THE "DANGEROUS CLASSES" OF NEW YORK.

[by Charles Loring Brace (1826-1890)]

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NEW YORK, though a much younger city than its European rivals, and with perhaps one-third the population of London, presents varieties of life among "the masses," quite as picturesque, and elements of population even more dangerous. The throng of different nationalities in the American city gives a peculiarly variegated air to the life beneath the surface, and the enormous over-crowding in portions of the poor quarters intensifies the evils, peculiar to large towns, to a degree seen only in a few districts in such cities as London and Liverpool.

       The mass of poverty and wretchedness is, of course, far greater in the English capital. There are classes with inherited pauperism and crime more deeply stamped in them, in London or Glasgow, than we ever behold in New York; but certain small districts can be found in our metropolis with the unhappy fame of containing more human beings packed to the square yard, and stained with more acts of blood and riot, within a given period, than is true of any other equal space of earth in the civilized world.

       There are houses, well known to sanitary boards and the police, where Fever has taken a perennial lease, and will obey no legal summons to quit; where Cholera — if a single germ-seed of it float anywhere in American atmosphere — at once ripens a black harvest; where Murder has stained every floor of its gloomy stories, and Vice skulks or riots from one year's end to the other. Such houses are never reformed. The only hope for them is in the march of street-improvements, which will utterly sweep them away.

       It is often urged that the breaking up of these "dens" and "fever nests" only scatters the pestilence and moral disease, but does not put an end to them.

       The objection is more apparent than real. The abolishing of one of these centres of crime and poverty is somewhat like withdrawing the virus from one diseased limb and diffusing it through an otherwise healthy body. It seems to lose its intensity. The diffusion weakens it. Above all, it is less likely to become hereditary.

       One of the remarkable and hopeful things about New York, to a close observer of its "dangerous classes," is, that they do not tend to become fixed and inherited, as in European cities. The universal turmoil of American life, the upturning of every thing, the searching character of its great forces, such as religion, education, and self-respect, which reach down, directly or indirectly, to the lowest strata — all these causes seem continually to disintegrate the American poor and criminal classes; and even more in the cities than in the villages. The same families do not remain here long in the same houses, or the same quarters. The husband leaves the wife, and the wife the husband; the children abandon the disagreeable home, or are caught up and trained by the various charitable and educational associations; some member of the family is continually rising up to opulence or respectability. The families of the paupers and beggars and criminals are constantly being broken up.

       The writer of this, with an experience of nearly twenty years among the poor of this city, can hardly recall a family where pauperism and crime have gone beyond a single generation; and he can think of hundreds where the children of beggars and rag-pickers and the most degraded persons, have risen up, not merely to decency and industry, but, at times, even to wealth and refinement.

       The mill of American life, which grinds up so many delicate and fragile things, has its uses, when it is turned on the vicious fragments of the lowest strata of society.

       Our villages, however, which are more conservative and stable, see much more frequently this most terrible of all evils, inherited pauperism and vice.

       But, though the crime and pauperism of New York are not so deeply stamped in the blood of the population as in European cities, they are even more dangerous. The intensity of the American temperament is felt in every fibre of these children of poverty and vice. Their crimes have the unrestrained and sanguinary character of a race accustomed to overcome all obstacles. They rifle a bank, where English thieves pick a pocket; they murder, where European prolétaires cudgel or fight with fists; in a riot, they begin what seems about to be the sacking of a city, where English rioters would merely batter policemen, or smash lamps. The "dangerous classes" of New York are mainly American-born, but the children of Irish and German immigrants. They are as ignorant as London flash-men or costermongers. They are far more brutal than the peasantry from whom they descend, and they are much banded together, in associations, such as "Dead Rabbit," "Plug-ugly," and various target-companies. They are our enfants perdus, grown up to young manhood. A murder of an inoffending old man, like Mr. Rogers, is nothing to them. They are ready for any offence or crime, however degraded or bloody. New York has never experienced the full effect of the nurture of these youthful ruffians as she will one day. They showed their hand only slightly at the riots during the war. At present, they are like the athletes and gladiators of the Roman demagogues. They are "the roughs" who sustain the ward politicians, and frighten honest voters. They can "repeat" to an unlimited extent, and serve their employers. They live on "panem et circerses," or City-hall places and pot-houses, where they have full credit. If an unfortunate time should come when our city demagogues could no longer help to support this host of ruffians, and all business were depressed, and capital seemed selfish and indifferent, these young men could raise such a following in our thronged eastern quarters, with some cry like "Bread or Blood!" as would shake the city with alarm to its foundations, and might crimson our streets with the blood of civil strife.

       The young ruffians of New York are mainly the products of accident. Among a million people, such as compose the population of this city and its suburbs, there will always be a great number of misfortunes; fathers die, and leave their children unprovided for; parents drink, and abuse their little ones, and they float away on the currents of the street; step-mothers or step-fathers drive out, by neglect and ill-treatment, their sons from the home. One cause which is a fruitful source of criminals among the working-class, is their little respect for marriage.

       An Irish peasant, with his family, emigrates to this city. At home, under the eyes of his neighbors, and of that Church, one of whose greatest services to humanity is, that it has embodied CHRIST'S idea of marriage, he would have clung to his wife and little ones till the end of life. Here, no one knows him; his wife has become older and less attractive; he is burdened with the care of their many children; and thus, becoming weary of his responsibilities, he abandons her, and migrates to another city, and secures a younger companion more suited to his "affinities." This base tragedy is being enacted every day in New York. Here we have the free-marriage doctrines practically and continually illustrated. The legitimate fruits are a breed of young outcasts and criminals, who have no home and know no father. The disappointed and broken-hearted wife tries, for a time, to bear up the heavy burden of the family; she hopes against hope for the return of the wanderer. Perhaps she seeks for consolation in liquor. The task of caring for the children becomes too burdensome, and soon they are found cutting their own way with the vagabonds and thieves and little sharpers of a great city.

       All the neglect and bad education and evil example of a poor class tend to form others, who grow up to swell the ranks of ruffians and criminals. So, at length, a great multitude of ignorant, untrained, passionate, irreligious boys and young men are formed, who become "the dangerous class" of our city. They form the "Nineteenth-Street Gangs," the young burglars and murderers, the garroters and rioters, the thieves and flash-men, the "repeaters" and ruffians, so well known to all who know this metropolis. Of the remedies for these evils we shall speak hereafter.

THE condition of our "dangerous classes" in New York is by no means so hopeless as that of similar classes in European cities. As we stated in a former article, they are continually being broken up by the whirl of American life, and the wonderfully-elevating influences of our society constantly reach down even to them.

       One great source of crime is always want of work, and this evil is comparatively little experienced by the boys and young men of the city. The street-trades offer a constant though not very improving occupation, and the demand from the country always affords an outlet for unemployed labor.

       The only evil influences peculiar to New York, as compared with European capitals, are the connection of these classes with politicians and the exciting effects produced by climate. Ignorance, idleness, vicious indulgence, and want of good associations, have helped to produce and assist to retain together this community of youthful ruffians. These causes and influences belong to all great cities.

       In New York, we believe almost alone among the great capitals of the world, a profound and sustained effort for many years has been made to cut off the sources and diminish the numbers of this most threatening class; and, as the records of crime show, with a marked effect.

       In most large cities, the first practical difficulty is the want of a united organization to work upon the evils connected with this lowest class. There are too many scattered efforts, aiming in a desultory manner at this and that particular evil, resulting from the condition of the children of the streets. There is no unity of plan and of work. Every large city should form one association or organization, whose sole object should be to deal alone with the sufferings, wants, and crimes, arising from a class of youth who are homeless, ignorant, or neglected. The injuries to public morals and property from such a class are important enough to call out the best thought and utmost energy and inventiveness of charitable men and women to prevent them. Where an association devotes itself thus to one great public evil, a thousand remedies or ingenious devices of cure and prevention will be hit upon, when, with a more miscellaneous field of work, the best methods would be overlooked. So threatening is the danger in every populous town from the children who are neglected, that the best talent ought to be engaged to study their condition and devise their improvement, and the highest character and most ample means should be offered to guarantee and make permanent the movements devised for their elevation.

       The lack of all this in many European capitals is a reason that so little comparatively has been done to meet these tremendous dangers.

       Then, again, in religious communities, such as the English and American, there is too great a confidence in technical religious means.

       We would not breathe a word against the absolute necessity of Christianity in any scheme of thorough social reform. If the Christian Church has one garland on its altars which time does not wither nor skepticism destroy, which is fresh and beautiful each year, it is that humble offering laid there through every age by the neglected little ones of society, whom the most enlightened Stoicism despised and Paganism cast out, but who have been blessed and saved by its ministrations of love.

       No skeptical doubt or "rationalism" can ever pluck from the Christian Church this, its purest crown.

       To attempt to prevent or cure the fearful moral diseases of our lowest classes without Christianity, is like trying to carry through a sanitary reform in a city without sunlight.

       But the mistake we refer to is too great a use of, or confidence in, the old technical methods — such as distributing tracts, and holding prayer-meetings, and scattering Bibles.

       The neglected and ruffian class which we are considering are in no way affected directly by such influences as these. New methods must be invented for them.

       Another obstacle, in American cities, to any comprehensive results of reform or prevention among these classes, was the too blind following of European precedents. In Europe, the labor-market is fully supplied. There is a steady pressure of population on subsistence. No general method of prevention or charity can be attempted which interferes with the rights of honest and self-supporting labor. The victims of society, the unfortunate, the enfants perdus, must be retained, when aided at all, in public institutions. They cannot be allowed to compete with outside industry. They are not wanted in the general market of labor. They must be kept in asylums.

       Now asylums are a bequest of monastic days. They breed a species of character which is monastic — indolent, unused to struggle; subordinate, indeed, but with little independence and manly vigor. If the subjects of the modern monastery be unfortunates — especially if they be already somewhat tainted with vice and crime — the effect is a weakening of true masculine vigor, an increase of the apparent virtues, and a hidden growth of secret and contagious vices. Moreover, the life under the machinery of an "institution" does not prepare for the thousand petty hand-labors of a poor man's cottage. But, greatest of all objections, the asylum system is of necessity immensely expensive, and can reach but a comparatively small number of subjects.

       These various obstacles and difficulties, which impede thorough work for the elevation of our worst classes, can, however, be overcome. And perhaps the best mode of showing what can be done in this work is by showing what has been done in this city.

A WORK ACCOMPLISHED AMONG THE "DANGEROUS CLASSES."

       Some twenty years ago, the then Chief of Police of New York, Captain Matsell, put forth a report on the condition of the street-children of the city, which aroused universal anxiety, and called forth much compassion. The writer of this was then engaged in rather desultory and despairing labors for the reform of adult prisoners on Blackwell's Island and the squalid poor in the Five-Points district. It was a Sisyphus-like work, and soon discouraged all engaged in it. We seemed in those infernal regions to repeat the toil of the Danaïdes, and to be attempting to fill the leaky vessel of society by efforts which left it as empty as before. What soon struck all engaged in those works was the immense number of boys and girls floating and drifting about our streets, with hardly any assignable home or occupation, who continually fed the multitude of criminals, prostitutes, and vagrants.

       Saddest of all sights was the thin child's face, so often seen behind prison-bars, and the melancholy procession of little children who were continually passing through that gloomy Egyptian portal, which seemed to some of us then always inscribed with the scroll over the entrance of the Inferno, "Here leave all hope behind!"

       It was evident soon, to all who thought upon the subject, that what New York most of all needed was some grand, comprehensive effort to check the growth of the "dangerous classes."

       The "Social Evil," of course, was pressed continually on the minds of those engaged in these labors. Mr. Pease was then making a most heroic effort to meet this in its worst form in the Five-Points region. No one that we have ever known of, was so qualified for this desperate work, or was so successful in it. Still, it was but one man against a sea of crime. The waves soon rolled over these enthusiastic and devoted labors, and the waste of misfortune and guilt remained as desolate and hopeless as before. It was clear that whatever was done there must be done in the source and origin of the evil — in prevention, not cure.

       We may be permitted, here, in illustration, to quote from our journal an incident which occurred after the new organization was perfected, which we shall subsequently describe:

"THE TOMBS.

       "Mrs. Forster, the excellent matron of the female department of the prison, had told us of an interesting young German girl, committed for vagrancy, who might just at this crisis be rescued. We entered these soiled and gloomy Egyptian archways, so appropriate and so depressing that the sight of the low columns and lotus capitals is to me now inevitably associated with the sombre and miserable histories of the place. After a short waiting, the girl was brought inl-a German girl, apparently about fourteen, very thinly but neatly dressed, of slight figure, and a face intelligent and old for her years, the eye passionate and shrewd. I give details, because the conversation which followed was remarkable. The poor feel; but they can seldom speak. The story she told, with a wonderful eloquence, thrilled all our hearts; it seemed to us, then, like the first articulate voice from the great poor class of the city. It may jar our refined sensibilities; but we ought to hear it.

       "Her eye had a hard look at first, but softened when I spoke to her in her own language.

       "'Have you been long here?'

       "'Only two days, sir.'

       "'Why are you here?'

       "'I will tell you, sir. I was working with a lady. I had to get up early and go to bed late, and I never had rest. She worked me always, and, finally, because I could not do every thing, she beat me; she beat me like a dog, and I ran away. I could not bear it.'

       "The manner of this was wonderfully passionate and eloquent. 'But I thought you were arrested for being near a place of bad character?' said I.

       "'I am going to tell you, sir. The next day I and my father went to get some clothes I left there, and the woman would not give them up; and what could we do? What can the poor do? My father is a poor old man, who picks rags in the streets, and I have never picked rags yet. He said, "I don't want you to be a rag-picker. You are not a child now — people will look at you — you will come to harm." And I said, "No, father; I will help you. We must do something, now I am out of place" — and so I went out. I picked all day, and didn't make much; and I was cold and hungry. Toward night, a gentleman met me — a very fine, well-dressed gentleman, an American — and he said, "Will you go home with me?" and I said, "No." He said, "I will give you twenty shillings," and I told him I would go. And the next morning I was taken up outside by the officer.'

       "'Poor girl!' said some one; 'had you forgotten your mother, and did you think what a sin it was?'

       "'No, sir; I did remember her. She had no clothes, and I had no shoes; and I have only this' (she shivered in her thin dress), 'and winter is coming on. I know what making money is, sir. I am only fourteen; but I am old enough. I have had to take care of myself ever since I was ten years old, and I have never had a cent given me. It may be a sin, sir' (and the tears rained down her cheeks, which she did not deign to wipe away). 'I do not ask you to forgive it. Men cannot forgive; but God will forgive. I know about men. The rich do such things, and worse; and no one says any thing against them. But me, sir — I am poor!' (This she said with a tone that struck the very heartstrings.) 'I have never had any one to take care of me. Many is the day I have gone hungry from morning till night, because I did not dare spend a cent or two — the only ones I had. Oh, I have wished sometimes so to die! Why does God not kill me?'

       "She was choked by her sobs. Mr. G—– let her calm herself a moment, and then told her our plan of finding her a good home, where she could make an honest living. She was mistrustful. 'I will tell your meine Herren, I know men, and I do not believe any one — I have been cheated so often! There is no trust in any one. I am not a child. I have lived as long as people twice as old.'

       "'But you do not wish to stay in prison?'

       "'Oh, God, no! Oh, there is such a weight on my heart here! There is nothing but bad to learn in prison. These dirty Irish girls! I would kill myself, if I had to stay here. Why was I ever born? I have such Kümmernisse (woes) here!' (She pressed her hands on her heart.) 'I am poor!'

       "We explained our object, and she became satisfied. We wished her to be bound to stay some years. 'No,' said she, passionately; 'I cannot. I confess to you, gentlemen, I should either run away or die, if I was bound.'

       "We talked with the matron. She had never known, in her experience, such a remarkable girl. The children there of nine or ten years were often as old as young women; but this girl was an experienced woman. The offence, however, she had no doubt, was her first. We obtained her release, and one of us, Mr. G—–, walked over to her house or cabin, some three miles on the other side of Williamsburgh, in order that she might see her parents before she went. As she walked along, she looked up in Mr. G—–'s face, and asked, thoughtfully, why we came there for her. He explained. She listened, and, after a little while, said, in broken English, 'Don't you think better for poor little girls to die than live?' He spoke kindly to her, and said something about a good God. She shook her head. 'No — no good God. Why am I so? It always was so. Why much suffer, if good God?' He told her they would get her a supper, and in the morning she should start off and find new friends. She became gradually almost ungoverned, sobbed, would like to die, even threatened suicide in this wild way. Kindness and calm words at length made her more reasonable. After much trouble, they reached the home, or the den, of the poor rag-picker. The parents were very grateful, and she was to start off the next morning to a country-home, where perhaps finally the parents will join her.

       "For myself, the evening-shadow seemed more sombre, and the cheerful home-lights less cheerful, as I walked home, remembering such a history.

       "Ye who are happy, whose lives have been under sunshine and gentle influences, around whom Affection and Piety and Love have watched, as ye gather in cheerful circles, think of these bitter and friendless children of the poor in the great city. But few have such eloquent expression as this poor girl; yet all inarticulately feel. There are sad histories beneath this gay world — lives over which is the very shadow of death. God be thanked there is a heart which feels for them all, where every pang and groan will find a sympathy, which will one day right the wrong, and bring back the light over human life. The day is short for us all; but for some it will be a pleasant thought, when we come to lay down our heads at last, that we have eased a few aching hearts, and brought peace and new hope to the dark lives of those whom men had forgotten or cast out."

WE stated, in a former article, how strong and wide-spread was the impression in our community, some seventeen years ago, that a general organization should be formed which should deal alone with the evils and dangers threatened from the class of neglected youth, then first coming plainly into public view. Those who possessed property-interests in the city saw the immense loss and damage which would occur from such an increasing community of young thieves and criminals. The humane felt for the little waifs of society who thus, through no fault of their own, were cast out on the currents of a large city; and the religious recognized it as a solemn duty to carry the good news of Christianity to these "heathen at home." Every thing seemed in readiness for some comprehensive and well-laid scheme of benevolence and education for the street-children of New York.

       A number of our active citizens were engaged at that time in a somewhat original method for benefiting the young "roughs" and vagabond boys of the metropolis. This was known as the effort of the

"BOYS' MEETINGS."

       The theory of these original assemblages was, that the "sympathy of an audience" might be used to influence these wild and untutored young Arabs when ordinary agencies were of no avail. The street-boys, as is well known, are exceedingly sharp and keen, and, being accustomed to theatrical performances, are easily touched by real oratory, and by dramatic instruction; but they are also restless, soon tired of long exhortations, and somewhat given to chaff.

       The early days of those "Boys' Meetings" were stormy. Sometimes the salutatory exercises from the street were showers of stones; sometimes a general scrimmage occurred over the benches; again, the visitors or missionaries were pelted by some opposition-gang, or bitter enemies of the lads, who attended the meeting. The exercises, too, must be conducted with much tact, or they broke up with a laugh or in a row. The platform of the Boys' Meeting seemed to become a kind of chemical test of the gaseous element in the brethren brains.. One pungent criticism we remember — on a pious and somewhat sentimental Sunday-school brother, who in one of our meetings had been pouring forth vague and declamatory religious exhortation — in the words "Gas! gas!" whispered with infinite contempt from one hard-faced young disciple to another. Unhappy, too, was the experience of any more daring missionary who ventured to question these youthful inquirers.

       Thus — "In this parable, my dear boys, of the Pharisee and the publican, what is meant by the 'publican?'"

       "Alderman, sir, wot keeps a pothouse!" "Dimocrat, sir!" "Black Republican, sir!"

       Or — "My boys, what is the great end of man? When is he happiest? How would you feel happiest?"

       "When we'd plenty of hard cash, sir!"

       They sometimes took their own quiet revenge among themselves, in imitating the Sunday-school addresses delivered to them.

       Still, ungoverned, prematurely sharp, and accustomed to all vileness, as these lads were, words which came forth from the depths of a man or woman's heart would always touch on some hidden chord in theirs. Pathos and eloquence vibrated on their heartstrings as with any other audience. Beneath all their rough habits and rude words, was concealed the solemn monitor, the daimon, which ever whispered to the lowest of human creatures, that some things are wrong — are not to be done.

       Whenever the speaker could, for a moment only, open the hearts of the little street-rovers to this voice, there was in the wild audience a silence almost painful, and every one instinctively felt, with awe, a mysterious Presence in the humble room, which blessed both those who spake and those who heard.

       Whatever was bold, or practical, or heroic in sentiment, and especially the dramatic in oratory, was most intently listened to by these children of misfortune.

       The Boys' Meetings, however, were not, and could not, in the nature of things, be a permanent success. They were the pioneer-work for more profound labors for this class. They cleared the way, and showed the character of the materials. Those engaged in them learned the fearful nature of the evils they were struggling with, and how little any moral influence on one day can do to combat them. These wild gatherings, like meetings for street-preaching, do not seem suited to the habits of our population: they are too much an occasion for frolic. They have given way to, and been merged in, much more disciplined assemblages for precisely the same class, which again are only one step in a long series of moral efforts in their behalf, that are in operation each day of every week and month, and extend through years.

       The gentlemen engaged in these efforts, feeling their inadequacy organized for a more permanent and comprehensive effort in 1853 The most prominent of these were A. C. RUSSELL, B. J. HOWLAND, W. L. KING, the late Judge MASON, M. T. HEWITT, and J. E. WILLIAMS, of whom the last had been engaged in similar movements in Boston.

       Several of these have become somewhat distinguished in their various professions, but it may be doubted if they will look back on any action of their public careers with more satisfaction than their first earnest efforts to lay firmly the foundations of a broad structure of charity, education, and reform.

       The organization was happily named

"THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY OF NEW YORK."

       This association, which from such small beginnings has grown to so important dimensions, was thus formed in 1853, and was subsequently incorporated in 1856 under the general Act of the State of New York in relation to charitable associations.

       A small office in Amity Street was opened, with a single lad in attendance, besides the present writer, who had abandoned the pursuits in which he was successfully engaged, and accepted the proposition of his fellow-workers in the movement, to be secretary of the future society, and to attempt to found carefully a comprehensive scheme for relieving New York of some of the evils of its "dangerous classes."

       The public immediately came forward with its subscriptions, so profound was the sense of these threatening evils — the first large gift (fifty dollars), being from the wife of the principal property-holder in the city, Mrs. William B. Astor.

       Most touching of all was the crowd of wandering little ones, who immediately found their way to the office. Ragged young girls who had nowhere to lay their heads; children driven from drunkards' homes; orphans who slept where they could find a box or stairway; boys cast out by step-mothers or step-fathers; newsboys whose incessant answer to our question "Where do you live?" rung in our ears, "Don't live nowhere;" little bootblacks, young pedlars, "canawl-boys," who seem to drift into the city every winter, and live a vagabond life; pickpockets and petty thieves trying to get honest work; child-beggars and flower-sellers growing up to enter courses of crime — all this motley throng of infantile misery and childish guilt passed through our doors, telling their simple stories of suffering, and loneliness, and temptation, until our hearts became sick, and the present writer certainly, if he had not been able to stir up the fortunate classes to aid in assuaging these fearful miseries, would have abandoned the post in discouragement and disgust.

       In investigating closely the different parts of the city, with reference to future movements for their benefit, we soon came to know certain centres of crime and misery, until every lane and alley, with its filth, and wretchedness, and vice, became familiar as the lane of a country homestead to its owner. There was the famed German "Rag-pickers' Den," in Pitt and Willett Streets — double rows of houses, flaunting with dirty banners, and the yards heaped up with bones and refuse, where cholera raged unchecked in its previous invasion. Here the wild life of the children soon made them outcasts and thieves.

       Then came the murderous blocks in Cherry and Water Streets, where so many dark crimes were continually committed, and where the little girls who flitted about with baskets and wrapped in old shawls, became familiar with vice before they were out of childhood.

       There were the thieves' lodging-houses in the lower wards, where the street-boys were trained by older pickpockets and burglars for their nefarious callings; the low immigrant boarding-houses and vile cellars of the First Ward, educating a youthful population for courses of guilt; the notorious rogues' den in Laurens Street — "Rotten Row" — where, it was said, no drove of animals could pass by and keep its numbers intact; and, farther above, the community of young garroters and burglars around "Hamersley Place." And, still more north, the dreadful population of youthful ruffians and degraded men and women in "Poverty Lane," near Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets and Ninth Avenue, which subsequently ripened into the infamous "Nineteenth Street Gang."

       On the east side, again, was "Dutch Hill," near Forty-second street, the squatters' village, whence issued so many of the little pedlars of the city, and the Eleventh Ward and "Corlear's Hook," where the "copper-pickers," and young wood-stealers, and the thieves who beset the ship-yards congregated; while below, in the Sixth Ward, was the Italian quarter, where houses could be seen crowded with children, monkeys, dogs, and all the appurtenances of the corps of organ-grinders, harpers, and little Italian street-sweepers, who then, ignorant and untrained, wandered through our down-town streets and alleys.

       Near each one of these "fever-nests," and centres of ignorance, crime, and poverty, it was our hope and aim eventually to place some agency which should be a moral and physical disinfectant — a seed of reform and improvement, amid the wilderness of vice and degradation.

       It seemed a too enthusiastic hope to be realized; and, at times, the waves of misery and guilt through these dark places appeared too overwhelming and irresistible for any one effort or association of efforts to be able to stem or oppose them.

       How the somewhat ardent hope was realized, and the plan carried out, will appear hereafter.

THE spectacle which earliest and most painfully arrested the attention of those engaged in the movement of reform and charity, spoken of in our recent articles, were the houseless boys in various portions of the city.

       There seemed to be a very considerable class of lads in New York who bore to the busy, wealthy world about them, something of the same relation which the Indians bear to the civilized Western settlers. They had no settled home, and lived on the outskirts of society, their hand against every man's pocket, and every man looking on them as natural enemies, their wits sharpened like those of a savage, and their principles often no better. Christianity reared its temples over them, and civilization was carrying on its great work, while they — a happy race of little heathens and barbarians — plundered, or frolicked, or or led their roving life, far beneath. Sometimes they seemed to me, like what the police call them, "street-rats," who gnawed at the foundations of society, and scampered away when light was brought near them. Their life was, of course, a painfully hard one. To sleep in boxes, or under stairways, or in hay-barges on the coldest winter-nights, for a mere child, was hard enough; but often to have no food, to be kicked and cuffed by the older ruffians, and shoved about by the police, standing barefooted and in rags under doorways as the winter-storm raged, and to know that in all the great city there was not a single door open with welcome to the little rover — this was harder Yet, with all this, a more light-hearted youngster than the street-boy is not to be found. He is always ready to make fun of his own sufferings, and to "chaff" others.

       His face is old from exposure and his sharp "struggle for existence;" his clothes flutter in the breeze; and his bare feet peep out from the broken boots. Yet he is merry as a clown, and always ready for the smallest joke, and quick to take "a point" or to return a repartee. His views of life are mainly derived from the more mature opinons of "flash-men," engine-runners, cock-fighters, pugilists, and pickpockets, whom he occasionally is permitted to look upon with admiration at some select pot-house; while his more ideal pictures of the world about him, and his literary education, come from the low theatres, to which he is passionately attached. His morals are, of course, not of a high order, living, as he does, in a fighting, swearing, stealing, and gambling set. Yet he has his code: he will not get drunk; he pays his debts to other boys, and thinks it dishonorable to sell papers on their beat, and, if they come on his, he administers summary justice by "punching;" he is generous to a fault, and will always divide his last sixpence with a poorer boy. "Life is a strife" with him, and money its reward; and, as bankruptcy means to the street-boy a night on the door-steps without supper, he is sharp and reckless, if he can only earn or get enough to keep him above water. His temptations are, to cheat, steal, and lie. His religion is vague. One boy, who told me he "didn't live nowhere," who had never heard of Christ, said he had heard of God, and the boys thought it "kind o' lucky" to say over something to Him one of them had learned, when they were sleeping out in boxes.

       With all their other vices, it is remarkable how few of these smaller street-boys ever take liquor. And their kindness to one another, when all are in the utmost destitution, is a credit to human nature. Only recently, a poor hump-backed lad in the Newsboys' Lodging-house gave his dollar, and collected nine more from the boys, for the family of the children who were lost in New Jersey.

       Their money is unfortunately apt to slip away, especially for gambling and petty lotteries, called "policy-tickets."

       A tradition in the remote past of some boy who drew a hundred dollars in these lotteries still pervades the whole body, and they annually sink a considerable portion of their hard-earned pennies in "policy-tickets."

       The choice of these lads of a night's resting-place is sometimes almost as remarkable as was Gavroche's in "Les Misérables." Two little newsboys slept one winter in the iron tube of the tubular bridge at Harlem; two others made their bed in a burned-out safe in Wall Street. Sometimes they ensconced themselves in the cabin of a ferry-boat, and thus spent the night. Old boilers, barges, steps, and, above all, steam-gratings, were their favorite beds.

       In those days the writer would frequently see ten or a dozen of them, piled together to keep one another warm, under the stairs of the printing-offices.

       In planning the alleviation of these evils, it was necessary to keep in view one object, not to weaken the best quality of this class — their sturdy independence — and, at the same time, their prejudices and habits were not too suddenly to be assailed. They had a peculiar dread of Sunday-schools and religious exhortations — I think partly because of the general creed of their older associates, but more for fear that these exercises were a "pious dodge" for trapping them into the House of Refuge or some place of detention.

       The first thing to be aimed at in the plan was, to treat the lads as independent little dealers, and give them nothing without payment, but at the same time to offer them much more for their money than they could get anywhere else. Moral, educational, and religious influences were to come in afterward. Securing them through their interests, we had a permanent hold of them.

       Efforts were made by the writer among our influential citizens and in various churches, public meetings were held, articles written, the press interested, and at length sufficient money was pledged to make the experiment. The board of the new Society gave it its approval, and a loft was secured in the old "Sun Buildings," and fitted up as a lodging-room, and in March, 1854, the first Lodging-house for street-boys or newsboys in this country was opened.

       An excellent superintendent was found in the person of a carpenter, Mr. C. C. Tracy, who showed remarkable ingenuity and tact in the management of these wild lads. These little subjects regarded the first arrangements with some suspicion and much contempt. To find a good bed offered them for six cents, with a bath thrown in, and a supper for four cents, was a hard fact, which they could rest upon and understand; but the motive was evidently "gaseous." There was "no money in it" — that was clear. The superintendent was probably "a street-preacher," and this was a trap to get them to Sunday-schools, and so prepare them for the House of Refuge. Still they might have a lark there, and it could be no worse than "bumming," i. e., sleeping out. They laid their plans for a general scrimmage in the school-room — first cutting off the gas, and then a row in the bedroom.

       The superintendent, however, in a bland and benevolent way, nipped their plans in the bud. The gas-pipes were guarded; the rough ring-leaders were politely dismissed to the lower door, where an officer looked after their welfare; and, when the first boots began to fly from a little fellow's bed, he found himself suddenly snaked out by a gentle but muscular hand, and left in the cold to shiver over his folly. The others began to feel that a mysterious authority was getting even with them, and thought it better to nestle in their warm beds.

       Little sleeping, however, was there among them that night; but ejaculations sounded out — such as, "I say, Jim, this is rayther better 'an bummin' — eh?" "My eyes! what soft beds these is!" "Tom! it's 'most as good as a steam-gratin', and there ain't no M. P.'s to poke neither!" "I'm glad I ain't a bummer to-night!"

       A good wash and a breakfast sent the lodgers forth in the morning, happier and cleaner, if not better, than when they went in. This night's success established its popularity with the newsboys. The "Fulton Lodge" soon became a boys' hotel, and one loft was known among them as the "Astor House."

       Quietly and judiciously did Mr. Tracy advance his lines among them.

       "Boys," said he, one morning, "there was a gentleman here this morning, who wanted a boy in an office, at three dollars a week."

       "My eyes! Let me go, sir!" And — "Me, sir!"

       "But he wanted a boy who could write a good hand."

       Their countenances fell.

       "Well, now, suppose we have a night-school, and learn to write — what do you say, boys?"

       "Agreed, sir."

       And so arose our evening-school.

       The Sunday Meeting, which is now an "institution," was entered upon in a similarly discreet manner. The lads had been impressed by a public funeral, and Mr. Tracy suggested their listening to a little reading from the Bible. They consented, and were a good deal surprised at what they heard. The "Golden Rule" struck them as an altogether impossible kind of precept to obey, especially when one was "stuck and short," and "had to live." The marvels of the Bible — the stories of miracles and the like — always seemed to them natural and proper. That a Being of such a character as Christ should control Nature and disease, was appropriate to their minds. And it was a kind of comfort to these young vagabonds that the Son of God was so often homeless, and that He belonged humanly to the working-classes. The petition for "daily bread" (which a celebrated divine has declared "unsuited to modern conditions of civilization") they always rolled out with a peculiar unction. I think that the conception of a Superior Being, who knew just the sort of privations and temptations that followed them, and who felt especially for the poorer classes, who was always near them, and pleased at true manhood in them, did keep afterward a considerable number of them from lying and stealing and cheating and vile pleasures.

       Their singing was generally prepared for by taking off their coats and rolling up their sleeves, and was entered into with a gusto.

       The voices seemed sometimes to come from a different part of their natures from what we saw with the bodily eyes. There was, now and then, a gentle and minor key, as if a glimpse of something: purer and higher passed through these rough lads. A favorite song was "There's a Rest for the Weary," though more untiring youngsters than these never frisked over the earth; and "There's a Light in the Window for Thee, Brother," always pleased them, as if they imagined themselves wandering alone through a great city at night, and at length a friendly light shone in the window for them.

       Their especial vice of money-wasting the superintendent broke up by opening a savings-bank, and allowing the boys to vote how long it should be closed. The small daily deposits accumulated to such a degree that the opening gave them a great surprise at the amounts which they possessed, and they began to feel thus the "sense of property" and the desire of accumulation, which, economists tell us, is the base of all civilization. A liberal interest was also soon allowed on deposits, which stimulated the good habit. At present, from two hundred to three hundred dollars will often be saved by the lads in a month.

       The same device, and constant instruction, broke up gambling, though I think policy-tickets were never fairly undermined among them.

       The present superintendent and matron of the Newsboys' Lodging-house, Mr. and Mrs. O'Connor (at Nos. 49 and 51 Park Place), are unsurpassed in such institutions in their discipline, order, good management, and excellent housekeeping. The floors, over which two hundred or two hundred and fifty street-boys tread daily, are as clean as a man-of-war's deck. The Sunday-evening meetings are as attentive and orderly as a church, the week-evening school quiet and studious. All that mass of wild young humanity is kept in perfect order, and brought under a thousand good influences.

       In the course of a year the population of a town passes through the Lodging-house — in 1868 and'69, eight thousand nine hundred and forty-four different boys.

       Many are put in good homes; some find places for themselves; others drift away — no one knows whither.

       They are an army of orphans — regiments of children who hate not a home or friend — a multitude of little street-rovers who have no place where to lay their heads. They are being educated in the streets rapidly to be thieves and burglars and criminals. The Lodging-house is at once school, church, intelligence-office, and hotel for them. Here they are shaped to be honest and industrious citizens; here taught economy, good order, cleanliness, and morality; here Religion brings its powerful influences to bear upon them; and they are sent forth to begin courses of honest livelihood.

       The Lodging-houses repay their expenses to the public ten times over each year, from the thieves and criminals they save, or prevent being formed. They are agencies of pure humanity and almost unmitigated good. Their only possible reproach could be, that some of their wild subjects are soon beyond their reach, and have been too deeply tainted with the vices of street-life to be touched even by kindness, education, or religion. The number who are saved, however, are most encouragingly large.

       The Newsboys' Lodging-house is by no means, however, an entire burden on the charity of the community. During 1869 the lads themselves paid three thousand six hundred and forty-four dollars toward its expense, and in 1870 they will pay about five thousand dollars.

       The following is a brief description of the rooms:

       The first floor is divided into various compartments — a large dining-room, where one hundred and fifty boys can sit down to a table, a kitchen, laundry, store-room, servants' room, and rooms for the family of the superintendent. The next story is partitioned into a school-room, gymnasium, and bath and wash rooms, plentifully supplied with hot and cold water. The hot water and the heat of the rooms are supplied by a steam-boiler on the lower story. The two upper stories are filled with neat iron bedsteads, having two beds each, arranged like ships' bunks over each other; of these there are two hundred and sixty. Here are also the water-vats, into which the many barrelsful used daily by the lodgers are pumped by the engine. The rooms are high and dry, and the floors clean.

       It is a commentary on the housekeeping and accommodations that for seventeen years no case of contagious disease has ever occurred among these thousands of boys.

       The New-York Newsboys' Lodging-house has been in existence seventeen years. During these years it has lodged 73,834 different boys, restored 5,465 boys to friends, provided 5,126 with homes, furnished 467,923 lodgings and 317,138 meals. The expense of all this has been $94,223.15. Of this amount the boys have contributed $24,742.27.

S IN the efforts which have previously been described, to cure and prevent the alarming evils arising in New York from the condition of the neglected youth, one difficulty was at once encountered. The children of the vicious poor, if left in the circumstances in which they were born, were exposed to temptations too overwhelming for any ordinary strength of character to conquer. They had not merely their own inherited tendencies toward vice or pauperism to struggle against, but the whole social tone and habit about them.

       With a lower class, even more than with a higher, the last influence which a single individual can successfully resist is the current opinion and practice of the society in which he lives. The social tone even of the outcast class in a city is an absolute tyranny. Whoever can raise himself above it possesses more than ordinary strength of character and intelligence.

       Among the lowest poor of New York, 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, lust, and idleness, and they grow up inevitably as sharpers, beggars, thieves, burglars, and prostitutes. Amid such communities of outcasts the institutions 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, there seems needed a more radical cure 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 institutions 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 for outcast children in preparing them for practical life. In large buildings, where a multitude 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 institutions, 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 class.

       From the nature of their circumstances, 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 associates 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 was 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 constitutional 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 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 wonderstruck 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 God'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 passes 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—–, February 14, 1859.       

       "I wish to add a few words to Carrie's letter, to inform you of her welfare and progress. As she has said, it is now one year since she came to us; and, in looking back upon the time, I feel that, considering her mental deficiencies, she has made as much progress in learning as could be expected. Her health, which was at first and for several months the greatest source of anxiety to us, is so much improved that she is, indeed, well. Her eyes are better; though rather weak, they do not much interfere with her studies. She could neither sew nor knit when she came here, and she can now do plain kinds of both, if it is prepared for her. She could not tell all the alphabet, and could spell only three or four words. She now reads quite fluently, though sometimes stopping at a 'hard word,' and is as good at spelling as many Yankee children of her age. I hope she has learned some wholesome moral truths, and she has received much religious instruction. Though really quite a conscientious child when she came, she had a habit of telling lies to screen herself from blame, to which she is peculiarly sensitive; but I think she has been cured of this for a long time, and I place perfect confidence in her word and in her honesty. I succeeded in getting her fitted to enter one of our intermediate schools by teaching her at home until the beginning of the present winter. I am obliged, on account of her exceeding dulness, to spend much time in teaching her out of school, in order that she may be able to keep up with her classes. But I think this has been a work worth doing, and I especially feel it to be so now, as I am employed in this retrospect.

       "I am often asked by my friends, who think the child is little more than half-witted, why I do not 'send her back, and get a brighter one.' My answer is, that she is just the one who needs the care and kindness which Providence has put it into my power to bestow. We love her dearly; but, if I did not, I should not think of sending her back to such a place as your great city. She is just one of those who could be imposed upon and abused, and perhaps may never be able to take care of herself wholly."

       Having found the defects of our first plan of emigration, we soon inaugurated another, which has since been followed out successfully during seventeen years of constant action.

       We formed little companies of emigrants, and, after thoroughly cleaning and clothing them, put them under a competent agent, and, first selecting a village where there was a call or opening for such a party, we dispatched them to the place.

       The farming community having been duly notified, there was usually a dense crowd of people at the station, awaiting the arrival of the youthful travellers. The sight of the little company of the children of misfortune always touched the hearts of a population naturally generous. They were soon billeted around among the citizens, and the following day a public meeting was called in the church or townhall, and a committee appointed of leading citizens. The agent then addressed the assembly, stating the benevolent objects of the society, and something of the history of the children. The sight of their worn faces was a most pathetic enforcement of his arguments. People who were childless came forward to adopt children; others, who had not intended to take any into their families, were induced to apply for them; and many who really wanted the children's labor pressed forward to obtain it.

       In every American community, especially in a Western one, there are many spare places at the table of life. There is no harassing "struggle for existence." They have enough for themselves and the stranger too. Not, perhaps, thinking of it before, yet, the orphan being placed in their presence without friends or home, they gladly welcome and train him. The committee decide on the applications. Sometimes there is almost a case for Solomon before them. Two eager mothers without children claim some little waif thus cast on the strand before them. Sometimes the family which has taken in a fine lad for the night feels that it cannot do without him, and yet the committee prefer a better home for him. And so hours of discussion and selection pass. Those who can, pay the fares of the children, or otherwise make some gift to the society, until at length the business of charity is finished, and a little band of young wayfarers and homeless rovers in the world find themselves in comfortable and kind homes, with all the boundless advantages and opportunities of the Western farmer's life about them.

THE EFFECTS.

       During the seventeen years, the Children's Aid Society has thus dispatched some seventeen thousand little ones to country-homes. The children are not indentured, but are free to leave, if ill-treated or dissatisfied; and the farmers can dismiss them, if they find them useless or otherwise unsuitable.

       This apparently loose arrangement has worked well, and put both sides on their good behavior. We have seldom had any cases brought to our attention of ill-treatment. The main complaint is, that the older lads change places often. This is an unavoidable result of a prosperous condition of the laboring classes. The employers, however, are ingenious, and succeed often, by little presents of a calf or pony or lamb or a small piece of land, in giving the child a permanent interest in the family and the farm. Thousands are growing up where they were first placed, and undistinguishable from the other children of the village. Many are now owners of good properties, and holding respectable positions. A great multitude of boys and girls are thus saved to the country and themselves.

       ONE of the most painful aspects of a large city is the multitude of little girls who are growing up neglected and in the habits of a vagabond life. With a boy, "Arab of the streets," one always has the consolation that, despite his ragged clothes and his bed in a box or hay-barge, he really has a rather good time of it, and enjoys many of the delicious pleasures of a child's roving life, and that a chance may at any time make an honest, industrious fellow of him. We cannot say that at heart he is much corrupted; his sins belong to his ignorance and his condition, and are often easily corrected by a radical change of circumstances. The oaths, tobacco-spitting, and slang, and even the fighting and stealing, of a street-boy, are not so bad as they look. Refined influences, the checks of religion, and a fairer chance for existence, without incessant struggle, will often utterly eradicate those evil habits, and the rough, thieving New-York vagrant make an honest, hard-working Western pioneer. It is true that sometimes the habit of vagrancy and idling may be too deeply worked in him for his character to speedily reform; but, if of tender years, a change of circumstances will nearly always bring a change of character.

       With a girl-vagrant it is different. She feels houselessness and friendlessness more; she has more of the feminine dependence on affection; the street-trades, too, are harder for her, and the return at night to some lonely cellar or tenement-room, crowded with dirty people of all ages and sexes, more dreary. She develops body and mind earlier than the boy, and the habits of vagabondism stamped on her in childhood are more difficult to wear off.

       Then the strange and mysterious subject of sexual degradation comes in. It has often seemed to me one of the most dark arrangements of this singular world that a female child of the poor should be permitted to start on its immortal career, with almost every influence about it degrading, its inherited tendencies overwhelming toward indulgence of passion, its examples all of crime or lust, its lower nature awake long before its higher, and then that it should be allowed to soil and degrade its soul before the maturity of reason, and beyond all human possibility of cleansing!

       For, there is no reality in the sentimental assertion that the sexual sins of the lad are as degrading as those of the girl. The instinct of the female is more toward the preservation of purity, and therefore her fall is deeper — an instinct grounded in the desire of preserving a stock, or even the necessity of perpetuating our race.

       Still, were the indulgences of the two sexes of a similar character — as in savage races — were they both following passion alone, the moral effect would not perhaps be so different in the two cases. But the sin of the girl soon becomes what the Bible calls "a sin against one's own body," the most debasing of all sins. She learns to offer for sale that which is in its nature beyond all price, and to feign the most sacred affections, and barter with the most delicate instincts. She no longer merely follows an instinct blindly and excessively; she perverts a passion and sells herself. The only parallel case with the male sex would be that in some Eastern communities which are rotting and falling to pieces from their debasing iniquities, where the men give themselves for hire to unnatural crimes. When we hear of such disgusting offences under any form of civilization, whether it be under the Rome of the Empire or the Turkey of to-day, we know that disaster, ruin, and death, are near the state and the people.

       This crime, with the girl, seems to sap and rot the whole nature. She loses self-respect, without which every human being soon sinks to the lowest depths; she loses the habit of industry, and cannot be taught to work. Having won her food at the table of Nature by unnatural means, Nature seems to cast her out, and henceforth she cannot labor. Living in a state of unnatural excitement, often worked up to a high pitch of nervous tension by stimulants, becoming weak in body and mind, her character loses fixedness of purpose and tenacity and true energy. The diabolical women who support and plunder her, the vile society she keeps, the literature she reads, the business she has chosen or fallen into, continually more and more degrade and defile her. If, in a moment of remorse, she flee away and take honest work, her weakness and bad habits follow her; she is inefficient, careless, unsteady, and lazy; she craves the stimulus and hollow gayety of the wild life she has led; her ill name dogs her; all the wicked have an instinct of her former evil courses; the world and herself are against reform, and, unless she chance to have a higher moral nature or stronger will than most of her class, or unless religion should happen to touch even her polluted soul, she soon falls back, and gives one more sad illustration of the immense difficulty in a fallen woman rising again.

       After twenty years' experience, the writer can truly say that he has but seldom known a case of permanent and genuine reform among the women who had grown up from childhood among this criminal class.

       The great majority of prostitutes, it must be remembered, have had no romantic or sensational history, though they always affect this. They usually relate, and perhaps even imagine, that they have been seduced from the paths of virtue suddenly, and by the wiles of some heartless seducer. Often they describe themselves as belonging to some virtuous, respectable, and even wealthy family. Their real history, however, is much more commonplace and matter-of-fact. They have been poor women's daughters, and did not want to work as their mothers did; or they have grown up in a tenement-room, crowded with boys and men, and lost purity before they knew what it was; or they have liked gay company, and have had no good influences around them, and sought pleasure in criminal indulgences; or they have been street-children, poor, neglected, and ignorant, and thus naturally and inevitably have become prostitutes. Their sad life and debased character is the natural outgrowth of poverty, ignorance, and laziness. The number among them who have "seen better days," or have fallen from heights of virtue, is incredibly small. They show what fruits neglect in childhood, and want of education, and of the habit of labor, and the absence of pure examples, will inevitably bear. Yet in their low estate they always show some of the divine qualities of their sex. The physicians in the Blackwell's Island Hospital say that there are no nurses so tender and devoted to the sick and dying as these girls. And the honesty of their dealings with the washerwomen and shopkeepers, who trust them while in their vile houses, has often been noted.

       The words of sympathy and religion always touch their hearts, though the effect passes like the April cloud. On a broad scale, probably no remedy that man could apply would ever cure this fatal disease of society. It may, however, be diminished in its ravages, and prevented in a large measure. The check to its devastations in a laboring or poor class will be the facility of marriage, the opening of new channels of female work, but, above all, the influences of education and religion.

       As a simple, practical measure to save from this vice the girls of the honest poor, nothing has ever been equal to the

INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.

       This remedy was applied very early in the movement which I have been describing. It is simply an expedient for educating in industrious habits the girl-vagrants of the street, and for bringing into connection the two extremes of society. Lady-volunteers are found who are willing to assist in the teaching; salaried teachers are secured; a hall is opened, and a meal is prepared. The little beggars and girl-rovers of the street are beguiled in; they are taught in a stirring and lively manner, especially through the "Object System," and soon are set at industrial work, which they are eager to learn. The meal supplies their wants, which they were gratifying by begging; they gradually earn by labor the shoes and garments which they were so destitute of; the little songs and festivals, and the bustle and work of the school, attract them; above all, the influence of these ladies, so far above them, and so unselfish and pure to their eyes, has a wonderful power on their wild natures. Whatever coarseness or vileness they may have learned, they never show to them. The thought of moral purity and of unselfishness begins to dawn within their souls. They come to like the school and the teachers; they get new habits of labor and attention and cleanliness; the vagabond life is less alluring to them; industry begins to please them; they are commencing, in fine, the great transformation from creatures of impulse and idleness and shiftlessness to beings under control, who are learning the first elements in the profound lesson of labor and duty.

       The influences which surround them seem, on any given day, almost trifling and superficial; yet they are founded on such deep principles that they need only a patient continuance, day after day, and week after week, and year after year, to change the character and destiny of a whole class, and to show their happy effects far away in the dark records of the prison and the dry tables of statistics of childish crime and suffering.

       No one charity or agency of benevolence in this city has ever produced such untold and far-reaching blessings among the daughters of the poor as the Industrial Schools. They have saved thousands of little girls, who were growing up amid brothels and in crowded cellars or attics, from lives of shame and crime. They have made of them honest, industrious, cleanly, and moral women, who have become servants in our families or the wives of mechanics and decent laboring. men, and sometimes even the wives of persons of wealth and position. They seem an absolute prevention of beggary, pauperism, and sexual vice.

       In seventeen years of experience in these schools, the writer has known of no girl coming forth from them to be a pauper or beggar; and, out of tens of thousands of children who have come under their influence, he has only, after the closest inquiry, heard of some eight or ten who have followed criminal careers for a livelihood, or have fallen into sexual degradation. Yet the little girls of the industrial schools are the very class from which prostitutes are fed.

       The remarkable diminution in feminine criminal offences during the last sixteen years, as shown by an examination of the reports of the Board of Police and of the City Prisons, is a striking proof of the profound influence of these simple agencies of charity and reform. These figures I shall present fully hereafter.

       The good influences are largely derived from the coöperating influence of the higher classes. The culture, refinement, and purity of the fortunate stoop to the lower and debased to lift them up. The two extremes are brought together, not without advantage to both.

       The objections made to these schools are, that they do a work which ought to be done by the public schools, and that they reward pauperism.

       It is true that we aim, by our system of popular education, to reach all classes, and to a degree we do combine the children of the rich and the poor under one method of education. But, in every large city, there is a considerable community of the unfortunate classes, whose children are growing up to be burdens or pests to society. They are boys and girls who are employed in street-trades, or are sent out by their parents to beg, or are roving the streets, soon becoming thieves and prostitutes. They require peculiar treatment, and individual means to reach them as a class, and thus educate them. Some are too ragged and filthy for the public schools; some can only attend a few hours; others can only afford to come if they are assisted with food or occasional gifts of clothing and shoes.

       To bring them to school, special agents are needed, to hunt about the docks and low streets, and to persuade the parents to educate them. To keep them within a place of education, and break up their vagrant habits, a lively and stirring method of teaching is necessary, and much industrial training must be intermingled; while their bad habits and unfortunate circumstances should be counterbalanced by a patient, moral influence in the school, which should come from a deep "enthusiasm of humanity" and a fervent spirit of unsectarian religion.

       All these conditions could not be supplied in a public school. An eleemosynary branch in our Board of Education would be productive of endless difficulties. Much moral or industrial training cannot be expected in ward schools; and the contact of some of these wild and ragged children with our own in the city schools is, to say the least, not desirable.

       No. The management of Industrial and Ragged Schools is much better left to private associations. They are a necessity to the public well-being, but can wisely be intrusted to individual philanthropy and discretion.

       The objection that they form paupers is peculiarly wide of the truth. They, above all, train to industry and the habit of labor, and the sense of self-respect. Their tendency is continually to elevate their pupils, and place them above pauperism and beyond the lowest temptations.

       While vice, poverty, and neglect, continue among the laboring-classes, so long must there be some such agencies as these Industrial Schools; and there is assuredly no way in which the benevolent can so easily and so efficiently aid the extremely poor as by contributing to the maintenance of these institutions.

       WE have spoken, in a recent article, of the peculiar and novel effort of the "Children's Aid Society" of New York to relieve the city of its homeless and neglected children by emigration, or a transference to homes in the West. This most sound and practical of charities always met with an intense opposition here from a certain class, for bigoted reasons. The poor were early taught, even from the altar, that the whole scheme of emigration was one of "proselytizing," and that every child thus taken forth was made a "Protestant." Stories were spread, too, that these unfortunate children were renamed in the West, and that thus even brothers and sisters might meet and perhaps marry! Others scattered the pleasant information that the little ones "were sold as slaves," and that the agents enriched themselves from the transaction.

       These were the obstacles and objections among the poor themselves. So powerful were these, that it would often happen that a poor woman, seeing her child becoming ruined on the streets, and soon plainly to come forth as a criminal, would prefer this to a good home in the West; and we would have the discouragement of beholding the lad a thief behind prison-bars, when a journey to the country would have saved him.

       Most distressing of all woes was, when a drunken mother or father followed their half-starved boy, already marked and sore with their brutality, and snatched him from one of our parties of little emigrants, all joyful with their new prospects, only to beat him and leave him on the streets.

       With a small number of the better classes there was also a determined opposition to this humane remedy. What may be called the asylum-interest" set itself in stiff repugnance to our emigration scheme. They claimed — and I presume the most obstinate among them still claim — that we were scattering poison over the country, and that we benefited neither the farmers nor the children. They urged that a restraint of a few years in an asylum or house of detention rendered these children of poverty much more fit for practical life, and purified them to be good members of society. We, on the other hand, took the ground that, as our children were not criminals, but simply destitute and homeless boys and girls, usually with some ostensible occupation, they could not easily, on any legal grounds, be enclosed within asylums; that, if they were, the expense of their maintenance would be enormous, while the cost of a temporary care of them in our schools and lodging-houses, and their transference to the West, was only trifling — in the proportion of fifteen dollars to one hundred and fifty dollars, reckoning the latter as a year's cost for a child's support in an asylum. Furthermore, we held and stoutly maintained that an asylum-life is a bad preparation for practical life. The child, most of all, needs individual care and sympathy. In an asylum, he is "Letter B, of Class 3," or "No. 2, of Cell 426," and that is all that is known of him. As a poor boy, who must live in a small house, he ought to learn to draw his own water, to split his wood, kindle his fires, and light his candle; as an "institutional child," he is lighted, warmed, and watered, by machinery. He has a child's imitation, a desire to please his superiors, and readiness to be influenced by his companions. In a great caravansary he soon learns the external virtues which secure him a good bed and meal-decorum and apparent piety and discipline — while he practises the vices and unnamable habits which masses of boys of any class nearly always teach one another. His virtue seems to have an almshouse flavor; even his vices do not present the frank character of a thorough street boy; he is found to lie easily, and to be very weak under temptation; somewhat given to hypocrisy, and something of a sneak. And, what is very natural, the longer he is in the asylum, the less likely he is to do well in outside life. I hope I do no injustice to the unfortunate graduates of our asylums; but that was and continues to be my strong impression of the institutional effect on an ordinary street boy or girl. Of course, there are numerous exceptional cases among children — of criminality and inherited habits, and perverse and low organization, and premature cunning, lust, and temper, where a half-prison life may be the very best thing for them; but the majority of criminals among children, I do not believe, are much worse than the children of the same class outside, and therefore need scarcely any different training.

       One test, which I used often to administer to myself, as to our different systems, was to ask — and I request any asylum advocate to do the same — "If your son were suddenly, by the death of his parents and relatives, to be thrown out on the streets, poor and homeless — as these children are — where would you prefer him to be placed — in an asylum, or in a good farmer's home in the West?"

       "The plainest farmer's home rather than the best asylum — a thousand times!" was always my sincere answer.

       Our discussion waxed warm, and was useful to both sides. Our weak point was that, if a single boy or girl in a village, from a large company we had sent, turned out badly, there was a cry raised that "every New-York poor child," thus sent out, became "a thief or a vagabond," and for a time people believed it.

       Our antagonists seized hold of this, and we immediately dispatched careful agents to collect statistics in the Central West, and, if possible, disprove the charges. They, however, in the mean time, indiscreetly published their statistics, and from these it appeared that only too many of the asylum graduates committed offences, and that those of the shortest terms did the best. The latter fact somewhat confused their line of attack.

       The effort of tabulating, or making statistics, in regard to the children dispatched by our society, soon appeared exceedingly difficult, mainly because these youthful wanderers shared the national characteristic of love of change, and, like our own servants here, they often left one place for another, merely for fancy or variety. This was especially true of the lads or girls over sixteen or seventeen. The offer of better wages, or the attraction of a new employer, or the desire of "moving," continually stirred up these latter to migrate to another village, county, or State.

       In 1859 we made a comprehensive effort to collect some of these statistics in regard to our children who had begun their new life in the West. The following is an extract from our report at this time:

       "During the last spring, the secretary made an extended journey through the Western States, to see for himself the nature and results of this work, carried on for the last five years through those States, under Mr. Tracy's careful supervision. During that time we have scattered there several thousands of poor boys and girls. In this journey he visited personally, and heard directly of, many hundreds of these little creatures, and appreciated, for the first time, to the full extent, the spirit with which the West has opened its arms to them. The effort to reform and improve these young outcasts has become a mission-work there. Their labor, it is true, is needed. But many a time a bountiful and Christian home is opened to the miserable little stranger, his habits are patiently corrected, faults without number are borne with, time and money are expended on him, solely and entirely from the highest religious motive of a noble self-sacrifice for an unfortunate fellow-creature. The peculiar warmheartedness of the Western people, and the equality of all classes, give them an especial adaptation to this work, and account for their success.

       "'Wherever we went' (we quote from his account)'we found the children sitting at the same table with the families, going to the school with the children, and every way treated as well as any other children. Some whom we had seen once in the most extreme misery, we beheld sitting, clothed and clean, at hospitable tables, calling the employer "Father," loved by the happy circle, and apparently growing up with as good hopes and prospects as any children of the country. Others who had been in the city on the very line between virtue and vice, and who at any time might have fallen into crime, we saw pursuing industrial occupations, and gaining a good name for themselves in their village. The observations on this journey alone would have rewarded years of labor for this class. The results — so far as we could ascertain them — were remarkable, and, unless we reflect on the wonderful influences possible from a Christian home upon a child unused to kindness, they would almost seem incredible.

       "'The estimate we formed from a considerable field of observation was that, out of those sent to the West under fifteen years, not more than two per cent. turned out badly; and, even of those from fifteen to eighteen, not more than four per cent.'

       "The former estimate is nearly the same as one forwarded to us since by an intelligent clergyman of Michigan (Rev. Mr. Gelston, of Albion), of the result in his State. Of course, some of the older boys disappear entirely; some few return to the city; but it may generally be assumed that we hear of the worst cases — that is, of those who commit criminal offences, or who come under the law — and it is these whom we reckon as the failures. One or two of such cases, out of hundreds in a given district who are doing well sometimes make a great noise, and give a momentary impression that the work is not coming out well there; and there are always a few weak-minded people who accept such rumors without examination. Were the proportion of failures far greater than it is, the work would still be of advantage to the West and a rich blessing to the city.

       "It is also remarkable, as years pass away, how few cases ever come to the knowledge of the society, of ill-treatment of these children. The task of distributing them is carried on so publicly by Mr. Tracy, and in connection with such responsible persons, that any case of positive abuse would at once be known and corrected by the community itself.

       "'On this journey,' says the secretary, 'we heard of but one instance even of neglect. We visited the lad, and discovered that he had not been schooled as he should, and had sometimes been left alone at night in the lonely log-house. Yet this had roused the feelings of the whole country-side; we removed the boy, amid the tears and protestations of the "father" and "mother," and put him in another place. As soon as we had left the village, he ran right back to his old place.'

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       .      .

       "We give our evidence below, consisting of letters from prominent gentlemen, clergymen, bankers, farmers, judges, and lawyers, through the West, where the main body of these poor children have been placed We think these letters, coming from some hundred different towns, and the evidence on our books from the boys themselves, establish the remarkable success of the work. Some of the writers speak of the children as thriving 'as well as any other children;' and, in some cases, those who have become disobedient and troublesome are said to have been so principally through the fault of their employers; few instances, comparatively, from this four or five thousand are known to have committed criminal offences — in some States not more than four per cent. This is true of Michigan; and in Ohio, we do not think, from all the returns we can gather, that the proportion is even so large as that. The agent of the American and Foreign Christian Union for Indiana, a gentleman of the highest respectability, constantly travelling through the State — a State where we have placed five hundred and fifty-seven children — testifies that 'very few have gone back to New York,' and that 'he has heard of no one who has committed criminal offences.'

       "The superintendent of the Chicago Reform School, one of the most successful and experienced men in this country in juvenile reform, states that his institution had never had but three of our children committed by the Illinois State courts, though we have sent to the State two hundred and sixty-five, and such an institution is, of course, the place where criminal children of this class would at once be committed.

       "A prominent gentleman residing in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the neighborhood of which we have put out about one hundred and twenty, writes: 'I think it is susceptible of proof that no equal number of children raised here are superior to those you have placed out.' Two prominent gentlemen from Pennsylvania, one of them a leading judge in the State, write that they have not known an instance of one of our children being imprisoned for a criminal offence, though we have sent four hundred and sixty-nine to this State."

       These important results were obtained in 1859, with but four or five thousand children settled in the West. We have now in various portions of our country between sixteen and seventeen thousand who have been placed in homes or provided with work.

       The general results are similar. The boys and girls who were sent out when under fourteen, are often heard from, and succeed remarkably well. In hundreds of instances, they cannot be distinguished from the young men and women natives in the villages. Large numbers have farms of their own, and are prospering reasonably well in the world. Some are in the professions, some are mechanics or shop-keepers; the girls are generally well married. Quite a number have sent donations to the society, and some have again in their turn brought up poor children. It was estimated that more than a thousand were in the national army in the civil war. With them the experiment of "emigration" has been an unmitigated blessing. With the larger boys, as we stated before, exact results are more difficult to attain, as they leave their places frequently. Some few seem to drift into the Western cities, and take up street-trades again. Very few, indeed, get back to New York. The great mass become honest producers on the Western soil instead of burdens or pests here, and are absorbed into that active, busy population; not probably becoming saints on earth, but not certainly preying on the community, or living idlers on the alms of the public. Many we know who have also led out their whole family from the house of poverty here, and have made the last years of an old father or mother easier and more comfortable.

       The immense, practically-unlimited demand by Western communities for the services of these children shows that the first-comers have at least done moderately well, especially as every case of crime is bruited over a wide country-side, and stamps the whole company sent with disgrace. These cases we always hear of. The lives of poor children in these our homes seem like the annals of great states in this, that, when they make no report and pass in silence, then we may be sure happiness and virtue is the rule. When they make a noise, crime and misery prevail. Twenty years' virtuous life in a street-boy makes no impression on the public. A single offence is heard for hundreds of miles. A theft of one lad is imparted to scores of others about him.

       On the whole, if the warm discussion between the "asylum-interest" and the "emigration-party" were ever renewed, probably both would agree (if they were candid) that their opponents' plan had virtues which they did not then see. There are some children so perverse, and inheriting such bad tendencies, and so stamped with the traits of a vagabond life, that a reformatory is the best place for them. On the other hand, the majority of orphan, deserted, and neglected boys and girls are far better in a country home. The asylum has its great dangers, and is very expensive. The emigration-plan must be conducted with careful judgment, and applied, so far as is practicable, to children under, say, the ages of fourteen years. Both plans have defects, but, of the two, the latter seems to us still to do the most good at the least cost.

       A great obstacle in our own particular experience was, as was stated before, the superstitious opposition of the poor. This is undoubtedly cultivated by the priests, who seem seldom gifted with the broad spirit of humanity of their brethren in Europe. They apparently desire to keep the miserable masses here under their personal influence.

       Our action, however, in regard to these waifs, has always been fair and open. We know no sect or race. Both Catholic and Protestant homes were offered freely to the children. No child's creed was interfered with. On the committees themselves in the Western villages have frequently been Roman Catholics. Notwithstanding this, the cry of "proselytizing" is still kept up among the guides of the poor against this most humane scheme, and continually checks our influence for good with the younger children, and ultimately will probably diminish to a great degree the useful results we might accomplish in this direction.

       The experience we have thus had for seventeen years in transferring such masses of poor children to rural districts is very instructive on the general subject of "emigration as a cure for pauperism."

THE MISSING ESSAY. Ten years later, Brace used these essays as the basis for his book Dangerous classes of New York, and twenty years work among them (1880). But in 1870, the editor of Appleton's chose not to print essay #08 which, judging by the book's table of contents, dealed either with the "Legal treatment of prostitutes" or with "German rag-pickers". — THE GASLIGHT EDITOR.

AMONG the terrible evils which met us in an appalling form when we began these labors, was the condition of street-girls. It seemed to combine human misfortunes in a manner to discourage the most hopeful, and to remove all chance for a successful struggle with the source of the evil.

       We have already described the efforts which, under the coöperation of the fortunate classes, and with the blessing of Providence, have proved so wonderfully successful in checking the growth and formation of the class of abandoned women among the children of the poor — the agency of the "Industrial Schools." We speak now, however, of an even more unfortunate class than the children attending these schools — the floating multitude of young girls, which are incessantly drifting through the streets of a large city, without a home or a friend. Their histories are as various as are the different lots of the inhabitants of a populous town. Some have come from the country, from kind and respectable homes, to seek work in the city: they gradually consume their scanty means, and are driven from one refuge to another, till they stand on the street, with the gayly-lighted house of vice and the gloomy police-station to choose between. Others have sought amusement in the town, and have been finally induced to enter some house of bad character as a boarding-house, and have been thus entrapped; and finally, in despair, and cursed with disease, they break loose, and take shelter even in the prison-cell, if necessary. Others still have abandoned an ill-tempered step-mother or father, and rushed out on the streets to find a refuge, or get employment anywhere.

       Drunkenness has darkened the childhood of some, and made home a hideous place, till they have been glad to sleep in the crowded cellar or the bare attic of some thronged "tenement," and then go forth to pick up a living as they could in the great metropolis. Some are orphans, some have parents whom they detest, some are children of misfortune, and others of vice; some are foreigners, some native. They come from the north and the south, the east and the west; all races and countries are represented among them. They are not habitually vicious, or they would not be on the streets. They are unlucky, unfortunate, getting a situation only to lose it, and finding a home, to be soon driven from it. Their habits are irregular, they do not like steady labor, they have learned nothing well, they have no discipline, their clothes are neglected, they have no appreciation of what neatness is; yet, if they earn a few shillings extra, they are sure to spend them on some foolish gewgaw. Many of them are pretty and bright, with apparently fine capacities, but inheriting an unusual quantity of the human tendencies to evil. They are incessantly deceived and betrayed, and they as constantly deceive others. Their cunning in concealing their indulgences or vices surpasses all conception. Untruth seems often more familiar to them than truth. Their worst quality is their superficiality. There is no depth either to their virtues or vices. They sin, and immediately repent with cheerfulness; they live virtuously for years, and a straw seems suddenly to turn them. They weep at the presentation of the divine character in Christ, and pray with fervency; and, the very next day, may ruin their virtue, or steal their neighbor's garment, or take to drinking, or set a whole block in ferment with some biting scandal. They seem to be children, but with woman's passion, and woman's jealousy and scathing tongue. They trust a superior as a child; they neglect themselves, and injure body and mind as a child might; they have a child's generosity, and occasional freshness of impulse and desire of purity: but their passions sweep over them with the force of maturity, and their temper, and power of setting persons by the ears, and backbiting, and occasional intensity of hate, belong to a later period of life. Not unfrequently, when real danger or severe sickness arouses them, they show the divine qualities of womanhood, in a power of sacrifice which utterly forgets self, and a love which shines brightly, even through the shadow of death.

       But their combination of childishness and undisciplined maturity is an extremely difficult one to manage practically, and exposes them to endless sufferings and dangers. Their condition fifteen years ago seemed a thoroughly wretched one.

       There was then, if we mistake not, but a single refuge in the whole city, where these unfortunate creatures could take shelter, and that was Mr. Pease's Five Points Mission, which contained so many women who had been long in vicious courses, as to make it unsuitable for those who were just on the dividing line.

       The parent society of the charities I am describing had, in the mean time, secured the services, as president, of one of those patient workers for humanity and religion, whose lives are a continued blessing to the city. He felt an especial compassion for the sufferings of this wretched class, and encouraged and aided the writer to form some plan for their relief. This eventually took the shape of what is called

THE GIRLS' LODGING-HOUSE.

       It is no exaggeration to say that this instrument of charity and reform has cost us more trouble than all our enterprises together.

       The simple purpose and plan of it was, like that of our other enterprises, to reform habits and character through material and moral appliances, and subsequently through an entire change of circumstances, and at the same time to relieve suffering and misfortune.

       We opened first a shelter, where any drifting, friendless girl could go for a night's lodging. If she had means, she was to pay a trifling sum — five or six cents; if not, she aided in the labor of the house, and thus in part defrayed the expense of her board. Agents were sent out on the docks and among the slums of the city, to pick up the wayfarers; notices were posted in the station-houses, and near the ferries and railroad depots, and even advertisements put into the cheap papers. We made a business of scattering the news of this charity wherever there were forlorn girls seeking for home or protection, or street-wandering young women who had no place to lay their heads.

       We hoped to reach down the hand of welcome to the darkest dens of the city, and call back to virtue some poor, unbefriended creature, who was trembling on the very line between purity and vice. Our charity seemed to stand by the ferries, the docks, the police-stations, and prisons, and open a door of kindness and virtue to these hard-driven, tired wanderers on the ways of life. Our design was that no young girl, suddenly cast out on the streets of a great city, should be without a shelter and a place where good influences could surround her. We opened a House for the houseless; an abode of Christian sympathy for the utterly unbefriended and misguided; a place of work for the idle and unthrifty. The plan seemed at once to reach its object: the doors opened on a forlorn procession of unfortunates. Girls broke out of houses of vice, where they had been entrapped, leaving every article of dress, except what they wore, behind them; the police brought wretched young wanderers, who had slept on the station-floors; the daughters of decent country-people, who had come to the town for amusement or employment, and, losing or wasting their means, had walked the streets all the night long, applied for shelter; orphans selling flowers, or peddling about the theatres; the children of drunkards; the unhappy daughters of families where quarrelling and abuse were the rule; girls who had run away; girls who had been driven away; girls who sought a respite in intervals of vice — all this most unfortunate throng began to beset the doors of the "Girls' Lodging-House."

       We had indeed reached the class intended, but now our difficulties only began.

       It would not do to turn our lodging-house into a reformatory of magdalens, nor to make it into a convenient resting-place for those who lived on the wages of lust. To keep a house for reforming young women of bad character, would only pervert those of good, and shut out the decent and honest poor. We must draw a line; but where? We attempted to receive only those of apparent honesty and virtue, and to exclude those who were too mature; keeping, if possible, below the age of eighteen years. We sought to shut out the professional "street-walkers." This at once involved us in endless difficulties. Sweet young maidens, whom we guilelessly admitted, and who gave most touching stories of early bereavement and present loneliness, and whose voices arose in moving hymns of penitence, and whose bright eyes filled with tears under the Sunday exhortation, turned out perhaps the most skilful and thoroughgoing deceivers, plying their bad trade in the day, and filling the minds of their comrades with all sorts of wickedness in the evening. We came to the conviction that these girls would deceive the very elect. Then some "erring child of poverty," as the reporters called her, would apply at a late hour at the door, after an unsuccessful evening, her breath showing her habit, and be refused, and go to the station-house, and in the morning a fearful narrative would appear in some paper, of the shameful hypocrisy and cruel machinery of charitable institutions.

       Or, perhaps, she would be admitted, and cover the house with disgrace by her conduct in the night. One wayfarer, thus received, scattered a contagious disease, which emptied the whole house, and carried off the housekeeper and several lodgers. Another, in the night, dropped her newly-born dead babe into the vault.

       The rule, too, of excluding all over eighteen years of age, caused great discontent with the poor, and with certain portions of the public. And yet, as rigidly as humanity would allow, we must follow our plan of benefiting children and youth.

       It soon turned out, however, that the young street-children, who were engaged in street-trades, had some relative to whom their labor was of profit, so that they gradually drifted back to their cellars and attics, and only occasionally took a night's lodging, when out late near the theatres. Those who were the greatest frequenters of the House, proved to be the young girls between fourteen and eighteen. And a more difficult class than these to manage, no philanthropic mortal ever came in contact with. The most had a constitutional objection to work: they had learned to do nothing well, and therefore got but little wages anywhere; they were shockingly careless, both of their persons and their clothing; and, worse than all, they showed a cunning and skill of deceit, and a capacity of scandal, and of setting the family by the ears in petty quarrels and jealousies, which might have discouraged the most sanguine reformer.

       The matron, Mrs. Trott, who had especially to struggle with these evils, had received a fitting preparatory training: she had taught in the "Five Points." She was a thorough disciplinarian; believed in work, and was animated by the highest Christian earnestness.

       The great danger and temptation of such establishments, as I have always found, are in the desire of keeping the inmates, and showing to the public your "reforms." My instruction always was, that the "Girls' Lodging-house" was not to be a "Home." We did not want to make an asylum of it. We hoped to begin the work of improvement with these young girls, and then leave them to the natural agencies of society. To teach them to work, to be clean, and to understand the virtues of order and punctuality; to lay the foundations of a housekeeper or servant; to bring the influences of discipline, of kindness and religion, to bear on these wild and ungoverned creatures — these were to be the great objects of the "Lodging-house:" then some good home or respectable family were to do the rest. We were to keep lodgers a little while only, and then to pass them along to situations or places of work.

       The struggles of Mr. and Mrs. Trott, the superintendent and matron, against these discouraging evils in the condition and character of this class, would make a history in itself. They set themselves to work upon details, and with an abounding patience, which should bear some resemblance to that exercised, as they believed, by a Higher One toward themselves.

       The first effort was to teach the girls something like a habit of personal cleanliness; then, to enforce order and punctuality, of which they knew nothing; next, to require early rising, and going to bed at a reasonable hour. The lessons of housekeeping were begun at the foundation, being tasks in scrubbing and cleaning; then, bed-making, and, finally, plain cooking, sewing, and machine-work. Some of the inmates went out for their daily labor in shops or factories; but the most had to be employed in housework, and thus paid for their support. They soon carried on the work of a large establishment, and at the same time made thousands of articles of clothing for the poor children elsewhere under the charge of the society.

       A great deal of stress, of course, was laid on religious and moral instruction. The girls always "listened gladly," and were easily moved by earnest and sympathetic teaching and oratory. Of the effects of the patient labors of years, we shall quote a few instances from Mrs. Trott's journal. She is writing, in the first extract, of a journey at the West:

       "Several stations were pointed out, where our Lodging-house girls are located; and we envied them their quiet, rural homes, wishing that others might follow their example. Maggie M., a bright American girl, who left us last spring, was fresh in our memory, as we almost passed her door. The friendless child bids fair to make an educated, respectable woman. She writes of her advantages and privileges, and says she intends to improve them, and make the very best use of her time.

       "Our old friend, Mary F., is still contented and happy; she shows no inclination to return, and remains in the place procured for her two years ago. She often expresses a great anxiety for several of the girls whom she left here, and have turned out very badly. We were rather doubtful of Mary's intentions when she left us, but have reason for thankfulness that thus far she tries to do right, and leads a Christian life. She was a girl well informed, of good common-sense, rather attractive, and, we doubt not, is 'a brand plucked from the burning.'

       "Emma H., a very interesting, amiable young girl, who spent several months at the Lodge, while waiting for a good opening, has just been to visit us. She is living with Mrs. H., Judge B—–'s daughter, on the Hudson. They are mutually pleased with each other; and Mrs. H. says that 'Emma takes an adopted daughter's place, and nothing would tempt me to part with her.' Emma was well dressed, and as comfortably situated as one could wish. There is no reason why she should not educate herself, and fill a higher position in the future.

       "S. A. was a cigar-girl when she came to the Lodging-house, six years ago. An orphan, friendless and homeless — we all knew her desire to obtain an education, her willingness to make any sacrifice, and put up with the humblest fare, that she might accomplish this end; and then her earnest desire to do good, and her consistent Christian character, since she united with the Church, and the real missionary she proved among the girls, when death was in the House, leaving her school, and assisting night and day among the sick. She is now completing her education, and will soon graduate with honors. Her teachers speak of her in the highest terms.

       "There was another, J. L., a very pretty little girl, who was with us at the same time, who was guilty of the most aggravating petty thefts. She was so modest and pleasing in her demeanor, so sincere in her attachments, that it was difficult to believe, until she acknowledged her guilt, that she had picked the pockets of the very persons to whom she had made showy presents. Vanity was her ruling motive — a desire to appear smart and generous, and to show that she had rich friends, who supplied her with money. She was expostulated with long and tenderly, promised to reform, and has lately united with a church, where she is an active and zealous member. We have never heard a word respecting her dishonesty since she left us, and she now occupies a responsible position as forewoman in a Broadway store.

       "P. E. was also a Lodging-house girl, a year or more, at the same time. She came to us in a very friendless, destitute condition. She was one of the unfortunates with the usual story of shame and desertion — she had just buried her child, and needed an asylum. We have every reason to believe her repentance sincere, and that she made no false pretensions to piety when her name was added to the list of professing Christians. The Church took an unusual interest in her, and have paid her school expenses several years. She is now teaching.

       "Our next is Mary M. Here is a bit of romance. When she first entered our home, she was reduced to the very lowest extremity of poverty and wretchedness. She remained with us some time, and then went to a situation in Connecticut, where she married a young Southern gentleman, who fell desperately in love with her (because she cared for him when ill), returned to New York, and, when she called upon us, was boarding at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. This was noticed at the time in several Eastern and New-York papers. She showed her gratitude to us by calling and making presents to members of the House-looking up an associate, whom she found in a miserable garret, clothing her, and returning her to her friends. She greatly surprised us in the exhibition of the true womanly traits which she always manifested. This is a true instance of the saying that a resident of the Five Points to-day may be found in her home in Fifth Avenue to-morrow.

       "Without going into details, we could also mention S. H., who has often been in our reports as unmanageable; the two D—– girls, who came from Miss Tracy's school; the two M—– sisters, who had a fierce drunken mother, that pawned their shoes for rum one cold winter's morn, before they had arisen from their wretched bed; two R—– sisters, turned into the streets by drunken parents, brought to our House by a kind-hearted expressman, dripping with rain; and little May, received, cold and hungry, one winter's day — all comfortably settled in country-homes; most of them married, and living out West — not forgetting Maggie, the Irish girl who wrote us, soon after she went West, that her husband had his little farm, pigs, cow, etc.; requesting us to send them a little girl for adoption. Her prospect here never would have been above a garret or cellar.

       "We have L. M. in New York, married to a mechanic. Every few months she brings a bundle of clothing for those who were once her companions. She is very energetic and industrious, and highly respected.

       "M. E., another excellent Christian girl. She has been greatly tried in trying to save a reckless sister from destruction; once she took her West; then she returned with her when she found her sister's condition made it necessary. Such sisterly affection is seldom manifested as this girl has shown. She bought her clothing out of her own earnings, when she had scarcely a change for herself; and, after the erring sister's death, paid her child's board, working night and day to do so.

       "These cases are true in every particular, and none of recent date. There are many more hopeful ones among our young girls, who have not been away from us long, and of whom we hear excellent reports.

       "One intelligent Western girl thus expresses herself: 'As plain as we thought the fare of the Lodging-house, I can never regret going: there, for it brought to me the "pearl of great price."'"

       One of the best features of this most practical "institution" for poor girls, is a sewing-machine class, where lessons are given gratuitously. In three weeks, a girl who had previously depended wholly on her needle, and could hardly earn her three dollars a week, will learn the use of the machine, and earn from one dollar to two dollars per day.

TRAINING-SCHOOL FOR SERVANTS.

       If Fortune favors us, we hope eventually to engraft on this Lodging-house a school to train ordinary house-servants; to teach plain cooking, waiting, the care of bedrooms, and good laundry-work. Nothing is more needed among this class, or by the public generally, than such a "training-school."

       Of the statistics of the Lodging-house, Mrs. Trott writes as follows:

       "Six thousand seven hundred and sixteen lodgers. What an army would the registered names make, since a forlorn, wretched child of thirteen years, from the old Trinity station-house, headed the lists in 18—! I cannot recollect a face that ever impressed me as more forbidding.

       "Among this number there are many cozily sitting by their own hearth-stones; others are filling positions of usefulness and trust in families and stores; some have been adopted in distant towns, where they fill a daughter's place; and some have gone to return no more. A large number we cannot trace.

       "During this period, nineteen hundred and fifteen have found employment, and gone to situations, or returned to friends.

       "Fifteen thousand four hundred and twenty-six garments have been cut and made, and distributed among the poor, or used as outfits in sending companies West."

A SKETCH of the long and successful efforts for the improvement of the dangerous classes we have been describing, would be imperfect without an account of

THE OFFICE OF THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY.

       This has become a kind of eddying-point, where the two streams of the fortunate and the unfortunate classes seem to meet. Such a varying procession of humanity as passes through these plain rooms, from one year's end to the other, can nowhere else be seen. If photographs could be taken of the human life revealed there, they would form a volume of pictures of the various fortunes of large classes in a great city. On one day, there will be several mothers with babes. They wish them adopted, or taken by any one. They relate sad stories of desertion and poverty; they are strangers or immigrants. When the request is declined, they beseech, and say that the child must die, for they cannot support both. It is but too plain that they are illegitimate children. As they depart, the horrible feeling presses on one, that the child will soon follow the fate of so many thousands born out of wedlock. Again, a pretty young woman comes to beg a home for the child of some friend, who cannot support it. Her story need not be told; the child is hers, and is the offspring of shame. Or some person from the higher classes enters, to inquire for the traces of some boy, long disappeared — the child of passion and sin.

       But the ordinary frequenters are the children of the street — the Arabs and gypsies of our city.

       Here enters a little flower-seller, her shawl drawn over her head, barefooted and ragged — she begs for a home and bread; here a news-boy, wide awake and impudent, but softened by his desire to "get West;" here "a bummer," ragged, frowzy, with tangled hair and dirty face, who has slept for years in boxes and privies; here a "canawl-boy," who cannot steer his little craft in the city as well as he could his boat; or a petty thief who wishes to reform his ways, or a bootblack who has conceived the ambition of owning land, or a little "revolver" who hopes to get quarters for nothing in a lodging-house and "pitch pennies" in the interval. Sometimes some white-haired German boy, stranded by fortune in the city, will apply, with such honest blue eyes, that the first employer who enters will carry him off; or a sharp, intelligent Yankee lad, left adrift by sudden misfortune, comes in to do what he has never done before — ask for assistance. Then an orphan-girl will appear, floating on the waves of the city, having come here no one knows why, and going no one can tell whither.

       Employers call to obtain "perfect children;" drunken mothers rush in to bring back their children they have already consented should be sent far from poverty and temptation; ladies enter to find the best object of their charities, and the proper field for their benevolent labors; liberal donors; "intelligent foreigners," inquiring into our institutions, applicants for teachers' places, agents, and all the miscellaneous crowd who support and visit agencies of charity.

A PHILANTHROPIST.

       The central figure in this office, disentangling all the complicated threads in these various applications, and holding himself perfectly cool and bland in this turmoil, is "a character" — Mr. J. MACY.

       He was employed first as a visitor for the Society; but, soon betraying a kind of bottled-up "enthusiasm of humanity" under a very modest exterior, he was put in his present position, where he has become a sort of embodied Children's Aid Society in his own person. Most men take their charities as adjuncts to life, or as duties enjoined by religion or humanity. Mr. Macy lives in his. He is never so truly happy as when he is sitting calmly amid a band of his "lambs," as he sardonically calls the heavy-fisted, murderous-looking young vagabonds who frequent the Cottage-Place Reading-Room, and seeing them all happily engaged in reading or quiet amusements. Then the look of beatific satisfaction that settles over his face, as, in the midst of a loving passage of his religious address to them, he takes one of the obstreperous lambs by the collar, and sets him down very hard on another bench — never for a moment breaking the thread or sweet tone of his bland remarks — is a sight to behold; you know that he is happier there than he would be in a palace.

       His labors with these youthful scapegraces around Cottage Place, during the last fifteen years, would form one of the most instructive chapters in the history of philanthropy. I have beheld him discoursing sweetly on the truths of Christianity while a storm of missiles was coming through the windows; in fact, during the early days of the meeting the windows were always barricaded with boards. The more violent the intruders were, the more amiable, and, at the same time, the more firm he became.

       In fact, he never seemed so well satisfied as when the roughest little "bummers" of the ward entered his Boys' Meeting. The virtuous and well-behaved children did not interest him half so much. By a patience which is almost incredible, and a steady kindness of years, he finally succeeded in subduing these wild young vagrants, frequently being among them every night of the week, holding magic-lantern exhibitions, temperance meetings, social gatherings, and the like, till he really knew them and attracted their sympathies. His cheerfulness was high when the meeting grew into an Industrial School, where the little girls, who perplexed him so, could be trained by female hands, and his happiness was at its acme when the liberality of one or two gentlemen enabled him to open a Reading-Room for "the lambs." The enterprise was always an humble one in appearance; but such was the genuineness and spirit of humanity in it — the product of his sisters as well as himself-that it soon met with kind support from various ladies and gentlemen, and now is one of those lights in dark places which must gladden any observer of the misery and crime of this city.

       Mr. Macy's salvation in these exhausting and nerve-wearing efforts, and divers others which I have not detailed, is his humor. I have seen him take two lazy-looking young men, who had applied most piteously for help, conduct them very politely to the door, and, pointing amiably to the Third Avenue, say: "Now, my boys, just be kind enough to walk right north up that avenue for one hundred miles into the country, and you will find plenty of work and food. Good-by! good-by!" The boys depart, mystified.

       Or a dirty little fellow presents himself in the office. "Please, sir, I am an orphant, and I want a home!" Mr. Macy eyes him carefully; his knowledge of "paidology" has had many years to ripen in; he sees, perhaps, amid his rags, a neatly-sewed patch, or notes that his naked feet are too white for a "bummer." He takes him to the inner office. "My boy! Where do you live? Where's your father?" "Please, sir, I don't live nowhere, and I hain't got no father, and me mither is dead!" Then follows a long and touching story of his orphanage, the tears flowing down his cheeks. The bystanders are almost melted themselves. Not so Mr. Macy. Grasping the boy by the shoulder, "Where's your mother, I say?" "Oh, dear; I'm a poor orphant, and I hain't got no mither!" "Where is your mother, I say? Where do you live? I give you just three minutes to tell, and then, if you do not, I shall hand you over to that officer!" The lad yields; his true story is told, and a runaway restored to his family.

       In the midst of his highest discouragements at Cottage Place, Mr. Macy frequently had some characteristic story of his "lambs" to refresh him in his intervals of rest. And some peculiar exhibition of mischief or wickedness always seemed to act as a kind of tonic on him and restore his spirits.

       I shall not forget the cheerfulness with which he related one day that, after having preached with great unction the Sunday previous on "stealing," he came back the next and discovered that a private room in the building, which he only occasionally used, had been employed by the boys for some time as a receptacle for stolen goods! On another occasion, he had held forth with peculiar "liberty" on the sin of thieving, and, when he sat down almost exhausted, discovered, to his dismay, that his hat had been stolen! But, knowing that mischief was at the bottom, and that a crowd of young "roughs" were outside waiting to see him go home bareheaded, he said nothing of his loss, but procured a cap and quietly walked away.

       I think the contest of wits among them — they for mischief and disturbance, and he to establish order and get control over them — gave a peculiar zest to his religious labors, which he would not have had in calmer scenes and more regular services. If they put pepper on the stove, he endured it much longer than they could, and kept them till they were half suffocated; and, when they barricaded the door outside, he protracted the devotional exercises or varied them with a "magic lantern," to give time for forcing the door, and an orderly exit.

       The girls, however, were his great torment, especially when they stoned their spiritual guides; these, however, he eventually forwarded into the Cottage-Place Industrial School, which sprang from the Meeting, and there they were gradually civilized.

       For real suffering and honest effort at self-help, he had a boundless sympathy; but the paupers and professional beggars were the terror of his life. He dreaded nothing so much as a boy or girl falling into habits of dependence. Where he was compelled to give assistance in money, he has been known to set one boy to throw wood down and the other to pile it up, before he would aid.

       His more stormy philanthropic labors have been succeeded by calmer efforts among a delightful congregation of poor German children in Second Street, who love and revere him. When he needs, however, a little refreshment and intoning, he goes over to his Cottage-Place Reading-Room, and sits with or instructs his "lambs!"

       His main work, however, is in the "office" of the Children's Aid Society, which I have described above. Though a plain half-Quaker himself, he has all the tact of a diplomat, and manages the complicated affairs of poverty and crime that come before him with a wonderful skill, getting on as well with the lady as the street-vagrant, and seldom ever making a blunder in the thousand delicate matters which pass through his hands. When it is remembered that some seventeen thousand street-children have passed through that office to homes in the country, and that but one lawsuit has ever occurred about them (and that through no mistake of the Society), while numbers of bitter enemies watch every movement of this charity, it will be seen with what consummate judgment these delicate matters have been managed. Besides all this, he is the guide, philosopher, and friend, of hundreds of these young wayfarers in every part of the country, sustaining with them an enormous correspondence; but, as sympathy and advice and religious instruction on such a gigantic scale would soon weary out even his vitality, he stereotypes his letters, and, by a sort of pious fraud, says to each what is written for all. It is very interesting to come across the quaint, affectionate words and characteristic expressions of this devoted philanthropist addressed to "his boys," but put up in packages of a thousand copies, and to think to how many little rovers over the land they bring sympathy and encouragement.

AT first sight, it would seem very obvious that a place of mental improvement and social resort, with agreeable surroundings, offered gratuitously to the laboring-people, would be frequented eagerly. On its face, the "Free Reading-room" appears a most natural, feasible method of applying the great lever of sociality (without temptations) to lifting up the poorer classes. The working-man and the street-boy get here what they so much desire, a pleasant place, warmed and lighted, for meeting their companions, for talking, playing innocent games, or reading the papers; they get it, too, for nothing. When we remember how these people live, in what crowded and slatternly rooms, or damp cellars, or close attics, some even having no home at all, and that their only social resort is the grog-shop, we might suppose that they would jump at the chance of a pleasant and free saloon and reading-room. But this is by no means the case. This instrument of improvement requires peculiar management to be successful. Our own experience is instructive.

       The writer of this had had the reading-room "on the brain" for many years, when, at length, on talking over the subject with a gentleman in the eastern part of the city — one whose name has since been a tower of strength to this whole movement-he consented to father the enterprise and be the treasurer, an office in young charities, be it remembered, no sinecure.

       We opened, accordingly, near the Novelty Iron-Works, under the best auspices,

THE ELEVENTH WARD FREE READING-ROOM.

       The rooms were spacious and pleasant, furnished with a plenty of papers and pamphlets, and, to add to the attractions and help pay expenses, the superintendent was to sell coffee and simple refreshments. Our theory was, that coffee would compete with liquor as a stimulus, and that the profits of the sales would pay most of the running cost. We were right among a crowded working-population, and every thing promised success.

       At first there were considerable numbers of laboring-men present every day and evening; but, to our dismay, they began to fall off. We tried another superintendent; still the working-man preferred his "dreary rooms," or the ruinous liquor-shops, to our pleasant reading-room. The coffee did not suit him; the refreshments were not to his taste; he would not read, because he thought he ought to call for something to eat or drink if he did; and so at length he dropped off. Finally the attendance became so thin, and the expenses were accumulating to such a degree, that we closed the room, and our magnanimous treasurer footed the bills. This failure discouraged us for some years, but the idea seemed to me sound, and I was resolved to try it once more under better circumstances.

       In looking about for some specially-adapted instrument for influencing "the dangerous classes," I chanced, just after the remarkable religions "revival" of 1858, on a singular character.

       This was a reformed or converted prize-fighter named Orville (and nicknamed "Awful") Gardner. He was a broad-shouldered, burly individual, with a tremendous neck, and an arm as thick as a moderate-sized man's leg.

       His career had been notorious and infamous in the extreme, he having been one of the roughs employed by politicians, and engaged in rows and fights without number, figuring several times in the prize-ring, and once having bitten off a man's nose!

       Yet the man must have been less brutal than his life would show. He was a person evidently of volcanic emotions and great capacity of affection. I was curious about his case, and watched it closely for Some years, as showing what is so often disputed in modern times — the reforming power of Christianity on the most abandoned characters.

       The point through which his brutalized nature had been touched had been evidently his affection for an only child — a little boy. He described to me once, in very simple, touching language, his affection and love for this child; how he dressed him in the best, and did all be could for him, but always keeping him away from all knowledge of his own dissipation. One day he was off on some devilish errand among the immigrants on Staten Island, when he saw a boat approaching quickly with one of his "pals." The man rowed up near him, and stopped and looked at him "very queer," and didn't say any thing.

       "What the devil are you looking at me in that way for?" said Gardner.

       "Your boy's drowned!" replied the other.

       Gardner says he fell back in the boat, as if you'd hit him right straight from the shoulder behind the ear, and did not know any thing for a long time. When he recovered, he kept himself drunk for three weeks, and smashed a number of policemen, and was "put up," just so as to forget the bright little fellow who had been the pride of his heart.

       This great loss, however, must have opened his nature to other influences. When the deep religious sympathy pervaded the community there came over him suddenly one of those revelations which, in some form or other, visit most human beings at least once in their lives. They are almost too deep and intricate to be described in these columns. The human soul sees itself, for the first time, as reflected in the mirror of divine purity. It has for the moment a conception of what CHRIST is, and what Love means. Singularly enough the thought and sentiment which took possession of this ruffian and debauchee and prize-fighter, and made him as one just cured of leprosy, was the Platonic conception of Love, and that embodied in the ideal form of Christianity. Under it he became as a little child; he abandoned his vices, gave up his associates, and resolved to consecrate his life to humanity and the service of Him to whom he owed so much.

       The spirit, when I first met him, with which he used to encounter his old companions must have been something like that of the early Christian converts.

       Thus, an old boon companion meets him in the street: "Why, Orful, what the h—ll's this about your bein' converted?"

       And the other turns to him with such pent-up feeling bursting forth, telling him of the new things that have come to him, that the "rough" is quite melted, and begins a better course of life.

       Again he is going down a narrow street, when lie suddenly sees coming up a bitter enemy. His old fire flames up, but he quenches it, walks to the other, and, with the Years streaming down his cheeks, he takes him by the hand and tells him the old story which is always new, and the two ruffians forget their feuds and are friends.

       Could the old Greek philosopher have seen this imbruted athlete, so mysteriously and suddenly fired with the ideal of Love till his past crimes seemed melted in the heat of this great sentiment, and his rough nature appeared transformed, he would have rejoiced in beholding at length the living embodiment of an ideal theory for so many ages held but as the dream of a poetic philosopher.

       Gardner was only a modern and striking instance of the natural and eternal power of Christianity.

       We resolved to put him where he could reach the classes from which he had come. With considerable exertion the necessary sums were raised to open a "Coffee and Reading-room" in the worst district of the city — the Fourth Ward. Great numbers of papers and publications were furnished gratuitously by that body who have always been so generous to this enterprise — the conductors of the press of the city.

       A bar for coffee and cheap refreshments was established, and Gardner was put at the head of the whole as superintendent.

       The opening is thus described in our journal:

       "We must confess as one of the managers of that institution, we felt particularly nervous about that opening meeting.

       "Messrs. Beecher and Cochrane and other eminent speakers had been invited to speak, and the mayor was to preside. It was certainly an act of some self-denial to leave their country-seats or cool rooms, and spend a hot summer evening in talking to Fourth-Ward rowdies. To requite this with any sort of 'accident' would have been very awkward. Where would we of the committee have hid our beads if our friends the 'roughs' had thought best to have a little bit of a shindy, and had knocked Brother Beecher's hat in, and had tossed the Hon. John Cochrane out of the window, or rolled the mayor down-stairs? We confess all suck possible eventualities did present themselves and we imagined the sturdy form of our eminent clerical friend breasting the opposing waves of rowdies, and showing himself as skilful in demolishing corporeal enemies as he is in overthrowing spiritual. We were comforted in spirit, however, by remembering that the saint at the head of our establishment — the renowned Gardner — would now easily take a place in the church militant, and perhaps not object to a new exercise of muscle in a good cause.

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       .      .

       After other addresses, Gardner — 'Awful Gardner' — was called for. He came forward — and a great trial it must have been to have faced that crowd, where there were hundreds who had once been with him in all kinds of debaucheries and deviltries — men who had drunk and fought and gambled and acted the rowdy with him — men very quick to detect any trace of vanity or cant in him. He spoke very simply and humbly; said that he had more solid peace and comfort in one month now than he had in years once; spoke of his 'black life,' his sins and disgrace, and then of his most cordial desire to welcome all his old companions there. In the midst of these remarks there seemed to come up before him suddenly a memory of Him who had saved him, his eyes filled with tears, and, with a manly and deep feeling that swept right through the wild audience, he made his acknowledgment to 'Him who sticketh closer than a brother — even the Lord Jesus Christ.'

       "No sermon could have been half so effective as these stammering, ungrammatical, but manly remarks."
 

       Our reading-room under this guidance became soon a very popular resort; in fact, it deserved the nickname one gentleman gave it, "The Drunkards' Club." The marked, simple, and genuine reform in a man of such habits as this pugilist, attracted numbers of that large class of young men who are always trying to break from the tyranny of evil habits and vices. The rooms used to be thronged with reformed or reforming young men. The great difficulty with a man under vices is to make him believe that change for him is possible. The sight of Gardner always demonstrated this possibility. Those men who are sunk in such courses cannot get rid of them gradually, and nothing can arouse them and break the iron rule of habits but the most tremendous truths.

       "Awful Gardner" had but one theory of reform — absolute and immediate change, in view of the love of Christ, and a deserved and certain damnation.

       The men to whom he spoke needed no soft words; they knew they were "in hell" now; some of them could sometimes for a moment realize what such a character as Christ was, and bow before it in unspeakable humility. No one whom I have ever seen could so influence the "roughs" of this city. He ought to have been kept as a missionary to the rowdies.

       I extract from our journal:

       "The moral success of the room has been all that we could have desired. Hundreds of young men have come there continually to read or chat with their friends — many of them even who had habitually frequented the liquor-saloons, and many persons with literally no homes. The place, too, has become a kind of central point for all those who have become more or less addicted to excessive drinking, and who are desirous of escaping from the habit.

       "There are days when the spectacle presented there is a most affecting one; the room filled with young men, each of whom has a history of sorrow or degradation — broken-down gentlemen, ruined merchants penniless clerks, homeless laboring-men and printers (for somehow this most intelligent profession seems to contain a large number of cases who have been ruined by drunkenness), and outcast men of no assignable occupation. These have been attracted in part by the cheerfulness of the room and to chances for reading, and in part by Gardner's influence, who has labored indefatigably in behalf of these poor wretches. Under the influences of the room, incredible as it may seem, over seven hundred of these men have been started in sober courses and provided with honest employments, and many of them have become hopefully religious. It is believed that the whole quarter has been improved by the opening of this agreeable and temperate place of resort."
 

       But, alas! even with a man so truly repentant and reformed, Nature does not let him off so easily. He had to bear in his body the fruits of his vices. His nervous system began to give way under the fearful strain both of his sins and his reform. He found it necessary to leave this post of work and retire to a quiet place in New Jersey, where he has since passed a calm and virtuous life, working I suppose at his trade, and, so far as I know, he has never been false to the great truths which once inspired him. With his departure, however, we thought it best to close the reading~room, especially as we could not realize our hope of making it self-supporting. So ended the second of our experiments at "virtuous amusements."

       I now resolved to try the experiment without any expectation of sustaining the room with sales of refreshments. The working-classes seem to be utterly indifferent to such attractions. They probably cannot compete a moment with those of the liquor-shops. With the aid of friends, who are always ready in this city to liberally support rational experiments of philanthropy, we have since then opened various free reading-rooms in different quarters of the city.

       The most successful was carried on by Mr. Macy at Cottage Place for his "lambs."

       Here sufficient books and papers were supplied by friends, little temperance and other societies were formed, the room was pleasant and cosy, and, above all, Mr. Macy presided or infused into it his spirit. The "lambs" were occasionally obstreperous and given to smashing windows, but to this Mr. M. was sufficiently accustomed, and in time the wild young barbarians began to feel the influences thrown around the place, until now one may see of a winter evening eighty or a hundred lads and young men quietly reading, or playing backgammon or checkers.

       The room answers exactly its object as a place of innocent amusement and improvement, competing with the liquor-saloons. The manufacturers of the neighborhood have testified to its excellent moral influences on the young men.

       A similar room was opened in the First Ward by the kind aid of the late Mr. J. Cowper Lord, and the good influences of the place have been much increased by the exertions of Mr. D. E. Hawley and a committee of gentlemen.

       There are other reading-rooms connected with the Boys' Lodging-houses. Most of them are doing an invaluable work; the First-Ward room especially being a centre for cricket-clubs and various social reunions of the laboring-classes, and undoubtedly saving great numbers of young men from the most dangerous temptations. Mr. Hawley has inaugurated here also a very useful course of popular lectures to the laboring-people.

       The reading-rooms connected with Boys' Lodging-houses, though sometimes doing well, are not uniformly successful, perhaps from the fact that working-men do not like to be associated with homeless boys.

       Besides those connected with the Children's Aid Society, the City Mission and various churches have founded others, so that now the free reading-room is recognized, as one of the means for improving the "dangerous classes," as much as the Sunday-school, chapel, or mission.

C. L. BRACE.       

AS the work of charity we have been describing went on, the peculiar causes of the misery and homelessness and crime of children became more apparent.

       Of course, first of all came Intemperance. The power of the appetite for alcoholic stimulus is something amazing. A laboring-man feels it especially, on account of the drag on his nervous system of steady and monotonous labor, and because of the few mental stimuli which he enjoys. He returns to his tenement-house after a hard day's work, "dragged out," and craving excitement; his rooms are disagreeable; perhaps his wife cross, or slatternly, and his children noisy; he has an intense desire for something which can take him out of all this, and cause his dull surroundings and his fatigue to be forgotten. Alcohol does this; moreover, he can bear alcohol and tobacco, to retard the waste of muscle, as a sedentary man cannot. In a few steps, he can find jolly companions, a lighted and warmed room, a newspaper, and, above all, a draught which, for the moment, can change poverty to riches, and drive care and labor and the thought of all his burdens and annoyances far away.

       The liquor-shop is his picture-gallery, club, reading-room, and social salon, at once. His glass is the magic transmuter of care to cheerfulness, of penury to plenty, of a low, ignorant, worried life, to an existence for the moment buoyant, contented, and hopeful. Alas! that the magician who thus, for the instant, transforms him with her rod, soon returns him to his low estate, with ten thousand curses haunting him. The one thus touched by the modern Circe is not even imbruted, for the brutes have no such appetite; he becomes a demonized man; all the treasures of life are trampled under his feet, and he is fit only to dwell "among the tombs." But, while labor is what it is, and the liquor-shop alone offers sociality and amusement to the poor, alcohol will still possess this overwhelming attraction. The results in this climate, and under the form of alcoholic stimulus offered here, are terrible beyond all computation. The drunkards' homes are the darkest spots even in the abyss of misery in every large city. Here the hearts of young women are truly broken, and they seek their only consolation in the same magic cup; here children are beaten, or maimed, or half-starved, until they run away to join the great throng of homeless street-rovers in our large towns, and grow up to infest society. From these homes radiate misery, grief, and crime. They are the nests in which the young fledglings of misfortune and vice begin their flight. Probably two-thirds of the crimes of every city (and a very large portion of its poverty) come from the over-indulgence of this appetite. As an appetite, we do not believe it can ever be eradicated from the human race.

       The effort fer total abstinence has been, indeed, an untold blessing to the working-class in this country and many parts of Europe. It may be said, in many regions, to have broken the wand of the terrible enchantress. It has introduced a new social habit in drinking. It has connected abstinence with the ceremonial of religion and the pleasures of social organizations. It has addressed the working-man — as, in fact, he often is — as a child, and saved him from his own habits, by a sworn abstinence. Thousands of men could never have freed themselves from this most tyrannical appetite, except by absolute refusal to touch. In fact, it may be said that no vice is ever abandoned by gradual steps. The only hope for any one under the control of any wrong indulgence, is in entire and immediate abandonment.

       With those, too, who had not fallen under the sway of this appetite, especially if of the working-class, abstinence was the safest rule.

       The "Temperance Reform" in this country, in Great Britain, and in Sweden, was one of the happiest events that ever occurred in the history of the working-classes. Its blessings will descend through many generations. But in its nature, it could not last. It was a tremendous reaction against the heavy and excessive drinking of fifty years since. It was a kind of noble asceticism. Like all asceticism, it could not continue as a permanent condition. Its power is now much spent. Wherever it can be introduced now among the laboring-classes, it should be; and we believe one of the especial services of the Irish Catholic clergy, at this day, to the world, is in supporting and encouraging this great reform.

       All who study the lower classes are beginning, however, now to look for other remedies of the evil of intemperance.

       It has become remarkably apparent, during the last few years, that one of the best modes of driving out low tastes in the masses is to introduce higher. It has been found that galleries and museums and parks are the most formidable rivals of the liquor-shops. The experience near the Sydenham Palace, in England, and other places of instructive and pleasant resort for the laboring-masses is, that drinking-saloons do not flourish in opposition. Wherever, in the evening, a laboring-man can saunter in a pleasant park, or, in company with his wife and family, look at interesting pictures, or sculpture, or objects of curiosity, he has not such a craving for alcoholic stimulus.

       Even open-air drinking in a garden — as is so common on the Continent — is never so excessive as in an artificial-lighted room. Where, too, a working-man can, in a few steps, find a cheerful-lighted reading-room with society or papers, or where a club is easily open to him without drinking, it will also be found that he ceases to frequent the saloon, and almost loses his taste for strong drink.

       Whatever elevates the taste of the laborer, or expands his mind, or innocently amuses him, or passes his time pleasantly without indulgence, or agreeably instructs, or provides him with virtuous associations, tends at once to guard him from habits of intoxication.

       The Kensington Museum and Sydenham Palace, of London, the Cooper Union, the Central Park, and free reading-rooms, of New York, are all temperance-societies of the best kind. The great effort now is to bring this class of influences to bear on the habits of the laboring-people, and thus diminish intemperance.

       It is a remarkable fact in this connection that, though eighty out of the hundred of our children in the Industrial Schools are the children of drunkards, not one of the thousands who have gone forth from them has been known to have fallen into intemperate habits. Under the elevating influences of the school, they imperceptibly grow out of the habits of their mothers and fathers, and never acquire the appetite.

       Another matter, which is well worthy of the attention of reformers, is the possibility of introducing into those countries where "heavy drinking " prevails the taste for light wines and the habit of open-air drinking.

       The passion for alcohol is a real one. On a broad scale it cannot be annihilated. Can we not satisfy it innocently?

       In this country, for instance, light wines can be made to a vast extent, and finally be sold very cheaply. If the taste for them were formed, would it not expel the appetite for whiskey and brandy, or at least, in the coming generation, form a new habit?

       There is, it is true, a peculiar intensity in the American temperament which makes the taking of concentrated stimulus natural to it. It will need some time for men accustomed to work up their nervous system to a white heat by repeated draughts of whiskey or brandy, to be content with weak wines. Perhaps the present generation never will be. But the laws of health and morality are so manifestly on the side of drinking light wines as compared with drinking heavy liquors, that any effort at social improvement in this direction would have a fair chance of success. Even the slight change of habit involved in drinking leisurely at a table in the open air with women and children — after the German fashion — would be a great social reform over the hasty bar-drinking, while standing. The worst intoxication of this city is with the Irish and American bar-drinkers, not; the German frequenters of gardens.

       In regard to legislation, it seems to me that our recent New-York license laws were, with a few improvements, a very "happy medium" in law-making. The ground was tacitly taken, in that code, that it subserved the general interests of morality to keep one day free from riotous or public drinking, and allow the majority of the community to spend it in rest and worship; and, inasmuch as that day was one of especial temptation to the working-classes, they were to be treated to a certain degree like minors, and liquor was to be refused to them on that day.

       Under this law also, minors and apprentices, on week-days, were forbidden to be supplied with intoxicating drinks, and the liquor-shops were closed at certain hours of the night. Very properly, also, these sellers of intoxicating beverages, making enormous profits, and costing the community immensely in the expenses of crime occasioned by their trade, were heavily taxed, and paid to the city over a million dollars annually in fees, licenses, and fines. The effects of the law were admirable, in the diminution of eases of arrest and crime on the Sunday, and the checking of the ravages of intoxication.

       But it was always apparent to the writer that, with the peculiar constitution of the population of this city, it could not be sustained, unless concessions were made to the prejudices and habits of certain nationalities among our citizens. Our reformers, however, as a class, are exceedingly adverse to concessions; they look at questions of habits as absolute questions of right and wrong, and they will permit no half-way or medium ground. But legislation is always a matter of concession. We cannot make laws for human nature as it ought to be, but as it is. If we do not get the absolutely best law passed, we must content ourselves with the medium best.

       If our temperance reformers had permitted a clause in the law, excepting the drinking in gardens, or of lager-beer, from the restrictions of the license law, we should not, indeed, have had so good a state of things as we had for a few years, under the old law, but we might have had it permanently.

       Now, we have nearly lost all control over drinking, and the Sunday orgies and crimes will apparently renew themselves without check or restraint. If a reform in legislation claim too much, there is always a severe reaction possible, when the final effects will be worse than the evils sought to be corrected.

       If a student of history were reviewing the gloomy list of the evils which have most cursed mankind, which have wasted households, stained the hand of man with his fellow's blood, sown quarrels and hatreds, broken women's hearts, and ruined children in their earliest years, bred poverty and crime, he would place next to the bloody name of War the black word — INTEMPERANCE.

       No wonder that the best minds of modern times are considering most seriously the soundest means of checking it. If abstinence were the natural and only means, the noble soul would still say, in the words of Paul: "It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth."

       But abstinence is not thoroughly natural; it has no chance of a universal acceptance; and experience shows that other and wider means must be employed. We must trust to the imperceptible and widely-extended influences of civilization, of higher tastes, and more refined amusements, on the masses. We must employ the powers of education, and, above all, the boundless force of Religion, to elevate the race above the tyranny of this tremendous appetite.

C. L. BRACE.       

(THE END)