Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/456

434, zoölogical 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 sentineled by these menacing excrescences of a moribund civilization." Dr. Seaman truly says: "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 increasing number of outrages, assaults, and crimes against both property and person. The island, the almshouses, and workhouses do not reach or touch their cases, for they gather physical endurance and resources from fresh campaignings across country, until rounded up again by winter weather in the great cities."

Indeed, the daily accounts of innocent women murdered, railroad trains invaded, pitched battles between hordes of these vagabonds and law-abiding citizens, attest to the insidious and rapid spread of this class, and not until some town is burned, and plunder and rape follow the burning, will the people realize what they have for so many years deliberately encouraged by free lunches at their kitchen doors. Indiscriminate charity has been encouraged by religious teaching. Powerful as the Church has been and still is in support of this practice, it is astonishing how rapidly the evils of this pernicious custom are being recognized by charity boards. Mr. McCulloch says the "so-called charitable people who give to begging children and women with baskets, have a vast sin to answer for. It is from them that this pauper element gets its consent to exist. Charity—falsely so called—covers a multitude of sins, and sends the pauper out with the benediction, 'Be fruitful and multiply.' Such charity has made this element, has brought children to the birth, and insured them a life of misery, cold, hunger, and sickness." And he asserts that so-called charity joins public relief in raising prostitutes and educating criminals. Though these are strong words, they but repeat the testimony of others who have made the subject an attentive study. In an article on London Charities, by Elizabeth Bisland (Cosmopolitan, July, 1891), is quoted the words of an eminent London citizen, who says that London is the scandal of the age by reason of its pauperized and demoralized condition, and yet 825,000,000 is given each year in alms to the unfortunate. "It is a gigantic laboratory of corruption and crime, and while it