A thing to be profoundly thankful for is the practical elimination of the girl vagrant from our social life. Ten years ago, Broadway from Fourteenth Street up was crowded with little girls who, under the pretence of peddling flowers and newspapers, pandered to the worst immorality. They went in regular gangs, captained and employed by a few conscienceless old harpies, who took the wages of their infamy and paid them with blows and curses if they fell short of their greed. The police and the officers of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children put an end to this traffic after a long fight, sending the old wretches to jail and some of their victims to the reformatories. One of the gangs that were broken up had a rendezvous in a stable in Thirtieth Street, near Broadway. The girls had latch-keys and went out and in at all hours of the night. To-day the flower-girl of tender years is scarcely ever met with in New York. Even the news-girl has disappeared almost entirely and left the field to the boys. Those who are not at work at home or in the shop have been gathered in by the agencies for their rescue, that have multiplied with the growth of the conviction that girl vagrancy is so much more corrosive than boy vagabondism, as it adds sexual immorality to the other dangers of the street. In 1881 the society's lodging-house in St. Mark's Place sheltered 1,287 girls. Their number has gone down since, as the census has gone up, until last year it had fallen to 335, and even these were no longer vagrants, but wayward daughters brought by their parents to be trained to obedience and industry. In the same period, during which the city's population increased more than one-fourth, the increase being very largely made up of just the material to feed its homelessness, the register of the boys' lodging-houses showed a reduction from 13,155 to 11,435.
In the introductory chapter I pointed out, as a result of the efforts made in behalf of the children in the past generation, not only by the Children's Aid Society, but by many kindred organizations, that the commitments of girls and women for vagrancy fell off between the years 1860 and 1890 from 5,880 to 1,980, or from 1 in every 138-1/2 persons to 1 in every 780 of a population that had more than doubled in the interval, while the commitments of petty girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890 from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500. Illustrated by diagram this last statement looks this way, the year 1869 being substituted as the starting-point; it had almost exactly the same number of commitments as 1865 (see Chart A).