The Children of the Poor

by Jacob A. Riis

“Little Maher it was,” she answered.

“Who takes care of him?”

“Oh! no one but God,” said she, “and he is too busy with other folks to give him much attention.”

Little Maher was the representative of a class that is happily growing smaller year by year in our city. It is altogether likely that a little inquiry into his case could have placed the responsibility for his forlorn condition considerably nearer home, upon someone who preferred giving Providence the job to taking the trouble himself. There are homeless children in New York. It is certain that we shall always have our full share. Yet it is equally certain that society is coming out ahead in its struggle with this problem. In ten years, during which New York added to her population one-fourth, the homelessness of our streets, taking the returns of the Children’s Aid Society’s lodging-houses as the gauge, instead of increasing proportionally, has decreased nearly one-fifth; and of the Topsy element, it may be set down as a fact, there is an end.

A SNUG CORNER ON A COLD NIGHT.

If we were able to argue from this a corresponding improvement in the general lot of the poor, we should be on the high road to the millennium. But it is not so. The showing is due mainly to the perfection of organized charitable effort, that proceeds nowadays upon the sensible principle of putting out a fire, viz., that it must be headed off, not run down, and therefore concerns itself chiefly about the children. We are yet a long, a very long way from a safe port. The menace of the Submerged Tenth has not been blotted from the register of the Potter’s Field, and though the “twenty thousand poor children who would not have known it was Christmas,” but for public notice to that effect, be a benevolent fiction, there are plenty whose brief lives have had little enough of the embodiment of Christmas cheer and good-will in them to make the name seem like a bitter mockery. Yet, when all is said, this much remains, that we are steering the right course. Against the drift and the head-winds of an unparalleled immigration that has literally drained the pauperism of Europe into our city for two generations, against the false currents and the undertow of the tenement in our social life, we are making headway at last.

Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time. What if there be a thousand left? There is one less. What that one more on the wrong side of the account might have meant will never be known till the final reckoning. The records of jails and brothels and poor-houses, for a hundred years to come, might but have begun the tale.

When, in 1849, the Chief of Police reported that in eleven wards there were 2,955 vagrants and dissolute children under fifteen years of age, the boys all thieves and the girls embryo prostitutes, and that ten per cent. of the entire child population of school age in the city were vagrants, there was no Children’s Aid Society to plead their cause. There was a reformatory, and that winter the American Female Guardian Society was incorporated, “to prevent vice and moral degradation;” but Mr. Brace had not yet found his life-work, and little Mary Ellen had not been born. The story of the legacy her sufferings left to the world of children I have briefly told, and in the chapter on Industrials Schools some of the momentous results of Mr. Brace’s devotion have been set forth. The story is not ended; it never will be, while poverty and want exist in this great city. His greatest work was among the homeless and the outcast. In the thirty-nine years during which he was the life and soul of the Children’s Aid Society it found safe country homes for 84,318[22] poor city children. And the work goes on. Very nearly already, the army thus started on the road to usefulness and independence equals in numbers the whole body of children that, four years before it took up its march, yielded its Lost Tenth, as the Chief of Police bore witness, to the prisons and perdition.

This great mass of children—did they all come from the street? Not all of them. Not even the larger number. But they would have got there, all of them, had not the Society blocked the way. That is how the race of Topsies has been exterminated in New York. That in this, of all fields, prevention is the true cure, and that a farmer’s home is better for the city child that has none than a prison or the best-managed public institution, are the simple lessons it has taught and enforced by example that has carried conviction at last. The conviction came slowly and by degrees. The degrees were not always creditable to sordid human nature that had put forth no hand to keep the child from the gutter, and in the effort to rescue it now saw only its selfish opportunity. There are people yet at this day, whose offers to accept “a strong and handsome girl of sixteen or so with sweet temper,” as a cheap substitute for a paid servant—“an angel with mighty strong arms,” as one of the officers of the Society indignantly put it once—show that the selfish stage has not been quite passed. Such offers are rejected with the emphatic answer: “We bring the children out because they need you, not because you need them.” The Society farms out no girls of sixteen with strong arms. For them it finds ways of earning an honest living at such wages as their labor commands, homes in the West, if they wish it, where good husbands, not hard masters, are waiting for them. But, ordinarily, its effort is to bend the twig at a much tenderer age. And in this effort it is assisted by the growth of a strong humane sentiment in the West, that takes less account of the return the child can make in work for his keep, and more of the child itself. Time was when few children but those who were able to help about the farm could be sure of a welcome. Nowadays babies are in demand. Of all the children sent West in the last two years, 14 per cent. were under five years, 43.6 per cent. over five and under ten years, 36.8 per cent. over ten and under fifteen, and only 5.3 per cent. over fifteen years of age. The average age of children sent to Western homes in 1891 by the Children’s Aid Society was nine years and forty days, and in 1892 nine years and eight months, or an average of nine years, four months, and twenty days for the two years.