records a movement
which has ceased to be experimental; as the little history includes
every failure as well as the final success, and thus stands as the best
argument yet made for the cause.

Industrial education for the child of to-day; co-operation as the end to
be attained by the worker into which the child will grow,--in these two
factors is bound up much of the problem. They will not touch many whose
miserable lives are recorded in these pages, but they will forever end
any chance of another generation in like case. There are workers who
think, who are being educated by sharp conflict with circumstances, and
who look beyond their own present need to the future. These men and
women, crowded to the wall by the present system, are searching eagerly,
not as mere anarchists and destroyers, but as those who believe that
something better than destruction is possible.

It is these workers for whom the path must be made plain, and to whom we
are most heavily responsible. And this brings me to the final point
bound up indissolubly with the two already defined,--a change in our own
ideals. Such change must come before any school can accomplish its best
work, and till it has at least begun neither school nor system has
lasting power. In these months of search in which women of all ages and
grades have given in their testimony,--from the girl of fourteen earning
her two or three dollars a week in the bag-factory or as cash-girl, to
the woman stitching her remnant of life into the garments that by and by
her more fortunate sisters will find on the bargain counter,--I discover
not alone their ignorance and stupidity and grossness and wilful
blindness, but behind it an ignorance and stupidity no less dense upon
which theirs is founded,--our own. The visible wretchedness is so
appalling, the need for instant relief so pressing, that it is small
wonder that no power remains to look beyond the moment, or to
disentangle one's self from the myriad conflicting claims, and ask the
real meaning of the demand. Mile after mile of the fair islands once the
charm of the East River and the great Sound beyond are covered by
lazar-houses,--the visible signs in this great equation that fills the
page of to-day; the problem of human crime and disease and wretchedness
complicating itself with every addition, and no nearer solution than
when the city was but a handful of houses and poverty yet unknown.

We have made attempts here and there to li