Part 32 (1/2)

1857..........2,450 1859..........2,626 1860..........2,575 1865..........2,347 1869..........2,338 1870..........2,168 1871..........1,978

A decrease in fourteen years of 502, when the natural increase should have brought the number to 2,861.

Of boys under fifteen imprisoned, the record stands thus since the new cla.s.sification:--

1864..........1,965 1865..........1,934 1869..........1,873 1870..........1,625 1871..........1,017

Of males between fifteen and twenty, in our city prisons, the following is the record:--

1857..........2,592 1859..........2,636 1860..........2,207 1861..........2,408 1868..........2,927 1870..........2,876 1871..........2,936

It often happens that youthful criminals are arrested who are not imprisoned. The reports of the Board of Police will give us other indications that, even here, juvenile crime has at length been diminished in its sources.

ARRESTS.

The arrests of pickpockets run thus since 1861, the limit of returns accessible:--

1861............466 1862............300 1865............275 1867............345 1868............348 1869............303 1870............274 1871............313

In ten years a reduction of 153 in the arrests of pickpockets.

In petty larceny the returns stand thus in brief:--

1862..........4,107 1865..........5,240 1867..........5,269 1870..........4,909 1871..........3,912

A decrease in nine years of 195.

Arrests of girls alone, under twenty:--

1863..........3,132 1867..........2,588 1870..........1,993 1871..........1,820

It must be plain from this, that crime among young girls is decidedly checked, and among boys is prevented from increasing with population.

If our readers will refer back to these dry but cheering tables of statistics, they will see what a vast sum of human misery saved is a reduction, in the imprisonment of female vagrants, of more than five thousand in 1871, as compared with 1869. How much homelessness and desperation spared! how much crime and wretchedness diminished are expressed in those simple figures! And, if we may reckon an average of punishment of two months' detention to each of those girls and women, we have one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars saved in one year to the public by preventive agencies in this cla.s.s of offenders alone.

The same considerations, both of economy and humanity, apply to each of the results that appear in these tables of crime and punishment.

No outlay of money for public purposes which any city or its inhabitants can make, repays itself half so well as its expenses for charities which prevent crime among children.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

THE CAUSES OF THE SUCCESS OF THE WORK.

In reviewing these long-continued efforts for the prevention of crime and the elevation of the neglected youth of this metropolis, it may aid others engaged in similar enterprises to note in summary the principles on which they have been carried out, and which account for their marked success.

In the first place, as has been so often said, though pre-eminently a Charity, this a.s.sociation has always sought to encourage the principle of Self-help in its beneficiaries, and has aimed much more at promoting this than merely relieving suffering. All its branches, its Industrial Schools, Lodging-houses, and Emigration, aim to make the children of the poor better able to take care of themselves; to give them such a training that they shall be ashamed of begging, and of idle, dependent habits, and to place them where their a.s.sociates are self-respecting and industrious. No inst.i.tution of this Society can be considered as a shelter for the dependent and idle. All its objects of charity work, or are trained to work. The consequence is that this effort brings after it none of the bad fruits of mere alms-giving. The poor do not become poorer or less self-reliant under it; on the contrary, they are continually rising out of their condition and making their own way in the world. The laborer in this field does not feel, as in so many other philanthropic causes, doubtful, after many years of labor, whether he has not done as much injury as good. He sees constantly the wonderful effect of these efforts, and he knows that, at the worst, they can only fail of the best fruit, but certainly cannot have a bad result.