Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1876 — Starvation in New York. [ARTICLE]

Starvation in New York.

Andrew H. Smith, M. D., writes to the New York Tribune as follows: Much is said about the present suffering among the poor, but those not brought Into contact with it can form any idea of the misery which exists. The gentleman who passes the day in attending to his business down town, and at night rejoins his family in the country, never dreams of the agony that is almost within bow-shot of his closed residence up town. During the winter, when the city is full of benevolent people, and the machinery of relief is in operation, extreme suffering is sure of mitigation in some way Of other. But now the doors are closed, even the scanty sum earned at other times by family sewing, washing, house-cleaning, etc., is withdrawn, and for mariy a poor widow and her helpless family there is no way of escape from actual famine. Yesterday I called upon a poor woman in Thirty-sixth street, a widow with three little children and a daughter aged nineteen. This woman was not a stolid creature without sensibility, and capable only of physical suffering. She was scrupulously neat in her person and surroundings, her face was intelligent and refined, and her grammar faultless. Before her husband’s death they were in comfortable circumstances. Now, all they have had for weeks has been what she and her daughter could earn at making calico shirts at fifty cents a dozen! By beginning venr early in the morning. ana working steadily until near rnmniglit through those terrible days in July, tney have been able to finish a dozen shirts. Of the fifty cents thus earned, thirtv cents were pledged for rent, leaving twenty cents a day to feed five persons! She told me that she and her children often suffered from hunger, not having the means to buy a loaf of bread, ana being too proud to beg. No wonder that persons in such straits purchase the cheapest food that will stay the gnawing of hunger, without reference to its fitness for a human stomach; and when disease and death follow they are ascribed in the health reports to any other than the real cause, starvation. Who shall tell how often the diseases reported as fevers, marasmus, cholera infantum, sunstroke, are branches of a single tree whose trank is famine ? One would suppose that among the very poor the instinct of self-preserva-tion would develop absolute selfishness. But it is not so. The poor widow is ever ready to divide a mite with one poorer than herself. I surprised a woman the other day in the act of giving a piece of bread to a blind man who had folt his way to her door. On inquiry I found that she and her children were then, at twelve o’clock, taking the first food they had tasted that day, some bread and potatoes Siven them by a woman in the same ouse. No, it is superfluity, not want, that hardens the heart. Many heartrending cases have been brought to my notice by the Rev. Mr. McCaffrey, rector of the Episcopal Church of our Savior (Third avenue, near Thirty-ninth street), who is laboring among the people east of Third avenue. At his request I visited yesterday a family in East Thirty-fifth street. The husband, a laboring man, had long been out of work, everything which a pawnbroker would take "was gone, the children were almost naked, ana the room presented the appearance of extreme wretchedness. The floor was covered with an old rag carpet, which wa3 fairly slippery with accumulated grease and filth and emitted a sickening odor. I begged them to throw this carpet away, but the woman lifted it up and showed me that the floor was full of rat-holes through which the children might break their legs, and that the carpet was necessary to cover up these holes, and to keep the children from wounding their feet with splinters and projecting heads of nails.