Few had shoes, all were bonnetless, their dresses were torn, ragged, and dirty; their hair tangled, and faces long unwashed; they had, many of them, a singularly wild and intense expression of eye and feature, as of half-tamed creatures, with passions aroused beyond their years.
The dress and ornaments of the ladies seemed to excite their admiration greatly. It was observed that they soon hid or softened their own worst peculiarities. They evidently could not at first understand the motive which led so many of a far higher and better class to come to help them. The two regular and salaried teachers took the discipline in hand gently and firmly. The ladies soon had their little classes, each gathered quietly about the one instructing. As a general thing, the ladies took upon themselves the industrial branches—sewing, knitting, crocheting, and the like; this gave them also excellent opportunities for moral instruction, and winning the sympathy of the children.
As these ladies, many of them of remarkable character and culture, began to show the fruits of a high civilization to these poor little barbarians, the thought seemed to strike them—though hardly capable of being expressed—that here was a goodness and piety they had never known or conceived. This offspring of poverty and crime veiled their vices and bad habits before these angels. They felt a new impulse—to be worthy of their noble friends. The idea of unselfish Love dawned on their souls; they softened and became respectful. So it continued; each day the wild little beggars became more disciplined and controlled; they began to like study and industry; they were more anxious to be clean and neatly dressed; they checked their tongues, and, in some degree, their tempers; they showed affection and gratitude to their teachers; their minds awakened; most of all, their moral faculties. The truths of Religion or of morals, especially when dramatized in stories and incidents, reached them.
And no words can adequately picture the amount of loving service and patient sacrifice which was poured out by these ladies in this effort among the poor of the Fourth Ward. They never spared themselves or their means. Some came down every day to help in the school; some twice in the week; they were there in all weathers, and never wearied. Three of the number offered up their lives in these labors of humanity, and died in harness.
A most gifted intellectual family, the S——s, supplied some of our most devoted workers; the wife, since deceased, of one of our leading merchants and public men, himself a man much loved for his generosity, occupied the place of one of the Directresses; the wife of a prominent physician was our Treasurer. A young lady of fortune, since dead, Miss G., took the hardest labors upon herself. The wife of a gentleman since Governor and United States Senator, was in especial charge of the house, and dreaded no labor of humanity, however disagreeable. Two others, sisters, who represented one of our most honored historical families, but whose characters needed no help of genealogy to make them esteemed by all, threw themselves into the work with characteristic earnestness. Another of that family, which has furnished the pioneer of all reform-work among the youthful criminals, and in criminal law, and which in the early days of our history so often led public affairs, visited from house to house among the miserable poor of the ward, and twice found herself face to face with small-pox in its most virulent form.
The effects of this particular School upon the morals of the juvenile population of the Fourth Ward were precisely what they have always been in similar schools. These little girls, who might be said to be almost the inmates of the brothels, and who grew up in an atmosphere of crime and degradation, scarcely ever, when mature, joined the ranks of their sisters and neighbors. Though living in the same houses with the gay dance-saloons, they avoided them as they would pestilential places. Trained to industry and familiar with the modest and refined appearance of pure women in the schools, they had no desire for the society of these bold girls, or to earn their living in this idle and shameful manner. They felt the disgrace of the abandoned life around them, and were soon above it. Though almost invariably the children of drunkards, they did not inherit the appetites of their mothers, or if they did, their new training substituted higher and stronger desires. They were seldom known to have the habit of drinking as they grew up. Situations were continually found for them in the country, or they secured places for themselves as servants in respectable families; and, becoming each day more used to better circumstances and more neatly dressed, they had little desire to visit their own wretched homes and remain in their families. Now and then there would be a fall from virtue among them, but the cases were very few indeed. As they grew up they married young mechanics or farmers, and were soon far above the class from which they sprang. Such were the fruits in general of the patient, self-denying labors of these ladies in the Fourth Ward School.
One most self-sacrificing and heroic man, a physician, Dr. Robert Ray, devoted his education and something of his fortune to these benevolent efforts, and died while in the harness. Singularly enough, I never knew, in twenty years' experience, an instance of one of these volunteer teachers contracting any contagious disease in these labors, though repeatedly they have entered tenement rooms where virulent typhoid or small-pox cases were being tended. They made it a rule generally to bathe and change their clothing after their work.
For a more exact account of the results of the Fourth-Ward labors, it is difficult to obtain precise statistics. But when we know from the Prison Reports that soon after the opening of this school there were imprisoned 3,449 female vagrants of all ages, and that last year (1870), when the little girls who then attended such schools would have matured, there were only 671; or when we observe that the Prison in that neighborhood inclosed 3,172 female vagrants in 1861 and only 339 in 1871, we may be assured that the sacrifices made in that Ward have not been without their natural fruit.
Extracts from our Journal: