The Children of the Poor Part 13

CHAPTER XV.

PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM

In spite of all this labor and effort, in the face of the fact that half of the miseries of society are at last acknowledged to be due to the sundering of the home-tie in childhood, and that therefore the remedy lies in restoring it, where that can be done, as early as possible, we have in New York a city of mighty inst.i.tutions, marshalling a standing army of nearly or quite sixteen thousand children, year in and year out.[27] Homes they are sometimes called; but too many of them are not homes in the saving sense. Those are, that are merely half-way houses to the ultimate family home that shall restore to the child what it has lost. Failing in that, they become public tenements, with most of the bad features of the tenement left out, but the worst retained: the smothering of the tenant's individuality. He is saved from becoming a tough to become an automaton.

It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that makes the pauper. It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that marshals the greater part of this army. Money backed up by pharisaical sectarianism. Where two such powerful factors combine, politics is never far in the rear, though modestly invisible to the naked eye. To this irresponsible combination--conspiracy it might be called without stretching the point far--the care of the defenceless child that comes upon the public for support has been handed over without check or control of any sort. Worse, a premium has been put upon his coming, upon child desertion in our community. What are the causes of this?

They have been stated often and urgently enough by those whose great experience gave weight to their arguments. Clothed in legal phrase, they may be found summed up in the law of 1875, which ordains that a dependent child shall be committed to an inst.i.tution controlled by persons of the same religious faith as its parents, when that can be done, and that the county shall pay the child's board. It was a tremendous bid for child pauperism, and poverty, ignorance, and greed were not slow to respond.

Under this so-called "religious clause," the number of children thrown upon the county, in New York City alone, was swelled, between 1875 and 1890, from 9.363 to 16.358, this statement including only the twenty-nine inst.i.tutions that can demand or do receive public money toward their support. Some of them, that have come into existence since it was pa.s.sed, were directly created by the law. It was natural that this should be so, "because it provided exactly the care which parents desired for their children, that of persons of their own religious faith, and supplied ample means for the children's support; while, although the funds were to be derived from public sources, yet since the inst.i.tutions were to be managed by private persons, the stigma which fortunately attaches to _public_ relief was removed. Thus every incentive to parents to place their children upon the public for support was created by the provisions of the law, and every deterrent was removed; for the law demanded nothing from the parent in return for the support of the child, and did not deprive him of any of his rights over the child, although relieving him of every duty toward it."[28] But New York City went a step further, by having special laws pa.s.sed securing a stated income from the money raised by local taxation to nine of its largest inst.i.tutions. This is where the trail of the politician might perhaps be traced with an effort. The amount drawn by the nine in 1890 was nearly a million dollars, while the total so expended footed up in that year over sixteen hundred thousand dollars. New York City to-day supports one dependent child to each one hundred of its population, and the tax levied, directly and indirectly, for the purpose is about a dollar a head for every man, woman, and child in the city. The State in 1888 supported one child to every 251 of its population. The State of California, which had also gone into the wholesale charity business, supported one dependent child to every 290 of its population, while Michigan, which had gone out of it, taking her children out of the poor-houses and sending them to a State public school, with the proviso that thenceforth parents surrendering their children to be public charges should lose all rights over or to their custody, services, or earnings, had only 1 to every 10,000 of its people.[29]

That proviso cut the matter to the quick. The law declared the school to be a "temporary home for dependent children, where they shall be detained only until they can be placed in family homes." That is a very different thing from the inst.i.tution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns, and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. To what extent these things are done in New York may be inferred from the statement of the Superintendent of the Juvenile Asylum, which contains an average of a thousand children, that three-fourths of the inmates could not be sent to free homes in the West because their relatives would not consent to their going.[30] It was only last summer that my attention was attracted, while on a visit to this Juvenile Asylum, to a fine-looking little fellow who seemed much above the average of the cla.s.s in which I found him. On inquiring as to the causes that had brought him to that place, I was shocked to find that he was the son of a public official, well-known to me, whose income from the city's treasury was sufficient not only to provide for the support of his family, but to enable him to gratify somewhat expensive private tastes as well. The boy had been there two years, during which time the Asylum had drawn for his account from the public funds about $240, at the per capita rate of $110 for each inmate and his share of the school money. His father, when I asked him why the boy was there, told me that it was because he would insist upon paying unauthorized visits to his grandmother in the country. There was no evidence that he was otherwise unmanageable. Seeing my surprise, he put the question, as if that covered the ground: "Well, now! where would you put him in a better place?" It was a handsome compliment to the Asylum, which as a reform school it perhaps deserved; but it struck me, all the same, that he could hardly have put him in a worse place, on all accounts.

I do not know how many such cases there were in the Asylum then. I hope not many. But it is certain that our public inst.i.tutions are full of children who have parents amply able, but unwilling, to support them. From time to time enough such cases crop out to show how common the practice is. Reference to cases 59,703, 59,851, and 60,497 in the report of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1892), will discover some striking instances that were ferreted out by the Society's officers.

All of the offenders were in thriving business. One of them kept a store in Newark--in another State--and was not even a resident of the city. He merely "honored it with the privilege of paying his children's boarding-school expenses in the inst.i.tution." They were all Italians.

These people seem to consider that it is their right to thus feed at the public crib. Perhaps it is the first quickening of the seed of munic.i.p.al politics that sprouts so energetically among them in the slums, under the teaching of their Irish patrons.

When Mrs. Lowell inspected the New York City inst.i.tutions in 1889, she found "that of 20,384 individual children sheltered in them, 4,139 had been that year returned to parents or friends, that is, to the persons who had given them up to be paupers; that there were only 1,776 orphans among them, and 4,987 half orphans, of whom 2,247 had living fathers, who presumably ought to have been made to support their children themselves."

Three years later, the imperfect returns to a circular inquiry sent out by the State Board of Charities, showed that of 18,556 children in inst.i.tutions in this State, 3,671, or less than twenty per cent., were orphans. The rest then had, or should have, homes. Doubtless, many were homes of which they were well rid; but all experience shows that there must have been far too many of the kind that were well rid of _them_, and to that extent the tax-payers were robbed and the parents and the children pauperized. And that even that other kind were much better off in the long run, their being in the inst.i.tution did not guarantee. Children, once for all, cannot be successfully reared in regiments within the narrow rules and the confinement of an asylum, if success is to be measured by the development of individual character. Power to regulate or shorten their stay is not vested to any practical extent or purpose in any outside agency. Within, with every benevolent desire to do the right, every interest of the inst.i.tution as a whole tends to confuse the perception of it. The more children, the more money; the fewer children, the less money.

A thousand children can be more economically managed for $110,000 than five hundred for half the money. The fortieth annual report of the Juvenile Asylum (1891) puts it very plainly, in this statement on page 23: "Until the capacity of the Asylum was materially increased, an annual deficit ranging between $5,000 and $10,000 had to be covered by appeals to private contributors." Now, it runs not only the New York house but its Western agency as well on its income.

The city pays the bills, but exercises no other control over the inst.i.tutions. It does not even trouble itself with counting the children.[31] The committing magistrate consults and is guided more or less by the Officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in his choice of the inst.i.tution into which the child is put.

But both are bound by the law that imposes the "faith-test." The faith-test, as enforced by civil law anywhere, is absurd. The parents of the eighty per cent. of children in inst.i.tutions who were not orphans, split no theological hairs in ridding themselves of their support. Backed by the money sacks of a great and wealthy city, it is injurious humbug.

This is not the perfection of organized charitable effort for the rescue of the children of which I spoke, but rather the perversion of it.

It is reasonable to ask that if the public is to pay the piper, the public should have the hiring of him too. A special city officer is needed to have this matter in charge. Nearly six years ago Commissioner Lowell submitted a draft for a bill creating a department for the care of dependent children in New York City, with a commissioner at the head whose powers would have been an effective check upon the evil tendencies of the present law. But we travel slowly along the path of munic.i.p.al reform, and the commissioner is yet a dream. Some day we may wake up and find him there, and then we shall be ready, by and by, to carry out the ideal plan of placing those children, for whom free homes cannot be found, out at board in families where they shall come by their rights, denied them by inst.i.tution life. Then, too, we shall find, I think, that there is a good deal less of the problem than we thought. The managers of the Union Temporary Home in Philadelphia decided, after thirty one years of work, to close the House and put the children out to board, because experience had convinced them that "life in the average inst.i.tution is not so good for children as life in the average home." The intelligence of the conclusion, and the earnestness with which they presented it, guaranteed that their "Home" had been above the average.

"The testimony of two gentlemen on our Board of Council," they reported, "both experienced as heads of great industrial enterprises, is that inst.i.tution boys are generally the least desirable apprentices. They have been dulled in faculty, by not having been daily exercised in the use of themselves in small ways; have marched in platoons; have done everything in squads; have had all the particulars of life arranged for them; and, as a consequence, they wait for someone else to arrange every piece of work, and are never ready for emergencies, nor able to 'take hold.'" But when they came to actually board the children out, all but the parents of nine were suddenly able to take good care of them themselves, and of the rest three found a way before final arrangements were made. There were seventy children in the Home. Pauperism runs in the same ruts in New York as in Pennsylvania, and the motive power is the same--ill-spent money.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE VERDICT OF THE POTTER'S FIELD

Looking back now over the field we have traversed, what is the verdict?

Are we going backward or forward? To be standing still would be to lose ground. Nothing stands still in this community of ours, with its ever-swelling population, least of all the problem of the children of the poor. It got the start of our old indifference once, and we have had a long and wearisome race of it, running it down.

But we have run it down. We are moving forward, and indifference will not again trap us into defeat. Evidence is multiplying on every hand to show that interest in the children is increasing. The personal service, that counts for so infinitely much more than money, is more freely given day by day, and no longer as a fas.h.i.+onable fad, but as a duty too long neglected.

From the colleges young men and women are going forth to study the problem in a practical way that is full of promise. Charity is forgetting its petty jealousies and learning the lesson of organization and co-operation.

"Looking back," writes the Secretary of the Charity Organization Society, "over the progress of the last ten years, the success seems large, while looking at our hopes and aims it often seems meagre." The Church is coming up, no longer down, to its work among the poor. In the multiplication of brotherhoods and sisterhoods, of societies of Christian Endeavor, of King's Daughters, of efforts on every hand to reach the ma.s.ses, the law of love, the only law that has real power to protect the poor, is receiving fresh ill.u.s.tration day by day.

The Fresh Air Work, the Boys' Clubs, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, bear witness to it, and to the energy and resources that shall yet win the fight for us. They were born of New York's plight.

The whole world shares in the good they have wrought.

Kindergartens, industrial schools, baby nurseries are springing up everywhere. We have children's play-grounds, and we shall be getting more, if the promised small parks are yet in the future. Munic.i.p.al progress has not kept step with private benevolence, but there is progress. New schools have been built this year and others are planned. We are beginning to understand that there are other and better ways of making citizens and voters than to grind them out through the political naturalization mill at every election. If the rum power has not lost its grip, it has not tightened it, at all events, in forty years. Then there was one saloon to every 90.8 inhabitants; to-day there is one to every 236.42.[32] The streets in the tenement districts, since I penned the first lines of this book, have been paved and cleaned as never before, and new standards of decency set up for the poor who live there and for their children. Jersey Street, Poverty Gap, have disappeared, and an end has been put, for a time at least, to the foul business of refuse gathering at the dumps.

Nothing stands still in New York. Conditions change so suddenly, under the pressure of new exigencies, that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with them. The fact that it is generally business which prompts the changes for the better has this drawback, that the community, knowing that relief is coming sooner or later, gets into the habit of waiting for it to come that way as the natural one. It is not always the natural way, and though relief comes with bustle and stir at last, it is sometimes too long delayed.

Another mischievous habit, characteristic of the American people, preoccupied with so many urgent private concerns, is to rise up and pa.s.s a law that is loudly in demand, and let it go with that, as if all social evils could be cured by mere legal enactment. As a result, some of the best and most necessary laws are dead letters on our statute books. The law is there, but no one thinks of enforcing it. The beginning was made at the wrong end; but we shall reach around to the other in season.

The chief end has been gained in the recognition of the child problem as the all-important one, of the development of individual character as the strongest barrier against the evil forces of the street and the tenement.

Last year I had occasion to address a convention at the National Capital, on certain phases of city poverty and suffering, and made use of the magic lantern to enforce some of the lessons presented. The last picture put on the screen showed the open trench in the Potter's Field. When it had pa.s.sed, the Secretary of the Convention, a clergyman whose life has been given to rescue work among homeless boys, told how there had just come to join him in his work the man who had until very lately been in charge of this Potter's Field. His experience there had taught him that the waste before which he stood helpless at that end of the line, looking on without power to check or relieve, must be stopped at its source. So he had turned from the dead to the living, pledging the years that remained to him to that effort.

It struck me then, and it has seemed to me since, that this man's position to the problem was most comprehensive. The evidence of his long-range view was convincing. Society had indeed arrived at the same diagnosis some time before. Reasoning by exclusion, as doctors do in doubtful diseases, the symptoms of which are clearer than their cause, it had conjectured that if the "tough" whom it must maintain in idleness behind prison-bars, to keep him from preying upon it, was a creature of environment, not justly to blame, the community must be, for allowing him to grow up a "tough." So, in self-defence, it had turned its hand to the forming of character in proportion as it had come to own its failure to reform it. To that failure the trench in the Potter's Field bore unceasing witness. Its claim to be heard in evidence was incontestable.

Now that it has been heard, its testimony confirms the judgment that had already experience to back it. There is no longer room for doubt that with the children lies the solution of the problem of poverty, as far as it can be reached under existing forms of society and with our machinery for securing justice by government. The wisdom of generations that were dust two thousand years ago made this choice. We have been long in making it, but not too long if our travail has made it clear at last that for all time to come it must be the only safe choice. And this, whether from the standpoint of the Christian or the unbeliever, from that of humanity or mere business. If the matter is reduced to a simple sum in arithmetic, so much for so much--child-rescue, as the one way of balancing waste with gain, loss with profit, becomes the imperative duty of society, its chief bulwark against bankruptcy and wreck.

Thus, through the gloom of the Potter's Field that has levied such heavy tribute on our city in the past--even the tenth of its life--brighter skies, a new hope, are discerned beyond. They brighten even the slum tenement, and s.h.i.+ne into the home which just now we despaired of reaching by any other road than that of pulling it down. Tireless, indeed, the hands need be that have taken up this task. Flag their efforts ever so little, hard-won ground is lost, mischief done. But we are gaining, no longer losing, ground. Seen from the tenement, through the frame-work of injustice and greed that cursed us with it, the outlook seemed little less than despairing. Groping vainly, with unseeing eyes, we said: There is no way out. The children, upon whom the curse of the tenement lay heaviest, have found it for us. Truly it was said: "A little child shall lead them."

REGISTER OF CHILDREN'S CHARITIES

AS PUBLISHED BY THE CHARITY ORGANIZATION SOCIETY

In addition to the charities given here, seventy-eight churches of all denominations conduct weekly industrial and sewing cla.s.ses, generally on Sat.u.r.days, for which see the Directory of the Charity Organization Society, under Churches, where may also be found the register of thirty-two fresh-air funds not recorded below, and of some kindergartens and clubs established by various churches for the children of their congregations.

NURSERIES.

AGES RECEIVED.

AHAWATH CHESED SISTERHOOD, 71 East 3d St. 3 to 6 yrs.

BETHANY DAY NURSERY, 453 East 57th St. 2 weeks to 6 yrs.

BETH-EL SOCIETY, 355 East 62d St. 2-1/2 to 6 yrs.

BETHLEHEM DAY NURSERY, 249 East 30th St. 1 week to 7 yrs.

CHILDREN'S CHARITABLE UNION, 70 Av. D. 3 to 7 yrs.

DAY NURSERY AND BABIES' SHELTER, 118 West 21st St. 1 to 5 yrs.

eCOLE FRANcAISE GRATUITE AND SALLE D'ASILE, 69 Was.h.i.+ngton Square.

2 to 11 yrs.

EMANU-EL SISTERHOOD, 159 East 74th St. 3 to 6 yrs.

GRACE HOUSE DAY NURSERY, 94 Fourth Av. 1 to 8 yrs.

HOPE NURSERY, 226 Thompson St.