Male children,882
Females,184
Children of American parents,103
Children of Foreign parents,963
Children who belong to some school, but are truants,106
Boys regularly employed in Bowling saloons,139
Children who do not attend any school nor have any lawful calling,821
Children who do not attend school for want of clothing, books, &c.129
Children of widows,238
Children with fathers but no mothers,29
Children, orphans,54
Their ages are as follows:
Six years of age,39
Seven years of age,53
Eight years of age,79
Nine years of age,77
Ten years of age,121
Eleven years of age,111
Twelve years of age,176
Thirteen years of age,141
Fourteen years of age,143
Fifteen years of age,80
Sixteen years of age,56

“My opinion is, that of the whole number, from eight to nine hundred (from neglect and their bad habits) are not fit to enter any of our present schools.

“From the best information which I can obtain, I am satisfied that the whole number in the City at the present time, (including the above number,) is not less than fifteen hundred of the same class as those described.

“And I earnestly call your attention to them, and the necessity of providing some means to have these children properly brought up, either at public or private expense; for I am satisfied that it will cost the State and City more for Police, Courts and Prisons, if they are suffered to go at large, than it would, to take them now, maintain them and make them useful citizens.

“The State Reform School at Westborough, will be a great benefit. Out of fifty-eight boys that have been sent there, thirty-four have gone from this City. But I am of opinion that the law is defective that waits until the child ‘shall be convicted of any offence known to the Laws of this Commonwealth and punishable by imprisonment’ before he can be sent there.

“Very few parents are willing to complain of and testify to the bad conduct of their children, knowing that such testimony will deprive them of their services.

“I am satisfied that the system heretofore pursued by the City Government of licensing minors to sell papers, and other small articles, is an injury to them.

“During the year 1846, out of 112 minors arrested for larceny, and carried before the Courts, 46 were news-boys. During the year 1847, out of 112 minors, 58 were news-boys.

“During the year 1847, out of 30 licensed, six were brought in for larceny during one week.

“There is evidently a great increase of crime among minors. The Police books show that the number arrested and brought in, is more than one hundred each quarter.

“The following extract is from the City School Report for the year 1847.

“‘Does the instruction provided by the City reach all those persons for whom it is intended? This question suggests itself to every one who observes the apparently great number of children, at large, in school hours, in almost every part of the City.

“‘It is not difficult to find out what are the occupations of many of these children. They are hawkers of papers, or sellers of matches,—most of the time occupied in quarreling and gambling. They are beggars, male and female, strolling from street to street, through lanes, by-ways and alleys, practicing the elementary lessons of pilfering, lying, deception and theft. They may be seen wherever wooden structures are in the process of building, repairing, or tearing down;—seeking for fragments of wood to which they evidently feel they have a very questionable right. They are the loafers on wharves and in all the modes of juvenile vice. Are these children in the way to become useful citizens or happy and respectable men? Are they not growing up to be the occupants of jails and almshouses? Are they not in a course of education for worthlessness and crime?

“‘Let us see what answer the records of the courts of justice make to these questions.

“‘There are, on an average, 74 inmates of the House of Reformation; nearly the same number in the school on Thompson’s Island; and, for the year ending in November last, 456, under age, had been inmates of the jails.

“‘In reference to providing instruction for this great mass of uneducated children, our system is not defective. Sufficient provision is now made for the instruction of those children who have passed the age at which they are admissible into the primary schools, and who are not qualified for the grammar schools. The number of this class is rapidly increasing, and is likely to increase still more. Our system was contrived and adapted to a small city, peopled by persons born in New England, and always enjoying and disposed to avail themselves of the advantages of the free-school system of these States. But some (no?) provision has been made for the vast accessions to our population by immigration from foreign countries of persons of every age, and of every condition of ignorance. Our system of government supposes educated citizens; and will not be safe unless our citizens are more or less educated. Now there are great masses coming in upon us who are not educated, except to vice and crime; the creatures or the victims of the justice or the oppression, or the over-population of the old world. For the education of these, adult and juvenile, not only must provision be made, but means must be used to render the provision effective. It is not enough to say that provision is made for their education, if they will avail themselves of it at a proper time. Unless they are made inmates of our schools, many of them will become inmates of our prisons; and it is vastly more economical to educate them in the former than to support them in the latter. The annual cost of educating an individual at the public schools is from six to twenty dollars. The annual cost of the support of an individual in the House of Reformation, the cheapest of all such institutions, is forty-four dollars, and in the House of Correction probably not less than one hundred dollars; and in this estimate is not included the great expense of the administration of criminal law, much of which might be prevented by the proper education of these children.

“‘It is a defect in the organization of this (School) Board, that there is now no person connected with and acting under direction of the Board, to ascertain what children of the legal age are not in the schools, and to use measures to bring them there. This Board is the only one which has, officially, a knowledge of the numbers of children in the schools and of those who ought to be there. It is the one whose duty it is to provide means for the education of all the children. It would be well if it could have authority not only to use means to bring wandering children into the schools, but to provide for the instruction of those portions of the adult population who are without, and who desire elementary instruction,—that is, instruction in reading, writing and accounts.’

“I know of no one thing,” says the City Marshal, “that is so much needed as a proper home for idle and vagrant female children, the ascertained number of which class is 184. There are, undoubtedly, 300 of the same character now in the City, they may be seen at the entrance of every public building and every great thoroughfare, peddling small articles or begging, and insulting every person who refuses to buy, or give when asked. Many of them have been so long neglected, that they are familiar with crime in its worst forms, but against whom it is difficult to procure evidence, and when procured, the only place they can be sent to, is to the House of Correction or House of Industry for short terms, and then they are suffered to go at large without a proper home or friends to care for them.

“In regard to habitual truants from the schools, I am satisfied that the powers of the Courts, and the City authorities, are entirely inadequate to meet the evil. The late Mayor directed me to detail some officer whose whole duty it should be to look after the truants that were reported to him, by the masters of the several schools.

“From the report of the officer detailed for this purpose, I make the following extract:

“‘During the year that I have had the charge of Truants, I have been called upon by the teachers of the Grammar and other Schools, to nearly 300 truant and idle children; and for want of some system by which to be governed, my practice has been as far as possible adapted to the circumstances of the case. I first call upon the parents, find out their condition and the character of the boy complained of, in order to know how to proceed with him; admonish him, and always in the first instance take him back to the school to which he belongs. In many cases this course has been sufficient. If called again to the same boy, by the consent of the parents, I have locked him up for a few hours, and given him to understand that a complaint against him would remain on file to be proceeded with if he again offends. This, sometimes, has been enough, but not often. After taking a boy to School two or three times, and he finds that nothing further is done, the Police-man’s badge and staff have no terrors for him. The reason, I think, is this. The law does not reach his case—the Courts say he is not a vagrant, because he has a home—and he is not a stubborn and disobedient child within the meaning of the statute. He is disobedient only so far as he is a truant; and there is no law against truancy. I have been into Court with a number of such cases and did not succeed in sustaining the complaint. The decision was almost fatal to the boy, and a great injury to the School to which he belonged. The only course left for us after this, was to watch the boy until we could arrest him for some trifling offence known to the law, and have him punished, which seemed to be necessary for the good of the boy, as well as the School.’

“The above statistics have been obtained in the following manner. During school hours the officer has visited the wharves, public thoroughfares, and all other places where these children congregate, and by kind treatment and persuasion, learned their names and residence, then gone with them to their homes and ascertained their condition, and that of their parents, a record of which is now in this office, and to which additions are daily made.”

This brief history of juvenile vagrancy in the city of Boston, whose school system has been so long and justly regarded as her chief glory, will not surprise those who are familiar with scenes at the wharves, railway-stations and steamboat landings of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Innumerable specimens of the same class of young renegades may be seen also at the doors or in the vestibules of public houses in the large inland towns; and unless some mild compulsory process is devised to form them to better habits, it is certain that a severe one will be demanded to protect the community against their violence and depredations.

No. 4.—The London Christian Observer’s notice of Rev. Mr. Field’s work on the advantages of the separate system of imprisonment.

In our last number we inserted, entire, an article on Mr. Field’s work, from the “London Medical and Chirurgical Review.” The February (1849) number of the London Christian Observer devotes ten or fifteen pages to it, and inclines “to agree to a considerable extent in the author’s opinion, that the separate system is superior, not only to every other system that has hitherto been tried, but also to any that shall be, or can be hereafter devised.” This is rather more than we should be willing to say of any human device, but we are glad to see an English periodical of so much influence and reputation committing itself so heartily to the right side.

The “Observer” has strangely fallen into the notion, that absolute solitude without labor or instruction, was ever adopted as a system of discipline in the United States. He speaks of “our good friends in the United States,” as having run into the extreme of “entire solitude for six or ten months together in prisons of the most wretched description,” but when the effects were seen, “the system was abandoned at once.” He expresses thankfulness, that this dreadful system was never tried in England, but that they have been permitted to learn better by the experience of their neighbors. There is no doubt, that studious efforts have been made by the opponents of separation in our country to confound it with solitude, and to give the impression, that whatever evils are imagined or proved to result from the latter, are necessarily incident to the former. But we should have looked for a little more discrimination in the Observer, and for evidence of more thorough knowledge on a subject of so much interest. Indeed, we might almost suppose, that the needful supply of knowledge and discrimination is at hand, when the inquiry affects the good repute of the “sea girt isle,” and only fails when the institutions of “young America” are presented for review.

“We come now,” says the Observer, “to the separate system as we have it amongst ourselves, and we must request our readers to bear in mind, that this system is essentially different from the Solitary, properly so called—different in its objects, in its working, in its effects. The separate cell is but the sick room, in which the morally diseased is put under treatment for such time as his case requires. The solitary cell is (or rather was, for it no longer exists among civilized nations) the grave; where the patient is left as being past treatment and without hope of recovery. Yet the two methods have been, and are confounded, and the failure of the one, with all its attendant circumstances of horror, is used blindly or unscrupulously as an argument against the other.”—p. 129-30.

It is this “blind or unscrupulous” confounding of solitude and its effects, with separation and its fruits, that constitutes one of the crying sins against humanity, for which we think the anti-separatists will be called to account.

“We are sorry that we cannot follow Mr. Field through his description of the system of instruction, and its effects on the prisoners in general. His work abounds in examples of the ignorant instructed, the profligate reclaimed, the hardened convict subdued, the weak-minded set firm in good principles; and almost all thankful for the discipline they have undergone, and setting out afresh in this world of trials, with, at all events, new strength and better principles. Mrs. Fry, indeed, regarding man as adapted for a state of trial, argued against the system[7] as one that takes the convict away from trial altogether; but surely, there are stages and states in the moral life, when the discipline of solitude and reflexion is absolutely required; just as the body, though its intended sphere of action may be the air and the light, may absolutely require total seclusion from both, must be placed in bed, and take sharp medicines, instead of taking exercise and facing the weather. To say nothing of the fact, that a crowded prison-yard can scarcely be regarded as a fair field of probation for any man.

“Altogether, we regard the present state of things with respect to this whole subject as affording a ground of great encouragement and thankfulness to God; and as opening prospects of large social improvement both at home and in the Colonies; for the wretched system of transportation, the plan of peopling new lands with the outcasts of the old, seems to have received its deathblow from the introduction of wholesome discipline at home. There are a few minor differences to be adjusted regarding the treatment of convicts, the length of their separate confinement, and the mode of disposing of them for the rest of their sentence; but the principle is now fairly admitted, that the prison is to be a place of severe moral and religious discipline. The office of a gaol chaplain, instead of being the most loathsome and repulsive that a clergyman could hold, is now a work full of interest and promise and hope, bringing often a speedy return for labor. Sarah Martin, the pious needlewoman of Yarmouth, who passed her life among the wretched inhabitants of the gaol, would indeed have rejoiced, if she could have accompanied as we have done, the zealous Chaplain of one of these new gaols along the clean, light, well-aired corridor, and entered with him into one cell after another, where the prisoner welcomed him cheerfully and respectfully, repeating his few verses of psalm or hymn—a voluntary task—and listened thankfully for the kind admonition or encouragement of perhaps the first friend he ever knew. It seems as if God had raised up men on purpose for the work. We are personally acquainted with some Gaol Chaplains, and have read the Reports of many, and believe, in most cases they are men of energy, discernment and piety. If we have a fault to find with them, it is, that from their experience of visible effects speedily and uniformly produced on those who are under their charge, they come to speak and write as if the reformation of a sinner were a matter of certainty, provided only a sufficient time is allowed. We are aware, that this is only an apparent error, for no man would be more ready than Mr. Field to acknowledge the absolute necessity of the power of the Holy Spirit in any work of genuine reformation.”