SCIENCE.-SUPPLEMENT. 



FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1886. 



THE SOCIAL WASTE OF A GREAT CITY. 



In the human body there is a legitimate waste 

 of tissue and substance, structurally indispensable 

 to its best development ; and there is waste which 

 depletes vitality, and is beyond the power of science 

 to make good, while it is the herald of approach- 

 ing dissolution. A great city is a corporation, a 

 body politic. This complex organization, too, has 

 a legitimate waste as a perpetual evidence of its 

 thrifty increase ; and at the same time it suffers 

 waste which is dead loss of social capital and 

 resource, while it points the way to ultimate dis- 

 integrations. Men and cities thrive, waste, and 

 perish on parallel and strictly analogous lines. 

 During a professional service of ten years among 

 1;he charitable institutions under the control of the 

 Board of commissioners of charities and correc- 

 tion, and also under the commissioners of emigra- 

 tion, this fundamental maxim of social science has 

 gathered significance with the growth of experi- 

 ence. The people have become so accustomed to 

 this downward drift, — this unresting current of 

 wretchedness, profligacy, and crime, — possibly so 

 hoodwinked by the imposing array of architectural 

 groups, and the glamour of official reports bris- 

 tling with statistics, that they miss the ghastliness 

 of the situation, and think about it, if at all, in a 

 vague and unconcerned way. But to the earnest 

 observer, ghosts constantly arise which will not 

 down. There is much ado in commercial circles 

 about the debris and material waste of the streets 

 and houses, and its best disposition ; the people 

 knowing full well that pestilence and epidemics 

 Taear with no trifling or superficial expedients. 

 Besides, the harbor and its approaches must be 

 neither choked nor befouled. The fear of disease, 

 the dread of death, the timidity and greed of capi- 

 tal, keep sharp and suspicious watch, and in this 

 direction the public welfare is measurably safe. 



But outside a group of philanthropists and pro- 

 fessional people, whose lives are spent in the service 

 of this great and growing under-world of poverty 

 (breeding desperation) and vice (breeding both 

 poverty and crime), few care or think about it, or 

 undertake to penetrate its dreadful secrets ; while 

 the casual shoaling of the harbor-channels, the 

 grounding of an ocean-going steamer, the least 

 chill or check of financial thrift, a ti'ace of typhoid 

 or small-pox, the transportation of dressed beef or 



cattle, the tug and chicanery of rival monopolies, 

 the disgusting encounters of professional pugilists, 

 stir and thrill the pulses of the metropolis to their 

 liveliest beat. 



All the while, this menacing under-world, with 

 a biting irony, asserts itself, and compels recogni- 

 tion as imperatively as does the cancer as it eats 

 its way to the vitals. It seizes upon and subsi- 

 dizes the fairest string of islands that grace a me- 

 tropolis the world over. Where there might have 

 been, under a shrewder, better providence, parks, 

 groves, museums, art -galleries, zoological gardens, 

 wholesome games, exhilarants for honest industry 

 and useful thrift, stretching at little intervals from 

 Governor's to Hart's Island, full eighteen miles, 

 the Nemesis of penalty and retribution has planted 

 her growing colonies of social waste, — of broken, 

 degraded, repulsive, dangerous human detritus ; 

 and this baleful colonization has pushed its way 

 along those beautiful eastern waters, keeping step 

 with the advancing city, vmtil its entire line of 

 eastern frontage, far up into Westchester county, 

 is sentinelled by these menacing excrescences of a 

 moribund civilization. The municipality is a body ; 

 and it requires no labored or exhaustive differ- 

 ential diagnosis to determine that a body thus 

 smitten with boils and blains, with tangled and 

 distempered wits, so scorched with fevers of 

 drunkenness and debauchery, so threatened with 

 poison in the very life-blood, is at best in a desper- 

 ate condition. 



So much for these * institutions of charities and 

 corrections.' In abundant outlay and thorough 

 and intelligent organization, and in general scien- 

 tific oversight, they stand, after their class, unri- 

 valled, at home or abroad. Indeed, we have come 

 to make much of them ; so that when distinguished 

 visitors, dignitaries, or scientists come upon us for 

 municipal hospitalities, who does not forecast the 

 inevitable festive picnic excursions through and 

 among these same ' institutions,' with its steamer 

 decked in bunting, its junketings, its congratula- 

 tory speeches, as the commissioners uncover our 

 plague-spots and social ulcers, our paupers and 

 desperadoes, oiu- crazed, and our foundlings, for 

 the edification of the day ? Why not extend the 

 route on future occasions, and so complete the 

 panorama ? This would take in the morgue and 

 Potter's field, and their upland springs and feeders ; 

 the bagnios, with their more than fifteen thou- 

 sand profligate women ; the ten thousand dram- 

 shops ; the underground hells and disreputable 



