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

by Charles Loring Brace

The Free School under our system does not need any influence from the Church. The American trusts to the separate sects to take care of the religious interests of the children. We separate utterly Church and State. There may be evils from this; but they are less than the danger of destroying our system of popular education by the contests of rival sects. We know how long every effort to secure popular education for England has been wrecked on this rock of Sectarianism.

We behold the fearful harvest of evils which she is reaping from the ignorance of the masses, especially induced by the oppositions of sects, who preferred no education for the people to education without their own dogmas.

We desire to avoid these calamities, and we can best do this by making every reasonable concession to ignorance and prejudice.

Give us the Free Schools without Religion, rather than no Free Schools at all!

CHAPTER XXXVI.

DECREASE OF JUVENILE CRIME IN NEW YORK.

THE COST OF PUNISHMENT AND PREVENTION.

Very few people have any just appreciation of the comparative cost of punishment and prevention in the treatment of crime. The writer recalls one out of many thousand instances in his experience, which strikingly illustrates the contrast

THE BROTHERS.

A number of years ago, three boys (brothers), the oldest perhaps seventeen, applied at the Newsboys' Lodging-house of this city for shelter. It was soon suspected that the eldest was a thief, employing the younger as assistants in his nefarious business. The younger lads finally confessed the fact, and the older brother left them to be taken care of in the Lodging-house. After a sufficient period of training, the two brothers were sent to a farmer in Illinois. They were faithful and hard-working, and soon began to earn money. When the war broke out they enlisted, and served with credit. At the close they passed through New York, and visited the superintendent while returning to their village, having already purchased a farm with their wages and bounty-money. They are now well-to-do, respectable farmers.