1891 maintain the point reached in 1887 and in 1890. However, the
important thing is that the decrease has gone on more or less steadily
through good years and bad since the children's societies took the field,
while the population has increased as never before. Had these forms of
disorder even held their own, the slope should have been steadily upward,
not downward. In this there is encouragement, surely. There is enough left
to battle with. The six lodging-houses sheltered in the last twelve years
149,994 children, 8,820 of them girls. We are not near the end yet. The
problem is a great one, but the efforts on foot to solve it are great and
growing. It has been a forty years' fight with poverty and ignorance and
crime, and it is only just begun. But the first blow is half the battle,
it is said, and it has been struck in New York, and struck to win.

CHAPTER XV.

PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM

In spite of all this labor and effort, in the face of the fact that half
of the miseries of society are at last acknowledged to be due to the
sundering of the home-tie in childhood, and that therefore the remedy lies
in restoring it, where that can be done, as early as possible, we have in
New York a city of mighty institutions, marshalling a standing army of
nearly or quite sixteen thousand children, year in and year out.[27] Homes
they are sometimes called; but too many of them are not homes in the
saving sense. Those are, that are merely half-way houses to the ultimate
family home that shall restore to the child what it has lost. Failing in
that, they become public tenements, with most of the bad features of the
tenement left out, but the worst retained: the smothering of the tenant's
individuality. He is saved from becoming a tough to become an automaton.

It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that makes the
pauper. It is money scattered without judgment--not poverty--that marshals
the greater part of this army. Money backed up by pharisaical
sectarianism. Where two such powerful factors combine, politics is never
far in the rear, though modestly invisible to the naked eye. To this
irresponsible combination--conspiracy it might be called without
stretching the point far--the care of the defenceless child that comes
upon the public for support has been handed over without check or control
of any sort. Worse, a premium has been put upon his coming, upon child
desertion in our community. What are the c