purposes.

What, above the mastery of all these details, {92} should be the
visitor's clear aim? To see to it that the children are better off
than their parents were, and are saved from the pitfalls into which the
latter have fallen; that the boys are better equipped to become
breadwinners, and the girls to become homemakers. The training given
in our public schools will often seem very inadequate, and some of us
look forward to the day when every boy and girl between the ages of six
and sixteen shall be trained to use hand and brain, when manual
training shall be part of the daily instruction of every school course.
Until this day comes, the visitor must make use of such aids as evening
classes in boys' and girls' clubs, people's institutes, and Christian
associations. A child's capabilities should be studied and every
encouragement given to his small ambitions.

But the best help, after all, is in the personal influence that the
visitor can acquire over the growing child. When we think what
personal influence has done in our own lives, how it has moulded our
convictions, our tastes, our very manner of speech, even, we should not
despair of the children, if we can {93} attach them to us and give them
a new and better outlook upon life. The time when we can be of the
greatest help to them is during the disorganized period that comes
between the school days and the settling down in life. Many a young
life has gone to wreck for lack of a guiding hand at this time, for
lack of a friend to make suggestions about employment, companions,
amusements, and home relations. The failure of philanthropy to make
any adequate provision for this critical period accounts, in part, for
the large number of married vagabonds in our great cities.

Collateral Readings: On care of infants see leaflets of local Boards of
Health. "The Working Child," Florence Kelley in Proceedings of
Twenty-third National Conference of Charities, pp. 161 _sq_. "The
Working Boy," the same in "American Journal of Sociology," Vol. II, No.
3. "Child Labor," W. F. Willoughby and Clare de Graffenreid in
publications of American Economic Association. "Influence of Manual
Training on Character," Felix Adler in Proceedings of Fifteenth
National Conference of Charities, pp. 272 _sq_. "Children of the
Road," Josiah Flynt in "Atlantic," January, 1896. "Family Life for
Dependent and Wayward Children," Homer Folks, volume on "Care of
Children" in Proce