The daily dispatch. [volume] (Richmond [Va.]) 1850-1884, 1853-02-14
I HE DAILY DISpnTC,u
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saUALlD MlsrKYI,s -a.,.=...=====---= CO..

oeuALiD MisERYnN GoTHAm.-1 go
IN Tie Courier asd Enqnirer. who b.. :.
Gently devoted considerable time ;, ax.,-
tons OF the Abodes of Vice and Misery = ~.
iofK mus indicates some OF his discoveries.
"We could tell OF Gnu room, twelve fee, h.,
twelve, IN which were five resident fam ;Ias
comprising twenty persons of both sexes and
all ages, with only two beds, without par,;,;op
or screen, or chair or table, and all dependen,
for their miserable support upon the sale of
chips, CLEANED from the streets, al four cents a
basket OF another, still smaller and still more
destitute, inhabited by a man, a woman, tw O
little girls and boy, who We're supported by
permitting the room TO be used as a rendezvous
by The abandoned woman Of the street-of all.
other, an attic room seven feet BY FIVE, con
tanning scarce y an article of furniture but a
bed, on which lay a fine looking man in ra-
ging fever, without medicine or drink or suta-
BILE food, his tol-worn wife engaged in clean
ing dirt from the floor, and his child asleep
on bundle Of rags in the corner-ofanother of
the same dimensions, in which we found, sea-
led on low boxes around candle placed on a
keg, woman and her oldest daug ghler, 1.-The lu,-
ter u girl of fifteen, and, we are told, prost-
tute )sew ing on shirts, for the making of which
they were paid four cents apiece, and even ut
that price, out oi which they had to support two
children, they could not get supply of work
of another Of about the same size occupied
by street rag-picker and his family, the in
come Of whose industry was eigh, dollars a
month-ofan other. scarcely larger, into which
we were drawn by the terrific screams of u
drunken man beating his wife, containing no
article of furniture whatever-another warmed
only by a tin pail of lighted charcoal placed in
the centre OF the room, over whlch bent blind
man endeayorlDg 10 warm hins Elf {; around
HIM three or four men and women swearing
and quarreling in one corner on the floor
woman, who had died the day prev Gus of dis
ease, and In another two or three children sleep.
ing on pile ofrags lin regard to this room
We may say That It's occupants were colored
psople, and from them but lew days previous
had been taken and adopted bv one of our be-
neyoents citizen a beautiful little white girl
four or five years of age, whose father was
dead and whose mother was at BIackwell's
lslaud,) another from which not long since
twenty persons sick with sever were taken TO
the Hospital and erery individual of them died.
But why extend the cataouge? Or why at
tempt TO convey TO the imagination by words,
the hideous squaior and the deadly effluvia,
the dim undrained courts oozing with pollu-
lion, the dark narrow stairways decayed with
age, reeking with filth and everrun with vermin
the rot,ed floors, ceilings begrimed, crumbling
othmes too low 10 permit you to stand upright,
and windows stuffed with rags or why try to
portray the gaunt shivering forms and wild
CHASTITY faces in these black and bee,Iing abodes
wherein from cellar to garret
ALL life dies d. ath lives and nature breeds
Perverse. all monstrous all prodi sious things,
Ab0mina5ie, uuutterabls.