INCIDENT AT THE FIVE POINTS HOUSE OF INDUSTRY.
To be able to appreciate Mr. Pease’s toils, and sacrifices, and self-denying labors at the Five Points House of Industry, one must visit the locality:—one must wind through those dirty streets and alleys, and see the wrecks of humanity that meet him at every step;—he must see children so dirty and squalid that they scarcely resemble human beings, playing in filthy gutters, and using language that would curdle his blood to hear from childhood’s lips;—he should see men, “made in God’s own image,” brutalised beyond his power to imagine;—he should see women (girls of not more than twenty years) reeling about the pavements in a state of beastly intoxication, without a trace of feminity in their vicious faces;—he should pass the rum shops, where men and women are quarreling and fighting and swearing, while childhood listens and learns!—he should pass the second-hand clothes cellars, where hard-featured Jewish dealers swing out faded, refuse garments, (pawned by starving virtue for bread,) to sell to the needy, half-naked emigrant for his last penny;—he should see decayed fruit and vegetables which the most ravenous swine might well root twice over before devouring, purchased as daily food by these poor creatures;—he should see gentlemen (?) threading these streets, not to make all this misery less, God knows, but to sever the last thread of hope to which many a tempted one is despairingly clinging.
One must see all this, before he can form a just idea of the magnitude and importance of the work that Mr. Pease has single-handed and nobly undertaken; remembering that men of wealth and influence have their own reasons for using that wealth and influence to perpetuate this modern Sodom.
One should spend an hour in Mr. Pease’s house, to see the constant drafts upon his time and strength, in the shape of calls and messages, and especially the applications for relief that his slender purse alas! is often not able to answer;—he should see his unwearied patience and activity, admire the kind, sympathetic heart—unaffected by the toil or the frowns of temporizing theorists—ever warm, ever pitiful, giving not only “the crumbs from his table,” but often his own meals to the hungry—his own wardrobe to the naked;—he should see this, and go away ashamed to have lived so long and done so little to help the maimed, and sick, and lame, to Bethesda’s Pool.
I will relate an incident which occurred, some time since, at the House of Industry, and which serves as a fair sample of daily occurrences there.
One morning an aged lady, of respectable appearance, called at the Mission House and enquired for Mr. Pease. She was told that he was engaged, and asked if some one else would not do as well. She said, respectfully, “No; my business is with him; I will wait, if you please, till he can see me.”
Mr. Pease immediately came in, when the old lady commenced her story:
“I came, sir,” said she, “in behalf of a poor, unfortunate woman and three little children. She is living now”—and the tears dropped over her wrinkled face—“in a bad place in Willet-street, in a basement. There are rum shops all around it, and many drunken people about the neighborhood. She has made out to pay the rent, but has had no food for the poor little children, who have subsisted on what they could manage to beg in the day time. The landlord promised, when she hired the basement, to put a lock on the door, and make it comfortable, so that ‘the Croton’ need not run in; but he got his rent and then broke his promise, and they have not seen him since.”
“Is the woman respectable?” enquired Mr. Pease.