"You are simply mistaken. I repeat, criminal by necessity. So educated from childhood, that they know of no way to live, but by the beggar's trade, or pilferer's, or prostitute's crime. Such are the parents, such must be the children. There is no hope otherwise. They are sent out in infancy to beg, and early taught to 'pick up things;' the place of education is the street, the watch house, or city prison."
"Why don't their parents send them to school?"
"Why should they? They never went to such a place themselves, and care not that their children should go. They care for nothing but rum, and that the builders of prisons, and hangers of murderers, take care they shall have the means of getting. The imprisonment and hanging, is the sequence of the license system."
"But you were to tell us what you saw this evening."
"Human misery. The houses of the city poor. The locality is Cow Bay. It opens upon Anthony street at the North West angle of the Five Points."
The first home we entered was a cellar room twelve by twenty feet, quite below the surface, and only just high enough to stand up under the beams of the floor over head, while at every step the water oozed up through the boards we trod upon. At one end was the narrow, muddy stairway and door, by which we entered, and at the other a fire-place.
On one side two windows with places for three panes of glass to each, gave all the light and ventilation afforded to the four families who occupied the room. These consisted of two men and their wives, two single women, an old woman and her three boys, and a young girl as a boarder. There were four sleeping places, called beds, upon forms, elevated above the floor, for none could sleep on that on account of the water.
"Do you always have the water as bad as it is now?" I inquired.
"Bad is it? An I wish then you could see it after a big rain, when the water is over the floor entirely fornent the the door."
"Have these women husbands?"