Twenty years ago, nothing seemed to check this evil. Captain Matsell, in the celebrated report I have alluded to, estimated the number of vagrant children as 10,000, and subsequently in later years, the estimate was as high as 30,000. The commitments for vagrancy were enormous, reaching in one year (1857), for females alone, 3,449; in 1859, 5,778; and in 1860, 5,880. In these we have not the exact number of children, but it was certainly very large.
What was needed to check crime and vagrancy among young girls was some
School of Industry and Morals, adapted for the class.
Many were ashamed to go to the Public Schools; they were too irregular for their rules. They needed some help in the way of food and clothing, much direct moral instruction and training in industry; while their mothers required to be stimulated by earnest appeals to their consciences to induce them to school them at all. Agents must be sent around to gather the children, and to persuade the parents to educate their offspring. It was manifest that the Public Schools were not adapted to meet all these wants, and indeed the mingling of any eleemosynary features in our public educational establishments would have been injudicious. As our infant Society had no funds, my effort was to found something at first by outside help, with the hope subsequently of obtaining a permanent support for the new enterprises, and bringing them under the supervision of the parent Society.
The agencies which we sought to found were the INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS, which
I shall now attempt to describe.
Each one of these humble charities has a history of its own—a history known only to the poor—of sacrifice, patience, and labor.
Some of the most gifted women of New York, of high position and fortune, as well as others of remarkable character and education, have poured forth without stint their services of love in connection with these ministrations of charity.
THE WILSON SCHOOL.
The School to which allusion has already been made on page 83, as growing out of the Boys' Meeting in Sixth Street, and afterwards in Avenue D, was the first of these Schools, and owes its origin especially to a lady of great executive power, Mrs. Wilson, wife of the Rev. Dr. Wilson. It has always been an exceedingly successful and efficient School. It was formed in February, 1853, the writer assisting in its organization, and was carried on outside of the Society whose history I am sketching.
THE ROOKERIES OF THE FOURTH WARD—A REMEDY.
In visiting from lane to lane and house to house in our poorest quarters, I soon came to know one district which seemed hopelessly given over to vice and misery—the region radiating out from or near to Franklin Square, especially such streets as Cherry, Water, Dover, Roosevelt, and the neighboring lanes. Here were huge barracks—one said to contain some 1,500 persons—underground cellars, crowded with people, and old rickety houses always having "a double" on the rear lot, so as more effectually to shut out light and air. Here were as many liquor-shops as houses, and those worst dens of vice, the "Dance-Saloons," where prostitution was in its most brazen form, and the unfortunate sailors were continually robbed or murdered. Nowhere in the city were so many murders committed, or was every species of crime so rife. Never, however, in this villainous quarter, did I experience the slightest annoyance in my visits, nor did any one of the ladies who subsequently ransacked every den and hole where a child could shelter itself. My own attention was early arrested by the number of wild ragged little girls who were flitting about through these lanes; some with basket and poker gathering rags, some apparently seeking chances of stealing, and others doing errands for the dance-saloons and brothels, or hanging about their doors. The police were constantly arresting them as "vagrants," when the mothers would beg them off from the good-natured Justices, and promise to train them better in future. They were evidently fast training, however, for the most abandoned life. It seemed me if I could only get the refinement, education, and Christian enthusiasm of the better classes fairly to work here among these children, these terrible evils might be corrected at least for the next generation.