is still regarded, in law, as outside of good morals and not
even to be tacitly allowed by license.

CHAPTER XII.

THE BEST PREVENTIVE OF VICE AMONG CHILDREN.

INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS.

As a simple, practical measure to save from vice the girls of the honest
poor, nothing has ever been equal to the Industrial School.

Along with our effort for homeless boys, I early attempted to found a
comprehensive organization of Schools for the needy and ragged little
girls of the city.

Though our Free Schools are open to all, experience has taught that vast
numbers of children are so ill-clothed and destitute that they are
ashamed to attend these excellent places of instruction; or their
mothers are obliged to employ them during parts of the day; or they are
begging, or engaged in street occupations, and will not attend, or, if
they do, attend very irregularly. Very many are playing about the docks
or idling in the streets.

Twenty years ago, nothing seemed to check this evil. Captain Matsell, in
the celebrated report I have alluded to, estimated the number of vagrant
children as 10,000, and subsequently in later years, the estimate was as
high as 30,000. The commitments for vagrancy were enormous, reaching in
one year (1857), for females alone, 3,449; in 1859, 5,778; and in 1860,
5,880. In these we have not the exact number of children, but it was
certainly very large.

What was needed to check crime and vagrancy among young girls was some
School of Industry and Morals, adapted for the class.

Many were ashamed to go to the Public Schools; they were too irregular
for their rules. They needed some help in the way of food and clothing,
much direct moral instruction and training in industry; while their
mothers required to be stimulated by earnest appeals to their
consciences to induce them to school them at all. Agents must be sent
around to gather the children, and to persuade the parents to educate
their offspring. It was manifest that the Public Schools were not
adapted to meet all these wants, and indeed the mingling of any
eleemosynary features in our public educational establishments would
have been injudicious. As our infant Society had no funds, my effort was
to found something at first by outside help, with the hope subsequently
of obtaining a permanent support for the new enterprises, and bringing
them under the supervision of the parent Socie