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Club Used for Beating a Child, 152 Summer Boarders from Mott Street, 158 Making for the “Big Water,” 167 Floating Hospital—St. John’s Guild, 169 Playing at Housekeeping, 177 Poverty Gappers Playing Coney Island, 183 Poverty Gap Transformed—the Spot where Young Healey was murdered is now a Playground, 185 The Late Charles Loring Brace, Founder of the Children’s Aid Society, 188 The First Patriotic Election in the Beach Street Industrial School—Parlor in John Ericsson’s Old House, 201 The Board of Election Inspectors in the Beach Street School, 207 The Plumbing Shop in the New York Trade Schools, 212 A Boys’ Club Reading room, 222 The Carpenter Shop in the Avenue C Working Boys’ Club, 226 Type-setting at the Avenue C Working Boys’ Club, 231 A Bout with the Gloves in the Boys’ Club of Calvary Parish, 235 Lining up for the Gymnasium, 240 A Snug Corner on a Cold Night, 246 2 A.M. in the Delivery-room in the “Sun” Office, 261 Buffalo, 264 Night School in the West Side Lodging-house.—Edward, the Little Pedlar, Caught Napping, 265 The “Soup-House Gang,” Class in History in the Duane Street Newsboy’s Lodging-house, 269

 

 

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THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

 

CHAPTER I.

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN

The problem of the children is the problem of the State. As we mould the children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of that energy. At the beginning of the century the urban population of the United States was 3.97 per cent. of the whole, or not quite one in twenty-five. To-day it is 29.12 per cent., or nearly one in three. In the lifetime of those who were babies in arms when the first gun was fired upon Fort Sumter it has all but doubled. A million and a quarter live to-day in the tenements of the American metropolis. Clearly, there is reason for the sharp attention given at last to the life and the doings of the other half, too long unconsidered. Philanthropy we call it sometimes with patronizing airs. Better call it self-defence.

In New York there is all the more reason because it is the open door through which pours in a practically unrestricted immigration, unfamiliar with and unattuned to our institutions; the dumping-ground where it rids itself of its burden of helplessness and incapacity, leaving the procession of the strong and the able free to move on. This sediment forms the body of our poor, the contingent that lives, always from hand to mouth, with no provision and no means of providing for the morrow. In the first generation it pre-empts our slums;[1] in the second, its worst elements, reinforced by the influences that prevail there, develop the tough, who confronts society with the claim that the world owes him a living and that he will collect it in his own way. His plan is a practical application of the spirit of our free institutions as his opportunities have enabled him to