The most graphic description ever given of a waif came from the lips of John Morrissey.[94] He said of himself,
“I was, at the age of seven years, thrown a waif upon the streets of Dublin. I slept in alleys and under sidewalks. I disputed with other waifs the possession of a crust. We fought like young savages for the garbage that fell from the basket of the scullion. The strongest won and satisfied the cravings of hunger; the weakest starved. I had no idea that anything was to be gained by other means than brute force. Hence my code of moral and political ethics—the strongest man is the best man. I became a pugilist.”
[94] A noted pugilist, proprietor of gambling-houses in New York City and at Saratoga Springs, and a politician who represented a New York City district in Congress.
The substantial citizen who passes the street waif with contempt should reflect that ten or a dozen years later he will meet him, a full-grown man, at the polls, still clothed in rags, perhaps, but his peer in all the rights of citizenship. It was the unfortunates of the dark alleys and noxious streets of New York—the waifs, the savages of the John Morrissey type—that made Tweedism[95] possible, that made robbery in the name of law possible, that made taxation the equivalent of confiscation in that city.
[95] For an account of the career of William Marcy Tweed, see “The American Cyclopædia,” Vol. XVI, p. 85. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1881.
Mr. Charles Dickens, in “Bleak House,” in the course of a pen-picture of a wretched quarter of London, under the name of “Tom-all-alones,” shows how ignorance, poverty, and vice react upon society. He says, “There is not an atom of Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing but shall work its retribution through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high.”
The presence of the poison is already shown in the failure of justice. These waifs, grown to man’s estate, but destitute of education and moral principle, wielding the power of the ballot, desecrate the jury-room with their vile presence, and tug at the skirts of sheriffs, prosecuting officers, and judges, and notorious criminals escape punishment! So grievous has the abuse become that Judge Lynch has opened his summary, awful court in almost every State of the Union.
To say that this class menaces the government with destruction is to state it mildly. In every case of the failure of justice the government is in part subverted; for when crime goes unpunished, the law, violated in that particular instance, becomes a dead letter; and when lynching shall have become the rule, and the execution of the law the exception, government by law will have ceased to exist—it will have given way to government by force. Then the army will be invoked to shoot down the men for whose education the law failed to provide, in every city of the land, as it was invoked in Pittsburg in 1877.
What are we doing to avert this danger which threatens our institutions? With the exception of here and there a weak effort on the part of a few humanitarians, as in the training school referred to, we are leaving hundreds of thousands of waifs to develop into savages, and, what is worse, savages with the power to tax civilized people! We have a system of public schools into which such children as choose may enter to a certain limit, remain as long as they please, and depart when they please. But there are thousands of children in every large city who could not enter if they would, and who are not compelled to receive the civilizing benefits of education, and who hence join the army of waifs and study the art of savagery; and, as has been remarked, they go to swell the ranks of a populace as depraved as that which in Rome cried for “bread and circuses!” and sacked the city while it was in flames.
The defective, not to say vicious character of our system of education, is shown by the reckless course of our legislators on the subject of the disposition of the public domain. William the Conqueror, conceiving that any social revolution is incomplete until it disturbs the proprietorship of land, confiscated the entire landed estates of England, and conferred what remained of the proprietary, after reservations in the Crown, upon his retainers, the Normans. Eight hundred years have elapsed since the issue of William’s land-tenure edict, but it still remains the controlling feature of the British Constitution. It has compelled the deportation of millions of Englishmen; it has reduced the masses of Scotland to a grinding poverty, and converted their country into hunting-grounds for the amusement of the landlord class; it has depopulated Ireland, and exasperated almost to madness the remnant of her people.