The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-08-27
N u WV o KIs M 8.
From Our 0'on Correspondent
NEW IUHh1 August % I0OJ
The Blue-Eyed Baby Business.


The Blue-Eyed Baby Business.
The Philadelphia readers of the most notori-
Gus of the New York daily newspapers will pro-
badly, at one time or other, have had their
attention attracted to certain quarter of the
journal wherein parties wishing to adopt beaut-
full blue-eyed babies could be accommodated
upon reasonable terms. Sometimes it is added
that the adopting party must be protesting
Christian, but more often the advertiser casts
aside all considerations of faith and practice,
and confines herself to statements in regard to
the reasonableness of terms.
The blue-eyed baby business is carried on to
greater extent in New York than in any other
city upon the American continent. The number
of blue-eyed babies that come to the surface in
the columns of the daily and weekly press is
immense. Baby-farming is regularly recog-
nized business in ITSELF and those harpies who
engage in the profession are most successful
who part with the greatest number of babies for
a consideration.
There are several of these baby-farmers in New
York One of them is in st. Marks Place. where
female physician, in conjunction with a male
one, undertakes to supply Christian families
with as many blue-eyed babies as may be desired.
She never makes any charge but it is tacitly
understood that babies of various degrees of
of blue-eyed beauty are to be procured from
her at all prices between $50 and $50. The
proprietress has sharp eye, a shrewd tongue a
long head and shert manner and is not capa-
BILE of being brow-beaten. Another one is on
Third avenue near to Stewards. 1t is located
over shop, and pervaded with an air of intense
responsibility. Indeed, the 'respectability' of
these places is their most gratifying and
salutary characteristic. The servant who
opens the door may look dowdy around
III. l;.t,, fIo but aha ;u
respectable the parlorinto which you are shown
may have cemetery-like moudness of atmos-
phere, suggestive of new-made graves, but the
pictures on the wall are scriptural in subject,
and the few ornaments are uniformably correct
and respectable; the 'lady' who receives you is
generally attred in black bombazne Gas though
she were a Rachel weeping for other peoples
chdren), but the respectability of her appear
ance and language is one of the first things that
strikes you. This Third avenue establishment
is however more of an Office than anything else.
The real hospital and nursery is 'farther-up-
town"
In Nineteenth street is third baby-farm, and
these three are the principal ones Of Gotham,
From these issue most of the advertisements
which dupes, blest with ne children of their
own, and wishing tc adopt those of others, so
readily answer. Scattered all over the city arc
smaller ones where the business is less artisti-
cally conducted and the police descents upon
which render a temporary residence there ex-
tremely risky.
It is in holes like these that the nobodies
children of New York. who somehow or other
are 'Ieft over" and never adopted out, go
through protracted courses of ill-treatment
which finally bring them to the grave. What
ever sorrowful chance may have taken the in
nocent visitor to such house. he will have re-
marked with ineXpressble compassion the old
countenances of the withered and unhappy little
children that there abound. These are the blue
eyed babies that the advertisements run about,
and which the female physician is so desirous of
adopting out into Chistian family where they
may experience the comforts of a home.
Wretched children of nobody, l am sure they
need it, for the tender mercies of the woman on
whose hands they are left are sure, sooner or
later, to conduct them to the grave.
Some of these children escape death, however,
by being sent to Randalls Island whose nur-
series received during the year 1868 over eleven
hundred such children Here their condition is
at least little better than under the roof-tree of
the venal friend who assisted their mothers Cat
the rate of $25 per week. in bringing them into
the world. They receive at least some educa-
ton. The girls are taught sewing, and the boys
get some inkling of farming. Thence, periodi-
cally they are sent West, and in few years no
small proportion of the population of the prairie
peopled West will consist of the grown-up
children of nobody. At the same time the con-
dtion of the juvenile occupants of Randals
Island-those little illegtimate ones-is nothing
to brag of. The nurses there who take charge
of the younger children mix a great dea'
of their milk of hdman kindness with bad gin
and educate the innocents to a love of whisky.
The mortality among the infant population is
extremely large. Last year much more than
one-half the entire number admitted died. The
various childreu's hospitals and other charitable
institutions for children established in the city
do something towards mitigating this evil but
all the benevolence heaped together seems but
as a drop in a bucket. 1t is one of the great
shames of New York that there are such extern
sive facilities for the putting away" of no.
body's children, and one of the first steps to-
wards reform should be the abolishment of all
such advertisements as the blue-eyed baby ones.
ALI BABA.