THE BEST PREVENTIVE OF VICE AMONG CHILDREN.
INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS.
As a simple, practical measure to save from vice the girls of the honest
poor, nothing has ever been equal to the Industrial School.
Along with our effort for homeless boys, I early attempted to found a
comprehensive organization of Schools for the needy and ragged little
girls of the city.
Though our Free Schools are open to all, experience has taught that vast
numbers of children are so ill-clothed and destitute that they are
ashamed to attend these excellent places of instruction; or their
mothers are obliged to employ them during parts of the day; or they are
begging, or engaged in street occupations, and will not attend, or, if
they do, attend very irregularly. Very many are playing about the docks
or idling in the streets.
Twenty years ago, nothing seemed to check this evil. Captain Matsell, in
the celebrated report I have alluded to, estimated the number of vagrant
children as 10,000, and subsequently in later years, the estimate was as
high as 30,000. The commitments for vagrancy were enormous, reaching in
one year (1857), for females alone, 3,449; in 1859, 5,778; and in 1860,
5,880. In these we have not the exact number of children, but it was
certainly very large.
What was needed to check crime and vagrancy among young girls was some
School of Industry and Morals, adapted for the class.
Many were ashamed to go to the Public Schools; they were too irregular
for their rules. They needed some help in the way of food and clothing,
much direct moral instruction and training in industry; while their
mothers required to be stimulated by earnest appeals to their
consciences to induce them to school them at all. Agents must be sent
around to gather the children, and to persuade the parents to educate
their offspring. It was manifest that the Public Schools were not
adapted to meet all these wants, and indeed the mingling of any
eleemosynary features in our public educational establishments would
have been injudicious. As our infant Society had no funds, my effort was
to found something at first by outside help, with the hope subsequently
of obtaining a permanent support for the new enterprises, and bringing
them under the supervision of the parent Society.
The agencies which we sought to found were the INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS, which
I shall now attempt to describe.
Each one of these humble charities has a history of its own--a history
known only to the poor--of sacrifice, patience, and labor.
Some of the most gifted women of New York, of high position and fortune,
as well as others of remarkable character and education, have poured
forth without stint their services of love in connection with these
ministrations of charity.
THE WILSON SCHOOL.
The School to which allusion has already been made on page 83, as
growing out of the Boys' Meeting in Sixth Street, and afterwards in
Avenue D, was the first of these Schools, and owes its origin especially
to a lady of great executive power, Mrs. Wilson, wife of the Rev. Dr.
Wilson. It has always been an exceedingly successful and efficient
School. It was formed in February, 1853, the writer assisting in its
organization, and was carried on outside of the Society whose history I
am sketching.
THE ROOKERIES OF THE FOURTH WARD--A REMEDY.
In visiting from lane to lane and house to house in our poorest
quarters, I soon came to know one district which seemed hopelessly given
over to vice and misery--the region radiating out from or near to
Franklin Square, especially such streets as Cherry, Water, Dover,
Roosevelt, and the neighboring lanes. Here were huge barracks--one said
to contain some 1,500 persons--underground cellars, crowded with people,
and old rickety houses always having "a double" on the rear lot, so as
more effectually to shut out light and air. Here were as many
liquor-shops as houses, and those worst dens of vice, the
"Dance-Saloons," where prostitution was in its most brazen form, and the
unfortunate sailors were continually robbed or murdered. Nowhere in the
city were so many murders committed, or was every species of crime so
rife. Never, however, in this villainous quarter, did I experience the
slightest annoyance in my visits, nor did any one of the ladies who
subsequently ransacked every den and hole where a child could shelter
itself. My own attention was early arrested by the number of wild ragged
little girls who were flitting about through these lanes; some with
basket and poker gathering rags, some apparently seeking chances of
stealing, and others doing errands for the dance-saloons and brothels,
or hanging about their doors. The police were constantly arresting them
as "vagrants," when the mothers would beg them off from the good-natured
Justices, and promise to train them better in future. They were
evidently fast training, however, for the most abandoned life. It seemed
me if I could only get the refinement, education, and Christian
enthusiasm of the better classes fairly to work here among these
children, these terrible evils might be corrected at least for the next
generation.
I accordingly went about from house to house among ladies whom I had
known, and, representing the condition of the Ward, induced them to
attend a meeting of ladies to be held at the house of a prominent
physician, whose wife had kindly offered her rooms.
For some months I had attempted to prepare the public mind for these
labors by incessant writing for the daily papers, by lectures and by
sermons in various pulpits. Experience soon showed that the most
effective mode of making real the condition of the poorest class, was by
relating incidents from real life which continually presented
themselves.
The rich and fortunate had hardly conceived the histories of poverty,
suffering, and loneliness which were constantly passing around them.
The hope and effort of the writer was to connect the two extremes of
society in sympathy, and carry the forces of one class down to lift up
the other. For this two things were necessary--one to show the duty
which Christ especially teaches of sacrifice to the poor for His sake,
and the value which He attaches to each human soul; and the other to
free the whole, as much as possible, from any sectarian or dogmatic
character. Nothing but "the enthusiasm of humanity" inspired by Christ
could lead the comfortable and the fastidious to such disagreeable
scenes and hard labors as would meet them here. It was necessary to feel
that many comforts most be foregone, and much leisure given up, for this
important work. Very unpleasant sights were to be met with, coarse
people to be encountered, and rude children managed; the stern facts of
filth, vice, and crime to be dealt with.
It was not to be a mere holiday-work, or a sudden gush of sentiment;
but, to be of use, it must be patiently continued, week by week, and
month by month, and year by year, with some faint resemblance to that
patience and love which we believed a Higher One had exercised towards
us. But, with this inspiration, as carefully as possible, all dogmatic
limitation must be avoided. All sects were invited to take a share in
the work, and, as the efforts were necessarily directed to the most
palpable and terrible evils, the means used by all would be essentially
the same. Even those of no defined religious belief were gladly welcomed
if they were ready to do the offices of humanity. The fact that
ninety-nine hundredths of these poor people were Roman Catholics
compelled us also to confine ourselves to the most simple and
fundamental instructions, and to avoid, in any way, arousing religious
bigotry.
In the meeting, gathered at the house of Dr. P., were prominent ladies
from all the leading sects.
An address was delivered by the writer, and then a constitution
presented, of the simplest nature, and an association organized and
officers appointed by the ladies present. This was the foundation of
the
"FOURTH WARD INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL."
In the meanwhile, we went forth through the slums of the ward, and let
it be widely known that a School to teach work, and where food was given
daily, and clothes were bestowed to the well-behaved, was just forming.
Our room was in the basement of a church in Roosevelt Street. Hither
gathered, on a morning in December, 1853, our ladies and a flock of the
most ill-clad and wildest little street-girls that could be collected
anywhere in New York. They flew over the benches, they swore and fought
with one another, they bandied vile language, and could hardly be tamed
down sufficiently to allow the school to be opened.
Few had shoes, all were bonnetless, their dresses were torn, ragged, and
dirty; their hair tangled, and faces long unwashed; they had, many of
them, a singularly wild and intense expression of eye and feature, as of
half-tamed creatures, with passions aroused beyond their years.
The dress and ornaments of the ladies seemed to excite their admiration
greatly. It was observed that they soon hid or softened their own worst
peculiarities. They evidently could not at first understand the motive
which led so many of a far higher and better class to come to help them.
The two regular and salaried teachers took the discipline in hand gently
and firmly. The ladies soon had their little classes, each gathered
quietly about the one instructing. As a general thing, the ladies took
upon themselves the industrial branches--sewing, knitting, crocheting,
and the like; this gave them also excellent opportunities for moral
instruction, and winning the sympathy of the children.
As these ladies, many of them of remarkable character and culture, began
to show the fruits of a high civilization to these poor little
barbarians, the thought seemed to strike them--though hardly capable of
being expressed--that here was a goodness and piety they had never known
or conceived. This offspring of poverty and crime veiled their vices and
bad habits before these angels. They felt a new impulse--to be worthy of
their noble friends. The idea of unselfish Love dawned on their souls;
they softened and became respectful. So it continued; each day the wild
little beggars became more disciplined and controlled; they began to
like study and industry; they were more anxious to be clean and neatly
dressed; they checked their tongues, and, in some degree, their tempers;
they showed affection and gratitude to their teachers; their minds
awakened; most of all, their moral faculties. The truths of Religion or
of morals, especially when dramatized in stories and incidents, reached
them.
And no words can adequately picture the amount of loving service and
patient sacrifice which was poured out by these ladies in this effort
among the poor of the Fourth Ward. They never spared themselves or their
means. Some came down every day to help in the school; some twice in the
week; they were there in all weathers, and never wearied. Three of the
number offered up their lives in these labors of humanity, and died in
harness.
A most gifted intellectual family, the S----s, supplied some of our most
devoted workers; the wife, since deceased, of one of our leading
merchants and public men, himself a man much loved for his generosity,
occupied the place of one of the Directresses; the wife of a prominent
physician was our Treasurer. A young lady of fortune, since dead, Miss
G., took the hardest labors upon herself. The wife of a gentleman since
Governor and United States Senator, was in especial charge of the house,
and dreaded no labor of humanity, however disagreeable. Two others,
sisters, who represented one of our most honored historical families,
but whose characters needed no help of genealogy to make them esteemed
by all, threw themselves into the work with characteristic earnestness.
Another of that family, which has furnished the pioneer of all
reform-work among the youthful criminals, and in criminal law, and which
in the early days of our history so often led public affairs, visited
from house to house among the miserable poor of the ward, and twice
found herself face to face with small-pox in its most virulent form.
The effects of this particular School upon the morals of the juvenile
population of the Fourth Ward were precisely what they have always been
in similar schools. These little girls, who might be said to be almost
the inmates of the brothels, and who grew up in an atmosphere of crime
and degradation, scarcely ever, when mature, joined the ranks of their
sisters and neighbors. Though living in the same houses with the gay
dance-saloons, they avoided them as they would pestilential places.
Trained to industry and familiar with the modest and refined appearance
of pure women in the schools, they had no desire for the society of
these bold girls, or to earn their living in this idle and shameful
manner. They felt the disgrace of the abandoned life around them, and
were soon above it. Though almost invariably the children of drunkards,
they did not inherit the appetites of their mothers, or if they did,
their new training substituted higher and stronger desires. They were
seldom known to have the habit of drinking as they grew up. Situations
were continually found for them in the country, or they secured places
for themselves as servants in respectable families; and, becoming each
day more used to better circumstances and more neatly dressed, they had
little desire to visit their own wretched homes and remain in their
families. Now and then there would be a fall from virtue among them, but
the cases were very few indeed. As they grew up they married young
mechanics or farmers, and were soon far above the class from which they
sprang. Such were the fruits in general of the patient, self-denying
labors of these ladies in the Fourth Ward School.
One most self-sacrificing and heroic man, a physician, Dr. Robert Ray,
devoted his education and something of his fortune to these benevolent
efforts, and died while in the harness. Singularly enough, I never knew,
in twenty years' experience, an instance of one of these volunteer
teachers contracting any contagious disease in these labors, though
repeatedly they have entered tenement rooms where virulent typhoid or
small-pox cases were being tended. They made it a rule generally to
bathe and change their clothing after their work.
For a more exact account of the results of the Fourth-Ward labors, it is
difficult to obtain precise statistics. But when we know from the Prison
Reports that soon after the opening of this school there were imprisoned
3,449 female vagrants of all ages, and that last year (1870), when the
little girls who then attended such schools would have matured, there
were only 671; or when we observe that the Prison in that neighborhood
inclosed 3,172 female vagrants in 1861 and only 339 in 1871, we may be
assured that the sacrifices made in that Ward have not been without
their natural fruit.
Extracts from our Journal:
A VISIT IN THE FOURTH WARD.
"We Started out a wintry afternoon to see some of our scholars in the
Industrial School of the Fourth Ward. A number of ragged little girls,
disdaining to enter, were clustered about the door of the School. As
they caught a glimpse of some one coming out, the cry of 'Lie low! lie
low!' passed among them, and they were off, capering about in the
snow-storm like so many little witches.
"We passed up Oak Street and Cherry. Here is the entrance, a narrow
doorway on the side. Wind through this dark passage and you are at the
door of a little back room; it is the home of a German rag-picker who
has a child in the school. A filthy, close room, with a dark bedroom;
there is one window, and a small stove, and two or three chairs. The
girl is neat and healthy-looking. 'I pick rags, sir,' says the mother,
'and I can't send her to Public School. I am away all day, and she would
have to be in the streets, and it's very hard to live this winter. It's
been a great help to send her to that school.' I told her we wanted none
who could go to Public School, but if it was so with her she might
continue to send. A miserable hole for a home, and yet the child looked
neatly.
"Here, beyond, is an old house. We climb the shaking stairs, up to the
attic--a bare front room with one roof-window. The only furniture a bed
and stove and a broken chair. Very chill and bare, but the floor is well
swept. A little humpbacked child is reading away very busily by the
light of the scuttle window, and another is cleaning up the floor. The
mother is an Irish woman. 'Shure! an' its nivir none of the schools I
could sind 'em to. I had no clo'es or shoes for 'em and, it's the truth,
I am jist living, an' no more. Could ye help us? We told her we meant to
help her by helping her children, and asked about the little deformed
one. 'Och! she is sich a swate won! She always larned very quick since
her accidint, and I used to think, maybe she wont live, and God will
take her away--she was so steady and good. Yes, I am thankful to those
ladies for what they are teaching her. She never had no chance before.
God bless ye, gintlemen!'
"We climbed again one of these rookeries. It is a back garret. A
dark-eyed, passionate-looking woman is sitting over the little stove,
and one of our little scholars is standing by--one of the prettiest and
brightest children in the school. One of those faces you see in the West
of Ireland, perhaps with some Spanish blood in them; a little oval face,
with soft brown complexion, quick, dark eyes and harsh, black hair. The
mother looked like a woman who had seen much of the worst of life. 'No,
sir, I never did send 'em to school. I know it, they ought to learn, but
I couldn't. I try to shame him sometimes--it's my husband, sir--but he
drinks, and then bates me. Look at that bruise!' and she pointed to her
cheek; 'and I tell him to see what's comin' to his children. There's
Peggy, goes sellin' fruit every night to those cellars in Water Street,
and they're _hells,_ sir. She's learnin' all sorts of bad words there,
and don't get back till eleven or twelve o'clock.' She spoke of a sister
of the little girl, about thirteen years old, and the picture of that
sweet, dark-eyed little thing, getting her education, unconsciously,
every night in those vile cellars of dancing prostitutes, came up to my
mind. I asked why she sent her there, and spoke of the dangers. 'I must,
sir; he makes nothing for me, and if it wasn't for this school, and the
help there, and her earning of a shilling or two shilling in them
places, I should starve. Oh, I wish they was out of this city! Yes, it's
the truth, I would rather have them dead than on the street, but I can't
help it.' I told her of some good families in the country, where we
could place the children. 'Would they git schoolin', sir?' 'Certainly,
that is the first condition. We always look especially to that.' The
little dark eyes sparkled, and she '_should_ like to take care of a baby
so!' The sister now came in, and we talked with her. 'Oh! no, she didn't
like to go to those places; but they only buy there at nights'--and she
seemed equally glad to get a place. So it was arranged that they were to
come up to the office next day, and then get a home in the country. The
little girl now wrapped her thin shawl about her head, and ran along
before us, through the storm, to some of the other children. The harder
it snowed, the more the little eyes sparkled and the prettier she
looked.
"Another home of poverty--dark, damp, and chill. The mother an
Englishwoman; her child had gone to the school barefooted. This girl was
engaged in the same business--selling fruit at night in the brothels. 'I
know it, sir,' she said; 'she ought to have as good a chance as other
people's children. But I'm so poor! I haven't paid a month's rent, and I
was sick three weeks.'
"'Yes, you're right. I know the city, sir; and I would rather have her
in her grave than brought down to those cellars. But what can I do,
sir?'
"We arrange, again, to find a situation in the country, if she
wishes--and engage her, at least, to keep the child at school.
"Our little sprite flies along again through the snow, and shows us
another home of one of our scholars--a prostitute's cellar. The elder
sister of the child is there, and meets us pleasantly, though with a
shame-faced look. 'Yes, she shall go to school every day, sir. We never
sent her before, nowheres; but she's learnin' very fast there now.'
"We tell her the general objects of the school, and of the good, kind
home which can be found for her sister in the country. She seems glad
and her face, which must have been pretty once, lights up, perhaps, at
the thought for her sister, of what she shall never more have--a pure
home. Two or three sailors, sitting at their bottles, say, 'Yes, that's
it! git the little gal out of this! it ain't no place for her.'
"They are all respectful, and seem to understand what we are doing.
"The little guide has gone back, and we go now to another address--a
back cellar in Oak Street--damp, dark, so that one at mid-day could
hardly see to read; filthy, chilly, yet with six or eight people living
there. Every one has a cold; and the oldest daughter, a nice girl of
fourteen, is losing her eyes in the foul atmosphere. The old story: 'No
work, no friends, rent to pay, and nothing to do.' The parents squalid,
idle, intemperate, and shiftless. There they live, just picking up
enough to keep life warm in them; groaning, and begging, and seeking
work. There they live, breeding each day pestilence and disease,
scattering abroad over the city seeds of fearful sickness--raising a
brood of vagrants and harlots--retorting on society its neglect by
cursing the bodies and souls of thousands whom they never knew, and who
never saw them.
"Yet it is cheering--it cheered me even in that squalid hole--that the
children are so much superior to their parents. It needs time for vice
and beggary and filth to degrade childhood. God has given every fresh
human soul something which rises above its surroundings, and which even
want and vice do not wear away. For the old poor, for the sensual who
have steeped themselves in crime, for the drunkard, the thief, the
prostitute who have run a long course, let those heroically work who
will. Yet, noble as is the effort, one's experience of human nature is
obliged to confess, the fruits will be very few. The old heart of man is
a hard thing to change. In any comprehensive view, the only hopeful
reform through society must begin with childhood, basing itself on a
change of circumstances and on religious influences."
The average expense of a school of this nature, with one hundred
scholars and two salaried teachers, where a cheap meal is supplied, and
garments and shoes are earned by the scholars, we reckon usually at
$1,500, or at $15 per head annually for each scholar.