City Young Men—the Masses
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CITY YOUNG MEN—THE MASSES.
About Brooklyn and New York, (and doubtless other American cities, just the same,) there is no problem that presents itself, more puzzling and more sad, than what to do with the vast and rapid increase of prematurely vicious young persons met with night and day in every direction through our streets. A late report of the Children’s Aid Society in New York has the following remark—(perhaps prophetic of something of the same sort, here in Brooklyn, in the future):
"The experience of our city this past year, with the younger set of rowdies, short-boys and thieves, has been terrible. We have beheld streets crowded with lads and young men armed with pistols and muskets, who were waging pitched battles with one another. Numbers have been wounded or killed. The criminal calendar has been marked with horrible youthful crimes—burglaries, arsons, and murders. This, the effect in part of the continued neglect of this class by the Christian public, is the explosion which those laboring to improve them have long ago expected and openly predicted."
There is probably no place in the world where passion and vice, (and, it must be admitted, the good elements of humanity also,) are so precocious as in the United States. Long before they have reached physical maturity, most of our young men are old in life, with all its experiences and dissipations. We may as well realize the fact, that there is amazingly little moral restraint—almost none at all. What control is exercised certainly comes from other sources. This may be lamentable beyond words to describe—but it is the fact nonetheless.
As a general thing, the masses, (probably two thirds) of city young men, in common life, hold themselves aloof from the influences of the various benevolent, the pious, and the reformatory leaders whose movements figure in the papers. With any literature except the lowest and most superficial, the masses in question are not conversant at all. Lectures, Churches, scientific expositions, &c., they never attend. They have no sympathy either with such means, or with the persons who have them in charge. Somehow those persons have thus far failed to get possession of the younger masses.
All the amusements of the majority of nearly grown and just grown lads, about Brooklyn and New York, are injurious. They soon get used to drink, and to feel perfectly at home in the most infamous places—and to look for their pleasure mostly there. Of many of them, by the time they become thirty years of age, they are old men, with ruined constitutions.
We have long believed that a false delicacy has much to do with fetching about these deplorable results. Young persons, while always on the alert to whatever affects the perfection, strength, endurance, and cleanliness of the body, have, as a general thing, hardly any realization of the strong and lasting results of inebriating drinks, irregular hours, and worse impure habits. A thoroughly enlightened conviction of those truths would do more good than all the sentimental denunciations of presses, pulpits, and tract-societies.