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.