CHAPTER XXII.
A PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPIST AMONG THE YOUNG "ROUGHS."
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 newsboy, wide-awake and impudent, but softened by his desire to "get West;" here "a bummer," ragged, frouzy, 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 yellow-haired German boy, stranded by fortune in the city, will apply, with such honest blue eyes, that the first employer that 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 PRACTICAL 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 were 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 until 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. [Mr. Macy, on one occasion, on a bitter winter day, found the lock of the room picked and the boys within. He accused some of the larger boys. They denied, "No sir—no: it couldn't be us; because we was in the liquor-shop on the corner; we ain't got nowhere else to go to!"]
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 skin, 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.