The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them

It is true that prostitution will always, in all probability, attend civilization; but so will all other sins and offenses. It may be possible, however, to diminish and control it. It is already immensely checked in this country, as compared with continental countries, partly through economical and partly through moral causes. It has been diminished among the daughters of the lowest poor in this city by the "Industrial Schools." Why should it be increased and established by legal recognition?

We admit that the present condition of the whole matter in New York is terrible. The humanity and science which ought to minister to the prostitute as freely as to any other class, are refused to her by the public, unless she apply as a pauper. The consequence is, that the fearful diseases which follow this offense, like avenging Furies, have spread through not only this class of women, but have been communicated to the virtuous and innocent, and are undermining the health of society. This fact is notorious to physicians.

Now we think a reasonable "middle course" might be pursued in this matter; that, for instance, greater conveniences for medical attendance and advice in the city (and not on Blackwell's Island) might be afforded by our authorities to this class, both as a matter of humanity and as a safeguard to the public health. If there was a hospital or a dispensary for such cases within the city, it would avoid the disgrace and publicity of each patient reporting herself to the court as a pauper, and then being sent to the Island Hospital. Hundreds more would present themselves for attendance and treatment than do now, and the public health be proportionately improved. No moral sanction would thus be given to this demoralizing and degrading business. The simple duties of humanity would be performed.

The advocates of the license system would still reply, however, that such a hospital would not meet the evil; that Law only can separate the sickly from the healthy, and thus guard society from the pestilence; and the only law which could accomplish this would be a strict system of license. The friend of public order, however, would urge that a wise legislator cannot consider physical well-being alone: he must regard also the moral tendencies of laws; and the influence of a license system for prostitution is plainly toward recognizing this offense as legal or permissible. It removes indirectly one of the safeguards of virtue.

Perhaps the reductio ad absurdum in the relation of the State with a criminal class, and of the Church with the State, was never so absurdly shown as in the Berlin license laws for prostitutes, twenty years since. According to these, in their final result, no woman could be a prostitute who had not partaken of the communion! – that is, the Schein, or license, was never given to this business any more than to any other, except on evidence of the person's having been "confirmed," or being a member of the State Church, that is, a citizen! This classing, however, the trade of prostitution with peddling, or any other business needing a license, did not in the least tend, so far as we have ever heard, to elevate the women, or save them from moral and mental degradation. On the contrary, the universal law of Providence that man or woman must live by labor, and that any unnatural substitute for it saps and weakens all power and vigor, applies to this class in Continental cities as much as here. Without doubt, too, wherever the Germanic races are, no degree of legalizing this traffic can utterly do away with the public sentence of scorn against the female participants in it; and the contempt of the virtuous naturally depresses the vicious.

The "public woman" has a far greater chance of recovery in France or Italy than in Germany, England, or America. Still, the wise legislator, though regretting the depression which this public sentiment causes to the vicious classes, cannot but value it as a safeguard of virtue, and will be very cautious how he weakens it by legislation.

There is, no doubt, some force in the position that the non-licensing of these houses is in some degree a terror to the community, and that the cautious and prudent are kept from the offense through fear of possible consequences in disease and infection. This, however, does not seem to us an object which legislators can hold before them as compared with the duties of humanity in curing and preventing disease and pestilence. They have nothing to do with adding to the natural penalties of sin, or with punishing sinners. They are concerned only with human law. But they have the right, and, as it seems to us, the duty, so to legislate as not to encourage so great an evil as this of prostitution. And licensing, it seems to us, has that tendency. It certainly has had it in Paris, where it has been tried to its full extent, and surely no one could claim the population of that city as a model to any nation, whether in physical or moral power.

Bad as London is in this matter – not, however, so much through defect of licensing as through want of a proper street-police – we do not believe there is so wide-spread a degradation among poor women as in Berlin.

New York, in our judgment, is superior to any great city in its smaller prostitute class, and the virtue of its laboring poor. Something of this, of course, is due to our superior economical conditions; something to the immense energy and large means thrown into our preventive agencies, but much also to the public opinion prevailing in all classes in regard to this vice. Our wealthy classes, we believe, and certainly our middle classes, have a higher sentiment in regard to the purity both of man and woman than any similar classes in the civilized world. More persons relatively marry, and marriages are happier. This is equally true of the upper laboring classes. If it is not true of the lowest poor, this results from two great local evils – Overcrowding, and the bad influences of Emigration. Still, even with these, the poor of New York compare favorably in virtue with those of Paris, Berlin, or Vienna. Now, how large a part of the public opinion which thus preserves both ends of society from vice may be due to the fact that we have not recognized the greatest offense against purity by any permissive legislation? The business is still regarded, in law, as outside of good morals and not even to be tacitly allowed by license.

CHAPTER XII

THE BEST PREVENTIVE OF VICE AMONG CHILDREN

INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS

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

Along with our effort for homeless boys, I early attempted to found a comprehensive organization of Schools for the needy and ragged little girls of the city.

Though our Free Schools are open to all, experience has taught that vast numbers of children are so ill-clothed and destitute that they are ashamed to attend these excellent places of instruction; or their mothers are obliged to employ them during parts of the day; or they are begging, or engaged in street occupations, and will not attend, or, if they do, attend very irregularly. Very many are playing about the docks or idling in the streets.

Twenty years ago, nothing seemed to check this evil. Captain Matsell, in the celebrated report I have alluded to, estimated the number of vagrant children as 10,000, and subsequently in later years, the estimate was as high as 30,000. The commitments for vagrancy were enormous, reaching in one year (1857), for females alone, 3,449; in 1859, 5,778; and in 1860, 5,880. In these we have not the exact number of children, but it was certainly very large.

What was needed to check crime and vagrancy among young girls was some

School of Industry and Morals, adapted for the class.

Many were ashamed to go to the Public Schools; they were too irregular for their rules. They needed some help in the way of food and clothing, much direct moral instruction and training in industry; while their mothers required to be stimulated by earnest appeals to their consciences to induce them to school them at all. Agents must be sent around to gather the children, and to persuade the parents to educate their offspring. It was manifest that the Public Schools were not adapted to meet all these wants, and indeed the mingling of any eleemosynary features in our public educational establishments would have been injudicious. As our infant Society had no funds, my effort was to found something at first by outside help, with the hope subsequently of obtaining a permanent support for the new enterprises, and bringing them under the supervision of the parent Society.

The agencies which we sought to found were the INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS, which

I shall now attempt to describe.

Each one of these humble charities has a history of its own – a history known only to the poor – of sacrifice, patience, and labor.

Some of the most gifted women of New York, of high position and fortune, as well as others of remarkable character and education, have poured forth without stint their services of love in connection with these ministrations of charity.

THE WILSON SCHOOL

The School to which allusion has already been made on page 83, as growing out of the Boys' Meeting in Sixth Street, and afterwards in Avenue D, was the first of these Schools, and owes its origin especially to a lady of great executive power, Mrs. Wilson, wife of the Rev. Dr. Wilson. It has always been an exceedingly successful and efficient School. It was formed in February, 1853, the writer assisting in its organization, and was carried on outside of the Society whose history I am sketching.

THE ROOKERIES OF THE FOURTH WARD – A REMEDY

In visiting from lane to lane and house to house in our poorest quarters, I soon came to know one district which seemed hopelessly given over to vice and misery – the region radiating out from or near to Franklin Square, especially such streets as Cherry, Water, Dover, Roosevelt, and the neighboring lanes. Here were huge barracks – one said to contain some 1,500 persons – underground cellars, crowded with people, and old rickety houses always having "a double" on the rear lot, so as more effectually to shut out light and air. Here were as many liquor-shops as houses, and those worst dens of vice, the "Dance-Saloons," where prostitution was in its most brazen form, and the unfortunate sailors were continually robbed or murdered. Nowhere in the city were so many murders committed, or was every species of crime so rife. Never, however, in this villainous quarter, did I experience the slightest annoyance in my visits, nor did any one of the ladies who subsequently ransacked every den and hole where a child could shelter itself. My own attention was early arrested by the number of wild ragged little girls who were flitting about through these lanes; some with basket and poker gathering rags, some apparently seeking chances of stealing, and others doing errands for the dance-saloons and brothels, or hanging about their doors. The police were constantly arresting them as "vagrants," when the mothers would beg them off from the good-natured Justices, and promise to train them better in future. They were evidently fast training, however, for the most abandoned life. It seemed me if I could only get the refinement, education, and Christian enthusiasm of the better classes fairly to work here among these children, these terrible evils might be corrected at least for the next generation.

I accordingly went about from house to house among ladies whom I had known, and, representing the condition of the Ward, induced them to attend a meeting of ladies to be held at the house of a prominent physician, whose wife had kindly offered her rooms.

For some months I had attempted to prepare the public mind for these labors by incessant writing for the daily papers, by lectures and by sermons in various pulpits. Experience soon showed that the most effective mode of making real the condition of the poorest class, was by relating incidents from real life which continually presented themselves.

The rich and fortunate had hardly conceived the histories of poverty, suffering, and loneliness which were constantly passing around them.

The hope and effort of the writer was to connect the two extremes of society in sympathy, and carry the forces of one class down to lift up the other. For this two things were necessary – one to show the duty which Christ especially teaches of sacrifice to the poor for His sake, and the value which He attaches to each human soul; and the other to free the whole, as much as possible, from any sectarian or dogmatic character. Nothing but "the enthusiasm of humanity" inspired by Christ could lead the comfortable and the fastidious to such disagreeable scenes and hard labors as would meet them here. It was necessary to feel that many comforts most be foregone, and much leisure given up, for this important work. Very unpleasant sights were to be met with, coarse people to be encountered, and rude children managed; the stern facts of filth, vice, and crime to be dealt with.

It was not to be a mere holiday-work, or a sudden gush of sentiment; but, to be of use, it must be patiently continued, week by week, and month by month, and year by year, with some faint resemblance to that patience and love which we believed a Higher One had exercised towards us. But, with this inspiration, as carefully as possible, all dogmatic limitation must be avoided. All sects were invited to take a share in the work, and, as the efforts were necessarily directed to the most palpable and terrible evils, the means used by all would be essentially the same. Even those of no defined religious belief were gladly welcomed if they were ready to do the offices of humanity. The fact that ninety-nine hundredths of these poor people were Roman Catholics compelled us also to confine ourselves to the most simple and fundamental instructions, and to avoid, in any way, arousing religious bigotry.

In the meeting, gathered at the house of Dr. P., were prominent ladies from all the leading sects.

An address was delivered by the writer, and then a constitution presented, of the simplest nature, and an association organized and officers appointed by the ladies present. This was the foundation of the

"FOURTH WARD INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL."

In the meanwhile, we went forth through the slums of the ward, and let it be widely known that a School to teach work, and where food was given daily, and clothes were bestowed to the well-behaved, was just forming.

Our room was in the basement of a church in Roosevelt Street. Hither gathered, on a morning in December, 1853, our ladies and a flock of the most ill-clad and wildest little street-girls that could be collected anywhere in New York. They flew over the benches, they swore and fought with one another, they bandied vile language, and could hardly be tamed down sufficiently to allow the school to be opened.

Few had shoes, all were bonnetless, their dresses were torn, ragged, and dirty; their hair tangled, and faces long unwashed; they had, many of them, a singularly wild and intense expression of eye and feature, as of half-tamed creatures, with passions aroused beyond their years.

The dress and ornaments of the ladies seemed to excite their admiration greatly. It was observed that they soon hid or softened their own worst peculiarities. They evidently could not at first understand the motive which led so many of a far higher and better class to come to help them. The two regular and salaried teachers took the discipline in hand gently and firmly. The ladies soon had their little classes, each gathered quietly about the one instructing. As a general thing, the ladies took upon themselves the industrial branches – sewing, knitting, crocheting, and the like; this gave them also excellent opportunities for moral instruction, and winning the sympathy of the children.

As these ladies, many of them of remarkable character and culture, began to show the fruits of a high civilization to these poor little barbarians, the thought seemed to strike them – though hardly capable of being expressed – that here was a goodness and piety they had never known or conceived. This offspring of poverty and crime veiled their vices and bad habits before these angels. They felt a new impulse – to be worthy of their noble friends. The idea of unselfish Love dawned on their souls; they softened and became respectful. So it continued; each day the wild little beggars became more disciplined and controlled; they began to like study and industry; they were more anxious to be clean and neatly dressed; they checked their tongues, and, in some degree, their tempers; they showed affection and gratitude to their teachers; their minds awakened; most of all, their moral faculties. The truths of Religion or of morals, especially when dramatized in stories and incidents, reached them.

And no words can adequately picture the amount of loving service and patient sacrifice which was poured out by these ladies in this effort among the poor of the Fourth Ward. They never spared themselves or their means. Some came down every day to help in the school; some twice in the week; they were there in all weathers, and never wearied. Three of the number offered up their lives in these labors of humanity, and died in harness.

A most gifted intellectual family, the S – s, supplied some of our most devoted workers; the wife, since deceased, of one of our leading merchants and public men, himself a man much loved for his generosity, occupied the place of one of the Directresses; the wife of a prominent physician was our Treasurer. A young lady of fortune, since dead, Miss G., took the hardest labors upon herself. The wife of a gentleman since Governor and United States Senator, was in especial charge of the house, and dreaded no labor of humanity, however disagreeable. Two others, sisters, who represented one of our most honored historical families, but whose characters needed no help of genealogy to make them esteemed by all, threw themselves into the work with characteristic earnestness. Another of that family, which has furnished the pioneer of all reform-work among the youthful criminals, and in criminal law, and which in the early days of our history so often led public affairs, visited from house to house among the miserable poor of the ward, and twice found herself face to face with small-pox in its most virulent form.

The effects of this particular School upon the morals of the juvenile population of the Fourth Ward were precisely what they have always been in similar schools. These little girls, who might be said to be almost the inmates of the brothels, and who grew up in an atmosphere of crime and degradation, scarcely ever, when mature, joined the ranks of their sisters and neighbors. Though living in the same houses with the gay dance-saloons, they avoided them as they would pestilential places. Trained to industry and familiar with the modest and refined appearance of pure women in the schools, they had no desire for the society of these bold girls, or to earn their living in this idle and shameful manner. They felt the disgrace of the abandoned life around them, and were soon above it. Though almost invariably the children of drunkards, they did not inherit the appetites of their mothers, or if they did, their new training substituted higher and stronger desires. They were seldom known to have the habit of drinking as they grew up. Situations were continually found for them in the country, or they secured places for themselves as servants in respectable families; and, becoming each day more used to better circumstances and more neatly dressed, they had little desire to visit their own wretched homes and remain in their families. Now and then there would be a fall from virtue among them, but the cases were very few indeed. As they grew up they married young mechanics or farmers, and were soon far above the class from which they sprang. Such were the fruits in general of the patient, self-denying labors of these ladies in the Fourth Ward School.

One most self-sacrificing and heroic man, a physician, Dr. Robert Ray, devoted his education and something of his fortune to these benevolent efforts, and died while in the harness. Singularly enough, I never knew, in twenty years' experience, an instance of one of these volunteer teachers contracting any contagious disease in these labors, though repeatedly they have entered tenement rooms where virulent typhoid or small-pox cases were being tended. They made it a rule generally to bathe and change their clothing after their work.

For a more exact account of the results of the Fourth-Ward labors, it is difficult to obtain precise statistics. But when we know from the Prison Reports that soon after the opening of this school there were imprisoned 3,449 female vagrants of all ages, and that last year (1870), when the little girls who then attended such schools would have matured, there were only 671; or when we observe that the Prison in that neighborhood inclosed 3,172 female vagrants in 1861 and only 339 in 1871, we may be assured that the sacrifices made in that Ward have not been without their natural fruit.

Extracts from our Journal:

A VISIT IN THE FOURTH WARD

"We Started out a wintry afternoon to see some of our scholars in the Industrial School of the Fourth Ward. A number of ragged little girls, disdaining to enter, were clustered about the door of the School. As they caught a glimpse of some one coming out, the cry of 'Lie low! lie low!' passed among them, and they were off, capering about in the snow-storm like so many little witches.

"We passed up Oak Street and Cherry. Here is the entrance, a narrow doorway on the side. Wind through this dark passage and you are at the door of a little back room; it is the home of a German rag-picker who has a child in the school. A filthy, close room, with a dark bedroom; there is one window, and a small stove, and two or three chairs. The girl is neat and healthy-looking. 'I pick rags, sir,' says the mother, 'and I can't send her to Public School. I am away all day, and she would have to be in the streets, and it's very hard to live this winter. It's been a great help to send her to that school.' I told her we wanted none who could go to Public School, but if it was so with her she might continue to send. A miserable hole for a home, and yet the child looked neatly.

"Here, beyond, is an old house. We climb the shaking stairs, up to the attic – a bare front room with one roof-window. The only furniture a bed and stove and a broken chair. Very chill and bare, but the floor is well swept. A little humpbacked child is reading away very busily by the light of the scuttle window, and another is cleaning up the floor. The mother is an Irish woman. 'Shure! an' its nivir none of the schools I could sind 'em to. I had no clo'es or shoes for 'em and, it's the truth, I am jist living, an' no more. Could ye help us? We told her we meant to help her by helping her children, and asked about the little deformed one. 'Och! she is sich a swate won! She always larned very quick since her accidint, and I used to think, maybe she wont live, and God will take her away – she was so steady and good. Yes, I am thankful to those ladies for what they are teaching her. She never had no chance before. God bless ye, gintlemen!'