on American soil, that child has missed its birthright.

With the many who accept it, it stands merely as an added capacity to
make money, and if taken in its narrowest application this is all that
it can do. Were this all, it would be simply an added injustice toward
the degeneration that money-making for the mere sake of money inevitably
brings. But at its best, perfected as it has been by patient effort on
the part of a few believers, it is far more than this. Added power to
earn comes with it, but there comes also a love of the work itself, such
as has had no place since the days when the great guilds gave joyfully
their few hours daily to the cathedrals, whose stones were laid and
cemented in love and hope, and a knowledge of the beauty to come, that
long ago died out of any work the present knows. The builders had small
book knowledge. They could be talked down by any public-school child in
its second or third year. But they knew the meaning of beauty and order
and law; and this trinity stands to-day, and will stand for many a
generation to come, as an ideal to which we must return till like causes
work again to like ends. The child who could barely read saw beauty on
every side, and took in the store of ballad and tradition that gave life
to labor. We have parted with all this wilfully. To the Puritan all
beauty that hand of man could create was of the devil, and thus we
represent a consecrated ugliness, any departure from which is even now,
by some conscientious souls, regarded with suspicion.

The child, then, who can be made to understand that beauty and order and
law are one, has a new sense born in him. Life takes on a new aspect,
and work a new meaning. But the fourteen weeks per year of education, at
present required by our law as it stands in its application to children
who must work, has no power to bring such result. It begins in the
kindergarten, from which the poorest child takes home, even to the
tenement-house, something strong enough, when growth has come, to
abolish the tenement-house forever. No man who works to these ends has
gauged possibilities more wisely than Felix Adler, whose school shows us
something not yet attained by the many who, partially accepting his
methods, pronounce his theories dangerous and destructive to what must
be held sacred. However this may be, he and his band of co-workers have
proved, in seven years of unceasing struggle against heavy odds, that a
development is possi