ers and parks, barges and
excursions, all designed to help the poorer part of the city's
population--without regard to creed or nationality--to bear and to help
their children to bear the killing heat of summer. So Jew and Gentile,
black and white, commingle; and gradually old hostilities are forgotten
or corrected. The board of education provides night schools for adults
and free lectures upon every conceivable interesting topic, including
the history and geography and natural history of distant lands.
Travelers always draw large audiences to their lectures.

The children soon learn to read well enough to translate the American
papers and there are always newspapers in the different vernaculars, so
that the emigrant soon becomes interested not only in the news of his
own country, but in the multitudinous topics which go to make up
American life. He soon grasps at least the outlines of politics,
national and international, and before he can speak English he will
address an audience of his fellow countrymen on "Our Glorious American
Institutions."

It is not only the emigrant parent who profits by the work of the public
school. The American parent also finds himself, or generally herself,
brought into friendly contact with the foreign teachers and the foreign
friends of her children. The New York public school system culminates in
the Normal College, which trains women as teachers, and the College of
the City of New York, which offers courses to young men in the
profession of law, engineering, teaching, and, besides, a course in
business training. The commencement at these institutions brings
strangely contrasted parents together in a common interest and a common
pride. The students seem much like one another, but the parents are so
widely dissimilar as to make the similarity of their offspring an
amazing fact for contemplation. Mothers with shawls over their heads and
work-distorted hands sit beside mothers in Parisian costumes, and the
silk-clad woman is generally clever enough to appreciate and to admire
the spirit which strengthened her weary neighbor through all the years
of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to
pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter. The feeling of
inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may
humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good. It will
certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and
co