CHAPTER XV.
THE PROTESTANT POOR AND STREET-ROVERS.
It is not often that our efforts carry us among Protestant poor, but it happens that on the west side of the city, near Tenth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, is a considerable district of English and Scotch laboring people, who are mainly Protestants.
A meeting of ladies was called in the western part of the city, in like manner with the proceedings at the formation of the other Schools; and a School was proposed. The wife of a prominent property-holder in the neighborhood, a lady of great energy of character, Mrs. R. R., took a leading part, and greatly aided the undertaking; other ladies joined, and the result was the formation of the
HUDSON RIVER INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL,
the fourth of our Schools founded in 1854. With all these Schools, in the beginning, the ladies themselves raised all the funds for their support, and, as I have related, devoted an incredible amount of time to aiding in them, there being usually, however, two salaried teachers.
The experience in the Edinburgh Ragged Schools, I was assured, when there, was, that you cannot depend on volunteer help after the first enthusiasm has passed by. This is not our experience.
As one set of "volunteers" have withdrawn or leave the work, others appear, and there are still in this and some of our other Industrial Schools, most active and efficient voluntary helpers. Gradually, however, the support and supervision of the Schools fell more and more into the hands of the central authority—The Children's Aid Society.
The obtaining a share in the Common School Fund enabled the Society to do more for these useful charities and to found new ones.
In the Hudson River School, it cannot be said that the Protestant poor proved much better than the Catholic; in fact, it has often seemed to me that when a Protestant is reduced to extreme poverty, and, above all, a Yankee, he becomes the most wretched and useless of all paupers. The work and its results were similar on the west side to those in the other districts which I have already described.
"MUSCULAR ORPHANS."
Our attention had thus far been directed mainly to girls in these Industrial School efforts. They seemed the class exposed to the most terrible evils, and besides, through our other enterprises, we were sheltering, teaching, and benefiting for life vast numbers of lads.
We determined now to try the effect of industry and schooling on the roving boys, and I chose a district where we had to make head against a "sea of evils." This was in the quarter bordering on East Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. There seemed to be there a society of irreclaimable little vagabonds. They hated School with an inextinguishable hatred; they had a constitutional love for smashing windows and pilfering apple-stands. They could dodge an "M. P." as a fox dodges a hound; they disliked anything so civilized as a bed-chamber, but preferred old boxes and empty barns, and when they were caught it required a very wide-awake policeman, and such an Asylum-yard as hardly exists in New York, to keep them.
I have sometimes stopped, admiringly, to watch the skill and cunning with which the little rascals, some not more than ten years old, would diminish a load of wood left on the docks; the sticks were passed from one to another, and the lad nearest the pile was apparently engaged eagerly in playing marbles. If the woodman's attention was called to his loss, they were off like a swarm of cockroaches.
[Illustration: STREET ARABS.]
We opened a School with all the accessories for reaching and pleasing them; our teacher was a skillful mechanic, a young man of excellent judgment and hearty sympathy with boys; he offered to teach them carpentering and box-making and pay them wages. Common-school lessons were given, also, and a good warm meal provided at noon. We had festivals and magic-lantern exhibitions and lectures. We taught, and we fed and clothed. In return, they smashed our windows; they entered the premises at night and carried off everything they could find; they howled before the door, and yelled "Protestant School!" We arrested one or two for the burglary, as a warning, but the little flibbertigibbets escaped from the police like rats, and we let them go with the fright they had had. Some few of the worst we induced to go to the country, and others we had arrested as vagrants, without appearing ourselves, until a kind of dark suspicion spread among them against the writer that he had the power of spiriting away bad boys to distant regions by some mysterious means. Those that did go to the country proved of the kind called by a Western paper "muscular orphans," for an unfortunate employer undertaking to administer corporal punishment to two of them, the little vagabonds turned and chastised him and then fled.
The following case is noted in our Journal of these up-town boys:
A HARD CASE REFORMED.
"MR. BRACE—Dear Sir: You request me to send you some reminiscences of the early life of Michael S——n. My most vivid recollection of him is his taking the broomstick to me once, as I was about to punish him for some misdemeanor. Being the first and last of my pupils who ever attempted anything of the kind, it stands out in bold relief in my memory. I soon conquered the broomstick, but on the first opportunity he ran out, thus ending his Industrial School career.
"His most marked characteristic was a desire to travel, and he presented himself with the freedom of the city at a very early age, going off for weeks at a time, sleeping in entries and around engine-houses, and disdaining bolts and bars when they were turned upon him. One of your visitors calling to consult with his mother as to what could be done with him, found him vigorously kicking the panels out of the door, she having locked him in for safe-keeping till she came home from work. The Captain of Police, tired of having him brought in so frequently, thought one day of a punishment that he expected would effectually frighten him, which was—to hang him. His mother consenting, he was solemnly hung up by the feet to a post, till he promised reformation. This failing to produce the desired effect, she placed him with "the Brothers," who put him in a kind of prison, where he had to be chained by the leg to prevent him from scaling the walls. Taking him from there, after some months of pretty severe discipline, he very soon went back to his old habits, when she had him sent to Randall's Island. Here he was discovered in a plan to swim to the opposite shore (something of a feat for a boy of twelve). Fearing he would attempt it and be drowned, she took him away and put him in the Juvenile Asylum, where he remained several months, and finally seemed so much tamed down that she ventured on taking him out and sending him to a place which you procured for him at Hastings. But, pretty soon, the ruling passion, strong as ever, took possession of him, and he started on a tour through the surrounding villages.
"Being brought home again, he told his mother very deliberately, one morning, that she need not expect him home any more; he was going to live with a soldier's wife. Knowing that if he went he would be in a very den of wickedness, she came to the resolution to give him to your care, and let him be sent to the West.
"It would require a volume to tell of all his freaks and wanderings; his scaling of fences, and breaking out of impossible places. Towards the last of his New York life he began to add other vices to his original stock—such as drinking, smoking, and swearing; yet strange to say, he disdained to lie, and was never known to steal; and his face would glow with satisfaction when he could take charge of an infant. His mother hears, with trembling hope, the good accounts of him from the West, scarcely daring to believe that her wild and vagrant son will ever make a steady, useful man. "Truly yours, "Mrs. E. S. Hurley."
The young rovers gradually became softened and civilized under the combined influences of warm dinners, carpentering, and good teaching; but we found the difficulty to be that we did not have sufficient hold over them out of school hours; we needed more appliances for such habitual vagabonds. What was wanted was a Lodging-house and all its influences, as well as School, for the former gives a greater control than does a simple Industrial School.
We accordingly transferred the whole enterprise to a still worse quarter, where I had done my first work in visiting, and which I thoroughly knew, the region on East River, at the foot of Eleventh Street. Here was a numerous band of similar boys, who slept anywhere, and lived by petty pilferings from the iron-works and wood-yards and by street jobs.
In this place we combined our carpenters' shop with Day-school, Night-school, Reading-room, and Lodging-house, and exerted thus a variety of influences over the "Arabs," which soon began to reform and civilize them. Here we had no difficulties, and made a steady progress as we had done everywhere else.
At present, some gentle female teachers guide the Industrial School. We have dropped the carpentering, as what the boys need is the habit of industry and a primary school-training more than a trade; and we have found that a refined woman can influence these rough little vagabonds even more than a man.
Subsequently, another school was founded in the quarter from which we removed this, and is now held in East Thirty-fourth Street.
One of the benefactions which we hope for in the future is the erection of a suitable building for a Lodging-house, Reading-room, Day-school, and Mission, in the miserable quarter on East River, near Thirty-fourth Street.