THE PROLETAIRES OF NEW YORK.
New York is a much younger city than its European rivals; and with
perhaps one-third the population of London, yet it presents varieties of
life among the "masses" quite as picturesque, and elements of population
even more dangerous. The throng of different nationalities in the
American city gives a peculiarly variegated air to the life beneath the
surface, and the enormous over-crowding in portions of the poor quarters
intensifies the evils, peculiar to large towns, to a degree seen only in
a few districts in such cities as London and Liverpool.
The _mass_ of poverty and wretchedness is, of course, far greater in the
English capital. There are classes with inherited pauperism and crime
more deeply stamped in them, in London or Glasgow, than we ever behold
in New York; but certain small districts can be found in our metropolis
with the unhappy fame of containing more human beings packed to the
square yard, and stained with more acts of blood and riot, within a
given period, than is true of any other equal space of earth in the
civilized world.
There are houses, well known to sanitary boards and the police, where
Fever has taken a perennial lease, and will obey no legal summons to
quit; where Cholera--if a single germ-seed of it float anywhere in
American atmosphere--at once ripens a black harvest; where Murder has
stained every floor of its gloomy stories, and Vice skulks or riots from
one year's end to the other. Such houses are never reformed. The only
hope for them is in the march of street improvements, which will utterly
sweep them away.
It is often urged that the breaking-up of these "dens" and "fever-nests"
only scatters the pestilence and moral disease, but does not put an end
to them.
The objection is more apparent than real. The abolishing of one of these
centres of crime and poverty is somewhat like withdrawing the virus from
one diseased limb and diffusing it through an otherwise healthy body. It
seems to lose its intensity. The diffusion weakens. Above all, it is
less likely to become hereditary.
One of the remarkable and hopeful things about New York, to a close
observer of its "dangerous classes," is, as I shall show in a future
chapter, that they do not tend to become fixed and inherited, as in
European cities.
But, though the crime and pauperism of New York are not so deeply
stamped in the blood of the population, they are even more dangerous.
The intensity of the American temperament is felt in every fibre of
these children of poverty and vice. Their crimes have the unrestrained
and sanguinary character of a race accustomed to overcome all obstacles.
They rifle a bank, where English thieves pick a pocket; they murder,
where European _proletaires_ cudgel or fight with fists; in a riot, they
begin what seems about to be the sacking of a city, where English
rioters would merely batter policemen, or smash lamps. The "dangerous
classes" of New York are mainly American-born, but the children of Irish
and German immigrants. They are as ignorant as London flash-men or
costermongers. They are far more brutal than the peasantry from whom
they descend, and they are much banded together, in associations, such
as "Dead Rabbit," "Plug-ugly," and various target companies. They are
our _enfants perdus,_ grown up to young manhood. The murder of an
unoffending old man, like Mr. Rogers, is nothing to them. They are ready
for any offense or crime, however degraded or bloody. New York has never
experienced the full effect of the nurture of these youthful ruffians as
she will one day. They showed their hand only slightly in the riots
during the war. At present, they are like the athletes and gladiators of
the Roman demagogues. They are the "roughs" who sustain the ward
politicians, and frighten honest voters. They can "repeat" to an
unlimited extent, and serve their employers. They live on _"panem et
circenses,"_ or City-Hall places and pot-houses, where they have full
credit.
We shall speak more particularly of the causes of crime in future
chapters, but we may say in brief, that the young ruffians of New York
are the products of accident, ignorance, and vice. Among a million
people, such as compose the population of this city and its suburbs,
there will always be a great number of misfortunes; fathers die, and
leave their children unprovided for; parents drink, and abuse their
little ones, and they float away on the currents of the street;
step-mothers or step-fathers drive out, by neglect and ill-treatment,
their sons from home. Thousands are the children of poor foreigners, who
have permitted them to grow up without school, education, or religion.
All the neglect and bad education and evil example of a poor class tend
to form others, who, as they mature, swell the ranks of ruffians and
criminals. So, at length, a great multitude of ignorant, untrained,
passionate, irreligious boys and young men are formed, who become the
"dangerous class" of our city. They form the "Nineteenth-street Gangs,"
the young burglars and murderers, the garroters and rioters, the thieves
and flash-men, the "repeaters" and ruffians, so well known to all who
know this metropolis.
THE DANGERS.
It has been common, since the recent terrible Communistic outbreak in
Paris, to assume that France alone is exposed to such horrors; but, in
the judgment of one who has been familiar with our "dangerous classes"
for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements
beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.
There are thousands on thousands in New York who have no assignable
home, and "flit" from attic to attic, and cellar to cellar; there are
other thousands more or less connected with criminal enterprises; and
still other tens of thousands, poor, hard-pressed, and depending for
daily bread on the day's earnings, swarming in tenement-houses, who
behold the gilded rewards of toil all about them, but are never
permitted to touch them.
All these great masses of destitute, miserable, and criminal persons
believe that for ages the rich have had all the good things of life,
while to them have been left the evil things. Capital to them is the
tyrant.
Let but Law lift its hand from them for a season, or let the civilizing
influences of American life fail to reach them, and, if the opportunity
offered, we should see an explosion from this class which might leave
this city in ashes and blood.
To those incredulous of this, we would recall the scenes in our streets
during the riots in 1863, when, for a short period, the guardians of
good order--the local militia--had been withdrawn for national purposes,
and when the ignorant masses were excited by dread of the draft.
Who will ever forget the marvelous rapidity with which the better
streets were filled with a ruffianly and desperate multitude, such as in
ordinary times we seldom see--creatures who seemed to have crept from
their burrows and dens to join in the plunder of the city--how quickly
certain houses were marked out for sacking and ruin, and what wild and
brutal crimes were committed on the unoffending negroes? It will be
recalled, too, how much _women_ figured in these horrible scenes, as
they did in the Communistic outbreak in Paris. It was evident to all
careful observers then, that had another day of license been given the
crowd, the attack would have been directed at the apparent wealth of the
city--the banks, jewelers' shops, and rich private houses.
No one doubted then, or during the Orange riot of 1871, the existence of
"dangerous classes" in New York. And yet the separate members of these
riotous and ruffianly masses are simply neglected and street-wandering
children who have come to early manhood.
The true preventive of social catastrophes like these, are just such
Christian reformatory and educational movements as we are about to
describe.
Of the number of the distinctly homeless and vagrant youth in New York,
it is difficult to speak with precision. We should be inclined to
estimate it, after long observation, as fluctuating each year between
20,000 and 30,000. [The homeless children who come each year under the
charitable efforts afterwards to be described amount to some 12,000.]
But to these, as they mature, must be added, in the composition of the
dangerous classes, all those who are professionally criminal, and who
have homes and lodging-places. And again to these, portions of that vast
and ignorant [It should be remembered that there are in this city over
60,000 persons above ten years of age who cannot write their names.]
multitude, who, in prosperous times, just keep their heads above water,
who are pressed down by poverty or misfortune, and who look with envy
and greed at the signs of wealth and luxury all around them, while they
themselves have nothing but hardship, penury, and unceasing drudgery.