itants-was divided into SIXTEEN DISTRICTS. Each of these districts was again subdivided into SECTIONS, making in all near three hundred. For each district there was appointed a responsible committee, and for each section an efficient visitor. It provided a central office of business, and appointed a general agent to superintend all operations of the society. At this of fice is kept a register of all persons who receive aid and the date of its reception, to which is also added an account of all other aid received by one and the same person from any other source. At the opening of the winter each visitor solicits contributions from all persons residing within his section, to the general fund of the association. The limits of every sec

tion are such that each visitor can personally see every family within his own in the space of a few hours. Each visitor is furnished with a manual containing rules by which he is to be guided in dispensing aid. In each district some one or two groceries are designated by the association on which orders are to be given to the poor by the visitors. Aid is rarely given in money, but in groceries and provisions, in clothes and fuel. The committees of each district hold semi-monthly meetings, and oftener, in an inclement period. Every visitor renders to the committee of his district a monthly report of all the persons and families he has aided. The following is a tabular form of the report, and shows fully the nature of a visitor's labors :

NEW-YORK ASSOCIATION FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE CONDITION OF THE POOR. VISITOR'S MONTHLY REPORT, OF SECTION No. DISTRICT No. Dated

A mark with a pen thus,, in the columns, will point out the class to which the person named belongs.

184

Expend-Remarks

ed.

Dois cts.

Remarks.

Total.

Signed,

Visitor.

These reports are transferred to the each Visitor; and also blank tickets, by General Agent, who forms a condensed the use of which all applicants are rereport of the operations of the whole ferred. If a citizen is applied to at his city, including statistical and other neces-residence, or in the street, he has onlyt sary information, and presents it to the Executive Committee at their stated meetings. To prevent imposition, and to secure prompt relief, a pocket directory is annually furnished to all contributors, who thus become members of the Association, and also to all citizens who desire it, which shows the name, residence, and section of

learn the number and street of the appli. cant, and hand to him blank No. 1, filled up as follows. The applicant goes at once to the Visitor in his district, who, after due inquiry at the home of the bearer of the ticket, and finding him needy, fills up and presents him with a Visitor's order No. 2.

"Croton or pure rain water is best. Boil the meat in a close covered pot two hours. Now add the other ingredients, except the seasoning, when, with the addition of the salt and pepper, it will be fit for use. There will be, when done, about four gallons or thirty-two Vis. pints of good soup, which will be an allowance of three pints a day for five persons, two days; and the whole cost, except cooking, will be but twenty-two cents. This will be less than the cost of one glass of grog or beer a day, to each individual.

"Into a house thus supplied, hunger and cold could not enter. And if to these articles is added what before he has felt able to purchase, abundance and comfort would be the inmates of his dwelling."

As an incidental means of aid, the association has, in addition, made arrangements to loan old stoves to those who are unable to procure them; to give cast-off clothes and cold victuals, and depots for these things have been established in the several districts.

ment is effected, it is uniformly followed by a corresponding change in the habits of families and individuals, which restores them to a permanent self-maintenance. There is a moral grandeur and interest in the enterprise, as thus contemplated, which should secure it a place in every bosom that expands with sympathetic benevolence. It indeed promises much, and great results might reasonably be expected. More than twenty-six thousand visits of sympathy and aid have been thus made the past year to the dwellings of the poor in New York city.

The expenses of the institution have continually increased since its organization. 1845-6 it relieved about 45,000 per

The aggregate expenditure to date has reached nearly $90,000. Similar organizations have been made in the cities of Brooklyn and Albany, and with corresponding success.

But scarcely a tithe of the labors of the institution are designed to be expended in ministering to those who personally claim its charity. Each of its three hundred visitors, in carrying out the plan as origin-In ally framed, should continually visit and inquire into the condition of every poor person and family within his section during the winter months. The Executive Committee hold monthly meetings throughout the year. In the winter of 1847, the district committees and visitors held more than two hundred meetings of conference, and the visitors made to the central office more than three thousand monthly reports. The rules which guide this class of officers

are:

"To give what is least susceptible of abuse. To give even necessary articles in small quantities, in proportion to immediate need. To give assistance both in quantity and quality, inferior, except in case of sickness or old age, to what might be procured by labor. To give assistance at the right moment; and not to prolong it beyond the duration of the necessity which calls for it; but to extend, restrict and modify it with that necessity."

The moral and higher aims of these officers should be, in the language of the Annual Report of 1846, "to minister to the moral necessities of the destitute, which are often the cause of every other, wherever his alms gain him access; and, as opportunity offers, to others beyond the cases relieved." This principle pervading the whole system, each visitor's circle of effort is compressed to a limit that will admit of his attention to those duties; and he consequently regards his work as incomplete, while the moral object is unattained. This beautiful feature of the system has already been productive of very salutary results. Where such improve

This plan has in it the elements of great power. No system of the kind could be more simple, and combine the same subdivision of labor, with the same central power in the executive advice and control of this labor. Its defects, if it have such, are to be found in the difficulty of procuring visitors of sound judgment, faithful, constant and conscientious in the discharge of their duties. Could such men be induced to systematic and efficient action, not only in alms-giving, but in correcting the numerous economic derangements which so much abound with the poor, and in watching constantly and perseveringly their social and moral condition, it would be unequalled by any kindred institution. existing in this country or in Europe.

The Almshouse became a separate department of our municipal organization in 1831. Prior to that, the legal expenditures for the poor were a part of the general and miscellaneous expenses of the city. From the period of this distinct organization to the present, the claims on the department, as well as its facilities, have constantly increased. As will be seen by the following schedule, they have risen from one hundred and twenty-five to four hundred thousand dollars per annum. ratio of increase is not exact, but this may be accounted for in the necessity for a continued enlargement of the institutions under its control, and in the severity or mild

The

The gross expenses | Long Island Farms, in 1834, and now temporarily removed to Blackwell's Island, will, ere long, have its permanent location on Randall's Island in nine beautiful and commodious buildings. This is one of the most important eleemosynary institutions of the city, the home of its poor children. They now number upwards of 1000, are here instructed in the elements of a good common school education, and trained to habits of temperance and industry. The Lunatic Asylum, Small Pox Hospital, Penitentiary and Hospital are all on Blackwell's Island; the Asylum and Hospital receive the insane and the contagiously diseased of the city, while the Penitentiary is more properly a House of Correction for all

Duchy of Hesse Darmstadt, were landed in our city too destitute and enfeebled to go at large, without the hazard of becoming, at once, a public charge. The plan of their shipment was soon after developed by a correspondence between the Burgomaster of this parish, and the overseers of parishes in other Duchies, for the avowed purpose, on the part of the latter, of learning the expense and the method by which it was done, and with an intimation, that the same course would soon be adopted by every other parish which felt itself burdened with its paupers. The entire population of Grosszimern amounted to 4000

exhausted, they enter on ship-board to breathe a foul air, and to subsist on meagre food, till a fever is generated, which here soon carries them off. The condition in which the foreign pauper population came upon us at this period was most melancholy. We cannot well describe it without casting the strongest and deepest censure upon parties connected with their transportation. We designate no parties in particular. The facts existed-most stubborn facts, and they could not have existed as they did, without a censurable cause. Prior to the spring of 1847, our general and state laws were wholly inadequate to protect either the immigrant or the city. Large-674 of whom, chiefly paupers, embarked numbers were landed on the shores of neighboring states, and from thence found their way into the city to be supported at its expense; so great was the influx during the fall of 1846, and the winter of 1847; so destitute, emaciated, and diseased, were a large proportion of many cargoes; so like mere merchandise did some of them apparently come upon our shores, that our municipal authority could no longer resist public opinion, and were compelled to an investigation. But wherein was the criminality, when thousands were fleeing from starvation, and pressing in companies into our ships to reach a land of plenty? The scattered dregs of foreign poor-houses, liberated prisoners, large numbers of diseased and debauched, and some idiotic were landed, it is true, as received. If such came in American vessels, the owner and the master, we reply, knew the law, and still more, they understood the moral relations of their position, both to the immigrant and to their country; yet in view of this, "there was adopted no systematic plan by which to separate the better from the morally prohibited class. The profits of transportation were allowed to more than balance every hazard of wrong. If this be a harsh, it is also a truthful picture. By whose plan do agents traverse the mountain-lands, and the bogs of Ireland, the destitute parishes of Germany, to make interest at every available point, even though this available point be the prison, the poor-house, or among the most degraded wherever found. Two cargoes, numbering in all upwards of six hundred immigrants, shipped late in the fall of 1846 from the parish of Grosszimern, in the

for the United States at the expense of the parish. Besides this, each received $1.50 or $2.00, for his immediate necessities on arrival at New York--the whole cost amounting to $16,850. By this enterprise, says the correspondence, the parish saved a yearly expense of 2500 florins or $833.33. These were the identical paupers, which, added to the native poor of our city, compelled the Commissioner of the Almshouse to transform its work-house, its garrets, and even its dead-house into dormitories. Destitute as they were, the greater proportion were about to be transferred in different directions into the interior, that, if they came back upon the city for support, they might come singly, or in small numbers, and thus, with greater difficulty be identified and made chargeable to their shippers. The Commissioner, with praiseworthy firmness and energy, promptly transferred the entire body to the Almshouse, crowded already as it was. These shippers as promptly compromised the matter, by paying $5000 into the city treasury; thus virtually confessing their knowledge of the legal, if not of the moral nature of the transaction.

The condition of embarkation and of transit has often heretofore been most melancholy for the immigrant. Stimulated by the love of gain and shielding their consciences under the cover of philanthropy, many shippers-we do not say all

in transporting the almost naked poor, and sometimes even the very dregs of society from a land of famine, and a country in which they were generally oppressed, have oftentimes crowded them into their vessels without distinction or