y, for the
second or third time, to investigate thoroughly the preventive and
reformatory institutions of Great Britain.

On my return I found that the President of our Board, of whom I have
already spoken, had taken a lease of a building in a notorious quarter.

His idea was that some of my observations in England might be utilized
here and tested in a preventive institution. The quarter was well known
to me. It had been the home and school of the murderous gang of boys and
young men known as

"THE NINETEENTH STREET GANG."

It happens that the beginnings and the process of growth of this society
of young criminals were thoroughly known by me at the time, and, as one
case of this kind illustrates hundreds going on now, I will describe it
in detail:--

Seventeen years ago, my attention had been called to the extraordinarily
degraded condition of the children in a district lying on the west side
of the city, between Seventeenth and Nineteenth Streets, and the Seventh
and Tenth Avenues. A certain block, called "Misery Row," in Tenth
Avenue, was the main seedbed of crime and poverty in the quarter, and
was also invariably a "fever-nest." Here the poor obtained wretched
rooms at a comparatively low rent; these they sub-let, and thus, in
little, crowded, close tenements, were herded men, women, and children
of all ages. The parents were invariably given to hard drinking, and the
children were sent out to beg or to steal. Besides them, other children,
who were orphans, or who had run away from drunkards' homes, or had been
working on the canal-boats that discharged on the docks near by, drifted
into the quarter, as if attracted by the atmosphere of crime and
laziness that prevailed in the neighborhood. These slept around the
breweries of the ward, or on the hay-barges, or in the old sheds of
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets. They were mere children, and kept
life together by all sorts of street-jobs--helping the brewery laborers,
blackening boots, sweeping sidewalks, "smashing baggages" (as they
called it), and the like. Herding together, they soon began to form an
unconscious society for vagrancy and idleness. Finding that work brought
but poor pay, they tried shorter roads to getting money by petty thefts,
in which they were very adroit. Even if they earned a considerable sum
by a lucky day's job, they quickly spent it in gambling, or for some
folly.

The police soon knew them as "street-rats;" bu