Table Talk [pp. 498-499]

APPLETONS' TO URIvAL OF POPULAR
not a home or friend-a multitude of little street-rovers who have no
place where to lay their heads. They are being educated in the
streets rapidly to be thieves and burglars and criminals. The Lodginghouse is at once school, church, intelligence-office, and hotel for them.
Here they are shaped to be honest and industrious citizens; here
taught economy, good order, cleanliness, and morality; here Religion
brings its powerful influences to bear upon them; and they are sent
forth to begin courses of honest livelihood.
The Lodging-houses repay their expenses to the public ten times
over each year, from the thieves and criminals they save, or prevent
being formed. They are agencies of pure humanity and almost unmitigated good. Their only possible reproach could be, that some of
their wild subjects are soon beyond their reach, and have been too
deeply tainted with the vices of street-life to be touched even by kindness, education, or religion. The number who are saved, however, are
most encouragingly large.
The Newsboys' Lodging-house is by no means, however, an entire
burden on the charity of the community. During 1869 the lads themselves paid three thousand six hundred and forty-four dollars toward
its expense, and in 1870 they will pay about five thousand dollars.
The following is a brief description of the rooms:
The first floor is divided into various compartments-a large
dining-room, where one hundred and fifty boys can sit down to a
table, a kitchen, laundry, store-room, servants' room, and rooms for
the family of the superintendent. The next story is partitioned into
a school-room, gymnasium, and bath and wash rooms, plentifully supplied with hot and cold water. The hot water and the heat of the
rooms are supplied by a steam-boiler on the lower story. The two
upper stories are filled with nieat iron bedsteads, having two beds
each, arranged like ships' bunks over each other; of these there are
two hundred and sixty. Here are also the water-vats, into which the
mnany barrelsful used daily by the lodgers are pumped by the engine.
The rooms are high and dry, and the floors clean.
It is a commentary on the housekeeping and accommodations that
for seventeen years no case of contagious disease has ever occurred
among these thousands of boys.
The New-York Newsboys' Lodging-house has been in existence
seventeen years. During these years it has lodged 73,834 different
boys, restored 5,465 boys to friends, provided 5,126 with homes, furnished 467,923 lodgings and 317,138 meals. The expense of all this
has been $94,223.15. Of this amount the boys have contributed
$24,742.27.
TABLE-TALK.
HE London Saturday Review, in an article on the woman-question,
tells the " shrieking sisterhood" to stop their noise and go to
work. The world is before them, and, if they can do any thing, let
them do it. Nobody will hinder them seriously, if they are in earnest,
and mean business. "Women have already succeeded to a great extent in opening to themselves the practice of medicine, for one thing,
and this is an immense opening if they know how to use it. A few
pioneers, unhelped for the most part, steadily, and without shrieking,
stormed the barricades of the hospitals and dissecting-rooms, heroically
bearing the shower of hard-mouthed missiles with which they were
pelted, and successfully forcing their way notwithstanding. But the
most successful of them are those who held on with least excitement,
and who strove more than they declaimed; while others, by constitution belonging to the shrieking sisterhood, have comparatively failed,
and have mainly succeeded in making themselves ridiculous. After
some pressure, but very little cackle, female colleges on a liberal and
extended system of education have been established, and young wom-.
en have now an opportunity of showing what they can do in brainwork. It is no longer by the niggardliness of men and the fault of
an imperfect system if they prove intellectually inferior to the stronger
sex; they have their dynamometer set up for them, and all they have to
do is to register their relative strength, and abide the issue. All commerce, outside the Stock Exchange, is open to them equally with men;
and there is nothing to prevent their becoming merchants, as they are
now petty traders, or setting up as bill-brokers, commission agents,
,or even bankers. In literature they have competitors in men, but no
monopolists. Indeed, they themselves have become almost the monopolists of the whole section of'light literature' and fiction; while
nothing but absolute physical and mental incapacity prevents their
taking the charge of a journal, and working it with female editor, subeditor, manager, reporters, compositors, and even news-girls to sell the
second edition at omnibus-doors and railway-stations." If a set of
women chose to establish a newspaper, and work it among themselves,
there is no law to prevent them. The women who have achieved distinction have done so without "shrieking," and wvithout clamoring for
help from men, or screaming to men to get out of their way. "Mrs.
Somerville asked no man's leave to study science and make herself a
distinguished name as the result, nor did she find the need of any more
special organization than what the best books, a free press, and firstrate available teaching offered. Miss Martineau dived with more or
less success into the forbidding depths of the' dismal science' at a
time when political economy was shirked by men, and considered as
essentially unfeminine as top-boots and tobacco; and she was confessedly an advanced Liberal when to be a high Tory was part of the
whole duty of woman. Miss Nightingale undertook the care of
wounded soldiers without any more publicity than was absolutely necessary for the organization of her staff, and with not so much as one
shriek. Rosa Bonheur laughed at those who told her that animalpainting was unwomanly, and that she had better restrict herself to
flowers and heads, as became the jeuoe demnoiselle of conventional life;
but she did not publish her programme of independence, nor take the
world into her confidence, and tell them of her difficulties and defiance."
- What does this new clamor about the "restoration of the
rod" mean? Only recently Mr. Beecher told us of the salutary effects
of the birch upon rebellious youngsters, and warned us to restore
Solomon's maxim to its ancient household place. Whether young
ladies, in the public schools, should or should not be birched, has for
some time been a subject of much discussion and philosophy in New
England, and now we find the matter agitating, with many pros ard
cons, the columns of some of the English journals. The Englishwom.
an's Domestic Magazine contained recently a very long communication
from one who signed herself "a Rejoicer in the Restoration of
the Rod," in which are told many incidents of how girls and boys are
flogged in English schools, and how, by an application of birch to the
bare person, obedience and all the virtues enter into the consciences
of the birched. The "Rejoicer" dwells particularly upon boys being
whipped by women, and relates two or three instances of how this is
done in a school in Kentish Town, London, kept by a Miss -, the
name in blank, but who is described as "very kind and good." One
instance is as follows:
"A boy had been to a large preparatory school at Clapham, near
London, where'corporal punishment was dispensed with.' This boy, at
twelve, was a perfect pest, and by great good luck his parents heard of
Miss's most excellent school, and sent him to it. He very soon began his bad ways. Miss -- tried at first gentle measures, but with no
success; and so, after many offences, she ordered him to his room, let
him wait by himself for half an hour, and then entered, holding the
birch- rod behind her, so that he should not see it. She spoke to him
very gravely and lovingly, and then told him she was going to birch
him, at the same time showing him the rod, and bidding him prepare
himself for punishment (as she considers making the boys prepare themselves to be whipped half the battle). He stoutly refused, whereupon,
after considerable delay, she left ~imn for half an hour more. At the end
of that time she again returned, bringing a cane as well as the rod. He
still refused to prepare himself, whereupon, spite of his struggles, she
took off his jacket, and then gave him a sound caning across his shoulers. Re soon promised to do as she told him. She then laid the cane
aside; and, when he had taken off his trousers, and had tucked his
shirt, at her bidding, under his waistcoat, and laid himself across the
little bed with his person bare, she told himn she should birch him now
for refusing to obey her orders, and that the original punishment would
be deferred. She then took the rod, and, after five or six well-delivered
strokes, the boy, after trying to protect himself with his hands, jumped
up. She again took the cane and gave him another caning; and then
he finally, and once for all, submitted, and my good fiiend was allowed
to finish her birching; and so far had she mastered him that, when the
next day another of the Miss - ordered him to his room to receive
the original pun~ishment-for the offence for which her sister was to have
administered punishment the day before-he prepared himself for the
rod exactly as she told him, and took his birching at her hands with
wonderful submission."
Alfter several birchit gs in this way-the several ladies of the establishment apparently taking their turn at the culprit-the boy be
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