The Children of the Poor

by Jacob A. Riis

THE BOARD OF ELECTION INSPECTORS IN THE BEACH STREET SCHOOL.

The first patriotic election in the Fifth Ward Industrial School was held on historic ground. The house it occupies was John Ericsson’s until his death, and there he planned nearly all his great inventions, among them one that helped save the flag for which the children voted that day. The children have lived faithfully up to their pledge. Every morning sees the flag carried to the principal’s desk and all the little ones, rising at the stroke of the bell, say with one voice: “We turn to our flag as the sunflower turns to the sun!” One bell, and every brown right fist is raised to the brow, as in military salute: “We give our heads!” Another stroke, and the grimy little hands are laid on as many hearts: “and our hearts!” Then with a shout that can be heard around the corner: “—— to our country! One country, one language, one flag!” No one can hear it and doubt that the children mean every word and will not be apt to forget that lesson soon.

The Industrial School has found a way of dealing with even the truants, of whom it gets more than its share, and the success of it is suggestive. As stated by the teacher in the West Eighteenth Street school who found it out, it is very simple: “I tell them, if they want to play truant to come to me and I will excuse them for the day, and give them a note so that if the truant officer sees them it will be all right.” She adds that “only one boy ever availed himself of that privilege.” The other boys with few exceptions became interested, as one would expect, and came to school regularly. It was the old story of the boys in the Juvenile Asylum who could be trusted to do guard duty in the grounds when put upon their honor, but the moment they were locked up for the night risked their necks to escape by climbing out of the third-story windows.

But when it has cheated the street and made of the truant a steady scholar, the work of the Industrial School is not all done. Next, it hands him over to the Public School, clothed and in his right mind, if his time to go to work has not yet come. Last year the thirty-three Industrial Schools of the Children’s Aid Society and the American Female Guardian Society thus dismissed nearly eleven hundred children who, but for their intervention, might never have reached that goal. That their charity had not been allowed to corrupt the children may be inferred from the statement that, with an average daily attendance of 4,348 in the Children’s Aid Society’s Schools, 1,729 children were depositors in the School Savings Banks to the aggregate amount of about $800—a very large sum for them—and this in the face of the fact, recorded on the school register, that 938 of the lot came from homes where drunkenness and poverty went hand in hand. It is not in the plan of the Industrial School to make paupers, but to develop to the utmost the kernel of self-help that is the one useful legacy of the street. The child’s individuality is preserved at any cost. Even the clothes that are given to the poorest in exchange for their rags are of different cut and color, made so with this one end in view. The distressing “institution look” is wholly absent from these schools, and one of the great stumbling-blocks of charity administered at wholesale is thus avoided.

The night schools are for the boys and girls already enlisted in the treadmill, and who must pick up what learning they can in their off hours. Together with the day-schools they footed up a total enrolment of nearly ten thousand children whom this Society reached in 1891. Upon the basis of the average daily attendance, the cost of their education to the community, which supported the charity, was $24.53 for each child. The cost of sheltering, feeding, and teaching 11,770 boys and girls in the Society’s six lodging-houses was $32.76 for each; the expense of sending 2,825 children to farm-homes $9.96 for each. The average cost per year for each prisoner in the Tombs is $107.75, and for every child maintained in an Asylum, or in the poor-house, nearly $140.[21]

“One of our great difficulties,” says the Secretary of the Children’s Aid Society, in a recent statement of the Society’s aims and purposes, echoing an old grievance, “is with the large boys of the city. There seems to be no place for them in the world as it is. They have grown up in it without any training but that in street trades. The trades unions have kept them from being apprenticed. They are soon too large for street occupations, and are unable to compete with the small boys. They are too old for our lodging-houses. We know not what to do with them. Some succeed well on Western farms, but they are usually disliked by their employers because they change places soon; and their occasional offences and disposition to move about have given us more trouble in the West than any other one thing. Very few people are willing to bear with them, even though a little patience will sometimes bring out excellent qualities in them.” They are the boys for whom the street and the saloon have use that shall speedily fashion of their “excellent qualities” a lash to sting the community’s purse, if not its conscience, with the memory of its neglect. As 107.75 is to 24.53, or 140 to 9.96, so will be the smart of it compared with the burden of patience that would have turned the scales the other way, to put the matter in a light where the hard-headed man of business can see it without an effort.

There is at least one man of that kind in New York who has seen and understood it to some purpose. His name is Richard T. Auchmuty, and he is by profession an architect. In that capacity he has had opportunity enough of observing how the virtual exclusion of the New York boy from the trades worked to his harm, and he started for his relief an Industrial School that deserves to be ranked among the great benefactions of our day, even more for its power to set people to thinking than for the direct benefit it confers upon the boy, great as that is. Once it comes to be thoroughly understood that a chance to learn his father’s honest trade is denied the New York boy by a foreign conspiracy, because he is an American lad and cannot be trusted to do its bidding, it is inconceivable that an end should not be put in quick order to this astounding abuse. This thing is exactly what is being done in New York now by the consent of its citizens, who without a protest read in the newspapers that a trades-union, one of the largest and strongest in the building trades, has decreed that for two years from a fixed date no apprentice shall be admitted to that trade in New York—decreed, with the consent and connivance of subservient employers, that so many lads who might have become useful mechanics shall grow up tramps and loafers; decreed that a system of robbery of the American mechanic shall go on by which it has come to pass that out of twenty-three millions of dollars paid in a year to the building trades in this city barely six millions are grudgingly accorded the native worker. There is no decree to exclude the mechanic from abroad. He may come and go—and go he does, in shoals, to his home across the sea at the end of each season, with its profits—under the scheme of international comradeship that excludes only the American workman and his boy. I have talked with some of the most intelligent of the labor leaders, men well known all over the land, to find out if there were any defence to be made for this that I was not aware of, but have got nothing but evasion and sophistries about the “protection of labor” for my answer. A protection, indeed, that has nearly resulted already in the practical extinction of the American mechanic, the best and cleverest in the world, in America’s chief city, at the bidding of the Walking Delegate.

THE PLUMBING SHOP IN THE NEW YORK TRADE SCHOOLS.