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FIRST among these barriers is the Foundling Asylum. It stands at the very outset of the waste of life that goes on in a population of nearly two millions of people; powerless to prevent it, though it gather in the outcasts by night and by day. In a score of years an army of twenty-five thousand of these forlorn little waifs have cried out from the streets of New York in arraignment of a Christian civilization under the blessings of which the instinct of motherhood even was smothered by poverty and want. Only the poor abandon their children. The stories of richly-dressed foundlings that are dished up in the
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newspapers at intervals are pure fiction. Not one instance of even a well-dressed infant having been picked up in the streets is on record. They come in rags, a newspaper often the only wrap, semi-occasionally one in a clean slip with some evidence of loving care; a little slip of paper pinned on, perhaps, with some such message as this I once read, in a woman's trembling hand: "Take care of Johnny, for God's sake. I cannot." But even that is the rarest of all happenings. |
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The city divides with the Sisters of
Charity the task of gathering them in. The real foundlings,
the children of the gutter that are picked up by the
police, are the city's wards. In midwinter, when the
poor shiver in their homes, and in the dog-days when
the fierce heat and foul air of the tenements smother
their babies by thousands, they are found, sometimes
three and four in a night, in hallways, in areas and
on the doorsteps of the rich, with whose comfort in
luxurious homes the wretched mother somehow connects
her own misery. Perhaps, as the drowning man clutches
at a straw, she hopes that these happier hearts may
have love to spare even for her little one. In this
she is mistaken. Unauthorized babies especially are
not popular in the abodes of the wealthy. It never happens
outside of the story-books that a baby so deserted finds
home and friends at once. Its career, though rather
more official, is less romantic, and generally brief.
After a night spent at Police Headquarters it travels
up to the Infants' Hospital on Randall's Island in the
morning, fitted out with a number and a bottle, that
seldom see much wear before they are laid aside for
a fresh recruit. Few outcast babies survive their desertion
long. Murder is the true name of the mother's crime in eight cases out of ten. Of 508 babies received at
the Randall's Island Hospital last year 333 died, 65.55
per cent. But of the 508 only 170 were picked up in
the streets, and among these the mortality was much
greater, probably nearer ninety per cent., if the truth
were told. The rest were born in the hospitals. The
high mortality among the foundlings is not to be marvelled
at. The wonder is, rather, that any survive. The stormier
the night, the more certain is the police nursery to
echo with the feeble cries of abandoned babes. Often
they come half dead from exposure. One live baby came
in a little pine coffin which a policeman found an inhuman
wretch trying to bury in an up-town lot. But many do
not live to be officially registered as a charge upon
the county. Seventy-two dead babies were picked up in
the streets last year. Some of them were doubtless put
out by very poor parents to save funeral expenses. In
hard times the number of dead and live foundlings always
increases very noticeably. But whether travelling by
way of the Morgue or the Infants' Hospital, the little
army of waifs meets, reunited soon, in the trench in
the Potter's Field where, if no medical student is in
need of a subject, they are laid in squads of a dozen. |
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Most of the foundlings
come from the East Side, where they are left by
young mothers without wedding-rings or other name
than their own to bestow upon the baby, returning
from the island hospital to face an unpitying
world with the evidence of their shame. Not infrequently
they wear the bed-tick regimentals of the Public
Charities, and thus their origin is easily enough
traced. Oftener no ray of light penetrates the
gloom, and no effort is made to probe the mystery
of sin and sorrow. This also is the policy pursued
in the great Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of
Charity in Sixty-eighth Street, known all over
the world as Sister Irene's Asylum. Years ago
the crib that now stands just inside the street
door, under the great main portal, was placed
outside at night; but it filled up too rapidly.
The babies took to coming in little squads instead
of in single file, and in self-defence the sisters
were forced to take the cradle in. |
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Now the mother must bring her child inside and
put it in the crib where she is seen by the sister
on guard. No effort is made to question her, or
discover the child's antecedents, but she is asked
to stay and nurse her own and another baby. If
she refuses, she is allowed to depart unhindered.
If willing, she enters at once into the great
family of the good Sister who in twenty-one years
has gathered as many thousand homeless babies
into her fold. One was brought in when I was last
in the asylum, in the middle of July, that
received in its crib the number 20715. The death-rate
is of course lowered a good deal where exposure of the
child is prevented. Among the eleven hundred infants
in the asylum it was something over nineteen per cent.
last year; but among those actually received in the
twelvemonth nearer twice that figure. Even the nineteen
per cent., remarkably low for a Foundling Asylum, was
equal to the startling death-rate of Gotham Court in
the cholera scourge.
Four hundred and sixty mothers, who could not or
would not keep their own babies, did voluntary penance
for their sin in the asylum last year by nursing a
strange waif besides their own until both should be
strong enough to take their chances in life's battle.
An even larger number than the eleven hundred were
"pay babies," put out to be nursed by "mothers"
outside the asylum. The money thus earned pays the
rent of hundreds of poor families. It is no trifle,
quite half of the quarter of a million dollars contributed
annually by the city for the support of the asylum.
The procession of these nurse-mothers, when they come
to the asylum on the first Wednesday of each month
to receive their pay and have the babies inspected
by the sisters, is one of the sights of the city.
The nurses, who are under strict supervision, grow
to love their little charges and part from them with
tears when, at the age of four or five, they are sent
to Western homes to be adopted. The sisters carefully
encourage the home-feeling in the child as their strongest
ally in seeking its mental and moral elevation, and
the toddlers depart happy to join their "papas
and mammas" in the far-away, unknown home.
An infinitely more fiendish, if to surface appearances
less deliberate, plan of child-murder than desertion
has flourished in New York for years under the title
of baby-farming. The name, put into plain English,
means starving babies to death. The law has fought
this most heinous of crimes by compelling the registry
of all baby-farms. As well might it require all persons
intending murder to register their purpose with time
and place of the deed under the penalty of exemplary
fines. Murderers do not hang out a shingle. "Baby-farms,"
said once Mr. Elbridge T. Gerry, the President of
the Society charged with the execution of the law
that was passed through his efforts, "are concerns
by means of which persons, usually of disreputable
character, eke out a living by taking two, or three,
or four babies to board. They are the charges of outcasts,
or illegitimate children. They feed them on sour milk,
and give them paregoric to keep them quiet, until
they die, when they get some young medical man without
experience to sign a certificate to the Board of Health
that the child died of inanition, and so the matter
ends. The baby is dead, and there is no one to complain."
A handful of baby-farms have been registered and licensed
by the Board of Health with the approval of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the last
five years, but none of this kind. The devil keeps
the only complete register to be found anywhere. Their
trace is found oftenest by the coroner or the police;
sometimes they may be discovered hiding in the advertising
columns of certain newspapers, under the guise of
the scarcely less heartless traffic in helpless children
that is dignified with the pretense of adoption--for
cash. An idea of how this scheme works was obtained
through the disclosures in a celebrated divorce case,
a year or two ago. The society has among its records
a very recent case [1] of a baby
a week old (Baby "Blue Eyes") that was offered
for sale--adoption, the dealer called it--in a newspaper.
The agent bought it after some haggling for a dollar,
and arrested the woman slave-trader; but the law was
powerless to punish her for her crime. Twelve unfortunate
women awaiting dishonored motherhood were found in
her house. |
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One gets a glimpse of the frightful depths
to which human nature, perverted by avarice
bred of ignorance and rasping poverty, can descend,
in the mere suggestion of systematic insurance for profit of children's
lives. A woman was put on trial in this city
last year for incredible cruelty in her treatment
of a step-child. The evidence aroused a strong
suspicion that a pitifully small amount of insurance
on the child's life was one of the motives for
the woman's savagery. A little investigation
brought out the fact that three companies that
were in the business of insuring children's
lives, for sums varying from $17 up, had issued
not less than a million such policies! The premiums
ranged from five to twenty-five cents a week.
What untold horrors this business may conceal
was suggested by a formal agreement entered
into by some of the companies, "for the
purpose of preventing speculation in the insurance
of children's lives." By the terms of this
compact, "no higher premium than ten cents
could be accepted on children under six years
old." Barbarism forsooth! Did ever heathen
cruelty invent a more fiendish |
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plot than the
one written down between the lines of this legal
paper?
It is with a sense of glad relief that one
turns from this misery to the brighter page
of the helping hands stretched forth on every
side to save the young and the helpless. New
York is, I firmly believe, the most charitable city in the world. Nowhere
is there so eager a readiness to help, when it is
known that help is worthily wanted; nowhere are such
armies of devoted workers, nowhere such abundance
of means ready to the hand of those who know the need
and how rightly to supply it. Its poverty, its slums,
and its suffering are the result of unprecedented
growth with the consequent disorder and crowding,
and the common penalty of metropolitan greatness.
If the structure shows signs of being top-heavy, evidences
are not wanting --they are multiplying day by day--
that patient toilers are at work among the underpinnings.
The Day Nurseries, the numberless Kindergartens and
charitable schools in the poor quarters, the Fresh
Air Funds, the thousand and one charities that in
one way or another reach the homes and the lives of
the poor with sweetening touch, are proof that if
much is yet to be done, if the need only grows with
the effort, hearts and hands will be found to do it
in ever-increasing measure. Black as the cloud is
it has a silver lining, bright with promise. New York
is to-day a hundredfold cleaner, better, purer, city
than it was even ten years ago. |
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Two powerful agents
that were among the pioneers in this work of moral
and physical regeneration stand in Paradise Park
to-day as milestones on the rocky, uphill road.
The handful of noble women, who braved the foul
depravity of the Old Brewery to rescue its child
victims, rolled away the first and heaviest bowlder;
which legislatures and city councils had tackled
in vain. The Five Points Mission and the Five
Points House of Industry have accomplished what
no machinery of government availed to do. Sixty
thousand children have been rescued by them from
the streets and had their little feet set in the
better way. Their work still goes on, increasing
and gathering in the waifs, instructing and feeding
them, and helping their parents with advice and
more substantial aid. Their charity knows not
creed or nationality. The House of Industry is
an enormous nursery-school with an average of
more than four |
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hundred day scholars and constant
boarders--"outsiders" and "insiders."
Its influence is felt for many blocks around in
that crowded part of the city. It is one of the
most touching sights in the world to see a score
of babies, rescued from homes of brutality and
desolation, where no other blessing than a drunken
curse was ever heard, saying their prayers in
the nursery at bedtime. Too often their white
night-gowns hide tortured little bodies and limbs cruelly
bruised by inhuman hands. In the shelter of this fold
they are safe, and a happier little group one may seek
long and far in vain. |
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Go to Chapter
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[1] Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children, Case 42,028, May 16, 1889. |
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