Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 August 1876 — Destitute Men and Women. [ARTICLE]

Destitute Men and Women.

It is a generally admitted fact that there never was a time in the history ot the United States when agr eater amount of misery, poverty and wretchedness existed than at the present moment. New York is full of want; Every third store you come to in Broadway is closed up! Working men are parading the streets, publicly setting forth their sufferings and calling for rcof affaire exists in all the larger cities ol the United State?. One of the iffobrunhappy phases of th.s universal depression is the numbef oi educated and refined persons who are out of employmofttr-coi-lege graduates, professional men, clerks, and the like—men whose training has not fitted them for physical labor, and Whose feelings will not permit them to resort to beggary oremne. It is no uncommon'thing ’|w employers in waufc of assistance to receive from one up to five hundred answers from all sorts of needy men. The Mayor of Boston recently received a perfect avalanche of applications from Harvard graduates, broken-down .doctors, and men of education, for a vacant place on the police force. Nor is this depressing state of affairs confined to the East. In Chicago to-day therojqjea hundreds of well-born, well-bred, and well-informed men walking the streets without a cent, without the knowledge of where to get a din- ' neror a bed. How these poor unfortunates live is best known to themselves. An empty stomach sharpens the wits, and a few cents to the initiated go a long way. Weary men tramp the streets day after day seeking employment, returning at night faint and footsore, perhaps to tramp again till morning or to lie down upon somo friendly bench or by the margin of the lake. Week after week the same weary round goes on, until the clothe* of the once respectable and well-clad man are seedy, and his general appearance sickly and unpromising. Can we wonder if the victim of circumstances beoomes a thief, or drowns bis sorrows in the cold, dark waters? The general impres-sion-is that no man can sink to the lowest depths of poverty and despair except through his own folly, idleness, or dissipation, but such is not always the case. At the present time nine-tenths of the cases of destitution existing in our midst have arisen from circumstances over which the poor outcast had no control, the ups and downs of business, overcrowded professions, the failure of other* to meet obligations, the fall in value of real estate, family sorrows* and other causes. Only a day gjr two ago a respeotabw man presented himself Before the police of this city aod said with tears In hi* eyes that he was starving. He is. not the only one who to-day ia starving ia the midst of phot* T-Infer-Ottan. ; .frajgflnMmiP