THE PROTESTANT POOR AND STREET-ROVERS.
It is not often that our efforts carry us among Protestant poor, but it
happens that on the west side of the city, near Tenth Avenue and
Twenty-seventh Street, is a considerable district of English and Scotch
laboring people, who are mainly Protestants.
A meeting of ladies was called in the western part of the city, in like
manner with the proceedings at the formation of the other Schools; and a
School was proposed. The wife of a prominent property-holder in the
neighborhood, a lady of great energy of character, Mrs. R. R., took a
leading part, and greatly aided the undertaking; other ladies joined,
and the result was the formation of the
HUDSON RIVER INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL,
the fourth of our Schools founded in 1854. With all these Schools, in
the beginning, the ladies themselves raised all the funds for their
support, and, as I have related, devoted an incredible amount of time to
aiding in them, there being usually, however, two salaried teachers.
The experience in the Edinburgh Ragged Schools, I was assured, when
there, was, that you cannot depend on volunteer help after the first
enthusiasm has passed by. This is not our experience.
As one set of "volunteers" have withdrawn or leave the work, others
appear, and there are still in this and some of our other Industrial
Schools, most active and efficient voluntary helpers. Gradually,
however, the support and supervision of the Schools fell more and more
into the hands of the central authority--The Children's Aid Society.
The obtaining a share in the Common School Fund enabled the Society to
do more for these useful charities and to found new ones.
In the Hudson River School, it cannot be said that the Protestant poor
proved much better than the Catholic; in fact, it has often seemed to me
that when a Protestant is reduced to extreme poverty, and, above all, a
Yankee, he becomes the most wretched and useless of all paupers. The
work and its results were similar on the west side to those in the other
districts which I have already described.
"MUSCULAR ORPHANS."
Our attention had thus far been directed mainly to girls in these
Industrial School efforts. They seemed the class exposed to the most
terrible evils, and besides, through our other enterprises, we were
sheltering, teaching, and benefiting for life vast numbers of lads.
We determined now to try the effect of industry and schooling on the
roving boys, and I chose a district where we had to make head against a
"sea of evils." This was in the quarter bordering on East Thirty-fourth
Street and Second Avenue. There seemed to be there a society of
irreclaimable little vagabonds. They hated School with an
inextinguishable hatred; they had a constitutional love for smashing
windows and pilfering apple-stands. They could dodge an "M. P." as a fox
dodges a hound; they disliked anything so civilized as a bed-chamber,
but preferred old boxes and empty barns, and when they were caught it
required a very wide-awake policeman, and such an Asylum-yard as hardly
exists in New York, to keep them.
I have sometimes stopped, admiringly, to watch the skill and cunning
with which the little rascals, some not more than ten years old, would
diminish a load of wood left on the docks; the sticks were passed from
one to another, and the lad nearest the pile was apparently engaged
eagerly in playing marbles. If the woodman's attention was called to his
loss, they were off like a swarm of cockroaches.
[Illustration: STREET ARABS.]
We opened a School with all the accessories for reaching and pleasing
them; our teacher was a skillful mechanic, a young man of excellent
judgment and hearty sympathy with boys; he offered to teach them
carpentering and box-making and pay them wages. Common-school lessons
were given, also, and a good warm meal provided at noon. We had
festivals and magic-lantern exhibitions and lectures. We taught, and we
fed and clothed. In return, they smashed our windows; they entered the
premises at night and carried off everything they could find; they
howled before the door, and yelled "Protestant School!" We arrested one
or two for the burglary, as a warning, but the little flibbertigibbets
escaped from the police like rats, and we let them go with the fright
they had had. Some few of the worst we induced to go to the country, and
others we had arrested as vagrants, without appearing ourselves, until a
kind of dark suspicion spread among them against the writer that he had
the power of spiriting away bad boys to distant regions by some
mysterious means. Those that did go to the country proved of the kind
called by a Western paper "muscular orphans," for an unfortunate
employer undertaking to administer corporal punishment to two of them,
the little vagabonds turned and chastised him and then fled.
The following case is noted in our Journal of these up-town boys:
A HARD CASE REFORMED.
"MR. BRACE--_Dear Sir:_ You request me to send you some reminiscences of
the early life of Michael S----n. My most vivid recollection of him is
his taking the broomstick to me once, as I was about to punish him for
some misdemeanor. Being the first and last of my pupils who ever
attempted anything of the kind, it stands out in bold relief in my
memory. I soon conquered the broomstick, but on the first opportunity he
ran out, thus ending his Industrial School career.
"His most marked characteristic was a desire to travel, and he presented
himself with the freedom of the city at a very early age, going off for
weeks at a time, sleeping in entries and around engine-houses, and
disdaining bolts and bars when they were turned upon him. One of your
visitors calling to consult with his mother as to what could be done
with him, found him vigorously kicking the panels out of the door, she
having locked him in for safe-keeping till she came home from work. The
Captain of Police, tired of having him brought in so frequently, thought
one day of a punishment that he expected would effectually frighten him,
which was--to hang him. His mother consenting, he was solemnly hung up
by the feet to a post, till he promised reformation. This failing to
produce the desired effect, she placed him with "the Brothers," who put
him in a kind of prison, where he had to be chained by the leg to
prevent him from scaling the walls. Taking him from there, after some
months of pretty severe discipline, he very soon went back to his old
habits, when she had him sent to Randall's Island. Here he was
discovered in a plan to swim to the opposite shore (something of a feat
for a boy of twelve). Fearing he would attempt it and be drowned, she
took him away and put him in the Juvenile Asylum, where he remained
several months, and finally seemed so much tamed down that she ventured
on taking him out and sending him to a place which you procured for him
at Hastings. But, pretty soon, the ruling passion, strong as ever, took
possession of him, and he started on a tour through the surrounding
villages.
"Being brought home again, he told his mother very deliberately, one
morning, that she need not expect him home any more; he was going to
live with a soldier's wife. Knowing that if he went he would be in a
very den of wickedness, she came to the resolution to give him to your
care, and let him be sent to the West.
"It would require a volume to tell of all his freaks and wanderings; his
scaling of fences, and breaking out of impossible places. Towards the
last of his New York life he began to add other vices to his original
stock--such as drinking, smoking, and swearing; yet strange to say, he
disdained to lie, and was never known to steal; and his face would glow
with satisfaction when he could take charge of an infant. His mother
hears, with trembling hope, the good accounts of him from the West,
scarcely daring to believe that her wild and vagrant son will ever make
a steady, useful man.
"Truly yours,
"Mrs. E. S. Hurley."
The young rovers gradually became softened and civilized under the
combined influences of warm dinners, carpentering, and good teaching;
but we found the difficulty to be that we did not have sufficient hold
over them out of school hours; we needed more appliances for such
habitual vagabonds. What was wanted was a Lodging-house and all its
influences, as well as School, for the former gives a greater control
than does a simple Industrial School.
We accordingly transferred the whole enterprise to a still worse
quarter, where I had done my first work in visiting, and which I
thoroughly knew, the region on East River, at the foot of Eleventh
Street. Here was a numerous band of similar boys, who slept anywhere,
and lived by petty pilferings from the iron-works and wood-yards and by
street jobs.
In this place we combined our carpenters' shop with Day-school,
Night-school, Reading-room, and Lodging-house, and exerted thus a
variety of influences over the "Arabs," which soon began to reform and
civilize them. Here we had no difficulties, and made a steady progress
as we had done everywhere else.
At present, some gentle female teachers guide the Industrial School. We
have dropped the carpentering, as what the boys need is the habit of
industry and a primary school-training more than a trade; and we have
found that a refined woman can influence these rough little vagabonds
even more than a man.
Subsequently, another school was founded in the quarter from which we
removed this, and is now held in East Thirty-fourth Street.
One of the benefactions which we hope for in the future is the erection
of a suitable building for a Lodging-house, Reading-room, Day-school,
and Mission, in the miserable quarter on East River, near Thirty-fourth
Street.