The Waifs of Society

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 3, 1875

The Waifs of Society.

HERE is a brief record of the zeal of a statistician, most suggestive of the evils which result from the usual indifference to the waifs of society:—

Some of the most curious and remarkable criminal statistics ever obtained have been given to the public by Dr. Harris of New York. His attention was called, some time since, to a county on the upper Hudson, which showed a remarkable proportion of crime and poverty to the whole population—four hundred and eighty of its forty thousand inhabitants being in the records a little, he found certain names continually appearing. Becoming interested in the subject, he concluded to search the genealogies of these families, and, after a thorough investigation, he discovered that from a young girl named “Margaret”—who was left adrift, nobody remembers how, in a village of the county, seventy years ago, and, in the absence of an almshouse, was left to grow up as best she could—have descended two hundred criminals.

As an illustration of this remarkable record, in one single generation of her unhappy line there were twenty children; of these, three died in their infancy and seventeen survived to maturity. Of the seventeen, nine served in the State Prison for high crimes an aggregate term of fifty years, while the others were frequent inmates of jails and penitentiaries and almshouses. The whole number of this girl's descendants, through six generations, is nine hundred, and, besides the two hundred who are on record as criminals, a large number have been idiots, imbeciles, drunkards, lunatics, prostitutes and paupers. A stronger argument for careful treatment of pauper children than these figures could hardly be found.—Springfield Republican.