The Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction, in their last report, made the startling announcement that there are no less than thirty-nine thousand children in the City of New York, growing up in ignorance and idleness. These children, influenced from their cradles by the most terrible surroundings, have no alternative but to become beggars and thieves almost as soon as they can run alone. Thousands of them are orphans, or perhaps worse, for they are often the children of parents who, ignoring the laws of nature, use them for the purpose of furthering their own vicious ends. They live principally in a neighborhood which abounds in lodging-houses for sailors, the lowest class of liquor stores, dancing and concert rooms, and various other low places of amusement; a neighborhood swarming with brothels, whose wretched inmates are permitted to flaunt their sin and finery, and ply their hateful trade openly, by day and night; where at midnight the quarrels, fights, and disturbances, are so noisy and so frequent that none can hope for a night's rest until they are inured by habit; where, night after night, they witness the most desperate encounters between drunken men and women, kicking, biting, and tearing one another's hair out, as they roll together in the gutter, or, as is too often the case, using deadly weapons, and where the crowd, instead of interfering to stop these awful scenes, stand by in a brutal enjoyment of them, abetting and encouraging the principal actors therein. And their homes, what are they? Their fathers, often out of work, are unable to support their families; their clothes, their bedding, their furniture, all gone to the pawn-shop; father, mother, and children, are often compelled to sleep on the bare boards, huddling close together for warmth in one ill-built, ill-ventilated room. Amid their misery, this neglect of the common decencies of life, this unblushing effrontery of reckless vice and crime, what chance have these poor unhappy little children of becoming decent members of society. They are sickly from the want of proper nourishment, vicious from example, ignorant because they do not care to learn, and their parents take no trouble to compel them to do so, and must inevitably grow up only to swell the already fearful sum total of our criminal population. At ten the boys are thieves, at fifteen the girls are all prostitutes.