A very spirited teacher here manages numbers of wild boys and ungoverned girls. The most interesting feature is a Night-school, where pupils come, some from a mile distant, having labored in factories or street-trades all day long—sometimes even giving up their suppers for the sake of the lessons, with a hunger for knowledge which the children of the favored classes know little of. Two other Schools shall conclude our catalogue—one in the House of Industry (West Sixteenth Street), and the other in the Eighteenth-street Lodging-house. Both Schools are struggling with great obstacles and difficulties, as they are planted in the quarter which has produced the notorious "Nineteenth-street Gang." The teacher in the latter has already overcome most of them, and has tamed as wild a set of little street-barbarians as ever plagued a school-teacher.
A rigid rule has been laid down and followed out in these Schools—that is, not to admit or retain pupils who might be in the Public Schools. Our object is to supplement these useful public institutions, and we are continually sending the children forth, when they seem fit, to take places in the Free Schools. Many, however, are always too poor, ragged and necessarily irregular in attendance, to be adapted to the more systematic and respectable places of instruction. As been already mentioned, the plan has been steadily pursued from the beginning by the writer, to make these as good Primary Schools as under the circumstances they were capable of becoming. The grade of the teachers has been constantly raised, and many of the graduates of our best training academy for teachers in New York State—the Oswego Normal School—have been secured at remunerative salaries.
Within the last four years, also, a new officer has been appointed by the Board of Trustees, to constantly examine the schools and teachers, keep them at the highest grade possible, and visit the families of the children. This place has been ably filled by an intelligent and educated gentleman, Mr. John W. Skinner, with the best effects on our system of instruction.
Our plan of visitation among the families of the poor, whereby the helping hand is held out to juvenile poverty and ignorance all the while, has been effectually carried out by a very earnest worker, Mr. M. Dupuy, in the lower wards, and by a young German-American of much judgment and zeal, Mr. Holste, in the German quarter, and by quite a number of female visitors.
[Illustration: "PLEASE SIR, MAY I HAVE A BED?" (A sketch from life.) NO. 1.]
CHAPTER XIX.
THE BEST REMEDY FOR JUVENILE PAUPERISM.
"Ameliorer l'homme par le terre et la terre par l'homme." DEMETZ
Among the lowest poor of New York, as we stated in a previous chapter, the influence of overcrowding has been incredibly debasing. When we find half a dozen families—as we frequently do—occupying one room, the old and young, men and women, boys and girls of all ages sleeping near each other, the result is inevitable. The older persons commit unnatural crimes; the younger grow up with hardly a sense of personal dignity or purity; the girls are corrupted even in childhood; and the boys become naturally thieves, vagrants, and vicious characters. Such apartments are at once "fever-nests" and seminaries of vice. The inmates are weakened and diseased physically, and degraded spiritually. Where these houses abound, as formerly in the Five Points, or now in the First Ward, or near Corlear's Hook, or in the Seventeenth Ward near the Tenth Avenue, there is gradually formed a hideous society of vice and pauperism. The men are idle and drunken, the women lazy, quarrelsome, and given to begging; the children see nothing but examples of drunkenness, lust, and idleness, and they grow up inevitably as sharpers, beggars, thieves, burglars, and prostitutes. Amid such communities of outcasts the institutions of education and religion are comparatively powerless. What is done for the children on one sacred day is wiped out by the influence of the week, and even daily instruction has immense difficulty in counteracting the lessons of home and parents.
For such children of the outcast poor, a more radical cure is needed than the usual influences of school and church.