The district of Five Points lies just a stone’s throw from City Hall. Busy shoppers on Broadway can glimpse it if they care to look beyond the marble and glass retail palaces towards the East River. They’ll see a place where the currency is misery, not dollars, where commerce quickly gives way to wretchedness. The very air here is thick with want and suffering. Even in the height of summer, the sun struggles to break through the grey cloud of hopelessness. No-one chooses to live in Five Points. Those lucky few who scrabble and clamber their way out never look back, never mind return. But for the unlucky majority of its residents, it is a life sentence.

Children who are born here all too often die here. The missions work tirelessly to provide succour, feeding, clothing, and schooling them, but for every child they take in, an untold number start the day on an empty stomach picking rags and go to bed even hungrier. The street urchins of Five Points are not an edifying sight. They are clad in rags, barefoot, caked in mud, and crawling with lice, their eyes huge in their heads, their bodies stick-thin. They are not attractive candidates for wealthy benefactors in search of a charitable cause. Confined to their slums, they are the undeserving poor, and easy to ignore.

They are unfairly maligned and often vilified, these Five Points children. They are not born criminals, though their life often forces them down that path. They are innocent, though they do not remain so for long. They are not stupid, but without schooling they will grow up ignorant. They are children who deserve a chance, every one of them, legitimate or fatherless, regardless of their religion, the country of their birth, their parents’ occupation or disposition.

The children of Five Points have nothing, but their needs are simple and few: food, clothing, warmth, a roof over their heads. Though first and foremost what these children deserve is to be treated as children; to be given a place to play, a place where they can be safe, free from judgement, treated as equals. A place where they can learn what happiness is.

We cannot continue to ignore what is going on under our very noses. We cannot continue to pretend these children don’t exist. In London, the children of the Rookeries are reviled and condemned; but this is the New World, the Land of Opportunity, where all men, women, and children have equal status.

Kindness benefits both the giver and the recipient. The children of Five Points deserve to be shown kindness. Who will offer it? Will it be you?

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty

Washington Square, New York, May 1870

IT’S AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE, MARGARET, very powerful and clearly spoken from the heart,” Randolph said, setting the copy of the Revolution newspaper down on her desk, “but how many people read this publication? A thousand?”

“Three thousand.”