The Morris County chronicle., 1904-01-29
HOMES FOR THE HOMELESS
Indebtedness to the New Jersey
ChlIdren's Home Society.

AA0OOU0uH0sS1 10 U00 new J0FS6y
ChlIdren's Home Society.
Suppose a homeless child is picked
up from the slums, or taken from the
almshouse and placed in good Chris
tian hOme-a home of culture and
refinement and trained as their own
child, what interest, if any, have
business men in general in such a
transaction2
THE condition of the customer
determines how much he will buy
Poor and ignorant people buy little,
and that of the poorest kind, while
intelligent, well-tO-do people buy in
far greater variety, because they seek
to gratify not merely physical wants.
but also mental wants buy for the
satisfaction of sentiment aud taste as
well as of sense. ''-Henry Ward
Beecher.
. This is plainsS practical common
sense.
A man in the slums lives with his
fanilyin, one room and that room a
howell: his meals are cooked upon an
old abandoned stoves sold for old iron:
if he has bedto sleep on, it is of the
same. class: the entire furniture.of his
house cost him less than $40; his
whole family live upon from 30 to so
cents per day. They have to, for his
wages are only 81 per day, and he is
out, Of, employment half. the time.
His fuel is picked,up by his children;
his scclothing. the cast-off garments of
more fortunate neighbors. He pro-
dnces nothing. adds to no. ones
wealth. The railroad. companies get
nothing from him during the year.
The wholesale manufacturers have no
interest in him, neither do the cloth
ing stores, the harness merchants, or
the lumbermen, or the dry goods
merchants. The. .grocerymen and the
doctors are about the only parties
directly interested, and the failure
to pay so often leaves them in doubt
as to whether his transportation to
another community would not be a
relief. No branch of business is
helped, nobody enriched by the
existence of such a family in the
community.
But suppose This man, when a child,
had been placed in family of culture
and refinement, given an education
and fitted to take his position among
the better classes, if he becomes a
mechanic, he is skilled mechanic ar d
earns $3.50 to $1,000 per year; and
whatever he earns goes largely into
the pockets of business men. If he
becomes a clerk or a salesman, or a
travelling man, or conductor, or
engineer, or enters one of the learned
professions. it is the same; his earn
ings add to the public veal. If he is
provident and builds him a house,
every penny the house and lot costs is
handled by the real estate man, and
the lumber man and the hardware
man and the various. mechanics
employed. If he is improvident and
spends all he earns upon his family, it
is all the same, for the furniture man,
the dry goods man, the tailor, the
dressmaker and grocer and almost
every industry in the country receive
the benefit of his earnings.
And after he has raised his family,
the next generation will only increase
the volume of outgoes and incomes
and increase the indebtedness of
every form of human industry to this
man rescued in childhood from the
slums and transplanted from a useless
parasite into the ranks of contributors
to the public veal.
And you do not have to wait until
this rescued one has grown into man
hood or womanhood: Immediately
the business men of the State begin
to have pecuniary interest in this
child
During the past nine years we have
placed nearly nine hundred homeless
children in good Christian homes,
chiefly in this State. The large
majority of these children were poor
and poorly clad. so that in almost
every instance the old clothing was
discarded and new outfit from top
to toe procured
"They showed me the nice clothing
and bed they had bought. / should
think the cost would amount to about
$50 already spent for the comfort of
the child" [This child had been in
the family only ten days, and is only
sample of what is constantly oc-
curing.l
And this is only the beginning.
The addition of a boy or a girl six or
eight years of age to a family in
comfortable circumstances means in
most cases not only another bed and
bed clothes, another room furnished;
it means another mouth to feed every
day in the year, another body to be
clothed and warmed for years to
come, it means carpets all over the
house worn out faster, aud furniture
used up sooner than before. 1t means
school books and toys, dolls and bob
sleds, skates and frequently it means
BICYCLES, gold rings, watches, organs
and even pianos. 1t means rides on
the trolleys, long trips on the steam
cars, weeks of lavish expenditure at
some summer resort in some cases.
In short, it means all the Thousand
and one things that love is ready to
procure in the support and care Of a
child, and that these children could
never have enjoyed had they remained
where our Society found them.
But in every one of these expend-
itures the business men of the State