The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them

THE SWILL-GATHERER'S CHILD

"Most of those familiar with the East River Industrial School will remember a poor widow – a swill-gatherer – who lived in the notorious village of shanties near Forty-second Street, known as 'Dutch Hill.' She owned a small shanty, which had been put up on some rich man's lot as a squatter's hut, and there, with her pigs and dogs and cat in the same room, she made her home. From morning till evening she was trailing about the streets, filling up her swill-cans, and at night she came back to the little dirty den, and spent her evenings – we hardly know how. She had one smart little girl who went to the Industrial School. As the child came back day by day, improving in appearance, singing her sweet songs, and with new ideas of how ladies looked and lived, the mother began to grow ashamed of her nasty home. And I remember entering one day, and finding, to my surprise, pigs and rubbish cleared out, the walls well scrubbed, and an old carpet on the floor, and the mother sitting in state on a chair! It was the quiet teachings of the school coming forth in the houses of the poor.

"After a while the little girl began to get higher ideas of what she might become, and went out with another girl to a place in the West. She did well there, and was contented, but her mother was continually anxious and unhappy about her, and finally, after some years, forced her to return to the city. She was now a very neat, active young girl, far above her mother's condition, and the change back to the pig-shanty and Dutch Hill was anything but pleasant. The old woman hid away her best clothes to prevent her going back, and seemed determined to make her a swill-gatherer like herself. Gradually, as might be expected, we began to hear bad stories about our old scholar. The people of the neighborhood said, she drank and quarreled with her mother, and that she was frequenting houses where low company met. Another of the worst Dutch Hill girls – the daughter of a drunkard – was constantly with her. Soon we heard that the other young girl had been sent to Blackwell's Island, and that this one must be saved now, or she would be utterly lost. I went up at once to the old woman's shanty, though with but the feeblest hopes of doing anything, yet with many unuttered prayers. For who that knows the career before the street-girl of the city can help breathing out his soul in agony of prayer for her, when the time of choice comes?

"When I entered the shanty, the young girl was asleep on the bed, and the mother sat on a box, crooning and weeping.

"'Och, and why did I iver tak ye from that swate place – ye that was makin' an honest woman of yoursel'! Ach, God bless your honor! can ye help her? She's a'most gone. Can't ye do somethin'?'

"'Well, how is she doing now?'

"'Och (in a whisper), your honor, she brought three bad fellers last night, and she brake my own door in, and I tould 'em-says I, I'm an honest woman, and I never had ony sich in my kin – and she was drunk – yes, yer honor, she, my own darlint, strak me, and wanted to turn me out – and now there she's been sleepin' all the mornin'. Ach, why did I tak her out of her place!'

"Here the girl woke up, and sat up on the bed, covering her face in shame. I said some few sober words to her, and then the mother threw herself down on the floor, tears pouring down her cheeks.

"'Ach, darlint! my own swate darlint! will ye not list to the gintleman?

Sure an' ye wouldn't bring disgrace to yer ould mither and yer family!

We've had six generations of honest people, and niver wan like this!

Ach, to think of comin' to your ind on the Island, and be on the town!

For the love of the blessed Vargin, do give them all up, and say ye won't taste a drop – do, darlint!'

"The girl seemed obdurate; so I took up the sermon, and we both pleaded, and pictured the shame and pain and wretched life and more wretched death before her. There is no need of delicacy in such cases, and the strongest old Bible Saxon words come home the deepest. At last, her tears began to flow, and finally she gave her full assent to breaking off from liquor and from her bad company (it should be remembered she was only about sixteen); and she would show her repentance by going back to the place where she was, if they would receive her. I hardly expected she would do so; but in a day or two she was in the office, and started for her old situation. Since that we have had a letter from her and her mistress, and she seems to be getting on wonderfully well. May God uphold her!

"The following is a letter we have received from her since:

"'B – , PENN., October 11.

"'MY DEAR MOTHER – I have the pleasure of writing a few lines to you, to let you know that I am well. I got safe back to my place; kind friends took me back again; I have got into the country, where there is plenty of everything to live on. Dear mother, I would like very much to hear from you. I hope you are all well; please write soon. I want you to show this letter to Miss Spratt. [Now Mrs. Hurley.] Good-by, dear mother. M.

"'DEAR MISS SPRATT – As I was writing to my mother, I thought I would like to write a few lines to you. Now that I am so far away, I feel a grateful remembrance of your kindness, I am very sorry I did not have a chance of going to see you before I left the city. Please tell Mr. Brace I am much obliged to him for his kindness: tell him I got safe back to Mr. M.'s, and have a very good home. Good-by, Miss Spratt'"

The East River Industrial School (at No. 206 East Fortieth Street) still continues its humble but profound labors of love. Mrs. Hurley is still there, the "Mend of the poor" for miles around, carrying sympathy, advice, and assistance to thousands of unbefriended creatures, and teaching faithfully all day in the School. Two gentlemen have especially aided her in providing food and clothing for her little ones; and the lady-volunteers still give liberally of their means and time. May the School long shine as a light in one of the dark places of the city.

CHAPTER XV

THE PROTESTANT POOR AND STREET-ROVERS

It is not often that our efforts carry us among Protestant poor, but it happens that on the west side of the city, near Tenth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, is a considerable district of English and Scotch laboring people, who are mainly Protestants.

A meeting of ladies was called in the western part of the city, in like manner with the proceedings at the formation of the other Schools; and a School was proposed. The wife of a prominent property-holder in the neighborhood, a lady of great energy of character, Mrs. R. R., took a leading part, and greatly aided the undertaking; other ladies joined, and the result was the formation of the

HUDSON RIVER INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL,

the fourth of our Schools founded in 1854. With all these Schools, in the beginning, the ladies themselves raised all the funds for their support, and, as I have related, devoted an incredible amount of time to aiding in them, there being usually, however, two salaried teachers.

The experience in the Edinburgh Ragged Schools, I was assured, when there, was, that you cannot depend on volunteer help after the first enthusiasm has passed by. This is not our experience.

As one set of "volunteers" have withdrawn or leave the work, others appear, and there are still in this and some of our other Industrial Schools, most active and efficient voluntary helpers. Gradually, however, the support and supervision of the Schools fell more and more into the hands of the central authority – The Children's Aid Society.

The obtaining a share in the Common School Fund enabled the Society to do more for these useful charities and to found new ones.

In the Hudson River School, it cannot be said that the Protestant poor proved much better than the Catholic; in fact, it has often seemed to me that when a Protestant is reduced to extreme poverty, and, above all, a Yankee, he becomes the most wretched and useless of all paupers. The work and its results were similar on the west side to those in the other districts which I have already described.

"MUSCULAR ORPHANS."

Our attention had thus far been directed mainly to girls in these Industrial School efforts. They seemed the class exposed to the most terrible evils, and besides, through our other enterprises, we were sheltering, teaching, and benefiting for life vast numbers of lads.

We determined now to try the effect of industry and schooling on the roving boys, and I chose a district where we had to make head against a "sea of evils." This was in the quarter bordering on East Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. There seemed to be there a society of irreclaimable little vagabonds. They hated School with an inextinguishable hatred; they had a constitutional love for smashing windows and pilfering apple-stands. They could dodge an "M. P." as a fox dodges a hound; they disliked anything so civilized as a bed-chamber, but preferred old boxes and empty barns, and when they were caught it required a very wide-awake policeman, and such an Asylum-yard as hardly exists in New York, to keep them.

I have sometimes stopped, admiringly, to watch the skill and cunning with which the little rascals, some not more than ten years old, would diminish a load of wood left on the docks; the sticks were passed from one to another, and the lad nearest the pile was apparently engaged eagerly in playing marbles. If the woodman's attention was called to his loss, they were off like a swarm of cockroaches.

We opened a School with all the accessories for reaching and pleasing them; our teacher was a skillful mechanic, a young man of excellent judgment and hearty sympathy with boys; he offered to teach them carpentering and box-making and pay them wages. Common-school lessons were given, also, and a good warm meal provided at noon. We had festivals and magic-lantern exhibitions and lectures. We taught, and we fed and clothed. In return, they smashed our windows; they entered the premises at night and carried off everything they could find; they howled before the door, and yelled "Protestant School!" We arrested one or two for the burglary, as a warning, but the little flibbertigibbets escaped from the police like rats, and we let them go with the fright they had had. Some few of the worst we induced to go to the country, and others we had arrested as vagrants, without appearing ourselves, until a kind of dark suspicion spread among them against the writer that he had the power of spiriting away bad boys to distant regions by some mysterious means. Those that did go to the country proved of the kind called by a Western paper "muscular orphans," for an unfortunate employer undertaking to administer corporal punishment to two of them, the little vagabonds turned and chastised him and then fled.

The following case is noted in our Journal of these up-town boys:

A HARD CASE REFORMED

"MR. BRACE —Dear Sir: You request me to send you some reminiscences of the early life of Michael S – n. My most vivid recollection of him is his taking the broomstick to me once, as I was about to punish him for some misdemeanor. Being the first and last of my pupils who ever attempted anything of the kind, it stands out in bold relief in my memory. I soon conquered the broomstick, but on the first opportunity he ran out, thus ending his Industrial School career.

"His most marked characteristic was a desire to travel, and he presented himself with the freedom of the city at a very early age, going off for weeks at a time, sleeping in entries and around engine-houses, and disdaining bolts and bars when they were turned upon him. One of your visitors calling to consult with his mother as to what could be done with him, found him vigorously kicking the panels out of the door, she having locked him in for safe-keeping till she came home from work. The Captain of Police, tired of having him brought in so frequently, thought one day of a punishment that he expected would effectually frighten him, which was – to hang him. His mother consenting, he was solemnly hung up by the feet to a post, till he promised reformation. This failing to produce the desired effect, she placed him with "the Brothers," who put him in a kind of prison, where he had to be chained by the leg to prevent him from scaling the walls. Taking him from there, after some months of pretty severe discipline, he very soon went back to his old habits, when she had him sent to Randall's Island. Here he was discovered in a plan to swim to the opposite shore (something of a feat for a boy of twelve). Fearing he would attempt it and be drowned, she took him away and put him in the Juvenile Asylum, where he remained several months, and finally seemed so much tamed down that she ventured on taking him out and sending him to a place which you procured for him at Hastings. But, pretty soon, the ruling passion, strong as ever, took possession of him, and he started on a tour through the surrounding villages.

"Being brought home again, he told his mother very deliberately, one morning, that she need not expect him home any more; he was going to live with a soldier's wife. Knowing that if he went he would be in a very den of wickedness, she came to the resolution to give him to your care, and let him be sent to the West.

"It would require a volume to tell of all his freaks and wanderings; his scaling of fences, and breaking out of impossible places. Towards the last of his New York life he began to add other vices to his original stock – such as drinking, smoking, and swearing; yet strange to say, he disdained to lie, and was never known to steal; and his face would glow with satisfaction when he could take charge of an infant. His mother hears, with trembling hope, the good accounts of him from the West, scarcely daring to believe that her wild and vagrant son will ever make a steady, useful man. "Truly yours, "Mrs. E. S. Hurley."

The young rovers gradually became softened and civilized under the combined influences of warm dinners, carpentering, and good teaching; but we found the difficulty to be that we did not have sufficient hold over them out of school hours; we needed more appliances for such habitual vagabonds. What was wanted was a Lodging-house and all its influences, as well as School, for the former gives a greater control than does a simple Industrial School.

We accordingly transferred the whole enterprise to a still worse quarter, where I had done my first work in visiting, and which I thoroughly knew, the region on East River, at the foot of Eleventh Street. Here was a numerous band of similar boys, who slept anywhere, and lived by petty pilferings from the iron-works and wood-yards and by street jobs.

In this place we combined our carpenters' shop with Day-school, Night-school, Reading-room, and Lodging-house, and exerted thus a variety of influences over the "Arabs," which soon began to reform and civilize them. Here we had no difficulties, and made a steady progress as we had done everywhere else.

At present, some gentle female teachers guide the Industrial School. We have dropped the carpentering, as what the boys need is the habit of industry and a primary school-training more than a trade; and we have found that a refined woman can influence these rough little vagabonds even more than a man.

Subsequently, another school was founded in the quarter from which we removed this, and is now held in East Thirty-fourth Street.

One of the benefactions which we hope for in the future is the erection of a suitable building for a Lodging-house, Reading-room, Day-school, and Mission, in the miserable quarter on East River, near Thirty-fourth Street.

CHAPTER XVI

NEW METHODS OF TEACHING

A lady of high culture and position, who felt peculiarly the responsibilities of the fortunate toward the unfortunate, conceived the idea of doing something to elevate the condition of the destitute classes in the quarter of the city between the East River and Avenue B. She accordingly made the proposition to us of an Industrial School in that neighborhood.

We gladly accepted, and soon secured a room, and gathered a goodly company of poor children, mostly Germans. Fortunately for our enterprise, we chanced on a teacher of singular ability and earnestness of purpose, a graduate of the best Normal School in the country, the Oswego Training School, and thoroughly versed in the "Object System" – Miss Jane Andrews.

The founder of our school proved as earnest in carrying out, as she had been generous in forming, her benevolent plan.

She took part herself, several times each week, in teaching the children, and was indefatigable in promoting their pleasures, as well as aiding their instruction. For many years now, this kind friend of the poor has supported this school and labored among its children. They all know and love her, and her memory will not die among them.

The great peculiarity of this school has now been adapted in the other Industrial Schools, under the name of the "Object System of Teaching" – a method which has proved so singularly successful with the children of the poor, that I shall describe it somewhat at length.

THE OBJECT SYSTEM

"I began with children," says Pestalozzi, "as nature does with savages, first bringing an image before their eyes, and then seeking a word to express the perception to which it gives rise." This statement of the great reformer of education expresses the essential principle of the Object System. The child's mind grasps first things rather than names; it deals with objects before words; it takes a thing as a whole rather than in parts. Its perceptive and observing faculties are those first awakened, and should be the first used in education; reflection, analysis, and comparison must come afterward. The vice of the former systems of education has been, that words have so much taken in the child's intellect the place of things, and its knowledge has become so often a mere routine, or a mechanical memorizing of names. The scholar was not taught to look beneath words, and to learn the precise thing which the word symbolized. He was trained to repeat like a machine. He did not observe closely, he had not been educated to apply his own faculties, and therefore he could not think afterward. The old system reversed the natural order. It began with what is the ripest fruit of the mature intellect-definitions, or the learning of rules and statements of principles, and went on later to observing facts and applying principles. It analyzed in the beginning, and only later in the course regarded things each as a whole.

The consequence was, that children were months and years in taking the first steps in education – such as learning to read – because they had begun wrong. They had no accurate habits of observation, and, as a natural result, soon fell into loose habits of thinking. What they knew they knew vaguely. When their acquirements were tested they were found valueless. The simplest principles of mathematics were almost unknown to them, because they had learned the science by rote, and had never exercised their minds on it. They could apply none of them. Algebra, instead of being an implement, was of no more practical use to them than Sanscrit would be. Geometry was as abstract as metaphysics. They had never learned it by solid figures, or studied it intelligently. Grammar was a memorized collection of dry abstract rules and examples. Natural history was only a catalogue, and geography a dictionary learned by heart.

Our manufacturers, who had occasion in former years, to employ these youths from our Public Schools, found them utterly incompetent for using their faculties on practical subjects. Nor did they go forth with minds expanded, and ready to receive the germs of knowledge which might be, as it were, floating in the atmosphere. Their faculties had not been aroused.

The "Object System" attempts to lay down the principles which have been tested in primary education, in the form of a Science; so that the teacher not gifted with the genius of invention and the talent for conveying knowledge shall be able to awaken and train the child's intellect as if he were.

Its first principle is to exercise the senses, but never during any long period at once. The play of the children is so contrived as to employ their sense of touch, of weight, and of harmony. Colors are placed, before them, and they are trained in distinguishing the different delicate shades – in the recognition of which children are singularly deficient. Numbers are taught by objects, such as small beans or marbles, and then when numerals are learned, regular tables of addition and subtraction are written on the board by the teacher at the dictation of the scholar.

The great step in all education is the learning the use of that wonderful vehicle and symbol of human thought, the printed word.

Here the object system has made the greatest advance. The English language has the unfortunate peculiarity of a great many sounds to each vowel, and of an utter want of connection between the name and the sound of the letter. No mature mind can easily appreciate the dark and mysterious gulf which, to the infant's view, separates the learning the letters and reading. The two seem to be utterly different acquirements. The new methods escape the difficulty in part by not teaching the names, but the sounds, of the letters first, and then leading the child to put his sounds together in the form of a word, and next to print the word on the black-board, the teacher calling on the scholar to find a similar one in a card or book. By this ingenious device, the modern infant, instead of being whipped into reading, is beguiled into it pleasantly and imperceptibly, and makes his progress by a philosophical law. He reads before he knows it. But here the obstacle arises that each vowel, printed in the same type, has so many sounds. One ingenious teacher. Dr. Leigh, obviates this by printing on his charts each vowel-sound in a slightly different form, and giving the silent letters in hair-lines. The objection here might be that the scholar learns a type different from that in common use. Still, the deviation from the ordinary alphabet is so slight as probably not to confuse any young mind, and the learner can go on by a philosophical classification of sounds. Other teachers indicate the different vowel-sounds by accents.

One well-known writer on the "Object System," Mr. Caulkins, seems to approve of what we are inclined to consider even more philosophical still – the learning the word first, and the letters and spelling afterward.

Most children in cultivated families learn to read in this way. The word is a symbol of thought – a thing in itself – first, perhaps, connected with a picture of the object placed at its side, but afterward becoming phonetic, representing arbitrarily any object by its sound. Then other words are learned – not separately, but in association, as one learns a foreign language. Farther on, the pupil analyzes, spells, considers each letter, and notes each part of speech.

An objection may occur here, that the habit of correct and careful spelling will not be so well gained by this method as by the old.

Mr. Caulkins's remarks on this topic in his Manual on "Object Lessons" are so sensible that we quote them in extenso: —

THE A B C METHOD

This old, long, and tedious way consists in teaching, first, the name of each of the twenty-six letters, then in combining these into unmeaning syllables of 'two letters,' 'three letters,' and, finally, into words of 'two syllables' and 'three syllables.' Very little regard is had to the meaning of the words. Indeed, it seems as if those who attempt to teach reading by this method supposed that the chief object should be to make their pupils fluent in oral spelling; and it ends in spelling, usually, since children thus taught go on spelling out their words through all the reading lessons, and seldom become intelligent readers. They give their attention to the words, instead of the ideas intended to be represented by them. When the child has succeeded in learning the names of the twenty-six letters, he has gained no knowledge of their real use as representatives of sounds, and, consequently, little ability in determining how to pronounce a new word from naming its letters. Besides, the names of the letters constantly mislead him when formed into words.

"He may have made the acquaintance of each of the twenty-six individual letters, so as to recognize their faces and be able to call them by name singly; but when these same letters change places with their fellows, as they are grouped into different words, he is frequently unable to address many of them in a proper manner, or to determine what duties they perform in their different places.