ssarily irregular in attendance, to be adapted to the more
systematic and respectable places of instruction. As been already
mentioned, the plan has been steadily pursued from the beginning by the
writer, to make these as good Primary Schools as under the circumstances
they were capable of becoming. The grade of the teachers has been
constantly raised, and many of the graduates of our best training
academy for teachers in New York State--the Oswego Normal School--have
been secured at remunerative salaries.

Within the last four years, also, a new officer has been appointed by
the Board of Trustees, to constantly examine the schools and teachers,
keep them at the highest grade possible, and visit the families of the
children. This place has been ably filled by an intelligent and educated
gentleman, Mr. John W. Skinner, with the best effects on our system of
instruction.

Our plan of visitation among the families of the poor, whereby the
helping hand is held out to juvenile poverty and ignorance all the
while, has been effectually carried out by a very earnest worker, Mr. M.
Dupuy, in the lower wards, and by a young German-American of much
judgment and zeal, Mr. Holste, in the German quarter, and by quite a
number of female visitors.

[Illustration: "PLEASE SIR, MAY I HAVE A BED?" (A sketch from life.) NO.
1.]

CHAPTER XIX.

THE BEST REMEDY FOR JUVENILE PAUPERISM.

"Ameliorer l'homme par le terre et la terre par l'homme." DEMETZ

Among the lowest poor of New York, as we stated in a previous chapter,
the influence of _overcrowding_ has been incredibly debasing. When we
find half a dozen families--as we frequently do--occupying one room, the
old and young, men and women, boys and girls of all ages sleeping near
each other, the result is inevitable. The older persons commit unnatural
crimes; the younger grow up with hardly a sense of personal dignity or
purity; the girls are corrupted even in childhood; and the boys become
naturally thieves, vagrants, and vicious characters. Such apartments are
at once "fever-nests" and seminaries of vice. The inmates are weakened
and diseased physically, and degraded spiritually. Where these houses
abound, as formerly in the Five Points, or now in the First Ward, or
near Corlear's Hook, or in the Seventeenth Ward near the Tenth Avenue,
there is gradually formed a hideous society of vice and pauperism. The
men are idle and drunken