PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM
In spite of all this labor and effort, in the face of the fact that half
of the miseries of society are at last acknowledged to be due to the
sundering of the home-tie in childhood, and that therefore the remedy lies
in restoring it, where that can be done, as early as possible, we have in
New York a city of mighty institutions, marshalling a standing army of
nearly or quite sixteen thousand children, year in and year out.[27] Homes
they are sometimes called; but too many of them are not homes in the
saving sense. Those are, that are merely half-way houses to the ultimate
family home that shall restore to the child what it has lost. Failing in
that, they become public tenements, with most of the bad features of the
tenement left out, but the worst retained: the smothering of the tenant's
individuality. He is saved from becoming a tough to become an automaton.
It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that makes the
pauper. It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that marshals
the greater part of this army. Money backed up by pharisaical
sectarianism. Where two such powerful factors combine, politics is never
far in the rear, though modestly invisible to the naked eye. To this
irresponsible combination--conspiracy it might be called without
stretching the point far--the care of the defenceless child that comes
upon the public for support has been handed over without check or control
of any sort. Worse, a premium has been put upon his coming, upon child
desertion in our community. What are the causes of this?
They have been stated often and urgently enough by those whose great
experience gave weight to their arguments. Clothed in legal phrase, they
may be found summed up in the law of 1875, which ordains that a dependent
child shall be committed to an institution controlled by persons of the
same religious faith as its parents, when that can be done, and that the
county shall pay the child's board. It was a tremendous bid for child
pauperism, and poverty, ignorance, and greed were not slow to respond.
Under this so-called "religious clause," the number of children thrown
upon the county, in New York City alone, was swelled, between 1875 and
1890, from 9.363 to 16.358, this statement including only the twenty-nine
institutions that can demand or do receive public money toward their
support. Some of them, that have come into existence since it was passed,
were directly created by the law. It was natural that this should be so,
"because it provided exactly the care which parents desired for their
children, that of persons of their own religious faith, and supplied ample
means for the children's support; while, although the funds were to be
derived from public sources, yet since the institutions were to be managed
by private persons, the stigma which fortunately attaches to _public_
relief was removed. Thus every incentive to parents to place their
children upon the public for support was created by the provisions of the
law, and every deterrent was removed; for the law demanded nothing from
the parent in return for the support of the child, and did not deprive him
of any of his rights over the child, although relieving him of every duty
toward it."[28] But New York City went a step further, by having special
laws passed securing a stated income from the money raised by local
taxation to nine of its largest institutions. This is where the trail of
the politician might perhaps be traced with an effort. The amount drawn by
the nine in 1890 was nearly a million dollars, while the total so expended
footed up in that year over sixteen hundred thousand dollars. New York
City to-day supports one dependent child to each one hundred of its
population, and the tax levied, directly and indirectly, for the purpose
is about a dollar a head for every man, woman, and child in the city. The
State in 1888 supported one child to every 251 of its population. The
State of California, which had also gone into the wholesale charity
business, supported one dependent child to every 290 of its population,
while Michigan, which had gone out of it, taking her children out of the
poor-houses and sending them to a State public school, with the proviso
that thenceforth parents surrendering their children to be public charges
should lose all rights over or to their custody, services, or earnings,
had only 1 to every 10,000 of its people.[29]
That proviso cut the matter to the quick. The law declared the school to
be a "temporary home for dependent children, where they shall be detained
only until they can be placed in family homes." That is a very different
thing from the institution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns,
and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand
boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and
taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the
rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the
family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the
asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. To what
extent these things are done in New York may be inferred from the
statement of the Superintendent of the Juvenile Asylum, which contains an
average of a thousand children, that three-fourths of the inmates could
not be sent to free homes in the West because their relatives would not
consent to their going.[30] It was only last summer that my attention was
attracted, while on a visit to this Juvenile Asylum, to a fine-looking
little fellow who seemed much above the average of the class in which I
found him. On inquiring as to the causes that had brought him to that
place, I was shocked to find that he was the son of a public official,
well-known to me, whose income from the city's treasury was sufficient not
only to provide for the support of his family, but to enable him to
gratify somewhat expensive private tastes as well. The boy had been there
two years, during which time the Asylum had drawn for his account from the
public funds about $240, at the per capita rate of $110 for each inmate
and his share of the school money. His father, when I asked him why the
boy was there, told me that it was because he would insist upon paying
unauthorized visits to his grandmother in the country. There was no
evidence that he was otherwise unmanageable. Seeing my surprise, he put
the question, as if that covered the ground: "Well, now! where would you
put him in a better place?" It was a handsome compliment to the Asylum,
which as a reform school it perhaps deserved; but it struck me, all the
same, that he could hardly have put him in a worse place, on all accounts.
I do not know how many such cases there were in the Asylum then. I hope
not many. But it is certain that our public institutions are full of
children who have parents amply able, but unwilling, to support them. From
time to time enough such cases crop out to show how common the practice
is. Reference to cases 59,703, 59,851, and 60,497 in the report of the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1892), will discover
some striking instances that were ferreted out by the Society's officers.
All of the offenders were in thriving business. One of them kept a store
in Newark--in another State--and was not even a resident of the city. He
merely "honored it with the privilege of paying his children's
boarding-school expenses in the institution." They were all Italians.
These people seem to consider that it is their right to thus feed at the
public crib. Perhaps it is the first quickening of the seed of municipal
politics that sprouts so energetically among them in the slums, under the
teaching of their Irish patrons.
When Mrs. Lowell inspected the New York City institutions in 1889, she
found "that of 20,384 individual children sheltered in them, 4,139 had
been that year returned to parents or friends, that is, to the persons who
had given them up to be paupers; that there were only 1,776 orphans among
them, and 4,987 half orphans, of whom 2,247 had living fathers, who
presumably ought to have been made to support their children themselves."
Three years later, the imperfect returns to a circular inquiry sent out by
the State Board of Charities, showed that of 18,556 children in
institutions in this State, 3,671, or less than twenty per cent., were
orphans. The rest then had, or should have, homes. Doubtless, many were
homes of which they were well rid; but all experience shows that there
must have been far too many of the kind that were well rid of _them_, and
to that extent the tax-payers were robbed and the parents and the children
pauperized. And that even that other kind were much better off in the long
run, their being in the institution did not guarantee. Children, once for
all, cannot be successfully reared in regiments within the narrow rules
and the confinement of an asylum, if success is to be measured by the
development of individual character. Power to regulate or shorten their
stay is not vested to any practical extent or purpose in any outside
agency. Within, with every benevolent desire to do the right, every
interest of the institution as a whole tends to confuse the perception of
it. The more children, the more money; the fewer children, the less money.
A thousand children can be more economically managed for $110,000 than
five hundred for half the money. The fortieth annual report of the
Juvenile Asylum (1891) puts it very plainly, in this statement on page 23:
"Until the capacity of the Asylum was materially increased, an annual
deficit ranging between $5,000 and $10,000 had to be covered by appeals to
private contributors." Now, it runs not only the New York house but its
Western agency as well on its income.
The city pays the bills, but exercises no other control over the
institutions. It does not even trouble itself with counting the
children.[31] The committing magistrate consults and is guided more or
less by the Officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children, in his choice of the institution into which the child is put.
But both are bound by the law that imposes the "faith-test." The
faith-test, as enforced by civil law anywhere, is absurd. The parents of
the eighty per cent. of children in institutions who were not orphans,
split no theological hairs in ridding themselves of their support. Backed
by the money sacks of a great and wealthy city, it is injurious humbug.
This is not the perfection of organized charitable effort for the rescue
of the children of which I spoke, but rather the perversion of it.
It is reasonable to ask that if the public is to pay the piper, the public
should have the hiring of him too. A special city officer is needed to
have this matter in charge. Nearly six years ago Commissioner Lowell
submitted a draft for a bill creating a department for the care of
dependent children in New York City, with a commissioner at the head whose
powers would have been an effective check upon the evil tendencies of the
present law. But we travel slowly along the path of municipal reform, and
the commissioner is yet a dream. Some day we may wake up and find him
there, and then we shall be ready, by and by, to carry out the ideal plan
of placing those children, for whom free homes cannot be found, out at
board in families where they shall come by their rights, denied them by
institution life. Then, too, we shall find, I think, that there is a good
deal less of the problem than we thought. The managers of the Union
Temporary Home in Philadelphia decided, after thirty one years of work, to
close the House and put the children out to board, because experience had
convinced them that "life in the average institution is not so good for
children as life in the average home." The intelligence of the conclusion,
and the earnestness with which they presented it, guaranteed that their
"Home" had been above the average.
"The testimony of two gentlemen on our Board of Council," they reported,
"both experienced as heads of great industrial enterprises, is that
institution boys are generally the least desirable apprentices. They have
been dulled in faculty, by not having been daily exercised in the use of
themselves in small ways; have marched in platoons; have done everything
in squads; have had all the particulars of life arranged for them; and, as
a consequence, they wait for someone else to arrange every piece of work,
and are never ready for emergencies, nor able to 'take hold.'" But when
they came to actually board the children out, all but the parents of nine
were suddenly able to take good care of them themselves, and of the rest
three found a way before final arrangements were made. There were seventy
children in the Home. Pauperism runs in the same ruts in New York as in
Pennsylvania, and the motive power is the same--ill-spent money.