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.