Street child

“ We have spoken of the street as a dangerous environment from which we would gladly rescue the children if we could, and so it undoubtedly is in so far as it supplants the influence of the home, tends to nullify that of the school and lets the boys and girls run wild just when they most need to be tamed.... ”

“ School reports show that street trades, when carried on by [30] young children, lead to truancy, low vitality, dullness and the breaking down of parental control. Since the children are on the streets at all hours, careless habits are developed which often lead to moral ruin to both boys and girls. ”

“ Almost every female carries a baby, and some females carry two. There are children in heaps at the corner of the street, children on the doorsteps, children in the gutter, children under the wheels of hansom cabs, up the lamp-posts, hanging over the window-sills, crowding the staircases, lying in the areas, rolling with the cabbage-stalks under the stalls, swarming and crawling all day long among the crowd, laughing, crying, screaming, and playing, unheeded, uncared for, unowned. ”

“ And he was oddly glad when the window rose without a squeak. He leaned out and looked up and down the street. It was unchanged. Across the way a door flung open, a child darted out with shrill laughter and dodged about the corner of the house, escaping after some mischief. ”

“ No event in the outer world makes any impression in this street. Nations may rise, or may totter in ruin; but here the colorless day will work through its twenty-four hours just as it did yesterday, and just as it will to-morrow. Without there may be party strife, wars and rumors of wars, public rejoicings; but the trotting of the little feet will be neither quickened nor stayed. Those quaint little women, the girl-children of this street, who use a motherly management toward all girl-things younger than themselves, and toward all boys as old or older, with "Bless the child!" ”

“ The street is painted as a black monster by some social workers, who can discern nothing but evil in it. Nevertheless the street is closely woven into the life of every city dweller, for his contact with it is daily and continuous. If it is all evil, it ought to be abolished ”

“ By none of the three, however, except in so far as street trading by a child under ten is counted an element in dependency, is the street-trading child safeguarded against parental neglect or greed, the vicious sights and sounds of the city street and the demoralizing habit of irregular employment. ”

“ She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror. ”

“ While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior. ”

“ Bitter experience has taught us that these restrictions are right and just, and we now have no hesitancy in barring young children from such employment, regardless of the training it affords. Why, then, do we exempt many forms of street work from the operation of the law? Why do we allow little children to [75] work at any age, both night and day, as newsboys, bootblacks and peddlers in the essentially dangerous environment of the street? Such employment offers but a gloomy future—the useless life of the casual worker. ”

“ With this boy, and with all those who are obviously too young to be permitted to engage in street trading, it is our duty to deal if we are to preserve the attitude the American city takes toward the dependent child. ”

“ All forms of street work that engage any considerable number of children have been described at length, and opinions and findings of others have been freely quoted. I have attempted to show the bad results of the policy of laissez-faire as applied to this problem. Simply because these little boys and girls have been ministering to its wants, the public has given them scarcely a passing thought. It has been so convenient to have a newspaper or a shoe brush thrust at one, it has not occurred to us that, for the sake of the children, such work would better be done by other means. ”

“ However, deterioration in one form or another is invariably noted in children who have been engaged in street work for any length of time, and this is sufficient proof of the undesirability of such employment for our boys and girls. ”

“ They are arrested for the only thing a child can do on the street, and they have no place but the street in which to do anything. These children represent the child population of half or more of the tenement districts of New York City. ”

“ But one of the little ones, standing before her mother, was pushed almost to falling; and the harlot, seeing her chance, snatched the child upon her knee. The child looked up, something in wonder, and smiled; and the woman leered as honestly as she might, saying a hoarse word or two.
Presently the conflict overhead, waxing and waning to an accompaniment of angry shouts, afforded another brief diversion to those within, and something persuaded the standing passengers to shove toward the door. The child had fallen asleep in the street-walker's arms. "Jinny!" ”

“ The problem is an urgent one, but generally ignored, for, as Myron E. Adams says, the public sees the street worker at his best and neglects him at his worst.
The charge that in street work a child has small chance of acquiring a suitable trade is one of the worst counts in the indictment. Street work leads to nothing else; the various occupations are so many industrial pitfalls, and the children who get into them must sooner or later struggle out and begin over again at some other line of work, if they would succeed. ”

“ No playing on the stairs, the little one always kept at home and watched closely, for children think of nothing but evil. The doors and windows shut, never any draughts, which bring the wicked things of the street with them. Out of doors, never leave go of the child’s hand, teach it to keep its eyes lowered to avoid seeing anything wrong. ”

“ They spend the day sitting on their dirty doorsteps, with the youngest baby on their knees, and their hair is all uncombed, and their dresses are filthy and torn, and they shout out to other women across the street, and make remarks on anyone who happens to pass. The poor little baby gets dreadful things to eat—things that you would think would kill an ordinary child—bits of herring or apple, and anything else its mother eats, and sometimes even sips of beer or gin. ”

“ I'd have only one handsome street suit or two, each season, beside evening dresses, and people would get to know me by sight, and bring their babies up to me in the street--" Her weak, kind eyes always watered at the picture. ”

“ Two long years had passed, and the memory of her and hers had long since faded out of Mulberry Street, when, in the overhauling of one of the children's homes we thought we had canvassed thoroughly, the child turned up, as unaccountably as she had been lost. All that I ever learned about it was that she had been brought there, picked up by some one in the street, probably, and, after more or less inquiry that had failed to connect with the search at our end of the line, had been included in their flock on some formal commitment, and had stayed there. ”

“ The utmost freedom is allowed, but it stops short of the license of the street. Its law of violence is replaced by the law of love. The child learns to govern himself. Not at once; I observed two or three black eyes during a tour of a half-score kindergartens, last June, that showed that the street yielded its reign reluctantly. During my visit to the East Sixty-third Street school I became interested in a little fellow who was its special pet and the ward of the Alumnæ of the Normal college, who through the New York Kindergarten Association had established and maintained the school. ”

“ In addition to these wandering children, parents often cast off girls on very slight grounds. To turn a child into the street, if the girl is out of work or supposed to be idle or disorderly, is by no means [Pg 321] uncommon. ”

“ There is no valid reason why just as efficient service in streets could not be rendered by adults. Certainly it would be far more suitable and humane to reserve such work for old men and women who need outdoor life and are physically unable to earn their living in other ways. We could buy our newspaper from a crippled adult at a stand just as easily as we get it now from an urchin who shivers on the street corner. It is only a question of habit, and we ought to be glad of the change for the good of all concerned.
E. N. C.
Cincinnati, 1912. ”

“ It could surprise no one if a child so neglected became so habituated to a street life, that she could not adapt herself to any other. I heard of other children thus or similarly neglected, but boys far more frequently than girls, who traded regularly in apples, oranges, &c., on their own account. Some have become regular street-sellers, and even in childhood have abandoned their homes and supported themselves. ”

“ When a child of 13, a bootblack, is 'often on the street to 12 P.M.,' or when a boy one year older works six hours daily outside of school time, 'often at night,' as a telegraph messenger, it is evident that his school work is not the only thing which is likely to suffer from the excessive strain upon the immature strength, and from the character of his occupation. ”

“ It must be remembered that one commonplace factor, the glaring publicity of the street, is all on the side of the town youth's virtue. The street has its safeguards as well as its dangers." [94]
With reference to the blind alley character of street work, another English writer avers: "As in London, the labours of the school children [in Manchester] are in no wise apprenticeship or preparation for their future lives. The grocer's little errand boy will be discharged when he grows bigger and needs higher wages; the chemist's runner is not in training to become a chemist. ”

“ Should he be unable to obtain possession of the till himself, he is instructed to pretend that he has missed his way, and to inquire for some street near the spot; or, he will address her with, "Please, ma'am, can you tell me what it is o'clock?" The unsuspecting woman, with the greatest kindness possible, shews the child the street he inquires for, or leaves the shop to ascertain the hour, and for her civility, she is sure to find herself robbed, when she returns, by some of the child's companions. ”

“ The many quotations in this chapter from authoritative sources with reference to the harmful effects of street work upon children constitute a most severe indictment. Students of labor conditions, specialists and official committees bitterly denounce the practice of permitting children to trade in city streets, and cite the consequences of such neglect. ”

“ One of the most decisive blows delivered against street work by children in Great Britain was the statement of Thomas Burke of the Liverpool City Council, a son of working people, who had lived in a crowded city street for twenty years, had attended a public elementary school until fourteen years of age, where the number of child street traders was very large, and had become convinced that "work after school hours was decidedly injurious to health and character." ”

“ In this list of undesirable forms of labor, street work should be included. Great Britain has had far more experience in the matter of regulating the work of children than any state of this country, and, in the light of all this experience, her departmental committee of 1910 has emphatically declared that street trading by boys under seventeen and girls under eighteen years should be absolutely prohibited. ”

“ Teachers—together with magistrates, police authorities, ministers of religion and social workers—are practically unanimous in condemning street trading as an employment of children of school age. In this occupation children deteriorate rapidly from the physical, mental and moral point of view. ”

“ With reference to the effects of street trading an English writer says: "It is difficult to imagine a life which could be worse for a young boy. Apart from the moral dangers, it is a means of earning a livelihood which perhaps more than any other is subject to the most violent fluctuations. But the uncertainty of the income is a trifling evil by comparison with the certainty of the bad moral effects of street [140] trading on boys and youths. ”

“ The father returning from work asks his child in the street where her mother is; and back the answer comes, "In the buildings."
A new race has sprung up, a street people. They pass their lives at work and in the streets. ”

“ It seems incredible that we have been so engrossed with throwing safeguards about the children in regular industries that we have altogether neglected the street worker, for the arguments against child labor in factories, mills, mines and retail shops apply with even greater force to the work of children in our city streets. ”

“ Many of the homes of city children very largely lack the element of attractiveness which is so essential in holding children under the influence of their parents, and this want must [22] be filled as far as possible by making the school an instrument not merely for instruction, but also for the entertainment and socializing of the entire neighborhood.
Again, the regulating of street trading should be undertaken jointly with the movement to supply adequate playground facilities. Playgrounds are not a municipal luxury, but a necessary. Children must have some suitable place for recreation. ”