Jersey Street and Jersey Lane | Page 2

THE EVENING ----.
SIR: In yesterday's issue you took occasion to speak of the
organ-grinding nuisance, about which I hope you will let me ask you
the following questions: Why must decent people all over town suffer
these pestilential beggars to go about torturing our senses, and
practically blackmailing the listeners into paying them to go away? Is it
not a most ridiculous excuse on the part of the police, when ordered to
arrest these vagrants, to tell a citizen that the city license exempts these
public nuisances from arrest? Let me ask, Can the city by any means
legalize a common-law misdemeanor? If not, how can the city
authorities grant exemption to these sturdy beggars and vagrants by
their paying for a license? The Penal Code and the Code of Criminal
Procedure, it seems, provide for the punishment of gamblers,
dive-keepers, and other disorderly persons, among whom
organ-grinders fall, as being people who beg, and exhibit for money,
and create disorder. If this is so, why can the police not be forced to
intervene and forbid them their outrageous behavior?--for these fellows
do not only not know or care for the observance of the city ordinance,
which certainly is binding on them, but, relying on a fellow-feeling of
vulgarity with the mob, resist all attempts made to remove them from
the exercise of their most fearful beggary, which is not even tolerated
any longer at Naples. R.
NEW YORK, February 20th.
[Our correspondent's appeal should be addressed to the Board of
Aldermen and the Mayor. They consented to the licensing of the
grinders in the face of a popular protest.--ED. EVENING ----.]
Now certainly that was not a good letter to write, and is not a pleasant
letter to read; but the worst of it is, I am afraid that you can never make
the writer of it understand why it is unfair and unwise and downright

cruel.
For I think we can figure out the personality of that writer pretty easily.
She is a nice old or middle-aged lady, unmarried, of course; well-to-do,
and likely to leave a very comfortable fortune behind her when she
leaves all worldly things; and accustomed to a great deal of deference
from her nephews and nieces. She is occasionally subject to nervous
headaches, and she wrote this letter while she had one of her headaches.
She had been lying down and trying to get a wink of sleep when the
organ-grinder came under the window. It was a new organ and very
loud, and its organ-grinder was proud of it and ground it with all his
might, and it was certainly a very annoying instrument to delicate ears
and sensitive nerves.
Now, she might have got rid of the nuisance at once by a very simple
expedient. If she had sent Abigail, her maid, down to the street, with a
dime, and told her to say: "Sicka lady, no playa," poor Pedro would
have swung his box of whistles over his shoulder and trudged
contentedly on. But, instead, she sent Abigail down without the dime,
and with instructions to threaten the man with immediate arrest and
imprisonment. And Abigail went down and scolded the man with the
more vigor that she herself had been scolded all day on account of the
headache. And so Pedro just grinned at her in his exasperating furrin
way, and played on until he got good and ready to go. Then he went,
and the old lady sat down and wrote that letter, and gave it to Abigail to
post.
[Illustration]
Later in the afternoon the old lady drove out, and the fresh air did her a
world of good, and she stopped at a toy store and bought some trifles
for sister Mary's little girl, who had the measles. Then she came home,
and after dinner she read Mr. Jacob Riis's book, "How the Other Half
Lives;" and she shuddered at the picture of the Jersey Street slums on
the title page, and shuddered more as she read of the fourteen people
packed in one room, and of the suffering and squalor and misery of it
all. And then she made a memorandum to give a larger check to the
charitable society next time. Then she went to bed, not forgetting first

to read her nightly chapter in the gospel of the carpenter's son of
Nazareth. And she had quite forgotten all about the coarse and
unchristian words she had written in the letter that was by that time
passing through the hands of the weary night-shift of mail-clerks down
in the General Post-office. And when she did read it in print, she was so
pleased and proud of the fluency of her own diction, and so many of
her nephews and nieces said so many admiring things