The Dangerous Classes of New York Part 1

The Dangerous Cla.s.ses of New York.

by Charles Loring Brace.

INTRODUCTION.

The great pioneer in the United States, in the labors of penal Reform and the prevention of crime,--EDWARD LIVINGSTON,--said as long ago as 1833, in his famous "Introductory Report to the Code of Reform and Prison Discipline": "As prevention in the diseases of the body is less painful, less expensive, and more efficacious than the most skillful cure, so in the moral maladies of society, to arrest the vicious before the profligacy a.s.sumes the shape of crime; to take away from the poor the cause or pretence of relieving themselves by fraud or theft; to reform them by education and make their own industry contribute to their support, although difficult and expensive, will be found more effectual in the suppression of offences and more economical than the best organized system of punishment."--(p. 322.)

My great object in the present work is to prove to society the practical truth of Mr. Livingston's theoretical statement: that the cheapest and most efficacious way of dealing with the "Dangerous Cla.s.ses" of large cities, is not to punish them, but to prevent their growth; to so throw the influences of education and discipline and religion about the abandoned and dest.i.tute youth of our large towns, to change their material circ.u.mstances, and draw them under the influence of the moral and fortunate cla.s.ses, that they shall grow up as useful producers and members of society, able and inclined to aid it in its progress.

In the view of this book, the cla.s.s of a large city most dangerous to its property, its morals and its political life, are the ignorant, dest.i.tute, untrained, and abandoned youth: the outcast street-children grown up to be voters, to be the implements of demagogues, the "feeders"

of the criminals, and the sources of domestic outbreaks and violations of law.

The various chapters of this work contain a detailed account of the const.i.tuents of this cla.s.s in New York, and of the twenty years' labors of the writer, and many men and women, to purify and elevate it; what the principles were of the work, what its fruits, what its success.

So much interest at home and abroad has been manifested in these extended charities, and so many inquiries are received continually about them, that it seemed at length time to give a simple record of them, and of the evils they have sought to cure.

If the narrative shall lead the citizens of other large towns to inaugurate comprehensive and organized movements for the improvement of their "Dangerous Cla.s.ses," my object will be fully attained.

I have the hope, too, that these little stories of the lot of the poor in cities, and the incidents related of their trials and temptations, may bring the two ends of society nearer together in human sympathy.

The discussion of the Causes of Juvenile Crime contained in this work must aid others who would found similar reformatory and preventive movements, to base them on principles and motives which should reach similar profound and threatening evils.

CHARLES LORING BRACE.

19 EAST 4TH STREET, NEW YORK.

June 1, 1872.

CHAPTER I.

CHRIST IN CHARITY AND REFORM.

THE CONDITION OF NEGLECTED CHILDREN BEFORE CHRISTIANITY.

The central figure in the world's charity is CHRIST. An eloquent rationalistic writer--Mr. Lecky--speaking of the Christian efforts in early ages in behalf of exposed children and against infanticide, says:

"Whatever mistakes may have been made, the entire movement I have traced displays an anxiety not only for the life, but for the moral well-being, of the castaways of society, such as the most humane nations of antiquity had never reached. This minute and scrupulous care for human life and human virtue in the humblest forms, in the slave, the gladiator, the savage, or the infant, was indeed wholly foreign to the genius of Paganism. It was produced by the Christian doctrine of the inestimable value of each immortal soul.

"It is the distinguishing and transcendent characteristic of every society into which the spirit of Christianity has pa.s.sed."

Christ has indeed given a new value to the poorest and most despised human being.

When one thinks what was the fate before He lived, throughout the civilized world, of for instance one large and pitiable cla.s.s of human beings--unfortunate children, dest.i.tute orphans, foundlings, the deformed and sickly, and female children of the poor; how almost universal, even under the highest pagan civilization--the Greek and Roman--infanticide was; how Plato and Aristotle both approved of it; how even more common was the dreadful exposure of children who were physically imperfect or for any cause disagreeable to their parents, so that crowds of these little unfortunates were to be seen exposed around a column near the Velabrum at Rome--some being taken to be raised as slaves, others as prost.i.tutes, others carried off by beggars and maimed for exhibition, or captured by witches to be murdered, and their bodies used in their magical preparations; when one remembers for how many centuries, even after the nominal introduction of Christianity, the sale of free children was permitted by law, and then recalls how utterly the spirit of the Founder of Christianity has exterminated these barbarous practices from the civilized world; what vast and ingenious charities exist in every Christian country for this unfortunate cla.s.s; what time and wealth and thought are bestowed to heal the diseases, purify the morals, raise the character, and make happy the life of foundlings, outcast girls and boys and orphans, we can easily understand that the source of the charities of civilized nations has been especially in Christ; and knowing how vital the moral care of unfortunate children is to civilization itself the most skeptical among us may still put Him at the head of even modern social reform.

EXPOSURE OF CHILDREN.

The "exposure of children" is spoken of casually and with indifference by numerous Latin authors. The comedians include the custom in their pictures of the daily Roman life, usually without even a pa.s.sing condemnation. Thus, in Terence's play (Heauton: Act iii., sc. v.), the very character who uttered the apothegm which has become a proverb of humanity for all ages--"I am a man, and nothing belonging to man is alien to me"--is represented, on the eve of his departure on a long journey, as urging his wife to destroy the infant soon to be born, if it should prove to be a girl, rather than expose it. She, however, exposes it, and it was taken, as was usual, and brought up as a prost.i.tute. This play turns in its plot, as is true of many popular comedies, on this exposition of the abandoned child.

It is frequently commented on by Roman dramatists, and subsequently by the early Christian preachers, that, owing to this terrible custom, brothers might marry sisters, or fathers share in the ruin of their unknown daughters in houses of crime.

Seneca, who certainly always writes with propriety and aims to be governed by reason, in his treatise on Anger (De Ira: i., 15), comments thus calmly on the practice: "Portentos foetus extingnimus; liberos quoque si debiles, monstrosique editi sunt, mergimus. Non ira, sed _ratio_ est, a sanis, inutilia secernere." (Monstrous offspring we destroy; children too, if weak and unnaturally formed from birth, we drown. It is not anger, but reason, thus to separate the useless from the sound.)

In another work (Controversi, lib. v., 33), he denounces the horrible practice, common in Rome, of maiming these unfortunate children and then offering them to the gaze of the compa.s.sionate. He describes the miserable little creatures with shortened limbs, broken Joints, and carved backs, exhibited by the villainous beggars who had gathered them at the _Lactaria,_ and then deformed them: "Volo nosse," "I should like to know" says the moralist, with a burst of human indignation, "illam calamitatum humanarum officinam--illud infantum spoliarium!"--"that workshop of human misfortunes--those shambles of infants!"

On the day that Germanicus died, says Suetonius (in Calig., n. 5), "Subversae Deam arae, partus conjugum expositi," parents exposed their new-born babes.

The early Christian preachers and writers were unceasing in their denunciations of the practice.

Quintilian (Decl. 306, vol vi., p. 236) draws a most moving picture of the fate of these unhappy children left in the Forum: "Rarum est ut expositi vivant! Yos ponite ante oculos puerum statim neglectum * * *

inter feras et volucres."

"It is rare that the exposed survive!" he says.

Tertullian, in an eloquent pa.s.sage (Apol., c. 9), asks: "Quot vultis ex his circ.u.mstantibus et in christianum sanguinem hiantibus * * * apud conscientias pulsem, qui natos sibi liberos enecent?"

"How many, do you suppose, of those standing about and panting for the blood of Christians, if I should put it to them before their very conscience, would deny that they killed their own children?"

Lactantius, who was the tutor of the son of Constantine, in a book dedicated to Constantine, protests: "It is impossible to grant that one has the right to strangle one's new-born children"; and speaks of exposition as exposing one's own blood--"ad servitutem vel ad lupanar"--"for slavery or the brothel." "It is a crime as execrable to expose a child as to kill him."

So fearfully did the numbers increase, under the Roman Empire, of these unfortunate children, that the spark of charity, which is never utterly extinguished in the human breast, began to kindle. Pliny the Younger is said to have appropriated a sum equivalent to $52,000 (see Epist., v., 7), to found an asylum for fathers unable to support their children.

THE FIRST CHILDREN'S ASYLUM.

Probably the first society or asylum in history for poor children was the foundation established by the Emperor Trajan (about A. D. 110) for dest.i.tute and abandoned children. The property thus established in perpetuity, with real estate and money at interest (at five per cent.), was equivalent in value to $920,000, and supported some five thousand children of both s.e.xes. Singularly enough, there seems to have been only one illegitimate child to one hundred and fifty legitimate in these inst.i.tutions.

The Antonines, as might be expected, did not neglect this charity; but both Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius founded a.s.sociations for dest.i.tute girls. Alexander Severus established one also for poor children. These form the only organized efforts made for this object, during many centuries, by the most civilized and refined state of antiquity.

The number, however, of these wretched creatures, increased beyond all cure from scattered exceptional efforts like these. Everywhere the poor got rid of their children by exposure, or sold them as slaves. The rich, if indifferent to their offspring, or unwilling to take the trouble of rearing them, sent them out to the public square, where pimps, beggars, witches, and slave-dealers gleaned their horrible harvest. At length, under the influence of Christianity, legislation began to take cognizance of the practice.

The Emperor Constantine, the Emperor Valentian, Valens, and Gratian, sixty years later, continued this humane legislation.

They ordered, under strict penalties, that every one should nourish his own children, and forbade exposition; declaring also that no one had the right to reclaim the children he had abandoned; the motive to this law being the desire to make it for the interest of those "taking up"

exposed children to keep them, even if necessary, as slaves, against any outside claims.

Unfortunately, at that period, slavery was held a less evil than the ordinary fate to which the poor left their children.

The punishment of death was also decreed against Infanticide.

It is an interesting fact that a portion, and probably the whole, of our ancestral tribes looked with the greatest horror on abortion and infanticide. The laws of the Visigoths punished these offenses with death or blindness. Their influence, of course, should always be considered, as well as that of Christianity, in estimating the modern position of woman and the outcast child, as compared with their status under Greek and Roman civilization.

At a later period (412 A. D.) the imperial legislation again endeavored to prevent the reclaiming of exposed children from compa.s.sionate persons who had taken them. "Were they right to say that those children belonged to them when they had despised them even to the point of abandoning them to death?"