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THE problem of the children becomes, in these swarms, to the last degree perplexing. Their very number make one stand aghast. I have already given instances of the packing of the child population in East Side tenements. They might be continued indefinitely until the array would be enough to startle any community. For, be it remembered, these children with the training they receive--or do not receive--with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up, are to be our future rulers, if our theory of government is worth anything. More than a working majority of our voters now register from the tenements. I counted the other day the little ones, up to ten years or so, in a Bayard Street tenement that for a yard has a triangular space in the centre with sides fourteen or fifteen feet long, just room enough for a row of ill-smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a hydrant at the apex. There was about as much light in this "yard" as in the average cellar. I gave up my self-imposed task in despair when I had counted one hundred and twenty-eight in forty families. Thirteen I had missed, or not found in. Applying the average for the forty to the whole fifty-three, the house contained one hundred and seventy children. It is not the only time I have had to give up such census work. I have in mind an alley--an inlet rather to a row of rear tenements--that is either two or four feet wide according as the wall of the crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in. I tried to count the children that swarmed there, but could not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows just how many there are about. Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along sin summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up. The truant officer assuredly does not know, though he spends his life trying to find out, somewhat illogically, perhaps, since the department that employs him admits that thousands of poor children are crowded out of the schools year by year for want of room. There was a big tenement in the Sixth Ward now happily appropriated by the beneficent spirit of business that blots out so many foul spots in New York--it figured not long ago in the official reports as "an out-and-out hog-pen"--that had a record of one hundred and two arrests in four years among its four hundred and seventy-eight tenants, fifty-seven of them for drunken and disorderly conduct. I do not know how many children there were in it, but the inspector reported that he found only seven in the whole house who owned that they went to school. The rest gathered all the instruction they received running for beer for their elders. Some of them claimed the "flat" as their home as a mere matter of form. They slept in the streets at night. The official came upon a little party of four drinking beer out of the cover of a milk-can in the hallway. They were of the seven good boys and proved their claim to the title by offering him some.
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The old question, what
to do with the boy, assumes a new and serious
phase in the tenements. Under the best conditions
found there, it is not easily answered. In nine
cases out of ten he would make an excellent mechanic,
if trained early to work at a trade, for he is
neither dull nor slow, but the short-sighted despotism
of the trades unions has practically closed that
avenue to him. Trade-schools, however excellent,
cannot supply the opportunity thus denied him,
and at the outset the boy stands condemned by
his own to low and ill-paid drudgery, held down
by the hand that of all should labor to raise
him. Home, the greatest factor of all in the training
of the young, means nothing to him but a pigeon-hole
in a coop along with so many other human animals.
Its influence is scarcely of the elevating kind,
if it have any. The very games at which he takes
a hand in the street become polluting in its atmosphere.
With no steady hand to guide him, the boy takes
naturally to idle ways. Caught in the street by
the truant officer, or by the agents of the Children's
Societies, peddling, perhaps, or begging, |
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to help
out the family resources; he runs the risk of
being sent to a reformatory, where contact with
vicious boys older than himself soon develop the
latent possibilities for evil that lie hidden
in him. The city has no Truant Home in which to
keep him, and al] efforts of the children's friends
to enforce school attendance are paralyzed by
this want. The risk of the reformatory is too
great. What is done in the end is to let him take chances--with the chances
all against him. The result is the rough young savage,
familiar from the street. Rough as he is, if any one
doubt that this child of common clay have in him the
instinct of beauty, of love for the ideal of which his
life has no embodiment, let him put the matter to the
test. Let him take into a tenement block a handful of
flowers from the fields and watch the brightened faces,
the sudden abandonment of play and fight that go ever
hand in hand where there is no elbow-room, the wild
entreaty for "posies," the eager love with
which the little messengers of peace are shielded, once
possessed; then let him change his mind. I have seen
an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better
than a policeman and his club, seen instincts awaken
under their gentle appeal, whose very existence the
soil in which they grew made seem a mockery.. I have
not forgotten the deputation of ragamuffins from a Mulberry
Street alley that knocked at my office door one morning
on a mysterious expedition for flowers, not for themselves,
but for "a lady," and having obtained what
they wanted, trooped off to bestow them, a ragged and
dirty little band, with a solemnity that was quite unusual.
It was not until an old man called the next day to thank
me for the flowers that I found out they had decked
the bier of a pauper, in the dark rear room where she
lay waiting in her pine-board coffin for the city's
hearse. Yet, as I knew, that dismal alley with its bare
brick walls, between which no sun ever rose or set,
was the world of those children. It filled their young
lives. Probably not one of them had ever been out of
the sight of it. They were too dirty, too ragged, and
too generally disreputable, too well hidden in their
slum besides, to come into line with the Fresh Air summer
boarders.
With such human instincts and cravings, forever unsatisfied,
turned into a haunting curse; with appetite ground to
keenest edge by a hunger that is never fed, the children
of the poor grow up in joyless homes to lives of wearisome
toil that claims them at an age when the play of their
happier fellows has but just begun. Has a yard of turf
been laid and a vine been coaxed to grow within their
reach, they are banished and barred out from it as from
a heaven that is not for such as they. I came upon a
couple of youngsters in a Mulberry Street yard a while
ago that were chalking on the fence their first lesson
in "writin'." And this is what they wrote:
"Keeb of te Grass." They had it by heart,
for there was not, I verily believe, a green sod within
a quarter of a mile. Home to them is an empty name.
Pleasure? A gentleman once catechized a ragged class
in a down-town public school on this point, and recorded
the result: Out of forty-eight boys twenty had never
seen the Brooklyn Bridge that was scarcely five minutes'
walk away, three only had been in Central Park, fifteen
had known the joy of a ride in a horse-car. The street,
with its ash-barrels and its dirt, the river that runs
foul with mud, are their domain. What training they
receive is picked up there. And they are apt pupils.
If the mud and the dirt are easily reflected in their
lives, what wonder? Scarce half-grown, such lads as
these confront the world with the challenge to give
them their due, too long withheld, or---. Our jails
supply the answer to the alternative. |
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A little fellow who seemed clad in but a single
rag was among the flotsam and jetsam stranded
at Police Headquarters one day last summer.
No one knew where he came from or where he belonged.
The boy himself knew as little about it as anybody,
and was the least anxious to have light shed
on the subject after he had spent a night in
the matron's nursery. The discovery that beds
were provided for boys to sleep in there, and
that he could have "a whole egg" and
three slices of bread for breakfast put him
on the best of terms with the world in general,
and he decided that Headquarters was "a
bully place." He sang "McGinty"
all through, with Tenth Avenue variations, for
the police, and then settled down to the serious
business of giving an account of himself. The
examination went on after this fashion:
"Where do you go to church, my boy?"
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"We don't have no clothes to go to church."
And indeed his appearance, as he was, in the
door of any New York church would have caused
a sensation.
"Well, where do you go to school, then?"
"I don't go to school," with a snort
of contempt.
"Where do you buy your bread?"
"We don't buy no bread; we buy beer,"
said the boy, and it was eventually the saloon
that led the police as a landmark to his "home."
It was worthy of the boy. As he had said, his
only bed was a heap of dirty straw on the
floor, his daily diet a crust in the morning, nothing
else.
Into the rooms of the Children's Aid Society were
led two little girls whose father had " busted
up the house " and put them on the street after
their mother died. Another, who was turned out by
her stepmother "because she had five of her own
and could not afford to keep her," could not
remember ever having been in church or Sunday-school,
and only knew the name of Jesus through hearing people
swear by it. She had no idea what they meant. These
were specimens of the overflow from the tenements
of our home-heathen that are growing up in New York's
streets to-day, while tender-hearted men and women
are busying themselves with the socks and the hereafter
of well-fed little Hottentots thousands of miles away.
According to Canon Taylor, of York, one hundred and
nine missionaries in the four fields of Persia, Palestine,
Arabia, and Egypt spent one year and sixty thousand
dollars in converting one little heathen girl. If
there is nothing the matter with those missionaries,
they might come to New York with a good deal better
prospect of success.
By those who lay flattering unction to their souls
in the knowledge that to-day New York has, at all
events, no brood of the gutters of tender years that
can be homeless long unheeded, let it be remembered
well through what effort this judgment has been averted.
In thirty-seven years the Children's Aid Society,
that came into existence as an emphatic protest against
the tenement corruption of the young, has sheltered
quite three hundred thousand outcast, homeless, and
orphaned children in its lodging-houses, and has found
homes in the West for seventy thousand that had none.
Doubtless, as a mere stroke of finance, the five millions
and a half thus spent were a wiser investment than
to have let them grow up thieves and thugs. In the
last fifteen years of this tireless battle for the
safety of the State the intervention of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has been
invoked for 138,891 little ones; it has thrown its
protection around more than twenty-five thousand helpless
children, and has convicted nearly sixteen thousand
wretches of child-beating and abuse. Add to this the
standing army of fifteen thousand dependent children
in New York's asylums and institutions, and some idea
is gained of the crop that is garnered day by day
in the tenements, of the enormous force employed to
check their inroads on our social life, and of the
cause for apprehension that would exist did their
efforts flag for ever so brief a time. |
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Nothing is now better
understood than that the rescue of the children
is the key to the problem of city poverty, as
presented for our solution to-day; that character
may be formed where to reform it would be a hopeless
task. The concurrent testimony of all who have
to undertake it at a later stage: that the young
are naturally neither vicious nor hardened, simply
weak and undeveloped, except by the bad influences
of the street, makes this duty all the more urgent
as well as hopeful. Helping hands are held out
on every side. To private charity the municipality
leaves the entire care of its proletariat of tender
years, lulling its conscience to sleep with liberal
appropriations of money to foot the bills. Indeed,
it is held by those whose opinions are entitled
to weight that it is far too liberal a paymaster
for its own best interests and those of its wards.
It deals with the evil in the seed to a limited
extent in gathering in the |
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outcast babies from
the streets. To the ripe fruit the gates of its
prisons, its reformatories, and its workhouses
are opened wide the year round. What the showing
would be at this end of the line were it not for
the barriers wise charity has thrown across the
broad highway to ruin--is building day by day--may
be measured by such results as those quoted above
in the span of a single life. |
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Go to Chapter
16 |
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