Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 204, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 August 1910 — Travesty of the Almshouse. [ARTICLE]

Travesty of the Almshouse.

James Openheim, writing in the June American Magazine about the terrible condition of the almshouses in the state of New York, says: “What is an almshouse? One would naturally suppose it to be the last refuge of the -old—men and women too weak to work, alone in the world," homeless, friendless, penniless. One would expect to find the almshouse full of gentle old people, near death. Such people are in the almshouse. They have crept there to die. There they wind up their obscure lives, their humble destinies. These are the lonely and lowly tragedies of our packed world. But they are not alone with one another. I jotted down the following list from the Oneida county almshouse register: “Old, Blind, Feeble-minded, Intemperate, Sick, Cripple, Epileptic, Vagrant, Lame, Pregnant. “They are mixed in with one another. The decent old, whose only crime is old age and misfortune, are herded in with unspeakable creatures. Imagine sleeping in a dormitory with babbling idiots, with jerky epileptics, with hardened, vicious criminals, and with consumptives. Imagine spending the day and eating one’s meals with this strange company. Such conditions, to an outsider, are Inhuman, indecent and intolerable.”