marvellous vitality. I cannot now recall ever having known a Jewish
+drunkard. On the other hand, I have never come across a Prohibitionist
+among them. The absence of the one renders the other superfluous.
+
+It was only last winter I had occasion to visit repeatedly a double
+tenement at the lower end of Ludlow Street, which the police census showed
+to contain 297 tenants, 45 of whom were under five years of age, not
+counting 3 pedlars who slept in the mouldy cellar, where the water was
+ankle deep on the mud floor. The feeblest ray of daylight never found its
+way down there, the hatches having been carefully covered with rags and
+matting; but freshets often did. Sometimes the water rose to the height of
+a foot, and never quite soaked away in the dryest season. It was an awful
+place, and by the light of my candle the three, with their unkempt beards
+and hair and sallow faces, looked more like hideous ghosts than living
+men. Yet they had slept there among and upon decaying fruit and wreckage
+of all sorts from the tenement for over three years, according to their
+own and the housekeeper's statements. There had been four. One was then in
+the hospital, but not because of any ill effect the cellar had had upon
+him. He had been run over in the street and was making the most of his
+vacation, charging it up to the owner of the wagon, whom he was getting
+ready to sue for breaking his leg. Up-stairs, especially in the rear
+tenement, I found the scene from the cellar repeated with variations. In
+one room a family of seven, including the oldest daughter, a young woman
+of eighteen, and her brother, a year older than she, slept in a common bed
+made on the floor of the kitchen, and manifested scarcely any concern at
+our appearance. A complaint to the Board of Health resulted in an
+overhauling that showed the tenement to be unusually bad even for that bad
+spot; but when we came to look up its record, from the standpoint of the
+vital statistics, we discovered that not only had there not been a single
+death in the house during the whole year, but on the third floor lived a
+woman over a hundred years old, who had been there a long time. I was
+never more surprised in my life, and while we laughed at it, I confess it
+came nearer to upsetting my faith in the value of statistics than anything
+I had seen till then. And yet I had met with similar experiences, if not
+quite so striking, often enough to convince me that poverty and want beget
+their own power to resist the evil influences of their worst surroundings.
+I was at a loss how to put this plainly to the good people who often asked
+wonderingly why the children of the poor one saw in the street seemed
+generally such a thriving lot, until a slip of Mrs. Partington's
+discriminating tongue did it for me: "Manured to the soil." That is it. In
+so far as it does not merely seem so--one does not see the sick and
+suffering--that puts it right.
+
+
+[Illustration: "SLEPT IN THAT CELLAR FOUR YEARS."]
+
+
+Whatever the effect upon the physical health of the children, it cannot be
+otherwise, of course, than that such conditions should corrupt their
+morals. I have the authority of a distinguished rabbi, whose field and
+daily walk are among the poorest of his people, to support me in the
+statement that the moral tone of the young girls is distinctly lower than
+it was. The entire absence of privacy in their homes and the foul contact
+of the sweaters' shops, where men and women work side by side from morning
+till night, scarcely half clad in the hot summer weather, does for the
+girls what the street completes in the boy. But for the patriarchal family
+life of the Jew that is his strongest virtue, their ruin would long since
+have been complete. It is that which pilots him safely through shoals upon
+which the Gentile would have been inevitably wrecked. It is that which
+keeps the almshouse from casting its shadow over Ludlow Street to add to
+its gloom. It is the one quality which redeems, and on the Sabbath eve
+when he gathers his household about his board, scant though the fare be,
+dignifies the darkest slum of Jewtown.
+
+How strong is this attachment to home and kindred that makes the Jew cling
+to the humblest hearth and gather his children and his children's children
+about it, though grinding poverty leave them only a bare crust to share, I
+saw in the case of little Jette Brodsky, who strayed away from her own
+door, looking for her papa. They were strangers and ignorant and poor, so
+that weeks went by before they could make their loss known and get a
+hearing, and meanwhile Jette, who had been picked up and taken to Police
+Headquarters, had been hidden away in an asylum, given another name when
+nobody came to claim her, and had been quite forgotten. But in the two
+years that passed before she was found at last, her empty chair stood ever
+by her father's, at the family board, and no Sabbath eve but heard his
+prayer for the restoration of their lost one. It happened once that I
+came in on a Friday evening at the breaking of bread, just as the four
+candles upon the table had been lit with the Sabbath blessing upon the
+home and all it sheltered. Their light fell on little else than empty
+plates and anxious faces; but in the patriarchal host who arose and bade
+the guest welcome with a dignity a king might have envied I recognized
+with difficulty the humble pedlar I had known only from the street and
+from the police office, where he hardly ventured beyond the door.
+
+But the tenement that has power to turn purest gold to dross digs a pit
+for the Jew even through this virtue that has been his shield against its
+power for evil. In its atmosphere it turns too often to a curse by helping
+to crowd his lodgings, already overflowing, beyond the point of official
+forbearance. Then follow orders to "reduce" the number of tenants that
+mean increased rent, which the family cannot pay, or the breaking up of
+the home. An appeal to avert such a calamity came to the Board of Health
+recently from one of the refugee tenements. The tenant was a man with a
+houseful of children, too full for the official scale as applied to the
+flat, and his plea was backed by the influence of his only friend in
+need--the family undertaker. There was something so cruelly suggestive in
+the idea that the laugh it raised died without an echo.
+
+The census of the sweaters' district gave a total of 23,405 children under
+six years, and 21,285 between six and fourteen, in a population of
+something over a hundred and eleven thousand Russian, Polish, and
+Roumanian Jews in the three wards mentioned; 15,567 are set down as
+"children over fourteen." According to the record, scarce one-third of the
+heads of families had become naturalized citizens, though the average of
+their stay in the United States was between nine and ten years. The very
+language of our country was to them a strange tongue, understood and
+spoken by only 15,837 of the fifty thousand and odd adults enumerated.
+Seven thousand of the rest spoke only German, five thousand Russian, and
+over twenty-one thousand, could only make themselves understood to each
+other, never to the world around them, in the strange jargon that passes
+for Hebrew on the East Side, but is really a mixture of a dozen known
+dialects and tongues and of some that were never known or heard anywhere
+else. In the census it is down as just what it is--jargon, and nothing
+else.
+
+Here, then, are conditions as unfavorable to the satisfactory, even safe,
+development of child life in the chief American city as could well be
+imagined; more unfavorable even than with the Bohemians, who have at least
+their faith in common with us, if safety lies in the merging through the
+rising generation of the discordant elements into a common harmony. A
+community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing
+interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in
+tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief
+from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness
+fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. Clearly, if ever there
+was need of moulding any material for the citizenship that awaits it, it
+is with this; and if ever trouble might be expected to beset the effort,
+it might be looked for here. But it is not so. The record shows that of
+the sixty thousand children, including the fifteen thousand young men and
+women over fourteen who earn a large share of the money that pays for rent
+and food, and the twenty-three thousand toddlers under six years, fully
+one-third go to school. Deducting the two extremes, little more than a
+thousand children of between six and fourteen years, that is, of school
+age, were put down as receiving no instruction at the time the census was
+taken; but it is not at all likely that this condition was permanent in
+the case of the greater number of these. The poorest Hebrew knows--the
+poorer he is, the better he knows it--that knowledge is power, and power
+as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long is
+what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day
+and night schools are crowded by his children, who are everywhere forging
+ahead of their Christian school-fellows, taking more than their share of
+prizes and promotions. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark
+back yard, has its school and its school-master with his scourge to
+intercept those who might otherwise escape. In the census there are put
+down 251 Jewish teachers as living in these tenements, a large number of
+whom conduct such schools, so that, as the children form always more than
+one-half of the population in the Jewish quarter, the evidence is after
+all that even here, with the tremendous inpour of a destitute, ignorant
+people, and with the undoubted employment of child labor on a large scale,
+the cause of progress along the safe line is holding its own.
+
+
+[Illustration: A SYNAGOGUE SCHOOL IN A HESTER STREET TENEMENT.]
+
+
+[Illustration: THE BACKSTAIRS TO LEARNING. (Entrance to a Talmud School in
+Hester Street.)]
+
+
+It is true that these tenement schools that absorb several thousand
+children are not what they might be from a sanitary point of view. It is
+also true that heretofore nothing but Hebrew and the Talmud have been
+taught there. But to the one evil the health authorities have recently
+been aroused; of the other, the wise and patriotic men who are managing
+the Baron de Hirsch charity are making a useful handle by gathering the
+teachers in and setting them to learn English. Their new knowledge will
+soon be reflected in their teaching, and the Hebrew schools become primary
+classes in the system of public education. The school in a Hester Street
+tenement that is shown in the picture is a fair specimen of its kind--by
+no means one of the worst--and so is the back yard behind it, that serves
+as the children's play-ground, with its dirty mud-puddles, its
+slop-barrels and broken flags, and its foul tenement-house surroundings.
+Both fall in well with the home-lives and environment of the unhappy
+little wretches whose daily horizon they limit. They get there the first
+instruction they receive in the only tongues with which the teachers are
+familiar, Hebrew and the Jargon, in the only studies which they are
+competent to teach, the Talmud and the Prophets. Until they are six years
+old they are under the "Melammed's" rod all day; after that only in the
+interval between public school and supper. It is practically the only
+religious instruction the poorest Jewish children receive, but it is
+claimed by some of their rabbis that they had better have none at all. The
+daily transition, they say, from the bright and, by comparison,
+aesthetically beautiful public school-room to these dark and inhospitable
+dens, with which the faith that has brought so many miseries upon their
+race comes to be inseparably associated in the child's mind as he grows
+up, tends to reflections that breed indifference, if not infidelity, in
+the young. It would not be strange if this were so. If the schools,
+through this process, also help pave the way for the acceptance of the
+Messiah heretofore rejected, which I greatly doubt, it may be said to be
+the only instance in which the East Side tenement has done its tenants a
+good Christian turn.
+
+There is no more remarkable class in any school than that of these
+Melammedim,[5] that may be seen in session any week day forenoon, save on
+Saturday, of course, in the Hebrew Institute in East Broadway. Old bearded
+men struggling through the intricacies of the first reader, "a cow, a
+cat," and all the rest of childish learning, with a rapt attention and a
+concentration of energy as if they were devoting themselves to the most
+heroic of tasks, which, indeed, they are, for the good that may come of it
+cannot easily be overestimated. As an educational measure it may be said
+to be getting down to first principles with a vengeance. When the reader
+has been mastered, brief courses in the history of the United States, the
+Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution follow. The test of
+proficiency in the pupil is his ability to translate the books of the Old
+Testament, with which he is familiar, of course, from Hebrew into English,
+and _vice versa_. The Melammed is rarely a dull scholar. No one knows
+better than he, to whom it has come only in the evening of his hard life,
+the value of the boon that is offered him. One of the odd group that was
+deep in the lesson of the day had five children at home, whom he had
+struggled to bring up on an income of ten dollars a week. The oldest, a
+bright boy who had graduated with honor, despite the patch on his
+trousers, from the public school, was ambitious to go to college, and the
+father had saved and pinched in a thousand ways to gratify his desire.
+One of the managers of the Institute who knew how the family were starving
+on half rations, had offered the father, a short time before, to get the
+boy employment in a store at three dollars a week. It was a tremendous
+temptation, for the money was badly needed at home. But the old man put it
+resolutely away from him. "No," he said, "I must send him to college. He
+shall have the chance that was denied his father." And he was as good as
+his word. And so was the lad, a worthy son of a worthy father. When I met
+him he had already proved himself a long way the best student in his
+class.
+
+
+[Illustration: CLASS OF MELAMMEDIM LEARNING ENGLISH.]
+
+
+In other class-rooms in the great building, which is devoted entirely to
+the cause of Americanizing the young Russian immigrants, hundreds of
+children get daily their first lessons in English and in patriotism in
+simultaneous doses. The two are inseparable in the beneficent plan of
+their instructors. Their effort is to lay hold of the children of the
+new-comers at once; tender years are no barrier. For the toddlers there
+are kindergarten classes, with play the street has had no chance to soil.
+And while playing they learn to speak the strange new tongue and to love
+the pretty flag with the stars that is everywhere in sight. The night
+school gathers in as many as can be corralled of those who are big enough,
+if not old enough, to work. The ease and rapidity with which they learn is
+equalled only by their good behavior and close attention while in school.
+There is no whispering and no rioting at these desks, no trial of strength
+with the teacher, as in the Italian ragged schools, where the question who
+is boss has always to be settled before the business of the school can
+proceed. These children come to learn. Even from the Christian schools in
+the district that gather in their share comes the same testimony. All the
+disturbance they report was made by their elders, outside the school, in
+the street. In the Hebrew Institute the average of absence for all causes
+was, during the first year, less than eight per cent. of the registered
+attendance, and in nearly every case sickness furnished a valid excuse. In
+a year and a half the principal had only been called upon three times to
+reprove an obstreperous pupil, in a total of 1,500. While I was visiting
+one of the day classes a little girl who had come from Moscow only two
+months before presented herself with her green vaccination card from the
+steamer. She understood already perfectly the questions put to her and was
+able to answer most of them in English. Boys of eight and nine years who
+had come over as many months before, knowing only the jargon of their
+native village, read to me whole pages from the reader with almost perfect
+accent, and did sums on the blackboard that would have done credit to the
+average boy of twelve in our public schools. Figuring is always their
+strong point. They would not be Jews if it was not.
+
+In the evening classes the girls of "fourteen" flourished, as everywhere
+in Jewtown. There were many who were much older, and some who were a long
+way yet from that safe goal. One sober-faced little girl, who wore a medal
+for faithful attendance and who could not have been much over ten, if as
+old as that, said that she "went out dressmaking" and so helped her
+mother. Another, who was even smaller and had been here just three weeks,
+yet understood what was said to her, explained in broken German that she
+was learning to work at "Blumen" in a Grand Street shop, and would soon be
+able to earn wages that would help support the family of four children, of
+whom she was the oldest. The girl who sat in the seat with her was from a
+Hester Street tenement. Her clothes showed that she was very poor. She
+read very fluently on demand a story about a big dog that tried to run
+away, or something, "when he had a chance." When she came to translate
+what she had read into German, which many of the Russian children
+understand, she got along until she reached the word "chance." There she
+stopped, bewildered. It was the one idea of which her brief life had no
+embodiment, the thing it had altogether missed.
+
+The Declaration of Independence half the children knew by heart before
+they had gone over it twice. To help them along it is printed in the
+school-books with a Hebrew translation and another in Jargon, a
+"Jewish-German," in parallel columns and the explanatory notes in Hebrew.
+The Constitution of the United States is treated in the same manner, but
+it is too hard, or too wearisome, for the children. They "hate" it, says
+the teacher, while the Declaration of Independence takes their fancy at
+sight. They understand it in their own practical way, and the spirit of
+the immortal document suffers no loss from the annotations of Ludlow
+Street, if its dignity is sometimes slightly rumpled.
+
+"When," said the teacher to one of the pupils, a little working-girl from
+an Essex Street sweater's shop, "the Americans could no longer put up with
+the abuse of the English who governed the colonies, what occurred then?"
+
+"A strike!" responded the girl, promptly. She had found it here on coming
+and evidently thought it a national institution upon which the whole
+scheme of our government was founded.
+
+
+[Illustration: DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
+
+  A DECLARATION BY THE REPRESENTATIVES
+  OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN
+  CONGRESS ASSEMBLED.
+
+               ENGLISH.                                 HEBREW.
+
+  When, in the course of human events,
+  it becomes necessary for one people
+  to dissolve the political bands which
+  have connected them with another,
+  and to assume, among the powers of the
+  earth, the separate and equal station
+  to which the laws of nature and of
+  nature's God entitle them, a decent
+  respect to the opinions of mankind
+  requires that they should declare the
+  causes which impel them to the
+  separation.
+
+  We hold these truths to be
+  self-evident--that all men are created
+  equal; that they are endowed by their
+  Creator with certain inalienable
+  rights; that among these are life,
+  liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
+  That, to secure these rights,
+  governments are instituted among men,
+  deriving their just powers from the
+  consent of the governed; that,
+  whenever any form of government
+  becomes destructive of these ends, it
+  is the right of the]
+
+[Illustration: JEWISH-GERMAN. Notes. HEBREW.]
+
+
+It was curious to find the low voices of the children, particularly the
+girls, an impediment to instruction in this school. They could sometimes
+hardly be heard for the noise in the street, when the heat made it
+necessary to have the windows open. But shrillness is not characteristic
+even of the Pig-market when it is noisiest and most crowded. Some of the
+children had sweet singing voices. One especially, a boy with straight red
+hair and a freckled face, chanted in a plaintive minor key the One Hundred
+and Thirtieth Psalm, "Out of the depths" etc., and the harsh gutturals of
+the Hebrew became sweet harmony until the sad strain brought tears to our
+eyes.
+
+The dirt of Ludlow Street is all-pervading and the children do not escape
+it. Rather, it seems to have a special affinity for them, or they for the
+dirt. The duty of imparting the fundamental lesson of cleanliness devolves
+upon a special school officer, a matron, who makes the round of the
+classes every morning with her alphabet: a cake of soap, a sponge, and a
+pitcher of water, and picks out those who need to be washed. One little
+fellow expressed his disapproval of this programme in the first English
+composition he wrote, as follows:
+
+
+[Illustration: (Handwriting)
+
+Indians.
+
+Indians do not want to wash because they like not water. I wish I was a
+Indian.]
+
+
+Despite this hint, the lesson is enforced upon the children, but there is
+no evidence that it bears fruit in their homes to any noticeable extent,
+as is the case with the Italians I spoke of. The homes are too hopeless,
+the grind too unceasing. The managers know it and have little hope of the
+older immigrants. It is toward getting hold of their children that they
+bend every effort, and with a success that shows how easily these children
+can be moulded for good or for bad. Nor do they let go their grasp of them
+until the job is finished. The United Hebrew Charities maintain
+trade-schools for those who show aptness for such work, and a very
+creditable showing they make. The public school receives all those who
+graduate from what might be called the American primary in East Broadway.
+
+The smoky torches on many hucksters' carts threw their uncertain yellow
+light over Hester Street as I watched the children troop homeward from
+school one night. Eight little pedlers hawking their wares had stopped
+under the lamp on the corner to bargain with each other for want of cash
+customers. They were engaged in a desperate but vain attempt to cheat one
+of their number who was deaf and dumb. I bought a quire of note-paper of
+the mute for a cent and instantly the whole crew beset me in a fierce
+rivalry, to which I put a hasty end by buying out the little mute's poor
+stock--ten cents covered it all--and after he had counted out the quires,
+gave it back to him. At this act of unheard-of generosity the seven, who
+had remained to witness the transfer, stood speechless. As I went my way,
+with a sudden common impulse they kissed their hands at me, all rivalry
+forgotten in their admiration, and kept kissing, bowing, and salaaming
+until I was out of sight. "Not bad children," I mused as I went along,
+"good stuff in them, whatever their faults." I thought of the poor boy's
+stock, of the cheapness of it, and then it occurred to me that he had
+charged me just twice as much for the paper I gave him back as for the
+penny quire I bought. But when I went back to give him a piece of my mind
+the boys were gone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+TONY AND HIS TRIBE
+
+
+I have a little friend somewhere in Mott Street whose picture comes up
+before me. I wish I could show it to the reader, but to photograph Tony is
+one of the unattained ambitions of my life. He is one of the whimsical
+birds one sees when he hasn't got a gun, and then never long enough in one
+place to give one a chance to get it. A ragged coat three sizes at least
+too large for the boy, though it has evidently been cropped to meet his
+case, hitched by its one button across a bare brown breast; one sleeve
+patched on the under side with a piece of sole-leather that sticks out
+straight, refusing to be reconciled; trousers that boasted a seat once,
+but probably not while Tony has worn them; two left boots tied on with
+packing twine, bare legs in them the color of the leather, heel and toe
+showing through; a shock of sunburnt hair struggling through the rent in
+the old straw hat; two frank, laughing eyes under its broken brim--that is
+Tony.
+
+He stood over the gutter the day I met him, reaching for a handful of mud
+with which to "paste" another hoodlum who was shouting defiance from
+across the street. He did not see me, and when my hand touched his
+shoulder his whole little body shrank with a convulsive shudder, as from
+an expected blow. Quick as a flash he dodged, and turning, out of reach,
+confronted the unknown enemy, gripping tight his handful of mud. I had a
+bunch of white pinks which a young lady had given me half an hour before
+for one of my little friends. "They are yours," I said, and held them out
+to him, "take them."
+
+Doubt, delight, and utter bewilderment struggled in the boy's face. He
+said not one word, but when he had brought his mind to believe that it
+really was so, clutched the flowers with one eager, grimy fist, held them
+close against his bare breast, and, shielding them with the other, ran as
+fast as his legs could carry him down the street. Not far; fifty feet away
+he stopped short, looked back, hesitated a moment, then turned on his
+track as fast as he had come. He brought up directly in front of me, a
+picture a painter would have loved, ragamuffin that he was, with the
+flowers held so tightly against his brown skin, scraped out with one foot
+and made one of the funniest little bows.
+
+"Thank you," he said. Then he was off. Down the street I saw squads of
+children like himself running out to meet him. He darted past and through
+them all, never stopping, but pointing back my way, and in a minute there
+bore down upon me a crowd of little ones, running breathless with
+desperate entreaty: "Oh, mister! give _me_ a flower." Hot tears of grief
+and envy--human passions are much the same in rags and in silks--fell when
+they saw I had no more. But by that time Tony was safe.
+
+And where did he run so fast? For whom did he shield the "posy" so
+eagerly, so faithfully, that ragged little wretch that was all mud and
+patches? I found out afterward when I met him giving his sister a ride in
+a dismantled tomato-crate, likely enough "hooked" at the grocer's. It was
+for his mother. In the dark hovel he called home, to the level of which
+all it sheltered had long since sunk through the brutal indifference of a
+drunken father, my lady's pinks blossomed, and, long after they were
+withered and yellow, still stood in their cracked jar, visible token of
+something that had entered Tony's life and tenement with sweetening touch
+that day for the first time. Alas! for the last, too, perhaps. I saw Tony
+off and on for a while and then he was as suddenly lost as he was found,
+with all that belonged to him. Moved away--put out, probably--and, except
+the assurance that they were still somewhere in Mott Street, even the
+saloon could give me no clue to them.
+
+I gained Tony's confidence, almost, in the time I knew him. There was a
+little misunderstanding between us that had still left a trace of
+embarrassment when Tony disappeared. It was when I asked him one day,
+while we were not yet "solid," if he ever went to school. He said
+"sometimes," and backed off. I am afraid Tony lied that time. The evidence
+was against him. It was different with little Katie, my nine-year-old
+housekeeper of the sober look. Her I met in the Fifty-second Street
+Industrial School, where she picked up such crumbs of learning as were for
+her in the intervals of her housework. The serious responsibilities of
+life had come early to Katie. On the top floor of a tenement in West
+Forty-ninth Street she was keeping house for her older sister and two
+brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to
+$1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the
+father brought home another wife. Their combined income was something like
+$9.50 a week, and the simple furniture was bought on instalments. But it
+was all clean, if poor. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the
+plain kind. They did not run much to fancy cooking, I guess. She scrubbed
+and swept and went to school, all as a matter of course, and ran the
+house generally, with an occasional lift from the neighbors in the
+tenement, who were, if anything, poorer than they. The picture shows what
+a sober, patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing
+on her day by day. At the school they loved her for her quiet, gentle
+ways. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a
+question and without a smile.
+
+"What kind of work do you do?" I asked, thinking to interest her while I
+made ready.
+
+"I scrubs," she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she
+scrubbed came out clean.
+
+
+[Illustration: "I SCRUBS."--KATIE, WHO KEEPS HOUSE IN WEST FORTY-NINTH
+STREET.]
+
+
+Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends. Very early the
+cross of her sex had been laid upon the little shoulders that bore it so
+stoutly. Tony's, as likely as not, would never begin. There were ear-marks
+upon the boy that warranted the suspicion. They were the ear-marks of the
+street to which his care and education had been left. The only work of
+which it heartily approves is that done by other people. I came upon Tony
+once under circumstances that foreshadowed his career with tolerable
+distinctness. He was at the head of a gang of little shavers like himself,
+none over eight or nine, who were swaggering around in a ring, in the
+middle of the street, rigged out in war-paint and hen-feathers, shouting
+as they went: "Whoop! We are the Houston Streeters." They meant no harm
+and they were not doing any just then. It was all in the future, but it
+was there, and no mistake. The game which they were then rehearsing was
+one in which the policeman who stood idly swinging his club on the corner
+would one day take a hand, and not always the winning one.
+
+The fortunes of Tony and Katie, simple and soon told as they are,
+encompass as between the covers of a book the whole story of the children
+of the poor, the story of the bad their lives struggle vainly to conquer,
+and the story of the good that crops out in spite of it. Sickness, that
+always finds the poor unprepared and soon leaves them the choice of
+beggary or starvation, hard times, the death of the bread-winner, or the
+part played by the growler in the poverty of the home, may vary the theme
+for the elders; for the children it is the same sad story, with little
+variation, and that rarely of a kind to improve. Happily for their peace
+of mind, they are the least concerned about it. In New York, at least, the
+poor children are not the stunted repining lot we have heard of as being
+hatched in cities abroad. Stunted in body perhaps. It was said of Napoleon
+that he shortened the average stature of the Frenchman one inch by getting
+all the tall men killed in his wars. The tenement has done that for New
+York. Only the other day one of the best known clergymen in the city, who
+tries to attract the boys to his church on the East Side by a very
+practical interest in them, and succeeds admirably in doing it, told me
+that the drill-master of his cadet corps was in despair because he could
+barely find two or three among half a hundred lads verging on manhood,
+over five feet six inches high. It is queer what different ways there are
+of looking at a thing. My medical friend finds in the fact that poverty
+stunts the body what he is pleased to call a beautiful provision of nature
+to prevent unnecessary suffering: there is less for the poverty to pinch
+then. It is self-defence, he says, and he claims that the consensus of
+learned professional opinion is with him. Yet, when this shortened
+sufferer steals a loaf of bread to make the pinching bear less hard on
+what is left, he is called a thief, thrown into jail, and frowned upon by
+the community that just now saw in his case a beautiful illustration of
+the operation of natural laws for the defence of the man.
+
+Stunted morally, yes! It could not well be otherwise. But stunted in
+spirits--never! As for repining, there is no such word in his vocabulary.
+He accepts life as it comes to him and gets out of it what he can. If that
+is not much, he is not justly to blame for not giving back more to the
+community of which by and by he will be a responsible member. The kind of
+the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and
+it pervades and shapes his young life. It is the tenement that gives up
+the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied
+him. Its exorbitant rents rob him of the schooling that is his one chance
+to elude its grasp, by compelling his enrolment in the army of
+wage-earners before he has learned to read. Its alliance with the saloon
+guides his baby feet along the well-beaten track of the growler that
+completes his ruin. Its power to pervert and corrupt has always to be
+considered, its point of view always to be taken to get the perspective
+in dealing with the poor, or the cart will seem to be forever getting
+before the horse in a way not to be understood. We had a girl once at our
+house in the country who left us suddenly after a brief stay and went back
+to her old tenement life, because "all the green hurt her eyes so." She
+meant just what she said, though she did not know herself what ailed her.
+It was the slum that had its fatal grip upon her. She longed for its
+noise, its bustle, and its crowds, and laid it all to the green grass and
+the trees that were new to her as steady company.
+
+From this tenement the street offered, until the kindergarten came not
+long ago, the one escape, does yet for the great mass of children--a
+Hobson's choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The
+opportunities rampant in the one are a sad commentary on the sure
+defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency
+like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M----,
+at that moment under arrest for half clubbing her husband to death, was "a
+very good, a very decent, woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the
+husband) was not much." Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a
+young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed
+District last autumn: "Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow," she
+said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; "them toughs don't know
+how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor."
+
+Hers was the standard of the street, the other's that of the tenement.
+Together they stamp the child's life with the vicious touch which is
+sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the
+rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather,
+perhaps, of the capacity for them, that crop out in constant exhibitions
+of loyalty, of gratitude, and true-heartedness, a never-ending source of
+encouragement and delight to those who have made their cause their own and
+have in their true sympathy the key to the best that is in the children.
+The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged
+schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the
+start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, leaves no room for
+doubt as to the influence the change has had upon the children. With the
+disappearance of the shanties--homesteads in effect, however humble--and
+the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in
+the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The
+crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the
+street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered,
+while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue-efforts put
+forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer
+of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a
+large extent, and his loss is our gain. The tough who has taken his place
+is able at least to spell his way through "The Bandits' Cave," the pattern
+exploits of Jesse James and his band, and the newspaper accounts of the
+latest raid in which he had a hand. Perhaps that explains why he is more
+dangerous than the old loafer. The transition period is always critical,
+and a little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing. It may be that in
+the day to come, when we shall have got the grip of our compulsory school
+law in good earnest, there will be an educational standard even for the
+tough, by which time he will, I think, have ceased to exist from sheer
+disgust, if for no other reason. At present he is in no immediate danger
+of extinction from such a source. It is not how much book-learning the boy
+can get, but how little he can get along with, and that is very little
+indeed. He knows how to make a little go a long way, however, and to serve
+on occasion a very practical purpose; as, for instance, when I read
+recently on the wall of the church next to my office in Mulberry Street
+this observation, chalked in an awkward hand half the length of the wall:
+"Mary McGee is engagd to the feller in the alley." Quite apt, I should
+think, to make Mary show her colors and to provoke the fight with the
+rival "feller" for which the writer was evidently spoiling. I shall get
+back, farther on, to the question of the children's schooling. It is so
+beset by lies ordinarily as to be seldom answered as promptly and as
+honestly as in the case of a little fellow whom I found in front of St.
+George's Church, engaged in the aesthetic occupation of pelting the
+Friends' Seminary across the way with mud. There were two of them, and
+when I asked them the question that estranged Tony, the wicked one dug his
+fists deep down in the pockets of his blue-jeans trousers and shook his
+head gloomily. He couldn't read; didn't know how; never did.
+
+"He?" said the other, who could, "he? He don't learn nothing. He throws
+stones." The wicked one nodded. It was the extent of his education.
+
+But if the three R's suffer neglect among the children of the poor, their
+lessons in the three D's--Dirt, Discomfort, and Disease--that form the
+striking features of their environment, are early and thorough enough. The
+two latter, at least, are synonymous terms, if dirt and discomfort are
+not. Any dispensary doctor knows of scores of cases of ulceration of the
+eye that are due to the frequent rubbing of dirty faces with dirty little
+hands. Worse filth diseases than that find a fertile soil in the
+tenements, as the health officers learn when typhus and small-pox break
+out. It is not the desperate diet of ignorant mothers, who feed their
+month-old babies with sausage, beer, and Limburger cheese, that alone
+accounts for the great infant mortality among the poor in the tenements.
+The dirt and the darkness in their homes contribute their full share, and
+the landlord is more to blame than the mother. He holds the key to the
+situation which her ignorance fails to grasp, and it is he who is
+responsible for much of the unfounded and unnecessary prejudice against
+foreigners, who come here willing enough to fall in with the ways of the
+country that are shown to them. The way he shows them is not the way of
+decency. I am convinced that the really injurious foreigners in this
+community, outside of the walking delegate's tribe, are the foreign
+landlords of two kinds: those who, born in poverty abroad, have come up
+through tenement-house life to the ownership of tenement property, with
+all the bad traditions of such a career; and the absentee landlords of
+native birth who live and spend their rents away from home, without
+knowing or caring what the condition of their property is, so the income
+from it suffer no diminution. There are honorable exceptions to the first
+class, but few enough to the latter to make them hardly worth mentioning.
+
+To a good many of the children, or rather to their parents, this latter
+statement and the experience that warrants it must have a sadly familiar
+sound. The Irish element is still an important factor in New York's
+tenements, though it is yielding one stronghold after another to the
+Italian foe. It lost its grip on the Five Points and the Bend long ago,
+and at this writing the time seems not far distant when it must vacate for
+good also that classic ground of the Kerryman, Cherry Hill. It is Irish
+only by descent, however; the children are Americans, as they will not
+fail to convince the doubter. A school census of this district, the Fourth
+Ward, taken last winter, discovered 2,016 children between the ages of
+five and fourteen years. No less than 1,706 of them were put down as
+native born, but only one-fourth, or 519, had American parents. Of the
+others 572 had Irish and 536 Italian parents. Uptown, in many of the poor
+tenement localities, in Poverty Gap, in Battle Row, and in Hell's Kitchen,
+in short, wherever the gang flourishes, the Celt is still supreme and
+seasons the lump enough to give it his own peculiar flavor, easily
+discovered through its "native" guise in the story of the children of the
+poor.
+
+The case of one Irish family that exhibits a shoal which lies always close
+to the track of ignorant poverty is even now running in my mind, vainly
+demanding a practical solution. I may say that I have inherited it from
+professional philanthropists, who have struggled with it for more than
+half a dozen years without finding the way out they sought.
+
+There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had
+about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When I
+took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over.
+The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother's tears, by a transition
+imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of
+the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that
+were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and
+with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother's appeal. It
+required very little experience to make the prediction that, shortly, ten
+pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if
+those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I
+scarcely know which was most to be condemned, when we tried to break the
+family up by throwing it on the street as a necessary step to getting
+possession of the children--the politician who tripped us up with his
+influence in the court, or the landlord who had all those years made the
+poverty on the second floor pan out a golden interest. It was the
+outrageous rent for the filthy den that had been the most effective
+argument with sympathizing visitors. Their pity had represented to him, as
+nearly as I could make out, for eight long years, a capital of $2,600
+invested at six per cent., payable monthly. The idea of moving was
+preposterous; for what other landlord would take in a homeless family with
+ten children and no income?
+
+Children anywhere suffer little discomfort from mere dirt. As an
+ingredient of mud-pies it may be said to be not unwholesome. Play with the
+dirt is better than none without it. In the tenements the children and the
+dirt are sworn and loyal friends. In his early raids upon the established
+order of society, the gutter backs the boy up to the best of its ability,
+with more or less exasperating success. In the hot summer days, when he
+tries to sneak into the free baths with every fresh batch, twenty times a
+day, wretched little repeater that he is, it comes to his rescue against
+the policeman at the door. Fresh mud smeared on the face serves as a
+ticket of admission which no one can refuse. At least so he thinks, but in
+his anxiety he generally overdoes it and arouses the suspicion of the
+policeman, who, remembering that he was once a boy himself, feels of his
+hair and reads his title there. When it is a mission that is to be raided,
+or a "dutch" grocer's shop, or a parade of the rival gang from the next
+block, the gutter furnishes ammunition that is always handy. Dirt is a
+great leveller;[6] it is no respecter of persons or principles, and
+neither is the boy where it abounds. In proportion as it accumulates such
+raids increase, the Fresh Air Funds lose their grip, the saloon
+flourishes, and turbulence grows. Down from the Fourth Ward, where there
+is not much else, this wail came recently from a Baptist Mission Church:
+"The Temple stands in a hard spot and neighborhood. The past week we had
+to have arrested two fellows for throwing stones into the house and
+causing annoyance. On George Washington's Birthday we had not put a flag
+over the door on Henry Street half an hour before it was stolen. When they
+neither respect the house of prayer or the Stars and Stripes one can feel
+young America is in a bad state." The pastor added that it was a comfort
+to him to know that the "fellows" were Catholics; but I think he was
+hardly quite fair to them there. Religious enthusiasm very likely had
+something to do with it, but it was not the moving cause. The dirt was; in
+other words: the slum.
+
+Such diversions are among the few and simple joys of the street child's
+life, Not all it affords, but all the street has to offer. The Fresh Air
+Funds, the free excursions, and the many charities that year by year
+reach farther down among the poor for their children have done and are
+doing a great work in setting up new standards, ideals, and ambitions in
+the domain of the street. One result is seen in the effort of the poorest
+mothers to make their little ones presentable when there is anything to
+arouse their maternal pride. But all these things must and do come from
+the outside. Other resources than the sturdy independence that is its
+heritage the street has none. Rightly used, that in itself is the greatest
+of all. Chief among its native entertainments is that crowning joy, the
+parade of the circus when it comes to town in the spring. For many hours
+after that has passed, as after every public show that costs nothing, the
+matron's room at Police Headquarters is crowded with youngsters who have
+followed it miles and miles from home, devouring its splendors with hungry
+eyes until the last elephant, the last soldier, or the last policeman
+vanished from sight and the child comes back to earth again and to the
+knowledge that he is lost.
+
+If the delights of his life are few, its sorrows do not sit heavily upon
+him either. He is in too close and constant touch with misery, with death
+itself, to mind it much. To find a family of children living, sleeping,
+and eating in the room where father or mother lies dead, without seeming
+to be in any special distress about it, is no unusual experience. But if
+they do not weigh upon him, the cares of home leave their mark; and it is
+a bad mark. All the darkness, all the drudgery is there. All the freedom
+is in the street; all the brightness in the saloon to which he early finds
+his way. And as he grows in years and wisdom, if not in grace, he gets his
+first lessons in spelling and in respect for the law from the card behind
+the bar, with the big black letters: "No liquor sold here to children."
+His opportunities for studying it while the barkeeper fills his growler
+are unlimited and unrestricted.
+
+Someone has said that our poor children do not know how to play. He had
+probably seen a crowd of tenement children dancing in the street to the
+accompaniment of a hand-organ and been struck by their serious mien and
+painfully formal glide and carriage--if it was not a German neighborhood,
+where the "proprieties" are less strictly observed--but that was only
+because it was a ball and it was incumbent on the girls to act as ladies.
+Only ladies attend balls. "London Bridge is falling down," with as loud a
+din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred
+years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march
+"all around the mulberry-bush" as gleefully as if there were a green shrub
+to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the
+game too easily, and the kindergarten work comes in in helping to wipe off
+the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than
+those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. Only in
+the very worst tenements have I observed the children's play to languish.
+In such localities two policemen are required to do the work of one.
+Ordinarily they lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd
+of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties
+were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a
+knot of tenement-house children with tails improvised from a newspaper,
+and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly
+across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a
+heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any
+crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper
+came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where
+the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails;
+every block a ball-ground when the policeman's back is turned, and every
+roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city
+ordinance "below Fourteenth Street."
+
+
+[Illustration: PRESENT TENANTS OF JOHN ERICSSON'S OLD HOUSE NOW THE BEACH
+STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.]
+
+
+It is rather that their opportunities of mischief are greater than those
+of harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with
+deliberate purpose to hatch the "tough." Given idleness and the street,
+and he will grow without other encouragement than an occasional "fanning"
+of a policeman's club. And the street has to do for a playground. There is
+no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered
+for his benefit five years ago exist yet only on paper. Games like
+kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily
+they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law
+and order, that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year
+the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten
+vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night
+sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other,
+with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow
+bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given
+out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of
+public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a show-case, containing
+property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has
+happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal, and
+burned up election night. The boys, organized in gangs, with the one
+condition of membership that all must "give in wood," store up enormous
+piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a
+good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling-wood for
+the winter, the pile grows again in a single night, as the neighborhood
+reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the
+gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our
+courts and our jails, may without much difficulty be discovered in these
+early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.
+
+Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment
+of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not
+defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry
+its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the
+street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the
+hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that,
+banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, horns and bassoons
+hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer the innocent purveyor
+of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the
+policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades which the latter
+formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang
+organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.
+
+And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the
+first time, cries out in delight, "How blue the sky and what a lot of it
+there is!"--not much of it at home in his barrack--has in the very love of
+dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own
+club or die in the attempt, in the intense vanity that is only a
+perverted form of pride, capable of any achievement, a handle by which he
+may be most easily grasped and led. It cannot be done by gorging him _en
+masse_ with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party.[7] It can be done
+only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in
+direct contact with the child--the great secret of success in all dealings
+with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the
+reproach of "bad form" as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire
+eventually to "down" a policeman, is his ambition to be a "gentleman," as
+his sister's to be a "lady." The street is responsible for the caricature
+either makes of the character. On a play-bill I saw in an East Side
+street, only the other day, this _repertoire_ set down: "Thursday--The
+Bowery Tramp; Friday--The Thief." It was a theatre I knew newsboys, and
+the other children of the street who were earning money, to frequent in
+shoals. The play-bill suggested the sort of training they received there.
+
+I wish I might tell the story of some of these very lads whom certain
+enthusiastic friends of mine tried to reclaim on a plan of their own, in
+which the gang became a club and its members "Knights," who made and
+executed their own laws; but I am under heavy bonds of promises made to
+keep the peace on this point. The fact is, I tried it once, and my
+well-meant effort made no end of trouble. I had failed to appreciate the
+stride of civilization that under my friends' banner marched about the
+East Side with seven-league boots. They read the magazines down there and
+objected, rather illogically, to being "shown up." The incident was a
+striking revelation of the wide gap between the conditions that prevail
+abroad and those that confront us. Fancy the _Westminster Review_ or the
+_Nineteenth Century_ breeding contention among the denizens of East London
+by any criticism of their ways? Yet even from Hell's Kitchen had I not
+long before been driven forth with my camera by a band of angry women, who
+pelted me with brickbats and stones on my retreat, shouting at me never to
+come back unless I wanted my head broken, or let any other "duck" from the
+(mentioning a well-known newspaper of which I was unjustly suspected of
+being an emissary) poke his nose in there. Reform and the magazines had
+not taken that stronghold of toughdom yet, but their vanguard, the
+newspapers, had evidently got there.
+
+"It only shows," said one of my missionary friends, commenting upon the
+East Side incident, "that we are all at sixes and at sevens here." It is
+our own fault. In our unconscious pride of caste most of us are given to
+looking too much and too long at the rough outside. These same workers
+bore cheerful testimony to the "exquisite courtesy" with which they were
+received every day in the poorest homes; a courtesy that might not always
+know the ways of polite society, but always tried its best to find them.
+"In over fifty thousand visits," reports a physician, whose noble life is
+given early and late to work that has made her name blessed where sorrow
+and suffering add their sting to bitter poverty, "personal violence has
+been attempted on but two occasions. In each case children had died from
+neglect of parents, who, in their drunken rage, would certainly have taken
+the life of the physician, had she not promptly run away." Patience and
+kindness prevailed even with these. The doctor did not desert them, even
+though she had had to run, believing that one of the mothers at least
+drank because she was poor and unable to find work; and now, after five
+years of many trials and failures, she reports that the family is at work
+and happy and grateful in rooms "where the sun beams in." Gratitude,
+indeed, she found to be their strong point, always seeking an outlet in
+expression--evidence of a lack of bringing up, certainly. "Once," she
+says, "the thankful fathers of two of our patients wished to vote for us,
+as 'the lady doctors have no vote.' Their intention was to vote for
+General Butler; we have proof that they voted for Cleveland. They have
+even placed their own lives in danger for us. One man fought a duel with a
+woman, she having said that women doctors did not know as much as men.
+After bar-tumblers were used as weapons the question was decided in favor
+of women doctors by the man. It seemed but proper that 'the lady doctor'
+was called in to bind up the wounds of her champion, while a 'man doctor'
+performed the service for the woman."
+
+My friends, in time, by their gentle but firm management, gained the
+honest esteem and loyal support of the boys whose manners and minds they
+had set out to improve, and through such means worked wonders. While some
+of their experiences were exceedingly funny, more were of a kind to show
+how easily the material could be moulded, if the hands were only there to
+mould it. One of their number, by and by, hung out her shingle in another
+street with the word "Doctor" over the bell (not the physician above
+referred to), but her "character" had preceded her, and woe to the urchin
+who as much as glanced at that when the gang pulled all the other bells
+in the block and laughed at the wrath of the tenants. One luckless chap
+forgot himself far enough to yank it one night, and immediately an angry
+cry went up from the gang, "Who pulled dat bell?" "Mickey did," was the
+answer, and Mickey's howls announced to the amused doctor the next minute
+that he had been "slugged" and she avenged. This doctor's account of the
+first formal call of the gang in the block was highly amusing. It called
+in a body and showed a desire to please that tried the host's nerves not a
+little. The boys vied with each other in recounting for her entertainment
+their encounters with the police enemy, and in exhibiting their intimate
+knowledge of the wickedness of the slums in minutest detail. One, who was
+scarcely twelve years old, and had lately moved from Bayard Street, knew
+all the ins and outs of the Chinatown opium dives, and painted them in
+glowing colors. The doctor listened with half-amused dismay, and when the
+boys rose to go, told them she was glad they had called. So were they,
+they said, and they guessed they would call again the next night.
+
+"Oh! don't come to-morrow," said the doctor, in something of a fright;
+"come next week!" She was relieved upon hearing the leader of the gang
+reprove the rest of the fellows for their want of style. He bowed with
+great precision, and announced that he would call "in about two weeks."
+
+The testimony of these workers agrees with that of most others who reach
+the girls at an age when they are yet manageable, that the most abiding
+results follow with them, though they are harder to get at. The boys
+respond more readily, but also more easily fall from grace. The same good
+and bad traits are found in both; the same trying superficiality--which
+merely means that they are raw material; the same readiness to lie as the
+shortest cut out of a scrape; the same generous helpfulness,
+characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter
+poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial
+School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless
+and those even poorer than they such gifts as they could--a handful of
+ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar
+or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I
+found little Katie. In her person and work she answered the question
+sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the
+girls; because the home and the shop claim their work much earlier and to
+a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for
+themselves, and because, therefore, their miseries are so much more
+commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is a woman's lot to
+suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous
+protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the
+occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her
+bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the
+wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the
+sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the
+same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of
+the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not
+a distinguishing feature of tenement-house life, any more among the
+children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for
+a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six
+girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three days before a
+letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. "Mrs.
+Reilly," it read, "if you have any sinse you will send for your child."
+That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made
+out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high
+dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness
+of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby,
+and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus:
+"She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin' of herself, till the
+missus she says, says she, 'Does yer mother lave ye to sit that long at
+the table, sis?'" The poor thing was where there was enough to eat for
+once in her life, and she was making the most of her opportunity.
+
+Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that
+discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. It
+was in March a year ago that a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human
+shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the
+tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with
+his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out
+the child, she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the
+smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen climbing after, groped
+around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came
+upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll's trunk over the
+floor.
+
+"I could not leave it," she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized
+her; "my mother----"
+
+They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the
+sidewalk and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for
+her dead mother's grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her
+thirteen years.
+
+Yet Bessie might, likely would, have been found in the front row where
+anything was going on or to be had, crowding with the best of them and
+thrusting herself and her claim forward regardless of anything or anybody
+else. It is a quality in the children which, if not admirable, is at least
+natural. The poor have to take their turn always, and too often it never
+comes, or, as in the case of the poor young mother, whom one of our
+committee found riding aimlessly in a street car with her dying baby, not
+knowing where to go or what to do, when it is too late. She took mother
+and child to the dispensary. It was crowded and they had to wait their
+turn. When it came the baby was dead. It is not to be expected that
+children who have lived the lawless life of the street should patiently
+put up with such a prospect. That belongs to the discipline of a life of
+failure and want. The children know generally what they want and they go
+for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to
+give or pictures to take. In the latter case they reversed my Hell's
+Kitchen experience with a vengeance. Their determination to be "took," the
+moment the camera hove in sight, in the most striking pose they could
+hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met. The
+recollection of one such occasion haunts me yet. They were serving a
+Thanksgiving dinner free to all comers at a charitable institution in
+Mulberry Street, and more than a hundred children were in line at the door
+under the eye of a policeman when I tried to photograph them. Each one of
+the forlorn host had been hugging his particular place for an hour,
+shivering in the cold as the line slowly advanced toward the door and the
+promised dinner, and there had been numberless little spats due to the
+anxiety of some one farther back to steal a march on a neighbor nearer the
+goal; but the instant the camera appeared the line broke and a howling mob
+swarmed about me, up to the very eye of the camera, striking attitudes on
+the curb, squatting in the mud in alleged picturesque repose, and shoving
+and pushing in a wild struggle to get into the most prominent position.
+With immense trouble and labor the policeman and I made a narrow lane
+through the crowd from the camera to the curb, in the hope that the line
+might form again. The lane was studded, the moment I turned my back, with
+dirty faces that were thrust into it from both sides in ludicrous anxiety
+lest they should be left out, and in the middle of it two frowsy,
+ill-favored girls, children of ten or twelve, took position, hand in hand,
+flatly refusing to budge from in front of the camera. Neither jeers nor
+threats moved them. They stood their ground with a grim persistence that
+said as plainly as words that they were not going to let this, the supreme
+opportunity of their lives, pass, cost what it might. In their rags,
+barefooted, and in that disdainful pose in the midst of a veritable bedlam
+of shrieks and laughter, they were a most ludicrous spectacle. The boys
+fought rather shy of them, of one they called "Mag" especially, as it
+afterward appeared with good reason. A chunk of wood from the outskirts of
+the crowd that hit Mag on the ear at length precipitated a fight in which
+the boys struggled ten deep on the pavement, Mag in the middle of the
+heap, doing her full share. As a last expedient I bethought myself of a
+dog-fight as the means of scattering the mob, and sent around the corner
+to organize one. Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd
+broke and ran in a body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line
+collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone. As
+an attraction the dog-fight outranked the dinner.
+
+This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a
+tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way.
+The newspapers tickle it by recording the exploits of his gang with
+embellishments that fall in exactly with his tastes. Idleness encourages
+it. The home exercises no restraint. Parental authority is lost. At a
+certain age young men of all social grades know a heap more than their
+fathers, or think they do. The young tough has some apparent reason for
+thinking that way. He has likely learned to read. The old man has not; he
+probably never learned anything, not even to speak the language that his
+son knows without being taught. He thinks him "dead slow," of course, and
+lays it to his foreign birth. All foreigners are "slow." The father works
+hard. The boy thinks he knows a better plan. The old man has lost his grip
+on the lad, if he ever had any. That is the reason why the tough appears
+in the second generation and disappears in the third. By that time father
+and son are again on equal terms, whatever those terms may be. The
+exception to this rule is in the poorest Irish settlements where the
+manufacture of the tough goes right on, aided by the "inflooence" of the
+police court on one side and the saloon on the other. Between the two the
+police fall unwillingly into line. I was in the East Thirty-fifth Street
+police station one night when an officer came in with two young toughs
+whom he had arrested in a lumber yard where they were smoking and
+drinking. They had threatened to kill him and the watchman, and loaded
+revolvers were taken from them. In spite of this evidence against them,
+the Justice in the police court discharged them on the following morning
+with a scowl at the officer, and they were both jeering at him before
+noon. Naturally he let them alone after that. It was one case of hundreds
+of like character. The politician, of course, is behind them. Toughs have
+votes just as they have brickbats and brass-knuckles; when the emergency
+requires, an assortment to suit of the one as of the other.
+
+The story of the tough's career I told in "How the Other Half Lives," and
+there is no need of repeating it here. Its end is generally lurid, always
+dramatic. It is that even when it comes to him "with his boots off," in a
+peaceful sick bed. In his bravado one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the
+sturdiest traits in the Celtic nature, burlesqued and caricatured by the
+tenement. One who had been a cut-throat, bruiser, and prizefighter all his
+brief life lay dying from consumption in his Fourth Ward tenement not long
+ago. He had made what he proudly called a stand-up fight against the
+disease until now the end had come and he had at last to give up.
+
+"Maggie," he said, turning to his wife with eyes growing dim, "Mag! I had
+an iron heart, but now it is broke. Watch me die!" And Mag told it proudly
+at the wake as proof that Pat died game.
+
+And the girl that has come thus far with him? Fewer do than one might
+think. Many more switch off their lovers to some honest work this side of
+the jail, making decent husbands of them as they are loyal wives, thus
+proving themselves truly their better halves. But of her who goes his way
+with him--it is not generally a long way for either--what of her end? Let
+me tell the story of one that is the story of all. I came across it in the
+course of my work as a newspaper man a year ago and I repeat it here as I
+heard it then from those who knew, with only the names changed. The girl
+is dead, but he is alive and leading an honest life at last, so I am told.
+The story is that of "Kid" McDuff's girl.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE STORY OF KID McDUFF'S GIRL
+
+
+The back room of the saloon on the northwest corner of Pell Street and the
+Bowery is never cheery on the brightest day. The entrance to the dives of
+Chinatown yawns just outside, and in the bar-room gather the vilest of the
+wrecks of the Bend and the Sixth Ward slums. But on the morning of which I
+speak a shadow lay over it even darker than usual. The shadow of death was
+there. In the corner, propped on one chair, with her feet on another, sat
+a dead woman. Her glassy eyes looked straight ahead with a stony,
+unmeaning stare until the policeman who dozed at a table at the other end
+of the room, suddenly waking up and meeting it, got up with a shudder and
+covered the face with a handkerchief.
+
+What did they see, those dead eyes? Through its darkened windows what a
+review was the liberated spirit making of that sin-worn, wasted life,
+begun in innocence and wasted--there? Whatever their stare meant, the
+policeman knew little of it and cared less.
+
+"Oh! it is just a stiff," he said, and yawned wearily. There was still
+half an hour of his watch.
+
+The clinking of glasses and the shuffle of cowhide boots on the sanded
+floor outside grew louder and was muffled again as the door leading to the
+bar was opened and shut by a young woman. She lingered doubtfully on the
+threshold a moment, then walked with unsteady step across the room toward
+the corner where the corpse sat. The light that struggled in from the
+gloomy street fell upon her and showed that she trembled, as if with the
+ague. Yet she was young, not over twenty-five; but on her heavy eyes and
+sodden features there was the stamp death had just blotted from the
+other's face with the memory of her sins. Yet, curiously blended with it,
+not yet smothered wholly, there was something of the child, something that
+had once known a mother's love and pity.
+
+"Poor Kid," she said, stopping beside the body and sinking heavily in a
+chair. "He will be sorry, anyhow."
+
+"Who is Kid?" I asked.
+
+"Why, Kid McDuff! You know him? His brother Jim keeps the saloon on
+---- Street. Everybody knows Kid."
+
+"Well, what was she to Kid?" I asked, pointing to the corpse.
+
+"His girl," she said promptly. "An' he stuck to her till he was pulled for
+the job he didn't do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him too,
+you bet.
+
+"Annie wasn't no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the
+Kid," the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me; the policeman
+nodded in his chair. "He kep' her the best he could, 'ceptin' when he was
+sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder
+drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin' bar
+for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that Bridgeport skin job, and
+when he went to the pen she went to the bad, and now----"
+
+Here a thought that had been slowly working down through her besotted mind
+got a grip on her strong enough to hold her attention, and she leaned over
+and caught me by the sleeve, something almost akin to pity struggling in
+her bleary eyes.
+
+"Say, young feller," she whispered hoarsely, "don't spring this too hard.
+She's got two lovely brothers. One of them keeps a daisy saloon up on
+Eighth Avenue. They're respectable, they are."
+
+Then she went on telling what she knew of Annie Noonan who was sitting
+dead there before us. It was not much. She was the child of an honest
+shoemaker who came to this country twenty-two or three years before from
+his English home, when Annie was a little girl of six or seven. Before she
+was in her teens she was left fatherless. At the age of thirteen, when she
+was living in an East Side tenement with her mother, the Kid, then a young
+tough qualifying with one of the many gangs about the Hook for the
+penitentiary, crossed her path. Ever after she was his slave, and followed
+where he led.
+
+The path they trod together was not different from that travelled by
+hundreds of young men and women to-day. By way of the low dives and
+"morgues" with which the East Side abounds, it led him to the Island and
+her to the street. When he was sent up the first time, his mother died of
+a broken heart. His father, a well-to-do mechanic in the Seventh Ward, had
+been spared that misery. He had died before the son was fairly started on
+his bad career. The family were communicants at the parish church, and
+efforts without end were made to turn the Kid from his career of wicked
+folly. His two sisters labored faithfully with him, but without avail.
+When the Kid came back from the Island to find his mother dead, he did not
+know his oldest sister. Grief had turned her pretty brown hair a snowy
+white.
+
+He found his girl a little the worse for rum and late hours than when he
+left her, but he "took up" with her again. He was loyal at least. This
+time he tried, too, to be honest. His mother's death had shocked him to
+the point where his "nerve" gave out. His brother gave him charge of one
+of his saloons and the Kid was "at work" keeping bar, with the way to
+respectability, as it goes on the East Side, open to him, when one of his
+old pals, who had found him out, turned up with a demand for money. He was
+a burglar and wanted a hundred dollars to "do up a job" in the country.
+The Kid refused, and his brother came in during the quarrel that ensued,
+flew into a rage, and grabbing the thief by the collar, threw him into the
+street. He went his way shaking his fist and threatening vengeance on
+both.
+
+It was not long in coming. A jewelry store in Bridgeport was robbed and
+two burglars were arrested. One of them was the man "Jim" McDuff had
+thrown out of his saloon. He turned State's evidence and swore that the
+Kid was in the job too. He was arrested and held in bail of ten thousand
+dollars. The Kid always maintained that he was innocent. His family
+believed him, but his past was against him. It was said, too, that back of
+the arrest was political persecution. His brother the saloon-keeper, who
+mixed politics with his beer, was the under dog just then in the fight in
+his ward. The situation was discussed from a practical standpoint in the
+McDuff household, and it ended with the Kid going up to Bridgeport and
+pleading guilty to theft to escape the worse charge of burglary. He was
+sentenced to four years' imprisonment. That was how he got into "the pen."
+
+Annie, after he had been put in jail, went to the dogs on her own account
+rather faster than when they made a team. For a time she frequented the
+saloons of the Tenth Ward. When she crossed the Bowery at last she was
+nearing the end. For a year or two she frequented the disreputable houses
+in Elizabeth and Hester Streets. She was supposed to have a room in
+Downing Street, but it was the rarest of all events that she was there.
+
+Two weeks before this morning, Fay Leslie, the girl who sat there telling
+me her story, met her on the Bowery with a cut and bruised face. She had
+been beaten in a fight in a Pell Street saloon with Flossie Lowell, one of
+the habitues of Chinatown. Fay took her to Bellevue Hospital, where she
+"had a pull with the night watch," she told me, and she was kept there
+three or four days. When she came out she drifted back to Pell Street and
+took to drinking again. But she was a sick girl.
+
+The night before she was with Fay in the saloon on the corner, when she
+complained that she did not feel well. She sat down in a chair and put her
+feet on another. In that posture she was found dead a little later, when
+her friend went to see how she was getting on.
+
+"Rum killed her, I suppose," I said, when Fay had ended her story.
+
+"Yes! I suppose it did."
+
+"And you," I ventured, "some day it will kill you too, if you do not look
+out."
+
+The girl laughed a loud and coarse laugh.
+
+"Me?" she said, "not by a jugful. I've been soaking it fifteen years and I
+am alive yet."
+
+The dead girl sat there yet, with the cold, staring eyes, when I went my
+way. Outside the drinking went on with vile oaths. The dead wagon had been
+sent for, but it had other errands, and had not yet come around to Pell
+Street.
+
+Thus ended the story of Kid McDuff's girl.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE LITTLE TOILERS
+
+
+Poverty and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is
+perpetual, indissoluble. The one begets the other. Need sets the child to
+work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages,
+thus increasing the need. Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it
+has not been said better since: "The destruction of the poor is their
+poverty."
+
+It is the business of the State to see to it that its interest in the
+child as a future citizen is not imperilled by the compact. Here in New
+York we set about this within the memory of the youngest of us. To-day we
+have compulsory education and a factory law prohibiting the employment of
+young children. All between eight and fourteen years old must go to school
+at least fourteen weeks in each year. None may labor in factories under
+the age of fourteen; not under sixteen unless able to read and write
+simple sentences in English. These are the barriers thrown up against the
+inroads of ignorance, poverty's threat. They are barriers of paper. We
+have the laws, but we do not enforce them.
+
+By that I do not mean to say that we make no attempt to enforce them. We
+do. We catch a few hundred truants each year and send them to
+reformatories to herd with thieves and vagabonds worse than they, rather
+illogically, since there is no pretence that there would have been room
+for them in the schools had they wanted to go there. We set half a dozen
+factory inspectors to canvass more than twice as many thousand workshops
+and to catechise the children they find there. Some are turned out and go
+back the next day to that or some other shop. The great mass that are
+under age lie and stay. And their lies go on record as evidence that we
+are advancing, and that child-labor is getting to be a thing of the past.
+That the horrible cruelty of a former day is; that the children have
+better treatment and a better time of it in the shops--often a good enough
+time to make one feel that they are better off there learning habits of
+industry than running about the streets, so long as there is no way of
+_making_ them attend school--I believe from what I have seen. That the law
+has had the effect of greatly diminishing the number of child-workers I do
+not believe. It has had another and worse effect. It has bred wholesale
+perjury among them and their parents. Already they have become so used to
+it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them. The child
+of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a
+matter of course. Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose
+of the law.
+
+More than a year ago, in an effort to get at the truth of the matter of
+children's labor, I submitted to the Board of Health, after consultation
+with Dr. Felix Adler, who earned the lasting gratitude of the community by
+his labors on the Tenement House Commission, certain questions to be asked
+concerning the children by the sanitary police, then about to begin a
+general census of the tenements. The result was a surprise, and not least
+to the health officers. In the entire mass of nearly a million and a
+quarter of tenants[8] only two hundred and forty-nine children under
+fourteen years of age were found at work in living-rooms. To anyone
+acquainted with the ordinary aspect of tenement-house life the statement
+seemed preposterous, and there are valid reasons for believing that the
+policemen missed rather more than they found even of those that were
+confessedly or too evidently under age. They were seeking that which, when
+found, would furnish proof of law-breaking against the parent or employer,
+a fact of which these were fully aware. Hence their coming uniformed and
+in search of children into a house could scarcely fail to give those a
+holiday who were not big enough to be palmed off as fourteen at least.
+Nevertheless, upon reflection, it seemed probable that the policemen were
+nearer the truth than their critics. Their census took no account of the
+factory in the back yard, but only of the living rooms, and it was made
+during the day. Most of the little slaves, as of those older in years,
+were found in the sweater's district on the East Side, where the home work
+often only fairly begins after the factory has shut down for the day and
+the stores released their army of child-laborers. Had the policemen gone
+their rounds after dark they would have found a different state of things.
+Between the sweat-shops and the school, which, as I have shown, is made to
+reach farther down among the poorest in this Jewish quarter than anywhere
+else in this city, the children were fairly accounted for in the daytime.
+The record of school attendance in the district shows that forty-seven
+attended day-school for every one who went to night-school.
+
+To settle the matter to my own satisfaction I undertook a census of a
+number of the most crowded houses, in company with a policeman not in
+uniform. The outcome proved that, as regards those houses at least, it was
+as I suspected, and I have no doubt they were a fair sample of the rest.
+In nine tenements that were filled with home-workers we found five
+children at work who owned that they were under fourteen. Two were girls
+nine years of age. Two boys said they were thirteen. We found thirteen who
+swore that they were of age, proof which the policeman as an uninterested
+census-taker would have respected as a matter of course, even though he
+believed with me that the children lied. On the other hand, in seven
+back-yard factories we found a total of 63 children, of whom 5 admitted
+being under age, while of the rest 45 seemed surely so. To the other 13 we
+gave the benefit of the doubt, but I do not think they deserved it. All
+the 63 were to my mind certainly under fourteen, judging not only from
+their size, but from the whole appearance of the children. My subsequent
+experience confirmed me fully in this belief. Most of them were able to
+write their names after a fashion. Few spoke English, but that might have
+been a subterfuge. One of the home-workers, a marvellously small lad whose
+arms were black to the shoulder from the dye in the cloth he was sewing,
+and who said in his broken German, without evincing special interest in
+the matter, that he had gone to school "e' bische'," referred us to his
+"mother" for a statement as to his age. The "mother," who proved to be the
+boss's wife, held a brief consultation with her husband and then came
+forward with a verdict of sixteen. When we laughed rather incredulously
+the man offered to prove by his marriage certificate that the boy must be
+sixteen. The effect of this demonstration was rather marred, however, by
+the inopportune appearance of another tailor, who, ignorant of the crisis,
+claimed the boy as his. The situation was dramatic. The tailor with the
+certificate simply shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work,
+leaving the boy to his fate.
+
+One girl, who could not have been twelve years old, was hard at work at a
+sewing-machine in a Division Street shirt factory when we came in. She got
+up and ran the moment she saw us, but we caught her in the next room
+hiding behind a pile of shirts. She said at once that she was fourteen
+years old but didn't work there. She "just came in." The boss of the shop
+was lost in astonishment at seeing her when we brought her back. He could
+not account at all for her presence. There were three boys at work in the
+room who said "sixteen" without waiting to be asked. Not one of them was
+fourteen. The habit of saying fourteen or sixteen--the fashion varies with
+the shops and with the degree of the child's educational
+acquirements--soon becomes an unconscious one with the boy. He plumps it
+out without knowing it. While occupied with these investigations I once
+had my boots blacked by a little shaver, hardly knee-high, on a North
+River ferry-boat. While he was shining away, I suddenly asked him how old
+he was. "Fourteen, sir!" he replied promptly, without looking up.
+
+In a Hester Street house we found two little girls pulling basting-thread.
+They were both Italians and said that they were nine. In the room in which
+one of them worked thirteen men and two women were sewing. The child could
+speak English. She said that she was earning a dollar a week and worked
+every day from seven in the morning till eight in the evening. This
+sweat-shop was one of the kind that comes under the ban of the new law,
+passed last winter--that is, if the factory inspector ever finds it. Where
+the crowds are greatest and the pay poorest, the Italian laborer's wife
+and child have found their way in since the strikes among the sweater's
+Jewish slaves, outbidding even these in the fierce strife for bread.
+
+Even the crowding, the feverish haste of the half-naked men and women, and
+the litter and filth in which they worked, were preferable to the silence
+and desolation we encountered in one shop up under the roof of a Broome
+Street tenement. The work there had given out--there had been none these
+two months, said the gaunt, hard-faced woman who sat eating a crust of dry
+bread and drinking water from a tin pail at the empty bench. The man sat
+silent and moody in a corner; he was sick. The room was bare. The only
+machine left was not worth taking to the pawnshop. Two dirty children,
+naked but for a torn undershirt apiece, were fishing over the stair-rail
+with a bent pin on an idle thread. An old rag was their bait.
+
+From among a hundred and forty hands on two big lofts in a Suffolk Street
+factory we picked seventeen boys and ten girls who were patently under
+fourteen years of age, but who all had certificates, sworn to by their
+parents, to the effect that they were sixteen. One of them whom we judged
+to be between nine and ten, and whose teeth confirmed our diagnosis--the
+second bicuspids in the lower jaw were just coming out--said that he had
+worked there "by the year." The boss, deeming his case hopeless, explained
+that he only "made sleeves and went for beer." Two of the smallest girls
+represented themselves as sisters, respectively sixteen and seventeen, but
+when we came to inquire which was the oldest, it turned out that she was
+the sixteen-year one. Several boys scooted as we came up the stairs. When
+stopped they claimed to be visitors. I was told that this sweater had been
+arrested once by the Factory Inspector, but had successfully barricaded
+himself behind his pile of certificates. I caught the children laughing
+and making faces at us behind our backs as often as these were brought out
+anywhere. In an Attorney Street "pants" factory we counted thirteen boys
+and girls who could not have been of age, and on a top floor in Ludlow
+Street, among others, two brothers, sewing coats, who said that they were
+thirteen and fourteen, but, when told to stand up, looked so ridiculously
+small as to make even their employer laugh. Neither could read, but the
+oldest could sign his name and did it thus, from right to left:
+
+
+[Illustration: (signature)]
+
+
+It was the full extent of his learning, and all he would probably ever
+receive.
+
+He was one of many Jewish children we came across who could neither read
+nor write. Most of them answered that they had never gone to school. They
+were mostly those of larger growth, bordering on fourteen, whom the
+charity school managers find it next to impossible to reach, the children
+of the poorest and most ignorant immigrants, whose work is imperatively
+needed to make both ends meet at home, the "thousand" the school census
+failed to account for. To banish them from the shop serves no useful
+purpose. They are back the next day, if not sooner. One of the Factory
+Inspectors told me of how recently he found a little boy in a sweat-shop
+and sent him home. He went up through the house after that and stayed up
+there quite an hour. On his return it occurred to him to look in to see
+if the boy was gone. He was back and hard at work, and with him were two
+other boys of his age who, though they claimed to have come in with dinner
+for some of the hands, were evidently workers there.
+
+So much for the sweat-shops. Jewish, Italian, and Bohemian, the story is
+the same always. In the children that are growing up, to "vote as would
+their master's dogs if allowed the right of suffrage," the community reaps
+its reward in due season for allowing such things to exist. It is a kind
+of interest in the payment of which there is never default. The physician
+gets another view of it. "Not long ago," says Dr. Annie S. Daniel, in the
+last report of the out-practice of the Infirmary for Women and Children,
+"we found in such an apartment five persons making cigars, including the
+mother. Two children were ill with diphtheria. Both parents attended to
+the children; they would syringe the nose of each child and, without
+washing their hands, return to their cigars. We have repeatedly observed
+the same thing when the work was manufacturing clothing and
+under-garments, to be bought as well by the rich as the poor. Hand-sewed
+shoes, made for a fashionable Broadway shoe store, were sewed at home by a
+man in whose family were three children with scarlet fever. And such
+instances are common. Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house
+manufactories. When reported to the Board of Health, the inspector at once
+prohibits further manufacture during the continuance of the disease, but
+his back is scarcely turned before the people return to their work. When
+we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their
+heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be
+expected to impress the people."
+
+
+[Illustration: SHINE, SIR?]
+
+
+And she adds: "Wages have steadily decreased. Among the women who earned
+the whole or part of the income the finishing of pantaloons was the most
+common occupation. For this work in 1881 they received ten to fifteen
+cents per pair; for the same work in 1891 three to five, at the most ten
+cents per pair. When the women have paid the express charges to and from
+the factory there is little margin left for profit. The women doing this
+work claim that wages are reduced because of the influx of Italian women."
+The rent has not fallen, however, and the need of every member of the
+family contributing by his or her work to its keep is greater than ever.
+The average total wages of 160 families whom the doctor personally treated
+and interrogated during the year was $5.99 per week, while the average
+rent was $8.62-3/4. The list included twenty-three different occupations
+and trades. The maximum wages was $19, earned by three persons in one
+family; the minimum $1.50, by a woman finishing pantaloons and living in
+one room for which she paid $4 a month rent! In nearly every instance
+observed by Dr. Daniel, the children's wages, when there were working
+children, was the greater share of the family income. A specimen instance
+is that of a woman with a consumptive husband, who is under her treatment.
+The wife washes and goes out by the day, when she can get such work to do.
+The three children, aged eleven, seven, and five years, not counting the
+baby for a wonder, work at home covering wooden buttons with silk at four
+cents a gross. The oldest goes to school, but works with the rest evenings
+and on Saturday and Sunday, when the mother does the finishing. Their
+combined earnings are from $3 to $6 a week, the children earning
+two-thirds. The rent is $8 a month.
+
+The doctor's observations throw a bright side-light upon the economic home
+conditions that lie at the root of this problem of child labor in the
+factories. With that I have not done. Taking the Factory Inspector's
+report for 1890, the last at that time available, I found that in that
+year his deputies got around to 2,147 of the 11,000 workshops (the number
+given in the report) in the Second district, which is that portion of New
+York south of Twenty-third Street. In other words, they visited less than
+one-fifth of them all. They found 1,102 boys and 1,954 girls under sixteen
+at work; 3,485 boys under eighteen, and 12,701 girls under twenty-one, as
+nearly as I could make the footings. The figures alone are instructive, as
+showing the preponderance of girls in the shops. The report, speaking of
+the State as a whole, congratulates the community upon the alleged fact
+"that the policy of employing very young children in manufactories has
+been practically abolished." It states that "since the enactment of the
+law the sentiment among employers has become nearly unanimous in favor of
+its stringent enforcement," and that it "has had the further important
+effect of preventing newly arrived non-English speaking foreigners from
+forcing their children into factories before they learned the language of
+the country," these being "now compelled to send their children to school,
+for a time at least, until they can qualify under the law." Further, "the
+system of requiring sworn certificates, giving the name, date, and place
+of birth of all children under sixteen years of age ... has resulted in
+causing parents to be very cautious about making untrue statements of the
+ages of their children." The deputies "are aware of the various
+subterfuges which have been tried in order to evade the law and put
+children at labor before the legal time," and the Factory Inspector is
+"happy to say that they are not often imposed upon by such tactics."
+
+Without wading through nearly seventy pages of small print it was not
+possible to glean from the report how many of the "under sixteen" workers
+were really under fourteen, or so adjudged. A summary of what has been
+accomplished since 1886 showed that 1,614 children under fourteen were
+discharged by the Inspector in the Second District in that time, and that
+415 were discharged because they could not read or write simple sentences
+in the English language. The "number of working children who could not
+read and write English" was in 1890 alone 252, according to the report, or
+more than one-half of the whole number discharged in the four years, which
+does not look as if the law had had much effect in that way, at least in
+New York city. I determined to see for myself what were the facts.
+
+I visited a number of factories, in a few instances accompanied by the
+deputy factory inspector, more frequently alone. Where it was difficult to
+gain admission I watched at the door when the employees were going to or
+coming from work, finding that on the whole the better plan, as affording
+a fairer view of the children and a better opportunity to judge of their
+age than when they sat at their work-benches. I found many shops in which
+there were scarcely any children, some from which they had been driven, so
+I was informed by the inspectors. But where manufacturers were willing to
+employ their labor--and this I believe to be quite generally the case
+where children's labor can be made to pay--I found the age certificate
+serving as an excellent protection for the employer, never for the child.
+I found the law considered as a good joke by some conscienceless men, who
+hardly took the trouble to see that the certificates were filled out
+properly; loudly commended by others whom it enabled, at the expense of a
+little perjury in which they had no hand, to fill up their shops with
+cheap labor, with perfect security to themselves. The bookkeeper in an
+establishment of the conscienceless kind told me with glee how a boy who
+had been bounced there three times in one year, upon his return each time
+had presented a sworn certificate giving a different age. He was fifteen,
+sixteen, and seventeen years old upon the records of the shop, until the
+inspectors caught him one day and proved him only thirteen. I found boys
+at work, posing as seventeen, who had been so recorded in the same shop
+three full years, and were thirteen at most. As seventeen-year freaks they
+could have made more money in a dime museum than at the work-bench, only
+the museum would have required something more convincing than the
+certificate that satisfied the shop. Some of these boys were working at
+power-presses and doing other work beyond their years. An examination of
+their teeth often disproved their stories as to their age. It was not
+always possible to make this test, for the children seemed to see
+something funny in it, and laughed and giggled so, especially the girls,
+as to make it difficult to get a good look. Some of the girls, generally
+those with decayed teeth,[9] would pout and refuse to show them. These
+were usually American girls, that is to say, they were born here. The
+greater number of the child-workers I questioned were foreigners, and our
+birth returns could have given no clue to them. The few natives were alert
+and on the defensive from the moment they divined my purpose. They easily
+defeated it by giving a false address.
+
+I finally picked out a factory close to my office where Italian girls were
+employed in large numbers, and made it my business to ascertain the real
+ages of the children. They seemed to me, going and coming, to average
+twelve or thirteen years. The year before the factory inspector had
+reported that nearly a hundred girls "under sixteen" were employed there.
+She had discharged sixty of them as unable to read or write English. I
+went to see the manufacturers. They were not disposed to help me and fell
+back on their certificates--no child was employed by them without
+one--until I told them that my purpose was not to interfere with their
+business but to prove that a birth-certificate was the only proper warrant
+for employment of child-labor.
+
+"Why," said the manufacturer, in his astonishment forgetting that he had
+just told me his children were all of age, "my dear sir! would you throw
+them all out of work?"
+
+It was what I expected. I found out eventually that a number of the
+children attended the evening classes in the Leonard Street Italian
+School, and there one rainy night I corralled twenty-three of them, all
+but one officially certified under oath to be fourteen or sixteen. But for
+the rain I might have found twice the number. The twenty-three I polled,
+comparing their sworn age with the entry in the school register, which the
+teachers knew to be correct. This was the result: one was eleven years old
+and had worked in the factory a year; one, also eleven, had just been
+engaged and was going for her certificate that night; three were twelve
+years old, and had worked in the factory from one month to a year; seven
+were thirteen, and of them three had worked in the shop two years, the
+others one; nine were fourteen; one of them had been there three years,
+four others two years, the rest shorter terms; one was fifteen and had
+worked in the factory three years; the last and tallest was sixteen and
+had been employed in the one shop four years. She said with a laugh that
+she had a "certificate of sixteen" when she first went there. Not one of
+them all was of legal age when she went to work in the shop, under the
+warrant of her parents' oath. The majority were not even then legally
+employed, since of those who had passed fourteen there were several who
+could not read simple sentences in English intelligibly; yet they had been
+at work in the factory for months and years. One of the eleven-year
+workers, who felt insulted somehow, said spitefully that "I needn't
+bother, there was lots of other girls in the shop younger than she." I
+have no doubt she was right. I should add that the firm was a highly
+respectable one, and its members of excellent social standing.
+
+I learned incidentally where the convenient certificates came from, at
+least those that were current in that school. They were issued, the
+children said, free of charge, by a benevolent undertaker in the ward. I
+thought at first that it was a bid for business, or real helpfulness. The
+neighborhood undertaker is often found figuring suggestively as the
+nearest friend of the poor in his street, when they are in trouble. But I
+found out afterward that it was politics combined with business. The
+undertaker was an Irishman and an active organizer of his district.
+Unpolitical notaries charged twenty-five cents for each certificate. This
+one made them out for nothing. All they had to do was to call for them.
+The girls laughed scornfully at the idea of there being anything wrong in
+the transaction. Their parents swore in a good cause. They needed the
+money. The end conveniently justified the means in their case. Besides
+"they merely had to touch the pen." Evidently, any argument in favor of
+education could scarcely be expected to have effect upon parents who thus
+found in their own ignorance a valid defence against an accusing
+conscience as well as a source of added revenue.
+
+My experience satisfied me that the factory law has had little effect in
+prohibiting child labor in the factories of New York City, although it may
+have had some in stimulating attendance at the night schools. The census
+figures, when they appear, will be able to throw no valuable light on the
+subject. The certificate lie naturally obstructs the census as it does the
+factory law. The one thing that is made perfectly clear by even such
+limited inquiry as I have been able to make, is that a birth certificate
+should be substituted for the present sworn warrant, if it is intended to
+make a serious business of the prohibition. In the piles upon piles of
+these which I saw, I never came across one copy of the birth registry.
+There are two obstacles to such a change. One is that our birth returns
+are at present incomplete; the other, that most of the children are not
+born here. Concerning the first, the Registrar of Vital Statistics
+estimates that he is registering nearly or quite a thousand births a month
+less than actually occur in New York; but even that is a great improvement
+upon the record of a few years ago. The registered birthrate is increasing
+year by year, and experience has shown that a determination on the part of
+the Board of Health to prosecute doctors and midwives who neglect their
+duty brings it up with a rush many hundreds in a few weeks. A wholesome
+strictness at the Health Office on this point would in a short time make
+it a reliable guide for the Factory Inspector in the enforcement of the
+law. The other objection is less serious than it appears at first sight.
+Immigrants might be required to provide birth certificates from their old
+homes, where their children are sure to be registered under the stringent
+laws of European governments. But as a matter of fact that would not often
+be necessary. They all have passports in which the name and ages of their
+children are set down. The claim that they had purposely registered them
+as younger to cheapen transportation, which they would be sure to make,
+need not be considered seriously. One lie is as good and as easy as
+another.
+
+Another lesson we may learn with advantage from some old-country
+governments, which we are apt to look down upon as "slow," is to punish
+the parents for the truancy of their children, whether they are found
+running in the street or working in a shop when they should have been at
+school. Greed, the natural child of poverty, often has as much to do with
+it as real need. In the case of the Italians and the Jewish girls it is
+the inevitable marriage-portion, without which they would stand little
+chance of getting a husband, that dictates the sacrifice. One little one
+of twelve in a class in the Leonard Street School, who had been working on
+coats in a sweat-shop nine months, and had become expert enough to earn
+three dollars a week, told me that she had $200 in bank, and that her
+sister, also a worker, was as forehanded. Their teacher supported her
+story. But often a meaner motive than the desire to put money in bank
+forges the child's fetters. I came across a little girl in an East Side
+factory who pleaded so pitifully that she had to work, and looked so poor
+and wan, that I went to her home to see what it was like. It was on the
+top floor of a towering tenement. The mother, a decent German woman, was
+sewing at the window, doing her share, while at the table her husband, a
+big, lazy lout who weighed two hundred pounds if he weighed one, lolled
+over a game of checkers with another vagabond like himself. A half-empty
+beer-growler stood between them. The contrast between that pitiful child
+hard at work in the shop, and the big loafer taking his ease, was enough
+to make anybody lose patience, and I gave him the piece of my mind he so
+richly deserved. But it rolled off him as water rolls off a duck. He
+merely ducked his head, shifted his bare feet under the table, and told
+his crony to go on with the play.
+
+It is only when the child rebels in desperation against such atrocious
+cruelty and takes to the street as his only refuge, that his tyrant hands
+him over to the justice so long denied him. Then the school comes as an
+avenger, not as a friend, to the friendless lad, and it is scarcely to be
+wondered at if behind his prison-bars he fails to make sense of the
+justice of a world that locks him up and lets his persecutor go
+free--likely enough applauds him for his public spirit in doing what he
+did. When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not
+work, and has to be supported, at the odd intervals at least when he comes
+back from the street, the father surrenders him as a truant and
+incorrigible. A large number of the children that are every year sent to
+the Juvenile Asylum are admitted in that way. The real animus of it crops
+out when it is proposed to put the little prisoner in a way of growing up
+a useful citizen by sending him to a home out of the reach of his grasping
+relatives. Then follows a struggle for the possession of the child that
+would make the uninitiated onlooker think a gross outrage was about to be
+perpetrated on a fond parent. The experienced Superintendent of the
+Asylum, who has fought many such fights to a successful end, knows better.
+"In a majority of these cases," he remarks in his report for last year,
+"the opposition is due, not to any special interest in the child's
+welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation
+for the boy in order to get his weekly wages."
+
+Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin
+covers for pocket-flasks--one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible
+of classification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor--with hands
+so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but
+lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work
+begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags
+down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes,
+much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running
+errands and earning a few pennies that way, takes her place at the bench
+and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has
+earned sixty cents--"more than mother," she says with a smile. "Mother"
+has been finishing "knee-pants" for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a
+pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing buttons on; but she
+cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look
+after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who "does not
+love work well," in the patient language of the housekeeper, had been out
+of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of
+his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not
+press for the rent long due. That was Susie's doings, too, though he
+didn't know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that
+dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.
+
+
+[Illustration: LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.]
+
+
+Of Susie's hundred little companions in the alley--playmates they could
+scarcely be called--some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while
+the boys earned money at "shinin'" or selling newspapers. The smaller
+girls "minded the baby," so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them
+did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The
+rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children's labor in
+and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm
+in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them
+always. In an evening school class of nineteen boys and nine girls which I
+polled once I found twelve boys who "shined," five who sold papers, one of
+thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of
+twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and
+worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one
+twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age
+minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old,
+and of them one worked for a sweater and "finished twenty-five coats
+yesterday," she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman's
+work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to
+help her mother sew coats when baby slept.
+
+I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the
+children under age into the stores, where they find employment as "cash"
+girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are
+as rare as angels' visits. I do not believe this is true to any great
+extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other
+mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would
+alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the
+Working Women's Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates
+that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all
+the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger.
+Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and
+less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I
+think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and
+not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the
+children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who
+exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal
+dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked
+fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more
+than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down
+when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two
+dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to
+leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most
+wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the
+hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing
+the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour
+spent in going through such a store tires many grown persons more than a
+whole day's work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their
+whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their
+strength.
+
+An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law
+to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it
+is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave
+things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in
+defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get
+their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road
+is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be
+wanting to smooth the way for them.
+
+There is still another kind of employment that absorbs many of the boys
+and ought to be prohibited with the utmost rigor of the law. I refer to
+the messenger service of the District Telegraph Companies especially.
+Anyone can see for himself how old some of these boys are who carry
+messages about the streets every day; but everybody cannot see the kind of
+houses they have to go to, the kind of people they meet, or the sort of
+influences that beset them hourly at an age when they are most easily
+impressed for good or bad. If that were possible, the line would be drawn
+against their employment rather at eighteen than at sixteen or fourteen.
+At present there is none except the fanciful line drawn against truancy,
+which, to a boy who has learned the tricks of the telegraph messenger, is
+very elastic indeed.
+
+
+[Illustration: MINDING THE BABY.]
+
+
+To send the boys to school and see that they stay there until they have
+learned enough to at least vote intelligently when they grow up, is the
+bounden duty of the State--celebrated in theory but neglected in practice.
+If it did its duty much would have been gained, but even then the real
+kernel of this question of child labor would remain untouched. The trouble
+is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of
+work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown
+to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more, and
+therefore less, than when they began, and with the years that should have
+prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery.
+How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the
+senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor, in denying to
+our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting
+foreign workmen in in shoals to crowd our market under the plea of the
+"solidarity of labor"--a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor
+all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.
+The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of
+improving the condition of the poor, who said to me, "They are down on the
+scrub level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you
+can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to
+find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out
+mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the
+whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the
+responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to
+another generation that is so much worse to start off with." She spoke of
+the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity
+of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass
+of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the
+children.
+
+I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee
+wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man
+found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing. The
+woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train.
+But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her
+hand," reported her first employer, indignantly. The children were sent to
+good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing
+and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved; they were
+simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever
+received--that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original
+creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.
+
+I confess I had always laid the blame for this discouraging feature of the
+problem upon our general industrial development in a more or less vague
+way--steam, machinery, and all that sort of thing--until the other day I
+met a man who gave me another view of it altogether. He was a manufacturer
+of cheap clothing, a very intelligent and successful one at that; a large
+employer of cheap Hebrew labor and, heaven save the mark!--a Christian.
+His sincerity was unquestionable. He had no secrets to keep from me. He
+was in the business to make money, he said with perfect frankness, and one
+condition of his making money was, as he had had occasion to learn when he
+was himself a wage-worker and a union man, to keep his workmen where they
+were at his mercy. He had some four hundred hands, all Jewish immigrants,
+all working for the lowest wages for which he could hire them. Among them
+all there was not one tailor capable of making a whole garment. His policy
+was to keep them from learning. He saw to it that each one was kept at
+just one thing--sleeves, pockets, buttonholes--some small part of one
+garment, and never learned anything else.
+
+"This I do," he explained, "to prevent them from going on strike with the
+hope of getting a job anywhere else. They can't. They don't know enough.
+Not only do we limit them so that a man who has worked three months in my
+shop and never held a needle before is just as valuable to me as one I
+have had five years, but we make the different parts of the suit in
+different places and keep Christians over the hands as cutters so that
+they shall have no chance to learn."
+
+Where we stood in his shop, a little boy was stacking some coats for
+removal. The manufacturer pointed him out. "Now," he said, "this boy is
+not fourteen years old, as you can see as well as I. His father works here
+and when the Inspector comes I just call him up. He swears that the boy is
+old enough to work, and there the matter ends. What would you? Is it not
+better that he should be here than on the street? Bah!" And this
+successful Christian manufacturer turned upon his heel with a vexed air.
+It was curious to hear him, before I left, deliver a homily on the
+"immorality" of the sweat-shops, arraigning them severely as "a blot on
+humanity."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS
+
+
+On my way to the office the other day, I came upon three boys sitting on a
+beer-keg in the mouth of a narrow alley intent upon a game of cards. They
+were dirty and "tough." The bare feet of the smallest lad were nearly
+black with dried mud. His hair bristled, unrestrained by cap or covering
+of any kind. They paid no attention to me when I stopped to look at them.
+It was an hour before noon.
+
+"Why are you not in school?" I asked of the oldest rascal. He might have
+been thirteen.
+
+"'Cause," he retorted calmly, without taking his eye off his neighbor's
+cards, "'cause I don't believe in it. Go on, Jim!"
+
+I caught the black-footed one by the collar. "And you," I said, "why don't
+you go to school? Don't you know you have to?"
+
+The boy thrust one of his bare feet out at me as an argument there was no
+refuting. "They don't want me; I aint got no shoes." And he took the
+trick.
+
+I had heard his defence put in a different way to the same purpose more
+than once on my rounds through the sweat-shops. Every now and then some
+father, whose boy was working under age, would object, "We send the child
+to school, as the Inspector says, and there is no room for him. What shall
+we do?" He spoke the whole truth, likely enough; the boy only half of it.
+There was a charity school around the corner from where he sat struggling
+manfully with his disappointment, where they would have taken him, and
+fitted him out with shoes in the bargain, if the public school rejected
+him. If anything worried him, it was probably the fear that I might know
+of it and drag him around there. I had seen the same thought working in
+the tailor's mind. Neither had any use for the school; the one that his
+boy might work, the other that he might loaf and play hookey.
+
+Each had found his own flaw in our compulsory education law and succeeded.
+The boy was safe in the street because no truant officer had the right to
+arrest him at sight for loitering there in school-hours. His only risk was
+the chance of that functionary's finding him at home, and he was trying to
+provide against that. The tailor's defence was valid. With a law
+requiring--compelling is the word, but the compulsion is on the wrong
+tack--all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to go to
+school at least one-fourth of the year or a little more; with a costly
+machinery to enforce it, even more costly to the child who falls under the
+ban as a truant than to the citizens who foot the bills, we should most
+illogically be compelled to exclude, by force if they insisted, more than
+fifty thousand of the children, did they all take it into their heads to
+obey the law. We have neither schools enough nor seats enough in them. As
+it is, we are spared that embarrassment. They don't obey it.
+
+This is the way the case stands: Computing the school population upon the
+basis of the Federal census of 1880 and the State census of 1892, we had
+in New York, in the summer of 1891, 351,330 children between five and
+fourteen[10] years. I select these limits because children are admitted
+to the public schools under the law at the age of five years, and the
+statistics of the Board of Education show that the average age of the
+pupils entering the lowest primary grade is six years and five months. The
+whole number of different pupils taught in that year was 196,307.[11] The
+Catholic schools, parochial and select, reported a total of 35,055; the
+corporate schools (Children's Aid Society's, Orphan Asylums, American
+Female Guardian Society's, etc.), 23,276; evening schools, 29,165;
+Nautical School, 111; all other private schools (as estimated by
+Superintendent of Schools Jasper), 15,000; total, 298,914; any possible
+omissions in this list being more than made up for by the thousands over
+fourteen who are included. So that by deducting the number of pupils from
+the school population as given above, more than 50,000 children between
+the ages of five and fourteen are shown to have received no schooling
+whatever last year. As the public schools had seats for only 195,592,
+while the registered attendance exceeded that number, it follows that
+there was no room for the fifty thousand had they chosen to apply. In
+fact, the year before, 3,783 children had been refused admission at the
+opening of the schools after the summer vacation because there were no
+seats for them. To be told in the same breath that there were more than
+twenty thousand unoccupied seats in the schools at that time, is like
+adding insult to injury. Though vacant and inviting pupils they were
+worthless, for they were in the wrong schools. Where the crowding of the
+growing population was greatest and the need of schooling for the
+children most urgent, every seat was taken. Those who could not travel far
+from home--the poor never can--in search of an education had to go
+without.
+
+The Department of Education employs twelve truant officers, who in 1891
+"found and returned to school" 2,701 truants. There is a timid sort of
+pretence that this was "enforcing the compulsory education law," though it
+is coupled with the statement that at least eight more officers are needed
+to do it properly, and that they should have power to seize the culprits
+wherever found. Superintendent Jasper tells me that he thinks there are
+only about 8,000 children in New York who do not go to school at all. But
+the Department's own records furnish convincing proof that he is wrong,
+and that the 50,000 estimate is right. That number is just about
+one-seventh of the whole number of children between five and fourteen
+years, as stated above. In January of this year a school-census of the
+Fourth and Fifteenth wards,[12] two widely separated localities, differing
+greatly as to character of population, gave the following result: Fourth
+Ward, total number of children between five and fourteen years, 2,016;[13]
+of whom 297 did not go to school. Fifteenth Ward, total number of
+children, 2,276; number of non-attendants, 339. In each case the
+proportion of non-attendants was nearly one-seventh, curiously
+corroborating the estimate made by me for the whole city.
+
+Testimony to the same effect is borne by a different set of records, those
+of the reformatories that receive the truants of the city. The Juvenile
+Asylum, that takes most of those of the Protestant faith, reports that of
+28,745 children of school age committed to its care in thirty-nine years
+32 per cent. could not read when received. The proportion during the last
+five years was 23 per cent. At the Catholic Protectory, of 3,123 boys and
+girls cared for during the year 1891, 689 were utterly illiterate at the
+time of their reception and the education of the other 2,434 was
+classified in various degrees between illiterate and "able to read and
+write" only.[14] The moral status of these last children may be inferred
+from the statement that 739 of them possessed no religious instruction at
+all when admitted. The analysis might be extended, doubtless with the same
+result as to illiteracy, throughout the institutions that harbor the
+city's dependent children, to the State Reformatory, where the final
+product is set down in 75 per cent. of "grossly ignorant" inmates, in
+spite of the fact that more than that proportion is recorded as being of
+"average natural mental capacity." In other words, they could have
+learned, had they been taught.
+
+
+[Illustration: "SHOOTING CRAPS" IN THE HALL OF THE NEWSBOYS' LODGING
+HOUSE.]
+
+
+How much of this bad showing is due to the system, or the lack of system,
+of compulsory education, as we know it in New York, I shall not venture to
+say. In such a system a truant school or home would seem to be a logical
+necessity. Because a boy does not like to go to school, he is not
+necessarily bad. It may be the fault of the school and of the teacher as
+much as of the boy. Indeed, a good many people of sense hold that the boy
+who has never planned to run away from home or school does not amount to
+much. At all events, the boy ought not to be classed with thieves and
+vagabonds. But that is what New York does. It has no truant home. Its
+method of dealing with the truant is little less than downright savagery.
+It is thus set forth in a report of a special committee of the Board of
+Education, made to that body on November 18, 1891. "Under the law the
+truant agents act upon reports received from the principals of the
+schools. After exhausting the persuasion that they may be able to exercise
+to compel the attendance of truant children, and in cases which seem to
+call for the enforcement of the law, the agent procures the indorsement
+of the President of the Board of Education and the Superintendent of
+Schools upon his requisition for a warrant for the arrest of the truant,
+which warrant, under the provisions of the law, is then issued by a Police
+Justice. A policeman is then detailed to make the arrest, and when
+apprehended the truant is brought to the Police Court, where his parents
+or guardians are obliged to attend. Should it happen that the latter are
+not present, the boy is put in a cell to await their appearance. It has
+sometimes happened that a public-school boy, whose only offence against
+the law was his refusal to attend school, has been kept in a cell two or
+three days with old criminals pending the appearance of his parents or
+guardians.[15] While we fully realize the importance of enforcing the laws
+relating to compulsory education, we believe that bringing the boys into
+associations with criminals in this way and making it necessary for
+parents to be present under such circumstances, is unjust and improper,
+and that criminal associations of this kind in connection with the
+administration of the truancy laws should not be allowed to continue. The
+Justice may, after hearing the facts, commit the child, who, in a majority
+of cases, is between eight and eleven years old, to one of the
+institutions designated by law. We do not think that the enforcement of
+the laws relating to compulsory education should at any time enforce
+association with criminal classes."
+
+But it does, all the way through. The "institutions designated by law" for
+the reception of truants are chiefly the Protectory and the Juvenile
+Asylum. In the thirty-nine years of its existence the latter has harbored
+11,636 children committed to it for disobedience and truancy. And this
+was the company they mingled with there on a common footing: "Unfortunate
+children," 8,806; young thieves, 3,097; vagrants, 3,173; generally bad
+boys and girls, 1,390; beggars, 542; children committed for peddling, 51;
+as witnesses, 50. Of the whole lot barely a hundred, comprised within the
+last two items, might be supposed to be harmless, though there is no
+assurance that they were. Of the Protectory children I have already
+spoken. It will serve further to place them to say that nearly one-third
+of the 941 received last year were homeless, while fully 35 per cent. of
+all the boys suffered when entering from the contagious eye disease that
+is the scourge of the poorest tenements as of the public institutions that
+admit their children. I do not here take into account the House of Refuge,
+though that is also one of the institutions designated by law for the
+reception of truants, for the reason that only about one-fifth of those
+admitted to it last year came from New York City. Their number was 55. The
+rest came from other counties in the State. But even there the percentage
+of truants to those committed for stealing or other crimes was as 53 to
+47.
+
+This is the "system," or one end of it--the one where the waste goes on.
+The Committee spoken of reported that the city paid in 1890, $63,690 for
+the maintenance of the truants committed by magistrates, at the rate of
+$110 for every child, and that two truant schools and a home for
+incorrigible truants could be established and maintained at less cost,
+since it would probably not be necessary to send to the home for
+incorrigibles more than 25 per cent. of all. It further advised the
+creation of the special office of Truant Commissioner, to avoid dragging
+the children into the police courts. In his report for the present year
+Superintendent Jasper renews in substance these recommendations. But
+nothing has been done.
+
+The situation is this, then, that a vast horde of fifty thousand children
+is growing up in this city whom our public school does not and cannot
+reach; if it reaches them at all it is with the threat of the jail. The
+mass of them is no doubt to be found in the shops and factories, as I have
+shown. A large number peddle newspapers or black boots. Still another
+contingent, much too large, does nothing but idle, in training for the
+penitentiary. I stopped one of that kind at the corner of Baxter and Grand
+Streets one day to catechise him. It was in the middle of the afternoon
+when the schools were in session, but while I purposely detained him with
+a long talk to give the neighborhood time to turn out, thirteen other lads
+of his age, all of them under fourteen, gathered to listen to my business
+with Graccho. When they had become convinced that I was not an officer
+they frankly owned that they were all playing hookey. All of them lived in
+the block. How many more of their kind it sheltered I do not know. They
+were not exactly a nice lot, but not one of them would I have committed to
+the chance of contact with thieves with a clear conscience. I should have
+feared especial danger from such contact in their case.
+
+As a matter of fact the record of average attendance (136,413) shows that
+the public school _per se_ reaches little more than a third of all the
+children. And even those it does not hold long enough to do them the good
+that was intended. The Superintendent of Schools declares that the average
+age at which the children leave school is twelve or a little over. It must
+needs be, then, that very many quit much earlier, and the statement that
+in New York, as in Chicago, St. Louis, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and other
+American cities, half or more than half the school-boys leave school at
+the age of eleven (the source of the statement is unknown to me) seems
+credible enough. I am not going to discuss here the value of school
+education as a preventive of crime. That it is, so far as it goes, a
+positive influence for good I suppose few thinking people doubt nowadays.
+Dr. William T. Harris, Federal Commissioner of Education, in an address
+delivered before the National Prison Association in 1890, stated that an
+investigation of the returns of seventeen States that kept a record of the
+educational status of their criminals showed the number of criminals to be
+eight times as large from the illiterate stratum as from an equal number
+of the population that could read and write. That census was taken in
+1870. Ten years later a canvass of the jails of Michigan, a State that had
+an illiterate population of less than five per cent., showed exactly the
+same ratio, so that I presume that may safely be accepted.
+
+In view of these facts it does not seem that the showing the public school
+is making in New York is either creditable or safe. It is not creditable,
+because the city's wealth grows even faster than its population,[16] and
+there is no lack of means with which to provide schools enough and the
+machinery to enforce the law and fill them. Not to enforce it because it
+would cost a great deal of money is wicked waste and folly. It is not
+safe, because the school is our chief defence against the tenement and the
+flood of ignorance with which it would swamp us. Prohibition of child
+labor without compelling the attendance at school of the freed slaves is
+a mockery. The children are better off working than idling, any day. The
+physical objections to the one alternative are vastly outweighed by the
+moral iniquities of the other.
+
+I have tried to set forth the facts. They carry their own lesson. The then
+State Superintendent of Education, Andrew Draper, read it aright when, in
+his report for 1889, he said about the compulsory education law:
+
+"It does not go far enough and is without an executor. It is barren of
+results.... It may be safely said that no system will be effectual in
+bringing the unfortunate children of the streets into the schools which at
+least does not definitely fix the age within which children must attend
+the schools, which does not determine the period of the year within which
+all must be there, which does not determine the method for gathering all
+needed information, which does not provide especial schools for
+incorrigible cases, which does not punish people charged with the care of
+children for neglecting their education, and which does not provide the
+machinery and officials for executing the system."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD
+
+
+I am reminded, in trying to show up the causes that go to make children
+bad, of the experience of a certain sanitary inspector who was laboring
+with the proprietor of a seven-cent lodging-house to make him whitewash
+and clean up. The man had reluctantly given in to several of the
+inspector's demands; but, as they kept piling up, his irritation grew,
+until at the mention of clean sheets he lost all patience and said, with
+bitter contempt, "Well! you needn't tink dem's angels!"
+
+They were not--those lodgers of his--they were tramps. Neither are the
+children of the street angels. If, once in a while, they act more like
+little devils the opportunities we have afforded them, as I have tried to
+show, hardly give us the right to reproach them. They are not the kind of
+opportunities to make angels. And yet, looking the hundreds of boys in the
+Juvenile Asylum over, all of whom were supposed to be there because they
+were bad (though, as I had occasion to ascertain, that was a mistake--it
+was the parents that were bad in some cases), I was struck by the fact
+that they were anything but a depraved lot. Except as to their clothes and
+their manners, which were the manners of the street, they did not seem to
+be very different in looks from a like number of boys in any public
+school. Fourth of July was just then at hand, and when I asked the
+official who accompanied me how they proposed to celebrate it, he said
+that they were in the habit of marching in procession up Eleventh Avenue
+to Fort George, across to Washington Bridge, and all about the
+neighborhood, to a grove where speeches were made. Remembering the iron
+bars and high fences I had seen, I said something about it being unsafe to
+let a thousand young prisoners go at large in that way. The man looked at
+me in some bewilderment before he understood.
+
+"Bless you, no!" he said, when my meaning dawned upon him. "If any one of
+them was to run away that day he would be in eternal disgrace with all the
+rest. It is a point of honor with them to deserve it when they are
+trusted. Often we put a boy on duty outside, when he could walk off, if he
+chose, just as well as not; but he will come in in the evening, as
+straight as a string, only, perhaps, to twist his bed-clothes into a rope
+that very night and let himself down from a third-story window, at the
+risk of breaking his neck. Boys will be boys, you know."
+
+But it struck me that boys whose honor could be successfully appealed to
+in that way were rather the victims than the doers of a grievous wrong,
+being in that place, no matter if they _had_ stolen. It was a case of
+misdirection, or no direction at all, of their youthful energies. There
+was one little fellow in the Asylum band who was a living illustration of
+this. I watched him blow his horn with a supreme effort to be heard above
+the rest, growing redder and redder in the face, until the perspiration
+rolled off him in perfect sheets, the veins stood out swollen and blue and
+it seemed as if he must burst the next minute. He was a tremendous
+trumpeter. I was glad when it was over, and patted him on the head,
+telling him that if he put as much vim into all he had to do, as he did
+into his horn, he would come to something great yet. Then it occurred to
+me to ask him what he was there for.
+
+"'Cause I was lazy and played hookey," he said, and joined in the laugh
+his answer raised. The idea of that little body, that fairly throbbed with
+energy, being sent to prison for laziness was too absurd for anything.
+
+The report that comes from the Western Agency of the Asylum, through which
+the boys are placed out on farms, that the proportion of troublesome
+children is growing larger does not agree with the idea of laziness
+either, but well enough with the idleness of the street, which is what
+sends nine-tenths of the boys to the Asylum. Satan finds plenty of
+mischief for the idle hands of these lads to do. The one great point is to
+give them something to do--something they can see the end of, yet that
+will keep them busy right along. The more ignorant the child, the more
+urgent this rule, the shorter and simpler the lesson must be. Over in the
+Catholic Protectory, where they get the most ignorant boys, they
+appreciate this to the extent of encouraging the boys to a game of Sunday
+base-ball rather than see them idle even for the briefest spell. Of the
+practical wisdom of their course there can be no question.
+
+"I have come to the conclusion," said a well-known educator on a recent
+occasion, "that much of crime is a question of athletics." From over the
+sea the Earl of Meath adds his testimony: "Three fourths of the youthful
+rowdyism of large towns is owing to the stupidity, and, I may add,
+cruelty, of the ruling powers in not finding some safety-valve for the
+exuberant energies of the boys and girls of their respective cities." For
+our neglect to do so in New York we are paying heavily in the maintenance
+of these costly reform schools. I spoke of the chance for romping and
+play where the poor children crowd. In a Cherry Street hall-way I came
+across this sign in letters a foot long: "No ball-playing, dancing,
+card-playing, and no persons but tenants allowed in the yard." It was a
+five-story tenement, swarming with children, and there was another just as
+big across that yard. Out in the street the policeman saw to it that the
+ball-playing at least was stopped, and as for the dancing, that, of
+course, was bound to collect a crowd, the most heinous offence known to
+him as a preserver of the peace. How the peace was preserved by such means
+I saw on the occasion of my discovering that sign. The business that took
+me down there was a murder in another tenement just like it. A young man,
+hardly more than a boy, was killed in the course of a midnight
+"can-racket" on the roof, in which half the young people in the block had
+a hand night after night. It was _their_ outlet for the "exuberant
+energies" of their natures. The safety-valve was shut, with the landlord
+and the policeman holding it down.
+
+It is when the wrong outlet has thus been forced that the right and
+natural one has to be reopened with an effort as the first condition of
+reclaiming the boy. The play in him has all run to "toughness," and has
+first to be restored. "We have no great hope of a boy's reformation,"
+writes Mr. William F. Round, of the Burnham Industrial Farm, to a friend
+who has shown me his letter, "till he takes an active part and interest in
+out-door amusements. Plead with all your might for play-grounds for the
+city waifs and school-children. When the lungs are freely expanded, the
+blood coursing with a bound through all veins and arteries, the whole mind
+and body in a state of high emulation in wholesome play, there is no time
+or place for wicked thought or consequent wicked action and the body is
+growing every moment more able to help in the battle against temptation
+when it shall come at other times and places. Next time another transit
+company asks a franchise make them furnish tickets to the parks and
+suburbs to all school-children on all holidays and Saturdays, the same to
+be given out in school for regular attendance, as a method of health
+promotion and a preventive of truancy." Excellent scheme! If we could only
+make them. It is five years and over now since we made them pass a law at
+Albany appropriating a million dollars a year for the laying out of small
+parks in the most crowded tenement districts, in the Mulberry Street Bend
+for instance, and practically we stand to-day where we stood then. The
+Mulberry Street Bend is still there, with no sign of a park or play-ground
+other than in the gutter. When I asked, a year ago, why this was so, I was
+told by the Counsel to the Corporation that it was because "not much
+interest had been taken" by the previous administration in the matter. Is
+it likely that a corporation that runs a railroad to make money could be
+prevailed upon to take more interest in a proposition to make it surrender
+part of its profits than the city's sworn officers in their bounden duty?
+Yet let anyone go and see for himself what effect such a park has in a
+crowded tenement district. Let him look at Tompkins Square Park as it is
+to-day and compare the children that skip among the trees and lawns and
+around the band-stand with those that root in the gutters only a few
+blocks off. That was the way they looked in Tompkins Square twenty years
+ago when the square was a sand-lot given up to rioting and disorder. The
+police had their hands full then. I remember being present when they had
+to take the square by storm more than once, and there is at least one
+captain on the force to-day who owes his promotion to the part he took and
+the injuries he suffered in one of those battles. To-day it is as quiet
+and orderly a neighborhood as any in the city. Not a squeak has been heard
+about "bread or blood" since those trees were planted and the lawns and
+flower-beds laid out. It is not all the work of the missions, the
+kindergartens, and Boys' clubs and lodging-houses, of which more anon; nor
+even the larger share. The park did it, exactly as the managers of the
+Juvenile Asylum appealed to the sense of honor in their prisoners. It
+appealed with its trees and its grass and its birds to the sense of
+decency and of beauty, undeveloped but not smothered, in the children, and
+the whole neighborhood responded. One can go around the whole square that
+covers two big blocks, nowadays, and not come upon a single fight. I
+should like to see anyone walk that distance in Mulberry Street without
+running across half a dozen.
+
+Thus far the street and its idleness as factors in making criminals of the
+boys. Of the factory I have spoken. Certainly it is to be preferred to the
+street, if the choice must be between the two. Its offence is that it
+makes a liar of the boy and keeps him in ignorance, even of a useful
+trade, thus blazing a wide path for him straight to the prison gate. The
+school does not come to the rescue; the child must come to the school, and
+even then is not sure of a welcome. The trades' unions do their worst for
+the boy by robbing him of the slim chance to learn a trade which the
+factory left him. Of the tenement I have said enough. Apart from all other
+considerations and influences, as the destroyer of character and
+individuality everywhere, it is the wickedest of all the forces that
+attack the defenceless child. The tenements are increasing in number, and
+so is "the element that becomes criminal because of lack of individuality
+and the self-respect that comes with it."[17]
+
+I am always made to think in connection with this subject of a story told
+me by a bright little woman of her friend's kittens. There was a litter of
+them in the house and a jealous terrier dog to boot, whose one aim in life
+was to get rid of its mewing rivals. Out in the garden where the children
+played there was a sand-heap and the terrier's trick was to bury alive in
+the sand any kitten it caught unawares. The children were constantly
+rushing to the rescue and unearthing their pets; on the day when my friend
+was there on a visit they were too late. The first warning of the tragedy
+in the garden came to the ladies when one of the children rushed in, all
+red and excited, with bulging eyes. "There," she said, dropping the dead
+kitten out of her apron before them, "a perfectly good cat spoiled!"
+
+Perfectly good children, as good as any on the Avenue, are spoiled every
+day by the tenement; only we have not done with them then, as the terrier
+had with the kitten. There is still posterity to reckon with.
+
+What this question of heredity amounts to, whether in the past or in the
+future, I do not know. I have not had opportunity enough of observing. No
+one has that I know of. Those who have had the most disagree in their
+conclusions, or have come to none. I have known numerous instances of
+criminality, running apparently in families for generations, but there was
+always the desperate environment as the unknown factor in the make-up.
+Whether that bore the greatest share of the blame, or whether the
+reformation of the criminal to be effective should have begun with his
+grandfather, I could not tell. Besides, there was always the chance that
+the great-grandfather, or some one still farther back, of whom all trace
+was lost, might have been a paragon of virtue, even if his descendant was
+a thief, and so there was no telling just where to begin. In general I am
+inclined to think with such practical philanthropists as Superintendent
+Barnard, of the Five Points House of Industry, the Manager of the
+Children's Aid Society, Superintendent E. Fellows Jenkins, of the Society
+for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Mr. Israel C. Jones, who
+for more than thirty years was in charge of the House of Refuge, that the
+bugbear of heredity is not nearly as formidable as we have half taught
+ourselves to think. It is rather a question of getting hold of the child
+early enough before the evil influences surrounding him have got a firm
+grip on him. Among a mass of evidence quoted in support of this belief,
+perhaps this instance, related by Superintendent Jones in _The
+Independent_ last March, is as convincing as any:
+
+     Thirty years ago there was a depraved family living adjacent to what
+     is now a part of the city of New York. The mother was not only
+     dishonest, but exceedingly intemperate, wholly neglectful of her
+     duties as a mother, and frequently served terms in jail until she
+     finally died. The father was also dissipated and neglectful. It was a
+     miserable existence for the children.
+
+     Two of the little boys, in connection with two other boys in the
+     neighborhood, were arrested, tried, and found guilty of entering a
+     house in the daytime and stealing. In course of time both of these
+     boys were indentured. One remained in his place and the other left
+     for another part of the country, where he died. He was a reputable
+     lad.
+
+     The first boy, in one way and another, got a few pennies together
+     with which he purchased books. After a time he proposed to his master
+     that he be allowed to present himself for examination as a teacher.
+     The necessary consent was given, he presented himself, and was
+     awarded a "grade A" certificate.
+
+     Two years from that time he came to the House of Refuge, as proud as
+     a man could be, and exhibited to me his certificate. He then entered
+     a law office, diligently pursued his studies, and was admitted to the
+     bar. He was made a judge, and is now chief magistrate of the court in
+     the city where he lives.
+
+     His sister, a little girl, used to come to the Refuge with her
+     mother, wearing nothing but a thin cloak in very cold weather, almost
+     perishing with the cold. As soon as this young man got on his feet he
+     rescued the little girl. He placed her in a school; she finally
+     graduated from the Normal School, and to-day holds an excellent
+     position in the schools in the State where she lives.
+
+
+The records of the three reformatory institutions before mentioned throw
+their own light upon the question of what makes criminals of the young. At
+the Elmira Reformatory, of more than five thousand prisoners only a little
+over one per cent. were shown to have kept good company prior to their
+coming there. One and a half per cent. are put down under this head as
+"doubtful," while the character of association is recorded for 41.2 per
+cent. as "not good," and for 55.9 per cent. as "positively bad."
+Three-fourths possessed no culture or only the slightest. As to moral
+sense, 42.6 per cent. had absolutely none, 35 per cent. "possibly some."
+Only 7.6 per cent. came from good homes. Of the rest 39.8 per cent. had
+homes that are recorded as "fair only," and 52.6 per cent. downright bad
+homes; 4.8 per cent. had pauper, and 76.8 per cent. poor parents; 38.4 per
+cent. of the prisoners had drunken parents, and 13 per cent. parents of
+doubtful sobriety. Of more than twenty-two thousand inmates of the
+Juvenile Asylum in thirty-nine years one-fourth had either a drunken
+father or mother, or both. At the Protectory the percentage of drunkenness
+in parents was not quite one-fifth among over three thousand children
+cared for in the institution last year.
+
+There is never any lack of trashy novels and cheap shows in New York, and
+the children who earn money selling newspapers or otherwise take to them
+as ducks do to water. They fall in well with the ways of the street that
+are showy always, however threadbare may be the cloth. As for that, it is
+simply the cheap side of our national extravagance.
+
+The cigarette, if not a cause, is at least the mean accessory of half the
+mischief of the street. And I am not sure it is not a cause too. It is an
+inexorable creditor that has goaded many a boy to stealing; for cigarettes
+cost money, and they do not encourage industry. Of course there is a law
+against the cigarette, or rather against the boy smoking it who is not old
+enough to work--there is law in plenty, usually, if that would only make
+people good. It don't in the matter of the cigarette. It helps make the
+boy bad by adding the relish of law-breaking to his enjoyment of the
+smoke. Nobody stops him.
+
+The mania for gambling is all but universal. Every street child is a born
+gambler; he has nothing to lose and all to win. He begins by "shooting
+craps" in the street and ends by "chucking dice" in the saloon, two names
+for the same thing, sure to lead to the same goal. By the time he has
+acquired individual standing in the saloon, his long apprenticeship has
+left little or nothing for him to learn of the bad it has to teach. Never
+for his own sake is he turned away with the growler when he comes to have
+it filled; once in a while for the saloon-keeper's, if that worthy
+suspects in him a decoy and a "job." Just for the sake of the experiment,
+not because I expected it to develop anything new, I chose at random,
+while writing this chapter, a saloon in a tenement house district on the
+East Side and posted a man, whom I could trust implicitly, at the door
+with orders to count the children under age who went out and in with
+beer-jugs in open defiance of law. Neither he nor I had ever been in or
+even seen the saloon before. He reported as the result of three and a half
+hours' watch at noon and in the evening a total of fourteen--ten boys and
+a girl under ten years of age, and three girls between ten and fourteen
+years, not counting a little boy who bought a bottle of ginger. It was a
+cool, damp day; not a thirsty day, or the number would probably have been
+twice as great. There was not the least concealment about the transaction
+in any of the fourteen cases. The children were evidently old customers.
+
+The law that failed to save the boy while there was time yet to make a
+useful citizen of him provides the means of catching him when his training
+begins to bear fruit that threatens the public peace. Then it is with the
+same blundering disregard of common sense and common decency that marked
+his prosecution as a truant that the half grown lad is dragged into a
+police court and thrust into a prison-pen with hardened thieves and
+criminals to learn the lessons they have to teach him. The one thing New
+York needs most after a truant home is a special court for the trial of
+youthful offenders only. I am glad to say that this want seems at last in
+a way to be supplied. The last Legislature authorized the establishment of
+such a court, and it may be that even as these pages see the light this
+blot upon our city is about to be wiped out.
+
+Lastly, but not least, the Church is to blame for deserting the poor in
+their need. It is an old story that the churches have moved uptown with
+the wealth and fashion, leaving the poor crowds to find their way to
+heaven as best they could, and that the crowds have paid them back in
+their own coin by denying that they, the churches, knew the way at all.
+The Church has something to answer for; but it is a healthy sign at least
+that it is accepting the responsibility and professing anxiety to meet it.
+In much of the best work done among the poor and for the poor it has
+lately taken the lead, and it is not likely that any more of the churches
+will desert the downtown field, with the approval of Christian men and
+women at least.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Little enough of the light I promised in the opening chapter has struggled
+through these pages so far. We have looked upon the dark side of the
+picture; but there is a brighter. If the battle with ignorance, with
+misery, and with vice has but just begun, if the army that confronts us is
+strong, too strong, in numbers still and in malice--the gauntlet has been
+thrown down, the war waged, and blows struck that tell. They augur
+victory, for we have cut off the enemy's supplies and turned his flank. As
+I showed in the case of the immigrant Jews and the Italians, we have
+captured his recruits. With a firm grip on these, we may hope to win, for
+the rest of the problem ought to be and _can_ be solved. With our own we
+should be able to settle, if there is any virtue in our school and our
+system of government. In this, as in all things, the public conscience
+must be stirred before the community's machinery for securing justice can
+move. That it has been stirred, profoundly and to useful purpose, the
+multiplication in our day of charities for attaining the ends the law has
+failed to reach, gives evidence. Their number is so great that mention can
+be made here merely of a few of the most important and typical efforts
+along the line. A register of all those that deal with the children
+especially, as compiled by the Charity Organization Society, will be found
+in an appendix to this book. Before we proceed to look at the results
+achieved through endeavors to stop the waste down at the bottom by private
+reinforcement of the public school, we will glance briefly at two of the
+charities that have a plainer purpose--if I may so put it without
+disparagement to the rest--that look upon the child merely as a child
+worth saving for its own sake, because it is helpless and poor and
+wretched. Both of them represent distinct departures in charitable work.
+Both, to the everlasting credit of our city be it said, had their birth
+here, and in this generation, and from New York their blessings have been
+carried to the farthest lands. One is the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, known far and near now as the Children's Society,
+whose strong and beneficent plan has been embodied in the structure of law
+of half the civilized nations of the world. The other, always spoken of as
+the "Fresh Air Fund," never had law or structural organization of any
+kind, save the law of love, laid down on the Mount for all time; but the
+life of that divine command throbs in it and has touched the heart of
+mankind wherever its story has been told.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+LITTLE MARY ELLEN'S LEGACY
+
+
+On a thriving farm up in Central New York a happy young wife goes singing
+about her household work to-day who once as a helpless, wretched waif in
+the great city through her very helplessness and misery stirred up a
+social revolution whose waves beat literally upon the farthest shores. The
+story of little Mary Ellen moved New York eighteen years ago as it had
+scarce ever been stirred by news of disaster or distress before. In the
+simple but eloquent language of the public record it is thus told: "In the
+summer of 1874 a poor woman lay dying in the last stages of consumption in
+a miserable little room on the top floor of a big tenement in this city. A
+Methodist missionary, visiting among the poor, found her there and asked
+what she could do to soothe her sufferings. 'My time is short,' said the
+sick woman, 'but I cannot die in peace while the miserable little girl
+whom they call Mary Ellen is being beaten day and night by her step-mother
+next door to my room.' She told how the screams of the child were heard at
+all hours. She was locked in the room, she understood. It had been so for
+months, while she had been lying ill there. Prompted by the natural
+instinct of humanity, the missionary sought the aid of the police, but she
+was told that it was necessary to furnish evidence before an arrest could
+be made. 'Unless you can prove that an offence has been committed we
+cannot interfere, and all you know is hearsay.' She next went to several
+benevolent societies in the city whose object it was to care for children,
+and asked their interference in behalf of the child. The reply was: 'If
+the child is legally brought to us, and is a proper subject, we will take
+it; otherwise we cannot act in the matter.' In turn then she consulted
+several excellent charitable citizens as to what she should do. They
+replied: 'It is a dangerous thing to interfere between parent and child,
+and you might get yourself into trouble if you did so, as parents are
+proverbially the best guardians of their own children.' Finally, in
+despair, with the piteous appeals of the dying woman ringing in her ears,
+she said: 'I will make one more effort to save this child. There is one
+man in this city who has never turned a deaf ear to the cry of the
+helpless, and who has spent his life in just this work for the benefit of
+unoffending animals. I will go to Henry Bergh.'
+
+"She went, and the great friend of the dumb brute found a way. 'The child
+is an animal,' he said, 'if there is no justice for it as a human being,
+it shall at least have the rights of the stray cur in the street. It shall
+not be abused.' And thus was written the first bill of rights for the
+friendless waif the world over. The appearance of the starved, half-naked,
+and bruised child when it was brought into court wrapped in a
+horse-blanket caused a sensation that stirred the public conscience to its
+very depths. Complaints poured in upon Mr. Bergh; so many cases of
+child-beating and fiendish cruelty came to light in a little while, so
+many little savages were hauled forth from their dens of misery, that the
+community stood aghast. A meeting of citizens was called and an
+association for the defence of outraged childhood was formed, out of
+which grew the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that was
+formally incorporated in the following year. By that time Mary Ellen was
+safe in a good home. She never saw her tormentor again. The woman, whose
+name was Connolly, was not her mother. She steadily refused to tell where
+she got the child, and the mystery of its descent was never solved. The
+wretched woman was sent to the Island and forgotten.
+
+John D. Wright, a venerable Quaker merchant, was chosen the first
+President of the Society. Upon the original call for the first meeting,
+preserved in the archives of the Society, may still be read a foot-note in
+his handwriting, quaintly amending the date to read, Quaker fashion, "12th
+mo. 15th 1874." A year later, in his first review of the work that was
+before the young society, he wrote, "Ample laws have been passed by the
+Legislature of this State for the protection of and prevention of cruelty
+to little children. The trouble seems to be that it is nobody's business
+to enforce them. Existing societies have as much, nay more to do than they
+can attend to in providing for those entrusted to their care. The Society
+for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children proposes to enforce by lawful
+means and with energy those laws, not vindictively, not to gain public
+applause, but to convince those who cruelly ill-treat and shamefully
+neglect little children that the time has passed when this can be done, in
+this State at least, with impunity."
+
+The promise has been faithfully kept. The old Quaker is dead, but his work
+goes on. The good that he did lives after him, and will live forever. The
+applause of the crowd his Society has not always won; but it has merited
+the confidence and approval of all right-thinking and right-feeling men.
+Its aggressive advocacy of defenceless childhood, always and everywhere,
+is to-day reflected from the statute-books of every State in the American
+Union, and well-nigh every civilized government abroad, in laws that
+sprang directly from its fearless crusade.
+
+In theory it had always been the duty of the State to protect the child
+"in person, and property, and in its opportunity for life, liberty, and
+happiness," even against a worthless parent; in practice it held to the
+convenient view that, after all, the parent had the first right to the
+child and knew what was best for it. The result in many cases was thus
+described in the tenth annual report of the Society by President Elbridge
+T. Gerry, who in 1879 had succeeded Mr. Wright and has ever since been so
+closely identified with its work that it is as often spoken of nowadays as
+Mr. Gerry's Society as under its corporate name:
+
+     "Impecunious parents drove them from their miserable homes at all
+     hours of the day and night to beg and steal. They were trained as
+     acrobats at the risk of life and limb, and beaten cruelly if they
+     failed. They were sent at night to procure liquor for parents too
+     drunk to venture themselves into the streets. They were drilled in
+     juvenile operas and song-and-dance variety business until their
+     voices were cracked, their growth stunted, and their health
+     permanently ruined by exposure and want of rest. Numbers of young
+     Italians were imported by _padroni_ under promises of a speedy
+     return, and then sent out on the streets to play on musical
+     instruments, to peddle flowers and small wares to the passers-by, and
+     too often as a cover for immorality. Their surroundings were those of
+     vice, profanity, and obscenity. Their only amusements were the
+     dance-halls, the cheap theatres and museums, and the saloons. Their
+     acquaintances were those hardened in sin, and both boys and girls
+     soon became adepts in crime, and entered unhesitatingly on the
+     downward path. Beaten and abused at home, treated worse than
+     animals, no other result could be expected. In the prisons, to which
+     sooner or later these unhappy children gravitated, there was no
+     separation of them from hardened criminals. Their previous education
+     in vice rendered them apt scholars in the school of crime, and they
+     ripened into criminals as they advanced in years."
+
+
+[Illustration: CASE NO. 25,745 ON THE SOCIETY BLOTTER: ANNIE WOLFF, AGED
+SEVEN YEARS, AS SHE WAS DRIVEN FORTH BY HER CRUEL STEP-MOTHER, BEATEN AND
+STARVED, WITH HER ARMS TIED UPON HER BACK; AND AS SHE APPEARED AFTER SIX
+MONTHS IN THE SOCIETY'S CARE.]
+
+
+All that has not been changed in the seventeen years that have passed; to
+remodel depraved human nature has been beyond the power of the Society;
+but step by step under its prompting the law has been changed and
+strengthened; step by step life has been breathed into its dead letter,
+until now it is as able and willing to protect the child against violence
+or absolute cruelty as the Society is to enforce its protection. There is
+work enough for it to do yet. I have outlined some in the preceding
+chapters. In the past year (1891) it investigated 7,695 complaints and
+rescued 3,683 children from pernicious surroundings, some of them from a
+worse fate than death. "But let it not be supposed from this," writes the
+Superintendent, "that crimes of and against children are on the increase.
+As a matter of fact wrongs to children have been materially lessened in
+New York by the Society's action and influence during the past seventeen
+years. Some have entirely disappeared, having been eradicated root and
+branch from New York life, and an influence for good has been felt by the
+children themselves, as shown by the great diminution in juvenile
+delinquency from 1875, when the Society was first organized, to 1891, the
+figures indicating a decrease of fully fifty per cent."[18]
+
+Other charitable efforts, working along the same line, contributed their
+share, perhaps the greater, to the latter result, but the Society's
+influence upon the environment that shapes the childish mind and
+character, as well as upon the child itself, is undoubted. It is seen in
+the hot haste with which a general cleaning up and setting to rights is
+begun in a block of tenement barracks the moment the "cruelty man" heaves
+in sight; in the "holy horror" the child-beater has of him and his
+mission, and in the altered attitude of his victim, who not rarely
+nowadays confronts his tormentor with the threat, "if you do that I will
+go to the Children's Society," always effective except when drink blinds
+the wretch to consequences.
+
+The Society had hardly been in existence four years when it came into
+collision with the padrone and his abominable system of child slavery.
+These traders in human misery, adventurers of the worst type, made a
+practice of hiring the children of the poorest peasants in the Neapolitan
+mountain districts, to serve them begging, singing, and playing in the
+streets of American cities. The contract was for a term of years at the
+end of which they were to return the child and pay a fixed sum, a
+miserable pittance, to the parents for its use, but, practically, the
+bargain amounted to a sale, except that the money was never paid. The
+children left their homes never to return. They were shipped from Naples
+to Marseilles, and made to walk all the way through France, singing,
+playing, and dancing in the towns and villages through which they passed,
+to a seaport where they embarked for America. Upon their arrival here they
+were brought to a rendezvous in some out-of-the-way slum and taken in hand
+by the padrone, the partner of the one who had hired them abroad. He sent
+them out to play in the streets by day, singing and dancing in tune to
+their alleged music, and by night made them perform in the lowest dens in
+the city. All the money they made the padrone took from them, beating and
+starving them if they did not bring home enough. None of it ever reached
+their parents. Under this treatment the boys grew up thieves--the girls
+worse. The life soon wore them out, and the Potter's Field claimed them
+before their term of slavery was at an end, according to the contract. In
+far-off Italy the simple peasants waited anxiously for the return of
+little Tomaso or Antonia with the coveted American gold. No word ever came
+of them.
+
+The vile traffic had been broken up in England only to be transferred to
+America. The Italian government had protested. Congress had passed an act
+making it a felony for anyone knowingly to bring into the United States
+any person inveigled or forcibly kidnapped in any other country, with the
+intent to hold him here in involuntary service. But these children were
+not only unable to either speak or understand English, they were
+compelled, under horrible threats, to tell anyone who asked that the
+padrone was their father, brother, or other near relative. To get the
+evidence upon which to proceed against the padrone was a task of exceeding
+difficulty, but it was finally accomplished by co-operation of the Italian
+government with the Society's agents in the case of the padrone Ancarola,
+who, in November, 1879, brought over from Italy seven boy slaves, between
+nine and thirteen years old, with their outfit of harps and violins. They
+were seized, and the padrone, who escaped from the steamer, was arrested
+in a Crosby Street groggery five days later. Before a jury in the United
+States Court the whole vile scheme was laid bare. One of the boys
+testified that Ancarola had paid his mother 20 lire (about four dollars)
+and his uncle 60 lire. For this sum he was to serve the padrone four
+years. Ancarola was convicted and sent to the penitentiary. The children
+were returned to their homes.
+
+The news travelled slowly on the other side. For years the padrone's
+victims kept coming at intervals, but the society's agents were on the
+watch, and when the last of the kidnappers was sent to prison in 1885
+there was an end of the business. The excitement attending the trial and
+the vigor with which the society had pushed its pursuit of the rascally
+padrone drew increased attention to its work. At the end of the following
+year twenty-four societies had been organized in other States upon its
+plan, and half the governments of Europe were enacting laws patterned
+after those of New York State. To-day there are a hundred societies for
+the prevention of cruelty to children in this country, independent of each
+other but owning the New York Society as their common parent, and nearly
+twice as many abroad, in England, France, Italy, Spain, the West Indies,
+South America, Canada, Australia, etc. The old link that bound the dumb
+brute with the helpless child in a common bond of humane sympathy has
+never been broken. Many of them include both in their efforts, and all the
+American societies, whether their care be children or animals, are united
+in an association for annual conference and co-operation, called the
+American Humane Association.
+
+In seventeen years the Society has investigated 61,749 complaints of
+cruelly to children, involving 185,247 children, prosecuted 21,282
+offenders, and obtained 20,697 convictions. The children it has saved and
+released numbered at the end of the year 1891 no less than 32,633.
+Whenever it has been charged with erring it has been on the side of mercy
+for the helpless child. It follows its charges into the police courts,
+seeing to it that, if possible, no record of crime is made against the
+offending child and that it is placed at once where better environment may
+help bring out the better side of its nature. It follows them into the
+institutions to which they are committed through its care, and fights
+their battles there, if need be, or the battles of their guardians under
+the law, against the greed of parents that would sacrifice the child's
+prospects in life for the sake of the few pennies it could earn at home.
+And it generally wins the fight.
+
+The Society has never received any financial support from the city, but
+has depended entirely upon private benevolence. Ample means have always
+been at its disposal. Last year it sheltered, fed, and clothed 1,697
+children in its rooms. Most of them were the victims of drunken parents.
+With the Society they found safe shelter. "Sometimes," Superintendent
+Jenkins says, "the children cry when they are brought here. They always
+cry when they go away."
+
+"Lastly," so ran the old Quaker merchant's address in his first annual
+report, "this Society, so far from interfering with the numerous societies
+and institutions already existing, is intended to aid them in their noble
+work. It proposes to labor in the interest of no one religious
+denomination, and to keep entirely free from political influences of every
+kind. Its duties toward the children whom it may rescue will be discharged
+when the future custody of them is decided by the courts of justice."
+Before the faithful adherence to that plan all factious or sectarian
+opposition that impedes and obstructs so many other charities has fallen
+away entirely. Humanity is the religion of the Children's Society. In its
+Board of Directors are men of all nationalities and of every creed. Its
+fundamental doctrine is that every rescued child must be given finally
+into the keeping of those of its own faith who will carry on the work
+begun in its rescue. Beyond that point the Society does not go. It has
+once refused the gift of a sea-side home lest it become a rival in a field
+where it would render only friendly counsel and aid.
+
+In the case of the little John Does a doubt arises which the Society
+settles by passing them on to the best institution available for each
+particular child, quite irrespective of sect. There are thirteen of them
+by this time, waifs found in the street by the Society's agents or friends
+and never claimed by anybody. Though passed on, in the plan of the Society
+from which it never deviates, to be cared for by others, they are never
+lost sight of but always considered its special charges, for whom it bears
+a peculiar responsibility.
+
+Poor little Carmen, of whom I spoke in the chapter about Italian children,
+was one of the Society's wards. Its footprints may be found all through
+these pages. To its printed reports, with their array of revolting cruelty
+and neglect, the reader is referred who would fully understand what a gap
+in a Christian community it bridges over.
+
+[Illustration: CLUB WITH WHICH A FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD WAS BRUTALLY
+BEATEN.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE STORY OF THE FRESH AIR FUND
+
+
+The last echoes of the storm raised by the story of little Mary Ellen had
+not died in the Pennsylvania hills when a young clergyman in the obscure
+village of Sherman preached to his congregation one Sunday morning from
+the text, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these
+least, ye did it unto me," a sermon which in its far-reaching effects was
+to become one of the strongest links in the chain of remorseful human
+sympathy then being forged in the fires of public indignation. Willard
+Parsons was a man with a practical mind as well as an open heart. He had
+lived in the city and had witnessed the suffering of the poor children in
+the stony streets on the hot summer days. Out there in the country he saw
+the wild strawberry redden the fields in June only to be trampled down by
+the cattle, saw, as the summer wore on, the blackberry-vines by the
+wayside groaning under their burden of sweet fruit, unconsidered and going
+to waste, with this starved host scarce a day's journey away. Starved in
+body, in mind, and in soul! Not for them was the robin's song _they_
+scarcely heard; not for them the summer fields or the cool forest shade,
+the sweet smell of briar and fern. Theirs was poverty and want, and heat
+and suffering and death--death as the entrance to a life for which the
+slum had been their only preparation. And such a preparation!
+
+All this the young preacher put in his sermon, and as he saw the love that
+went out from his own full heart kindling in the eager faces of his
+listeners, he told them what had been in his mind on many a lonely walk
+through those fields: that while the flowers and the brook and the trees
+might not be taken to the great prison-pen where the children were, these
+might be brought out to enjoy them there. There was no reason why it
+should not be done, even though it had not been before. If they were poor
+and friendless and starved, yet there had been One even poorer, more
+friendless than they. They at least had their slum. He had not where to
+lay his head. Well they might, in receiving the children into their homes,
+be entertaining angels unawares. "Inasmuch as ye did it unto even the
+least of these, ye did it unto Me."
+
+The last hymn had been sung and the congregation had gone home, eagerly
+discussing their pastor's new scheme; but a little company of men and
+women remained behind in the church to talk it over with the minister.
+They were plain people. The sermon had shown them a plain duty to be done,
+and they knew only one way: to do it. The dinner-hour found them there
+yet, planning and talking it over. It was with a light heart that, as a
+result of their talk, the minister set out for New York the day after with
+an invitation to the children of the slums to come out in the woods and
+see how beautiful God had made his world. They were to be the guests of
+the people of Sherman for a fortnight, and a warm welcome awaited them
+there. A right royal one they received when, in a few days, the pastor
+returned, bringing with him nine little waifs, the poorest and the
+neediest he had found in the tenements to which he went with his offer.
+They were not such children as the farm-folk thereabouts saw every day,
+but they took them into their homes, and their hearts warmed to them day
+by day as they saw how much they needed their kindness, how under its
+influence they grew into bright and happy children like their own; and
+when, at the end of the two weeks, nine brown-faced laughing boys and
+girls went back to tell of the wondrous things they had heard and seen, it
+was only to make room for another little band. Nor has ever a summer
+passed since that first, which witnessed sixty city urchins made happy at
+Sherman, that has not seen the hospitable houses of the Pennsylvania
+village opened to receive holiday parties like those from the slums of the
+far city.
+
+Thus modestly began the Fresh Air movement that has brought health and
+happiness to more than a hundred thousand of New York's poor children
+since, and has spread far and near, not only through our own but to
+foreign lands, wherever there is poverty to relieve and suffering to
+soothe. It has literally grown up around the enthusiasm and practical
+purpose of the one man whose personality pervades it to this day. Willard
+Parsons preaches now to a larger flock than any church could contain, but
+the burden of his sermon is ever the same. From the _Tribune_ office he
+issues his appeals each spring, and money comes in abundance to carry on
+the work in which city and country vie with each other to lend a hand.
+After that first season at Sherman, a New York newspaper, the _Evening
+Post_, took the work under its wing and raised the necessary funds until
+in 1882 it passed into the keeping of its neighbor, the _Tribune_. Ever
+since it has been known as the _Tribune_ Fresh Air Fund, and year by year
+has grown in extent and importance until at the end of the year 1891 more
+than 94,000 children were shown to have been given a two weeks' vacation
+in the country in the fifteen summers that had passed. The original 60 of
+1877 had grown to an army of holiday-makers numbering 13,568 in 1891. By
+this time the hundred thousand mark has long been passed. The total amount
+of money expended in sending the children out was $250,633.88, and so well
+had the great fund been managed that the average cost per child had fallen
+from $3.12 in the first year to $2.07 in the last. Generalship, indeed, of
+the highest order was needed at the headquarters of this army. In that
+summer there was not a day except Sunday when less than seven companies
+were sent out from the city. The little knot of children that hung timidly
+to the skirts of the good minister's coat on that memorable first trip to
+Pennsylvania had been swelled until special trains, once of as many as
+eighteen cars, were in demand to carry those who came after.
+
+The plan of the Fresh Air Fund is practically unchanged from the day it
+was first conceived. The neediest and poorest are made welcome. Be they
+Protestants, Catholics, Jews, or heathen, it matters not if an invitation
+is waiting. The supply is governed entirely by the demands that come from
+the country. Sometimes it is a Catholic community that asks for children
+of that faith, sometimes prosperous Jews, who would bring sunlight and
+hope even to Ludlow Street; rarely yet Italians seeking their own. The cry
+of the missionary, from the slums in the hot July days: "How shall we give
+those babies the breath of air that means life?--no one asks for Italian
+children," has not yet been answered. Prejudice dies slowly. When an end
+has been made of this at last, the Fresh Air Fund will receive a new boom.
+To my mind there are no more tractable children than the little Italians,
+none more grateful for kindness; certainly none more in need of it.
+Against colored children there is no prejudice. Sometimes an invitation
+comes from Massachusetts or some other New England State for them, and
+then the missions and schools of Thompson Street give up their
+pickaninnies for a gleeful vacation spell. With the first spring days of
+April a canvass of the country within a radius of five hundred miles of
+New York has been begun. By the time the local committees send in their
+returns--so many children wanted in each town or district--the workers
+from the missions, the King's Daughters' circles, the hospitals,
+dispensaries, industrial schools, nurseries, kindergartens, and the other
+gates through which the children's host pours from the tenements, are at
+work, and the task of getting the little excursionists in shape for their
+holiday begins.
+
+
+[Illustration: SUMMER BOARDERS FROM MOTT STREET.]
+
+
+That is the hardest task of all. Places are found for them readily enough;
+the money to pay their way is to be had for the asking; but to satisfy the
+reasonable demand of the country hosts that their little guests shall come
+clean from their tenement homes costs an effort, how great the workers who
+go among those homes "with a Bible in one hand and a pair of scissors and
+a cake of soap in the other" know best. A physician presides over these
+necessary preliminaries. In the months of July and August he is kept
+running from church to hospital, from chapel to nursery, inspecting the
+brigades gathered there and parting the sheep from the goats. With a list
+of the houses in which the health officers report contagious diseases, he
+goes through the ranks. Any hailing from such houses--the list is brought
+up to date every morning--are rejected first. The rest as they pass in
+review are numbered 1 and 2 on the register. The No. 1's are ready to go
+at once if under the age limit of twelve years. They are the sheep, and,
+alas! few in number. Amid wailing and gnashing of teeth the cleansing of
+the goats is then begun. Heads are clipped and faces "planed off."
+Sometimes a second and a third inspection still fails to give the child a
+clean bill of entry. Just what it means is best shown by the following
+extract from a mission worker's report to Mr. Parsons, last summer, of the
+condition of her squad of 110, held under marching orders in an up-town
+chapel:
+
+"All the No. 2's have now been thoroughly oiled, larkspur'd, washed in hot
+suds, and finally had an application of exterminator. This has all been
+done in the church to be as sure as possible that they are safe to send
+away. Ninety have been thus treated." Her experience was typical. Twenty
+No. 1's in a hundred was the average given by one of the oldest workers in
+the Fresh Air Service whose field is in the East Side tenements.
+
+But all this is of the past, as are the long braids of many a little girl,
+sacrificed with tears upon the altar of the coveted holiday, when the
+procession finally starts for the depot, each happy child carrying a
+lunch-bag, for often the journey is long, though never wearisome to the
+little ones. Their chaperon--some student, missionary, teacher, or kind
+man or woman who, for sweet charity's sake, has taken upon him this
+arduous duty--awaits them and keeps the account of his charges as squad
+after squad is dropped at the station to which it is consigned. Sometimes
+the whole party goes in a lump to a common destination, more frequently
+the joyous freight is delivered, as the journey progresses, in this valley
+or that village, where wagons are waiting to receive it and carry it home.
+
+Once there, what wondrous things those little eyes behold, whose horizon
+was limited till that day, likely enough, by the gloom of the filthy
+court, or the stony street upon which it gave, with the gutter the
+boundary line between! The daisies by the roadside, with no sign to warn
+them "off the grass," the birds, the pig in its sty, the cow with its
+bell--each new marvel is hailed with screams of delight. "Sure, heaven
+can't be no nicer place than this," said a little child from one of the
+missions who for the first time saw a whole field of daisies; and her
+fellow-traveller, after watching intently a herd of cows chew the cud
+asked her host, "Say, mister, do you have to buy gum for all them cows to
+chew?"
+
+The children sent out by the Fresh Air Fund go as guests always. No penny
+of it is spent in paying for board. It goes toward paying their way only.
+Most of the railroad companies charge only one-fourth of the regular fare
+for the little picnickers up to the maximum of $3.50; beyond that they
+carry them without increase within the five hundred mile limit. Last year
+Mr. Parsons' wards were scattered over the country from the White
+Mountains in the East to Western Pennsylvania, from the lakes to West
+Virginia. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, New York,
+New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia were hosts, and
+Canada entertained one large party. Ohio and North Carolina were on the
+list of entertainers, but the way was too long for the children. The
+largest party that went out comprised eleven hundred little summer
+boarders.
+
+Does any good result to the children? The physical effect may be summed up
+in Dr. Daniel's terse statement, after many years of practical interest in
+the work: "I believe the Fresh Air Fund is the best plaster we have for
+the unjust social condition of the people." She spoke as a doctor,
+familiar with the appearance of the children when they went out and when
+they came back. There are not wanting professional opinions showing most
+remarkable cures to have resulted from even this brief respite from the
+slum. The explanation is simple: it was the slum that was the real
+complaint; with it the cause was removed and improvement came with a
+bound. As to the moral and educational effect, Mr. Parsons thus answers a
+clergyman who objected that "it will only make the child discontented with
+the surroundings where God placed him:"
+
+"I contend that a great gain has been made if you can only succeed in
+making the tenement-house child thoroughly discontented with his lot.
+There is some hope then of his getting out of it and rising to a higher
+plane. The new life he sees in the country, the contact with good people,
+not at arm's length, but in their homes; not at the dinner, feast, or
+entertainment given to him while the giver stands by and looks _down_ to
+see how he enjoys it, and remarks on his forlorn appearance; but brought
+into the family and given a seat at the table, where, as one boy wrote
+home, 'I can have two pieces of pie if I want, and nobody says nothing if
+I take three pieces of cake;' or, as a little girl reported, where 'We
+have lots to eat, and so much to eat that we could not tell you how much
+we get to eat.'
+
+"This is quite a different kind of service, and has resulted in the
+complete transformation of many a child. It has gone back to its
+wretchedness, to be sure, but in hundreds of instances about which I have
+personally known, it has returned with head and heart full of new ways,
+new ideas of decent living, and has successfully taught the shiftless
+parents the better way."
+
+The host's side of it is presented by a pastor in Northern New York, whose
+people had entertained a hundred children: "They have left a rich blessing
+behind them," he wrote, "and they actually gave more than they received.
+They have touched the hearts of the people and opened the fountains of
+love, sympathy, and charity. The people have read about the importance of
+benevolence, and have heard many sermons on the beauty of charity; but
+these have been quickly forgotten. The children have been an object-lesson
+that will long live in their hearts and minds."
+
+Not least among the blessings of the Fresh Air work has been the drawing
+closer in a common interest and sympathy of the classes that are drifting
+farther and farther apart so fast, as wealth and poverty both increase
+with the growth of our great cities. Each year the invitations to the
+children have come in greater numbers. Each year the fund has grown
+larger, and as yet no collector has ever been needed or employed. "I can
+recall no community," says Mr. Parsons, "where hospitality has been given
+once, but that some children have been invited back the following years."
+In at least one instance of which he tells, the farmer's family that
+nursed a poor consumptive girl back to health and strength did entertain
+an angel unawares. They were poor themselves in their way, straining every
+nerve to save enough to pay interest on a mortgage and thus avert the sale
+of their farm. A wealthy and philanthropic lady, who became interested in
+the girl after her return from her six weeks' vacation, heard the story of
+their struggle and saved the farm in the eleventh hour.
+
+What sort of a gap the Fund sometimes bridges over the following instance
+from its report for 1891 gives a feeble idea of: "Something less than a
+year ago a boy from this family fell out of an upper-story window and was
+killed. Later on, a daughter in the same family likewise fell out of a
+window, sustaining severe injuries, but she is still alive. About this
+same time a baby came and the father had to quit work and stay at home to
+see that all was well with the mother. By the time she was well, the
+father was stricken down with a fever. On his recovery he went to hunt
+another job. On the first day at work a brick fell off a scaffold and
+fractured his skull. That night the _Tribune_ Fresh Air Fund came to the
+rescue and relieved the almost distracted mother by sending four of her
+children to the country for two weeks. The little ones made so many good
+friends that the family is now well provided for."
+
+From Mr. Parsons' record of "cases" that have multiplied in fifteen years
+until they would fill more than one stout volume, this one is taken as a
+specimen brick:
+
+In the earlier days of the work a bright boy of ten was one of a company
+invited to Schoharie County, N. Y. He endeared himself so thoroughly to
+his entertainers, who "live in a white house with green blinds and
+Christmas-trees all around it," that they asked and received permission to
+keep the lad permanently. The following is an exact copy of a part of the
+letter he wrote home after he had been for a few months in his new home:
+
+     DEAR MOTHER: i am still to Mrs. D---- and i was so Busy that i Could
+     not Write Sooner i drive the horses and put up the Cows and clean out
+     the Cow Stable i am all well i pick stones and i have an apple tree 6
+     Feet High and i have got a pair of new pants and a new Coat and a
+     pair of Suspenders and Mr. D---- is getting a pair of New Boots made
+     for me We killed one pig and one Cow i am going to plow a little
+     piece of land and plant Some Corn. When Mr. D---- killed the Cow i
+     helped and Mr. D----had to take the Cow skin to be taned to make
+     leather and Mr. D---- gave the man Cow skin for leather to make me
+     Boots i am going to school to-morrow and I want to tell
+     lizzie--pauline--Charlie--Christie--maggie--george and you to all
+     write to me and if they all do when Christmas Comes i will send all
+     of you something nice if my uncle frank comes to see yous you must
+     tell him to write to me i Close my letter
+
+     From your oldest son A----.
+
+
+A year after that time the mother died. Some time afterward an uncle began
+writing for the lad to come back to the city--he coveted his small
+earnings. But the little fellow had sense enough to see that he was better
+off where he was. Finally the uncle went after the boy, and told him his
+brother was dying in the hospital, and was calling constantly for him.
+Under such circumstances his foster parents readily gave him permission to
+return with the uncle for a visit. Before they reached the city the uncle
+told him he should never go back. He sent him to work at Eleventh Avenue
+and Twenty-ninth Street, in a workroom situated in the cellar, and his
+bedroom, like those in most tenement houses, had no outside window. The
+third day he was sent up-stairs on an errand, and as soon as he saw the
+open door he bolted. He remembered that a car that passed Fourth Street
+and Avenue C would take him to the People's Line for Albany. He ran with
+all his might to Fourth Street, and then followed the car-tracks till he
+saw on the large flag "People's Line." He told part of his story to the
+clerk, and finally added, "I am one of Mr. Parsons' Fresh-Air boys and I
+have got to go to Albany." That settled the matter, and the clerk readily
+gave him a pass. A gentleman standing by gave him a quarter for his
+supper. He held on to his appetite as well as his quarter, and in the
+morning laid his twenty-five cents before the ticket agent at Albany, and
+called for a ticket to R----, a small place fifty miles distant. He got
+the ticket. After a few miles' walk from R---- he reached his new home
+safely, and there he proposed to stay. He said he would take to the woods
+if his uncle came after him again. This happened ten years ago.
+
+About a year ago a letter came from the young fellow. He is now an active
+Christian, married, and worth property, and expects in a few years to have
+his farm all paid for.
+
+A hundred benevolent enterprises have clustered about the Fresh Air Fund
+as the years have passed, patterning after it and accepting help from it
+to carry out their own plans. Churches provide excursions for their poor
+children and the Fund pays the way. Vacations for working girls, otherwise
+out of reach, are made attainable by its intervention. An independent
+feature is the _Tribune_ Day Excursion that last summer gave nearly thirty
+thousand poor persons, young and old, a holiday at a beautiful grove on
+the Hudson, with music and milk to their hearts' desire. The expense was
+borne by a wealthy citizen of this city, who gave boats, groves, and
+entertainment free of charge, stipulating only that his name should not be
+disclosed.
+
+Other cities have followed the example of New York. Boston and
+Philadelphia have their "Country Week," fashioned after the Fresh Air Fund
+idea. Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other cities clear to San
+Francisco have sent committees to examine its workings, and deputations
+have come from Canada, from London and Manchester, where the holiday work
+is doing untold good and is counted among the most useful of philanthropic
+efforts. German, Austrian, and Italian cities have fallen into line, and
+the movement has spread even to the Sandwich Islands. Yet this great work,
+as far as New York, where it had its origin, is concerned, has never had
+organization or staff of officers of any sort. Three well-known citizens
+audit Mr. Parsons' accounts once a year. The rest he manages and always
+has managed himself. "The constitution and by-laws," he says, drily, "are
+made and amended from day to day as required, and have yet to be written."
+The Fresh Air Fund rests firmly upon a stronger foundation than any human
+law or enactment. Its charter was written in the last commandment that is
+the sum of all the rest: "That ye love one another."
+
+The method of the Fresh Air Fund was and is its great merit. Its plan,
+when first presented, was unique. There had been other and successful
+efforts before that to give the poor in their vile dwellings an outing in
+the dog days, but they took the form rather of organized charities than of
+this spontaneous outpouring of good-will and fellowship between brother
+and brother: "My house and my home are yours; come and see me!" The New
+York _Times_ had conducted a series of free excursions, and three summers
+before Mr. Parsons preached his famous sermon, the Children's Aid Society,
+that had battled for twenty years with the slum for the possession of the
+child, had established a Health Home down the Bay, to which it welcomed
+the children from its Industrial schools and the sick babies that were
+gathered in by its visiting physicians. This work has grown steadily in
+extent and importance with the new interest in the poor and their lives
+that has characterized our generation. To-day the Society conducts a
+Summer Home at Bath Beach where the girls are given a week's vacation, and
+the boys a day's outing; a cottage for crippled girls, and at Coney Island
+a Health Home for mothers with sick children. Sick and well, some ten
+thousand little ones were reached by them last year. The delight of a
+splash in the "big water" every day is the children's at Bath. Two
+hundred at a time, the boys plunge in headlong and strike out manfully for
+the Jersey shore, thirteen miles away; but the recollection of the
+merry-go-round with the marvellous wooden beasts, the camera obscura, the
+scups, and the flying machine on shore, not to mention the promised
+lemonade and cake, makes them turn back before yet they have reached the
+guard-boat where they cease to touch bottom. The girls, less boisterous,
+but quite as happy, enjoy the sight of the windmill "where they make the
+wind that makes it so nice and cool," the swings and the dinner, rarely
+forgetting, at first, after eating as much as they can possibly hold, to
+hide something away for their next meal, lest the unexampled abundance
+give out too soon. That it should last a whole week seems to them too
+unreasonable to risk.
+
+
+[Illustration: MAKING FOR THE "BIG WATER."]
+
+
+At the Health Home more than eighteen hundred sick babies were cared for
+last year. They are carried down, pale and fretful, in their mother's
+arms, and at the end of the week come back running at her side. The effect
+of the sea-air upon a child sick with the summer scourge of the tenements,
+cholera infantum, is little less than miraculous. Even a ride on a river
+ferryboat is often enough to put life into the weary little body again.
+The salt breeze no sooner fans the sunken cheeks than the fretful wail is
+hushed and the baby slumbers, quietly, restfully, to wake with a laugh and
+an appetite, on the way to recovery. The change is so sudden that even the
+mother is often deceived and runs in alarm for the doctor, thinking that
+the end is at hand.
+
+Scores of such scenes are witnessed daily in the floating hospital of St.
+John's Guild, the great marine cradle that goes down the Bay every
+week-day, save Saturday, in July and August, with hundreds upon hundreds
+of wailing babies and their mothers. Twice a week it is the west-siders'
+turn; on three days it gathers its cargo along the East River, where
+crowds with yellow tickets stand anxiously awaiting its arrival. The
+floating hospital carries its own staff of physicians, including a
+member of the Health Department's corps of tenement doctors, who is on the
+lookout for chance contagion. The summer corps is appointed by the Health
+Board upon the approach of hot weather and begins a systematic canvass of
+the tenements immediately after the Fourth of July, followed by the King's
+Daughters' nurses, who take up the doctor's work where he had to leave it.
+With his prescription pad he carries a bunch of tickets for the Floating
+Hospital, and the tickets usually give out first. Any illness that is not
+contagious is the baby's best plea for admission. It never pleads in vain,
+unless it be well and happy, and even then it is allowed to go along, if
+there is no other way for the mother to get off with its sick sister. For
+those who need more than one day's outing, the Guild maintains a Seaside
+hospital, three hours' sail down the Bay, on Staten Island, where mother
+and child may remain without a cent of charge until the rest, the fresh
+air, and the romp on the beach have given the baby back health and
+strength. Opposite the hospital, but out at sea where the breeze has free
+play over the crowded decks, the great hospital barge anchors every day
+while the hungry hosts are fed and the children given a salt-water bath on
+board.
+
+
+[Illustration: FLOATING HOSPITAL--ST. JOHN'S GUILD.]
+
+
+St. John's Guild is not, as some have supposed from its name, a
+denominational charity. It is absolutely neutral in matters of sect and
+religion, leaving the Church to take care of the soul while it heals the
+body of the child. It is so with the Bartholdi Creche on Randall's Island,
+in the shadow of the city's Foundling Hospital, that ferries children over
+the river for a romp on the smooth, green lawns, on presentation of a
+ticket with the suggestive caution printed on the back that "all persons
+behaving rudely or taking liberties will be sent back by the first boat."
+"The Little Mothers" Aid Society follows the same plan in reaching out for
+the little home worker whose work never ends, the girl upon whom falls the
+burden and responsibility of caring for the perennial baby when scarcely
+more than a baby herself, often even the cooking and all the rest of the
+housework so that the mother may have her own hands free to help earn the
+family living. These little slaves the Society drums up, "hires" the baby
+attended in a nursery if need be, and carries the little mother off for a
+day in the woods up at Pelham Bay Park where the Park Commissioners have
+set a house on the beach apart for their use in the summer months. There
+was much opposition to this plan at first among the East Side Jews, whose
+children needed the outing more sorely than any other class; but when a
+few of the more venturesome had come back well-fed, in clean clothes,
+whereas they went out in rags, and reported that they had escaped baptism,
+the sentiment of Ludlow Street underwent a change, and so persistent were
+the raids made upon the Society's chaperones after that that they had to
+take another route for awhile, lest their resources should be swamped in a
+single trip. The United Hebrew Charities, like many other relief societies
+with a special field, provide semi-weekly excursions for the poorest of
+their own people, and maintain a sea-side sanitarium for the sick
+children.
+
+There is no lack of fresh air charities nowadays. Their number is
+increasing year by year and so is their helpfulness, though it has come to
+a pass where it is necessary to exercise some care to prevent them from
+lapping over, as Sunday School Christmas-trees have been known to do, and
+opening the way for mischief. There can be no doubt that their civilizing
+influence is great. It could hardly be otherwise, with the same lessons
+of cleanliness and decency enforced year after year. The testimony is that
+there is an improvement; the children come better "groomed" for
+inspection. The lesson has reached the mother and the home. The subtler
+lesson of the flowers, the fields, the sky, and the sea, and of the
+kindness that asked no reward, has not been lost either. One very striking
+fact this charity has brought out that is most hopeful. It emphasizes the
+difference I pointed out between the material we have here to work upon in
+these children and that which is the despair of philanthropists abroad, in
+England for instance. We are told of children there who, coming from their
+alleys into the field, "are able to feel no touch of kinship between
+themselves and Mother Nature"[19] when brought into her very presence. Not
+so with ours. They may "guess" that the sea is salt because it is full of
+codfish; may insist that the potatoes are home-made "cause I seen the
+garding;" both of which were actual opinions expressed by the Bath Beach
+summer boarders; but the interest, the sympathy, the hearty appreciation
+of it, is there always, the most encouraging symptom of all. Down in the
+worst little ruffian's soul there is, after all, a tender spot not yet
+pre-empted by the slum. And Mother Nature touches it at once. They are
+chums on the minute.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES
+
+
+If the influence of an annual cleaning up is thus distinctly traced in the
+lives of the children, what must be the effect of the daily teaching of
+the kindergarten, in which soap is always the moral agent that leads all
+the rest? I have before me the inventory of purchases for a single school
+of this kind that was started a year ago in a third loft of a Suffolk
+Street tenement. It included several boxes of soap and soap-dishes, 200
+feet of rope, 10 bean-bags, 24 tops, 200 marbles, a box of chalk, a
+base-ball outfit for indoor use, a supply of tiddledywinks and "sliced
+animals," and 20 clay pipes. The pipes were not for lessons in smoking,
+but to smooth the way for a closer acquaintance with the soap by the
+friendly intervention of the soap-bubble. There were other games and no
+end of colored paper to cut up, the dear delight of childhood, but made in
+the hands and under the eyes of the teacher to train eye and hand while
+gently but firmly cementing the friendship ushered in by the gorgeous
+bubble. No wonder, with such a stock, a mother complained that she had to
+whip her Jimmie to keep him home.
+
+Without a doubt the kindergarten is one of the longest steps forward that
+has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for in gathering in the
+children it is gradually, but surely, conquering also the street with its
+power for mischief. There is only one force that, to my mind, exerts an
+even stronger influence upon the boys' lives especially; I mean the club,
+of which I shall speak presently. But that comes at a later stage. The
+kindergarten begins at the very beginning, and in the best of all ways,
+with the children's play. What it does, counts at both ends on that tack.
+Very soon it makes itself felt in the street and in what goes on there, as
+anyone can see for himself by observing the children's play in a tenement
+neighborhood where there is a kindergarten and again where there is none,
+while by imperceptibly turning the play into work that teaches habits of
+observation and of industry that stick, it builds a strong barrier against
+the doctrine of the slum that the world owes one a living, which lies in
+ambush for the lad on every grog-shop corner. And all corners in the
+tenement districts are grog-shop corners. Beyond all other considerations,
+beyond its now admitted function as the right beginning of all education,
+whether of rich or poor, its war upon the street stands to me as the true
+office of the kindergarten in a city like New York, with a tenement-house
+population of a million and a quarter souls.[20] The street itself owns
+it, with virtual surrender. Hostile as its normal attitude is to every new
+agency of reform, the best with the worst, I have yet to hear of the first
+instance in which a kindergarten has been molested by the toughest
+neighborhood, or has started a single dead cat on a post-mortem career of
+window-smashing, whether it sprang from Christian, Jewish, or heathen
+humanity. There is scarce a mission or a boy's club in the city that can
+say as much.
+
+The kindergarten is no longer an experiment in New York. Probably as many
+as a hundred are to-day in operation, or will be when the recently
+expressed purpose of the Board of Education to make the kindergarten a
+part of the public school system has been fully carried out. The
+Children's Aid Society alone conducts a dozen in connection with its
+industrial schools, and the New York Kindergarten Association nine, if its
+intention of opening two new schools by the time this book is in the
+printer's hands is realized. There is no theology, though there is a heap
+of religion in most of them. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Theosophists,
+and Ethical Culturists, if I may so call them, men of one or of various
+opinions, or of none, concerning the hereafter, alike make use of the
+kindergarten as a means of reaching and saving the shipwrecked of the
+present. Sometimes the Sunday School is made to serve as a feeder for the
+kindergarten, or the kindergarten for the Sunday School. Sometimes the
+wisdom that wrests success from doubt and perplexity is expressed in the
+fundamental resolution that the kindergarten "shall not be a Sunday
+School." The system is the same in all cases with very little change. "We
+have tried it and seen it tried with various kinks and variations," said
+one of the old managers of the Children's Aid Society to me, "but after
+all there is only one way, the way of the great kindergartner who said,
+'We learn by doing.'"
+
+A clean face is the ticket of admission to the kindergarten. A clean or
+whole frock is wisely not insisted upon too firmly at the start; torn or
+dirty clothes are not so easily mended as a smudged face, but the
+kindergarten reaches that too in the end, and by the same road as the
+Fresh Air scrubbing--the home. Once he is let in, the child is in for a
+general good time that has little of school or visible discipline to
+frighten him. He joins in the ring for the familiar games, delighted to
+find that the teacher knows them too, and can be "It" and his "fair lady"
+in her turn. He does not notice the little changes the game has undergone,
+the kindergarten touch here and there that lifts it out of the mud; but
+the street does presently, when the new version is transferred to it, and
+is the better for it. After the game there are a hundred things for him to
+do that do not seem like work in the least. Between threading colored
+beads, cutting and folding pink and green papers in all sorts of odd
+ways, as boats and butterflies and fancy baskets; moulding, pasting,
+drawing, weaving and blowing soap-bubbles when all the rest has ceased to
+hold his attention, the day slips by like a beautiful dream, and he flatly
+refuses to believe that it is gone when the tenement home claims him
+again. Not infrequently he goes home howling, to be found the next morning
+waiting at the door an hour before the teacher comes. Little Jimmie's
+mother says that he gets up at six o'clock to go to the Fifty-first Street
+kindergarten, and that she has to whip him to make him wait until nine.
+
+
+[Illustration: PLAYING AT HOUSEKEEPING.]
+
+
+The hours pass with happy play that slowly but surely moulds head, hand,
+and heart together. The utmost freedom is allowed, but it stops short of
+the license of the street. Its law of violence is replaced by the law of
+love. The child learns to govern himself. Not at once; I observed two or
+three black eyes during a tour of a half-score kindergartens, last June,
+that showed that the street yielded its reign reluctantly. During my visit
+to the East Sixty-third Street school I became interested in a little
+fellow who was its special pet and the ward of the Alumnae of the Normal
+college, who through the New York Kindergarten Association had established
+and maintained the school. Johnny was a sweet little fellow, one of eight
+children from a wretched tenement home down the street into which the
+kindergartner had found her way. The youngest of the eight was a baby that
+was getting so big and heavy that it half killed the mother to drag it
+around when she went out working, and the father, with a consideration for
+her that was generously tempered with laziness, was considering the
+advisability of staying home to take care of it himself, "so as to give
+her a show." There was a refinement of look and manner, if not of dress,
+about little Johnny after he was washed clean, that made the tenement
+setting seem entirely too plebeian for him, and his rescuers had high
+hopes of his future. I regret to say that I saw the pet, before I left,
+deliberately knock the smallest baby in the school down, and when he was
+banished from the ring in consequence and condemned to take his howling
+playmate over in the corner and show her pictures until he repented, take
+an unworthy revenge by pinching her surreptitiously until she howled
+louder. Worse than that, when the baby had finally been comforted with a
+headless but squeaking toy sheep, he secretly pulled the insides and the
+ba-a out of the lambkin through its broken neck, when no one was looking.
+I was told that Johnny was believed to have the making of a diplomat in
+his little five-year-old body, and I think it very likely--of a politician
+anyway.
+
+While this was going on, another boy, twice as large as Johnny, had been
+temporarily exiled from the ring for clumsiness. It was even more
+hopelessly constitutional, to all appearances, than Johnny's Machiavelian
+cunning. In the game he had persistently stumbled over his own feet. Made
+to take a seat at the long table, he fell off his chair twice in one
+minute from sheer embarrassment. In luminous contrast to his awkwardness
+was the desperate agility of a little Irishman I had just left in another
+kindergarten. Each time he was told to take his seat, which was about
+every ten seconds, he would perform the feat with great readiness by
+climbing over the back of the chair as a dog climbs over a fence, to the
+consternation of the teacher, whose reproachful "O Alexander!" he disarmed
+with a cheerful "I'm all right, Miss Brown," and an offer to shake hands.
+
+Let it not be inferred from this that the kindergarten is the home of
+disorder. Just the reverse. Order and prompt obedience are the cardinal
+virtues taught there, but taught in such a way as to make the lesson seem
+all fun and play to the child. It sticks all the better. It is the
+province of the kindergarten to rediscover, as it were, the natural
+feelings the tenement had smothered. But for its appeal, the love of the
+beautiful might slumber in those children forever. In their homes there is
+nothing to call it into life. The ideal of the street is caricature,
+burlesque, if nothing worse. Under the gentle training of the
+kindergartner the slumbering instinct blossoms forth in a hundred
+different ways, from the day the little one first learns the difference
+between green and red by stringing colored beads for a necklace "for
+teacher," until later on he is taught to make really pretty things of
+pasteboard and chips to take home for papa and mamma to keep. And they do
+keep them, proud of the child--who would not?--and their influence is felt
+where mayhap there was darkness and dirt only before. So the kindergarten
+reaches directly into the home, too, and thither follows the teacher, if
+she is the right kind, with encouragement and advice that is not lost
+either. No door is barred against her who comes in the children's name. In
+the truest and best sense she is a missionary to the poor.
+
+Nearly all the kindergartens in this city are crowded. Many have scores of
+applicants upon the register whom they cannot receive. There are no
+truants among their pupils. All of the New York Kindergarten Association's
+schools are crowded, and new are added as fast as the necessary funds are
+contributed. The Association was organized in the fall of 1889 with the
+avowed purpose of engrafting the kindergarten upon the public school
+system of the city, through persistent agitation. There had been no
+official recognition of it up till that time. The Normal School
+kindergarten was an experiment not countenanced by the School Board. The
+Association has now accomplished its purpose, but its work, far from being
+ended, has but just begun. It is doubtful if all the kindergartens in the
+city, including those now in the public schools, accommodate much more
+than five or six thousand children, if that number. The last sanitary
+census showed that there were 160,708 children under five years old in the
+tenements. At least half of these are old enough to be in a kindergarten,
+and ought to be, seeing how little schooling they will get after they
+outgrow it. That leaves in round numbers 75,000 children yet to be so
+provided for in New York's tenements. There is no danger that the
+kindergarten will become too "common" in this city for a while yet. As an
+adjunct to the public school in preparing the young minds for more serious
+tasks, it is admitted by teachers to be most valuable. But its greatest
+success is as a jail deliverer. "The more kindergartens the fewer prisons"
+is a saying the truth of which the generation that comes after us will be
+better able to grasp than we.
+
+The kindergarten is the city's best truant officer. Not only has it no
+truants itself, but it ferrets out a lot who are truants from necessity,
+not from choice, and delivers them over to the public school. There are
+lots of children who are kept at home because someone has to mind the baby
+while father and mother earn the bread for the little mouths. The
+kindergarten steps in and releases these little prisoners. If the baby is
+old enough to hop around with the rest, the kindergarten takes it. If it
+can only crawl and coo, there is the nursery annex. Sometimes it is an
+independent concern. Almost every church or charity that comes into
+direct touch with the poor has nowadays its nursery where poor mothers may
+leave their children to be cared for while they are out working. Relief
+more practical could not be devised. A small fee, usually five cents, is
+charged as a rule for each baby. Pairs come cheaper, and three go for ten
+cents at the nursery in the Wilson mission. Over 50,000 babies were
+registered there last year, which meant, if not 5,000 separate children,
+at least 5,000 days' work and wages to poor mothers in dire need of both,
+and a good, clean, healthy start for the infants, a better than the
+tenement could have given them. To keep them busy, when the rocking-horse
+and the picture-book have lost their charm, the kindergarten grows
+naturally out of the nursery, where that was the beginning, just as the
+nursery stepped in to supplement the kindergarten where that had the lead.
+The two go hand in hand. The soap cure is even more potent in the nursery
+than in the kindergarten, as a silent rebuke to the mother, who rarely
+fails to take the hint. At the Five Points House of Industry the children
+who come in for the day receive a general scrubbing twice a week, and the
+whole neighborhood has a cleaner look after it. The establishment has come
+to be known among the ragamuffins of Paradise Park as "the school where
+dey washes 'em." Its value as a moral agent may be judged from the
+statements of the Superintendent that some of the children "cried at the
+sight of a washtub," as if it were some new and hideous instrument of
+torture for their oppression.
+
+Private benevolence in this, as in all measures for the relief of the
+poor, has been a long way ahead of public action; properly so, though it
+has seemed sometimes that we might as a body make a little more haste and
+try to catch up. It has lately, by the establishment of children's
+play-grounds in certain tenement districts, west and east, provided a kind
+of open-air kindergarten that has hit the street in a vital spot. These
+play-grounds do not take the place of the small parks which the city has
+neglected to provide, but they show what a boon these will be some day.
+There are at present, as far as I know, three of them, not counting the
+back-yard "beaches" and "Coney Islands," that have made the practical
+missionaries of the College Settlement, the King's Daughters' Tenement
+Chapter, and like helpers of the poor, solid with their little friends.
+One of them, the largest, is in Ninety-second Street, on the East Side,
+another at the foot of West Fiftieth Street, and still another in West
+Twenty-eighth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, the block long
+since well named Poverty Gap. Two, three, or half a dozen vacant lots,
+borrowed or leased of the owner, have been levelled out, a few loads of
+sand dumped in them for the children to dig in; scups, swings, and
+see-saws, built of rough timber; a hydrant in the corner; little
+wheelbarrows, toy-spades and pails to go round, and the outfit is
+complete. Two at least of the three are supported each by a single
+generous woman, who pays the salaries of a man janitor and of two women
+"teachers" who join in the children's play, strike up "America" and the
+"Star Spangled Banner" when they tire of "Sally in our Alley" and
+"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," and by generally taking a hand in what goes on
+manage to steer it into safe and mannerly ways.
+
+
+[Illustration: POVERTY GAPPERS PLAYING CONEY ISLAND.]
+
+
+More than two hundred children were digging, swinging, see-sawing, and
+cavorting about the Poverty Gap playground when I looked in on a hot
+Saturday afternoon last July. Long files of eager girls, whose shrill
+voices used to make the echoes of the Gap ring with angry clamor, awaited
+their turn at the scups, quiet as mice and without an ill word when they
+trod upon each other's toes. The street that used to swarm with
+mischievous imps was as quiet as a church. The policeman on the beat stood
+swinging his club idly in the gate. It was within sight of this spot that
+the Alley Gang beat one of his comrades half to death for telling them to
+go home and let decent people pass; the same gang which afterward murdered
+young Healey for the offence of being a decent, hard-working lad, who was
+trying to support his aged father and mother by his work. The Healeys
+lived in one of the rear houses that stood where the children now skip at
+their play, and the murder was done on his doorstep. The next morning I
+found the gang camping on a vacant floor in the adjoining den, as if
+nothing had happened. The tenants knew the toughs were there, but were
+afraid of betraying them. All that was only a couple of years ago; but a
+marvellous transformation had been wrought in the Gap. The toughs were
+gone, with the old tenements that harbored them. Poverty Gap itself was
+gone. A decent flat had taken the place of the shanty across the street
+where a 'longshoreman kicked his wife to death in drunken rage. And this
+play-ground, with its swarms of happy children who a year ago would have
+pelted the stranger with mud from behind the nearest truck--that was the
+greatest change of all. The retiring toughs have dubbed it "Holy Terror
+Park" in memory of what it was, not of what it is. Poverty Park the
+policeman called it, with more reason. It was not exactly an attractive
+place. A single stunted ailanthus tree struggled over the fence of the
+adjoining yard, the one green spot between ugly and ragged brick walls.
+The "sand" was as yet all mud and dirt, and the dust the many little feet
+kicked up was smothering. But the children thought it lovely, and lovely
+it was for Poverty Gap, if not for Fifth Avenue.
+
+
+[Illustration: POVERTY GAP TRANSFORMED--THE SPOT WHERE YOUNG HEALEY WAS
+MURDERED IS NOW A PLAYGROUND.]
+
+
+I came back to my office to find a letter there from a rich man who lives
+on the Avenue, offering to make another Poverty Park for the
+tenement-house children of another street, if he had to buy the lots. I
+told him the story of Poverty Gap and bade him go and see for himself if
+he could spend his money to better purpose. There are no play-grounds yet
+below Fourteenth Street and room and need for fifty. The Alley and the
+Avenue could not meet on a plane that argues better for the understanding
+between the two that has been too long and needlessly delayed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS
+
+
+That "dirt is a disease," and their mission to cure it, was the new gospel
+which the managers of the Children's Aid Society carried to the slums a
+generation ago. In practice they have not departed from their profession.
+Their pill is the Industrial School, their plaster a Western farm and a
+living chance in exchange for the tenement and the city slum. The
+wonder-cures they have wrought by such simple treatment have been many. In
+the executive chair of a sovereign State sits to-day a young man who
+remembers with gratitude and pride the day they took him in hand and, of
+the material the street would have moulded into a tough, made an honorable
+man and a governor. And from among the men whose careers of usefulness
+began in the Society's schools, and who to-day, as teachers, ministers,
+lawyers, and editors, are conspicuous ornaments of the communities, far
+and near, in which they have made their homes, he would have no difficulty
+in choosing a cabinet that would do credit and honor to his government.
+Prouder monument could be erected to no man's memory than this record at
+the grave of the late Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the Children's
+Aid Society.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE LATE CHARLES LORING BRACE, FOUNDER OF THE CHILDREN'S
+AID SOCIETY.]
+
+
+The Industrial School plants itself squarely in the gap between the
+tenement and the public school. If it does not fill it, it at least
+spreads itself over as much of it as it can, and in that position
+demonstrates that this land of lost or missing opportunities is not the
+barren ground once supposed, but of all soil the most fruitful, if
+properly tilled. Wherever the greatest and the poorest crowds are, there
+also is the Industrial School. The Children's Aid Society maintains
+twenty-one in seventeen of the city's twenty-four wards, not counting
+twelve evening schools, five of which are in the Society's
+lodging-houses. It is not alone in the field. The American Female Guardian
+Society conducts twelve such day schools, and individual efforts in the
+same direction are not wanting. The two societies' schools last year
+reached a total enrolment of nearly fifteen thousand children, and an
+average attendance of almost half that number. Slum children, all of them.
+Only such are sought and admitted. The purpose of the schools, in the
+language of the last report of the Children's Aid Society, whose work,
+still carried on with the aggressive enthusiasm that characterized its
+founder, may well be taken as typical and representative in this field,
+"is to receive and educate children who cannot be accepted by the public
+schools, either by reason of their ragged and dirty condition, or owing to
+the fact that they can attend but part of the time, because they are
+obliged to sell papers or to stay at home to help their parents. The
+children at our schools belong to the lowest and poorest class of people
+in the city." They are children, therefore, who to a very large extent
+speak another language at home than the one they come to the school to
+learn, and often have to work their way in by pantomime. It is encouraging
+to know that these schools are almost always crowded to their utmost
+capacity.
+
+A census of the Society's twenty-one day schools, that was taken last
+April, showed that they contained that day 5,132 pupils, of whom 198 were
+kindergarten children under five years of age, 2,347 between five and
+seven, and 2,587 between eight and fourteen years of age. Considerably
+more than ten per cent.--the exact number was 571--did not understand
+questions put to them in English. They were there waiting to "catch on,"
+silent but attentive observers of what was going on, until such time as
+they should be ready to take a hand in it themselves. Divided according to
+nativity, 2,082 of the children were found to be of foreign birth. They
+hailed from 22 different countries; 3,050 were born in this country, but
+they were able to show only 1,009 native parents out of 6,991 whose
+pedigrees could be obtained. The other 5,176 were foreign born, and only
+810 of them claimed English as their mother-tongue. This was the showing
+the chief nationalities made in the census:
+
+  -------------+---------+--------
+    Born in.   |Children.|Parents.
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  United States|  3,050  | 1,009
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Italy        |  1,066  | 2,354
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Germany      |    460  | 1,819
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Bohemia      |    198  |   720
+  -------------+---------+--------
+  Ireland      |     98  |   583
+  -------------+---------+--------
+
+
+At that time the Jewish children were crowding into the Monroe Street and
+some other schools, at a rate that promised to put them in complete
+possession before long. Upon this lowest level, as upon every other where
+they come into competition with the children of Christian parents, they
+distanced them easily, taking all the prizes that were to be had for
+regular attendance, proficiency in studies, and good conduct generally.
+Generally these prizes consisted of shoes or much-needed clothing. Often,
+as in the Monroe Street School, the bitter poverty of the homes that gave
+up the children to the school because there they would receive the one
+square meal of the day, made a loaf of bread the most acceptable reward,
+and the teachers gladly took advantage of it as the means of forging
+another link in the chain to bind home and school, parents, children, and
+teachers, firmly together.
+
+This "square meal" is a chief element in the educational plan of most of
+the schools, because very often it is the one hot meal the little ones
+receive--not infrequently, as I have said, the only one of the day that is
+worthy of the name. It is not an elaborate or expensive affair, though
+substantial and plentiful. At the West Side Industrial School, on Seventh
+Avenue, where one day, not long ago, I watched a file of youngsters
+crowding into the dining-room with glistening eyes and happy faces, the
+cost of the dinners averaged 2-1/2 cents last year. In a specimen month
+they served there 4,080 meals and compared this showing gleefully with the
+record of the old School in Twenty-ninth Street, nine years before. The
+largest number of dinners served there in any one month, was 2,666. It is
+perhaps a somewhat novel way of measuring the progress of a school: by the
+amount of eating done on the premises. But it is a very practical one, as
+the teachers have found out. Yet it is not used as a bait. Care is taken
+that only those are fed who would otherwise go without their dinner, and
+it is served only in winter, when the need of "something warm" is
+imperative. In the West Side School, as in most of the others, the dinners
+are furnished by some one or more practical philanthropists, whose pockets
+as well as their hearts are in the work. The schools themselves, like the
+Society's lodging-houses for homeless children, stand as lasting monuments
+to a Christian charity that asks no other reward than the consciousness of
+having done good where the need was great. Sometimes the very name of the
+generous giver is unknown to all the world save the men who built as he or
+she directed. The benefactor is quite as often a devoted woman as a rich
+and charitable man, who hides his munificence under a modesty unsuspected
+by a community that applauds and envies his shrewd and successful
+business ventures, but never hears of the investment that paid him and it
+best of all.
+
+According to its location, the school is distinctively Italian, Bohemian,
+Hebrew or mixed; the German, Irish, and colored children coming in under
+this head, and mingling usually without the least friction. The Leonard
+Street School and the West Side Italian School in Sullivan Street are
+devoted wholly to the little swarthy Southerners. In the Leonard Street
+School alone there were between five and six hundred Italian children on
+the register last year; but in the Beach Street School, and in the Astor
+Memorial School in Mott Street they are fast crowding the Irish element,
+that used to possess the land, to the wall. So, in Monroe Street and East
+Broadway are the Jewish children. Neither the teachers nor the Society's
+managers are in any danger of falling into sleepy routine ways. The
+conditions with which they have to deal are constantly changing; new
+problems are given them to solve before the old are fairly worked out, old
+prejudices to be forgotten or worked over into a new and helpful interest.
+And they do it bravely, and are more than repaid for their devotion by the
+real influence they find themselves exerting upon the young lives which
+had never before felt the touch of genuine humane sympathy, or been
+awakened to the knowledge that somebody cared for them outside of their
+own dark slum.
+
+All the children are not as tractable as the Russian Jews or the Italians.
+The little Irishman, brimful of mischief, is, like his father, in the
+school and in the street, "ag'in' the government" on general principles,
+though in a jovial way that often makes it hard to sit in judgment on his
+tricks with serious mien. He feels, too, that to a certain extent he has
+the sympathy of his father in his unregenerate state, and is the more to
+be commended if he subdues the old Adam in himself and allows the
+instruction to proceed. The hardest of them all to deal with, until he has
+been won over as a friend and ally, is perhaps the Bohemian child. He
+inherits, with some of his father's obstinacy, all of his hardships, his
+bitter poverty and grinding work. School to him is merely a change of
+tasks in an unceasing round that leaves no room for play. If he lingers on
+the way home to take a hand in a stolen game of ball, the mother is
+speedily on his track. Her instruction to the teacher is not to let the
+child stay "a minute after three o'clock." He is wanted at home to roll
+cigars or strip tobacco-leaves for his father, while the mother gets the
+evening meal ready. The Bohemian has his own cause for the reserve that
+keeps him a stranger in a strange land after living half his life among
+us; his reception has not been altogether hospitable, and it is not only
+his hard language and his sullen moods that are to blame. All the better
+he knows the value of the privilege that is offered his child, and will
+"drive him to school with sticks" if need be; an introduction that might
+be held to account for a good deal of reasonable reluctance, even
+hostility to the school, in the pupil. The teacher has only to threaten
+the intractable ones with being sent home to bring them round. And yet, it
+is not that they are often cruelly treated there. On the contrary, the
+Bohemian is an exceptionally tender and loving father, perhaps because his
+whole life is lived with his family at home, in the tenement that is his
+shop and his world. He simply proposes that his child shall enjoy the
+advantages that are denied him--denied partly perhaps because of his
+refusal to accept them, but still from his point of view denied. And he
+takes a short cut to that goal by sending the child to school. The result
+is that the old Bohemian disappears in the first generation born upon our
+soil. His temper remains to some extent, it is true. He still has his
+surly streaks, refuses to sing or recite in school when the teacher or
+something else does not suit him, and can never be driven where yet he is
+easily led; but as he graduates into the public school and is thrown more
+into contact with the children of more light-hearted nationalities, he
+grows into that which his father would have long since become, had he not
+got a wrong start: a loyal American, proud of his country, and a useful
+citizen.
+
+In the school in East Seventy-third Street, of which I am thinking, there
+was last winter, besides the day school of some four hundred pupils, an
+evening class of big factory girls, most of them women grown, that vividly
+illustrated the difficulties that beset teaching in the Bohemian quarter.
+It had been got together with much difficulty by the principal and one of
+the officers of the Society, who gave up his nights and his own home life
+to the work of instructing the school. On the night when it opened, he was
+annoyed by a smell of tobacco in the hallways and took the janitor to task
+for smoking in the building. The man denied the charge, and Mr. H---- went
+hunting through the house for the offender with growing indignation, as he
+found the teachers in the class-rooms sneezing and sniffing the air to
+locate the source of the infliction. It was not until later in the
+evening, when the sneezing fit took him too as he was bending over a group
+of the girls to examine their slates, that he discovered it to be a
+feature of the new enterprise. The perfume was part of the school. Without
+it, it could not go on. The girls were all cigar makers; so were their
+parents at home. The shop and the tenement were organized on the tobacco
+plan, and the school must needs adopt it with what patience it could, if
+its business were to proceed.
+
+It did, and got on fairly well until a reporter found his way into it and
+roused the resentment of the girls by some inconsiderate, if well-meant,
+criticisms of their ways. The rebellion he caused was quelled with
+difficulty by Mr. H----, who re-established his influence over them at
+this point and gained their confidence by going to live among them in the
+school-house with his family. Still the sullen moods, the nightly
+ructions. The girls were as ready to fight as to write, in their fits of
+angry spite, until my friend was almost ready to declare with the angry
+Irishman, that he would have peace in the house if he had to whip all
+hands to get it. Christmas was at hand with its message of peace and
+good-will, but the school was more than usually unruly, when one night, in
+despair, he started to read a story to them to lay the storm. It was Hans
+Christian Andersen's story of the little girl who sold matches and lighted
+her way to mother and heaven with them as she sat lonely and starved,
+freezing to death in the street on New Year's eve. As match after match
+went out with the pictures of home, of warmth, and brightness it had shown
+the child, and her trembling fingers fumbled eagerly with the bunch to
+call them back, a breathless hush fell upon the class, and when the story
+was ended, and Mr. H---- looked up with misty eyes, he found the whole
+class in tears. The picture of friendless poverty, more bitterly desolate
+than any even they had known, had gone to their hearts and melted them.
+The crisis was passed and peace restored.
+
+A crisis of another kind came later, when the pupils' "young men" got into
+the habit of coming to see the girls home. They waited outside until
+school was dismissed, and night after night Mr. H---- found a ball in
+progress on the sidewalk when the girls should long have been home. The
+mothers complained and the success of the class was imperilled. Their
+passion for dancing was not to be overcome. They would give up the school
+first. Mr. H---- thought the matter out and took a long step--a perilous
+one. He started a dancing-class, and on certain nights in the week taught
+the girls the lanciers instead of writing and spelling. Simultaneously he
+wrote to every mother that the school was not to be blamed if the girls
+were not home at ten minutes after nine o'clock; it was dismissed at 8.55
+sharp every night. The thing took tremendously. The class filled right up,
+complaints ceased, and everything was lovely, when examination day
+approached with the annual visit of friends and patrons. My friend awaited
+its coming with fear and trembling. There was no telling what the
+committee might say to the innovation. The educational plan of the Society
+is most liberal, but the lanciers was a step even the broadest of its
+pedagogues had not yet ventured upon. The evil day came at last, and, full
+of forebodings, Mr. H---- had the girls soothe their guests with cakes and
+lemonade of their own brewing, until they were in a most amiable mood.
+Then, when they expected the reading to begin, with a sinking heart he
+bade them dance. The visitors stared in momentary amazement, but at the
+sight of the happy faces in the quadrilles, and the enthusiasm of the
+girls, they caught the spirit of the thing and applauded to the echo. The
+dancing-class was a success, and so has the school been ever since.
+
+As far as I know, this is the only instance in which the quadrille has
+been made one of the regular English branches taught in the Industrial
+Schools. But cake and lemonade have more than once smoothed the way to a
+hearty acceptance of the three R's with their useful concomitants, as
+taught there. One of the excellent features of the system is the "kitchen
+garden," for the little ones, a kind of play housekeeping that covers the
+whole range of house-work, and the cooking class for the larger girls that
+gives many of them a taste for housekeeping which helps to overcome their
+prejudice against domestic service, and so to solve one of the most
+perplexing questions of the day--no less serious to the children of the
+poor than to the wives of the rich, if they only knew or would believe it.
+It is the custom of the wise teachers, when the class has become
+proficient, to invite the mothers to a luncheon gotten up by their
+children. "I never," reports the teacher of the Eighteenth Ward Industrial
+School after such a session, "saw women so thoroughly interested." And it
+was not only the mother who was thus won over in the pride over her
+daughter's achievement. It was the home itself that was invaded with
+influences that had been strangers to it heretofore. For the mother
+learned something she would not be apt to forget, by seeing her child do
+intelligently and economically what she had herself done ignorantly and
+wastefully before. Poverty and waste go always hand in hand. The girls are
+taught, with the doing of a thing, enough also of the chemistry of cooking
+to enable them to understand the "why" of it. The influence of that sort
+of teaching in the tenement of the poor no man can measure. I am well
+persuaded that half of the drunkenness that makes so many homes miserable
+is at least encouraged, if not directly caused, by the mismanagement and
+bad cooking at home. All the wife and mother knows about housekeeping she
+has picked up in the tenement since she was married, among those who
+never knew how to cook a decent meal or set a clean table; while the
+saloonkeeper hires the best cook he can get for money, and serves his hot
+lunch free to her husband in a tidy and cheerful room, where no tired
+women--tired of the trials and squabbles of the day--no cross looks, and
+no dirty, fighting children come to spoil his appetite and his hour of
+rest.
+
+Here, as everywhere, it is the personal influence of the teacher that
+counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home,
+and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the
+way of trouble and sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred
+ways. "Sometimes," says one of the teachers, who has seen the children of
+her first pupils go from her school into their own homes to take up the
+battle of life, "sometimes a teacher, while conducting a class, is also
+fashioning, from some soft white material, a shroud for some little one
+whose parents can provide none themselves. When a child dies of a disease
+that is not contagious, its classmates gather around the coffin and sing
+in German or English, 'I am Jesus's little lamb.' Sometimes the children's
+hymn and the Lord's Prayer are the only service." Her life work has been
+among the poorest Germans on the East Side. "Among our young men," she
+reports, "I know of only three who have become drunkards, and many are
+stanch temperance men. I have never known of one of our girls drinking to
+excess. I have looked carefully over our records, and can truly say that,
+so far as I can learn, not one girl who remained with us until over
+seventeen lived a life of shame."
+
+What teaching meant to this woman the statement that follows gives an idea
+of: "Shrove Tuesday evening is a time when all Germans plan for a frolic;
+they call it 'Fastnacht.' Twenty years ago I gave the young people of the
+evening school a party on that evening, and at the suggestion of one of
+the girls decided to have a reunion every year at that time. So each year
+our married girls and boys, and those still unmarried, who have grown
+beyond us in other ways, come 'home.' We sing the old songs, talk over old
+times, play games, drink coffee and eat doughnuts, and always end the
+evening with 'Auld Lang Syne.' Last spring, two of the young men stood at
+the stairway and counted the guests as they went to the supper-room: they
+reported over four hundred. Letters came from Boston, Chicago,
+Philadelphia, Washington, Texas, Idaho, and Wyoming from those who would
+gladly have been with us. All who live within a radius of fifty miles try
+to be here."
+
+"Among our grown girls," she adds, "we have teachers, governesses,
+dressmakers, milliners, trained nurses, machine operators, hand sewers,
+embroiderers, designers for embroidering, servants in families,
+saleswomen, book-keepers, typewriters, candy packers, bric-a-brac packers,
+bank-note printers, silk winders, button makers, box makers, hairdressers,
+and fur sewers. Among our boys are book-keepers, workers in stained glass,
+painters, printers, lithographers, salesmen in wholesale houses, as well
+as in many of our largest retail stores, typewriters, stenographers,
+commission merchants, farmers, electricians, ship carpenters, foremen in
+factories, grocers, carpet designers, silver engravers, metal burnishers,
+carpenters, masons, carpet weavers, plumbers, stone workers, cigar makers,
+and cigar packers. Only one of our boys, so far as we can learn, ever sold
+liquor, and he has given it up."
+
+Not a few of these, without a doubt, got the first inkling of their trade
+in the class where they learned to read. The curriculum of the Industrial
+Schools is comprehensive. The nationality of the pupils makes little or no
+difference in it. The start, as often as is necessary, is made with an
+object lesson--soap and water being the elements, and the child the
+object. As in the kindergarten, the alphabet comes second on the list.
+Then follow lessons in sewing, cooking, darning, mat-weaving, pasting, and
+dressmaking for the girls, and in carpentry, wood carving, drawing,
+printing, and like practical "branches" for the boys, not a few of whom
+develop surprising cleverness at this or that kind of work. The system is
+continually expanding. There are schools yet that have not the necessary
+facilities for classes in manual training, but as the importance of the
+subject is getting to be more clearly understood, and interest in the
+subject grows, new "shops" are being constantly opened and other
+occupations found for the children. Even where the school quarters are
+most pinched and inadequate, a shift is made to give the children work to
+do that will teach them habits of industry and precision as the
+all-important lesson to be learned there. In some of the Industrial
+Schools the boys learn to cook with the girls, and in the West Side
+Italian School an attempt to teach them to patch and sew buttons on their
+own jackets resulted last year in their making their own shirts, and
+making them well, too. Perhaps the possession of the shirt as a reward for
+making it acted as a stimulus. The teacher thought so, and she was
+probably right, for more than one of them had never owned a whole shirt
+before, let alone a clean one. A heap can be done with the children by
+appealing to their proper pride--much more than many might think, judging
+hastily from their rags. Call it vanity--if it is a kind of vanity that
+can be made a stepping-stone to the rescue of the child, it is worth
+laying hold of. It was distinct evidence that civilization and the
+nineteenth century had invaded Lewis Street, when a class of Hungarian
+boys in the American Female Guardian Society's school in that thoroughfare
+earned the name of the "neck-tie class" by adopting that article of
+apparel in a body. None of them had ever known collar or necktie before.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST PATRIOTIC ELECTION IN THE BEACH STREET INDUSTRIAL
+SCHOOL--PARLOR IN JOHN ERICSSON'S OLD HOUSE.]
+
+
+It is the practice to let the girls have what garments they make, from
+material, old or new, furnished by the school, and thus a good many of the
+pupils in the Industrial Schools are supplied with decent clothing. In the
+winter especially, some of them need it sadly. In the Italian school of
+which I just spoke, one of the teachers found a little girl of six years
+crying softly in her seat on a bitter cold day. She had just come in from
+the street. In answer to the question what ailed her, she sobbed out,
+"I'se so cold." And no wonder. Beside a worn old undergarment, all the
+clothing upon her shivering little body was a thin calico dress. The soles
+were worn off her shoes, and toes and heels stuck out. It seemed a marvel
+that she had come through the snow and ice as she had, without having her
+feet frozen.
+
+Naturally the teacher would follow such a child into her home and there
+endeavor to clinch the efforts begun for its reclamation in the school. It
+is the very core and kernel of the Society's purpose not to let go of the
+children of whom once it has laid hold, and to this end it employs its own
+physicians to treat those who are sick, and to canvass the poorest
+tenements in the summer months, on the plan pursued by the Health
+Department. Last year these doctors, ten in number, treated 1,578 sick
+children and 174 mothers. Into every sick-room and many wretched hovels,
+daily bouquets of sweet flowers found their way too, visible tokens of a
+sympathy and love in the world beyond--seemingly so far beyond the poverty
+and misery of the slum--that had thought and care even for such as they.
+Perhaps in the final reckoning these flowers, that came from friends far
+and near, will have a story to tell that will outweigh all the rest. It
+may be an "impracticable notion," as I have sometimes been told by
+hard-headed men of business; but it is not always the hard head that
+scores in work among the poor. The language of the heart is a tongue that
+is understood in the poorest tenements where the English speech is
+scarcely comprehended and rated little above the hovels in which the
+immigrants are receiving their first lessons in the dignity of American
+citizenship.
+
+Very lately a unique exercise has been added to the course in these
+schools, that lays hold of the very marrow of the problem with which they
+deal. It is called "saluting the flag," and originated with Colonel George
+T. Balch, of the Board of Education, who conceived the idea of instilling
+patriotism into the little future citizens of the Republic in doses to
+suit their childish minds. To talk about the Union, of which most of them
+had but the vaguest notion, or of the duty of the citizen, of which they
+had no notion at all, was nonsense. In the flag it was all found embodied
+in a central idea which they could grasp. In the morning the star-spangled
+banner was brought into the school, and the children were taught to salute
+it with patriotic words. Then the best scholar of the day before was
+called out of the ranks, and it was given to him or her to keep for the
+day. The thing took at once and was a tremendous success.
+
+Then was evolved the plan of letting the children decide for themselves
+whether or not they would so salute the flag as a voluntary offering,
+while incidentally instructing them in the duties of the voter at a time
+when voting was the one topic of general interest. Ballot-boxes were set
+up in the schools on the day before the last general election (1891). The
+children had been furnished with ballots for and against the flag the week
+before, and told to take them home to their parents and talk it over with
+them, a very apt reminder to those who were naturalized citizens of their
+own duties, then pressing. On the face of the ballot was the question to
+be decided: "Shall the school salute the Nation's flag every day at the
+morning exercises?" with a Yes and a No, to be crossed out as the voter
+wished. On its back was printed a Voter's A, B, C, in large plain type,
+easy to read:
+
+"This country in which I live, and which is _my_ country, is called a
+REPUBLIC. In a Republic, _the people govern_. The people who govern are
+called _citizens_. I am one of the people and _a little citizen_.
+
+"The way the citizens govern is, either by voting for the person whom they
+want to represent them, or who will say what the people want him to
+say--or by voting _for_ that thing they would like to do, or _against_
+that thing which they do not want to do.
+
+"The Citizen who votes is called a _voter_ or an _elector_, and the right
+of voting is called the _suffrage_. The voter puts on a piece of paper
+what he wants. The piece of paper is called a _Ballot_. THIS PIECE OF
+PAPER IS MY BALLOT.
+
+"The right of a Citizen to vote; the right to say what the citizen thinks
+is best for himself and all the rest of the people; the right to say who
+shall govern us and make laws for us, is A GREAT PRIVILEGE, A SACRED
+TRUST, A VERY GREAT RESPONSIBILITY, which I must learn to exercise
+conscientiously, and to the best of my knowledge and ability, as a little
+Citizen of this great AMERICAN REPUBLIC."
+
+On Monday the children cast their votes in the Society's twenty-one
+Industrial Schools, with all the solemnity of a regular election and with
+as much of its simple machinery as was practicable. Eighty-two per cent.
+of the whole number of enrolled scholars turned out for the occasion, and
+of the 4,306 votes cast, 88, not quite two per cent., voted against the
+flag. Some of these, probably the majority, voted No under a
+misapprehension, but there were a few exceptions. One little Irishman, in
+the Mott Street school, came without his ballot. "The old man tored it
+up," he reported. In the East Seventy-third Street school five Bohemians
+of tender years set themselves down as opposed to the scheme of making
+Americans of them. Only one, a little girl, gave her reason. She brought
+her own flag to school: "I vote for that," she said, sturdily, and the
+teacher wisely recorded her vote and let her keep the banner.
+
+I happened to witness the election in the Beach Street school, where the
+children are nearly all Italians. The minority elements were, however,
+represented on the board of election inspectors by a colored girl and a
+little Irish miss, who did not seem in the least abashed by the fact that
+they were nearly the only representatives of their people in the school.
+The tremendous show of dignity with which they took their seats at the
+poll was most impressive. As a lesson in practical politics, the occasion
+had its own humor. It was clear that the negress was most impressed with
+the solemnity of the occasion, and the Irish girl with its practical
+opportunities. The Italian's disposition to grin and frolic, even in her
+new and solemn character, betrayed the ease with which she would, were it
+real politics, become the game of her Celtic colleague. When it was all
+over they canvassed the vote with all the solemnity befitting the
+occasion, signed together a certificate stating the result, and handed it
+over to the principal sealed in a manner to defeat any attempt at fraud.
+Then the school sang Santa Lucia, a sweet Neapolitan ballad. It was
+amusing to hear the colored girl and the half-dozen little Irish children
+sing right along with the rest the Italian words, of which they did not
+understand one. They had learned them from hearing them sung by the
+others, and rolled them out just as loudly, if not as sweetly, as they.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE BOARD OF ELECTION INSPECTORS IN THE BEACH STREET
+SCHOOL.]
+
+
+The first patriotic election in the Fifth Ward Industrial School was held
+on historic ground. The house it occupies was John Ericsson's until his
+death, and there he planned nearly all his great inventions, among them
+one that helped save the flag for which the children voted that day. The
+children have lived faithfully up to their pledge. Every morning sees the
+flag carried to the principal's desk and all the little ones, rising at
+the stroke of the bell, say with one voice: "We turn to our flag as the
+sunflower turns to the sun!" One bell, and every brown right fist is
+raised to the brow, as in military salute: "We give our heads!" Another
+stroke, and the grimy little hands are laid on as many hearts: "and our
+hearts!" Then with a shout that can be heard around the corner: "---- to
+our country! One country, one language, one flag!" No one can hear it and
+doubt that the children mean every word and will not be apt to forget that
+lesson soon.
+
+The Industrial School has found a way of dealing with even the truants, of
+whom it gets more than its share, and the success of it is suggestive. As
+stated by the teacher in the West Eighteenth Street school who found it
+out, it is very simple: "I tell them, if they want to play truant to come
+to me and I will excuse them for the day, and give them a note so that if
+the truant officer sees them it will be all right." She adds that "only
+one boy ever availed himself of that privilege." The other boys with few
+exceptions became interested, as one would expect, and came to school
+regularly. It was the old story of the boys in the Juvenile Asylum who
+could be trusted to do guard duty in the grounds when put upon their
+honor, but the moment they were locked up for the night risked their necks
+to escape by climbing out of the third-story windows.
+
+But when it has cheated the street and made of the truant a steady
+scholar, the work of the Industrial School is not all done. Next, it hands
+him over to the Public School, clothed and in his right mind, if his time
+to go to work has not yet come. Last year the thirty-three Industrial
+Schools of the Children's Aid Society and the American Female Guardian
+Society thus dismissed nearly eleven hundred children who, but for their
+intervention, might never have reached that goal. That their charity had
+not been allowed to corrupt the children may be inferred from the
+statement that, with an average daily attendance of 4,348 in the
+Children's Aid Society's Schools, 1,729 children were depositors in the
+School Savings Banks to the aggregate amount of about $800--a very large
+sum for them--and this in the face of the fact, recorded on the school
+register, that 938 of the lot came from homes where drunkenness and
+poverty went hand in hand. It is not in the plan of the Industrial School
+to make paupers, but to develop to the utmost the kernel of self-help that
+is the one useful legacy of the street. The child's individuality is
+preserved at any cost. Even the clothes that are given to the poorest in
+exchange for their rags are of different cut and color, made so with this
+one end in view. The distressing "institution look" is wholly absent from
+these schools, and one of the great stumbling-blocks of charity
+administered at wholesale is thus avoided.
+
+The night schools are for the boys and girls already enlisted in the
+treadmill, and who must pick up what learning they can in their off hours.
+Together with the day-schools they footed up a total enrolment of nearly
+ten thousand children whom this Society reached in 1891. Upon the basis of
+the average daily attendance, the cost of their education to the
+community, which supported the charity, was $24.53 for each child. The
+cost of sheltering, feeding, and teaching 11,770 boys and girls in the
+Society's six lodging-houses was $32.76 for each; the expense of sending
+2,825 children to farm-homes $9.96 for each. The average cost per year for
+each prisoner in the Tombs is $107.75, and for every child maintained in
+an Asylum, or in the poor-house, nearly $140.[21]
+
+"One of our great difficulties," says the Secretary of the Children's Aid
+Society, in a recent statement of the Society's aims and purposes, echoing
+an old grievance, "is with the large boys of the city. There seems to be
+no place for them in the world as it is. They have grown up in it without
+any training but that in street trades. The trades unions have kept them
+from being apprenticed. They are soon too large for street occupations,
+and are unable to compete with the small boys. They are too old for our
+lodging-houses. We know not what to do with them. Some succeed well on
+Western farms, but they are usually disliked by their employers because
+they change places soon; and their occasional offences and disposition to
+move about have given us more trouble in the West than any other one
+thing. Very few people are willing to bear with them, even though a little
+patience will sometimes bring out excellent qualities in them." They are
+the boys for whom the street and the saloon have use that shall speedily
+fashion of their "excellent qualities" a lash to sting the community's
+purse, if not its conscience, with the memory of its neglect. As 107.75 is
+to 24.53, or 140 to 9.96, so will be the smart of it compared with the
+burden of patience that would have turned the scales the other way, to put
+the matter in a light where the hard-headed man of business can see it
+without an effort.
+
+There is at least one man of that kind in New York who has seen and
+understood it to some purpose. His name is Richard T. Auchmuty, and he is
+by profession an architect. In that capacity he has had opportunity enough
+of observing how the virtual exclusion of the New York boy from the trades
+worked to his harm, and he started for his relief an Industrial School
+that deserves to be ranked among the great benefactions of our day, even
+more for its power to set people to thinking than for the direct benefit
+it confers upon the boy, great as that is. Once it comes to be thoroughly
+understood that a chance to learn his father's honest trade is denied the
+New York boy by a foreign conspiracy, because he is an American lad and
+cannot be trusted to do its bidding, it is inconceivable that an end
+should not be put in quick order to this astounding abuse. This thing is
+exactly what is being done in New York now by the consent of its citizens,
+who without a protest read in the newspapers that a trades-union, one of
+the largest and strongest in the building trades, has decreed that for two
+years from a fixed date no apprentice shall be admitted to that trade in
+New York--decreed, with the consent and connivance of subservient
+employers, that so many lads who might have become useful mechanics shall
+grow up tramps and loafers; decreed that a system of robbery of the
+American mechanic shall go on by which it has come to pass that out of
+twenty-three millions of dollars paid in a year to the building trades in
+this city barely six millions are grudgingly accorded the native worker.
+There is no decree to exclude the mechanic from abroad. He may come and
+go--and go he does, in shoals, to his home across the sea at the end of
+each season, with its profits--under the scheme of international
+comradeship that excludes only the American workman and his boy. I have
+talked with some of the most intelligent of the labor leaders, men well
+known all over the land, to find out if there were any defence to be made
+for this that I was not aware of, but have got nothing but evasion and
+sophistries about the "protection of labor" for my answer. A protection,
+indeed, that has nearly resulted already in the practical extinction of
+the American mechanic, the best and cleverest in the world, in America's
+chief city, at the bidding of the Walking Delegate.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE PLUMBING SHOP IN THE NEW YORK TRADE SCHOOLS.]
+
+
+Even to Colonel Auchmuty's Industrial School this persecution has been
+extended in a persistent attempt for years to taboo its graduates. In
+spite of it, the New York Trade Schools open their twelfth season this
+winter with six hundred scholars and more, in place of the thirty who sat
+in the first class eleven years ago. The community's better sense is
+coming to the rescue, and the opposition to the school is wearing off. In
+the spring as many hundred young plasterers, printers, tailors, plumbers,
+stone-cutters, bricklayers, carpenters, and blacksmiths will go forth
+capable mechanics, and with their self-respect unimpaired by the
+associations of the shop and the saloon under the old apprentice system.
+In this one respect the trades union may have done them a service it did
+not intend. Colonel Auchmuty's school has demonstrated what it amounts to
+by furnishing from among its young men the bricklayers for more than as
+many handsome buildings in New York as there were pupils in its first
+class. When a committee of master builders came on from Philadelphia to
+see what their work was like, the report it brought back was that it
+looked as if the builders had put their hearts in it, and a trade-school
+was forthwith established in that city. Of that, too, Colonel Auchmuty
+paid the way from the start.
+
+His wealth has kept the New York school above water since it was started;
+but this winter a benevolent millionaire, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, for whom
+wealth has other and greater responsibilities than that of ministering to
+his own comfort, has endowed it with half a million dollars, and Mrs.
+Auchmuty has added a hundred thousand with the land on First Avenue
+between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets upon which the school
+stands, so that it starts out with an endowment sufficient to insure its
+future. The charges for tuition in the day and evening classes have never
+been much more than nominal, but these may now, perhaps, be reduced even
+further to allow the "excellent qualities" of the big boys, of whom the
+reformer despairs, to be put to their proper use without robbing them of
+the best of all, their self-respect. Then the gage will have been thrown
+to the street in good earnest, and the Walking Delegate's day will be
+nearly spent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+THE BOYS' CLUBS
+
+
+But it is by the boys' club that the street is hardest hit. In the fight
+for the lad it is that which knocks out the "gang," and with its own
+weapon--the weapon of organization. That this has seemed heretofore so
+little understood, even by some who have wielded the weapon valiantly, is
+to me the strongest argument for the University Settlement plan, which
+sends those who would be of service to the poor out to live among them, to
+study their ways and their needs. Very soon they discover why the gang has
+such a grip on the boy. It is because it responds to a real need of his
+nature. The distinguishing characteristic of the American city boy is his
+genius for organization. Whether it be in the air, in the soil, or in an
+aptitude for self-government that springs naturally from the street, where
+every little heathen is a law unto himself--one of them surely, for the
+children of foreigners, who never learn to speak the language in which
+their sons vote, exhibit it, if anything, more plainly than the
+native-born--he has it, undeniably. Unbridled, allowed to run riot, it
+results in the gang. Thwarted, it defeats all attempts to manage the boy.
+Accepted as a friend, an ally, it is the indispensable key to his nature
+in all efforts to reclaim him _en bloc_. Individuals may require different
+methods of treatment. To the boys as a class the club is the pass-key.
+
+There are many boys' clubs in New York now, and room for more. Some have
+had great success; a few have failed. I venture the guess that the real
+failure in a good many instances--most of them perhaps--was the failure to
+trust the boys to rule themselves. I say _rule_. Rule there must be; boss
+rule at that. That is the kind their fathers own, the fashion of the
+slums. It is a case of rule or ruin, order or anarchy. To let the boys
+have full swing would merely be to invite the street in to take charge of
+the house, and only trouble would come of it. But the boss must be a
+benevolent and very politic despot. The boy must have a fair chance. To
+enlist him heart and soul, the opportunity must be given him to show that
+he _can_ rule himself. And he will show it. He must be allowed to choose
+his own leaders. His freedom of speech must not be abridged in debate by
+any rule but that of parliamentary law. Ten to one he will not abuse it,
+but will enforce that rule and submit to it as scrupulously as the most
+punctilious of his elders. Let him be sure that his right to
+self-government will not be interfered with, and he will voluntarily give
+up the street and his gang. Three boys' clubs had been started by the
+ladies of the College Settlement, on the principle of non-interference
+within the few and simple rules of the house. The boys wrote their own
+laws and maintained order with success. The street looked on, observant.
+To the policeman it had opposed secret hostility or open war. But a social
+order with the policeman eliminated was something worthy of approval. Its
+offer of surrender was brought in form by a committee representing the
+"Pleasure Club" in the toughest block of the neighborhood. "We will change
+and have your kind of a club," was its message. Thus the fourth boys' club
+of the Settlement was launched.
+
+They have not all had so peaceful a beginning. Storm and stress of weather
+have ushered in most of them. Each new one has cost something for
+window-glass, and the mud of the neighborhood has had its inning before it
+was forced to abdicate in favor of the club. It was so with the first that
+was started, fourteen years ago, in Tompkins Square, that was then pretty
+much all mud and given over to anarchy and disorder. In fact, it was the
+mud that started the club. It flew so thick about the Wilson Mission, and
+bespattered those who went out and in so freely that on a particularly
+boisterous night the good missionary's wife decided that something must be
+done. She did not send for a policeman. She had tried that before, but the
+relief he brought lasted only while he was in sight. She went out and
+confronted the mob herself. When it had yelled itself hoarse at her, she
+sweetly asked it in to have some coffee and cakes. The mob stared,
+breathless. Coffee and cakes for stones and mud! This was the Gospel in a
+shape that was new and bewildering to Tompkins Square. The boys took
+counsel among themselves. Visions of a big policeman behind the door
+troubled the timid; but the more courageous were in favor of taking
+chances. When they had sidled through the open door and no yell of
+distress had betrayed treason within, the rest followed to find the coffee
+and the cakes a solid and reassuring fact. No awkward questions were asked
+about the broken windows, and the boys came out voting the "missionary
+people" trumps, with a tinge of remorse, let us hope, for the reception
+they had given them. There was no more mud-slinging after that, but the
+boys fell naturally into neighborly ways with the house and its occupants,
+and the proposition to be allowed to come in and "play games," came from
+them when the occasional misunderstandings with the policeman on the post
+made the street a ticklish play-ground. They were let in, and when certain
+good people heard of what was going on in Tompkins Square, they sent down
+chairs and tables and games, so that they might be made to feel at home.
+Thus kindness conquered the street, and that winter was founded the first
+boys' club here, or, for aught I know, anywhere. It is still the Boys'
+Club of St. Mark's Place, and has grown more popular with the boys as the
+years have passed. The record of last winter's doings over there show no
+less than 2,757 boys on its roll of membership. The total attendance for
+the year was 42,118, and the nightly average 218 boys, everyone of whom,
+but for the coffee and cakes of that memorable night, might have been in
+the streets slinging mud.
+
+These doings include, nowadays, more than amusements and games. They made
+the beginning, and they are yet the means of bringing the boys in. Once
+there, as many as choose may join classes in writing, in book-keeping,
+singing, and modelling; those who come merely for fun can have all they
+want, on condition that they pay their respects to the wash-room and keep
+within the bounds of the house. This they do with the aid of the
+Superintendent and his assistants, who are chosen from among the bigger
+boys and manage to preserve order marvellously well with very little show
+of authority, all considered. The present Superintendent, Mr. Tyrrell,
+still nurses the memory of a pair of black eyes he achieved in the
+management of a "tough" club in Macdougal Street, where the boys came with
+"billies" and pistols in their hip-pockets and taught him the secret of
+club management in their own way. He puts it briefly this way: "It is just
+a question of who is to be boss." That settled, things run smoothly
+enough if the right party is on top.
+
+In justice to the Tompkins Square boys, it should be said that the
+question with them once for all was decided by the missionary's coffee and
+cakes. If there was ever a passing disposition to forget it, "Pop's"
+blighting eye helped the club to recall it in no time. Pop was the
+doorkeeper, and a cripple, with a single mind. His one conscious purpose
+in life was to keep order in the club, and he was blessed beyond most
+mortals in attaining his ambition, if blessed in nothing else. Under
+different auspices Pop might have been a rare bruiser, for, cripple that
+he was, he was as strong as he was determined. Under the humanizing
+influences that had conquered Tompkins Square he became one of the jewels
+of the Boys' Club. If a round in the boxing-room threatened to wind up in
+a "slugging match;" if luck had gone against a boy at the game of
+"pot-cheese" until he felt that he must avenge his defeat by thumping his
+adversary, or burst--Pop's stern glance transfixed the offender and
+pointed him to the street, silent and meek, all the fight taken out of him
+on the spot. The boys liked him for all that, perhaps just because they
+were a little afraid of him, and when Pop died last summer, at the age of
+twenty-two, after ten years of faithful attendance upon the basement-door
+in St. Mark's Place, many an honest sob was gulped down at his funeral
+behind a dirty and tattered cap. It is not the style for boys to cry in
+Tompkins Square, but it _is_ the style to honor the memory of a dead
+friend, and the Square never saw such a funeral as poor Pop's. The boys
+chipped in and bought a gorgeous floral pillow for his coffin. So soft a
+pillow Pop never knew in life.
+
+Many a little account in the club's penny savings-bank was wiped out to
+do Pop that last good turn; but the Superintendent cashed all demands
+without a remonstrance. It is not often the money is drawn with so lofty a
+purpose. Most of the depositors earn a few pennies selling newspapers or
+doing errands. Their accounts are seldom large. In the aggregate they make
+up quite a little sum, however. On a certain night last June, when I was
+there, the bank contained almost a hundred dollars, in deposits ranging
+from ten cents up to nearly five dollars. That week the Superintendent had
+cashed sixteen books; the smallest had eleven cents to the credit of its
+owner, who had been greatly taken with a mouth-organ and had withdrawn his
+capital to buy it. Another had been saving up for a pair of boots. There
+were a few capitalists in the club, who, when they got a dollar and a half
+or two dollars together, transferred them to the Bowery Bank, where they
+kept an account. It was easy to predict a successful business career for
+these; not so with the general run, who were anything but steady
+depositors, though the Superintendent gave them the credit that "very few
+drew out their money till they had fifty cents in bank."
+
+If the club has developed no great financiers, it has at least brought out
+one latent genius in a young sculptor who has graduated from the modelling
+class into an art museum, and was at last accounts preparing to go abroad
+and spend his accumulated savings in the pursuit of further knowledge. A
+short time before the visit of which I speak, a sudden crisis had made the
+old class in "First Aid to the Injured" come out strong under
+difficulties. A man had fallen down the basement-stairs into the
+club-room, in an epileptic fit. It was three years since the boys had been
+taught how to manage till the doctor came, in case of accident, but they
+rose to the emergency with a jump. One unbuttoned the man's collar,
+another slapped his hands, while a third yelled for a dollar to put
+between his teeth. It had not occurred to the young surgeon who taught the
+boys the first principles of his profession that dollars are rather
+scarcer about Tompkins Square than on the Avenue, and this oversight came
+near upsetting the good done by the rest of his teaching. There was no
+dollar, not even a quarter, in the crowd, and the man lay gritting his
+teeth until one of the rescuers, less literal but more practical than the
+rest, suggested a pencil or a pocket-knife and broke the spell.
+
+The mass of the boys come in nightly just to have a good time, and they
+have it. They play at parchesi and messenger-boy with an ardor that leaves
+them no time to care what visitors come and go. Like street boys
+everywhere, they have a special fondness for games that admit the dice as
+an element. Gambling is in the very air of the street, and is encouraged
+in a hundred hidden ways the police rarely discover. Small candy stores
+and grocery back-rooms harbor policy shops, lotteries, and regular
+gambling hells, where the boys are taught how to buck the tiger on a penny
+scale. In the club games the dice are robbed of their power for evil. It
+is the environment here again that makes the difference. It has made a
+vast difference in the boy who once stalked in, hat on the back of his
+head, and grimy fists in his breeches' pockets until Pop's stony eye
+caught his. Now he hangs up his hat upon entering, and goes to the
+wash-room without waiting to be asked by the Superintendent if there is no
+soap and water where he comes from. Then he gets the game or the book he
+wants, surrendering his card as a check upon him until it is returned. It
+is a precaution intended to identify the borrower in case of any damage
+being done to the club's property. Such a thing as theft of book or game
+is not known. In his business meetings the boy debates a point of order
+with the skill and persistence of a trained politician. The aptitude for
+politics sticks out all over him; but he has some lessons of that trade to
+learn yet, to his harm. He has not mastered the trick of betraying a
+friend. Any member of his club, the Superintendent feels sure, would stand
+up for him and take a thrashing, if need be, should he be found in trouble
+on his "beat." The "beats" that converge at St. Mark's Place and Avenue A
+cover a good deal of ground. The lads come from a mile around to the Boys'
+Club. Occasionally "the gang" calls in a body. One evening it is the
+Thirteenth Street gang, the next the Eighth Street gang, and again a
+detachment from Avenue A. By the first-comers it is sometimes possible to
+foretell the particular complexion of the _clientele_ of the night; but
+the business character of the gang is left outside on the sidewalk. Within
+it is amiability itself, and gradually the rough corners are rubbed off,
+old quarrels made up, feuds forgotten in the new companionship; the gang
+is merged in the club, the victory over the street won.
+
+
+[Illustration: A BOYS' CLUB READING-ROOM.]
+
+
+At Christmas and at odd seasons, when the necessary talent can be secured,
+entertainments are given in the club-room. Sometimes the boys themselves
+furnish the entertainment, and then there is never a lack of critics in
+the audience. There never is, for that matter. Mr. Evert Jansen Wendell,
+who has been one of the boys' best friends, tells some amusing things
+about his experience at such gatherings. Ice-cream is always intensely
+popular as a side issue. Some of the boys never fail to wrap a piece up in
+paper, or put it in the pocket without wrapping, to take home to the baby
+sister or brother. Only one, to Mr. Wendell's knowledge, ever refused
+ice-cream at an entertainment, and he explained, by way of apology, that
+he had had the colic all day and his mother had told him "she'd lick him
+if he took any." For a dignified missionary, who in telling the boys about
+the spread of the Gospel in the Far East, proposed to illustrate heathen
+customs by arraying himself in native costumes, brought along for the
+purpose, it must have been embarrassing to a degree to be cautioned by the
+audience to "keep his shirt on." But his mishap was as nothing to what
+befell a young lady, the daughter of a wealthy and distinguished
+financier, who with infinite trouble had persuaded her father to assist at
+a certain festive occasion in her favorite club. He was an amateur with
+the magic lantern, the boys' dear delight, and took it down to amuse them.
+Mr. Wendell tells what followed:
+
+The show was progressing famously, and the daughter was beaming with
+pride, when one of the boys suddenly beckoned to her, and pointing to the
+distinguished financier remarked:
+
+"What der yer call dat bloke?"
+
+"Whom do you mean?" asked the proud daughter, in a tone of much surprise,
+being quite unaccustomed to hearing the distinguished financier described
+as a "bloke."
+
+"I mean dat bloke over dere, settin' off dem picturs!" replied the boy.
+
+"What do you desire to know about him?" inquired the proud daughter, with
+freezing dignity.
+
+"I want ter know what yer call one of them fellers dat sets off picturs?"
+persisted the boy.
+
+"That gentleman," said the proud daughter, in her most impressive tone,
+"is my father."
+
+"Well!" said the boy, surveying her with supreme contempt, "don't yer know
+yer own father's trade?"
+
+The Boys' Club has had many followers. Some aim at teaching the lads
+trades; others content themselves with trying to mend their manners, while
+weaning them from the street and its coarse ways. Still others keep the
+moral improvement in view as the immediate object, as it is the ultimate
+end. Some follow the precedent of the Boys' Club in charging nothing for
+admission; other club-organizers, like the managers of the College
+Settlement, have found the weekly fee as necessary as home rule to
+encourage self-help and self-respect in the boy, and to bring out the best
+that is in him. Most of them have libraries suited to the children. The
+College Settlement has a very excellent one of more than a thousand
+volumes, which is in constant use. The managers report that the boys
+clamor for history and science, popularly presented, as boys do
+everywhere, while the girls mainly read fiction. The success of different
+plans demonstrates the futility of some pet theories on this phase of
+social economics at least, in the present state of knowledge on the
+subject. The Boys' Club in St. Mark's Place, for instance, is kept
+entirely free from religious influence of any sort, and their experience
+has led many of its friends to believe that success is possible only in
+that way. Probably in that particular case it might not have been possible
+on anything like such a scale in any other way. The mud of Tompkins Square
+testified loudly enough to that. On the other hand, the managers of some
+very successful and active boys' clubs that have sprouted under Church
+influence and with a strong Sunday-school bias, maintain with conviction
+that theirs is the true and only plan. One holds that only in leaving
+religion out is there hope of success; the other, that there can be none
+without letting it in and keeping it ever in the foreground. Each sees
+only half the truth. It is not the profession, or lack of profession, of a
+principle, but the principle itself that is the condition of success--the
+real sympathy and interest in the children that bids them come and be
+welcome, that seeks to understand their needs and help them for their own
+sake, a religion that "beats preaching" among the poor any day. It is a
+question of men and of hearts, not of faith. And the poorer the children,
+the more friendless and forsaken, the more readily do they respond to
+approaches in that spirit. The testimony of a teacher in the Poverty Gap
+play-ground, who went up town to take charge of one where the children
+were better dressed and correspondingly "stuck up," was that in all their
+rags and dirt the little toughs of the Gap were much the more approachable
+and more promising to work with.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CARPENTER SHOP IN THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS' CLUB.]
+
+
+Naturally the Church might be expected to have found this out and to be
+turning the knowledge to use. And it is so. All sects are reaching now for
+the children in a healthy rivalry, in which the old cry about empty pews
+is being smothered and forgotten. Of the twenty-six boys' clubs that are
+down in the Charity Organization Society's directory, nineteen are under
+church roofs or patronage, and of the remaining seven I know two at least
+to have been founded by churches. The proportion is more than preserved, I
+think, in the larger number not registered there, as in all the
+philanthropic work of many kinds that is now going on among the children.
+The Roman Catholics never lost sight of the fact that the little ones were
+the life of the Church, which the Protestants have had, in a measure, to
+rediscover. Their grip upon the children was never relaxed. The parochial
+school has enabled them to maintain it without need of recourse to the
+social shifts the Protestants are adopting to regain lost prestige.
+Nevertheless, they have not let lie unused the best grappling-hook by
+which the boy might be caught and held. Their schools and churches abound
+with clubs and societies, organized upon a plan of absolute home-rule,
+under the spiritual directorship of the parish priest. Among Protestant
+denominations the Episcopal Church especially shows this evidence of a
+strong life stirring within it. The Boys' Clubs of Calvary Parish, of St.
+George's, and of many other churches, are powerful moral agents in their
+own neighborhoods. Everywhere some strong sympathetic personality is found
+to be the centre and the life of the work. It may be that the pastor
+himself is the moving force; or he has the faculty of stirring it in
+others. His young men are at work in the parish. It is a hopeful sign to
+find young men, to whom the sacrifice meant the loss of much that makes
+life beautiful, giving their time and services freely to the poor night
+schools and rough boys' clubs--hopeful alike for the Church, for the boys,
+and for their teachers. The women have had the missionary work of the
+Church, as well as the pews, long enough to themselves. I am not speaking
+now of the college-bred men and women, who in their University Settlements
+pursue the plan that has proven so beneficent in England, but of another
+class, young business men, bank clerks, and professional men--sometimes of
+large means and of high social standing--whom night after night I have
+found thus unostentatiously working among the children with more patience
+than I could muster, and with the genuine love for their work that
+overcame all obstacles. They were not always going the errand of a church
+there, but that they were doing the work of the Church there could be no
+doubt, and doing it in a way to make it once more a living issue among the
+poor.
+
+The rector of old St. George's, which under his pastorate has grown from a
+forgotten temple with empty pews to be one of the strong factors in life
+on the crowded East Side, with Sunday congregations the great building can
+hardly contain, roughly outlines his plans for work among the children
+this way, which with variations of detail is the plan of all the churches:
+
+"Get as many of the very little children as possible into our
+kindergartens, and there let them have the advantage of Christian
+kindergarten training, before they are old enough to go to the public
+schools. Keep touch of those same children and get them into the infant
+departments of the Sunday-school. Then take the little fellows from these,
+and see that in one or two nights in the week we reach them in our boys'
+clubs; and then, when they are fourteen years old, they are eligible for
+admission to our battalion. There, by drills, exercises, etc., we hold
+them till they can enter our Men's Club."
+
+The Sunday-school commands the approach to the club, but does not obstruct
+it. It stands at the door and takes the tickets. Anyone may enter, but
+through that door only. Once he has passed in, he is his own master. The
+church is content with claiming only his Sundays when the club is not in
+session. The experience at St. George's on the home-rule question has been
+eminently characteristic. The boys could not be made to take a live
+interest in the club except on condition that they must run it themselves.
+That point yielded, they promptly boomed it to high-water mark. At present
+they elect their officers twice a year, to give them full swing, and one
+set is no sooner installed than wire-pulling begins for the next election.
+Once, when some trouble in the Athletic Club caused the clergy to take it
+in hand and appoint a president of their own choice, the membership fell
+off so rapidly that it was on the point of collapse when the tide was
+turned by a bold stroke. The managers announced a free election. The boys
+returned with a rush, put opposition tickets in the field, and amid
+intense enthusiasm over three hundred and fifty out of a total of four
+hundred votes were cast. The club was saved. It has been popular ever
+since.
+
+The payment of monthly dues was found at St. George's to be equally
+essential to success. "The boys know that they have to pay," said the
+young clergyman, who quietly superintends their doings; "if they didn't,
+it wouldn't be a right club." So they pay their pennies and enjoy the
+independence of it. The result has been a transformation in which the
+entire neighborhood rejoices. "Four years ago," said their friend, the
+clergyman, "these same boys stoned us and carried on like the toughs they
+were. Now we have got here a lot of young gentlemen and loyal friends."
+Every week-day night the Parish House in East Sixteenth Street resounds
+with their merriment; on Saturday, with the roll of drums and crash of
+martial music. Then the Battalion Club meets for drill under the
+instruction of a former officer in the United States Army. In their natty
+uniforms the lads are good to look upon, and thoroughly enjoy the
+exercises, as any boy of spirit would.
+
+The Little Boys' Club languished somewhat for want of a definite programme
+until the happy idea of a series of talks on elementary chemistry and
+physics was hit upon. An eminently practical turn was given to the talks
+by taking the boys to the gas-house, for instance, when gas was up for
+discussion; to the ship-yard, when boat-building was the topic; to the
+water-works, when it was water; and to see the great dynamos at work, when
+they were grappling with the subject of electricity. Afterward the boys
+were made to tell in writing what they had seen, and some of them told it
+surprisingly well, showing that they had made excellent use of their eyes
+and their brains. There is a limit, unfortunately, to the range of
+subjects that can be illustrated to advantage in that way; the managers
+had come to the end of their tether, and were puzzling over the question
+what to do next, when a friend of the club gave it several thousand
+dollars with which to fit up a manual training-school. Since then it has
+been in clover. A house was hired in East Eleventh Street and transformed
+into a carpenter-shop, and preparations to open it were in progress when
+these pages were sent to the printer. The club then had over two hundred
+members. It will probably have twice as many before the winter is over.
+
+
+[Illustration: TYPE-SETTING AT THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS' CLUB.]
+
+
+The carpenter-shop of the Avenue C Working Boys' Club has been a distinct
+success for several seasons. The work done by the boys after a few months'
+instruction compares often well with that of the majority of apprentices
+who have been years learning the trade in the regular way. The shop is
+fitted out with benches and all the necessary tools. A class in
+type-setting vies with the young carpenters in excellence of workmanship
+and devotion to business. The printers have ambitious designs upon the
+reading public. They intend to start a monthly "organ" of their club, an
+experiment that was tried once but frustrated by a change of base from
+Twenty-first Street to the present quarters at No. 650 East Fourteenth
+Street. The club grew up under the eaves of St. George's Church eight
+years ago, and was known by the name of the St. George's Boys' Club after
+it had been forced to move away to make room for the erection of the
+Parish House. Some of the boys work in the daytime at the trades which
+they are taught at the club in the evening, and the instruction thus
+received has helped them to earn better salaries in many cases. One of the
+managers keeps a bank account for those who can save money and want to
+invest it, and more than one of them has a snug little sum to his credit.
+There are fifty boys in each class, and always plenty waiting for
+vacancies to occur. The best pupils receive medals at the end of the year,
+and once every summer the managers, who are young men of position and
+character, take them out in the country for an outing, and are boys with
+them in their games and in their delight over the new sights they see
+there.
+
+Mr. Wendell tells of one of these trips down to see "Buffalo Bill" on
+Staten Island. There was a big crowd of excursionists on the boat going
+down, and the captain took a fatherly interest in the boys, who were
+gathered together in the bow of the boat, quiet as lambs. The return trip
+was not so peaceful, though the captain good-naturedly delayed the boat
+beyond the starting time for fear some of "our boys" would get left, as
+indeed proved to be the fate of several. But by the time this was
+discovered it was no longer a source of regret to him. The Indians and the
+bucking broncos had made the boys restless. They stood around the brass
+band, and one of them attempted to relieve his pent-up feelings by
+sticking a button into the big trombone, with the effect of nearly
+strangling the stout gentleman who was playing on it. The enraged musician
+made a wild dive for the boy, who dodged around the smokestack and caught
+up a chair to defend himself with. In a moment a first-class riot was in
+progress, chairs flying, the band men swearing, and the boys yelling like
+Comanches. When quiet had been finally restored, the boys banished to the
+after-deck, and the button fished out of the trombone, the perspiring
+captain swore with a round oath that he "wouldn't take those d----d boys
+down to Staten Island again for ten dollars a head."
+
+The trade-school feature of the Working Boys' Club may soon be reproduced
+in the Calvary Parish Boys' Club in East Twenty-third Street. They have
+already a useful type-setting class there, and they have that which their
+neighbors in Fourteenth Street have yet to get: their own handsome
+building, bought for the club by wealthy members of Calvary Church, in
+which it had its birth four years ago. More than that, they have a
+gymnasium that is the chief attraction of all that neighborhood,
+particularly the boxing-gloves in it. There were some serious doubts about
+these, and long and grave discussion before they were added to the general
+outfit. The street was rather too partial to fisticuffs, it was thought,
+and there were too many outstanding grudges among the boys to make their
+introduction safe. However, another view prevailed and the choice proved
+to be a wise one. The gloves are popular--very, and under the firm
+management of the experienced superintendent, who knows where to draw the
+safe line, the boys work off their superabundant spirits and sundry other
+little accounts very successfully in their nightly bouts. The feeling of
+fellowship and neighborly interest thus encouraged has even led to the
+establishment of a mutual benefit fund, through which the boys help each
+other in sickness or distress, and which they manage themselves, electing
+their own officers.
+
+For anyone who knows the boys of the East Side it is not hard to
+understand that the Calvary Parish Boys' Club has registered more than
+twenty-eight thousand callers since it was opened, only four years ago. It
+has four hundred enrolled members, who pay monthly dues of ten cents, so
+that they may feel that the club is theirs by right, not by charity.
+Though church and temperance stood at the cradle of the club--it was
+organized at a meeting of the Calvary branch of the Church Temperance
+Society--there is no preaching to the boys. The only sermons they hear at
+the club are the sermons of brotherly love and kindness, which the
+cheerful rooms, the games, the books, and the gymnasium--even the
+boxing-gloves--preach to them every night, and which the contrast of it
+all with the street, that was their all only a little while ago, is not
+apt to let them forget.
+
+
+[Illustration: A BOUT WITH THE GLOVES IN THE BOYS' CLUB OF CALVARY
+PARISH.]
+
+
+A small sign, with the words "Wayside Boys' Club," hung for a while over
+the Third Avenue door of the Bible House. Two years ago it was taken down;
+the club had been merged in the Boys' Club of Grace Mission, in East
+Thirteenth Street. The members were all little fellows. They were soon
+made aware that they had fallen among strangers who, boylike, proposed to
+investigate them and to test their prowess before letting them in on
+equal terms. Within a week, says Mr. Wendell, this note came to their
+patroness in the Bible House:
+
+     "DEAR MRS. ----:
+
+     "Would you please come and see to our Wayside Boys' Club; that the
+     first time it was open it was very nice, and after that near every
+     boy in that neighborhood came walking in. And if you would be so kind
+     to come and put them out it would be a great pleasure to us.
+
+     "Mrs. ----, the club is not nice any more, and when we want to go
+     home, the boys would wait for us outside, and hit you.
+
+     "Mrs. ----, since them boys are in the club we don't have any games
+     to play with, and if we do play with the games, they come over to us
+     and take it off us.
+
+     "And by so doing please oblige,
+
+           ----, _President_,
+           ----, _Vice-President_,
+           ----, _Treasurer_,
+           ----, _Secretary_,
+           ----, _Floor Manager_.
+
+     "Please excuse the writing. I was in haste.
+
+     "----, _Treasurer_."
+
+
+The appeal had its effect. The Wayside boys were rescued and there has
+been quiet in Thirteenth Street since. They have got a new house now, and
+are looking hopefully forward to the day when "near every boy in that
+neighborhood," shall "come walking in" upon an errand of peace.
+
+Most of the clubs close in the summer months, when it has heretofore been
+supposed that few of the boys would attend. The experience of the Boys'
+Club in St. Mark's Place, which this past summer was kept open a full
+month later than usual and experienced no such collapse, although the park
+across the street might be supposed to be an extra attraction on warm
+evenings, suggests that there is some mistake about this which it would be
+worth while to find out. The street is no less dangerous to the boy in
+summer because it is more crowded. The Free Reading-Room for boys in West
+Fourteenth Street is open all the year round, and though the attendance in
+summer decreases one-half, yet the rooms are never empty.
+
+The wish expressed by the President of the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, in a public utterance a year ago, that there might be
+a boys' club for every ward in the city, has been more than fulfilled.
+There are more boys' clubs nowadays than there are wards, though I am not
+sure that they are so distributed that each has one. There are some wards
+in which twenty might not come amiss. A directory of the local gangs,
+which might be obtained by consultation with the corner-grocers and with
+the policeman on the beat after a "scrap" with the boys, would be a good
+guide to the right spots and also in the choice of managers. Something
+over a year ago a club was opened in Bleecker Street that forthwith took
+on the character of a poultice upon a rather turbulent neighborhood. In
+the second week more than a hundred boys crowded to its meetings. It
+"drew" entirely too well. When I looked for it this fall, it was
+gone--"thank goodness!" said the owner of the tenement, a little woman who
+kept a shop across the street, with a sigh of relief that spoke volumes.
+Yet she had no more definite complaint to make than what might be inferred
+from the emphasis she put on the words "them boys!" A friend of the club,
+or of some of the boys belonging to it, whom I hunted up, interpreted the
+sigh and the emphasis. The boys got the upper hand, he said. They had just
+then made a fresh start under another roof and with a new manager.
+
+Such experiences have not been uncommon, and, as it often happens when
+inquiry is pursued in the right spirit, the mistakes they buoyed have been
+the greatest successes of the cause. There has been enough of the other
+kind too. Any club manager can tell of cases, lots of them, in which the
+club has been the stepping-stone of the boy to a useful career. In some
+cases the boys, having outgrown their club, have carried on the work
+unaided and organized young men's societies on a plane of in-door
+respectability that has raised an effectual barrier against the gang and
+its club-room, the saloon. These things show what a hold the idea has upon
+the boy and how much more might be made of it. So far, private benevolence
+has had the field to itself, properly so; but there is a way in which the
+municipality might help without departing from safe moorings, so it seems
+to me. Why not lend such schools or class-rooms as are not used at night
+to boys' clubs that can show a responsible management, for their meetings?
+In England the Recreative Evening Schools Association has accomplished
+something very like this by simply demonstrating its justice and
+usefulness. "Its object," says Robert Archey Woods, in his work on English
+social movements, "is to carry on through voluntary workers evening
+classes in the board schools, combining instruction and recreation for
+boys and girls who have passed through the elementary required course. Its
+plan includes also the use of the schools for social clubs, and the use of
+school play-grounds for gymnastics and out-door games. This simple
+programme, as carried out, has shown how much may be accomplished through
+means which are close at hand. There are in London three hundred and
+forty-five such classes, combining manual training with entertainment, and
+their average attendance is ten thousand. Schools of the same kind are
+carried on in a hundred other places outside of London. Beside their
+immediate success under private efforts, these schools are bringing
+Parliament to see the importance of their object. Of late the Government
+has been assuming the care of recreative evening classes, little by
+little, and it looks as if ultimately all the work of the Evening Schools
+Association would be undertaken by the school boards." I am not advocating
+the surrender of the boys' club to our New York School Board. I am afraid
+it would gain little by it and lose too much. But they might be trusted as
+landlords, if not as managers. The rent is always the heaviest item in the
+expense account of a boys' club, for the lads must have room. If cramped,
+they will boil over and make trouble. If this item were eliminated, the
+cause might experience a boom that would more than repay the community for
+the wear and tear of the school-rooms, by a reduction in the outlay for
+jails and police courts. There would be another advantage in the
+introduction of the school to the boy in the _role_ of a friend, which
+might speed the work of the truant officer. I cannot see any serious
+objection to such a proposition. I have no doubt there are school trustees
+who can see a whole string of them; but I should not be surprised if they
+all came to this, that the schools are not for any such purpose. To this
+it would be a sufficient answer that the schools belong to the people.
+
+
+[Illustration: LINING UP FOR THE GYMNASIUM.]
+
+
+Another suggestion came home to me with force while watching the drill of
+the Battalion Club at St. George's one night recently. It has long been
+the favorite idea of a friend and neighbor of mine, who is an old army
+officer and has seen service in the field, that a summer camp for boys
+from the city tenements could be established somewhere in the mountains at
+a safe distance from tempting orchards, where an army of them might be
+drilled with immense profit to themselves and to everybody. He will have
+it that they could be managed as easily as an equal number of men, with
+the right sort of organization and officers, and as in his business he
+runs along smoothly with four or five hundred girls under his command, I
+am bound to defer to his judgment, however much my own may rebel,
+particularly as he would be acting out my own convictions, after all, in
+his wholesale way. In any event the experiment might be tried with a
+regiment if not with an army, and it would be a very interesting one. The
+boys would have lots of chance for wholesome play as well as drill, and
+would get no end of fun out of it. The possible hardships of camping out
+would have no existence for them. As for any lasting good to come of it,
+outside of physical benefits, I think the discipline alone, with what it
+stands for, would cover that. In the reform schools, where they have
+military drill, they have found it their most useful ally in dealing with
+the worst and wildest class of the boys. It is the bump of organization
+that is touched again there. Resistance ceases of itself and the boys fall
+into line. Too much can be made of discipline, of course. The body may be
+drilled until it is a mere machine and the real boy is dead. But that has
+nothing to do with such an experiment as I spoke of. That is the concern
+of reform schools, and I do not think they are in any danger of overdoing
+it.
+
+I spoke of managing the girls. It is just the same with them. I have had
+the "gang" in mind as the alternative of the club, and therefore have
+dealt so far only with their brothers. Girls do not go in gangs, thank
+goodness, at least not yet in New York. They flock, until the boys scatter
+them and drive them off one by one. But the same instinct of
+self-government is in them. They take just as kindly to the club. The
+Neighborhood Guild, the College Settlement, and various church and
+philanthropic societies, carry on such clubs with great success. The girls
+sew, darn stockings, cook, make their own dresses, and run their own
+meetings with spirit when the boys are made to keep their profaning hands
+off. On occasion they develop the same rugged independence with an extra
+feminine touch to it, that is, a mixture of dash and spite. I recall the
+experience of a band of early philanthropists, who, a score of years ago
+or more, bought the Big Flat in the Sixth Ward and fitted it up as a
+boarding-house for working girls. They filled it without any trouble,
+though with a rather better grade of boarders than they had expected. No
+sooner were the girls in possession than they promptly organized and
+"resolved" that the management should make no rules for the house without
+first submitting them to their body for approval. Philanthropy chose the
+least pointed horn of the dilemma, and retired from the field. The Big
+Flat, from a model boarding-house became a very bad tenement, and the
+boarders' club dissolved, to the loss and injury of a posterity that was
+distinctly poorer and duller, no less for the want of the club than for
+the possession of the tenement.
+
+The boys' club was born of the struggle of the community with the street,
+as a measure of self-defence. It has proven a useful war-club too, but its
+conquests have been the conquests of peace. It has been the kernel of
+success in many a philanthropic undertaking, secular and religious alike.
+In the plan of the Free Reading-Room for Working Boys, of which I made
+mention, it is used as a battering-ram in an attack upon the saloon. The
+Free Reading-Room was organized some nine or ten years ago by the Loyal
+Legion Temperance Society. It has been popular with lads of all ages from
+the very start, not least on account of the club or clubs which they were
+encouraged to found--literary societies they call them there. The
+Superintendent found them helpful, too, as a means of interesting the
+boys, by debate and otherwise, in the cause of temperance which he had at
+heart. The first thing a boys' club casts about for after the offices have
+been manned and the by-laws made hard and fast, is a cause. One of young
+boys, that had been in existence a month or less at the College
+Settlement, almost took the ladies' breath away by announcing one day that
+it had decided to expel any boy who smoked or got drunk. The Free
+Reading-Room gives ample opportunity for the exercise of this spirit of
+convert zeal, when it manifests itself. The average nightly attendance
+last year was seventy-one, and a good deal larger than that in winter. The
+boys came from as far south as Houston Street, nearly a mile below, and
+from Forty-second Street, a mile and half to the north, in all kinds of
+weather.
+
+The doors of the reading-room stand wide open on Sunday as on week-day
+nights. With singing, and talks on serious or religious subjects in a vein
+the boys can follow, they try to give to the proceedings a Sabbath turn of
+which the impression may abide with them. The regular Sunday-School
+exercises have, I am told by the Superintendent, been abandoned, and the
+present less formal, but more effective, programme substituted. One has
+need of being wiser than the serpent if he would build effectually in this
+field among the poor of many races and faiths that swarm in New York's
+tenements, and he must make his foundation very broad. The great thing for
+the boys is that the room is not closed against them on the very night in
+all the week when they need it most. I think we are coming at last to
+understand what a trap we have been digging for the young in our great
+cities, when we thought to save them from temptation, by shutting every
+door but that of the church against them on the day when the devil was
+busiest finding mischief for their idle hands to do, while narrowing that
+down to the size of a wicket-gate with our creeds and confessions. The
+poor bury their dead on Sunday to save the loss of a day's pay. Poverty
+has given over their one day of rest to their sorrows. Is it likely that
+any attempt to rob it of its few harmless joys should win them over? It is
+the shadow of bigotry and intolerance falling across it that has turned
+healthy play into rioting and moral ruin. Open the museums, the libraries,
+and the clubs on Sunday, and the church that draws the bolt will find the
+tide of reawakened interest that will set in strong enough to fill its own
+pews, too, to overflowing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THE OUTCAST AND THE HOMELESS
+
+
+Under the heading "Just one of God's Children," one of the morning
+newspapers told the story last winter of a newsboy at the Brooklyn Bridge,
+who fell in a fit with his bundle of papers under his arm, and was carried
+into the waiting-room by the bridge police. They sent for an ambulance,
+but before it came the boy was out selling papers again. The reporters
+asked the little dark-eyed news-woman at the bridge entrance which boy it
+was.
+
+"Little Maher it was," she answered.
+
+"Who takes care of him?"
+
+"Oh! no one but God," said she, "and he is too busy with other folks to
+give him much attention."
+
+Little Maher was the representative of a class that is happily growing
+smaller year by year in our city. It is altogether likely that a little
+inquiry into his case could have placed the responsibility for his forlorn
+condition considerably nearer home, upon someone who preferred giving
+Providence the job to taking the trouble himself. There are homeless
+children in New York. It is certain that we shall always have our full
+share. Yet it is equally certain that society is coming out ahead in its
+struggle with this problem. In ten years, during which New York added to
+her population one-fourth, the homelessness of our streets, taking the
+returns of the Children's Aid Society's lodging-houses as the gauge,
+instead of increasing proportionally, has decreased nearly one-fifth; and
+of the Topsy element, it may be set down as a fact, there is an end.
+
+
+[Illustration: A SNUG CORNER ON A COLD NIGHT.]
+
+
+If we were able to argue from this a corresponding improvement in the
+general lot of the poor, we should be on the high road to the millennium.
+But it is not so. The showing is due mainly to the perfection of
+organized charitable effort, that proceeds nowadays upon the sensible
+principle of putting out a fire, viz., that it must be headed off, not run
+down, and therefore concerns itself chiefly about the children. We are yet
+a long, a very long way from a safe port. The menace of the Submerged
+Tenth has not been blotted from the register of the Potter's Field, and
+though the "twenty thousand poor children who would not have known it was
+Christmas," but for public notice to that effect, be a benevolent fiction,
+there are plenty whose brief lives have had little enough of the
+embodiment of Christmas cheer and good-will in them to make the name seem
+like a bitter mockery. Yet, when all is said, this much remains, that we
+are steering the right course. Against the drift and the head-winds of an
+unparalleled immigration that has literally drained the pauperism of
+Europe into our city for two generations, against the false currents and
+the undertow of the tenement in our social life, we are making headway at
+last.
+
+Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a
+woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time. What if there be a
+thousand left? There is one less. What that one more on the wrong side of
+the account might have meant will never be known till the final reckoning.
+The records of jails and brothels and poor-houses, for a hundred years to
+come, might but have begun the tale.
+
+When, in 1849, the Chief of Police reported that in eleven wards there
+were 2,955 vagrants and dissolute children under fifteen years of age, the
+boys all thieves and the girls embryo prostitutes, and that ten per cent.
+of the entire child population of school age in the city were vagrants,
+there was no Children's Aid Society to plead their cause. There _was_ a
+reformatory, and that winter the American Female Guardian Society was
+incorporated, "to prevent vice and moral degradation;" but Mr. Brace had
+not yet found his life-work, and little Mary Ellen had not been born. The
+story of the legacy her sufferings left to the world of children I have
+briefly told, and in the chapter on Industrials Schools some of the
+momentous results of Mr. Brace's devotion have been set forth. The story
+is not ended; it never will be, while poverty and want exist in this great
+city. His greatest work was among the homeless and the outcast. In the
+thirty-nine years during which he was the life and soul of the Children's
+Aid Society it found safe country homes for 84,318[22] poor city children.
+And the work goes on. Very nearly already, the army thus started on the
+road to usefulness and independence equals in numbers the whole body of
+children that, four years before it took up its march, yielded its Lost
+Tenth, as the Chief of Police bore witness, to the prisons and perdition.
+
+This great mass of children--did they all come from the street? Not all of
+them. Not even the larger number. But they would have got there, all of
+them, had not the Society blocked the way. That is how the race of Topsies
+has been exterminated in New York. That in this, of all fields, prevention
+is the true cure, and that a farmer's home is better for the city child
+that has none than a prison or the best-managed public institution, are
+the simple lessons it has taught and enforced by example that has carried
+conviction at last. The conviction came slowly and by degrees. The degrees
+were not always creditable to sordid human nature that had put forth no
+hand to keep the child from the gutter, and in the effort to rescue it now
+saw only its selfish opportunity. There are people yet at this day, whose
+offers to accept "a strong and handsome girl of sixteen or so with sweet
+temper," as a cheap substitute for a paid servant--"an angel with mighty
+strong arms," as one of the officers of the Society indignantly put it
+once--show that the selfish stage has not been quite passed. Such offers
+are rejected with the emphatic answer: "We bring the children out because
+they need you, not because you need them." The Society farms out no girls
+of sixteen with strong arms. For them it finds ways of earning an honest
+living at such wages as their labor commands, homes in the West, if they
+wish it, where good husbands, not hard masters, are waiting for them. But,
+ordinarily, its effort is to bend the twig at a much tenderer age. And in
+this effort it is assisted by the growth of a strong humane sentiment in
+the West, that takes less account of the return the child can make in work
+for his keep, and more of the child itself. Time was when few children but
+those who were able to help about the farm could be sure of a welcome.
+Nowadays babies are in demand. Of all the children sent West in the last
+two years, 14 per cent. were under five years, 43.6 per cent. over five
+and under ten years, 36.8 per cent. over ten and under fifteen, and only
+5.3 per cent. over fifteen years of age. The average age of children sent
+to Western homes in 1891 by the Children's Aid Society was nine years and
+forty days, and in 1892 nine years and eight months, or an average of nine
+years, four months, and twenty days for the two years.
+
+It finds them in a hundred ways--in poverty-stricken homes, on the Island,
+in its Industrial Schools, in the street. Often they are brought to its
+office by parents who are unable to take care of them. Provided they are
+young enough, no questions are asked. It is not at the child's past, but
+at its future, that these men look. That it comes from among bad people is
+the best reason in the world why it should be put among those that are
+good. That is the one care of the Society. Its faith that the child, so
+placed, will respond and rise to their level, is unshaken after these many
+years. Its experience has knocked the bugbear of heredity all to flinders.
+
+So that this one condition may be fulfilled, a constant missionary work of
+an exceedingly practical and business-like character goes on in the
+Western farming communities, where there is more to eat than there are
+mouths to fill, and where a man's children are yet his wealth. When
+interest has been stirred in a community to the point of arousing demands
+for the homeless children, the best men in the place--the judge, the
+pastor, the local editor, and their peers--are prevailed upon to form a
+local committee that passes upon all applications, and judges of the
+responsibility and worthiness of the applicants. In this way a sense of
+responsibility is cultivated that is the best protection for the child in
+future years, should he need any, which he very rarely does. On a day set
+by the committee the agent arrives from New York with his little troop.
+Each child has been comfortably and neatly dressed in a new suit, and
+carries in his little bundle a Bible as a parting gift from the Society.
+The committee is on hand to receive them. So usually are half the mothers
+of the town, who divide the children among themselves and take them home
+to be cared for until the next day. If there are any babies in the lot, it
+is always hard work to make them give them up the next morning, and
+sometimes the company that gathers in the morning at the town hall, for
+inspection and apportionment among the farmers, has been unexpectedly
+depleted overnight. From twenty and thirty miles around, the big-hearted
+farmers come in their wagons to attend the show and to negotiate with the
+committee. The negotiations are rarely prolonged. Each picks out his
+child, sometimes two, often more than one the same child. The committee
+umpires between them. They all know each other, and the agent's knowledge
+of each child, gained on the way out and perhaps through previous
+acquaintance, helps to make the best choice. There is no ceremony of
+adoption. That is left to days to come, when the child and the new home
+have learned to know each other, and to the watchful care of the local
+committee. To any questions concerning faith or previous condition that
+may be asked, the Society's answer is always the same. In substance it is
+this:
+
+"We do not know. Here is the child. Take him and make a good Baptist, or
+Methodist, or Christian of any sect of him! That is your privilege and his
+gain. The fewer questions you ask the better. Let his past be behind him
+and the future his to work out. Love him for himself."[23]
+
+And in the spirit in which the advice is given it is usually accepted.
+Night falls upon a joyous band returning home over the quiet country
+roads, the little stranger snugly stowed among his new friends, one of
+them already, with home and life before him.
+
+And does the event justify the high hopes of that home journey? Almost
+always in the end, if the child was young enough when it was sent out.
+Sometimes a change has to be made. Oftener the change is of name, in the
+adoption that follows. Some of the boys get restless as they grow up, and
+"run about a good deal," to the anguish of the committee. A few are
+reported as having "gone to the bad." But even these commonly come out all
+right at last. One of them, of whom mention is made in the Society's
+thirty-fifth annual report, turned up after long years as Mayor of his
+town and a member of the legislature. "We can think," wrote Mr. Brace
+before his death, "of little Five Points thieves who are now ministers of
+the gospel or honest farmers; vagrants and street children who are men in
+professional life; and women who, as teachers or wives of good citizens,
+are everywhere respected; the children of outcasts or unfortunates whose
+inherited tendencies have been met by the new environment, and who are
+industrious and decent members of society." Only by their losing
+themselves does the Society lose sight of them. Two or three times a year
+the agent goes to see them all. In the big ledgers in St. Mark's Place
+each child who has been placed out has a page to himself on which all his
+doings are recorded, as he is heard of year by year. There are twenty-nine
+of these canvas-bound ledgers now, and the stories they have to tell would
+help anyone, who thinks he has lost faith in poor human nature, to pick it
+up with the vow never to let go of it again. I open one of them at random,
+and copy the page--page 289 of ledger No. 23. It tells the story of an
+English boy, one of four who were picked up down at Castle Garden twelve
+years ago. His mother was dead, and he had not seen his father for five
+years before he came here, a stowaway. He did not care, he said, where
+they sent him, so long as it was not back to England:
+
+June 15, 1880. James S----, aged fourteen years, English; orphan; goes
+West with J. P. Brace.
+
+Placed with J. R----, Neosha Rapids, Kan. January 26, 1880, James writes
+that he gets along pleasantly; wrote to him; twenty-sixth annual report
+sent August 4th. July 14, 1880, Mr. and Mrs. R---- write that James is
+impudent and tries them greatly. Wrote to him August 17, 1880; wrote again
+October 15th. October 21, 1880, Mr. R---- writes that they could not
+possibly get along with James and placed him with Mr. G. H----, about five
+miles from his house. Mr. H---- is a good man and has a handsome property.
+Wrote to James March 8, 1881. May 1, 1883, has left his place and has
+engaged to work for Mr. H----, of Hartford. James seems to be a pretty
+wild boy, and the probability is he will turn out badly; is very profane
+and has a violent temper. April 17, 1887, Mrs. Lyman Fry writes James was
+crushed to death in Kansas City, where he was employed as brakeman on a
+freight train.
+
+October 16, 1889.--The above is a mistake. James calls to-day at the
+office and says that after I saw him he turned over a new leaf, and has
+made a pretty good character for himself. Has worked steadily and has many
+friends in Emporia. Has been here three days and wants to look up his
+friends. Is grateful for having been sent West."
+
+So James came out right after all, and all his sins are forgiven. He was a
+fair sample of those who have troubled the Society's managers most,
+occasionally brought undeserved reproach upon them, but in the end given
+them the sweet joy of knowing that their faith and trust were not put to
+shame. Many pages in the ledgers shine with testimony to that. I shall
+mention but a single case, the one to which I alluded in the introduction
+to the story of the Industrial Schools. Andrew H. Burke was taken by the
+Society's agents from the nursery at Randall's Island, thirty-three years
+ago, with a number of other boys, and sent out to Nobleville, Ind. They
+heard from him in St. Mark's Place as joining the Sons of Temperance, then
+as going to the war, a drummer boy; next of his going to college with a
+determination "to be somebody in the world." He carried his point. That
+boy is now the Governor of North Dakota. Last winter he wrote to his kind
+friends, full of loyalty and gratitude, this message for the poor children
+of New York:
+
+"To the boys now under your charge please convey my best wishes, and that
+I hope that their pathways in life will be those of morality, of honor, of
+health, and industry. With these four attributes as a guidance and
+incentive, I can bespeak for them an honorable and happy and successful
+life. The goal is for them as well as for the rich man's son. They must
+learn to labor and to wait, for 'all things come to him who waits.' Many
+times will the road be rugged, winding, and long, and the sky overcast
+with ominous clouds. Still, it will not do to fall by the wayside and give
+up. If one does, the battle of life will be lost.
+
+"Tell the boys I am proud to have had as humble a beginning in life as
+they, and that I believe it has been my salvation. I hope my success in
+life, if it can be so termed, will be an incentive to them to struggle for
+a respectable recognition among their fellow-men. In this country family
+name cuts but little figure. It is the character of the man that wins
+recognition, hence I would urge them to build carefully and consistently
+for the future."
+
+The bigger boys do not always give so good an account of themselves. I
+have already spoken of the difficulty besetting the Society's efforts to
+deal with that end of the problem. The street in their case has had the
+first inning, and the battle is hard, often doubtful. Sometimes it is
+lost. These are rarely sent West, early consignments of them having
+stirred up a good deal of trouble there. They go South, where they seem to
+have more patience with them. "The people there," said an old agent of the
+Society to me, with an enthusiasm that was fairly contagious, "are the
+most generous, kind-hearted people in the world. And they are more easy
+going. If a boy turns out badly, steals and runs away perhaps, a letter
+comes, asking not for retaliation or upbraiding us for letting him come,
+but hoping that he will do better, expressing sorrow and concern, and
+ending usually with the big-hearted request that we send them another in
+his place." And another comes, and, ten to one, does better. What lad is
+there whose wayward spirit such kindness would not conquer in the end?[24]
+
+These bigger boys come usually out of the Society's lodging-houses for
+homeless children. Of these I spoke so fully in the account of the Street
+Arab in "How the Other Half Lives," that I shall not here enter into any
+detailed description of them. There are six, one for girls in East Twelfth
+Street, lately moved from St. Mark's Place, and five for boys. The oldest
+and best known of these is the Newsboys' lodging-house in Duane Street,
+now called the Brace Memorial Lodging-house for Boys. The others are the
+East Side house in East Broadway, the Tompkins Square house, the West Side
+house at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-second Street, and the lodging-house at
+Forty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. A list of the builders' names
+emphasizes what I said a while ago about the unostentatious charity of
+rich New Yorkers. I have never seen them published anywhere except in the
+Society's reports, but they make good and instructive reading, and here
+they are in the order in which I gave the houses they built, beginning
+with the one on East Broadway: Miss Catharine L. Wolfe, Mrs. Robert L.
+Stuart, John Jacob Astor, Morris K. Jesup. The girls' home in East Twelfth
+Street, just completed, was built as a memorial to Miss Elizabeth
+Davenport Wheeler by her family, and is to be known as the Elizabeth Home.
+The list might be greatly extended by including the twenty-one Industrial
+Schools, which are in fact links in the same great chain; but that is not
+to the present purpose, and probably I should not be thanked for doing it.
+I have already transgressed enough. The wealth that seeks its
+responsibilities among the outcast children in this city, is of the kind
+that prefers that it should remain unidentified and unheralded to the
+world in connection with its benefactions.
+
+It is in these lodging-houses that one may study the homelessness that
+mocks the miles of brick walls which enclose New York's tenements, but
+not its homes. Only with special opportunities is it nowadays possible to
+study it anywhere else in New York. One may still hunt up by night waifs
+who make their beds in alleys and cellars and abandoned sheds. This last
+winter two stable fires that broke out in the middle of the night routed
+out little colonies of boys, who slept in the hay and probably set it on
+fire. But one no longer stumbles over homeless waifs in the street
+gutters. One has to hunt for them and to know where. The "cruelty man"
+knows and hunts them so assiduously that the game is getting scarcer every
+day. The doors of the lodging-houses stand open day and night, offering
+shelter upon terms no cold or hungry lad would reject: six cents for
+breakfast and supper, six for a clean bed. They are not pauper barracks,
+and he is expected to pay; but he can have trust if his pockets are empty,
+as they probably are, and even a bootblack's kit or an armful of papers to
+start him in business, if need be. The only conditions are that he shall
+wash and not swear, and attend evening school when his work is done. It is
+not possible to-day that an outcast child should long remain supperless
+and without shelter in New York, unless he prefers to take his chances
+with the rats of the gutter. Such children there are, but they are no
+longer often met. The winter's cold drives even them to cover and to
+accept the terms they rejected in more hospitable seasons. Even the
+"dock-rat" is human.
+
+It seems a marvel that he is, sometimes, when one hears the story of what
+drove him to the street. Drunkenness and brutality at home helped the
+tenement do it, half the time. It drove his sister out to a life of shame,
+too, as likely as not. I have talked with a good many of the boys, trying
+to find out, and heard some yarns and some stories that were true. In
+seven cases out of ten, of those who had homes to go to, it was that, when
+we got down to hard pan. A drunken father or mother made the street
+preferable to the house, and to the street they went.[25] In other cases
+death, perhaps, had broken up the family and thrown the boys upon the
+world. That was the story of one of the boys I tried to photograph at a
+quiet game of "craps" (see picture on page 122) in the hallway of the
+Duane Street lodging-house--James Brady. Father and mother had both died
+two months after they came here from Ireland, and he went forth from the
+tenement alone and without a friend, but not without courage. He just
+walked on until he stumbled on the lodging-house, and fell into a job of
+selling papers. James, at the age of sixteen, was being initiated into the
+mysteries of the alphabet in the evening school. He was not sure that he
+liked it. The German boy who took a hand in the game, and who made his
+grub and bed money, when he was lucky, by picking up junk, had just such a
+career. The third, the bootblack, gave his reasons briefly for running
+away from his Philadelphia home: "Me muther wuz all the time hittin' me
+when I cum in the house, so I cum away." So did a German boy I met there,
+if for a slightly different reason. He was fresh from over the sea, and
+had not yet learned a word of English. In his own tongue he told why he
+came. His father sent him to a gymnasium, but the Latin was "zu schwer"
+for him, and "der Herr Papa sagt heraus!" He was evidently a boy of good
+family, but slow. His father could have taken no better course, certainly,
+to cure him of that defect, if he did not mind the danger of it.
+
+There are always some whom nobody owns. Boys who come from a distance
+perhaps, and are cast up in our streets with all the other drift that sets
+toward the city's maelstrom. But the great mass were born of the maelstrom
+and ground by it into what they are. Of fourteen lads rounded up by the
+officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children one
+night this past summer, in the alleys and byways down about the printing
+offices, where they have their run, two were from Brooklyn, one a runaway
+from a good home in White Plains, and the rest from the tenements of New
+York. Only one was really without home or friends. That was perhaps an
+unusually--I was going to say good showing; but I do not know that it can
+be called a good showing that ten boys who had homes to go to should
+prefer to sleep out in the street. The boy who has none would have no
+other choice until someone picked him up and took him in. The record of
+the 84,318 children that have been sent to Western homes in thirty-nine
+years show that 17,383 of them had both parents living, and therefore
+presumably homes, such as they were; 5,892 only the father, and 11,954 the
+mother, living; 39,406 had neither father nor mother. The rest either did
+not know, or did not tell. That again includes an earlier period when the
+streets were full of vagrants without home-ties, so that the statement, as
+applied to to-day, errs on the other side. The truth lies between the two
+extremes. Four-fifths, perhaps, are outcasts, the rest homeless waifs.
+
+The great mass, for instance, of the newsboys who cry their "extrees" in
+the streets by day, and whom one meets in the Duane Street lodging-house
+or in Theatre Alley and about the Post-office by night, are children with
+homes who thus contribute to the family earnings, and sleep out, if they
+do, because they have either not sold their papers or gambled away the
+money at "craps," and are afraid to go home. It was for such a reason
+little Giuseppe Margalto and his chum made their bed in the ventilating
+chute at the Post-office on the night General Sherman died, and were
+caught by the fire that broke out in the mail-room toward midnight.
+Giuseppe was burned to death; the other escaped to bring the news to the
+dark Crosby Street alley in which he had lived. Giuseppe did not die his
+cruel death in vain. A much stricter watch has been kept since upon the
+boys, and they are no longer allowed to sleep in many places to which they
+formerly had access.
+
+A bed in the street, in an odd box or corner, is good enough for the
+ragamuffin who thinks the latitude of his tenement unhealthy, when the
+weather is warm. It is cooler there, too, and it costs nothing, if one can
+keep out of the reach of the policeman. It is no new experience to the
+boy. Half the tenement population, men, women, and children, sleep out of
+doors, in streets and yards, on the roof, or on the fire-escape, from May
+to October. In winter the boys can curl themselves up on the steam-pipes
+in the newspaper offices that open their doors after midnight on secret
+purpose to let them in. When these fail, there is still the lodging-house
+as a last resort. To the lad whom ill-treatment or misfortune drove to the
+street it is always a friend. To the chronic vagrant it has several
+drawbacks: the school, the wash, the enforced tax for the supper and the
+bed, that cuts down the allowance for "craps," his all-absorbing passion,
+and finally the occasional inconvenient habit of mothers and fathers to
+come looking there for their missing boys. The police send them there, and
+sometimes they take the trouble to call when the boys have gone to bed,
+taking them at what they consider a mean disadvantage. However, most of
+them do not trouble themselves to that extent. They let the strap hang
+idle till the boy comes back, if he ever does.
+
+
+[Illustration: 2 A.M. IN THE DELIVERY ROOM IN THE "SUN" OFFICE.]
+
+
+Last February Harry Quill, aged fifteen, disappeared from the tenement No.
+45 Washington Street, and though he was not heard of again for many
+weeks, his people never bothered the police. Not until his dead body was
+fished up from the air-shaft at the bottom of which it had lain two whole
+months, was his disappearance explained. But the full explanation came
+only the other day, in September, when one of his playmates was arrested
+for throwing him down and confessed to doing it. Harry was drunk, he said,
+and attacked him on the roof with a knife. In the struggle he threw him
+into the air-shaft. Fifteen years old, and fighting drunk! The mere
+statement sheds a stronger light on the sources of child vagabondage in
+our city than I could do, were I to fill the rest of my book with an
+enumeration of them.
+
+However, it is a good deal oftener the father who gets drunk than the boy.
+Not all, nor even a majority, of the boys one meets at the lodging-houses
+are of that stamp. If they were, they would not be there long. They have
+their faults, and the code of morals proclaimed by the little newsboys,
+for instance, is not always in absolute harmony with that generally
+adopted by civilized society. But even they have virtues quite as
+conspicuous. They are honest after their fashion, and tremendously
+impartial in a fight. They are bound to see fair play, if they all have to
+take a hand. It generally ends that way. A good many of them--the great
+majority in all the other lodging-houses but that in Duane Street--work
+steadily in shops and factories, making their home there because it is the
+best they have, and because there they are among friends they know. Two
+little brothers, John and Willie, attracted my attention in the Newsboys'
+Lodging-house by the sturdy way in which they held together, back to back,
+against the world, as it were. Willie was thirteen and John eleven years
+old. Their story was simple and soon told. Their mother died, and their
+father, who worked in a gas-house, broke up the household, unable to
+maintain it. The boys went out to shift for themselves, while he made his
+home in a Bowery lodging-house. The oldest of the brothers was then
+earning three dollars a week in a factory; the younger was selling
+newspapers, and making out. The day I first saw him he came in from his
+route early--it was raining hard--to get dry trousers out for his brother
+against the time he should be home from the factory. There was no doubt
+the two would hew their way through the world together. The right stuff
+was in them, as in the two other lads, also brothers, I found in the
+Tompkins Square lodging-house. Their parents had both died, leaving them
+to care for a palsied sister and a little brother. They sent the little
+one to school, and went to work for the sister. Their combined earnings at
+the shop were just enough to support her and one of the brothers who
+stayed with her. The other went to the lodging-house, where he could live
+for eighteen cents a day, turning the rest of his earnings into the family
+fund. With this view of these homeless lads, the one who goes much among
+them is not surprised to hear of their clubbing together, as they did in
+the Seventh Avenue lodging-house, to fit out a little ragamuffin, who was
+brought in shivering from the street, with a suit of clothes. There was
+not one in the crowd that chipped in who had a whole coat to his back.
+
+It was in this lodging-house I first saw Buffalo. He was presented to me
+the night I took the picture of my little vegetable-peddling friend,
+Edward, asleep on the front bench in evening school. Edward was nine years
+old and an orphan, but hard at work every day earning his own living by
+shouting from a pedlar's cart. He could not be made to sit for his
+picture, and I took him at a disadvantage--in a double sense, for he had
+not made his toilet; it was in the days of the threatened water-famine,
+and the boys had been warned not to waste water in washing, an injunction
+they cheerfully obeyed. I was anxious not to have the boy disturbed, so
+the spelling-class went right on while I set up the camera. It was an
+original class, original in its answers as in its looks. This was what I
+heard while I focused on poor Eddie:
+
+The teacher: "Cheat! spell cheat."
+
+
+[Illustration: BUFFALO.]
+
+
+Boy spells correctly. Teacher: "Right! What is it to cheat?"
+
+Boy: "To skin one, like Tommy----"
+
+The teacher cut the explanation short, and ordering up another boy, bade
+him spell "nerve." He did it. "What is nerve?" demanded the teacher; "what
+does it mean?"
+
+
+[Illustration: NIGHT-SCHOOL IN THE WEST SIDE LODGING-HOUSE. EDWARD, THE
+LITTLE PEDLAR, CAUGHT NAPPING.]
+
+
+"Cheek! don't you know," said the boy, and at that moment I caught
+Buffalo blacking my sleeping pedlar's face with ink, just in time to
+prevent his waking him up. Then it was that I heard the disturber's story.
+He _was_ a character, and no mistake. He had run away from Buffalo, whence
+his name, "beating" his way down on the trains, until he reached New York.
+He "shined" around until he got so desperately hard up that he had to sell
+his kit. Just about then he was discovered by an artist, who paid him to
+sit for him in his awful rags with his tousled hair that had not known the
+restraint of a cap for months. "Oh! it was a daisy job," sighed Buffalo,
+at the recollection. He had only to sit still and crack jokes. Alas!
+Buffalo's first effort at righteousness upset him. He had been taught in
+the lodging-house that to be clean was the first requisite of a gentleman,
+and on his first pay-day he went bravely, eschewing "craps," and bought
+himself a new coat and had his hair cut. When, beaming with pride, he
+presented himself at the studio in his new character, the artist turned
+him out as no longer of any use to him. I am afraid that Buffalo's
+ambition to be "like folks," received a shock by this mysterious
+misfortune, that spoiled his career. A few days after that he was caught
+by a policeman in the street, at his old game of "craps." The officer took
+him to the police court and arraigned him as a hardened offender. To the
+judge's question if he had any home, he said frankly yes! in Buffalo, but
+he had run away from it.
+
+"Now, if I let you go, will you go right back?" asked the magistrate,
+looking over the desk at the youthful prisoner. Buffalo took off his
+tattered cap and stood up on the foot-rail so that he could reach across
+the desk with his hand.
+
+"Put it there, jedge!" he said. "I'll go. Square and honest, I will."
+
+And he went. I never heard of him again.
+
+The evening classes are a sort of latch-key to knowledge for belated
+travellers on the road. They make good use of it, if they are late, as
+instanced in the class in history in the Duane Street lodging-house, which
+the younger boys irreverently speak of as "The Soup-house Gang." I found
+it surprisingly proficient, if it was in its shirtsleeves, and there were
+at least a couple of pupils in it who promised to make their mark. All of
+its members are working lads, and not a few of them are capitalists in a
+small but very promising way. There is a savings bank attached to each
+lodging-house, with the superintendent as president and cashier at once.
+No less than $5,197 was deposited by the 11,435 boys who found shelter in
+them in 1891. They were not all depositors, of course. In the Duane Street
+lodging-house, out of 7,614 newsboys who were registered, 1,108 developed
+the instinct of saving, or were able to lay by something. Their little
+pile at the end of the year held the respectable sum of $3,162.39.[26] It
+is safe to say that the interest of the Soup-house Gang in it was
+proportionate to its other achievements. In the West Side lodging-house,
+where nearly a thousand boys were taken in during the year, 54 patronized
+the bank and saved up $360.11. I found a little newsboy there who sells
+papers in the Grand Central Depot, and whose bank-book showed deposits of
+$200. Some day that boy, for all he has a "tough" father and mother who
+made him prefer the lodging-house as a home at the age of nine years, will
+be running the news business on the road as the capable "boss" of any
+number of lads of his present age. He neglects no opportunity to learn
+what the house has to offer, if he can get to the school in time. On the
+whole, the teachers report the boys as slow at their books, and no wonder.
+A glimpse of little Eddie, in from the cart after his day's work and
+dropping asleep on the bench from sheer weariness, more than excuses him,
+I think. Eddie may have a chance now to learn something better than
+peddling apples. They have lately added to the nightly instruction there,
+I am told, the feature of manual training in the shape of a
+printing-office, to which the boys have taken amazingly and which
+promises great things.
+
+There was one pupil in that evening class, at whose door the charge of
+being "slow" could not be laid, indifferent though his scholarship was in
+anything but the tricks of the street. He was the most hopeless young
+scamp I ever knew, and withal so aggravatingly funny that it was
+impossible not to laugh, no matter how much one felt like scolding. He
+lived by "shinin'" and kept his kit in a saloon to save his dragging it
+home every night. When I last saw him he was in disgrace, for not showing
+up at the school four successive nights. He explained that the policeman
+who "collared" him "fur fightin'" was to blame. It was the third time he
+had been locked up for that offence. When he found out that I wanted to
+know his history, he set about helping me with a readiness to oblige that
+was very promising. Did he have any home? Oh, yes, he had.
+
+"Well, where do you live?" I asked.
+
+"Here!" said Tommy, promptly, with just a suspicion of a wink at the other
+boys who were gathered about watching the examination. He had no father;
+didn't know where his mother was.
+
+"Is she any relation to you!" put in one of the boys, gravely. Tommy
+disdained the question. It turned out that his mother had been after him
+repeatedly and that he was an incorrigible runaway. She had at last given
+him up for good. While his picture was being "took"--it will be found on
+page 100 of this book--one of the lads reported that she was at the door
+again, and Tommy broke and ran. He returned just when they closed the
+doors of the house for the night, with the report that "the old woman was
+a fake."
+
+
+[Illustration: THE "SOUP-HOUSE GANG," CLASS IN HISTORY IN THE DUANE STREET
+NEWSBOYS' LODGING-HOUSE.]
+
+
+The crippled boys' brush shop is a feature of the lodging-house in East
+Forty-fourth Street. It is the _bete noire_ of the Society, partly on
+account of the difficulty of making it go without too great an outlay,
+partly on account of the boys themselves. They are of all the city's
+outcasts the most unfortunate and the hardest to manage. Their misfortune
+has soured their temper, and as a rule they are troublesome and
+headstrong. No wonder. There seems to be no room for a poor crippled lad
+in New York. There are plenty of institutions that are after the well and
+able-bodied, but for the cripples the only chance is to shrivel and die in
+the Randall's Island Asylum. No one wants them. The brush shop pays them
+wages that enables them to make their way, and the boys turn out enough
+brushes, if a market could only be found for them. It is a curious and
+saddening fact that the competition that robs it of its market comes from
+the prisons, to block the doors of which the Society expends all its
+energies--the prisons of other States than our own at that. The managers
+have a good word to say for the trades unions, which have been very kind
+to them, they say, in this matter of brushes, trying to help the boys, but
+without much success. The shop is able to employ only a small fraction of
+the number it might benefit, were it able to dispose of its wares readily.
+Despite their misfortunes the cripples manage to pick up and enjoy the
+good things they find in their path as they hobble through life. Last year
+they challenged the other crippled boys in the hospital on Randall's
+Island to a champion game of base-ball, and beat them on their crutches
+with a score of 42 to 31. The game was played on the hospital lawn, before
+an enthusiastic crowd of wrecks, young and old, and must have been a sight
+to see.
+
+A worse snag than the competition of the prisons is struck by the Society
+in the cheap Bowery lodging-houses--"hotels" they are called--that attract
+the homeless boys with their greater promise of freedom. There are no
+troublesome rules to obey there, no hours to keep, and very little to pay.
+An ordinance of the Health Department, which exercises jurisdiction over
+those houses, prohibits the admission of boys under sixteen years old, but
+the prohibition is easily evaded, and many slip in to encounter there the
+worst of all company for such as they. The lowest of these houses, that
+are also the cheapest and therefore the ones the boys patronize, are the
+nightly rendezvous of thieves and, as the police have more than once
+pointed out, murderers as well. There should be a much stricter
+supervision over them--supervision by the police as well as by the health
+officers--and the age limit should be put at eighteen years instead of
+sixteen. There is this much to be said for the lodging-houses, however,
+that it is a ticklish subject to approach until the city as a municipality
+has swept before its own door. They at least offer a bed, such as it is,
+and shelter after their fashion. The hospitality the city offers to its
+homeless poor in the police-station lodging-rooms is one of the scandals
+of a civilized age. The moral degradation of an enforced stay in these
+dens is immeasurable. To say that they are the resort of tramps and "bums"
+who know and deserve nothing better, is begging the question. It is true
+of the majority, but that very fact consigns the helpless minority, too
+poor to pay and too proud to beg, to a fate worse than death. I myself
+picked from the mass of festering human filth in a police-station
+lodging-room, one night last winter, six young lads, not one of whom was
+over eighteen, and who for one reason or another had been stranded there
+that night. They were not ruffians either, but boys who to all appearances
+had come from good homes, the memory of which might not efface the lessons
+learned that night in a lifetime. The scandal has been denounced over and
+over again by grand juries, by the Police Commissioners, and by
+philanthropists who know of the facts, and efforts without end have been
+made to get the city authorities to substitute some decent system of
+municipal hospitality for this unutterable disgrace, as other cities have
+done, but they have all been wrecked by political jobbery or official
+apathy.
+
+A thing to be profoundly thankful for is the practical elimination of the
+girl vagrant from our social life. Ten years ago, Broadway from Fourteenth
+Street up was crowded with little girls who, under the pretence of
+peddling flowers and newspapers, pandered to the worst immorality. They
+went in regular gangs, captained and employed by a few conscienceless old
+harpies, who took the wages of their infamy and paid them with blows and
+curses if they fell short of their greed. The police and the officers of
+the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children put an end to this
+traffic after a long fight, sending the old wretches to jail and some of
+their victims to the reformatories. One of the gangs that were broken up
+had a rendezvous in a stable in Thirtieth Street, near Broadway. The girls
+had latch-keys and went out and in at all hours of the night. To-day the
+flower-girl of tender years is scarcely ever met with in New York. Even
+the news-girl has disappeared almost entirely and left the field to the
+boys. Those who are not at work at home or in the shop have been gathered
+in by the agencies for their rescue, that have multiplied with the growth
+of the conviction that girl vagrancy is so much more corrosive than boy
+vagabondism, as it adds sexual immorality to the other dangers of the
+street. In 1881 the society's lodging-house in St. Mark's Place sheltered
+1,287 girls. Their number has gone down since, as the census has gone up,
+until last year it had fallen to 335, and even these were no longer
+vagrants, but wayward daughters brought by their parents to be trained to
+obedience and industry. In the same period, during which the city's
+population increased more than one-fourth, the increase being very largely
+made up of just the material to feed its homelessness, the register of the
+boys' lodging-houses showed a reduction from 13,155 to 11,435.
+
+In the introductory chapter I pointed out, as a result of the efforts made
+in behalf of the children in the past generation, not only by the
+Children's Aid Society, but by many kindred organizations, that the
+commitments of girls and women for vagrancy fell off between the years
+1860 and 1890 from 5,880 to 1,980, or from 1 in every 138-1/2 persons to 1
+in every 780 of a population that had more than doubled in the interval,
+while the commitments of petty girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890
+from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500. Illustrated by diagram this last statement
+looks this way, the year 1869 being substituted as the starting-point; it
+had almost exactly the same number of commitments as 1865 (see Chart A).
+
+
+[Illustration: CHART A.]
+
+
+The year is at the top, and its record of commitments of petty girl
+thieves at the bottom. The tendency is steadily downward, it will be seen,
+and downward here is the safe course. The police court arraignments for
+what is known as juvenile delinquency, which is, in short, all the
+mischief that is not crime under the code, make the following showing,
+starting with the year 1875, the upper line representing the boys and the
+lower the girls:
+
+
+[Illustration: CHART B.]
+
+
+Taking, finally, the commitments of girls under twenty for all causes, in
+thirteen years, we have this showing:
+
+
+[Illustration: CHART C.]
+
+
+These diagrams would be more satisfactory if they always meant exactly
+what they seem to show. The trouble is that they share in the general
+inapplicability to the purposes of scientific research of all public
+reports in this city (save those of the Health Department, which is
+fortunate in possessing a responsible expert statistician in Dr. Roger S.
+Tracy) by reason of lack of uniformity or otherwise. When one gets down to
+the bottom of a slump like that between the years 1888 and 1889, in the
+last diagram, one is as likely to find a negligent police clerk or some
+accidental change of classification there as an economic fact. Something
+like this last is, I believe, hidden in this particular one. The figures
+for 1891 maintain the point reached in 1887 and in 1890. However, the
+important thing is that the decrease has gone on more or less steadily
+through good years and bad since the children's societies took the field,
+while the population has increased as never before. Had these forms of
+disorder even held their own, the slope should have been steadily upward,
+not downward. In this there is encouragement, surely. There is enough left
+to battle with. The six lodging-houses sheltered in the last twelve years
+149,994 children, 8,820 of them girls. We are not near the end yet. The
+problem is a great one, but the efforts on foot to solve it are great and
+growing. It has been a forty years' fight with poverty and ignorance and
+crime, and it is only just begun. But the first blow is half the battle,
+it is said, and it has been struck in New York, and struck to win.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM
+
+
+In spite of all this labor and effort, in the face of the fact that half
+of the miseries of society are at last acknowledged to be due to the
+sundering of the home-tie in childhood, and that therefore the remedy lies
+in restoring it, where that can be done, as early as possible, we have in
+New York a city of mighty institutions, marshalling a standing army of
+nearly or quite sixteen thousand children, year in and year out.[27] Homes
+they are sometimes called; but too many of them are not homes in the
+saving sense. Those are, that are merely half-way houses to the ultimate
+family home that shall restore to the child what it has lost. Failing in
+that, they become public tenements, with most of the bad features of the
+tenement left out, but the worst retained: the smothering of the tenant's
+individuality. He is saved from becoming a tough to become an automaton.
+
+It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that makes the
+pauper. It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that marshals
+the greater part of this army. Money backed up by pharisaical
+sectarianism. Where two such powerful factors combine, politics is never
+far in the rear, though modestly invisible to the naked eye. To this
+irresponsible combination--conspiracy it might be called without
+stretching the point far--the care of the defenceless child that comes
+upon the public for support has been handed over without check or control
+of any sort. Worse, a premium has been put upon his coming, upon child
+desertion in our community. What are the causes of this?
+
+They have been stated often and urgently enough by those whose great
+experience gave weight to their arguments. Clothed in legal phrase, they
+may be found summed up in the law of 1875, which ordains that a dependent
+child shall be committed to an institution controlled by persons of the
+same religious faith as its parents, when that can be done, and that the
+county shall pay the child's board. It was a tremendous bid for child
+pauperism, and poverty, ignorance, and greed were not slow to respond.
+Under this so-called "religious clause," the number of children thrown
+upon the county, in New York City alone, was swelled, between 1875 and
+1890, from 9.363 to 16.358, this statement including only the twenty-nine
+institutions that can demand or do receive public money toward their
+support. Some of them, that have come into existence since it was passed,
+were directly created by the law. It was natural that this should be so,
+"because it provided exactly the care which parents desired for their
+children, that of persons of their own religious faith, and supplied ample
+means for the children's support; while, although the funds were to be
+derived from public sources, yet since the institutions were to be managed
+by private persons, the stigma which fortunately attaches to _public_
+relief was removed. Thus every incentive to parents to place their
+children upon the public for support was created by the provisions of the
+law, and every deterrent was removed; for the law demanded nothing from
+the parent in return for the support of the child, and did not deprive him
+of any of his rights over the child, although relieving him of every duty
+toward it."[28] But New York City went a step further, by having special
+laws passed securing a stated income from the money raised by local
+taxation to nine of its largest institutions. This is where the trail of
+the politician might perhaps be traced with an effort. The amount drawn by
+the nine in 1890 was nearly a million dollars, while the total so expended
+footed up in that year over sixteen hundred thousand dollars. New York
+City to-day supports one dependent child to each one hundred of its
+population, and the tax levied, directly and indirectly, for the purpose
+is about a dollar a head for every man, woman, and child in the city. The
+State in 1888 supported one child to every 251 of its population. The
+State of California, which had also gone into the wholesale charity
+business, supported one dependent child to every 290 of its population,
+while Michigan, which had gone out of it, taking her children out of the
+poor-houses and sending them to a State public school, with the proviso
+that thenceforth parents surrendering their children to be public charges
+should lose all rights over or to their custody, services, or earnings,
+had only 1 to every 10,000 of its people.[29]
+
+That proviso cut the matter to the quick. The law declared the school to
+be a "temporary home for dependent children, where they shall be detained
+only until they can be placed in family homes." That is a very different
+thing from the institution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns,
+and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand
+boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and
+taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the
+rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the
+family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the
+asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. To what
+extent these things are done in New York may be inferred from the
+statement of the Superintendent of the Juvenile Asylum, which contains an
+average of a thousand children, that three-fourths of the inmates could
+not be sent to free homes in the West because their relatives would not
+consent to their going.[30] It was only last summer that my attention was
+attracted, while on a visit to this Juvenile Asylum, to a fine-looking
+little fellow who seemed much above the average of the class in which I
+found him. On inquiring as to the causes that had brought him to that
+place, I was shocked to find that he was the son of a public official,
+well-known to me, whose income from the city's treasury was sufficient not
+only to provide for the support of his family, but to enable him to
+gratify somewhat expensive private tastes as well. The boy had been there
+two years, during which time the Asylum had drawn for his account from the
+public funds about $240, at the per capita rate of $110 for each inmate
+and his share of the school money. His father, when I asked him why the
+boy was there, told me that it was because he would insist upon paying
+unauthorized visits to his grandmother in the country. There was no
+evidence that he was otherwise unmanageable. Seeing my surprise, he put
+the question, as if that covered the ground: "Well, now! where would you
+put him in a better place?" It was a handsome compliment to the Asylum,
+which as a reform school it perhaps deserved; but it struck me, all the
+same, that he could hardly have put him in a worse place, on all accounts.
+
+I do not know how many such cases there were in the Asylum then. I hope
+not many. But it is certain that our public institutions are full of
+children who have parents amply able, but unwilling, to support them. From
+time to time enough such cases crop out to show how common the practice
+is. Reference to cases 59,703, 59,851, and 60,497 in the report of the
+Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1892), will discover
+some striking instances that were ferreted out by the Society's officers.
+All of the offenders were in thriving business. One of them kept a store
+in Newark--in another State--and was not even a resident of the city. He
+merely "honored it with the privilege of paying his children's
+boarding-school expenses in the institution." They were all Italians.
+These people seem to consider that it is their right to thus feed at the
+public crib. Perhaps it is the first quickening of the seed of municipal
+politics that sprouts so energetically among them in the slums, under the
+teaching of their Irish patrons.
+
+When Mrs. Lowell inspected the New York City institutions in 1889, she
+found "that of 20,384 individual children sheltered in them, 4,139 had
+been that year returned to parents or friends, that is, to the persons who
+had given them up to be paupers; that there were only 1,776 orphans among
+them, and 4,987 half orphans, of whom 2,247 had living fathers, who
+presumably ought to have been made to support their children themselves."
+Three years later, the imperfect returns to a circular inquiry sent out by
+the State Board of Charities, showed that of 18,556 children in
+institutions in this State, 3,671, or less than twenty per cent., were
+orphans. The rest then had, or should have, homes. Doubtless, many were
+homes of which they were well rid; but all experience shows that there
+must have been far too many of the kind that were well rid of _them_, and
+to that extent the tax-payers were robbed and the parents and the children
+pauperized. And that even that other kind were much better off in the long
+run, their being in the institution did not guarantee. Children, once for
+all, cannot be successfully reared in regiments within the narrow rules
+and the confinement of an asylum, if success is to be measured by the
+development of individual character. Power to regulate or shorten their
+stay is not vested to any practical extent or purpose in any outside
+agency. Within, with every benevolent desire to do the right, every
+interest of the institution as a whole tends to confuse the perception of
+it. The more children, the more money; the fewer children, the less money.
+A thousand children can be more economically managed for $110,000 than
+five hundred for half the money. The fortieth annual report of the
+Juvenile Asylum (1891) puts it very plainly, in this statement on page 23:
+"Until the capacity of the Asylum was materially increased, an annual
+deficit ranging between $5,000 and $10,000 had to be covered by appeals to
+private contributors." Now, it runs not only the New York house but its
+Western agency as well on its income.
+
+The city pays the bills, but exercises no other control over the
+institutions. It does not even trouble itself with counting the
+children.[31] The committing magistrate consults and is guided more or
+less by the Officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
+Children, in his choice of the institution into which the child is put.
+But both are bound by the law that imposes the "faith-test." The
+faith-test, as enforced by civil law anywhere, is absurd. The parents of
+the eighty per cent. of children in institutions who were not orphans,
+split no theological hairs in ridding themselves of their support. Backed
+by the money sacks of a great and wealthy city, it is injurious humbug.
+This is not the perfection of organized charitable effort for the rescue
+of the children of which I spoke, but rather the perversion of it.
+
+It is reasonable to ask that if the public is to pay the piper, the public
+should have the hiring of him too. A special city officer is needed to
+have this matter in charge. Nearly six years ago Commissioner Lowell
+submitted a draft for a bill creating a department for the care of
+dependent children in New York City, with a commissioner at the head whose
+powers would have been an effective check upon the evil tendencies of the
+present law. But we travel slowly along the path of municipal reform, and
+the commissioner is yet a dream. Some day we may wake up and find him
+there, and then we shall be ready, by and by, to carry out the ideal plan
+of placing those children, for whom free homes cannot be found, out at
+board in families where they shall come by their rights, denied them by
+institution life. Then, too, we shall find, I think, that there is a good
+deal less of the problem than we thought. The managers of the Union
+Temporary Home in Philadelphia decided, after thirty one years of work, to
+close the House and put the children out to board, because experience had
+convinced them that "life in the average institution is not so good for
+children as life in the average home." The intelligence of the conclusion,
+and the earnestness with which they presented it, guaranteed that their
+"Home" had been above the average.
+
+"The testimony of two gentlemen on our Board of Council," they reported,
+"both experienced as heads of great industrial enterprises, is that
+institution boys are generally the least desirable apprentices. They have
+been dulled in faculty, by not having been daily exercised in the use of
+themselves in small ways; have marched in platoons; have done everything
+in squads; have had all the particulars of life arranged for them; and, as
+a consequence, they wait for someone else to arrange every piece of work,
+and are never ready for emergencies, nor able to 'take hold.'" But when
+they came to actually board the children out, all but the parents of nine
+were suddenly able to take good care of them themselves, and of the rest
+three found a way before final arrangements were made. There were seventy
+children in the Home. Pauperism runs in the same ruts in New York as in
+Pennsylvania, and the motive power is the same--ill-spent money.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+THE VERDICT OF THE POTTER'S FIELD
+
+
+Looking back now over the field we have traversed, what is the verdict?
+Are we going backward or forward? To be standing still would be to lose
+ground. Nothing stands still in this community of ours, with its
+ever-swelling population, least of all the problem of the children of the
+poor. It got the start of our old indifference once, and we have had a
+long and wearisome race of it, running it down.
+
+But we have run it down. We are moving forward, and indifference will not
+again trap us into defeat. Evidence is multiplying on every hand to show
+that interest in the children is increasing. The personal service, that
+counts for so infinitely much more than money, is more freely given day by
+day, and no longer as a fashionable fad, but as a duty too long neglected.
+From the colleges young men and women are going forth to study the problem
+in a practical way that is full of promise. Charity is forgetting its
+petty jealousies and learning the lesson of organization and co-operation.
+"Looking back," writes the Secretary of the Charity Organization Society,
+"over the progress of the last ten years, the success seems large, while
+looking at our hopes and aims it often seems meagre." The Church is coming
+up, no longer down, to its work among the poor. In the multiplication of
+brotherhoods and sisterhoods, of societies of Christian Endeavor, of
+King's Daughters, of efforts on every hand to reach the masses, the law of
+love, the only law that has real power to protect the poor, is receiving
+fresh illustration day by day.
+
+The Fresh Air Work, the Boys' Clubs, the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Children, bear witness to it, and to the energy and resources
+that shall yet win the fight for us. They were born of New York's plight.
+The whole world shares in the good they have wrought.
+
+Kindergartens, industrial schools, baby nurseries are springing up
+everywhere. We have children's play-grounds, and we shall be getting more,
+if the promised small parks are yet in the future. Municipal progress has
+not kept step with private benevolence, but there is progress. New schools
+have been built this year and others are planned. We are beginning to
+understand that there are other and better ways of making citizens and
+voters than to grind them out through the political naturalization mill at
+every election. If the rum power has not lost its grip, it has not
+tightened it, at all events, in forty years. Then there was one saloon to
+every 90.8 inhabitants; to-day there is one to every 236.42.[32] The
+streets in the tenement districts, since I penned the first lines of this
+book, have been paved and cleaned as never before, and new standards of
+decency set up for the poor who live there and for their children. Jersey
+Street, Poverty Gap, have disappeared, and an end has been put, for a
+time at least, to the foul business of refuse gathering at the dumps.
+Nothing stands still in New York. Conditions change so suddenly, under the
+pressure of new exigencies, that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with
+them. The fact that it is generally business which prompts the changes for
+the better has this drawback, that the community, knowing that relief is
+coming sooner or later, gets into the habit of waiting for it to come that
+way as the natural one. It is not always the natural way, and though
+relief comes with bustle and stir at last, it is sometimes too long
+delayed.
+
+Another mischievous habit, characteristic of the American people,
+preoccupied with so many urgent private concerns, is to rise up and pass a
+law that is loudly in demand, and let it go with that, as if all social
+evils could be cured by mere legal enactment. As a result, some of the
+best and most necessary laws are dead letters on our statute books. The
+law is there, but no one thinks of enforcing it. The beginning was made at
+the wrong end; but we shall reach around to the other in season.
+
+The chief end has been gained in the recognition of the child problem as
+the all-important one, of the development of individual character as the
+strongest barrier against the evil forces of the street and the tenement.
+Last year I had occasion to address a convention at the National Capital,
+on certain phases of city poverty and suffering, and made use of the magic
+lantern to enforce some of the lessons presented. The last picture put on
+the screen showed the open trench in the Potter's Field. When it had
+passed, the Secretary of the Convention, a clergyman whose life has been
+given to rescue work among homeless boys, told how there had just come to
+join him in his work the man who had until very lately been in charge of
+this Potter's Field. His experience there had taught him that the waste
+before which he stood helpless at that end of the line, looking on without
+power to check or relieve, must be stopped at its source. So he had turned
+from the dead to the living, pledging the years that remained to him to
+that effort.
+
+It struck me then, and it has seemed to me since, that this man's position
+to the problem was most comprehensive. The evidence of his long-range view
+was convincing. Society had indeed arrived at the same diagnosis some time
+before. Reasoning by exclusion, as doctors do in doubtful diseases, the
+symptoms of which are clearer than their cause, it had conjectured that if
+the "tough" whom it must maintain in idleness behind prison-bars, to keep
+him from preying upon it, was a creature of environment, not justly to
+blame, the community must be, for allowing him to grow up a "tough." So,
+in self-defence, it had turned its hand to the forming of character in
+proportion as it had come to own its failure to reform it. To that failure
+the trench in the Potter's Field bore unceasing witness. Its claim to be
+heard in evidence was incontestable.
+
+Now that it has been heard, its testimony confirms the judgment that had
+already experience to back it. There is no longer room for doubt that with
+the children lies the solution of the problem of poverty, as far as it can
+be reached under existing forms of society and with our machinery for
+securing justice by government. The wisdom of generations that were dust
+two thousand years ago made this choice. We have been long in making it,
+but not too long if our travail has made it clear at last that for all
+time to come it must be the only safe choice. And this, whether from the
+standpoint of the Christian or the unbeliever, from that of humanity or
+mere business. If the matter is reduced to a simple sum in arithmetic, so
+much for so much--child-rescue, as the one way of balancing waste with
+gain, loss with profit, becomes the imperative duty of society, its chief
+bulwark against bankruptcy and wreck.
+
+Thus, through the gloom of the Potter's Field that has levied such heavy
+tribute on our city in the past--even the tenth of its life--brighter
+skies, a new hope, are discerned beyond. They brighten even the slum
+tenement, and shine into the home which just now we despaired of reaching
+by any other road than that of pulling it down. Tireless, indeed, the
+hands need be that have taken up this task. Flag their efforts ever so
+little, hard-won ground is lost, mischief done. But we are gaining, no
+longer losing, ground. Seen from the tenement, through the frame-work of
+injustice and greed that cursed us with it, the outlook seemed little less
+than despairing. Groping vainly, with unseeing eyes, we said: There is no
+way out. The children, upon whom the curse of the tenement lay heaviest,
+have found it for us. Truly it was said: "A little child shall lead
+them."
+
+
+
+
+REGISTER OF CHILDREN'S CHARITIES
+
+AS PUBLISHED BY THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY
+
+
+In addition to the charities given here, seventy-eight churches of all
+denominations conduct weekly industrial and sewing classes, generally on
+Saturdays, for which see the Directory of the Charity Organization
+Society, under Churches, where may also be found the register of
+thirty-two fresh-air funds not recorded below, and of some kindergartens
+and clubs established by various churches for the children of their
+congregations.
+
+
+NURSERIES.
+
+                                                            AGES RECEIVED.
+
+  AHAWATH CHESED SISTERHOOD, 71 East 3d St.                    3 to 6 yrs.
+
+  BETHANY DAY NURSERY, 453 East 57th St.                 2 weeks to 6 yrs.
+
+  BETH-EL SOCIETY, 355 East 62d St.                        2-1/2 to 6 yrs.
+
+  BETHLEHEM DAY NURSERY, 249 East 30th St.                1 week to 7 yrs.
+
+  CHILDREN'S CHARITABLE UNION, 70 Av. D.                       3 to 7 yrs.
+
+  DAY NURSERY AND BABIES' SHELTER, 118 West 21st St.           1 to 5 yrs.
+
+  ECOLE FRANCAISE GRATUITE AND SALLE D'ASILE, 69 Washington Square.
+                                                              2 to 11 yrs.
+
+  EMANU-EL SISTERHOOD, 159 East 74th St.                       3 to 6 yrs.
+
+  GRACE HOUSE DAY NURSERY, 94 Fourth Av.                       1 to 8 yrs.
+
+  HOPE NURSERY, 226 Thompson St.
+
+  JEWELL DAY NURSERY, 20 Macdougal St.                         2 to 5 yrs.
+
+  MANHATTAN WORKING GIRLS' ASSOCIATION, 440 East 57th St.
+                                                        2 weeks to 10 yrs.
+
+  MEMORIAL DAY NURSERY, 275 East Broadway.                     1 to 6 yrs.
+
+  RIVERSIDE DAY NURSERY, 121 West 63d St.                  1 mo. to 8 yrs.
+
+  ST. AGNES' DAY NURSERY, 7 Charles St.                   8 days to 6 yrs.
+
+  ST. BARNABAS' HOUSE, 304 Mulberry St.                  4 weeks to 8 yrs.
+
+  ST. CHRYSOSTOM CHAPEL NURSERY, 224 West 38th St.
+
+  ST. JOHN'S DAY NURSERY, 223 East 67th St.                    1 to 6 yrs.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S DAY NURSERY, 473 West 57th St.            2 weeks to 7 yrs.
+
+  ST. STEPHEN'S EQUITY CLUB, KINDERGARTEN AND NURSERY, 59 West 46th St.
+
+  ST. THOMAS' DAY NURSERY, 231 East 59th St.                  -- to 6 yrs.
+
+  SALLE D'ASILE ET ECOLE PRIMAIRE, 2 South 5th Av.             3 to 8 yrs.
+
+  SILVER CROSS DAY NURSERY, 2249 Second Av.             2 weeks to 10 yrs.
+
+  SUNNYSIDE DAY NURSERY, 51 Prospect Pl.                 2 weeks to 7 yrs.
+
+  VIRGINIA DAY NURSERY, 632 5th St.                       6 mos. to 6 yrs.
+
+  WAYSIDE DAY NURSERY, 216 East 20th St.                  2 mos. to 7 yrs.
+
+  WEST SIDE DAY NURSERY, 266 West 40th St.               18 mos. to 7 yrs.
+
+  WILSON INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL DAY NURSERY, 125 St. Mark's Pl.
+                                                           1 mo. to 6 yrs.
+
+
+KINDERGARTENS.
+
+  AHAWATH CHESED SISTERHOOD FREE KINDERGARTEN               71 East 3d St.
+
+  ALL SOULS' CHURCH FREE KINDERGARTEN       70th St. East of Lexington Av.
+
+  BETH-EL SOCIETY FREE KINDERGARTEN                       355 East 62d St.
+
+  CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH FREE KINDERGARTEN           454 West 42d St.
+
+  CHERRY STREET KINDERGARTEN                                340 Cherry St.
+
+  CHILDREN'S CHARITABLE UNION KINDERGARTEN                       70 Av. D.
+
+  EAST SIDE CHAPEL AND BIBLE WOMEN'S ASSOCIATION KINDERGARTEN
+                                                         404 East 15th St.
+
+  EAST SIDE HOUSE KINDERGARTEN                       Foot of East 76th St.
+
+  EMANU-EL SISTERHOOD KINDERGARTEN                         159 E. 74th St.
+
+  FREE KINDERGARTEN ASS'N, OF HARLEM, No. 1 School          2048 First Av.
+
+  FREE KINDERGARTEN OF ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL                Varick near Beach.
+
+  FRENCH FREE SCHOOL                               69 South Washington Sq.
+
+  HEBREW FREE SCHOOL ASSOCIATION              East B'way and Jefferson St.
+
+  KINDERGARTEN OF MADISON SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH HOUSE
+                                                    Third Av. and 30th St.
+
+       "       "  ST. GEORGE'S AV. A MISSION                    253 Av. A.
+
+       "       "         "     CHAPEL                      130 Stanton St.
+
+       "       "  SHEARITH ISRAEL CONGREGATION             5 West 19th St.
+
+  LADIES' BIKUR CHOLIM SOCIETY KINDERGARTEN             177 East Broadway.
+
+  NEIGHBORHOOD GUILD KINDERGARTEN                          146 Forsyth St.
+
+  N. Y. FOUNDLING HOSPITAL KINDERGARTEN                  175 East 68th St.
+
+  N. Y. KINDERGARTEN ASSOCIATION SCHOOLS:
+          No. 1, 221 East 51st St.
+          No. 2, Alumnae Kindergarten, cor. 63d St. and First Av.
+          No. 3, 228 West 35th St.
+          No. 4, 348 West 26th St.
+          No. 5, Shaw Memorial, 61 Henry St.
+          No. 6, McAlpine, 62 Second St.
+          No. 7, Av. A and 15th St.
+
+  ST. ANDREWS' FREE KINDERGARTEN                           2067 Second Av.
+
+  ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S    "                                  209 East 42d St.
+
+  ST. JAMES' FREE KINDERGARTEN                          Av. A and 78th St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S KINDERGARTEN                                    438 Grand St.
+
+  SHAARAY TEFILLA SISTERHOOD KINDERGARTEN                127 West 44th St.
+
+  SILVER CROSS        "           "                        2249 Second Av.
+
+  SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL CULTURE     "                      109 West 54th St.
+
+  TEMPLE ISRAEL SISTERHOOD KINDERGARTEN              125th St. and 5th Av.
+
+  TRINITY CHURCH ASS'N          "                           209 Fulton St.
+
+  WILSON INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL KINDERGARTEN                  125 St Mark's Pl.
+
+
+INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS.
+
+  ABIGAIL SCHOOL AND KINDERGARTEN                           242 Spring St.
+
+  AMERICAN FEMALE GUARDIAN SOCIETY                Office, 32 East 30th St.
+
+  HOME SCHOOL                                             29 East 29th St.
+
+  INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL NO. 1                       552 First Av. cor. 32d St.
+
+       "        "    "  2 (Rose Memorial)                418 West 41st St.
+
+       "        "    "  3                                124 West 26th St.
+
+       "        "    "  4                                   34 Willett St.
+
+       "        "    "  5                                220 West 36th St.
+
+       "        "    "  6                                    125 Allen St.
+
+       "        "    "  7                                234 East 80th St.
+
+       "        "    "  8                                 463 West 32d St.
+
+       "        "    "  9                     East 60th St. and Boulevard.
+
+       "        "    " 10                                    125 Lewis St.
+
+       "        "    " 11                           52d St. and Second Av.
+
+       "        "    " 12                                  2247 Second Av.
+
+  CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY.                        Office, 24 St. Mark's Pl.
+      _Industrial Schools_--
+          ASTOR MEMORIAL                                      256 Mott St.
+          AV. B                                          607 East 14th St.
+          COTTAGE PLACE                                   208 Bleecker St.
+          BRACE MEMORIAL                                       9 Duane St.
+          EAST RIVER                                     247 East 44th St.
+          EAST SIDE                                     287 East Broadway.
+          ELEVENTH WARD                                     295 Eighth St.
+          FOURTH WARD                                        73 Monroe St.
+          FIFTH WARD                                          36 Beach St.
+          FIFTY-SECOND STREET                             573 West 52d St.
+          GERMAN                                            272 Second St.
+          HENRIETTA                                      215 East 21st St.
+          ITALIAN                                          156 Leonard St.
+          JONES MEMORIAL                                  407 East 73d St.
+          LORD                                           135 Greenwich St.
+          PARK                                     68th St. near Broadway.
+          PHELPS                                         314 East 35th St.
+          RHINELANDER                                    350 East 88th St.
+          SIXTEENTH WARD                                 211 West 18th St.
+          SIXTH STREET                                       632 Sixth St.
+          WEST SIDE                                       201 West 32d St.
+          WEST SIDE ITALIAN                                24 Sullivan St.
+      _Night Schools_--
+          GERMAN                                            272 Second St.
+          ITALIAN                                          156 Leonard St.
+          BRACE MEMORIAL (Newsboys)                            9 Duane St.
+          ELEVENTH WARD                                        295 8th St.
+          EAST SIDE                                     287 East Broadway.
+          LORD                                           135 Greenwich St.
+          JONES MEMORIAL                                  407 East 73d St.
+          FIFTY-SECOND STREET                             573 West 52d St.
+          WEST SIDE                                        400 Seventh Av.
+
+  CHURCH SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIANITY AMONG JEWS
+  (Industrial School for Girls)                            68 East 7th St.
+
+  EIGHTH WARD MISSION SCHOOL                                1 Charlton St.
+
+  FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY                              155 Worth St.
+
+   "     "    MISSION                                          63 Park St.
+
+  FREE GERMAN SCHOOL                                      140 East 4th St.
+
+  HEBREW FREE SCHOOL ASSOCIATION           East Broadway and Jefferson St.
+
+  ITALIAN MISSION (P. E. School for Girls)                809 Mulberry St.
+
+  INDUSTRIAL CHRISTIAN ALLIANCE                          113 Macdougal St.
+
+  LOUIS DOWN-TOWN SABBATH AND DAILY SCHOOL (Hebrew)          267 Henry St.
+
+  MISSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN       Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.
+
+  MISSION SCHOOL OF ALL SOULS' CHURCH                    213 East 21st St.
+
+  NEW YORK BIBLE AND TRACT MISSION (School for Girls)    422 East 26th St.
+
+  NEW YORK HOUSE AND SCHOOL OF INDUSTRY                  120 West 16th St.
+
+  SISTERHOOD OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD (P. E.)                419 West 19th St.
+
+  ST. BARNABAS HOUSE                                      304 Mulberry St.
+
+  ST. VINCENT DE PAUL INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                   346 West 43d St.
+
+  ST. ELIZABETH INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                        235 East 14th St.
+
+  SPANISH INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                             1345 Lexington Av.
+
+  TRINITY INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                                 90 Trinity Pl.
+
+  ST. GEORGE'S INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                            Teutonia Hall.
+
+  TRINITY CHAPEL INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                        15 West 25th St.
+
+  ST. AUGUSTINE'S CHAPEL INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL            105 East Houston St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S                                 Lawrence St., Manhattanville.
+
+  WEST SIDE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                            266 West 40th St.
+
+  WILSON INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                              125 St. Mark's Pl.
+
+  UNITED HEBREW CHARITIES (Industrial School for Girls)     128 Second Av.
+
+  ZION AND ST. TIMOTHY INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL                 332 West 57th St.
+
+
+FRESH AIR WORK.
+
+  THE TRIBUNE FRESH-AIR FUND                             Tribune Building.
+
+  BARTHOLDI CRECHE                                       21 University Pl.
+
+  CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY--Health Home                   West Coney Island.
+
+     "        "     "     Summer Home                          Bath Beach.
+
+  THE KING'S DAUGHTERS TENEMENT-HOUSE COMMITTEE             77 Madison St.
+
+  NEW YORK INFIRMARY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN               5 Livingston Pl.
+
+  NEW YORK CITY MISSION AND TRACT SOCIETY                 106 Bible House.
+
+  ST. JOHN'S GUILD                                           501 Fifth Av.
+
+   "   "      "   Floating Hospital         (every week-day but Saturday).
+
+   "   "      "   Seaside Hospital             Cedar Grove, Staten Island.
+
+  SANITARIUM FOR HEBREW CHILDREN                         124 East 14th St.
+
+  SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL CULTURE                            109 West 54th St.
+
+  NEW YORK ASSOCIATION FOR IMPROVING THE CONDITION OF THE
+  POOR (Ocean Parties)                                       79 Fourth Av.
+
+  ST. BARNABAS FRESH-AIR FUND                              38 Bleecker St.
+
+  THE LITTLE MOTHERS' AID SOCIETY                        305 East 17th St.
+
+  NEW YORK BIBLE AND TRACT MISSION                       416 East 26th St.
+
+  NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR PARKS AND PLAY-GROUNDS FOR CHILDREN
+                                                          36 Union Square.
+
+  AMERICAN FEMALE GUARDIAN SOCIETY         Summer Home at Oceanport, N. J.
+
+  SUMMER SHELTER                                         Morristown, N. J.
+                (Apply to Charity Organization Society, 21 University Pl.)
+
+
+BOYS' CLUBS AND READING-ROOMS.
+
+  ASCENSION MEMORIAL CHAPEL (P. E.)                       330 West 43d St.
+
+  AVENUE C CLUB                                           65 East 14th St.
+
+  BETHANY CHURCH                        Tenth Av., bet. 35th and 36th Sts.
+
+  CALVARY PARISH                                          344 East 23d St.
+
+  CHAPEL OF THE COMFORTER                                814 Greenwich St.
+
+  CHRIST CHAPEL                           West 65th St. near Amsterdam Av.
+
+  CHURCH OF THE ARCHANGEL (P. E.)           117th St. and St. Nicholas Av.
+
+  CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER                             Park Av. and 81st St.
+
+  COLLEGE SETTLEMENT                                      95 Rivington St.
+
+  COVENANT CHAPEL                                         310 East 42d St.
+
+  DEWITT CHAPEL                                          160 West 29th St.
+
+  EAST SIDE HOUSE                         Foot of 76th St. and East River.
+
+  FREE READING-ROOMS  8 West 14th St., 330 Fourth Av., and 590 Seventh Av.
+
+  GRACE MISSION                                          640 East 13th St.
+
+  HOLY COMMUNION (P. E.) CHURCH                           49 West 20th St.
+
+  HOLY CROSS LYCEUM                   43d St., bet. Eighth and Ninth Aves.
+
+  HOLY CROSS MISSION                                   300 East Fourth St.
+
+  LAFAYETTE CLUB (Middle Collegiate Church)               14 Lafayette Pl.
+
+  MISSION CHAPEL OF MADISON AV. CHURCH                   440 East 57th St.
+
+  MADISON SQUARE CHURCH HOUSE                     Third Av., cor. 30th St.
+
+  MANOR CHAPEL                                           348 West 26th St.
+
+  MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH                        Washington Square, South.
+
+  MONDAY NIGHT CLUB (Church of Holy Communion)            49 West 20th St.
+
+  NEIGHBORHOOD GUILD                                       147 Forsyth St.
+
+  NEW JERUSALEM CHURCH                                   114 East 35th St.
+
+  NORTH SIDE BOYS' CLUB                                   79 Macdougal St.
+
+  ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S PARISH HOUSE                          207 East 42d St.
+
+  ST. GEORGE'S (P. E.) CHURCH (Memorial House)           207 East 16th St.
+
+  ST. LUKE'S M. E. CHURCH (Knights of St Luke)           108 West 41st St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S                                 Lawrence St., Manhattanville.
+
+  WEST SIDE                                 Vermilye Chapel, 794 Tenth Av.
+
+  WILSON MISSION BUILDING ("Av. A Club")                125 St. Mark's Pl.
+
+
+CHILDREN'S LODGING-HOUSES.
+
+  BRACE MEMORIAL                                               9 Duane St.
+
+  GIRLS' TEMPORARY HOME                              307-309 East 12th St.
+
+  TOMPKINS SQUARE                                              295 8th St.
+
+  EAST SIDE                                             287 East Broadway.
+
+  FORTY-FOURTH STREET                                    247 East 44th St.
+
+  WEST SIDE                                                400 Seventh Av.
+
+  MISSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN       Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.
+
+
+CHILDREN'S HOMES--TEMPORARY AND PERMANENT.
+
+  ASYLUM OF ST. VINCENT DE PAUL                          215 West 39th St.
+
+  ASYLUM OF SISTERS OF ST. DOMINIC (House of Reception)     137 Second St.
+
+  BERACHAH ORPHANAGE (Gospel Tabernacle)                    692 Eighth Av.
+
+  BETHLEHEM ORPHAN AND HALF-ORPHAN ASYLUM             College Point. L. I.
+      (Controlled by thirteen Lutheran churches of New York and vicinity.)
+
+  CHILDREN'S FOLD                                   92d St. and Eighth Av.
+
+  COLORED ORPHAN ASYLUM                       West 143d St. and Boulevard.
+
+  FREE HOME FOR DESTITUTE YOUNG GIRLS                     23 East 11th St.
+
+  DOMINICAN CONVENT OF OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY             329 East 63d St.
+
+  FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY                              155 Worth St.
+
+  GERMAN ODD FELLOWS' ORPHANAGE               Apply at Home, 82 Second Av.
+
+  HEBREW BENEVOLENT AND ORPHAN ASYLUM          Amsterdam Av. and 136th St.
+
+  HEBREW SHELTERING GUARDIAN ORPHAN ASYLUM      Eleventh Av. and 151st St.
+
+  HOLY ANGELS' ORPHAN ASYLUM (for Italian Children from New York)
+                                                  West Park-on-the-Hudson.
+
+  HOUSE OF MERCY                                  81st St. and Madison Av.
+
+  LADIES' DEBORAH NURSERY AND CHILD'S PROTECTORY, Male Department,
+    95 East Broadway and 83 Henry St.; Female Department, East 162d St.,
+    near Eagle Av.
+
+  LEAKE AND WATTS ORPHAN HOUSE                Ludlow Station, Hudson R. R.
+
+  MESSIAH HOME FOR LITTLE CHILDREN                        4 Rutherford Pl.
+
+  MISSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN FOR HOMELESS AND DESTITUTE CHILDREN
+                                         Lafayette Pl. and Great Jones St.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S HOME FOR DESTITUTE CHILDREN
+                                 House of Reception, 143 West 31st Street.
+
+  NEW YORK FOUNDLING HOSPITAL (Asylum of Sisters of Charity)
+                                                         175 East 68th St.
+
+  NEW YORK INFANT ASYLUM                        Amsterdam Av. and 61st St.
+
+  ORPHANAGE OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY            400 East 50th St.
+
+  ORPHAN ASYLUM SOCIETY                   Riverside Drive and West 73d St.
+
+  ORPHANS' HOME AND ASYLUM OF PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH
+                                               49th St. near Lexington Av.
+
+  ROMAN CATHOLIC ORPHAN ASYLUM                    Madison Av. and 51st St.
+
+  ST. AGATHA'S HOME FOR CHILDREN                         209 West 15th St.
+
+  ST. ANN'S HOME FOR DESTITUTE CHILDREN               Av. A, cor. 90th St.
+
+  ST. BENEDICT'S HOME FOR COLORED CHILDREN
+                                     House of Reception, 120 Macdougal St.
+
+  ST. CHRISTOPHER'S HOME                     Riverside Drive and 112th St.
+
+  ST. JAMES' HOME                               21 Oliver and 26 James St.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S ORPHAN ASYLUM                           89th St. and Av. A.
+
+  SHEPHERD'S FOLD (P. E. Church)                    92d St. and Eighth Av.
+
+  PROTESTANT HALF-ORPHAN ASYLUM               Manhattan Av. near 104th St.
+
+  HOME FOR SEAMEN'S CHILDREN (New York and vicinity)
+                                                  West New Brighton, S. I.
+
+  SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN       100 East 23d St.
+
+
+REFORMATORY INSTITUTIONS.
+
+  BURNHAM INDUSTRIAL FARM                        Office, 135 East 15th St.
+
+  HEBREW SHELTERING GUARDIAN SOCIETY            Eleventh Av. and 151st St.
+
+  NEW YORK CATHOLIC PROTECTORY                      Office, 415 Broome St.
+
+  NEW YORK JUVENILE ASYLUM                     176th St. and Amsterdam Av.
+
+  ST. JAMES' HOME                                            21 Oliver St.
+
+  HOUSE OF REFUGE                                        Randall's Island.
+
+  HOUSE OF THE HOLY FAMILY                                  132 Second Av.
+
+
+CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES.
+
+  ALL SAINTS' CONVALESCENT HOME FOR MEN AND BOYS (Holy Cross Mission)
+                                                      Avenue C and 4th St.
+
+  BABIES' HOSPITAL OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK               657 Lexington Av.
+
+  BABIES' WARD, POST-GRADUATE HOSPITAL                   226 East 20th St.
+
+  CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL                                    Randall's Island.
+
+  NEW YORK INFIRMARY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN               5 Livingston Pl.
+
+  FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY INFIRMARY                    147 Worth St.
+
+  GOOD SAMARITAN DIAKONISSEN (Hahnemann Hospital)    Park Av. and 67th St.
+
+  INFANTS' HOSPITAL                                      Randall's Island.
+
+  LAURA FRANKLIN FREE HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN              17 East 111th St.
+
+  NEW YORK FOUNDLING HOSPITAL                            175 East 68th St.
+
+  NURSERY AND CHILD'S HOSPITAL                  Lexington Av. and 51st St.
+
+  ST. MARY'S FREE HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN                  405 West 34th St.
+
+  HARLEM DISPENSARY FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN                 2331 Second Av.
+
+  SICK CHILDREN'S MISSION OF CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY     287 East Broadway.
+
+  YORKVILLE DISPENSARY AND HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN
+                                                        1307 Lexington Av.
+
+  NEW YORK ORTHOPAEDIC HOSPITAL                           126 East 59th St.
+
+  NEW YORK OPHTHALMIC HOSPITAL                            201 East 23d St.
+
+
+ASYLUMS FOR DEFECTIVE CHILDREN.
+
+  CRIPPLED BOYS' HOME (Forty-fourth Street Lodging House)
+                                                         247 East 44th St.
+
+  INSTITUTION FOR THE IMPROVED INSTRUCTION OF DEAF MUTES
+                                                Lexington Av. and 67th St.
+
+  IDIOT ASYLUM                                           Randall's Island.
+
+  NEW YORK INSTITUTION FOR THE BLIND                Ninth Av. and 34th St.
+
+  NEW YORK INSTITUTION FOR THE INSTRUCTION OF THE DEAF AND DUMB
+                                                 Eleventh Av. and 163d St.
+
+  NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE RELIEF OF THE RUPTURED AND CRIPPLED
+                                                 Lexington Av. and 42d St.
+
+  ST. JOSEPH'S INSTITUTION FOR THE IMPROVED INSTRUCTION OF DEAF MUTES
+                                                        772 East 188th St.
+
+  SHELTERING ARMS                              Amsterdam Av. and 129th St.
+
+  SOCIETY OF ST. JOHNLAND        Apply at Calvary Chapel, 220 East 23d St.
+
+  SYRACUSE STATE SCHOOL FOR FEEBLE-MINDED
+                               (Apply to Superintendent of Out-door Poor.)
+
+  CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY                 Haxtun Cottage, Bath Beach, L. I.
+
+  HOUSE OF ST. GILES THE CRIPPLE                 422 Degraw St., Brooklyn.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] It is, nevertheless, true that while immigration peoples our slums, it
+also keeps them from stagnation. The working of the strong instinct to
+better themselves, that brought the crowds here, forces layer after layer
+of this population up to make room for the new crowds coming in at the
+bottom, and thus a circulation is kept up that does more than any sanitary
+law to render the slums harmless. Even the useless sediment is kept from
+rotting by being constantly stirred.
+
+[2] Report of committing magistrates. See Annual Report of Children's Aid
+Society, 1891.
+
+[3] The census referred to in this chapter was taken for a special
+purpose, by a committee of prominent Hebrews, in August, 1890, and was
+very searching.
+
+[4] Dr. Roger S. Tracy's report of the vital statistics for 1891 shows
+that, while the general death-rate of the city was 25.96 per 1,000 of the
+population--that of adults (over five years) 17.13, and the baby
+death-rate (under five years) 93.21--in the Italian settlement in the west
+half of the Fourteenth Ward the record stood as follows: general
+death-rate, 33.52; adult death-rate, 16.29; and baby death-rate, 150.52.
+In the Italian section of the Fourth Ward it stood: general death-rate,
+34.88; adult death-rate, 21.29; baby death-rate 119.02. In the sweaters
+district in the lower part of the Tenth Ward the general death rate was
+16.23; the adult death rate, 7.59; and the baby death rate 61.15. Dr.
+Tracy adds: "The death-rate from phthisis was highest in houses entirely
+occupied by cigarmakers (Bohemians), and lowest in those entirely occupied
+by tailors. On the other hand, the death-rates from diphtheria and croup
+and measles were highest in houses entirely occupied by tailors."
+
+[5] Meaning "teachers."
+
+[6] Even as I am writing a transformation is being worked in some of the
+filthiest streets on the East Side by a combination of new asphalt
+pavements with a greatly improved street cleaning service that promises
+great things. Some of the worst streets have within a few weeks become as
+clean as I have not seen them in twenty years, and as they probably never
+were since they were made. The unwonted brightness of the surroundings is
+already visibly reflected in the persons and dress of the tenants, notably
+the children. They take to it gladly, giving the lie to the old assertion
+that they are pigs and would rather live like pigs.
+
+[7] As a matter of fact, I heard, after the last one that caused so much
+discussion, in a court that sent seventy-five children to the show, a
+universal growl of discontent. The effect on the children, even to those
+who received presents, was bad. They felt that they had been on
+exhibition, and their greed was aroused. It was as I expected it would be.
+
+[8] The Sanitary census of 1891 gave 37,358 tenements, containing 276,565
+families, including 160,708 children under five years of age; total
+population of tenements, 1,225,411.
+
+[9] The general impression survives with me that the children's teeth were
+bad, and those of the native born the worst. Ignorance and neglect were
+clearly to blame for most of it, poor and bad food for the rest, I
+suppose. I give it as a layman's opinion, and leave it to the dentist to
+account for the bad teeth of the many who are not poor. That is his
+business.
+
+[10] The fourteenth year is included. The census phrase means "up to 15."
+
+[11] The average attendance was only 136,413, so that there were 60,000
+who were taught only a small part of the time.
+
+[12] See Minutes of Stated Session of the Board of Education, February 8,
+1892.
+
+[13] Meaning evidently in this case "up to fourteen."
+
+[14] Report of New York Catholic Protectory, 1892.
+
+[15] If this were not the sober statement of public officials of high
+repute it would seem fairly incredible.
+
+[16] Between 1880 and 1890 the increase in assessed value of the real and
+personal property in this city was 48.36 per cent., while the population
+increased 41.06 per cent.
+
+[17] Philosophy of Crime and Punishment, by Dr. William T. Harris, Federal
+Commissioner of Education.
+
+[18] Seventeenth Annual Report of Society, 1892.
+
+[19] English Social Movements, by Robert Archey Woods, page 196.
+
+[20] The Superintendent of the House of Refuge for thirty years wrote
+recently: "It is essential to have the plays of the children more
+carefully watched than their work."
+
+[21] Report for 1891 of Children's Aid Society.
+
+[22] In this reckoning is included employment found for many big boys and
+girls, who were taken as help, and were thus given the chance which the
+city denied them.
+
+[23] It is inevitable, of course, that such a programme should steer clear
+of the sectarian snags that lie plentifully scattered about. I have a
+Roman Catholic paper before me in which the Society's "villainous work,
+which consists chiefly in robbing the Catholic child of his faith," is
+hotly denounced in an address to the Archbishop of New York. Mr. Brace's
+policy was to meet such attacks with silence, and persevere in his work.
+The Society still follows his plan. Catholic or Protestant--the question
+is never raised. "No Catholic child," said one of its managers once to me,
+"is ever brought to us. A _poor_ child is brought and we care for it."
+
+[24] The Society pleads for a farm of its own, close to the city, where it
+can organize a "farm school" for the older boys. There they could be taken
+on probation and their fitness for the West be ascertained. They would be
+more useful to the farmers and some trouble would be avoided. Two farms,
+or three, to get as near to the family plan as possible, would be better.
+The Children's Aid Society of Boston has three farm schools, and its work
+is very successful.
+
+[25] I once questioned a class of 71 boys between eight and twelve years
+old in a reform school, with this result: 22 said they blacked boots; 36
+sold papers; 26 did both; 40 "slept out;" but only 3 of them all were
+fatherless, 11 motherless, showing that they slept out by choice. The
+father probably had something to do with it most of the time.
+Three-fourths of the lads stood up when I asked them if they had been to
+Central Park. The teacher asked one of those who did not rise, a little
+shaver, if he had never been in the Park. "No, mem!" he replied, "me
+father he went that time."
+
+[26] The lodging-houses are following a noteworthy precedent. From the
+Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, organized in the beginning of
+this century, sprang the first savings bank in the country.
+
+[27] That is the average number constantly in asylums. With those that
+come and go, it foots up quite 25,000 children a year that are a public
+charge.
+
+[28] Report upon the Care of Dependent Children in New York City and
+elsewhere, to the State Board of Charities, by Commissioner Josephine Shaw
+Lowell. December, 1889.
+
+[29] Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell on Dependent Children. Report of 1889.
+
+[30] Anna T. Wilson: Some Arguments for the Boarding-out of Dependent
+Children in the State of New York. This opposition the Superintendent
+explains in his report for 1891, to be due in part to the lying stories
+about abuse in the West, told by bad boys who return to the city. He adds,
+however, that "oftentimes the most strenuous opposition ... is made by
+step-mothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins," and is "due in the majority of
+cases not to any special interest in the child's welfare, but to
+self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation for the boy in
+order to get his weekly wages."
+
+[31] It will do so hereafter. This autumn the discovery was made that the
+city was asked to pay for more children than there ought to be in the
+institutions according to the record of commitments. The comptroller sent
+two of his clerks to count all the children. The result was to show
+slipshod book-keeping, if nothing worse, in certain cases. Hereafter the
+ceremony of counting the children will be gone through every six months.
+Nothing could more clearly show the irresponsible character of the whole
+business and the need of a change, lest we drift into corporate pauperism
+in addition to encouraging the vice in the individual.
+
+[32] In 1854, with a population of 605,000, there were 6,657 licensed and
+unlicensed saloons in the city, or 1 to every 90.8 of its inhabitants. At
+the beginning of 1892, with a population of 1,706,500, there were 7,218
+saloons, or 1 to every 236.42. Counting all places where liquor was sold
+by license, including hotels, groceries, steamboats, etc., the number was
+9,050, or 1 to every 188.56 inhabitants.
+
+
+
+
+How the Other Half Lives.
+
+STUDIES AMONG THE TENEMENTS OF NEW YORK.
+
+By JACOB A. RIIS.
+
+_With 40 Illustrations from Photographs taken by the Author._
+
+12mo, net $1.25.
+
+
+This volume is the result of fifteen years' familiarity as police reporter
+with the seamy side of New York life. It is, however, by no means a mere
+record of personal observations, but a careful, comprehensive, and
+systematic presentation of a thesis with illustrations. It is philosophic
+as well as expository, and from beginning to end is an indictment of the
+tenement system as it exists at present in New York.
+
+No page is uninstructive, but it would be misleading to suppose the book
+even tinctured with didacticism. It is from beginning to end as
+picturesque in treatment as it is in material. The author's acquaintance
+with the latter is extremely intimate. The reader feels that he is being
+guided through the dirt and crime, the tatters and rags, the byways and
+alleys of nether New York by an experienced cicerone. Mr. Riis, in a word,
+though a philanthropist and philosopher, is an artist as well. He has also
+the advantage of being an amateur photographer, and his book is abundantly
+illustrated from negatives of the odd, the out-of-the-way, and
+characteristic sights and scenes he has himself caught with his camera. No
+work yet published--certainly not the official reports of the charity
+societies--shows so vividly the complexion and countenance of the
+"Down-town Back Alleys," "The Bend," "Chinatown," "Jewtown," "The Cheap
+Lodging-houses," the haunts of the negro, the Italian, the Bohemian poor,
+or gives such a veracious picture of the toughs, the tramps, the waifs,
+drunkards, paupers, gamins, and the generally gruesome populace of this
+centre of civilization.
+
+
+
+
+  THE CHEAP LODGING-HOUSES.                                  87
+
+  perch in the world. Uneasy sleepers roll off at intervals,
+  but they have not far to fall to the next tier of bunks,
+  and the commotion that ensues is speedily quieted by the
+  boss and his club. On cold winter nights, when every
+
+  [Illustration: BUNKS IN A SEVEN-CENT LODGING-HOUSE, PELL STREET.]
+
+  bunk had its tenant, I have stood in such a lodging-room
+  more than once, and listening to the snoring of the
+  sleepers like the regular strokes of an engine, and the
+  slow creaking of the beams under their restless weight,
+  imagined myself on shipboard and experienced the very
+
+                     [SPECIMEN PAGE.]
+
+
+
+
+COMMENDATIONS.
+
+  THE NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE
+  PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN,
+  100 East 23d Street.
+
+NEW YORK, February 28th, 1891.
+
+JACOB A RIIS, Esq.,
+
+_Dear Sir_:--"It gives me very great pleasure to express my gratification
+in reading your valuable work 'How the Other Half Lives.' I regard it as
+one of the most valuable contributions to the history of child-saving work
+in this great city, and as pointing out the numerous evils which exist at
+the present time and which loudly call for legislative aid and
+interference.
+
+"The thorough familiarity which you have shown with the subject of your
+work is equaled only by the accuracy of its detail and the graphic
+pictures which illustrate the scenes described. It is a book which every
+one may peruse with interest, and the larger the circulation which can be
+given to it, the sooner I think will the charitable and well-disposed
+people of this city realize the need, on the part of The Other Half, of
+support, aid, and assistance, and which you have so graphically
+described."
+
+  I have the honor to remain, with great respect,
+  ELDRIDGE T. GERRY,
+  President, etc.
+
+
+  THE CHRISTIAN UNION,
+  80 Lafayette Place,
+  New York.
+
+"It is one of the encouraging signs of the times that Jacob Riis's book on
+'How the Other Half Lives' has found so many readers that a new edition is
+now called for. The priest and the Levite are no longer passing by on the
+other side; that is itself a sign of moral weakness.
+
+"I was first attracted to Mr. Riis's work by an illustrated lecture which
+he gave in Plymouth Church which stirred our hearts very deeply, and which
+showed how thorough an investigation and exploration he had made.
+
+"His book presents by pictures for the eye, and by pen and ink pictures
+quite as graphic, those phases of modern paganism which exist in our great
+cities and are beginning to arouse the wonder, the indignation, and the
+wrath of philanthropists and Christians.
+
+"'How the Other Half Lives' is worthy to be a companion to 'In Darkest
+England,' to which, indeed, as a picture of existing conditions it is
+superior; nor is it without suggestions of remedy, which, if less
+elaborate than Mr. Booth's, will strike the average reader as more
+immediately practicable."
+
+  LYMAN ABBOTT.
+
+
+"It was a murderer who asked the question 'Am I my brother's keeper?' and
+hoped for a negative answer. But the affirmative answer of God has been
+ringing through all the milleniums since then. This eternal 'YES' meets
+the church of to-day, and there are signs that the church is waking to
+seek some method by which that 'YES' shall be adequately carried out. The
+first thing is to know how my brother lives, and what are his
+temptations, difficulties, trials, hopes, fears. On this no book that has
+ever appeared in this land pours such light as Mr. Riis's book on 'The
+Other Half.' Let all who want to know what to do for these brothers of
+theirs in this town, read this book which is enormously more interesting
+than any novel that ever was written or that ever will be. Dens, dives,
+hovels, sickness, death, sorrow, drink, and murder, all these exist in our
+midst in appalling magnitude, and with all of these we must have to do if
+we are not to be modern Cains. No '_eau de cologne_' business is this, if
+we are to uplift these brothers of ours, as will be apparent from a
+reading of this remarkable book. Let all who are in any way interested in
+the welfare of humanity buy and read it at once, and let all who are not
+interested repent at once and get the book, and then bring forth fruits
+meet for repentance."
+
+  A. F. SCHAUFFLER.
+
+
+
+
+PRESS NOTICES.
+
+"Criticism, in the narrower sense, has no hold on 'How the Other Half
+Lives.' The book is most beautiful without, as fascinating within. Every
+word bears its message; every illustration--there are many--means
+something. Mr. Riis has deserved nobly of the public for his thorough and
+resourceful work. We cannot believe that his reward will fail. We should
+be sorry to think that his earnest words would be less to any reader than
+a commanding invitation to the thick of the battle against social
+injustice."--_The Boston Times._
+
+"From personal observation, conducted with the perseverance and tact
+needed by the newspaper reporter, Mr. Riis has gathered, and here
+presents, many interesting, pathetic, and monitory facts concerning the
+extreme poverty, filth, or unhomelike existence of too many of the
+tenement-dwellers of New York--omitting mention of those costlier
+tenements which are called flats. He ventures upon some suggestions of
+remedy, but the chief value of his chapters lies in their
+exposition."--_Sunday School Times._
+
+"The studies of Mr. Riis among the tenements of New York take the reader
+into strange places and bring him into contact with startling conditions;
+but among all the problems now pressing for solution there are none so
+grave or so difficult as those upon the fundamental facts of which these
+pages throw light. The author has made a thorough exploration of the great
+city, and has produced a series of pictures which illustrate strikingly
+the many phases of life concerned."--_The N. Y. Tribune._
+
+"Mr. Riis's book is an important contribution to sociological literature,
+and the truths it brings forward as well as the conclusions it deduces
+must not be evaded, for on them rest all really hopeful projects for the
+restriction of poverty and crime."--_The Boston Beacon._
+
+"This is a book to be studied alike by the social scientist and by the
+philanthropist. It presents, in compact form, the story of the nether
+world of New York City, which, in general outline, varies but little from
+the story of the nether world of any large city."--_Chicago Times._
+
+"This book bears evidence on every page of faithful investigation and
+intelligent sympathy with the subject, and should be read by everyone who
+has it in any way in his power to help on the work, for as the author
+says: 'The "dangerous classes" of New York long ago compelled recognition.
+They are dangerous less because of their own crimes than because of the
+criminal ignorance of those who are not of their kind.'"--_Milwaukee
+Sentinel._
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.
+
+Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate
+both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as
+presented in the original text.
+
+The following misprints have been corrected:
+  "unfamilar" corrected to "unfamiliar" (page 2)
+  "opportunties" corrected to "opportunities" (page 36)
+  "virture" corrected to "virtue" (page 43)
+  "inpectors" corrected to "inspectors" (page 103)
+  "Commisioners" corrected to "Commissioners" (page 172)
+  "bookblack's" corrected to "bootblack's" (page 257)
+
+Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
+spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained.
+
+Unmatched quotation marks are presented as in the original text.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Children of the Poor, by Jacob A. Riis
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR ***
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