application to the Children's Aid
Society.

Training in citizenship must not be overlooked. Our boys and girls
should know more about our country than their parents can teach them.
The publications of the Patriotic League, 230 W. 13th St., New York,
will be found very useful. The League issues a Young Citizens'
Catechism and a monthly journal, "Our Country." The Sunday-school is
another help to the visitor, and it is well to know not only the
public-school teacher, but the Sunday-school teacher, whose cooperation
should be sought in any plans for the children's welfare. One
Sunday-school is a help, but two or more Sunday-schools for one child
are thoroughly demoralizing, and we {88} should do our best to
discourage any child in whom we are interested from going to more than
one.

It too often happens that children are sent by their parents to several
churches with the deliberate purpose of making profitable charitable
connections. This habit of thrusting the children forward to excite
sympathy, of sending them to ask help of teachers, clergymen, and
charity agents, is so obviously bad for the children that one wonders
how the charitable can ever have permitted it to become so general.
Children should never be permitted to deliver begging notes and
messages from a family in which there is an able-bodied adult.

Of all charitable practices that help to manufacture misery and vice,
the practice of giving to child-beggars on the street is the most
pernicious. One boy who has become a skilful beggar teaches another,
and first the money goes for candy and cigarettes, then for gambling
and low theatres. The next step is petty thieving, the next burglary,
and then follow commitment to a {89} reformatory, which often fails to
reform, and, later, a criminal career. I have seen children travel
this road so often that it is difficult to speak without bitterness of
the unthinking alms that led them into temptation. Sometimes parents
connive at child-begging, but often they know nothing of it until the
children have grown incorrigible. A strict enforcement of the laws
against child-begging is very difficult until every one is convinced of
the cruelty of giving money to unknown children on the street or at the
door.

It sometimes becomes the visitor's painful duty to protect children
from cruelty, criminal neglect, or immorality by legal removal from
their parents' control. Here a society for the protection of childre