or less
pestilent homes.

Yet foul air and overcrowding would be less fatal in their results were
food understood. The well-filled stomach gives strange powers of
resistance to the body, and nothing shows this more strongly than the
myriad cases of children and infants who are taken from the
tenement-houses to the sanitariums at Bath or Rockaway. A week or two
of pure air and plenty of milk gives a look almost of health to
children who have been brought there often with glazed eyes and
pinched, ghastly little faces. Air has meant half, but many mothers
have been persuaded to give milk or oatmeal porridge instead of weak
tea and bread poisoned with alum, and have found the child's strength
become a permanent and not temporary fact.

That these children are alive at all, that fatherhood and motherhood
are allowed to be the right of drunkards and criminals of every grade,
is a problem whose present solution passes any human power, but which
all lovers of their kind must sooner or later face. In the mean time
the children are with us, born to inheritances that tax every power
good men and women can bring to bear. Hopeless as the outlook often
seems, salvation for the future of the masses lies in these children.
Not in a teaching which gives them merely the power to grasp at the
mass of sensational reading, which fixes every wretched tendency and
blights every seed of good, but in a practical training which shall
give the boys trades and force their restless hands and mischievous
minds to occupations that may ensure an honest living, while the girls
find work from which, with few fortunate exceptions, they are still
debarred.

The American distaste for domestic service seems to be shared in even
greater degree by the children of foreigners born in this country and
to a certain extent Americanized. The mothers have usually been
servants, and still "go out to days' work," but, no matter how numerous
the family, such life for any daughter is despised and discouraged from
the beginning. Work in a bag-factory or any one of the thousand, but to
the employes profitless, industries of a great city is eagerly sought,
and hardships cheerfully endured which if enforced by a mistress would
lead to a riot. To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition. To have
dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest
Fifth Avenue ridiculousness, to flirt with shop-boys as feeble-minded
and brainless as themselves, and to