[24] The Society pleads for a farm of its own, close to the city, where it can organize a “farm school” for the older boys. There they could be taken on probation and their fitness for the West be ascertained. They would be more useful to the farmers and some trouble would be avoided. Two farms, or three, to get as near to the family plan as possible, would be better. The Children’s Aid Society of Boston has three farm schools, and its work is very successful.
[25] I once questioned a class of 71 boys between eight and twelve years old in a reform school, with this result: 22 said they blacked boots; 36 sold papers; 26 did both; 40 “slept out;” but only 3 of them all were fatherless, 11 motherless, showing that they slept out by choice. The father probably had something to do with it most of the time. Three-fourths of the lads stood up when I asked them if they had been to Central Park. The teacher asked one of those who did not rise, a little shaver, if he had never been in the Park. “No, mem!” he replied, “me father he went that time.”
[26] The lodging-houses are following a noteworthy precedent. From the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, organized in the beginning of this century, sprang the first savings bank in the country.
[27] That is the average number constantly in asylums. With those that come and go, it foots up quite 25,000 children a year that are a public charge.
[28] Report upon the Care of Dependent Children in New York City and elsewhere, to the State Board of Charities, by Commissioner Josephine Shaw Lowell. December, 1889.
[29] Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell on Dependent Children. Report of 1889.
[30] Anna T. Wilson: Some Arguments for the Boarding-out of Dependent Children in the State of New York. This opposition the Superintendent explains in his report for 1891, to be due in part to the lying stories about abuse in the West, told by bad boys who return to the city. He adds, however, that “oftentimes the most strenuous opposition ... is made by step-mothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins,” and is “due in the majority of cases not to any special interest in the child’s welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation for the boy in order to get his weekly wages.”
[31] It will do so hereafter. This autumn the discovery was made that the city was asked to pay for more children than there ought to be in the institutions according to the record of commitments. The comptroller sent two of his clerks to count all the children. The result was to show slipshod book-keeping, if nothing worse, in certain cases. Hereafter the ceremony of counting the children will be gone through every six months. Nothing could more clearly show the irresponsible character of the whole business and the need of a change, lest we drift into corporate pauperism in addition to encouraging the vice in the individual.
[32] In 1854, with a population of 605,000, there were 6,657 licensed and unlicensed saloons in the city, or 1 to every 90.8 of its inhabitants. At the beginning of 1892, with a population of 1,706,500, there were 7,218 saloons, or 1 to every 236.42. Counting all places where liquor was sold by license, including hotels, groceries, steamboats, etc., the number was 9,050, or 1 to every 188.56 inhabitants.