The arrangements for men are similar to those for women, though less extensive. The entrances are separate, and there are watchmen in the male dormitory. The refuge provides thirty-two beds for men and one hundred and fifty for women. It is by packing in children with their parents that so many individuals are lodged.
The survey of the building ended, we pass out of the front door just as five o'clock strikes, and the tattered throng, Jenny among them, present themselves for admission. This institution could be copied with good effect in several American cities. Its system of management guards against two evils. Provision being made only for the bare necessities of life, no temptation is offered to impostors. Propriety of behavior being ensured by strict surveillance, the chance of contamination is materially lessened, perhaps wholly removed.
It is no unusual thing, even in the United States, for men and boys, women and girls, to spend a night in the station-house because they have no other place to sleep. A refuge is less expensive than other charitable establishments. The first cost of a building is considerable; the annual outlay in provisions, fuel, and light, comparatively trifling. The money spent every year in indiscriminate almsgiving in a large city would serve to support a night refuge for several hundred persons. But while providing for the houseless poor of to-day, we should remember that their numbers are increasing with every successive generation. The children of our poorest class must be rescued from their present migratory life, divided between street, jail, and penitentiary.
Much has been done for girls, and we can only desire an extension of the work. With an increase of funds, the Sisters of Charity, of Mercy, of the Good Shepherd, and of Notre Dame could accomplish a mission of great importance to the future prosperity of our country. These ladies devote their lives to saving from misery and degradation the children of those who cannot or will not perform a parent's duty. They need money to accomplish this. We too often dole it out to them as if they had asked alms for themselves. Let us give them not only money but sympathy and encouragement. Many a good work has failed for want of friendly words to give the strength for one final vigorous effort.
But what is to be done for the boys? They may be divided into three classes. First, children guilty of no worse crime than friendlessness. Second, small boys obnoxious to the police for petty infringements of the laws; third, newsboys, bootblacks, and costermongers, more or less familiar with the vices of city life. The third class is developed from the other two, because neglected poverty naturally gravitates to vice and crime.
The development of a true ragamuffin is a process painfully interesting to watch. At an age when the children of the rich take sober walks attended by nursery-maid or governess, he knows the streets as well as any watchman. At seven years old, he is arrested by some energetic policeman for throwing stones, bathing, stealing a bunch of grapes, or some other first-class felony. Once in the hands of the law, there is no redress for him unless he is "bailed out." He must go to jail to wait for trial-day—perhaps three or four weeks. The turnkeys do their best for him; find him a decent companion if he is frightened, or, still better, give him a cell to himself, where he looks more like a squirrel in a cage than a criminal offender. I have seen in one day four mere babies in prison for "breaking and entering!"
But, with all the precautions used in a well-ordered jail to prevent mischief, our infant ragamuffin comes out older by many years than he went in. He has been in prison, and his tiny reputation is gone for ever. A few years later he comes back, arrested for some grave misdemeanor; a sly, old-fashioned little rogue by this time, gifted with an ingenuity fitting him admirably to be the tool of some professional thief. Then begins a course of sojourns in workhouses and juvenile penitentiaries. By and by he reappears in jail with a smart suit of clothes, the fruit of a successful burglary, and you are informed with an air of conscious superiority that this time it is a house of correction or State's prison offence. There is ambition in crime as well as in other careers, we may be sure. He grows up to be a drunkard, a libertine, a bad husband, and the father of children more degraded than himself. We know of an entire family having been in prison at one time, father, mother, and all the children.
Who is to blame for this career of vice and crime? Not the officers of the jail, who bitterly regret the necessity of receiving children, but cannot set them free. Not the judges, who are sworn to administer the laws as they stand, not to improve upon them.