The Children of the Poor quotes

The “Soup-House Gang,” Class in History in the Duane Street Newsboy’s Lodging-house,

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.

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 one has the making of something in him, unpromising as he looks; seen in a certain light he may even be considered a hopeful symptom. The other is just so much dead loss.

The tough is not born: he is made.

The all-important point is the one at which the manufacture can be stopped.

The one has the making of something in him, unpromising as he looks; seen in a certain light he may even be considered a hopeful symptom. The other is just so much dead loss. The tough is not born: he is made.

The all-important point is the one at which the manufacture can be stopped.

So rapid and great are the changes in American cities, that no slum has yet had a chance here to grow old enough to distil its deadliest poison. New York has been no exception. But we cannot always go at so fast a pace.

Plenty of evidence will be found in these pages to show that it has been made in the right spirit already, and that it has proved a wise choice.

No investment gives a better return to-day on the capital put out than work among the children of the poor.

A single fact will show what is meant by that.

… seasons have passed since the crowding of the black-eyed brigade of “guinnies,” as they were contemptuously dubbed, in ever-increasing numbers, into the ragged schools and the kindergartens, was watched with regret and alarm by the teachers, as by many others who had no better cause.

The event proved that the children were the real teachers.

They had a more valuable lesson to impart than they came to learn, and it has been a salutary one. To-day they are gladly welcomed.

Once taken, the place is hers to keep for good.

Sickness, unless it be mortal, is no excuse from the drudgery of the tenement.

When, recently, one little Italian girl, hardly yet in her teens, stayed away from her class in the Mott Street Industrial School so long that her teacher went to her home to look her up, she found the child in a high fever, in bed, …

Crime, suicide, and police business generally seem to bear the same relation to the stairs in a tenement that they bear to poverty itself. The more stairs the more trouble.

The deepest poverty is at home in the attic.

] But this tailor; with his immediate household, including the boarders, he occupied the larger of the two rooms. The other, a bedroom eight feet square, he sublet to a second tailor and his wife;

But children laugh because they are happy. They are not happy in Ludlow Street. Nobody is except the landlord. Why should they be?

Born to toil and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late.

There is even less time than there is room for play in Jewtown, good reason why the quality of the play is poor. There is work for the weakest hands, a step for the smallest feet in the vast tread-mill of these East Side homes.

Why should they be? Born to toil and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late. There is even less time than there is room for play in Jewtown, good reason why the quality of the play is poor.

There is work for the weakest hands, a step for the smallest feet in the vast tread-mill of these East Side homes.

A thing is worth there what it will bring. All other considerations, ambitions, desires, yield to that. Education pays as an investment, and therefore the child is sent to school.

I had a bunch of white pinks which a young lady had given me half an hour before for one of my little friends. “They are yours,” I said, and held them out to him, “take them.”

Doubt, delight, and utter bewilderment struggled in the boy’s face.

He said not one word, but when he had brought his mind to believe that it really was so, clutched the flowers with one eager, grimy fist, held them close against his bare breast, and, shielding them with the other, ran as fast as his …

If that is not much, he is not justly to blame for not giving back more to the community of which by and by he will be a responsible member.

The kind of the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and it pervades and shapes his young life.

It is the tenement that gives up the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied him.

They got a heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper came out with his club.

Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails; every block a ball-ground when the policeman’s back is turned, and every roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city ordinance “below Fourteenth Street.”

PRESENT TENANTS OF JOHN ERICSSON’S OLD HOUSE NOW THE BEACH STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.

Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd broke and ran in a body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone.

As an attraction the dog-fight outranked the dinner.

This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way.

Thus ended the story of Kid McDuff’s girl.

Poverty and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is perpetual, indissoluble.

The one begets the other. Need sets the child to work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages, thus increasing the need. Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it has not been said better since:

Poverty and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is perpetual, indissoluble. The one begets the other.

Need sets the child to work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages, thus increasing the need.

Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it has not been said better since: “The destruction of the poor is their poverty.”

None may labor in factories under the age of fourteen; not under sixteen unless able to read and write simple sentences in English. These are the barriers thrown up against the inroads of ignorance, poverty’s threat.

They are barriers of paper. We have the laws, but we do not enforce them.

By that I do not mean to say that we make no attempt to enforce them. We do.

It has had another and worse effect. It has bred wholesale perjury among them and their parents. Already they have become so used to it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them.

The child of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a matter of course.

Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose of the law.

Already they have become so used to it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them. The child of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a matter of course.

Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose of the law.

More than a year ago, in an effort to get at the truth of the matter of children’s labor, I submitted to the Board of Health, after consultation with Dr.

Hand-sewed shoes, made for a fashionable Broadway shoe store, were sewed at home by a man in whose family were three children with scarlet fever. And such instances are common.

Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house manufactories.

When reported to the Board of Health, the inspector at once prohibits further manufacture during the continuance of the disease, but his back is scarcely turned before the people return to their work.

They all have passports in which the name and ages of their children are set down. The claim that they had purposely registered them as younger to cheapen transportation, which they would be sure to make, need not be considered seriously.

One lie is as good and as easy as another.

Another lesson we may learn with advantage from some old-country governments, which we are apt to look down upon as “slow,” is to punish the parents for the truancy of their children, whether they are found running in the street or working in a shop …

She spoke of the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass of such unions.

Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the children.

I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing.

In such a system a truant school or home would seem to be a logical necessity.

Because a boy does not like to go to school, he is not necessarily bad.

It may be the fault of the school and of the teacher as much as of the boy. Indeed, a good many people of sense hold that the boy who has never planned to run away from home or school does not amount to much.

“’Cause I was lazy and played hookey,” he said, and joined in the laugh his answer raised.

The idea of that little body, that fairly throbbed with energy, being sent to prison for laziness was too absurd for anything.

The report that comes from the Western Agency of the Asylum, through which the boys are placed out on farms, that the proportion of troublesome children is growing larger does not agree with the idea of laziness either, but well enough with the idleness of …

nor even the larger share. The park did it, exactly as the managers of the Juvenile Asylum appealed to the sense of honor in their prisoners.

It appealed with its trees and its grass and its birds to the sense of decency and of beauty, undeveloped but not smothered, in the children, and the whole neighborhood responded.

One can go around the whole square that covers two big blocks, nowadays, and not come upon a single fight. I should like to see anyone walk that distance in Mulberry Street without running across half a dozen.

The mania for gambling is all but universal.

Every street child is a born gambler; he has nothing to lose and all to win.

He begins by “shooting craps” in the street and ends by “chucking dice” in the saloon, two names for the same thing, sure to lead to the same goal.

rarely yet Italians seeking their own. The cry of the missionary, from the slums in the hot July days: “How shall we give those babies the breath of air that means life?—no one asks for Italian children,” has not yet been answered.

Prejudice dies slowly.

When an end has been made of this at last, the Fresh Air Fund will receive a new boom. To my mind there are no more tractable children than the little Italians, none more grateful for kindness; certainly none more in need of it.

She spoke as a doctor, familiar with the appearance of the children when they went out and when they came back. There are not wanting professional opinions showing most remarkable cures to have resulted from even this brief respite from the slum.

The explanation is simple: it was the slum that was the real complaint; with it the cause was removed and improvement came with a bound.

As to the moral and educational effect, Mr. Parsons thus answers a clergyman who objected that “it will only make the child discontented with the surroundings where God placed him:”

may insist that the potatoes are home-made “cause I seen the garding;” both of which were actual opinions expressed by the Bath Beach summer boarders; but the interest, the sympathy, the hearty appreciation of it, is there always, the most encouraging symptom of all.

Down in the worst little ruffian’s soul there is, after all, a tender spot not yet pre-empted by the slum.

And Mother Nature touches it at once. They are chums on the minute.

As an adjunct to the public school in preparing the young minds for more serious tasks, it is admitted by teachers to be most valuable. But its greatest success is as a jail deliverer.

“The more kindergartens the fewer prisons” is a saying the truth of which the generation that comes after us will be better able to grasp than we.

The kindergarten is the city’s best truant officer. Not only has it no truants itself, but it ferrets out a lot who are truants from necessity, not from choice, and delivers them over to the public school.

But its greatest success is as a jail deliverer. “The more kindergartens the fewer prisons” is a saying the truth of which the generation that comes after us will be better able to grasp than we.

The kindergarten is the city’s best truant officer.

Not only has it no truants itself, but it ferrets out a lot who are truants from necessity, not from choice, and delivers them over to the public school.

It may be an “impracticable notion,” as I have sometimes been told by hard-headed men of business; but it is not always the hard head that scores in work among the poor.

The language of the heart is a tongue that is understood in the poorest tenements where the English speech is scarcely comprehended and rated little above the hovels in which the immigrants are receiving their first lessons in the dignity of American citizenship.

Very lately a unique exercise has been added to the course in these schools, that lays hold of the very marrow of the problem with which they deal. It is called “saluting the flag,” and originated with Colonel George T.

Three boys’ clubs had been started by the ladies of the College Settlement, on the principle of non-interference within the few and simple rules of the house.

The boys wrote their own laws and maintained order with success.

The street looked on, observant. To the policeman it had opposed secret hostility or open war. But a social order with the policeman eliminated was something worthy of approval.

She went out and confronted the mob herself. When it had yelled itself hoarse at her, she sweetly asked it in to have some coffee and cakes. The mob stared, breathless.

Coffee and cakes for stones and mud!

This was the Gospel in a shape that was new and bewildering to Tompkins Square. The boys took counsel among themselves. Visions of a big policeman behind the door troubled the timid; but the more courageous were in favor of taking chances.

In his business meetings the boy debates a point of order with the skill and persistence of a trained politician. The aptitude for politics sticks out all over him; but he has some lessons of that trade to learn yet, to his harm.

He has not mastered the trick of betraying a friend.

Any member of his club, the Superintendent feels sure, would stand up for him and take a thrashing, if need be, should he be found in trouble on his “beat.” The “beats” that converge at St.

“That gentleman,” said the proud daughter, in her most impressive tone, “is my father.”

“Well!” said the boy, surveying her with supreme contempt, “don’t yer know yer own father’s trade?”

The Boys’ Club has had many followers. Some aim at teaching the lads trades; others content themselves with trying to mend their manners, while weaning them from the street and its coarse ways.

… principle itself that is the condition of success—the real sympathy and interest in the children that bids them come and be welcome, that seeks to understand their needs and help them for their own sake, a religion that “beats preaching” among the poor any day.

It is a question of men and of hearts, not of faith.

And the poorer the children, the more friendless and forsaken, the more readily do they respond to approaches in that spirit.

… a full month later than usual and experienced no such collapse, although the park across the street might be supposed to be an extra attraction on warm evenings, suggests that there is some mistake about this which it would be worth while to find out.

The street is no less dangerous to the boy in summer because it is more crowded.

The Free Reading-Room for boys in West Fourteenth Street is open all the year round, and though the attendance in summer decreases one-half, yet the rooms are never empty.

The Superintendent found them helpful, too, as a means of interesting the boys, by debate and otherwise, in the cause of temperance which he had at heart.

The first thing a boys’ club casts about for after the offices have been manned and the by-laws made hard and fast, is a cause.

One of young boys, that had been in existence a month or less at the College Settlement, almost took the ladies’ breath away by announcing one day that it had decided to expel any boy who smoked or got drunk.

… them from temptation, by shutting every door but that of the church against them on the day when the devil was busiest finding mischief for their idle hands to do, while narrowing that down to the size of a wicket-gate with our creeds and confessions.

The poor bury their dead on Sunday to save the loss of a day’s pay. Poverty has given over their one day of rest to their sorrows.

Is it likely that any attempt to rob it of its few harmless joys should win them over? It is the shadow of bigotry and intolerance falling across it that has turned healthy play into rioting and moral ruin.

Against the drift and the head-winds of an unparalleled immigration that has literally drained the pauperism of Europe into our city for two generations, against the false currents and the undertow of the tenement in our social life, we are making headway at last.

Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time.

What if there be a thousand left? There is one less. What that one more on the wrong side of the account might have meant will never be known till the final reckoning.

Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time.

What if there be a thousand left? There is one less.

What that one more on the wrong side of the account might have meant will never be known till the final reckoning. The records of jails and brothels and poor-houses, for a hundred years to come, might but have begun the tale.

It finds them in a hundred ways—in poverty-stricken homes, on the Island, in its Industrial Schools, in the street. Often they are brought to its office by parents who are unable to take care of them. Provided they are young enough, no questions are asked.

It is not at the child’s past, but at its future, that these men look.

That it comes from among bad people is the best reason in the world why it should be put among those that are good. That is the one care of the Society.

They are of all the city’s outcasts the most unfortunate and the hardest to manage. Their misfortune has soured their temper, and as a rule they are troublesome and headstrong. No wonder.

There seems to be no room for a poor crippled lad in New York.

There are plenty of institutions that are after the well and able-bodied, but for the cripples the only chance is to shrivel and die in the Randall’s Island Asylum. No one wants them.

They at least offer a bed, such as it is, and shelter after their fashion.

The hospitality the city offers to its homeless poor in the police-station lodging-rooms is one of the scandals of a civilized age.

The moral degradation of an enforced stay in these dens is immeasurable. To say that they are the resort of tramps and “bums” who know and deserve nothing better, is begging the question.

Failing in that, they become public tenements, with most of the bad features of the tenement left out, but the worst retained: the smothering of the tenant’s individuality. He is saved from becoming a tough to become an automaton.

It is money scattered without judgment—not poverty—that makes the pauper.

It is money scattered without judgment—not poverty—that marshals the greater part of this army. Money backed up by pharisaical sectarianism. Where two such powerful factors combine, politics is never far in the rear, though modestly invisible to the naked eye.

And that even that other kind were much better off in the long run, their being in the institution did not guarantee.

Children, once for all, cannot be successfully reared in regiments within the narrow rules and the confinement of an asylum, if success is to be measured by the development of individual character.

Power to regulate or shorten their stay is not vested to any practical extent or purpose in any outside agency. Within, with every benevolent desire to do the right, every interest of the institution as a whole tends to confuse the perception of it.

Power to regulate or shorten their stay is not vested to any practical extent or purpose in any outside agency. Within, with every benevolent desire to do the right, every interest of the institution as a whole tends to confuse the perception of it.

The more children, the more money; the fewer children, the less money.

A thousand children can be more economically managed for $110,000 than five hundred for half the money. The fortieth annual report of the Juvenile Asylum (1891) puts it very plainly, in this statement on page 23: