Some years ago, the Gerry Society picked up two boys that “lived nowhere,” so they said. (See illustration facing page 136.) They were brothers with a drunken father and no mother. Some one was curious enough to try to find out their moral and religious status. The older of the two had heard of the Lord’s Prayer as something that it was lucky to say over at night before one went to sleep, so as to have good luck the next day pitching pennies; his younger brother knew the name of the Saviour as something to swear by. These were our home heathen, growing up in the Christian city of New York. That is one way of looking at it. There is another for which we have to wait only a few years: then these lads come to the polls with their ballots, and there develops the citizen equality over which their father puzzled in his air-shaft. Ask yourself the question again, is it safe?
THEY “LIVED NOWHERE” From “How the Other Half Lives.” Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
These boys belong to the street and they learn its lessons: gambling, pilfering, and by and by robbery. A little further along on the road they are traveling are the Rogues’ Gallery and the jail. At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen they are thieves, little and big, house-breakers, and highway robbers. One year when I kept a census of the child criminals I had to deal with in Mulberry Street, I found them beginning their careers at four and six years. The very little ones were useful to their elders to “crawl through a hole” into the place that was to be robbed.
Was that good sense? No, it was not. That came later when a man came into Mulberry Street, where “the gang” was beginning to make serious trouble, and wanted to know if the boys would join a club he was forming. Would they join, those boys? They fell over one another to get there. The whole block joined with a rush. That was the good sense of the new day that lets the boys in, instead of forever warning them off from everything and everywhere. His club was a marching club (see illustration facing page 138) and with their wooden guns on their shoulders, that man could lead those boys where and how far he chose; they would go with him wherever he went. Just remember that it is one of two things, a gun on the shoulder or stripes on the back, where the home interposes no barrier. It is because of the killing off of that home that our jails are filled with young men from the big cities.