few lamps
scattered around only add to the repulsive nature of the place. The
pestiferous exhalations of the filthy streets, and not less filthy
shanties, inhabited by the lowest and most disreputable characters, are
disgusting beyond any description. Scattered over this neighborhood,
densely settled by the most depraved classes of all nationalities, there
lived, and still live, some fifteen hundred of the poorest class of
Italians, who traditionally cling to that locality. They are generally
from the Ligurian coasts, which are over-populated. When the farms
require working, the inhabitants usually have something to do; but, at
some seasons, want of employment compels them to turn elsewhere. Men,
women, and lads went in ordinary times to the largest cities of Northern
Italy for temporary occupation, leaving behind their children to the
care of relatives or acquaintances, who, owing to their business,
inability, or carelessness, neglected in most cases to exercise over
them parental duties. When the hand-organ came into vogue, they found it
the easiest way to employ their unoccupied time. Seeing, afterward, that
they could realize more by the organ than by the shovel, they went
grinding all the year, and spread all over Italy at first, then over
Europe and America. Some of the children left were sent for, while
others were hired out to those who proposed a grinding-tour to America.
Those who arrived here first having done well, others followed, and the
tide of the organ-grinding emigration set in on a gradual rise. The
failure of the Revolutionary movements of 1848 and 1849 having
impoverished, to a greater or smaller extent, the several Italian
provinces, gave a great impetus to this emigration, and it was not long
before the Five Points were crowded to overflowing. Accustomed as they
were to agricultural pursuits and out of the reach of better social
influences, and totally ignorant of the language, they formed a separate
colony, associating only with those of their own country in the Five
Points. Had they displayed the vices or criminal inclinations which
prevail to a deplorable extent among the low classes of other
nationalities, they would soon have been brought to public notice and
taken care of by our benevolent and religious societies; but they cannot
be reproached with intoxication, prostitution, quarreling, stealing,
etc; and thus, escaping the unenviable notoriety of the criminal, they
fell into a privacy that