It is true
of the majority, but that very fact consigns the helpless minority, too
poor to pay and too proud to beg, to a fate worse than death. I myself
picked from the mass of festering human filth in a police-station
lodging-room, one night last winter, six young lads, not one of whom was
over eighteen, and who for one reason or another had been stranded there
that night. They were not ruffians either, but boys who to all appearances
had come from good homes, the memory of which might not efface the lessons
learned that night in a lifetime. The scandal has been denounced over and
over again by grand juries, by the Police Commissioners, and by
philanthropists who know of the facts, and efforts without end have been
made to get the city authorities to substitute some decent system of
municipal hospitality for this unutterable disgrace, as other cities have
done, but they have all been wrecked by political jobbery or official
apathy.

A thing to be profoundly thankful for is the practical elimination of the
girl vagrant from our social life. Ten years ago, Broadway from Fourteenth
Street up was crowded with little girls who, under the pretence of
peddling flowers and newspapers, pandered to the worst immorality. They
went in regular gangs, captained and employed by a few conscienceless old
harpies, who took the wages of their infamy and paid them with blows and
curses if they fell short of their greed. The police and the officers of
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children put an end to this
traffic after a long fight, sending the old wretches to jail and some of
their victims to the reformatories. One of the gangs that were broken up
had a rendezvous in a stable in Thirtieth Street, near Broadway. The girls
had latch-keys and went out and in at all hours of the night. To-day the
flower-girl of tender years is scarcely ever met with in New York. Even
the news-girl has disappeared almost entirely and left the field to the
boys. Those who are not at work at home or in the shop have been gathered
in by the agencies for their rescue, that have multiplied with the growth
of the conviction that girl vagrancy is so much more corrosive than boy
vagabondism, as it adds sexual immorality to the other dangers of the
street. In 1881 the society's lodging-house in St. Mark's Place sheltered
1,287 girls. Their number has gone down since, as the census has gone up,
until last year it had fallen to 335, and even these were