Part 24 (1/2)
During the summer of 1865, I was present in London as a delegate to the International Reformatory Convention, and had the opportunity, for the second or third time, to investigate thoroughly the preventive and reformatory inst.i.tutions of Great Britain.
On my return I found that the President of our Board, of whom I have already spoken, had taken a lease of a building in a notorious quarter.
His idea was that some of my observations in England might be utilized here and tested in a preventive inst.i.tution. The quarter was well known to me. It had been the home and school of the murderous gang of boys and young men known as
”THE NINETEENTH STREET GANG.”
It happens that the beginnings and the process of growth of this society of young criminals were thoroughly known by me at the time, and, as one case of this kind ill.u.s.trates hundreds going on now, I will describe it in detail:--
Seventeen years ago, my attention had been called to the extraordinarily degraded condition of the children in a district lying on the west side of the city, between Seventeenth and Nineteenth Streets, and the Seventh and Tenth Avenues. A certain block, called ”Misery Row,” in Tenth Avenue, was the main seedbed of crime and poverty in the quarter, and was also invariably a ”fever-nest.” Here the poor obtained wretched rooms at a comparatively low rent; these they sub-let, and thus, in little, crowded, close tenements, were herded men, women, and children of all ages. The parents were invariably given to hard drinking, and the children were sent out to beg or to steal. Besides them, other children, who were orphans, or who had run away from drunkards' homes, or had been working on the ca.n.a.l-boats that discharged on the docks near by, drifted into the quarter, as if attracted by the atmosphere of crime and laziness that prevailed in the neighborhood. These slept around the breweries of the ward, or on the hay-barges, or in the old sheds of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets. They were mere children, and kept life together by all sorts of street-jobs--helping the brewery laborers, blackening boots, sweeping sidewalks, ”smas.h.i.+ng baggages” (as they called it), and the like. Herding together, they soon began to form an unconscious society for vagrancy and idleness. Finding that work brought but poor pay, they tried shorter roads to getting money by petty thefts, in which they were very adroit. Even if they earned a considerable sum by a lucky day's job, they quickly spent it in gambling, or for some folly.
The police soon knew them as ”street-rats;” but, like the rats, they were too quick and cunning to be often caught in their petty plunderings, so they gnawed away at the foundations of society undisturbed. As to the ”popular education” of which we boast, and the elevating and inspiring faith of Christianity which had reared its temples all around them, they might almost as well have been the children of the Makololos in Central Africa. They had never been in school or church, and knew of G.o.d and Christ only in street-oaths, or as something of which people far above them spoke sometimes.
I determined to inaugurate here a regular series of the ”moral disinfectants,” if I may so call them, for this ”crime-nest,” which act almost as surely, though not as rapidly, as do the physical disinfectants--the sulphate of iron, the chloride of lime, and the various deodorizers of the Board of Health--in breaking up the ”fever-nests” of the city.
These measures, though imitated in some respects from England, were novel in their combination.
The first step in the treatment is to appoint a kind-hearted agent or ”Visitor,” who shall go around the infected quarter, and win the confidence of, and otherwise befriend the homeless and needy children of the neighborhood. Then we open an informal, simple, religious meeting--the Boys' Meeting which I have described; next we add to it a free Reading-room, then an Industrial School, afterwards a Lodging-house; and, after months or years of the patient application of these remedies, our final and most successful treatment is, as I have often said, the forwarding of the more hopeful cases to farms in the West.
While seeking to apply these long-tried remedies to the wretched young population in the Sixteenth Ward, I chanced on a most earnest Christian man, a resident of the quarter, whose name I take the liberty of mentioning--Mr. D. Slater, a manufacturer.
He went around himself through the rookeries of the district, and gathered the poor lads even in his own parlor; he fed and clothed them; he advised and prayed with them. We opened together a religious meeting for them. Nothing could exceed their wild and rowdy conduct in the first gatherings. On one or two occasions some of the little ruffians absolutely drew knives on our a.s.sistants, and had to be handed over to the police. But our usual experience was repeated even there. Week by week patient kindness and the truths of Christianity began to have their effect on these wild little heathen of the street. We find, in our Journal of 1856, the following entries (p. 11):--
”The other meeting has been opened in the hall, at the corner of Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue, by Mr. D. Slater. It had, in the beginning, a rather stormy time, being frequented by the rowdy and thieving boys of the quarter. Mr. S. has once or twice been obliged to call in the help of the police, and to arrest the ringleaders. Now, however, by his patient kindness and anxiety for the welfare of the lads, he has gained a permanent influence. The police have remarked how much less the streets, on a Sunday, have been infested, since he opened the meeting, with vagabond boys. Several notorious street-boys have abandoned their bad habits, and now go regularly to the Public Schools, or are in steady business. The average attendance the first month was 88; it is now 162. The average evening attendance is 104.
There is a family of four boys, all orphans, whom their friends could do nothing with, and turned into the streets. They lived by petty stealing, and slept in hay-lofts in winter, and on stoops or in coal-boxes in summer. Since they came to the meeting they have all gone to work; they attend Public School, and come regularly to evening meeting. They used to be in rags and filth, but now are clean and well dressed. Their uncle came to me and said the meeting had done them more good than all their friends together.”--(_Mr. Slater's Report._)
”Yesterday, Mr. Slater brought a thin, sad boy to us--had found him in the streets and heard his story, and then gave him a breakfast, and led him up to our office. The lad seemed like one weary almost of living.
'Where are your father and mother, my boy?' 'Both dead, sir.' 'Where are your other relatives or friends?' 'Hain't got no friends, sir; I've lived by myself on the street.' 'Where did you stay?' 'I slept _in the privy_ sometime, sir; and then in the stables in Sixteenth Street.'
'Poor fellow,' said some one, 'how did you get your living?' 'Begged it--and then, them stable-men, they give me bread sometimes.' 'Have you ever been to school, or Sunday School?' 'No, sir.' So the sad story went on. Within two blocks of our richest houses, a desolate boy grows up, not merely out of Christianity and out of education, but out of a common human shelter, and of means of livelihood.
”The vermin were creeping over him as he spoke. A few days before this, Mr. S. had brought up three thorough-going street-boys--active, bold, impudent, smart fellows--a great deal more wicked and much less miserable than this poor fellow. Those three were sent to Ohio together, and this last boy, after a thorough was.h.i.+ng and cleansing, was to be dispatched to Illinois. A later note adds: 'The lad was taken by an old gentleman of property, who, being childless, has since adopted the boy as his own, and will make him heir to a property.'”
Several other lads were helped to an honest livelihood. A Visitor was then appointed, who lived and worked in the quarter. But our moral treatment for this nest of crime had only commenced.
We appealed to the public for aid to establish the reforming agencies which alone can cure these evils, and whose foundation depends mainly on the liberality, in money, of our citizens. We warned them that these children, if not instructed, would inevitably grow up as ruffians. We said often that they would not be like the stupid foreign criminal cla.s.s, but that their crimes, when they came to maturity, would show the recklessness, daring, and intensity of the American character. In our very first report (for 1854) we said:--
”It should be remembered that there are no dangers to the value of property, or to the permanency of our inst.i.tutions, so great as those from the existence of such a cla.s.s of vagabond, ignorant, ungoverned children. This 'dangerous cla.s.s' has not begun to show itself, as it will in eight or ten years, when these boys and girls are matured. Those who were too negligent, or too selfish to notice them as children, will be fully aware of them as men. They will vote--they will have the same rights as we ourselves, though they have grown up ignorant of moral principle, as any savage or Indian. They will poison society. They will perhaps be embittered at the wealth and the luxuries they never share.
Then let society beware, when the outcast, vicious, reckless mult.i.tude of New York boys, swarming now in every foul alley and low street, come to know their power and _use it!_
Again, in 1857, we said:--
”Why should the 'street-rat,' as the police call him--the boy whose home in sweet childhood was a box or a deserted cellar; whose food was crumbs begged or bread stolen; whose influences of education were kicks and cuffs, curses, neglect, dest.i.tution and cold; who never had a friend, who never heard of duty either to society or G.o.d--why should he feel himself under any of the restraints of civilization or of Christianity?
Why should he be anything but a garroter and thief?”
”Is not this crop of thieves and burglars, of shoulder-hitters and short-boys, of prost.i.tutes and vagrants, of garroters and murderers, the very fruit to be expected from this seed, so long being sown? What else was to be looked for? Society hurried on selfishly for its wealth, and left this vast cla.s.s in its misery and temptation. Now these children arise and wrest back, with b.l.o.o.d.y and criminal hands, what the world were too careless or too selfish to give. The worldliness of the rich, the indifference of all cla.s.ses to the poor, will always be avenged.
Society must act on the highest principles, or its punishment incessantly comes within itself. The neglect of the poor, and tempted, and criminal, is fearfully repaid.” (Pp. 5, 6.)