It has shut up the den of the too celebrated Owney Geoghegan, who long defied the law and the police, encouraging the efforts of prostitutes to debauch young girls.  Women of notorious reputation, who enticed away the children of respectable mechanics to sell them for money, have been severely punished.  In short, not content with bringing to justice these outrageous offenders with a firmness which has made it the terror of these oppressors of childhood, the society has been the instrument of checking acts even of carelessness or imprudence.  It no longer permits the drunkard to keep his children in a cellar where the rats bite their feet; or the mercenary father to allow his son to engage in a wager, dangerous to his health, to make a hundred miles in twenty-four hours; or a man to ride a bicycle bearing on his shoulders his five-year-old daughter.

So great a work demanded accommodations of corresponding magnitude.  In 1881, and at the price of $43,000, the society purchased a large building situated at the corner of 23rd street and 4th avenue, one of the most important thoroughfares of New York.  Not far from the offices, in the main part of the building, is found a collection of all the instruments of cruelty seized in the legal proceedings,—­rods of iron, whips, firebars (barres de poeles), pokers, cudgels (gourdins), and other instruments.  These furnish convincing proofs of the sufferings of the children,—­for example those of Maggie Scully, when she said:  “I do all the work at my aunt’s house, and if you do not believe that I have been beaten, look at me, for my aunt has beaten me this morning with a poker.”  Adjoining the offices are the rooms for the officers and the archives of the institution, containing the papers in each case setting forth the facts and the evidence.  On the upper floor is a dormitory, where the children are kept until final disposition is made of them, that is to say, generally during one night.  In fact, the work is going on without interruption at all hours of the day and night.  If at night a call by telephone is received from the police-station, an officer of the society responds immediately to this appeal.

As is most frequently the case, he finds a drunken woman in the street, with three or four ragged children gathered about her, covered with vermin, without fire or lodging, having been abandoned by the father.  The mother is detained at the station, but the children are taken to the society, where they are washed, fed, and for the first time in their lives, perhaps, put to sleep in a bed.  On the following day, the children are taken to court.  If the parents or guardians are worthy, they are returned to them; if not, the justice commits them to some charitable institution.  Some of these have a religious character, and others a secular one; the American judge, in rendering his decision, is influenced by interests of family, of nationality, of race, or of religion of the child, as well as by the requirements of the law.  Sick children and nursing infants are sent to the hospital on Randall’s Island, the Ladies’ Deborah Nursery, and the Child’s Hospital.  Each of the charitable institutions receives a per capita allowance for children during the time that they remain in their care.