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The Children Of The Poor

From: The Poor In Great Cities: The Problems And What Is Doing To Solve Them
Creator: Jacob A. Riis (author)
Date: 1895
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York
Source: Available at selected libraries

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"One of God's Children" -- Progress in the Care of Poor Children in New York -- The Children's Aid Society -- Italians in Mulberry Bend -- The Schools -- Some Typical Children of the East Side -- Child Population of the Jewish Tenements -- Child Labor in the Tenements -- Some Solutions of the Problem -- Ambition among the School Children -- The Flag in the Schools -- Street Gamins and their Future -- Boys' Clubs -- Little Housekeepers -- The Story of "Buffalo."

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UNDER the heading "Just One of God's Children" one of the morning- newspapers told the story not long ago of a newsboy at the Brooklyn Bridge, who fell in a fit with his bundle of papers under his arm, and was carried into the waiting-room by the Bridge police. They sent for an ambulance, but before it came the boy was out selling papers again. The reporters asked the little dark-eyed newswoman at the bridge entrance which boy it was.

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"Little Maher it was," she answered.

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"Who takes care of him?"

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"Oh! no one but God," said she, "and he is too busy with other folks to give him much attention"

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Little Maher was the representative of a class that is happily growing smaller year by year in our city. It is altogether likely that a little inquiry into his case could have placed the responsibility for his forlorn condition considerably nearer home, upon someone who preferred giving Providence the job to taking the trouble himself. There are homeless children in New York. It is certain that we shall always have our full share. Yet it is equally certain that society is coming out ahead in its struggle with this problem. In ten years, during which New York added to her population one-fourth, the homelessness of our streets, taking the returns of the Children's Aid Society's lodging houses as the gauge , instead of increasing proportionally has decreased nearly one-fifth; and of the Topsy element, it may be set down as a fact, there is an end.

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If we were able to argue from this a corresponding improvement in the general lot of the poor, we should have good cause for congratulation. But it is not so. The showing is due mainly to the perfection of organized charitable effort, that proceeds nowadays upon the sensible principle of putting out a fire, viz., that it must be headed off, not run down. It is possible also that the Bowery lodging-houses attract a larger share of the half-grown lads with their promise of greater freedom, which is not a pleasant possibility. The general situation is not perceptibly improved. The menace of the Submerged Tenth has not been blotted from the register of the Potter's Field, and though the "twenty thousand poor children who would not have known it was Christmas," but for public notice to that effect, be a benevolent fiction, there are plenty whose brief lives have had little enough of the embodiment of Christmas cheer and good-will in them to make the name seem like a bitter mockery. If indeed, New York were not what she is; if it were possible to-morrow to shut her door against the immigration of the world and still maintain the conditions of to-day, I should confidently predict a steady progress that would leave little of the problem for the next generation to wrestle with. But that is only another way of saying "if New York were not New York." It is because she is New York that in reviewing our own miseries we have to take into account half the poverty, the ignorance, and the helplessness of the cities of the Old World, that is dumped at our door while the procession of the strong and of the able moves on. And that is what makes our problem.

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Heretofore the assimilation of these alien elements has been sufficiently rapid. Will it continue so? There has been evidence lately that we are entering upon a new stage of metropolitan development that might have fresh difficulties on this score. Anyone who will sit an hour at a meeting of the Police Board, for instance, when candidates for appointments are questioned as to their knowledge of the city, will discover that a generation of young men has grown up about us who claim, not New York as their birthplace, but this or that section of it -- the East Side, the Hook, Harlem, and so on, and outside of that immediate neighborhood, unless their employment has been of a character to take them much about, know as little of the city of their birth as if the rest of it were in Timbuctoo. These were the children of yesterday, when the population was, so to speak, yet on the march. To-day we find it, though drifting still, tarrying longer and crystallizing on race-lines in settlements some of which have already as well-defined limits as if they were walled in, to all intents and purposes separate towns. The meaning of this is that our social fabric is stiffening into more permanent forms. Does it imply also that with its elasticity it is losing its old power of assimilation, of digestion?

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I think not. The evidence is all to the contrary. Its vitality seems to me not only unimpaired, but growing plainly stronger as greater claims are made upon it by the influx of races foreign alike of speech, of tradition, and of sentiment. Fresh problems are presented, fresh troubles foreshadowed, fresh prejudices aroused only to receive in their turn the same orderly, logical, and simple solution that discovers all alarm to have been groundless. Yesterday it was the swarthy Italian, to-day the Russian Jew that excited our distrust; to-morrow it may be the Arab or the Greek. All alike they have taken, or are taking, their places in the ranks of our social phalanx, pushing upward from the bottom with steady effort, as I believe they will continue to do, unless failure to provide them with proper homes arrests the process. The slum tenement bears to it the same relation as the effect the rags of an old tramp are said to have upon the young idler in his company. He has only to wear them to lose all ambition and become himself a tramp; the stamp is on him. But in the general advance the children are the moving force, the link between the past that had no future and the present that accounts no task too great in the dawning consciousness of a proud manhood. Their feeble hands roll away in play the stone before which the statecraft of our wise day stood aghast. The one immigrant who does not keep step, who, having fallen out of the ranks, has been ordered to the rear, is the Chinaman, who brought neither family nor children to push him ahead. He left them behind that he might not become an American, and by the standard he himself set up he has been judged.

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