The Democratic sentinel. [volume] (Cadiz, Ohio) 1852-1853, 1853-02-23

e" Poverty in Rome, il is said, was the
spouse of Content, and the mother Of Love;
how that may have been, we know not, but
this we do know, that Poverty, as we've seen
in New York, is welded to despair, and its
offspring is Vengeance Do you think this
strong language? Doyou intimate that you
have been here a score of years and have
never been Disguised or Mortified by any
Ching of the sort? Do you say that you
have never spied it from the window, or met
il in the streets? Talk not of this, doubter,
till you have sought out its real habtaton,
and you your self have CROSSED its thresh-
hold. It's to be seen in its real aspect at
home, and no where else; and fyou have not
looked for 1t there your doubts are foolish
ness.
We sat down with the purpose of detailing
some Of our own personal observation OF
household wrctehedneSs in the Fourth and
Sixth Wards of our city-but the taste re-
volts and our pen shrinks from the narration
We could tell you of one room twelve feet
by twelve in which were five resident fam-
lies, comprising twenty persons OF both sexs
and all ages, with only two beds without par
ttlon or screen or chair or table, and all de-
pendent for their support upon the sale
Of chips cleaned from the strtees at four
cents basker--of another, still smaller and
still more destitute, inhabited by a man, a
woman, two Iitte girls and boy, who were
supported by p ermitting the room to be used
as a rendezvous by the abandoned women OF
the street-of another, an attic room seven
feet by five containing scarcely an article oil
furniture buta bed, on which lay fine look
ing man in a raging fever, without medicine
OF drink or suitable food, his toil-worn wife
engaged in cleaning dirt from the floor, and
his little child asleep Oh bundle of rags in
the corner-of another of the same dmcn-
tons, in which we found, seated on low
boxes around "a candle placed on kcg, Il
woman and her oldest daughter (the latter
Il girl ofhfteen, and as we were told pros
tjtute) sewing on shirts, for the making Of
which they were paid four cents apiece,
and even at that price, out OF which they
had to support two small children, they
could not set supply of work-of another
about the same size, occupied by street
rag picker and his family, the income o
whose industry was eight dollars a month
of an other, scarcely larger, into which VT
were drawn by the terrific screams of a drunk
en- man beating his wife, containing no ar
tce of furniture whatever--of another
warmed only by i" tinpail Of iiyhled charcoal
( placed in the centre OF the room, over which
bent blind man endeavoring to warm him
| SalE. orOitpI hin tbpaa frpr ,pI
men swearing and quawelling; in one cor
ner on the floor woman who had died the
day previous of disease, and in another two
or three chiI4rensleeping on pile ofrags;(r
regard to this room we may say that its oc
cupants were coloreL people, and from
them but few days previous had been taken
and adopted by one of our benevolent citi.
zens beautiful little white girl, four or five
years of age, whose father was dead and
whose mother was at BlackwelPs Island
of another from which not long since
twenty persoos sick with fever were taken
to the Hospital and every individual Of them
died.
But why extend this catalogue? Or why
attempt to convey to the immagination by
words, hideous squalor and the deadly cf-
fluvia, the dim undrained courts oozng with
population, the dark narrw starirwayS de-
cayed with vermin; the rotted flors, ceilings,
begrimed, crumbing, oftimes too low to
permit you to stand upright, and windows
stuffed with rags; Or why try to portr ay the
gaunt shivering forms and wild ghastly fa-
ces in these black and beoting abodes where
in from cellar to garrett.
ALI life dies. death ives and nature breeds
Preverse, all monsrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, unutterab!e.
" Cour. d; Enq