and 1,903, officers and employees. This means that more than a one-hundredth part of all the inhabitants of the city are wards or employees of this department, the entire responsibility for the administration of which is placed in the hands of three men. (Population of New York City, April 15, 1895, 1,849,866). The institutions of this department would of themselves make a good-sized city. In fact, the census of the Department of Public Charities and Correction is nearly as great as was the census of the whole city at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and is greater than the census [1890] of the County of Hamilton, Putnam or Schuyler, or of the city of Lockport, Ithaca, Ogdensburg, or Watertown. Each of these cities has an entire framework of municipal government, but for all the needs of the large population of the Department of Public Charities and Correction, scattered over Manhattan, Blackwell's, Ward's, Randall's and Hart's Islands, with a farm colony on Long Island, and occupying for sleeping quarters alone more than 95 buildings, the three Commissioners must provide. Furthermore, while the municipal government ordinarily assumes control of matters affecting but comparatively few of the interests of its citizens, in the case of the wards of the Department of Public Charities and Correction, the three Commissioners are charged with the duty and responsibility of providing for all their needs. They must provide shelter, clothing, food, attendance, employment and medical attention, must maintain order and discipline, and should afford opportunities for such special care, training and education as may be suited to the necessities of the various classes under their charge.

Moreover, this great population is not composed of normal persons living under ordinary conditions, but is made up entirely of those for whom the ordinary conditions of life are no longer possible, of the insane, the blind, the feeble-minded, the idiotic, epileptics, paralytics, hospital patients of every sort and description, infants and sick children, and, unfortunately, of vagrants, drunkards, disorderly persons, workhouse rounders and criminals. To thoroughly master the problems involved in the treatment of almost any one of these classes, a lifetime is none toolong. Yet their number and the number of institutions in which they are cared for are so great that an intimate personal knowl

edge on the part of the Commissioners of the condition and needs of each institution is impossible. If there were no reason other than that of its size and unwieldiness, this alone would be sufficient cause for the division of the existing department.

A census of the department on February 1, 1895, grouping the institutions according to their distribution between the two new departments under the provisions of the act, is printed as Appendix C. (See p. 92.)

The number of persons who pass through the institutions of the department in the course of a year is, of course, much larger than is indicated by the census on a given date. The number of admissions to the various institutions of the department (not including the prisons or penitentiary, and not including transfers from one institution to another) during the year ending October 1, 1895, was 66,191. During the same period 18,820 lodgings were provided for homeless people, and 121,818 cases were treated in the four dispensaries maintained by the department.

II. The population of the existing Department of Public Charities and Correction comprises two distinct classes, namely, the destitute and the criminal.

The problems involved in the intelligent care of the destitute are radically different from those involved in the treatment of the criminal. Both problems include the provision of shelter, clothing and food for human beings, but beyond this they have little in common. If it is both humane and wise for the city to restore the destitute as far as may be to self-support, and to treat the criminal with a view to the reformation of the individual and the diminution of crime, then there must be a radical difference in the spirit, methods and aims of the treatment of the two classes, -a difference so great as to preclude the possibility of an effective administration of both departments by a single Board. The truth of this statement has been amply proven by experience. It has been found that the existing department has not been able to furnish with regularity even sufficient accommodation, food, clothing, medicines, nurses, attendants and other necessaries. Nearly every year of its existence there has been some revelation, as startling as discredit

able to the city, of great overcrowding or of neglect to provide in one or more institutions even the necessaries of life. Much less has the single department been able to institute and maintain advanced methods of caring for the sick and the insane, for developing defective faculties, for rendering dependents fully or partially self-supporting, for surrounding worthy unfortunates with a moderate degree of comfort, and for affording the requisite discipline for the reformation and repression of vagrants and criminals.

As a matter of fact, the present department includes a third distinct class, the insane. It was expected at the time of the introduction and passage of this bill that the insane of New York County would be transferred to the care of the State during the present year, in accordance with a bill proposed by this Association, and for this reason no effort was made to secure a separate departinent for this class. If the city insane asylums should be reorganized as a State Hospital, and we hope this may be done early in the coming year, the number of inmates remaining under the Department of Public Charities, as will be seen from the census, will not be greatly in excess of the number of inmates in the Department of Correction.

III.-It is an injustice to the sick and the destitute, many of whom have been brought to their present condition through misfortune rather than through misconduct, to associate them in the same institutions or under the same management with those who are being held under restraint and subjected to discipline for the actual commission of crime. Not many years ago the nurses for the sick in the city hospitals and the attendants for the insane in the city asylums, were prisoners from the workhouse and the penitentiary. Such association was a gross injustice and was extremely demoralizing in its effects upon the recipients of the charity of the city. A gradual, but not as yet a complete, reform of this flagrant evil has been effected. On the docks and boats, in the wards of hospitals, and in other ways, the destitute are still forced into actual association with the vicious and the criminal.

But hardly less serious than this are the evil effects of the constant association, in the minds of the public and of the

city authorities, of the two classes. The general public is little acquainted with these institutions, and does not draw fine distinctions. Through the long association of the destitute and the criminal, they have all come to be regarded as being more or less of the same stripe, and to be sent to the Island, for any cause whatever, is generally considered a disgrace.

IV. Another most important reason for separating the charitable from the correctional institutions is the fact, established beyond a doubt by long years of experience, that it is impossible to secure adequate appropriations for providing the special treatment required by the sick, the insane, the feebleminded and other classes of dependents, so long as they are unequally yoked together with criminals, vagrants, drunkards, disorderly persons and workhouse rounders, under a common administration, and supported from a common departmental treasury. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment cannot become personally familiar with the peculiar needs of the inmates of the various hospitals and asylums, and thus realize the necessity of applying an entirely different standard in making appropriations to these institutions, from that which is proper in making appropriations for vagrants and criminals. Every interest of humanity and economy demands the use of the most improved means and appliances for providing the special treatment needed for the respectable inmates of the charitable institutions, in order to restore them to health and enable them as quickly as possible to return to the community and become again self-supporting, or, should this be impossible, to pass their lives in reasonable comfort in the city's institutions performing such labor as is proper. Yet it has never been possible to secure the appropriations needed for these purposes, because the inmates of the charitable institutions are classed with and confused with the workhouse and prison inmates, who are commonly regarded as a hopeless and worthless lot, any expenditure for whom, beyond that required to provide the necessaries of life, is considered a waste of money. It is the verdict of those who have watched closely the operations of the Department of Charities and Correction for twenty years, that no other branch of the city government has been so stinted for

money, and in no other department has it been so difficult to secure appropriations for needed improvements. When the charitable institutions are entirely separated from the correctional institutions, it will be possible to secure a more careful consideration of the needs of each.

It has been suggested by some who have opposed the division of the department, that these reasons are of a general and theoretical, or even sentimental character. This criticism would hardly be made, we think, by any disinterested person who was familiar with the general condition of the department, as a whole. As evidence that such is not the case, and as proof that radical changes of some sort are imperative, we submit the following brief statement of some of the more glaring defects and evils in the department.*

The Almshouse is continuously and excessively overcrowded. During the past summer more than 300 patients slept on beds on the floor, and in winter the number has been much larger. Fifteen hundred inmates occupy buildings four stories high, which have neither hot nor cold water, no bathrooms, no lavatories, and only outside, uncovered stairs. The food is never served hot and lacks variety, the cost of food for the inmates of the almshouse proper being between five and six cents per day. In the almshouse hospitals there is but one nurse, untrained and incompetent, for every forty patients.

At the City Hospital no repairs have been made for several years; the building is seriously dilapidated; the window frames do not exclude wind or rain; the building is lighted by kerosene; the ventilating apparatus has never been completed; and the heating apparatus is inadequate.

The Infants' Hospital and the Children's Hospitals on Randall's Island have no medical superintendent, and the nurses are generally untrained and insufficient in number. Of 160 foundlings, cared for in 1894, 149 died, and of 384 other infants, not foundlings, but cared for without their mothers, 298 died.

The Asylums for the Insane have been most seriously over

* The Association is glad to state that Hon. John P. Faure, who has been at the head of the Bureau of Charities since last April, has shown great zeal and activity in his efforts to correct the evils which have existed so long in the charitable institutions of this -department.