The Dangerous Classes of New York Part 10

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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses, 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 n.o.ble 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 grat.i.tude 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 appet.i.tes of their mothers, or if they did, their new training subst.i.tuted 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 circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sured 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 cl.u.s.tered about the door of the School. As they caught a glimpse of some one coming out, the cry of 'Lie low! lie low!' pa.s.sed among them, and they were off, capering about in the snow-storm like so many little witches.

"We pa.s.sed up Oak Street and Cherry. Here is the entrance, a narrow doorway on the side. Wind through this dark pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d 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.

G.o.d bless ye, gintlemen!'

"We climbed again one of these rookeries. It is a back garret. A dark-eyed, pa.s.sionate-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 _h.e.l.ls,_ 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 prost.i.tutes, 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 prost.i.tute'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. G.o.d 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 prost.i.tute who have run a long course, let those heroically work who will. Yet, n.o.ble 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 circ.u.mstances 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.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE GERMAN RAG-PICKERS.

Our next great effort was among the Germans. On the eastern side of the city is a vast population of German laborers, mechanics, and shop-keepers. Among them, also, are numbers of exceedingly poor people, who live by gathering rags and bones.

I used at that time to explore these singular settlements, filled with the poor peasantry of the "Fatherland," and being familiar with the German _patois,_ I had many cheery conversations with these honest people, who had drifted into places so different from their mountain-homes. In fact, it used to convey to me a strange contrast, the dirty yards piled with bones and flaunting with rags, and the air smelling of carrion; while the accents reminded of the glaciers of the Bavarian Alps or the fresh breezes and wild scenes of the Harz. The poor people felt the contrast terribly, and their children most of all.

From ignorance of the language and the necessity of working at their street-trades, they did not attend our schools, and seldom entered a church. They were growing up without either religion or education. Yet they were a much more honest and hopeful cla.s.s than the Irish. There seemed always remaining in them something of the good old German _Biederkeit,_ or solidity. One could depend on the children if they were put in places of trust, and in school they seemed to grasp knowledge with much more tenacity and vigor. The young girls, however, coming from a similar low cla.s.s were weaker in virtue than the Irish.

The number of the Germans in the poor quarters may be somewhat measured by the population of the Wards which they inhabited. The Eleventh Ward at that time (1854) was reckoned to contain 50,000 inhabitants; at present (1870) it contains 64,372, and the Sixteenth Ward, another strong German district, has 99,375.

The a.s.sociation of ladies which we called together for labors among this population happened to be composed mainly of Unitarians, a religious body that has always felt a peculiar interest in the moral condition of our German poor. The moving spirit in the a.s.sociation was a lady of such singular grace and delicacy of character, that I hardly venture, even after these many years, to make public her name. She occupied then one of the foremost positions in New York society--a position accorded in part to her name, honored for intellectual services to the Republic, beyond almost any other in our history, but above all due to her own singular sweetness and dignity of manner and a very highly cultivated and strong intellect. Her power, whether with rich or poor, was her wonderful consideration for others, and her quick sympathy. The highest inspiration of Christian faith breathed through her life and animated her in laboring with these children of poverty. The same inspiration sustained her subsequently in a prolonged and terrible trial of months under a fearful disease, and made her death a sun-set of glory to all who knew her. Never did the faith in immortal union with G.o.d through Christ attain a more absolute certainty in any human being. Her death, even to many skeptics who were intimate with her, became a new and astonishing argument for Immortality.

She numbered among her friends many of the leading intellects of the country, as well as those among the poor who depended on her advice, sympathy, and aid.

Into this labor of love among the Germans, Mrs. S. threw herself, in company with a few friends, with profound earnestness.

In view of the peculiar temptations of the young German girls, one of our objects in this school was to offer a social as well as educational resort in the evenings. We furnished the rooms pleasantly and tastefully, and proposed to vary our school exercises by games or an occasional dance and frolic. Mrs. S. and other ladies consented to be often present, to instruct and talk with the girls. Our visitors and myself at once gathered in a needy-looking a.s.sembly of the poor German girls of the Eleventh Ward, not as ragged or wild as the Irish throng in the Fourth Ward, but equally poor and quite as much exposed to temptation. The School went on day by day in its ministrations of love and its patient industry, and gradually produced the same effects as have been experienced under all these Schools. The wild became tamer, the wayward more docile. The child of the rag-picker soon began to like in-door industry better than the vagrant business of the streets, and to lose something of her boldness and correct her slovenliness.

After laboring thus for some years with a board of ladies, a strong effort was made to secure the a.s.sistance of the German merchants of the city.

In 1859, a subscription of about $1,000 was obtained from them, and the School was enlarged and made still more attractive, so as to reach the young working German girls in the evening. At this time a young lady of high culture, from one of the prominent intellectual families of New England, offered herself for this difficult task, and she was placed at the head of the School. For two years she labored unceasingly for this wild, uncontrolled cla.s.s, being present every evening in the school, and bringing all her education and earnestness of character to bear upon them. They never forgot her, and she left an indelible impression on these children, and aided in saving them from the temptations which have ruined so many of their companions.

Our German patrons gradually left us, and it was only in 1870 that their a.s.sistance was secured again for a charity which was saving so many thousand children of their countrymen.

The School is now held at No. 272 Second Street, and contains some four hundred children.

"DUTCH HILL" AND THE SWILL-GATHERERS.

On the eastern side of the city, in the neighborhood of Fortieth Street, is a village of squatters, which enjoys the t.i.tle of "Dutch Hill." The inhabitants are not, however, "Dutch," but mainly poor Irish, who have taken temporary possession of unused sites on a hill, and have erected shanties which serve at once for pig-pens, hen-coops, bed-rooms, and living-rooms. They enjoy the privilege of squatters in having no rent to pay; but they are exposed to the penalty of being at any moment turned out from their dens, and losing land and house at once. Usually they remain while the quarrymen who are opening streets almost undermine their shanties, and then if the buildings are not blown away, they pull them down and pack them away like tents to another dwelling-place.

The village is filled with snarling dogs, which aid in drawing the swill or coal carts, for the children are mainly employed in collecting swill and picking coals through the streets.

The shanty family are never quite so poor as the tenement-house family; as they have no rent to pay. But the filth and wretchedness in which they sometimes live are beyond description.

It happened that for many years (not wishing to scatter my efforts too much), I made this quarter my special "parish" for visitations; and very discouraging visits they were, many of them. The people had very little regular occupation, many being widows who did occasional "ch.o.r.es" in families; others lived on the sale of the coal their children gathered, or on the pigs which shared their domicile; others kept fowls, and all had vast flocks of goats, though where the profits from these latter came I could never discover, as no one seemed to buy the milk, and I never heard of their killing them. Money, however, in some way they did procure, and one old red-faced swill-gatherer I knew well, whose bright child we tried so long to save, who died finally, it was said, with a large deposit in the Savings-Bank, which no one could claim; yet one corner of her bed-chamber was filled with a heap of smelling bones, and the pigs slept under her bed.

Another old rag-picker I remember whose shanty was a sight to behold; all the odds and ends of a great, city seemed piled up in it,--bones, broken dishes, rags, bits of furniture, cinders, old tin, useless lamps, decaying vegetables, ribbons, cloths, legless chairs, and carrion, all mixed together, and heaped up nearly to the ceiling, leaving hardly room for a bed on the floor where the woman and her two children slept. Yet all these were marvels of health and vigor, far surpa.s.sing most children I know in the comfortable cla.s.ses. The woman was German, and after years of effort could never be induced to do anything for the education of her children, until finally I put the police on their track as vagrants, and they were safely housed in the "Juvenile Asylum."

Many a time have I come into their shanties on a snowy morning and found the people asleep with the snow lying thick on their bed-clothes. One poor creature was found thus one morning by the police, frozen stiff.

They all suffered, as might be expected, terribly from rheumatism.

Liquor, of course, "prevailed." Every woman drank hard, I suppose to forget her misery; and dreadful quarrels raged among them.

The few men there worked hard at stone-quarrying, but were often disabled by disease and useless from drunkenness. Many of the women had been abandoned by their husbands, as their families increased and became burdensome, or as they themselves grew plain and bad-tempered. Some of these poor creatures drank still more to heal their wounded affections.

The children, of course, were rapidly following the ways of their parents. The life of a swill-gatherer, or coal-picker, or _chiffonnier_ in the streets soon wears off a girl's modesty and prepares her for worse occupation.

Into this community of poor, ignorant, and drunken people I threw myself, and resolved, with G.o.d's aid, to try to do something for them.

Here for years I visited from cabin to cabin, or hunted out every cellar and attic of the neighboring tenement-houses; standing at death-beds and sick-beds, seeking to administer consolation and advice, and, aided by others, to render every species of a.s.sistance.