between the covers of a book the whole story of the children
of the poor, the story of the bad their lives struggle vainly to conquer,
and the story of the good that crops out in spite of it. Sickness, that
always finds the poor unprepared and soon leaves them the choice of
beggary or starvation, hard times, the death of the bread-winner, or the
part played by the growler in the poverty of the home, may vary the theme
for the elders; for the children it is the same sad story, with little
variation, and that rarely of a kind to improve. Happily for their peace
of mind, they are the least concerned about it. In New York, at least, the
poor children are not the stunted repining lot we have heard of as being
hatched in cities abroad. Stunted in body perhaps. It was said of Napoleon
that he shortened the average stature of the Frenchman one inch by getting
all the tall men killed in his wars. The tenement has done that for New
York. Only the other day one of the best known clergymen in the city, who
tries to attract the boys to his church on the East Side by a very
practical interest in them, and succeeds admirably in doing it, told me
that the drill-master of his cadet corps was in despair because he could
barely find two or three among half a hundred lads verging on manhood,
over five feet six inches high. It is queer what different ways there are
of looking at a thing. My medical friend finds in the fact that poverty
stunts the body what he is pleased to call a beautiful provision of nature
to prevent unnecessary suffering: there is less for the poverty to pinch
then. It is self-defence, he says, and he claims that the consensus of
learned professional opinion is with him. Yet, when this shortened
sufferer steals a loaf of bread to make the pinching bear less hard on
what is left, he is called a thief, thrown into jail, and frowned upon by
the community that just now saw in his case a beautiful illustration of
the operation of natural laws for the defence of the man.

Stunted morally, yes! It could not well be otherwise. But stunted in
spirits--never! As for repining, there is no such word in his vocabulary.
He accepts life as it comes to him and gets out of it what he can. If that
is not much, he is not justly to blame for not giving back more to the
community of which by and by he will be a responsible member. The kind of
the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and
it pervades and shapes his