THE J 
Social Waste of a Great City 
A PAPER READ BEFORE THE 
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE 
AT ITS 
Annual Meeting in Buffalo, August 20, 1880 
BY 
LOUIS L. SEAMAN, M.D., LL.B. 
LATE CHIEF OF STAFF CHARITY, MATERNITY, PENITENTIARY, EPILEPTIC, AND PARALYTIC 
HOSPITALS, B. I. ; MEMBER OF THE A. A. A. S. ; THE NEW YORK COUNTY MEDICAL 
SOCIETY; FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY OF MEDICINE, ETC. 
Reprint from Science, Septenit>er 24, 1886 
NEW YORK 
TROW’S PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING CO. 
201-213 East Twelfth Street 
1886 THE 
Social Waste of a Great City 
A PAPER READ BEFORE THE 
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE 
AT ITS 
Annual Meeting in Buffalo, August 20, 1886 
BY 
LOUIS L. SEAMAN, M.D., LL.B. I 
LATE CHIEF OF STAFF CHARITY, MATERNITY, PENITENTIARY, EPILEPTIC, AND PARALYTIC 
HOSPITALS, B. I. ; MEMBER OF THE A. A. A. S. ; THE NEW YORK COUNTY MEDICAL 
SOCIETY ; FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY’ OF MEDICINE, ETC. 
Reprint from Science, September 24, 1886 
NEW YORK 
TROW’S PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING CO. 
201-213 East Twelfth Street 
1886 EXTRACTS FROM THE PRESS. 
CITY CHARITIES AND CORRECTION. 
(Editorial from The New York Tribune, August 21, 1886.) 
Dr. L. L. Seaman, for many years Chief of Staff at Charity Hos- 
pital, Blackwell’s Island, yesterday read a paper before the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, at Buffalo, which is of 
special interest to New Yorkers. Copious extracts from this essay are 
given elsewhere in this issue. In vivid language Dr. Seaman describes 
the social waste of this metropolis, and reviews the operations of the 
great municipal department which takes charge both of criminals and 
of those whose only offence is their poverty. His long and thorough 
experience in the department enables him to speak with authority, and 
he does not hesitate to speak out boldly in condemnation of the evils 
and abuses which have grown up in this branch of the city govern- 
ment, and which seriously impair its efficiency. The chief source of 
trouble is that partisan politics has been allowed to affect a large part 
of the service, although there is no department from which ward 
“workers” and faction parasites should be more rigorously excluded. 
Some of the institutions are undoubtedly in excellent hands. Dr. 
Macdonald, for instance, owes his high position to unquestioned merit 
and exceptional ability, and not to political considerations of any sort. 
But it is evident to all who have scrutinized the operations of the De- 
partment of Charities and Correction that some of the Commissioners 
are politicians first and public servants afterward, and that to a lament- 
able degree the hospitals, asylums, and prisons are looked to as a 
means of paying off obligations for services in election districts, rather 
than as institutions demanding intelligent and conscientious super- 
vision, and requiring in every official and attendant the possession of 
qualities which can never be useful in the conciliation of the floating 
vote of the dram-shops or in the working out of the tricks and schemes 
of the subways of ward politics. 4 
THE “UNDER-WORLD” OF A GREAT CITY. 
{Editorial from The Mail and Express, August 21. 18S6.) 
Among the papers read at the present session of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, at Buffalo, is one by Dr. 
L. L. Seaman, on “The Social Waste of a Great City,” that deserves 
the thoughtful attention of all New Yorkers. Dr. Seaman was for 
many years Chief of Staff at Charity Hospital, on Blackwell’s Isl- 
and, and knows what he is talking about. Ilis statements are, or 
ought to be, startling ; but they are true as Gospel. 
After speaking of the necessity for waste that exists in every or- 
ganism—waste that up to a certain point is the sign of a healthful 
growth, but beyond that is a sign of decay and of ultimate disinte- 
gration—he instances the city’s institutions of charities and correction 
as measures of the city’s waste, and calls attention to the enormous 
proportions of this outcast and useless element in social life. It has, 
he says, seized upon and subsidized the fairest string of islands that 
graces a metropolis the world over. Where there might have been, 
under a shrewder, better providence, parks, groves, museums, art-gal- 
leries, zoological gardens, wholesome games, exhilarants for honest in- 
dustry and useful thrift, stretching at little intervals from Governor’s 
to Hart’s Island, full eighteen miles, the Nemesis of penalty and ret- 
ribution has planted its growing colonies of social waste—of broken, 
degraded, repulsive, dangerous human detritus ; and this baleful colo- 
nization has pushed its way along those beautiful eastern waters, 
keeping step with the advancing city, until its entire line of eastern 
frontage, far up into Westchester County, is sentinelled by those men- 
acing excrescences of a moribund civilization. The municipality is a 
body, and it requires no labored or exhaustive differential diagnosis to 
determine that a body thus smitten with boils, and blains, with tangled 
and distempered wits, so scorched with fevers of drunkenness and de- 
bauchery, so threatened with poison in the very life-blood, is at best 
in a desperate condition. 
The millions spent in maintaining these institutions—prisons, jails, 
reformatories, almshouses, hospitals—are so much waste money ; 
money that goes for the mere cleaning out of the social cesspools, and 
for keeping the social body from being infected and diseased through 
and through. They must be maintained, for the sake of the public 5 
welfare, but what a tremendous waste of treasure, of life, of energy, is 
involved in merely getting rid of the city’s social garbage ! 
The primary cause of all this waste, the cause without whose oper- 
ation these “ institutions ” of waste would, in a decade, shrink and 
shrivel wellnigh out of sight, is strong drink. “Drink and debauch- 
ery,” says Dr. Seaman, “are inseparable, and poverty and crime and 
pestilence are their progeny.” “ If drink and lust furnish three-quar- 
ters of the criminals, they are more lavish yet with the almshouses, 
and they have a busy hand in filling the wards of the hospitals.” 
While the dram-shops are the breeders of the vice and crime that 
render such institutions a necessity, they are, also, says this fearless 
and incisive writer, the spawning-ground of the politicians who con- 
trol the management of the city’s departments. The garbage and the 
contractor who takes it away and takes care of it have a common ori- 
gin, £,nd it is to the interest of the contractor that the supply of gar- 
bage shall not fall short. “ Under such conditions,” says Dr. Seaman, 
“ what else could happen than has steadily happened—perpetual jost- 
lings, abuse of discipline, tampering with the courts, muddling of 
justice, and an impassable chasm which separates between a time- 
serving officialism and the scientific and professional superintenden- 
cies; a deadlock which discourages, if it does not paralyze, the esprit 
de corps of medical administrations; which withholds the incentive for 
legitimate emulation, and reduces the men who devote, and not infre- 
quently surrender, their lives to the standing of tide-waiters under the 
bidding of an irresponsible board, which is itself nothing better than 
an accident in political evolution. The “ machine ” is supreme. And 
the Commissioners rattle their own handcuffs of partisan servitude 
while reducing this army of employees and subordinates to the lock- 
step of partisan bondage. The same process is going on in the kin- 
dred departments of municipal administration, as the Department of 
Public Works, the Fire Department, and the Board of Education. 
Pickings and stealings, the building up of snug fortunes, the judicious 
nursing of thrifty opportunities, are insignificant elements if they 
really lie in the subject. The crowning injustice, the superlative cruel- 
ty, lies in the fact that this gravest trust from the people is become at 
once the toy and makeshift of professional politicians.” 
This is a dark picture, but who will dare to say that the colors are 
too black ? 6 
SOCIAL WASTE. 
{Editorial from The Neio York Tribune, August 27, 1886.) ] 
Tiie paper read by Dr. L. L. Seaman before the American Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Science, on “ The Social Waste of a Great 
City,” full extracts from which appeared in Saturday’s Tribune, is very 
suggestive. The author’s long personal experience as Chief of Staff 
at the Blackwell’s Island Hospital gives special weight to his observa- 
tions, and seldom have the defects of municipal administration and the 
social system been laid bare with a keener scalpel. The doctor has laid 
his hand on the spring of manifold abuses. It is unfortunately true 
that the appetite for drink and the agencies which minister to that 
appetite combine to produce and perpetuate evils which the clear- 
sighted observer mav well fear are undermining modern civilization. 
The drink evil by itself is bad enough, but when the element which 
prospers by ministering to and fostering it comes to control the 
machinery which deals with the results of debauchery, the efforts of 
philanthropy and science to diminish the alarming growth of physical 
and moral disease are made terribly difficult and hopeless. 
“ Drink and debauchery,” says Dr. Seaman, “ are inseparable, and 
poverty and crime and pestilence are their progeny. . . . Elimi- 
nate or shorten within hygienic limits the traffic in strong drink, and 
these ‘institutions’ of waste would, in a decade, shrivel and shrink 
wellnigh out of sight.” But what expectation of better conditions 
can be entertained so long as the intelligent public, the real arbiters 
of the commonwealth’s destinies, regard with inert complacency or 
passive indifference the active operation of processes which are con- 
stantly feeding the already great army of the incompetent, the crimi- 
nal and the incurable, and poisoning society at its base by dooming to 
hopeless failure tens of thousands whose degradation renders them at 
once the enemies and the pensioners of the community ? On the one 
hand stand the manufactories of misery, disease, and crime, always 
active, always turning out new subjects for the penitentiary, the hos- 
pital, and the almshouse. On the other hand are the institutions 
which have been made necessary by the activities of these laboratories 
of evil, and the final supervision of which is in the hands of men virt- 
ually chosen by the makers of the drunkards, the ruffians, and the 
wrecks. 7 
This is travelling in a vicious circle, as Dr. Seaman observes, and 
while the existing conditions are tolerated by society it is useless to 
think of amendment. So obtuse, however, do men become by habit- 
uation to abuses that, instead of deriving from the contemplation of 
our vast system of Charities and Correction the rational inference 
that the necessity for such machinery is in itself an impeachment of 
the social and political systems, the majority ignore the causes alto- 
gether, and “ point with pride ” to the excellence and completeness of 
the effects. Would the possession of the biggest inebriate asylum in 
the country be a matter for congratulation to any city ? Is an enor- 
mous machinery for handling society’s failures better evidence of ad- 
vancing civilization ? The country has fought through one war to 
abolish the more obvious kind of human slavery. If, indeed, the 
moral sense of man is becoming keener and more sensitive, the time 
cannot be distant when the American conscience will rise in revolt 
against the agencies which put the very souls of thousands under a 
servitude compared to which African slavery was a blessing, and 
which debauch private life and government, sinking the individual 
and the body politic in one common abasement. 8 
THE SOCIAL WASTE OF A GREAT CITY. 
Is the human body there is a legitimate waste of tissue and sub- 
stance, structurally indispensable to its best development ; and there 
is waste which depletes vitality, and is beyond the power of science to 
make good, while it is the herald of approaching dissolution. A great 
city is a corporation, a body politic. This complex organization, too, 
has a legitimate waste as a perpetual evidence of its thrifty increase ; 
and at the same time it suffers waste which is dead loss of social capi- 
tal and resource, while it points the way to ultimate disintegrations. 
Men and cities thrive, waste, and perish on parallel and strictly analo- 
gous lines. During a professional service of ten years among the 
charitable institutions under the control of the Board of Commis- 
sioners of Charities and Correction, and also under the Commissioners 
of Emigration, this fundamental maxim of social science has gathered 
significance with the growth of experience. The people have become 
so accustomed to this downward drift—this unresting current of 
wretchedness, profligacy, and crime—possibly so hoodwinked by the 
imposing array of architectural groups, and the glamour of official 
reports bristling with statistics, that they miss the ghastliness of the 
situation, and think about it, if at all, in a vague and unconcerned way. 
But to the earnest observer ghosts constantly arise which will not 
down. There is much ado in commercial circles about the debris and 
material waste of the streets and houses, and its best disposition, the 
people knowing full well that pestilence and epidemics bear with no 
trifling or superficial expedients. Besides, the harbor and its ap- 
proaches must be neither choked nor befouled. The fear of disease, 
the dread of death, the timidity and greed of capital keep sharp and 
suspicious watch, and in this direction the public welfare is measurably 
safe. 
But outside a group of philanthropists and professional people, 
whose lives are spent in the service of this great and growing un- 
der-world of poverty breeding desperation, and vice breeding both 
poverty and crime, few care or think about it, or undertake to pene- 
trate its dreadful secrets ; while the casual shoaling of the harbor- 9 
channels, the grounding of an ocean-going steamer, the least chill or 
check of financial thrift, a trace of typhoid or small-pox, the trans- 
portation of dressed beef or cattle, the tug and chicanery of rival 
monopolies, the disgusting encounters of professional jiugilists, stir 
and thrill the pulses of the metropolis to their liveliest beat. 
All the while this menacing under-world, with a biting irony, as- 
serts itself, and compels recognition as imperatively as does the cancer 
as it eats its way to the vitals. It seizes upon and subsidizes the fair- 
est string of islands that grace a metropolis the world over. Where 
there might have been, under a shrewder, better providence, parks, 
groves, museums, art-galleries, zoological gardens, wholesome games, 
exhilarants for honest industry and useful thrift, stretching at little 
intervals from Governor’s to Hart’s Island, full eighteen miles, the 
Nemesis of penalty and retribution has planted her growing colonies 
of social waste—of broken, degraded, repulsive, dangerous human 
detritus; and this baleful colonization has pushed its way along those 
beautiful eastern waters, keeping step with the advancing city, until 
its entire line of eastern frontage, far up into Westchester County, is 
sentinelled by these menacing excrescences of a moribund civilization. 
The municipality is a body; and it requires no labored or exhaustive 
differential diagnosis to determine that a body thus smitten with 
boils and blains, with tangled and distempered wits, so scorched with 
fevers of drunkenness and debauchery, so threatened with poison in 
the very life-blood, is at best in a desperate condition. 
So much for these “institutions of charities and correction.” In 
abundant outlay and thorough and intelligent organization, and in 
general scientific oversight, they stand, after their class, unrivalled, at 
home or abroad. Indeed, we have to make much of them; so that 
when distinguished visitors, dignitaries, or scientists come upon us for 
municipal hospitalities, who does not forecast the inevitable festive 
picnic excursion through and among these same “ institutions,” with 
its steamer decked in bunting, its junketings, its congratulatory 
speeches, as the Commissioners uncover our plague-spots and social 
ulcers, our paupers and desperadoes, our crazed and our foundlings, 
for the edification of the day ? Why not extend the route on future 
occasions, and so complete the panorama ? This would take in the 
Morgue and Potter’s Field, and their upland springs and feeders; the 
bagnios, with their more than fifteen thousand profligate women; the 
ten thousand dram-shops; the underground hells and disreputable con- 
cert dance-halls, which day and night, year in and year out, keep up 10 
the infernal work of peopling these islands. There would be some- 
thing like logic and thoroughness in such an exposition. 
The extent and magnitude of this social waste no man knows, and 
no man can know. There are outlying hidden realms of developing, 
maturing mischief and evil yet in the egg, scattered, unsuspected items 
of blemish and loss, which no report ever tabulates; and we are thrown 
back upon the depressing consciousness that the larger part of this 
under-world, like the freighted steamer or the floating iceberg, lies 
well out of sight. 
Let us take a rapid account of stock, and, in part at least, see 
where we stand. First, these islands: Blackwell’s, nearly two miles 
long, flushed by two swift channels of the river it divides, full ninety 
acres in extent, studded from end to end with the epileptic and para- 
lytic, maternity and charity hospitals, the New York penitentiary 
sprawling athwart well nigh from shore to shore, the almshouse, the 
workhouse, and the women’s lunatic asylum, and its growing popula- 
tion of more than seven thousand. Then Ward’s Island, lying in a 
nearly rectangular area of two hundred and sixty acres, at the junc- 
tion of the Harlem and East Livers at Hell Gate; here are the luna- 
tic asylum for males and the homoeopathic hospital, together having 
about three thousand inmates. Immediately north, and separated by 
Little Hell Gate, some two hundred feet wide, is Randall’s Island, a 
shield-shaped area of a hundred and sixty acres, and, with Ward’s, 
lying close to the city; here are the infants’ and Randall’s Island 
hospitals, an asylum for idiots, a branch of the penitentiary, an insane 
asylum for the young, and the house of refuge. Advancing a mile, 
we find Riker’s Island, for the exclusive use of correctional institu- 
tions, a fair domain of sixty acres. And yet farther up the Sound, some 
seventeen miles from the city, the advanced post of this ever-growing 
colonization, with its area of some fifty acres, its hospital for incura- 
bles, and branch workhouse and lunatic asylum (nearly thirty-five 
hundred inmates), and—the ghastly halting-place of all this intermin- 
able procession—Potter’s Field, with its myriads of friendless, dishon- 
ored dead, we reach and stop at Hart’s Island. 
Here are more than six hundred acres of the fairest islands, lying 
all the way close to the city frontage, now become a rank witness of 
its loss and shame. Who will venture an estimate of the present and 
prospective value of this perverted, sequestered real estate, and the 
outlay represented in its multiplied structures ? Add to these assets 
of the Board of Commissioners of Charities and Correction a fleet of 11 
transports, for the service of more than sixteen thousand colonists; 
Bellevue Hospital, the various buildings in the service of the depart- 
ment, the hospital service at police stations, ambulances, equipments, 
prison vans; then the police stations and properties, the jails and 
prisons, and a just allotment of court and justice chambers, where the 
selections are made and the harvest of tares gathered—this is but a 
fraction of cost and loss to the people—a shameful investment, which, 
as will shortly appear, feeds the sources and energies that exact it. 
We must not lose sight of the millions spent in the erection and 
support of foundling-asylums, reformatories of various sorts and uses, 
dispensaries, children’s aid societies, infirmaries, and hospitals founded 
and sustained by individual and private beneficence—all part of the 
great total exactions wrung from the public thrift, and turned aside 
from legitimate uses and benefits to the nourishment and maintenance 
of this terrible under-world. 
It is equally impossible to measure the yearly outlay in this account 
with social waste. The Board of Commissioners alone send in estimates 
for their own disbursements for 1886 amounting to 11,947,607.50. Ac- 
cording to the City Comptroller’s report for 1883, the appropriations 
for asylums, reformatories, and charitable institutions, presumably out- 
side such as are committed to the care of the Commissioners of Chari- 
ties and Correction, was $1,029,953.53, and this had in 1885 grown to 
$1,108,957.51. This total ratio of growth in the increasing cost of 
social waste must not be lost sight of, for the colonies grow by a visibly 
advancing ratio; so does the cost in all the municipal departments having- 
special care of them ; while the conservative, reparative institutions lag 
behind the constantly increasing development of the city. The Board 
of Education, for example, for ten years past, scarcely breaks the even 
tenor of an annual appropriation, which fell to $3,400,000 in 1879, and 
rose to $3,769,086 in 1874, and only reached $3,750,000 in 1883. These 
data are drawn from the Comptroller’s report of 1883. Later accounts 
might throw light upon this apparent decline in the educational enter- 
prise of the city. In this hurried glance at the schedule of assets, we 
are not to lose sight of the police department—a standing army, keep- 
ing guard night and day, trained, officered, armed, and paid—the 
picked brawn and muscle of the town, banded together for the public 
protection. Add to these another army of keepers, attendants, nurses, 
deputies, resident bodies of medical men and their student assistants, 
and we begin to catch an outline of the magnitude and proportions of 
outlay in money, values, time, and men, subtracted from the normal 12 
uses and functions of thrift-production both in social and civil life, 
both of which are thus far impoverished and debilitated because of 
this shrinkage and loss in vitality. Here the sociologist is baffled ; 
for no statistical tabulation, however minute and exact, adequately or 
even approximately represents the substance of the problem. 
I do not review the physical elements of this problem to arraign the 
authorities, or to challenge the costliness of the attempt to meet and 
discharge an absolute duty ; it is simply the exaction of Nemesis— 
the price of ignorance, unthrift, sensuality, and crime, which the peo- 
ple must pay in one shape or another. The questions left for consid- 
eration are the sources of social waste, and the practical hinderances 
in the way of their municipal relief and correction. 
The sources mostly lie far back out of sight, and in unexpected 
places. Among these is the pressure of labor, especially women’s 
labor ; and the tens of thousands of young girls literally7- imprisoned 
over-hours at the sewing-machine, behind the counters of stifling 
shops, in cigar-factories, and at tenement-house tobacco-work, in fac- 
tories innumerable, where the fever of competition feeds on the blood 
and brain of girls and children, with the inevitable poisoned air, in- 
sufficient nutrition, and exhaustive toil, constitute one of the most 
perilous sources of supply for the vicious and criminal classes. Hun- 
ger, desperation, unendurable tension of nerve and muscle, are all the 
time goading thousands toward mercenary profligacy. These condi- 
tions are not only unfriendly to virtue and chastity ; they create and 
intensify those critical conditions that breed shame and dishonor. Vir- 
tuous, easy-going ladies and gentlemen must get their haberdashery 
at bargain prices, even at the yearly immolation of hecatombs of girl 
and women workers, who are literally starved into the ranks of the 
falling and fallen. Among all the thousands who drift into the island 
population there are found few exceptions to this experience. Pov- 
erty, lust, and drink—these three—and their progeny—profligacy and 
crime—cover nine-tenths of the social and moral history of these com- 
ing and going islanders. The disreputable dance-halls and concert 
dives and bagnios, and vile places of resort of one kind and another, 
all connect with this range of hopeless, suffering world of women- 
workers. 
When capital and commerce grow humane, and become as consid- 
erate of human hearts and lives as they are of machinery, vehicles, 
horses, and other useful appliances of industry and honest increase, 
then, and not sooner, will this diabolic waste of womanhood be checked 
and stayed. 13 
Note again the viperous nests of friendless and orphaned boys and 
lads who herd in out-of-the-way covers in or about the city, without 
homes, teaching, or training—the progeny of criminals, or paupers, or 
drunkards—getting keenness and animal ferocity out of their hard- 
ships, and a training, of its kind, for the full-grown thief, burglar, and 
murderer. 
“Mr. Delamater, of the New York Police Department, after careful 
estimate, states ‘ that seventy-five per cent, of our convicts are city 
born and bred,’and adds, ‘that of the 2,576 inmates of the three 
State prisons of New York, on September 30, 1884, 1,645, or 63.8 per 
cent., were from Kings and New York counties.’ 
“ The secretary of the National Prison Association write smore con- 
jecturally, but more emphatically: ‘Hooked over . . . my list 
of cases, which I have investigated personally, and find that more than 
four-fifths of the wrong-doers were either born in cities or had become 
residents of cities when very young. ... If you had asked “as 
between large towns and city, and country-bred children,” I should 
have been obliged to add almost the other fifth.’ ” * 
“ The celebrated French reformatory, Mettray, has since its foun- 
dation admitted 3,588 youthful inmates : 707 of these were the chil- 
dren of convicts; 534 ‘natural’ children; 221 foundlings; 504 
children of a second marriage ; 308 those whose parents live in con- 
cubinage ; and 1,542 children without either father or mother” 
( Une visite d Mettray, Paris, 1868). 
“ According to Dr. Bittinger (‘ Transactions of the National Con- 
gress,’ p. 279), of the 7,963 inmates of the reformatories of the United 
States in 1870, fifty-five per cent, were orphans or half-orphans.” 
M. de Marsaugy, a clever French author, in writing of the causes of 
juvenile crime in France, says that “a fifth of those who have been the 
objects of judicial pursuit are composed of orphans, the half have no 
father, a quarter no mother, and, as for those who have a family, nearly 
all are dragged by it into evil ” (Moralisation de Venfance coupable, p. 
13)- 
The precocity of the criminal classes is notorious and portentous. 
It sets back year by year, until the courts have long since passed the 
teens, and children under twelve are seen in the prisoner’s dock, with 
growing frequency, for serious misdemeanors and crimes. The police 
confess the practical difficulty, not so much of exterminating as of 
* Charles D. Kellogg, In a paper read before the American Social Science Association, 1865. 14 
repressing these nests of juvenile outcasts, who prove more formi- 
dable even than bands of adult outlaws. Something is done toward 
depleting this threatening element, under the action of the Children’s 
Aid Society and the various half-penal reformatories. But these latter 
too often send out graduates, ripe in the vilest lore of evil, contracted 
while under the costly care and training of the State. 
Superintendant Kellogg, of the Charity Organization Society, in 
the address already quoted, further states that : 
“ In 1883 every twelfth commitment by the courts of New York 
was either of a girl under twenty, or of a boy under fourteen years of 
age : of the former there were 2,054, and of the latter, 2,118, a total 
of 4,172. At the same time there were thousands of children drawn 
from the poor, permanently lodged in the public correctional institu- 
tions and the fifteen or twenty reformatories of the city. Those youth 
who have fallen into police custody are probably lost forany good pur- 
pose to the community ; and that loss, it will be seen, is greater pe- 
cuniarily and numerically than that caused by preventable death. As 
a social disease, their presence in the community is injurious beyond 
computation, since an infiltration goes on from them through gradually 
enlarging areas of society. Nor is their depravity like the calamity 
that comes with a blow, and then all is over. Having reached ado- 
lescence, they go on from year to year, dependent, predatory, contam- 
inating. V 
We have taken too superficial an estimate of the tramp population 
in its relation to social waste and disorder. 
The following statistics were taken from the Annual Report of the 
Board of Police Justices of the City of New York for 1884 : “6,275 
persons were arrested, or appeared in the police courts of New York 
City, in 1884, against whom a charge of vagrancy was preferred ; and 
of this number 5,892 were convicted upon competent testimony or 
upon their own confession.” 
Comparison with former Years. 
Number Arraigned. 
Number Convicted. 
Year. 
Males. 
Females. 
Total. 
Males. 
Females. 
Total. 
1874 
1,751 
1,388 
3,139 
1.572 
1,293 
2,865 
1883 
3,012 
2,566 
5,578 
2,737 
2,434 
5,171 
1884 
3,638 
2,637 
6,275 
3,372 
2,520 
5,892 15 
“ The number of persons arrested upon the charge of disorderly con- 
duct in 1884 was 28,G(JG. Of these, there were convicted and fined, or 
held to bail for good behavior, 20,311.” 
Comparison with former Years. 
Year. 
Number Arraigned. 
Number Convicted. 
Males. 
Females. 
. Total. 
Males. 
Females. 
Total. 
1874 
1888 
1884 
13,568 
16,272 
19,944 
7,125 
7,611 
8,752 
20,693 
23,883 
28,696 
7,058 
10,517 
13,141 
4,699 
6,196 
7,170 
11,757 
16,713 
20,311 
“ The registration bureau of The Charity Organization Society of 
New York City records a list of 71,332 different families, or a total popu- 
lation of 285,000 individuals, involved in mendicancy or dependence” 
{Report of Charity Organization Society, 1S8G). 
This waste shows a deadly apathy, a dying-out of purpose, a fatal 
estrangement from home, family, and society, for which there has, as 
yet, been found neither remedy nor cure. This tramp class grows, and 
grows dangerous and desperate, too, and is chargeable with an in- 
creasing number of outrages, assaults, and crimes against both prop- 
erty and person. The island, the almshouse, and workhouses do not 
reach or touch their cases, for they gather physical endurance and re- 
sources from fresh campaignings across country, until rounded up 
again by winter weather in the great cities. Even the dead weight of 
this class, like sheer moral inertia, rests like an incubus upon the com- 
munity ; a species of leprosy, in short, that spreads while it kills, 
surely if slowly. This discouraged, cowed, broken-down class is likely 
to increase under a civilization which develops millionnaires and mo- 
nopolies out of the feebleness and misfortunes of the masses. Strange 
illustrations of this soulless work of disintegration may be found any 
and every day in hospital, penitentiary, almshouse, insane asylum, or 
morgue. 
But well-to-do labor, legitimate, hopeful industry, insensibly con- 
tribute their quota in the multitudes, who, too heavily handicapped in 
the struggles, in the irresistible spirit of emulation and haste for 
riches that stimulates and fires on all sides, succumb to some form of 
mania or insanity. The inmates of these insane asylums are largely 16 
over-worked, over-anxious lives, thrown out of gearing often by a very 
slight obstruction—lives too far collapsed to resist an appetite or pas- 
sion which might hardly ruffle the equipoise of a robust nature. 
The heredity of evil is an element of incalculable significance, the 
fearful rolling-up or rolling-down from generation to generation, 
through all the ages, of the weakness, vice, and moral darkness of the 
past. The increase is more than compounded. It spreads and pene- 
trates in every direction without spending or diluting its death-dealing 
vigor. Evil is gregarious, it is prolific. It grows into a society of its 
own, well named the half or under world. It stamps its offspring in- 
delibly. It not only inbreeds to deadlier purpose ; it grows by what 
it captures, defiles, and anneals in some vital, hopeless way to itself. 
No man or woman who is “ sent up ” to these colonies ever returns to 
the city scot-free. There is a lien, visible or hidden, upon his or her 
present or future, which too often proves stronger than the best pur- 
poses and fairest opportunities of social rehabilitation. The under 
world, with the police and detective forces practically in its interest, 
holds in rigorous bondage every unfortunate or miscreant who has 
once “served time.” There is often tragic interest in the struggles of 
these insnared wretches to break away from the meshes spun about 
them. But the maelstrom has no bowels of mercy ; and the would-be 
fugitives are flung back again and again into the devouring whirlpool 
of crime and poverty, until the end is reached on the dissecting-table 
or in Potter’s field. Men who insist on breaking with this tyrannous 
fellowship are often driven to seek refuge among the various institu- 
tions on the islands, in menial or half-menial service, as helpers, mes- 
sengers, or orderlies, under the beggarly wages of the department, as 
a better alternative than a life at large, constantly imperilled by the 
threats and allurements of evil association. 
A serious percentage of this waste is thrown at our doors by emi- 
gration. “ Less than forty-eight per cent, of the criminals convicted 
in the police courts of the city of New York in 1884 were native born. 
Of the total number, 51,845, the United States contributed 24,511 ; 
Ireland, 10,349 ; Germany, 5,272 ; England, 1,801 ; Italy, 1,707 ; other 
countries, 2,205 ” (Annual Report of Board of Police Justices, New 
York, 1884). Thus, while it is not properly our own, we become 
charged with its care and cost. Many of the old abuses have given 
way before a more intelligent and discriminating legislation ; and the 
penitentiaries, workhouses, and almshouses of Europe no longer en- 
gage in the systematic and wholesale deportation of their paupers 17 
and criminals to our shores. But in the large volume of a growing 
and desirable immigration, the casualties and exhaustion of ocean 
travel, epidemics, and misfortune leave many stranded and helpless in 
this great city. 
But the crowning, almost inclusive, source of public injury is un- 
questionably strong drink and drunkenness. Yet the people pocket 
a hush or conscience money of half a million or so yearly, and then 
legalize or explicitly connive at the establishment of more than ten 
thousand drinking-places in the city. The moralist and social re- 
former have for generations shouted in our ears and spread before our 
eyes the terrible statistics of this most inhumane and inhuman traffic. 
Judges from the bench take up and repeat the refrain. Science and 
philanthropy, hand in hand, demonstrate, expostulate, and threaten ; 
yet the bribe-taking goes on, and the city, for its yearly dole of half 
a million, lets loose this army of incendiaries, more dreadful than con- 
flagrations, more deadly than pestilence, more destructive than the 
field of battle. It is no metaphor to attribute this moribund, hope- 
less, repulsive, excrescence population to the parentage of strong 
drink, for drink and debauchery are inseparable, and poverty and 
crime and pestilence are their progeny. If drink and lust furnish 
three-fourths of the criminals, they are more lavish yet with the alms- 
house, and they have a busy hand in filling the wards of the hospitals. 
Eliminate or shorten within hygienic limits the traffic in strong drink, 
and these institutions of waste would in a decade shrivel and shrink 
wellnigh out of sight. 
What can the moralist or scientist do by way of resuscitation ? 
Very little at best. The flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds and 
fragments of wasted lives. Such a ministry must begin at the sources 
—is necessarily prophylactic, nutritive, educational. On these islands 
there are no flexible twigs, only gnarled, blasted, blighted trunks, in- 
sensible to moral or social influences. 
The physician, priest, and turnkey share a common outlook of 
nearly ballled hopelessness ; and almost the sole blossom—the sole 
fair and precious jewel to be found in this world of refuse and desola- 
tion—is the culture of a stronger, surer medical science, and the train- 
ing and education of ministrants for the sick-room and hospital-wards. 
And the sole ground of hope and amelioration lies in the rigid enforce- 
ment of a more practical civil service, and in the vigilant, gratuitous, 
and inexpensive supervision of the State Board of Charities, whose 
stated and fearless probings into dark, unsuspected corners, whose 18 
scientific insight and humane devotion to their unwelcome mission, 
have instituted or energized every project or reform for betterment 
thus far attempted in our municipal institutions. 
The hindrances in the work, and the conditions unfavorable and 
even hostile to its best administration, lie in full sight of every think- 
ing observer. 
First, we note the illogical and most unrighteous affiliation between 
crime and poverty. “ Charities ” and “ correction,” forsooth ; some 
diabolic Malaprop surely linked these terms in unequal fellowship. 
What have criminals to do with the sick and poor, and why should con- 
ditions morally more widely separated than the poles be literally hand- 
cuffed in mutual ignominy? The relation between crime and poverty 
is no more essential than between crime and wealth. It is not for a 
so-called modern civilization to smirch and befoul a condition in life in 
itself honorable, reputable, and of a certain dignity, by involuntary 
association with the tramp, harlot, thief, and assassin. There is a 
charity called for at the hands of the municipality which suffers unen- 
durable shame and affront under this duplex administration of charity 
and correction. There is much pitiable, unfortunate, blameless poverty 
finding shelter in the hospitals and at the almshouse. Why should it 
be thrust into intolerable contrast with shameful, dissolute pauperdom? 
Keep the absurd term “ pauper,” if it must be, to mark the latter herd ; 
but leave “poverty” and “the poor” to the patient, long-enduring, 
suffering, and often heroic victims of failures, that fall under the 
wheels of success or monopoly. To such, a true life pays involuntary 
courtesy as to the maimed, unshapely, helpless victims of the battle- 
field. Because of this graceless confusion and breach of duty, much 
that even municipal charities might undertake and accomplish is now 
hopelessly out of reach. 
The conclusion is irresistible that a fatality lurks in the very organ- 
ization of the Board of Management. Here is the sphere where there 
is a demand for the soundest philanthropist, the matured student in 
sociology, together with the bravest and wisest medical service. Such 
alone are competent to look after and administer this settlement of 
social waste. There is natural congruity in this postulate. Financiers, 
we say, for banking, trust funds, and the public treasury ; metallur- 
gists and chemists and engineers, for mining ; learning, logic, and 
eloquence, for the forum ; that is, the specialist full ripe for his 
specialty. But how is it with this board who have so long been in 
place ? Here and there the tonic presence of a strong personality has 19 
been felt ; but who is so weak or stupid as to identify the board, 
under its present constitution, with these necessary interests in the 
life of the community ? 
And here we are forcibly confronted with a monstrous anomaly, 
and it is the constant peril of this whole field of municipal adminis- 
tration. The Board of Commissioners of Charities and Correction, 
together with its entire system from greatest to least, from centre to 
outpost, is in abject slavery to municipal politics, is a recognized, 
hopeless appendage of the “ machine.” It does not spring frankly and 
wisely from the popular suffrage. It has no freedom, no will, no 
autonomy. On the contrary, it is honeycombed with bureaucracy and 
officialism ; and the powers that move and manipulate every member 
of this great constituency are as far removed above their heads as the 
chess-player above the pieces he manipulates. This is the inherent 
vice of a system which relegates the administration of the under-world 
of social waste to the machine and its politicians ; for at the outset a 
vicious circle is established. The dram-shops are the spawning-grounds 
of municipal politics and politicians. Yet these same dram-shops are 
chiefly responsible for the existence and growth of the very institu- 
tions over whose fortunes the politicians, their other progeny, have 
come to preside. What else could happen than has steadily happened 
—perpetual jostlings, abuse of discipline, tampering with the courts, 
muddling of justice, and an impassable chasm which separates between 
a time-serving officialism and the scientific and professional superin- 
tendencies—a dead-lock which discourages, if it does not paralyze, the 
esprit de corps of medical administration ; which withholds the in- 
centive for legitimate emulation, and reduces the men who devote, and 
not infrequently surrender, their lives, to the standing of tide-waiters 
under the bidding of an irresponsible board, which is itself nothing 
better than an accident in political evolution ? The machine is su- 
preme ; and the Commissioners rattle their own handcuffs of partisan 
servitude while reducing this array of employees and subordinates to 
the lock-step of partisan bondage. The same process is going on in 
the kindred departments of municipal administration, as the Depart- 
ment of Public Works, the Fire Department, and the Board of Edu- 
cation. Pickings and stealings, the building-up of snug fortunes, the 
judicious nursing of thrifty opportunities, are insignificant elements, 
if they really lie in the subject. The crowning injustice, the superla- 
tive cruelty, lies in the fact that this gravest trust from the people is 
become at once the toy and makeshift of professional politicians. 20 
When the Board of Commissioners of Charities and Correction 
shall come to be made up of philanthropists, men versed in sociology, 
who accept a duty toward the people as the highest and most invio- 
able of trusts, instead of men who regard public office as personal 
property ; men who live above all entanglements of political chicanery 
—then there will be found ways for checking and lessening this cur- 
rent of social waste, even if it may never be absolutely arrested, and 
moral disinfectants, detergent and tonic energies, be brought to bear 
directly and hopefully upon these imperilled thousands.