THS IN THE SOCIETY'S CARE.]

All that has not been changed in the seventeen years that have passed; to
remodel depraved human nature has been beyond the power of the Society;
but step by step under its prompting the law has been changed and
strengthened; step by step life has been breathed into its dead letter,
until now it is as able and willing to protect the child against violence
or absolute cruelty as the Society is to enforce its protection. There is
work enough for it to do yet. I have outlined some in the preceding
chapters. In the past year (1891) it investigated 7,695 complaints and
rescued 3,683 children from pernicious surroundings, some of them from a
worse fate than death. "But let it not be supposed from this," writes the
Superintendent, "that crimes of and against children are on the increase.
As a matter of fact wrongs to children have been materially lessened in
New York by the Society's action and influence during the past seventeen
years. Some have entirely disappeared, having been eradicated root and
branch from New York life, and an influence for good has been felt by the
children themselves, as shown by the great diminution in juvenile
delinquency from 1875, when the Society was first organized, to 1891, the
figures indicating a decrease of fully fifty per cent."[18]

Other charitable efforts, working along the same line, contributed their
share, perhaps the greater, to the latter result, but the Society's
influence upon the environment that shapes the childish mind and
character, as well as upon the child itself, is undoubted. It is seen in
the hot haste with which a general cleaning up and setting to rights is
begun in a block of tenement barracks the moment the "cruelty man" heaves
in sight; in the "holy horror" the child-beater has of him and his
mission, and in the altered attitude of his victim, who not rarely
nowadays confronts his tormentor with the threat, "if you do that I will
go to the Children's Society," always effective except when drink blinds
the wretch to consequences.

The Society had hardly been in existence four years when it came into
collision with the padrone and his abominable system of child slavery.
These traders in human misery, adventurers of the worst type, made a
practice of hiring the children of the poorest peasants in the Neapolitan
mountain districts, to serve them begging, singing, and playing in the
streets of American cities. The contract was for a term of