Jersey Street and Jersey Lane Urban and Suburban Sketches

Excerpt

JERSEY AND MULBERRY

I found this letter and comment in an evening paper, some time ago, and I cut the slip out and kept it for its cruelty:

To the Editor of 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....