A PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPIST AMONG THE YOUNG "ROUGHS."
A sketch of the long and successful efforts for the improvement of the
dangerous classes we have been describing would be imperfect without an
account of
THE OFFICE OF THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY.
This has become a kind of eddying-point, where the two streams of the
fortunate and the unfortunate classes seem to meet. Such a varying
procession of humanity as passes through these plain rooms, from one
year's end to the other, can nowhere else be seen. If photographs could
be taken of the human life revealed there, they would form a volume of
pictures of the various fortunes of large classes in a great city. On
one day, there will be several mothers with babes. They wish them
adopted, or taken by any one. They relate sad stories of desertion and
poverty; they are strangers or immigrants. When the request is declined,
they beseech, and say that the child must die, for they cannot support
both. It is but too plain that, they are illegitimate children; As they
depart, the horrible feeling presses on one, that the child will soon
follow the fate of so many thousands born out of wedlock. Again, a
pretty young woman comes to beg a home for the child of some friend, who
cannot support it. Her story need not be told; the child is hers, and is
the offspring of shame. Or some person from the higher classes enters,
to inquire for the traces of some boy, long disappeared--the child of
passion and sin.
But the ordinary frequenters are the children of the street--the Arabs
and gypsies of our city.
Here enters a little flower-seller, her shawl drawn over her head,
barefooted and ragged--she begs for a home and bread; here a newsboy,
wide-awake and impudent, but softened by his desire to "get West;" here
"a bummer," ragged, frouzy, with tangled hair and dirty face, who has
slept for years in boxes and privies; here a "canawl-boy," who cannot
steer his little craft in the city as well as he could his boat; or a
petty thief who wishes to reform his ways, or a bootblack who has
conceived the ambition of owning land, or a little "revolver" who hopes
to get quarters for nothing in a Lodging-house and "pitch pennies" in
the interval. Sometimes some yellow-haired German boy, stranded by
fortune in the city, will apply, with such honest blue eyes, that the
first employer that enters will carry him off; or a sharp, intelligent
Yankee lad, left adrift by sudden misfortune, comes in to do what he has
never done before--ask for assistance. Then an orphan-girl will appear,
floating on the waves of the city, having come here no one knows why,
and going no one can tell whither.
Employers call to obtain "perfect children;" drunken mothers rush in to
bring back their children they have already consented should be sent far
from poverty and temptation; ladies enter to find the best object of
their charities, and the proper field for their benevolent labors;
liberal donors; "intelligent foreigners," inquiring into our
institutions, applicants for teachers' places, agents, and all the
miscellaneous crowd who support and visit agencies of charity.
A PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPIST.
The central figure in this office, disentangling all the complicated
threads in these various applications, and holding himself perfectly
cool and bland in this turmoil, is "a character"--Mr. J. Macy.
He was employed first as a visitor for the Society; but, soon betraying
a kind of bottled-up "enthusiasm of humanity" under a very modest
exterior, he was put in his present position, where he has become a sort
of embodied Children's Aid Society in his own person. Most men take
their charities as adjuncts to life, or as duties enjoined by religion
or humanity. Mr. Macy lives in his. He is never so truly happy as when
he is sitting calmly amid a band of his "lambs," as he sardonically
calls the heavy-fisted, murderous-looking young vagabonds who frequent
the Cottage place Reading-room, and seeing them all happily engaged in
reading or quiet, amusements. Then the look of beatific satisfaction
that settles over his face, as, in the midst of a loving passage of his
religious address to them, he takes one of the obstreperous lambs by the
collar, and sets him down very hard on another bench--never for a moment
breaking the thread or sweet tone of his bland remarks--is a sight to
behold; you know that he is happier there than he would be in a palace.
His labors with these youthful scapegraces around Cottage Place, during
the last fifteen years, would form one of the most instructive chapters
in the history of philanthropy. I have beheld him discoursing sweetly on
the truths of Christianity while a storm of missiles was coming through
the windows; in fact, during the early days of the meeting, the windows
were always barricaded with boards. The more violent the intruders were,
the more amiable, and at the same time, the more firm he became.
In fact, he never seemed so well satisfied as when the roughest little
"bummers" of the ward entered his Boys' Meeting. The virtuous and
well-behaved children did not interest him half so much. By a patience
which is almost incredible, and a steady kindness of years, he finally
succeeded in subduing these wild young vagrants, frequently being among
them every night of the week, holding magic-lantern exhibitions,
temperance meetings, social gatherings, and the like, till he really
knew them and attracted their sympathies. His cheerfulness was high when
the meeting grew into an Industrial School, where the little girls, who
perplexed him so, could be trained by female hands, and his happiness
was at its acme when the liberality of one or two gentlemen enabled him
to open a Reading-room for "the lambs." The enterprise was always an
humble one in appearance; but such were the genuineness and spirit of
humanity in it--the product of his sisters as well as himself--that it
soon met with kind support from various ladies and gentlemen, and now is
one of those lights in dark places which must gladden any observer of
the misery and crime of this city.
Mr. Macy's salvation in these exhausting and nerve-wearing efforts, and
divers others which I have not detailed, is his humor. I have seen him
take two lazy-looking young men, who had applied most piteously for
help, conduct them very politely to the door, and, pointing amiably to
the Third Avenue, say, "Now, my boys, just be kind enough to walk right
north up that avenue for one hundred miles into the, country, and you
will find plenty of work and food. Good-by! good-by!" The boys depart,
mystified.
Or a dirty little fellow presents himself in the office. "Please, sir, I
am an orphant, and I want a home!" Mr. Macy eyes him carefully; his
knowledge of _"paidology"_ has had many years to ripen in; he sees,
perhaps, amid his rags, a neatly-sewed patch, or notes that his naked
feet are too white for a "bummer." He takes him to the inner office. "My
boy! Where do you live? Where's your father?"
"Please, sir, I don't live nowhere, and I hain't got no father, and me
mither is dead!" Then follows a long and touching story of his
orphanage, the tears flowing down his cheeks. The bystanders are almost
melted themselves. Not so Mr. Macy. Grasping the boy by the shoulder,
"Where's your mother, I say?" "Oh, dear, I'm a poor orphant, and I
hain't got no mither!" "Where is your _mother_, I say? Where do you
live? I give you just three minutes to tell, and then, if you do not, I
shall hand you over to that officer!" The lad yields; his true story is
told, and a runaway restored to his family.
In the midst of his highest discouragements at Cottage Place, Mr. Macy
frequently had some characteristic story of his "lambs" to refresh him
in his intervals of rest And some peculiar exhibition of mischief or
wickedness always seemed to act as a kind of tonic on him and restore
his spirits.
I shall not forget the cheerfulness with which he related one day that,
after having preached with great unction the Sunday previous on
"stealing," he came back the next and discovered that a private room in
the building, which he only occasionally used, had been employed by the
boys for some time as a receptacle for stolen goods!
On another occasion, he had held forth with peculiar "liberty" on the
sin of thieving, and, when he sat down almost exhausted, discovered, to
his dismay, that his hat had been stolen! But, knowing that mischief was
at the bottom, and that a crowd of young "roughs" were outside waiting
to see him go home bareheaded, he said nothing of his loss, but procured
a cap and quietly walked away.
I think the contest of wits among them--they for mischief and
disturbance, and he to establish order and get control over them--gave a
peculiar zest to his religious labors, which he would not have had in
calmer scenes and more regular services. If they put pepper on the
stove, he endured it much longer than they could, and kept them until
they were half suffocated; and when they barricaded the door outside, he
protracted the devotional exercises or varied them with a "magic
lantern," to give time for forcing the door, and an orderly exit. [Mr.
Macy, on one occasion, on a bitter winter day, found the lock of the
room picked and the boys within. He accused some of the larger boys.
They denied, "No sir--no: it couldn't be us; because we was in the
liquor-shop on the corner; _we ain't got nowhere else to go to!"_]
The girls, however, were his great torment, especially when they stoned
their spiritual guides; these, however, he eventually forwarded into the
Cottage place Industrial School, which sprang from the Meeting, and
there they were gradually civilized.
For real suffering and honest effort at self-help, he had a boundless
sympathy; but the paupers and professional beggars were the terror of
his life. He dreaded nothing so much as a boy or girl falling into
habits of dependence. Where he was compelled to give assistance in
money, he has been known to set one boy to throw wood down and the other
to pile it up, before he would aid.
His more stormy philanthropic labors have been succeeded by calmer
efforts among a delightful congregation of poor German children in
Second Street, who love and revere him. When he needs, however, a little
refreshment and intoning, he goes over to his Cottage-place
Reading-room, and sits with or instructs his "lambs!"
His main work, however, is in the "office" of the Children's Aid
Society, which I have described above. Though a plain half-Quaker
himself, he has all the tact of a _diplomat,_ and manages the
complicated affairs of poverty and crime that come before him with a
wonderful skin, getting on as well with the lady as the street-vagrant,
and seldom ever making a blunder in the thousand delicate matters which
pass through his hands. When it is remembered that some seventeen
thousand street-children have passed through that office to homes in the
country, and that but one lawsuit has ever occurred about them (and that
through no mistake of the Society), while numbers of bitter enemies
watch every movement of this charity, it will be seen with what
consummate judgment these delicate matters have been managed. Besides
all this, he is the guide, philosopher, and friend of hundreds of these
young wayfarers in every part of the country, sustaining with them an
enormous correspondence; but, as sympathy, and advice, and religious
instruction on such a gigantic scale would soon weary out even his
vitality, he stereotypes his letters, and, by a sort of pious fraud,
says to each what is written for all. It is very interesting to come
across the quaint, affectionate words and characteristic expressions of
this devoted philanthropist addressed to "his boys," but put up in
packages of a thousand copies, and to think to how many little rovers
over the land they bring sympathy and encouragement.