The Dangerous Classes of New York Part 16

A TRULY "RAGGED SCHOOL."

It is remarkable that the School which is most of a "Ragged School," of all these, is in one of the former fashionable quarters of the city. The quaint, pleasing old square called St John's Park is now occupied as a freight depot, and the handsome residences bordering it have become tenement-houses. Between the grand freight station and the river, overlooked by the statue of the millionaire, are divers little lanes and alleys, filled with a wretched population.

Their children are gathered into this School. An up-hill work the teachers have had of it thus far, owing to the extreme poverty and misery of the parents, and the little aid received from the fortunate cla.s.ses.

FOURTEENTH WARD SCHOOL.

This is a large and useful charity, and is guided by two sisters of great elevation of purpose and earnestness of character, who are known as "Friends of the Poor" in all that quarter.

THE COLORED SCHOOL.

Here gather great numbers of dest.i.tute colored children of the city.

Some are rough boys and young men, who are admirably controlled by a most gentle lady, who is Princ.i.p.al; her a.s.sistant was fittingly prepared for the work by teaching among the freedmen.

The colored people of the city seldom fall into such helpless poverty as the foreign whites; still there is a good deal of dest.i.tution and exposure to temptation among them. The children seem to learn as readily as whites, though they are afflicted with a more sullen temper, and require to be managed more delicately--praise and ridicule being indispensable implements for the teacher. Their singing far surpa.s.ses that of our other scholars.

Among our other schools is a most useful one for a peculiarly wild cla.s.s, in the Rivington-street Lodging-house; one in West Fifty-third and in West Fifty-second Streets, and a very large and well-conducted one for the shanty population near the Park, called

THE PARK SCHOOL.

A very spirited teacher here manages numbers of wild boys and ungoverned girls. The most interesting feature is a Night-school, where pupils come, some from a mile distant, having labored in factories or street-trades all day long--sometimes even giving up their suppers for the sake of the lessons, with a hunger for knowledge which the children of the favored cla.s.ses know little of. Two other Schools shall conclude our catalogue--one in the House of Industry (West Sixteenth Street), and the other in the Eighteenth-street Lodging-house. Both Schools are struggling with great obstacles and difficulties, as they are planted in the quarter which has produced the notorious "Nineteenth-street Gang."

The teacher in the latter has already overcome most of them, and has tamed as wild a set of little street-barbarians as ever plagued a school-teacher.

A rigid rule has been laid down and followed out in these Schools--that is, not to admit or retain pupils who might be in the Public Schools.

Our object is to supplement these useful public inst.i.tutions, and we are continually sending the children forth, when they seem fit, to take places in the Free Schools. Many, however, are always too poor, ragged and necessarily irregular in attendance, to be adapted to the more systematic and respectable places of instruction. As been already mentioned, the plan has been steadily pursued from the beginning by the writer, to make these as good Primary Schools as under the circ.u.mstances they were capable of becoming. The grade of the teachers has been constantly raised, and many of the graduates of our best training academy for teachers in New York State--the Oswego Normal School--have been secured at remunerative salaries.

Within the last four years, also, a new officer has been appointed by the Board of Trustees, to constantly examine the schools and teachers, keep them at the highest grade possible, and visit the families of the children. This place has been ably filled by an intelligent and educated gentleman, Mr. John W. Skinner, with the best effects on our system of instruction.

Our plan of visitation among the families of the poor, whereby the helping hand is held out to juvenile poverty and ignorance all the while, has been effectually carried out by a very earnest worker, Mr. M.

Dupuy, in the lower wards, and by a young German-American of much judgment and zeal, Mr. Holste, in the German quarter, and by quite a number of female visitors.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "PLEASE SIR, MAY I HAVE A BED?" (A sketch from life.) NO.

1.]

CHAPTER XIX.

THE BEST REMEDY FOR JUVENILE PAUPERISM.

"Ameliorer l'homme par le terre et la terre par l'homme." DEMETZ

Among the lowest poor of New York, as we stated in a previous chapter, the influence of _overcrowding_ has been incredibly debasing. When we find half a dozen families--as we frequently do--occupying one room, the old and young, men and women, boys and girls of all ages sleeping near each other, the result is inevitable. The older persons commit unnatural crimes; the younger grow up with hardly a sense of personal dignity or purity; the girls are corrupted even in childhood; and the boys become naturally thieves, vagrants, and vicious characters. Such apartments are at once "fever-nests" and seminaries of vice. The inmates are weakened and diseased physically, and degraded spiritually. Where these houses abound, as formerly in the Five Points, or now in the First Ward, or near Corlear's Hook, or in the Seventeenth Ward near the Tenth Avenue, there is gradually formed a hideous society of vice and pauperism. The men are idle and drunken, the women lazy, quarrelsome, and given to begging; the children see nothing but examples of drunkenness, l.u.s.t, and idleness, and they grow up inevitably as sharpers, beggars, thieves, burglars, and prost.i.tutes. Amid such communities of outcasts the inst.i.tutions of education and religion are comparatively powerless. What is done for the children on one sacred day is wiped out by the influence of the week, and even daily instruction has immense difficulty in counteracting the lessons of home and parents.

For such children of the outcast poor, a more radical cure is needed than the usual influences of school and church.

The same obstacle also appeared soon with the homeless lads and girls who were taken into the Lodging-houses. Though without a home, they were often not legally vagrant--that is, they had some ostensible occupation, some street-trade--and no judge would commit them, unless a very flagrant case of vagrancy was made out against them. They were unwilling to be sent to Asylums, and, indeed, were so numerous that all the Asylums of the State could not contain them. Moreover, their care and charge in public inst.i.tutions would have entailed expenses on the city so heavy, that tax-payers would not have consented to the burden.

The workers, also, in this movement felt from the beginning that "asylum-life" is not the best training to outcast children in preparing them for practical life. In large buildings, where a mult.i.tude of children are gathered together, the bad corrupt the good, and the good are not educated in the virtues of real life. The machinery, too, which is so necessary in such large inst.i.tutions, unfits a poor boy or girl for practical handwork.

The founders of the Children's Aid Society early saw that the best of all Asylums for the outcast child, is the _farmer's home._

The United States have the enormous advantage over all other countries, in the treatment of difficult questions of pauperism and reform, that they possess a practically unlimited area of arable land. The demand for labor on this land is beyond any present supply. Moreover, the cultivators of the soil are in America our most solid and intelligent cla.s.s. From the nature of their circ.u.mstances, their laborers, or "help," must be members of their families, and share in their social tone. It is, accordingly, of the utmost importance to them to train up children who shall aid in their work, and be a.s.sociates of their own children. A servant who is nothing but a servant, would be, with them, disagreeable and inconvenient. They like to educate their own "help."

With their overflowing supply of food also, each new mouth in the household brings no drain on their means. Children are a blessing, and the mere feeding of a young boy or girl is not considered at all.

With this fortunate state of things, it was but a natural inference that the important movement now inaugurating for the benefit of the unfortunate children of New York should at once strike upon a plan of

EMIGRATION.

Simple and most effective as this ingenious scheme now seems--which has accomplished more in relieving New York of youthful crime and misery than all other charities together--at the outset it seemed as difficult and perplexing as does the similar cure proposed now in Great Britain for a more terrible condition of the children of the poor.

Among other objections, it was feared that the farmers would not want the children for help; that, if they took them, the latter would be liable to ill-treatment, or, if well treated, would corrupt the virtuous children around them, and thus New York would be scattering seeds of vice and corruption all over the land. Accidents might occur to the unhappy little ones thus sent, bringing odium on the benevolent persons who were dispatching them to the country. How were places to be found?

How were the demand and supply for children's labor to be connected? How were the right employers to be selected? And, when the children were placed, how were their interests to be watched over, and acts of oppression or hard dealing prevented or punished? Were they to be indentured, or not? If this was the right scheme, why had it not been tried long ago in our cities or in England?

These and innumerable similar difficulties and objections were offered to this projected plan of relieving the city of its youthful pauperism and suffering. They all fell to the ground before the confident efforts to carry out a well-laid scheme; and practical experience has justified none of them.

To awaken the demand for these children, circulars were sent out through the city weeklies and the rural papers to the country districts.

Hundreds of applications poured in at once from the farmers and mechanics all through the Union. At first, we made the effort to meet individual applications by sending just the kind of children wanted; but this soon became impracticable.

Each applicant or employer always called for "a perfect child," without any of the taints of earthly depravity. The girls must be pretty, good-tempered, not given to purloining sweetmeats, and fond of making fires at daylight, and with a const.i.tutional love for Sunday Schools and Bible-lessons. The boys must be well made, of good stock, never disposed to steal apples or pelt cattle, using language of perfect propriety, and delighting in family-worship and prayer-meetings more than in fishing or skating parties. These demands, of course, were not always successfully complied with. Moreover, to those who desired the children of "blue eyes, fair hair, and blond complexion," we were sure to send the dark-eyed and brunette; and the particular virtues wished for were very often precisely those that the child was deficient in. It was evidently altogether too much of a lottery for bereaved parents or benevolent employers to receive children in that way.

Yet, even under this incomplete plan, there were many cases like the following, which we extract from our Journal:--

A WAIF.

"In visiting, during May last, near the docks at the foot of Twenty-third Street, I found a boy, about twelve years of age, sitting on the wharf, very ragged and wretched-looking. I asked him where he lived, and he made the answer one hears so often from these children--'I don't live nowhere.' On further inquiry, it appeared that his parents had died a few years before--that his aunt took him for a while, but, being a drunken woman, had at length turned him away; and for some time he had slept in a box in Twenty-second Street, and the _boys fed him,_ he occasionally making a sixpence with holding horses or doing an errand. He had eaten nothing that day, though it was afternoon. I gave him something to eat, and he promised to come up the next day to the office.

"He came up, and we had a long talk together. He was naturally an intelligent boy, of good temperament and organization; but in our Christian city of New York he had never heard of Jesus Christ! His mother, long ago, had taught him a prayer, and occasionally he said this in the dark nights, lying on the boards. * * * Of schools or churches, of course, he knew nothing. We sent him to a gentleman in Delaware, who had wished to make the experiment of bringing up a vagrant boy of the city. He thus writes at his arrival:--

"'The boy reached Wilmington in safety, where I found him a few hours after he arrived. Poor boy! He bears about him, or, rather, _is,_ the unmistakable evidence of the life he has led--covered with vermin, almost a leper, ignorant in the extreme, and seeming wonder-struck almost at the voice of kindness and sympathy, and bewildered with the idea of possessing a wardrobe gotten for him.

"'So far as I can judge from so short an observation, I should think him an amiable boy, grateful for kindness shown him, rather timid than energetic, yet by no means deficient in intellectual capacity, and altogether such a one as, by G.o.d's help, can be made something of. Such as he is, or may turn out to be, I accept the trust conferred upon me, not insensible of the responsibility I incur in thus becoming the instructor and trainer of a being destined to an endless life, of which that which he pa.s.ses under my care, while but the beginning, may determine all the rest.'

"In a letter six months later, he writes:--

"'It gives me much pleasure to be able to state that Johnny S---continues to grow in favor with us all. Having been reclaimed from his vagrant habits, which at first clung pretty close to him, he may now be said to be a steady and industrious boy.

"'I have not had occasion, since he has been under my care, to reprove him so often as once even, having found gentle and kindly admonition quite sufficient to restrain him. He is affectionate in disposition, very truthful, and remarkably free from the use of profane or rough language. I find less occasion to look after him than is usual with children of his age, in order to ascertain that the animals intrusted to his care are well attended to, etc.

"' * * * Johnny is now a very good speller out of books, reads quite fairly, and will make a superior penman--an apt scholar, and very fond of his books. I have been his teacher thus far. He attends regularly a Sabbath School, of which I have the superintendence, and the religious services which follow,'"

The effort to place the city-children of the street in country families revealed a spirit of humanity and kindness, throughout the rural districts, which was truly delightful to see. People bore with these children of poverty, sometimes, as they did not with their own. There was--and not in one or two families alone--a sublime spirit of patience exhibited toward these unfortunate little creatures, a bearing with defects and inherited evils, a forgiving over and over again of sins and wrongs, which showed how deep a hold the spirit of Christ had taken of many of our countrywomen.

To receive such a letter as this elevated one's respect for human nature:--

"S----, OHIO, February 14, 1859.